It's been about 20 years since we had a 7-point possession, so here you go.

What a thrilling end to game 5 of the Bucks-Celtics series that was...well, unless you're a Boston fan, I suppose. Jrue Holiday reminded me why he's my favorite NBA player with a legendary block and then a steal to eliminate Boston's last chance to tie things up. In some ways, I thought the Celtics actually played better in game 5 than they did in game 4 -- their offense was more varied and they lead most of the game. Alas, in basketball the 4th quarter is definitely the most important of theem all. It's amazing to see what Giannis gets away with sometimes. He's taken so many bad 3s this series alone that I cringe a little every time he catches the ball on the perimeter, but in game 5 he actually hit two huge shots from behind the arc that took away the Celtics' momentum. Even his sometimes shaky free throw shooting didn't really get him into much trouble: Boston lost their last lead of the game when Giannis missed a free throw and then Bobby Portis scooped up the rebound and scored.

The last Suns-Mavs game was inexplicable. Everyone's talking about Chris Paul not being a huge factor in the last few games, but game 6 was particularly worrying for the Suns because both Paul and Booker seemed to vanish for long stretches of the game. Phoenix's offense and ball handling were shaky. The team just looked uncomfortable in their own skin out there at times. The Mavs on the other hand did a much better job of helping out Luka this time. I don't consider Dallas to be a great defensive team, but they nonetheless ably harassed and pressured the Suns' offense. One thing I thought they did particularly well was put pressure on the Suns' passing. Phoenix likes to make the extra pass and keep throwing the ball around until the opportunity to take the perfect shot opens up for someone. Dallas never let the Suns relax and get comfortable so they never found those perfect shot opportunities, and Phoenix's shooting and turnover numbers reflect that. Ultimately, I don't expect gave 6 will really mean all that much. Every team suffers the occasional letdown during the playoffs. I still think the Suns to go into game 7 ready to play and to close out the series...but it's going to be a bit more interesting than I expected. It'll be particularly interesting to see what kind of adjustments Monty Williams will make. I suspect they'll be significant.

What a meltdown by GSW tonight. It's tough to remember a team that goes so cold so often. Unlike some teams where when one player has a bad night the others pick up the slack, it seems like when one GSW player has a bad night it affects everyone.

Some thoughts on recent games and the current playoff series:

Bucks vs Celtics

These are two fairly similar teams who are both great defensively and play mature and intelligent basketball. However, only the Bucks have Giannis, and I expected that alone to be the difference maker in game 4. It ultimately wasn't. The Celtics largely ceded the paint to Giannis and Brook Lopez and relied on their jump shooting (and defense). It was a risky strategy, but it worked out in the end. Jayson Tatum scored 30, which isn't a surprise, but so did 35 year old Al Horford who managed to hit five three pointers, antagonize the generally mild-mannered Giannis enough to get the Greek star T'd up, and change the momentum of the game in the fourth quarter which was definitely a surprise. I've watched Horford for years and years, but I can't remember ever seeing him play better than this. He came up absolutely huge in a very big moment. One thing I love about watching basketball is getting to see the wily veteran turn back time and temporarily assume or reassume superstar status. Horford was absolutely the man of the game in game 4.

I still expect the Bucks to win this series. Giannis' game is just more high percentage than Tatum's or Jalen Brown's. The Celtics need to be both lockdown on defense and a little lucky to win -- the Bucks just need Giannis to pound the paint and do what he does best. One positive for Boston is that Khris Middleton is still out injured so the Bucks are a little lacking in offensive firepower at the moment.

Heat vs 76ers

You can count me as a skeptic of the big trade that reunited James Harden with Daryl Morey in Philadelphia. I'm not surprised that Morey did it given that he's always felt numbers are more important than emotions in basketball, but I just didn't see the combination of Harden and Joel Embiid taking Philly to the next level. You could certainly argue that any trade that got Ben Simmons off the roster was worth it. Nonetheless, game 5 provided a textbook example of why I was skeptical. Harden looked last night like he often looked as his Houston tenure was coming to a close: listless and unfocused. He took a lot of bad shots (and sometime made them) and made bad turnovers. He so often seems to me like a really talented player who just doesn't care much about the game at this point. It's safe to say that Embiid was expected to be the more reliable and stable partner in this dynamic duo, but he was very passive and low energy through out much of game 5 with moments of scattered brilliance. He is both physically beat up and probably hurting a bit mentally due to being overlooked for MVP.

You want to bring your A-game against a team like the Heat which is the epitome of strength and stability. Philly got crushed. Miami is so solid and deep they're a little bit scary. You have Jimmy Butler dropping 36, Max Strus nailing 4 three pointers and making the hustle plays, Bam Adebayo dominating the paint on both sides, P.J. Tucker driving everyone crazy, and then when it's garbage time they bring out, uh...Duncan Robinson? Yeah, that's a bit much. I expect the Heat to take this one, but it'll probably be in 7 because Embiid will have something to prove in front of his home fans in the next game.

