Can Durant step up? Not wild about MLB playoffs, getting late fast for Mets

Durant, by the way, played one of the most passive 26-point games you will ever see on Thursday night.

It will be interesting to see, going forward, if there is a night – and maybe it could be Sunday night – when Durant is asked to carry his team the way LeBron always carries his. The Yankees might win 110 games this season even if Brian Cashman doesn’t go out and get another starting pitcher at the trade deadline. By the way? We keep hearing about the Yankee starting pitching, and I happen to think it’s better than what the Red Sox have, even though the Red Sox have Sale, Price and Porcello at the top of their rotation.

Maybe one of these days Price will make you believe he could ever get a game off the Yankees in a big moment. He just hasn’t done it yet. I can’t help it, every time I see

Mets relief pitcher running in from the bullpen, I imagine one of those bad volcanoes in Hawaii. After this season, Major League Baseball needs to take a look at the Wild Card system, as a way of making it more fair.

There is great fun, for sure, in having do-or-die games in both leagues for the two Wild Card teams.

So often games like that have provided great drama.

But what has been constructed, even with the best of intentions, is a scenario where you could win more than 100 games, as either the Yankees or Red Sox could this season, and have done nothing more than earn the right to play in one of those Dayton play-in games in college basketball.

The long regular season in Major League Baseball (which could be a little less long, frankly) has more integrity than any of the others in professional sports.

That season is basically twice as long as the ones you get in the NBA and NHL.

At the end of it, if you have won 95 games or 100 or more than that, you should earn the right to do more than go up against a hot starting pitcher and lose to him the way you can lose to a hot goalie in hockey in a onegame season.

This may involve shortening the regular season, dialing it back to 154.

But there should be a way to play two-of-three, even if the team with the best Wild Card record gets all three.

Colangelo, who runs the 76ers, will get every chance to prove that he is, as he says, being “set up” on these burner Twitter accounts first reported at theringer.com.

He will get that chance to prove that he was, even though you wonder just who it would be setting him up, since he comes off pretty well in some of the tweets.

But if he actually did this, or his wife did this, he is through running the 76ers. Wilt Chamberlain somehow once averaged 50 points per game for an entire NBA season. When you watch Rafael Nadal play tennis at the French Open, as you see him going for his 11th title at Roland Garros and know that his lifetime record there, through Saturday’s victory over Richard Gasquet is 80-2.

Man oh man, do I hope that he and Roger Federer tee it up one last time at this year’s Wimbledon. The Mets started out the way they started out and coming out of Friday night’s loss to the Cubs, they were just eight games ahead of the Miami Marlins. Still more than 100 games left. But you know what the noted philosopher, Prof. Lawrence Peter Berra once said: Sure gets late early around here. And right now, after what we’ve seen since 11-1, even that Wild Card game against the Giants just two years ago feels like 200. It was either Yogi who said that about it getting late early, or Michael Cohen. Or Ben Stiller.

Somebody said it, I know that.