I’m not even going to bother prefacing the post about how I think today’s NBA is shit, it was better in the past, yadda yadda. But the sports fan in me was intrigued by the fact that both the eastern and the western conferences were going to game 7s, and when I had little else to do on a long holiday weekend, I figured why not tune in to see what was happening? When the dust settled, we were left with the Golden State Warriors versus the Cleveland Cavaliers; for the fourth straight year, which is a marvel in itself, and something that if Marty McFly told me was going to happen back in 1998, I would’ve disavowed the entire Back to the Future franchise as a whole.
I mean, going into the playoffs, I would’ve bet money that it was going to turn out this way; Golden State is the modern day super team that actually is super and actually does win basketball games. And on the other side, we have LeBron James whom with each passing year truly deserves to have his name mentioned in the same breath as Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant, as a player who inexplicably has the ability to win, by almost nothing more than sheer force of will sometimes, regardless of whom the Cavaliers field around him, because he just puts the team on his back and has overcome some majorly dubious odds this particular playoffs to get to where they are now.
But the point of this post isn’t about how great the Warriors are or how amazing LeBron James is, but more about how the Houston Rockets basically gifted the Warriors the west, and how they weren’t so much a team that was beat by the superior team as much as they were the squad of fucking idiots that simply didn’t understand how to change plans when it was abundantly clear that their Plan A was just not working.
The eye test when watching the game notices that the Rockets are jacking up an inordinate amount of three point shots. The Warriors too, but the difference is that the Warriors were making a few of them here and there, while the Rockets were flinging enough bricks to build a village in Zaire. The Rockets’ 11-point lead at the half was quickly whittled away and when Durant, Curry and Thompson started burying some practically half court shots to start taking the lead and begin their usual pulling away from the opponent spiel, the Rockets simply did not pivot and change up their plans accordingly. Instead, they threw up bad three pointer after bad three pointer, and I’m thinking to myself, does this team know how to play basketball inside the key?