[5-minute read] [This is Part 2 of a live-ish reaction to Finals Game 2. Part 1 is here.]
My goodness, Jalen Brunson was magnificent in the 2nd half of game 1, and he’s under gigantic defensive pressure/punishment here. Karl-Anthony Towns is an awkward big, but those hands. That rebounding. He’s been a bit of a punchline in my (mainly online, podcast-driven) NBA fanship. But hey, can we put in a word for the possibility that even seasoned, veteran players like him can LEARN? Can improve? He clearly has, and much of it has been just this year, from what I can tell.
Hacking Mitchell Robinson. Ugly basketball. I know what the hardliners would say: His fault. Just make your damned free throws if you don’t want to get hacked! But it’s one of several ways that the FIBA rules are superior to those of the NBA. It’s an “unsporting foul”, 2 free throws and the offence retains the ball, and suddenly this side show, where San Antonio reserves just keeping intentionally fouling one guy, far from the play (and in the first case, when Knick Landry Shamet had beaten his man on an actual Basketball Play and was attacking the goal), is just removed from the game. Good riddance!
Moral dilemma: I can fast-forward through the interminable, repetitive commercial breaks and get myself to bed before midnight, but then I don’t have time to record my every hoop-nuts thought for the edutainment of the masses! Tough call.
This is bad basketball. Another stupid foul on Robinson — but he hit both. Good for him. Sidebar: why the hell won’t somebody with that terrible a free-throw stroke try the underhand shot. YES, I MEAN THE ‘GRANNY’! This shooting coach — I mean ME — in a basketball tributary pool far from the world centres of the game, is conceited enough to think he could teach Mr. Robinson how to make at least HALF his free throws…
End of quarter. Great start for these precocious baby guards in San Antonio. (Man, they’ve had massive draft luck: 1st pick in the Wembanyama Draft, then getting Stephon Castle at 4 the next year, and Dylan Harper at 2 last June, but superb and less-obvious choices in the last two cases) And, you have to think that they, along with Oklahoma City and precious few other franchises, are doing a wonderful job of developing the players they have, and not the constant “Trade Machine” roulette, another thing I find tiresome. They did set De’Aaron Fox (got his first-name spelled almost right, first try!) free from Sacramento Kings purgatory; always loved that guy since the tears at the end of his (brief!) college career, in contrast to the oh well, just another game in another tournament AAU-cursed cool of, say, Lonzo Ball in the same year after he got bounced out of the NCAA Tournament.
Did I say “tiresome”? “And let’s check on our superstars, Draft Kings odds blah blah blah”– gad, even the former NBA players doing colour commentary on the game have to shill for this Resident Evil that has so tarnished the pro game. An old dude like me remembers gambling as being the number one enemy afflicting sports, and now it’s every league’s best friend, even as it preys on vulnerable young men. (An old Sports Illustrated feature: “This Week’s Sign That the Apocalypse is Upon Us”. For this decade, it’s clearly the unbelievable hold that gambling suddenly has on pro sports. Sickening.) I remember the old Supertramp album from the 1970s: “What Were Once Vices Are Now Habits”. How prescient is that? And yeah, I said it. Gambling is a vice. The love of money is the root of evils. Yup, I said “evil”, too; so did the New Testament and most calls to right living. (That’s some harsh language, sir!)
Towns is playing so well! At a certain point in my coaching, I was about to rename our old “Mikan Drill”, the big man shooting protocol immortalized by the great Laker from the ’50s (when the Lakers were in Minnesota, where there are actually, y’know, lakes), and call it the KAT drill, but his obvious skills didn’t seem to match his total “impact on winning”, as coaches like to say. So the drill is still named after George Mikan, at least in our gym. But it’s great to see the transformation of Towns into this smart, responsible player (and not just a star)…
I love how fast the Knicks are playing, both teams, really. As much as I love Shai Gilgeous-Alexander — a good old Hamilton homeboy, as I almost am, as my nephew Tyler (yes, *that* Tyler, Ternowski of the Hamilton Tiger-Cats of the CFL, for one season a high school teammate of SGA at Sir Allan MacNab) actually is — I think, from what I saw and heard of the Spurs’ victory over the Thunder in the western finals, that Shai loves too much to advance the ball slowly; it’s the same tendency that Jayson Tatum, according to Coach Jay, needs to overcome. I do love the fast-break game. Why allow a suffocating defensive team to get set?
Gosh, I thought I’d be pulling for the Spurs. They beat Shai’s Thunder, for one thing, but I have loved the Spurs for pretty much the whole Gregg Popovich era: the Admiral, Timmy!, Tony, Manu, that incredible dismantling of the Miami Heatles during the James/Wade/Bosh era, the fearless political (well, let’s just say “humane”) commentary of Coach Pop, that beautiful brand of team basketball, the new era with an intelligent, sane young unicorn in Victor W…. But man, these Knicks are reminding me, speaking of gorgeous ball movement and shooting, of what I grew up on in the ’70s. The Knicks with two titles, the Celtics of Havlicek and Cowens and JoJo White. I am shocked to be pulling for the Knicks, but Brunson is so good. Josh Hart is an outstanding role player doing all the right things. Kat 2.0. Loved the Villanova University teams of Jay Wright (Hart, Brunson, Bridges), and this is a team built on the fundamentals of team ball. I love it.
And now Kenny, Shaq and Charles are yelling incoherently at each other during “At the Half”. Later!