In my life as a god-fearing, basketball-watching, Spurs-loving human being, I’m not sure I’ve ever hated a shot more than that three Victor took from the logo.
As soon as he pulled up I shouted NO. It felt like time stopped. I could sense my life flashing before my eyes. Everything good in the world was crashing down around me. The walls were crumbling. The water was rushing in. The air was sucked out of the room.
I was just so mad, you know? Like. The game was so good. I know the urge to throw around
phrases like “instant classic” or “best ever” is strong in these situations. We want to contextualize something in real time against whatever has come before. Stack it up against our memories and definitively state that we were there. We witnessed it live. We knew right away. We saw the light and it was good.
I’m always trying to resist this temptation, to avoid the trap. To sidestep looking like a fool who got carried away in the moment. But, man, you could just feel it. This was different. This was another level of basketball. It was something that was perilously tiptoeing along the edge of becoming overhyped and still managing to meet, even exceed, expectations. It was just a basketball game, sure, but it was a basketball game that was taking our brains, cracking them against the counter, and scrambling them on a hot pan for almost four hours.
And he was about to ruin it.
The audacity of this manchild. He’d taken only one three all game and bricked it. He was so gassed. Legs gone. Brain gone. Sense of right and wrong, gone. Why would he do this to me? To us? The game wasn’t over but airballing a prayer of a three from Steph Curry range was going to, without a doubt, kill it. The blue shirts in the crowd would crescendo into a wall of sound that would swallow us completely. They took our best punch and it wasn’t enough. How would we come back from that? We probably wouldn’t.
It would be a shame, too, because the boys played beautifully, didn’t they? They gave almost everything you could possibly ask for. A measured but aggressive approach on the offensive end. Scoring spread across the roster. Attacking the rim. Timely jumpers. Feeding Wembanyama in the paint in all the right ways, gobbling up boards.
And defensively? Oh, it was a masterclass. You’re not going to stop a team as good as the Thunder, but the Spurs effectively neutralized them for most of the game. Shai was out of sorts. Chet was in purgatory. No one outside of Alex Caruso could conjure anything close to the magic we’re used to seeing from them. It was all going according to plan. We were going to bask in the glow of this performance for years. I could taste it.
It was slipping away, though. Little by little, the Thunder were getting off the mat. The score was closer. Then the score was tied. We suffered the indignity of Chet blocking Wemby at the buzzer. Now we had to keep playing and, sure enough, Shai was starting to find it. He was working his angles. He was finding space. He charged baseline and finished over Steph. He sliced through our defense and dunked in Wemby’s face. Everything tasted sour all of a sudden.
The ball was made of grease. We couldn’t buy a basket. Champagnie missed a three. The Thunder were off and running. Everyone looked so tired. Just absolutely spent. They had given everything they had to try and pull off this miracle and it wasn’t going to be enough. We were about to be down two possessions with under a minute. The dream was over. We hadn’t survived.
Now, I don’t know why Jalen Williams decided to give us life by taking an ill-advised contested mid-range, but it didn’t matter, because of this colossal doofus. This 7-foot-4 buffoon. This immature, foolish, arrogant boy was about to throw that gift in the trash by pulling up from a million miles out and launching a desperate prayer. What a joke. What a disaster. What an absolute tragedy.
I don’t believe in magic. I don’t believe in miracles. I don’t think there’s some kind of divine presence intervening in the trials and tribulations of sport. I won’t sit here and pretend something happened out there on the court in Oklahoma that means anything beyond the three points that went on the board after that ball fell through the hoop.
All I can report is that I felt different afterwards. The chemistry inside my body changed. Like the Ship of Theseus, I came out the other end functionally the same but radically altered on a fundamental level.
I’ve never hated a shot more than I did when Victor pulled up from the logo.
I don’t think I’ve ever loved a shot more than when Victor pulled up from the logo.
Takeaways
- Hoo boy, Spurs fans. Are we okay? Do we think we can survive a whole round of this? My mind, body, and soul are, honestly, going to be a game-time decision the rest of the way.
- I’d like to go ahead and get this on the record now: every single instance of someone saying some version of “This is the actual NBA Finals right here” puts me on edge. I don’t care how good the Spurs and Thunder are. I don’t care how good the Knicks and Cavs are. The concept of putting the cart so significantly before the horse drives me insane. Stop doing it! If we somehow manage to survive this series, we have to trundle into Madison Square Garden and topple a team that’s handed us losses repeatedly this year. We’re not allowed to pretend the regular season games against the Thunder matter if we’re going to say the regular season games against the Knicks don’t. The Cavs might also be there. (At press time, Charlie did not have any other thoughts on the Cavs. Uh, stay tuned as this story develops.)
- I think I’m okay with the Alex Caruso of it all. Like, I think we probably run that back, right? He obviously played out of his mind, and we were clearly willing to go with the strategy of “if Alex Caruso beats us then so be it.” If we needed to shut down Alex Caruso, my boy Sean Sweeney could probably dial something up, it would just likely come at the expense of stuffing Shai in a locker all night. We make that trade every time, yea? I’m not going to enjoy him bombing wide open corner threes for the next two weeks, but I’m willing to play the odds.
- The thing where Thunder fans don’t sit until they score their first basket would make me so uncomfortable if I were in that crowd. I just don’t understand the upside. If they score quickly, great, it’s over and you’re just sitting. If they go seven minutes without scoring, everyone is just standing there staring at each other making it awkward. It doesn’t affect me at all, so you know, go with God or whatever. But I do not understand it. Spurs fans are perfect and don’t do anything weird. Case closed.
- I loved the Spurs unleashing Carter Bryant on Shai every once in a while just to go get in his face and cause problems. What a delight. What a fun wrinkle! You could just feel Shai shake his head like “not this guy” every time Bryant stepped on the court. They should give a “Not This Guy” award at the end of the series, like an MVP, for whoever was the most annoying to play against. Make the trophy obnoxious. Adam Silver, you know where to find me. I have dozens of ideas like this.
WWL Post Game Press Conference
Do you have a ranking of shots that you hated?
No, I think I try to forget about the shots I hate as much as possible. I have a pretty distinct memory of hating a lot of Manu’s shots over the years but, you know, I think in his case the ends ended up justifying the means over time.
He was kind of the archetypal “No, no, no, YES” player, right?
For sure. That was like his brand.
What about the Tim Duncan three against the Suns in ’08? I’m sure you weren’t psyched about that.
See, that’s a totally different thing than the Wemby situation here. Wemby pulled up in the middle of transition with a ton of time left on the clock to, I don’t know, do something reasonable. Set up the offense. Run a play. Burn some clock. Normal things, right? I hated Wemby’s shot because it defied the logic my brain was desperately grasping onto in its dying moments. Timmy’s miracle three was born out of something else entirely. There were like four seconds left. He had to take that thing. Now, for the life of me I still have no idea why he, of all people, was standing out beyond the arc while Manu barreled into the lane, but hey. The Lord works in mysterious ways.
I thought you said you didn’t believe in a divine presence intervening in the trials and tribulations of sport.
Look, I say a lot of things. I also said my brain was scrambled on a hot pan for four hours last night, so maybe give a guy a break.
