The Grip - Mon 6.4.18

Eternal darkness of the flawless jumpshot

June 04, 2018

6.4.18

Aptly written while listening to Beyonce's Déjà Vu [Spotify] [Apple Music]

This is all so damn messed up

No. 2 Golden State vs. No. 4 Cleveland

Game 1: Warriors 124, Cavaliers 114 [OT] Game 2: Warriors 122, Cavaliers 103 [Box Score] [Highlights]Game 3: Warriors @ Cavaliers, Wednesday, 9 PM EST, ABC

The best way to discuss last night’s game is to jump back into another edition of our popular segment: What’s Sadder?

  • That our two head writers felt like watching the game was such a non-priority that they played soccer and worked overtime for the first half and missed nothing.

  • That JR Smith responded to MVP chants from Oracle Arena by bricking a free throw. Wait, no, that’s just funny.

Looks like option No. 1 is the winner.

If you REALLY want to know what happened last night, just watch this gif.

Please, watch again. And this time, focus first on how high that shot went, then focus on the Cleveland bench. Want to see a collective broken spirit? There it is.

Then consider the following:

The Nick Young NBA Championship ring countdown: The earliest he can get it is Friday. Let’s enjoy this final week while it lasts. And mourn that he will have a ring before Karl Malone, Elgin Baylor, John Stockton, Reggie Miller, Dominique Wilkins, Bernard King, Alex English, Charles Barkley, Patrick Ewing, Allen Iverson, Steve Nash, George Gervin and Chris Webber.

Fine, we’ll drop the attitude, and ask you this:

Is there something wrong with us? Are we acting spoiled? Should we just shut up and watch the Greatest Team of All-Time thwart the Second Greatest Player of All-Time?

The problem here, honestly, is that this series just does not feel like appointment viewing anymore. We poured our time and energy into the last two months; cheered the upsets and blogged so hard our 2011 Apple laptops almost blinked their last blink.

We hoped for ANYthing else. And we got this, again. And then JR Smith took a break at halftime to chicago a joint and play Edward 40-Hands with himself. That really sucked.

That felt like the last straw -- one of us covered college baseball last night and the other played rec league soccer, DURING THE GAME! We aren’t proud of this, but we’ll say: If this was Celtics vs. Warriors, or Celtics vs. Rockets, or Rockets vs. Cavs, we would be watching our butts off. Clearing the schedule. Live-Tweeting to an audience of few. Texting back-and-forth. Calling friends during did-you-see-that moments.

Because that would be new.

Analogy time: The Office is great. It’s a creative, relatable, lovable, long-running legitimately great T.V. show. There is a consensus that it is an enjoyable show.

The 2015 NBA Finals were awesome; a super-team came out of nowhere and blossomed into a revolution. Cleveland was resurrected by LeBron, who almost dragged a high school team to a title.

And 2016 has a case for the best NBA Finals of all-time. People stopped what they were doing for that game seven in Oakland. It shook the (sports) world. You could palpably feel how much it meant to everyone involved, and everyone not involved.

But 2017 was forgettable, sans the Kevin Durant-game three shot. And 2018 -- game two in particular -- felt like coming home after work with high hopes of expanding your mind with a new show on T.V.

Instead, though, you turn on Netflix, and, bless you, it’s right to season four of The Office. The Dinner Party episode. The Dundees episode. The one where Michael runs a 5K after wolfing fettuccine alfredo.

You’ll put down the remote, laugh at a few punchlines in the same way you’ll still marvel at a Steph Curry three or a LeBron dunk, but then you’ll drift off to sleep and wake up at 3 a.m., and The Office will no longer be running.

The T.V. will ask you one question. It’s the same question we will ask you, readers.

Are you still watching?

(Finally) confronting the Celtics’ loss

Stop what you’re doing for one second, and think about what Isaiah Thomas meant to the city of Boston during the spring of 2017.

He was in mourning of his little sister, playing with a broken hip, Tweeting to the Boston youth, combing the projects for his next pickup game. He was the orphan who found a home, the Little Guy who’d shoot it in your mouth and talk all the shit in the world, the 29-a-game two-time all-star, the ok-but-when-did-YOU-get-drafted motherfucker.

He was a bad man. Now he’s a punchline with a non-recovered hip looking for big money that he burned away in April and May of 2017.

Do you think about that spring? You don’t -- but it was magical. You remember now. He was one series win away from his own Mark Wahlberg movie script.  

And the 2018 playoffs run for the Celtics was great, too, but Danny Ainge is the man with a penchant for maniacal hand-rubbing and evil laughter, who sweats through his Chipotle brand t-shirt if he’s more than 30 feet from the blow-it-up button.

In 2019, when Jaylen Brown has been blindsided and shipped off and the Drew Bledsoe-Terry Rozier kinshop is a footnote never to be revisited, we’ll write this reminder again.

Don’t forget this run, because 2018 was the Celtics year. Just like 2019 will be, and 2020. There is too much of an eagerness to move on and consider how great a team will be once they get an injured player back, once that team grows up a little more. Once LeBron heads west.

See how that worked out for the Oklahoma City Thunder, coming off a run to the NBA Finals in 2012; how Penny and Shaq were destined for championships, how the NBA world felt about the Timberwolves two years ago.

This league is too combustible, too throw-out-and-move-on; how can a title be the only thing that matters when we watched a 20-year-old dunk all over LeBron; when we got to read about Terry Rozier’s careful love for his disabled sister; when we learned what Semi Ojeleye’s parents had to do to get their son to the NBA?   

We’ll probably never really understand what clicked for this team, or what they had over the 76ers, or why they couldn’t quite conquer LeBron. Maybe they’ll keep the crew together, add the two injured stars, and make a run next year to the NBA Finals.

It’s also possible they never make it back, that Philadelphia puts it all together and dominates the east for the next five years.

But even if that does happen, 2018 was the Celtics year, in the same way that 2012 was OKC’s year, in the same way that 2017 was Isaiah’s year.

What else happened?