Improbably, almost impossibly, the Golden State Warriors' dream season continues tonight with game 1 of their Western Conference semifinal matchup with the Utah Jazz. The Warriors are into the semis by virtue of their historic six-game stunner over the top-seeded Dallas Mavericks; the Jazz eeked out a game 7 road win over the Houston Rockets.

The Jazz are the fourth seed in the Western Conference, but in our minds, its the Dubs that enter this series as the favorites. The Jazz are undoubtedly mentally and physically drained after their game 7 thriller on Saturday, while the Warriors are riding a wave of emotion that shows no sign of dissipating.

Here's todays rounup of sports news....

Oh good grief, Warriors.

Spurs 126, Warriors 89. And it wasn't nearly that close.

Coming off Sunday night's agonizing loss to their nemesis, the Lakers, the Warriors needed a strong showing. But last night the Spurs exposed the Warriors for what they are: a second-tier basketball club that's not quite ready for prime time.

Here's todays sports wrap up...

Over the last 12 years, nobody has really accused the Warriors of having their act together. They've burned through a litany of coaches, a couple of really bad GMs, and more than one first round draft choice with nothing to show for them but more new coaches, front office suits, and first round draft choices.

Another hallmark of the modern-day Warriors' mean mean stride has been their fast starts, awful middles, and decent finishes. Even in their worst years, the Warriors managed to finish the season on an uptick, perpetually giving false hope for the next season – even if that hope was just a Lottery pick.

This year had all the looks of more of the same, but a funny thing happened on the way to the cellar: the bottom fell out of the middle of the Western Conference.

What a stinking dog of a putrid rotting corpse of a disgusting disgrace of an abomination of a disgrace of a debacle of a sham of a fraud of a spectacle of a sham of an embarrassment. Or something like that. How else to describe the Warriors recent sleepwalk through Texas.

On Monday night, the San Antonio Spurs spanked the tribe like a teenager's monkey, 129-89; just 24 hours later, the Houston Rockets piled on and beat the living tar out of them, 118-90 -- neither game was as close as the scores would indicate.

Memo to David Stern: Start the playoffs right now, baby, the Warriors are ready to make a run!

What is it with this team? Just when Warrior nation was about to write them off as the latest version of Chris Cohan's spectacularly unsuccessful basketball product, they up and beat two of the best teams in the league in consecutive games.

Expect a snarled commute today: three cars and two trucks mixed it up on southbound 101 near 22nd Street at 2:19 p.m.. Only minor injuries, but Officer Cakebread of the CHP (awesome name) says there's no ETA on how long it'll take to clear the highway. That means more time with you and the light hits on KOIT. Officer Cakebread is all over the news today -- earlier, he came to our attention when he......

We're breaking with our Blotter tradition of SF crime movie clip art because, well, we can't find two other animal-related stories to post an Animal Roundup and -- would you look at how cute that marmoset is??? The Peninsula Humane Society responded to a call from an engineering student in East Palo Alto who saw a monkey running on a neighborhood fence, which turned out to be a member of the species known as the......

TGIF, folks who don't work at home. Boy, it's been an almost comically-bad week for commuting: doesn't the Gitmo Montgomery shutdown seem like it happened ages ago? Well, we hope SFist Jon is still at work right now, because we don't think he could stand the latest -- 101 South is completely backed up after a woman jumped off the San Antonio overpass at Palo Alto, causing a seven-car pileup. Suicide is never the answer, but it's definitely not the answer when it involves ruining people's weekends too. Two lanes are still closed. And at least this time it wasn't a bomb threat (those moved over to three San Jose schools today instead) -- BART had to evacuate the South Hayward station and stop service beyond that stop to Fremont when a fire broke out around noon. And now it's drizzling again. Can we just all agree to be extra, extra careful on the way home? TGIF. ...

Ironic, that one leaving for work early in the morning to avoid traffic can end up causing it. A man driving to work in Palo Alto around 5:30 this morning slammed into the side of a 60-foot-long delivery truck on Middlefield near San Antonio. The man claims he didn't see the truck, which seems a little weird to us, because the truck had blocked three lanes of Middlefield as it was backing into the Toyota of Palo Alto lot. The guy was going under 20 mph, and wedged his 1994 Acura Legend right underneath the trailer. Fortunately, no one was injured, in part because the guy was going so slow and the car was relatively low to the ground. Up in San Francisco, the professionally-sensitive CHP have announced that a woman was found wandering in a daze by the side of 101 S near Cesar Chavez around 7:30 this morning with minor bruising and bleeding. According to the article, the woman, who was picked up at the corner of 16th and Mission, was "negotiating for some type of services" with the man, whom she reports not knowing, when they got in an argument and he pushed her out of the car near the 280/101 split. Gee, what do you think was going on there? The woman claims the car was going 60 mph, but the CHP says her injuries would have been much worse if that were true. Call 1-800-TELL-CHP if you have any information. ...man, finding the third entry is always the hardest. Um, MUNI is closing down parts of Third Street this evening as they test the electrical system for the new Third Street rail. You'll see a flash and hear some popping sounds at 10 p.m. and 11 p.m. tonight. ...

Steady Warriors, steady now. We may have started a mild regional anxiety attack last week when we scooped the talking heads by speculating that Phil Jackson and the Lakers were secretly in the running forRon ArtestContinue Reading "The Warriors: An (Ar)test of wills"

We all acknowledge that as the Warriors' feel their way toward the playoffs this year, there will be some stumbles. Well, there are stumbles and then there are the kind of STUMBLES that make you realize this may have been the wrong week to quit sniffing glue. Last Wednesday against the defending NBA champeen San Antonio Spurs, the Warriors were stripped buck naked and exposed as pretenders. The Spurs absolutely had their way with the shell-shocked tribe. Can you say "low bridge"? It's pronounced Spurs 113 Warriors 89. ...

The San Antonio Spurs and Detroit Pistons have Wednesday off, and the And1 Mixtape tour has come and gone. San Francisco basketball fans, though, have long needed to seek a June hoops fix someplace besides the NBA, and this week our ship comes in: the SF Bay Area ProCity Summer Basketball League tips off its 26th season at 8 p.m. tonight in Kezar Pavilion at Stanyan and Waller. They'll play most nights between now......

SFist has done their fair share of snarking on the Warriors in the past and feels kind of bad about it. It was just too darn easy, kicking that dog when they were down. But things have changed since then. The Warriors are h-o-t hot right now, hotter than leather chaps-wearing Jessica Alba dancing on a stripper pole. Well, not that hot, but you get our drift. Last night, the Warriors beat the Seattle SuperSonics 101-92 to win their fifth in a row, their longest winning streak of the year. And that's Seattle, as in Division Winning, possible title contending Seattle. Of course, as Ray Ratto pointed out, we've been here before and we're still talking about a team that's once more going to go to David Stern's little game show he likes to call the NBA Lottery Draft, but something feels different this time around. We are, after all, talking about a team that was well out of it months ago but is suddenly playing with a fire, passion, and energy usually not seen in these here parts....

Things aren't looking good for professional sports in San Jose. It seems that because of dismal attendance and the lack of a new stadium, the Anschutz Group is looking to sell the San Jose Earthquakes to Mexico's Club America [Espanol], who would then shop them to cities in Texas - including Houston, San Antonio and Dallas....