Wow, what an odd few days for Spurs fans, including this one. First, we saw our best player live out an expression that never actually happens in real life: “he fell flat on his face”. The Spurs then lost that game, which ESPN claimed they had a 98% chance of winning with 8 minutes and 33 seconds left in the fourth quarter. At home.
We then had to try to determine how long Victor would be out of action. Would his youth overcome the average seven day layoff for players who suffer concussions? Or would the fact
that his face fell over seven feet before hitting the court overwhelm his youth so that he would be out more than the seven day average?
Would he even be on the team plane to Portland? I even looked at whether it would be better to rent a big RV and drive Victor to Portland, until Google maps told me that it would take 31 hours to drive to Portland. Yet another reason the Spurs would have preferred to play Phoenix in the 2-7 match-up: it’s only a 14 hour drive.
We were relieved to learn that Victor was well enough to travel with the team to Portland (in the plane, not in my imagined RV). And then the internet showed him at the team shoot-around in Portland, shooting threes, messing around with his teammates, and looking healthy and happy. In my mind, that increased his odds of playing from 2% to about 20%, but no more. Of course, the 80% or 98% prevailed, and the Spurs correctly held Victor out of Game 3.
Now, a personal detour. For reasons not relevant to any other Spurs fans, I could not watch Game 3. Don’t ask. Anyway, I was in a place with spotty internet connections, and was forced to check in on the game with occasional access to ESPN and the score of the game. It looked OK when I checked in early and game was close. I lost contact for a while, and my last opportunity to see the score showed the Spurs down 14 points late in the third quarter. ESPN showed Portland with an 87.5% chance to win, and that was the last score I could see for several hours.
During those hours, I played out the rest of the series in my head. I assumed Victor might be able to play Sunday’s game, but it was at best 50/50. If he didn’t play, the Spurs would likely lose, and go down 3-1 in the series. While the Spurs might be able to come back from that deficit, the odds are that they would not. And our joyous regular season would turn into a “we could have been a contender” instead of any of the possible much better outcomes.
When I got home, I checked Pounding the Rock just to see the final score of the Spurs’ loss, only to see that the Spurs had won! All the scenarios I played out in my head disappeared. The best “late night check of your phone” ever. I slept much better than I expected to, and my Saturday flight to Mexico City with my wife and daughter was much more pleasant than I expected. I was surely much more pleasant to travel with.
But the Spurs surprising win over the Blazers was not the only odd thing in those 24 hours.
The Lakers came back from down 6 points in the last minute of regulation to beat the Rockets in OT on Friday night, taking a 3-0 lead over the Rockets without Luka Doncic and Austin Reaves. No one had that on their bingo card.
And on Saturday night, the Timberwolves beat the Nuggets despite losing two starters, including Anthony Edwards, in the first half. He reportedly avoided ligament damage but is expected to miss a few weeks. It looks like the other injured starter, Donte DiVincenzo, has a torn achilles and out for a very long time — possibly all of next season. But just as no one predicted, some guy named Ayo Dosunmu came off the bench to score 43 points on 13-17 shooting, including 12-12 from the line and 5-5 from three. The broken Wolves are now up 3-1 over the Nuggets.
In about 24 hours, the Spurs went from possibly going down 3-1, and even if they won, having to go through Denver and OKC to get to the NBA Finals to being up 2-1 and possibly having to go through a Wolves team without Edwards and DiVincenzo to get to the Western Conference Finals.
To cap it off, we had chorizo, guacamole and grasshopper tacos for dinner. As I said, an odd few days. Let’s see what odd things happen in Game 4 against the Blazers.
