I woke up this morning.
I know, I’m as surprised as you are, but I did. I woke up. I went downstairs. I made coffee and it tasted exactly like it did yesterday. The sun was shining through the windows. My kids were playing with their Legos. Everything was fine. Perfect, actually.
It’s always striking to me how relentlessly life just marches on with so little regard for the circumstances and events that fill in the blanks. Nothing slows down, nothing speeds up. Time may be relative, sure, but it’s also
consistent. Tomorrow will forever follow today.
If you’re reading this then, congratulations. You also survived. What happened in Madison Square Garden on June 10th didn’t kill you. It probably didn’t feel great either, but that’s beside the point. We’re here. We’re alive. There’s nothing to be done except pick up the pieces.
Now, we could certainly sit here and rehash the game if you’d like. The big lead. The big collapse. The missed opportunities. The OG play. Taylor Swift. I have a whole book full of notes and we can dissect it piece by piece. I’m sure we’ll find plenty of excuses and reasons for everything in there. Hidden gems that will tell us exactly when and where it all started to fall apart. If bet if we look close enough, we can pinpoint the exact second our hearts ripped in half.
For the life of me though, I can’t imagine wanting to go through that again. I’d rather figure out what we’re going to do now.
We could wallow, obviously. Lord knows there’s every reason to. But, look, we all watched Knicks fans spend the 48 hours between Games 3 and 4 having a collective existential meltdown on every podcast, show and platform they could find. We watched them take to the streets and cry to the heavens about the injustice, the indignity, of having to suffer through a 2-1 series lead. I watched a crowd of people yell obscenities at a man in a DeMar DeRozan jersey. These are not serious people.
I have no interest in doing anything like that. Frankly, it’s unbecoming.
Last night wasn’t the refs. The league doesn’t have a vendetta against us. The Illuminati didn’t convene and determine that in order for the world to prosper, the third biggest market in Texas needs to be humiliated on national television. We just lost. It was brutal and it was basically every sports fan’s worst nightmare come to life. But that’s all it was. A loss.
And we survived.
Y’all, we are so unbelievably lucky. Maybe it’s a little hokey of me to be preaching gratitude at a time like this, but like, ask a Sacramento Kings fan if they’d trade places with us. Ask a Hawks fan. A Clippers fan. Hell, go back in time four years ago and ask a fan of the Spurs team that finished 15th in the Western Conference and tied for the worst record in franchise history. Today feels pretty awful but I don’t think I’d trade it for anything.
You can’t get your heart broken if you never go to the dance.
We’re in the NBA Finals. We have one of the most talented, young rosters in the history of the league. We have a 7’4″ Shaolin monk who hits step back threes. We have five banners flying back home in our arena. We have Tim, Manu, and Pop waiting on the tarmac to help pick up the pieces. We have each other.
If you still feel bad, that’s okay. Feel it. Embrace it. Live with it. If you’re not watching sports to feel something then you’re not doing it right.
Eat, drink, and be merry.
Game 5 is Saturday.
Takeaways
- It never felt safe. Not for one single second and if you did feel safe you’ve not been paying attention. It was going too well. The shots were too clean. Everything was going to plan. That’s just…not how any of this works. It felt like a trap the entire time. A guy I was watching with made some comment about how, like, “Can you imagine paying 15K for those seats and now you’re having the worst night of your life?” and as soon I heard that question I almost turned the TV off. We tempted fate. We flew too close to the sun. They gave us all the clues.
- I’m willing to give De’Aaron Fox some grace on that last play where he tried to go to the rack in transition. I know he’s being a little defensive about it right now, trying to explain his thinking on it, and that’s okay. He allowed to do that. It all happened really fast and the moment got away from him. There were no shortage of mistakes to go around last night and I’m sure no one feels worse about it than he does. Fox is going to be heard from again in this series, I can feel it.
- At one point in the 4th quarter, I think I said something along the lines of “I’d be okay if we never shot another three the rest of the game.” I hate to be that guy, but I just wanted us to go to the rim over and over and over again. That’s all I wanted. Burn clock. Go to the rim, if you get blocked whatever, but make them work. It’s like we were just trying to re-catch lightning in a bottle and that’s simply not how lightning or bottles works. The lightning was gone. Ugh, I don’t know. Maybe that wouldn’t have worked either. That game simply felt destined to break our hearts one way or another and there isn’t really a tactic or scheme lurking around in some playbook to combat destiny.
- Maybe it will change as we get a little further away from it, but I’m pretty sure this still wasn’t as bad as the Ray Allen shot. It’s close! As close as I ever want to even remotely get ever again, but it’s not as bad as the ropes already being out for the celebration. Nothing will ever be as bad as that. And even if it is, I mean, hey, everything turned out okay in the end, right?
- Spurs in 7.
WWL Press Conference
I, uh, am not sure where to go on this one.
Yeah. Sort of hard to like, lean into the fun bits after you spent the evening watching Detective Benson, Taylor Swift and the Haim sisters dance on your grave.
Pretty undignified way to go.
It’s not what you want. It really is such a surreal experience to be living through a horrific sports trauma and then the camera cuts to Adam Sandler in a giant hoodie clapping along to your demise. I’m trying to process my grief and David Zaslav is staring at me in a backwards hat. There’s not a playbook for things like that. We weren’t trained for this.
Do you think it’d feel better if it were just random Knick fans instead?
I think the concept of whatever that was last night “feeling better” in any way, shape or form is not something I think is worth entertaining right now.
Spurs in 7 though?
Spurs in 7.