Suns vs Mavericks

I can't root for Luka Doncic because that would feel like rooting for Ivan Drago. He's frighteningly good -- a near perfect offensive player who can score from anywhere. Every time I watch the Mavs Luka is fantastic. His teammates are the main reason Dallas doesn't go 82-0 every reason. So it was in game 5 of this series: Jalen Brunson, Dorian Finney-Smith, and Davis Bertans had moments of brilliance, but they couldn't match the solid, consistent play of players like Devin Booker, Chris Paul, Deandre Ayton, and a resurgent Mikal Bridges. Ultimately, this boiled down to a Suns vs Luka showdown, and it's tough for even a truly great player to take on a great team largely by himself. Monty Williams showed a willingness to throw everything against the wall to stop Luka. Everyone from Chris Paul to Deandre Ayton took a turn at guarding the Slovenian. I thought the bigger Ayton did a surprisingly good job of chasing Luka around. Monty also tweaked the Suns' rotation for primarily defensive purposes and gave Bismack Biyombo and Landry Shamet some more playing time. It's a chess match out there on the hardwood!

The Chris Paul-Devin Booker partnership can be explosive and high scoring, but it's Chris Paul and Deandre Ayton who I particularly love to watch play together. The combination of Paul's creative passing and Ayton's inside play is always fun to watch. Ayton doesn't have the array of inside moves that Giannis has, but he's great under the basket whether he's powering home a dunk or using his soft touch to glide the ball in. He's still young, too. Definitely one of the Suns' best prospects for the future. Paul had more assists than points so it wasn't his flashiest game, but he did his part to help his team win. Booker was great as usual: 25 points and shooting over 50%.

I definitely expect the Suns to close this series out shortly.

Random observation. In game two of the Suns/Dallas series, Chris Paul played some of the best basketball I've ever seen. They overuse the phrase "textbook basketball," but it was. I wouldn't surprise me if every NBA rookie (and certainly anyone about to play the Suns) was forced to watch that game.

...and then, in games 3 and 4, Chris Paul has been completely uneffective. I think in game 4 he at one point had 7 points and 7 turnovers, and ultimately fouled it. Absolutely terrible performance. Just a great example of one team dominating and another team making adjustments.

Flack wrote: Thu Apr 28, 2022 7:09 pm which I still have.

We could have saved some server space here.

Mavs put out the Jazz in six. Game was down to the wire and hinged on the final shot, where the Jazz missed an open 3 that would have won the game. Dallas take it home, 98-96. I was going to say something about Luka Doncic's play but he just dropped "bullshit" live in the post game interview and now I'm distracted. Dallas vs. Phoenix in round two.

Phoenix takes down the Pelicans in six. I was surprised the series was as close as it was to be honest. Great to see Booker back on the court for game six, and double-great to see Chris Paul getting respect in New Orleans. Of course Paul got drafted and immediately moved to Oklahoma City as the Oklahoma City Hornets. I spent two years rooting for CP3 from the cheap seats and even got a bobblehead on Chris Paul night, which I still have.

Maybe it makes me a bad person, but I got great joy -- GREAT JOY! -- from the Brooklyn Nets being swept in the first round of the playoffs. Those jackholes managed to put together a super-team of super-idiots -- some of the greatest ball players of our time who also happened to be dysfunctional boobs. Kyrie Irving sat out every home game of the season, preventing the team from gaining any cohesion and eventually driving James Harden to leave. Durant spends as much time fighting on Twitter as he does playing ball. It was obvious that the Nets thought if they could just get to the playoffs they could start taking things seriously and the result was 0-4 first round against the second ranked Celtics. Good riddance!

This has nothing to do with the current season, but wondering if you guys remember this -- Tyronn Lue was the head coach for the lone championship of the Cleveland Cavaliers. Everyone knew LeBron James was not sticking around forever, but you'd think the first coach that wins a championship would be forever revered. He won a championship and made the finals the next two years. He started 0-6 in the 2018-2019 season and was fired.

But why? 6 games is nothing, and they didn't have James, who was worth 40 games on his own back then. Obviously they didn't expect to be in the finals. Does anyone know why he was canned? I'd think that bringing a championship to that organization would get you 10 years afterwards.

That's not it. Lots of teams have been accused of coasting through the regular season or resting players before the playoffs. Accusing NBA players of not working hard enough on defense or running down court and not even trying except during the playoffs is nothing new.

The Lakers are ranked 9th in the west with a current record of 28-35 -- that's worse than a "just get to the playoffs" record. I get that Davis went out with an ankle injury a couple of weeks ago, but their record wasn't any better then, with three of the top 20 players in the league (James, Westbrook, and Davis) on their team. Even with Howard in and Melo on backup the Lakers should not have the record they have. They've lost 7 or their last 9 games to the Bucks (2/8), Portland (2/9), GSW (2/12), the Clippers (2/25 and 3/3), New Orleans (2/27), and the Mavericks (3/1), with a single win against Utah there in the middle. I feel like LeBron James should be able to be paired up with any four kids from the nearest YMCA and have a .500 record. Instead he's got 8x NBA All-Star Dwight Howard and Russel "I will shoot from anywhere, anytime" Westbrook. You would think these guys could find a way to make things work, but they just can't.

But where I was going with this was, it's not just a Lakers thing. The Nets put together a superteam with Durant and Harden and Irving and none of them could play together. Irving refused to get vaccinated which screwed everything up, and Harden and Durant can't seem to get along (which they couldn't in OKC, either). The news is filled with stories about Irving's crazy theories, Harden's trips to local strip clubs, and Durant's beefs with Twitter fans, members of the media, and his teammates.

I dunno. Maybe social media has magnified things, but it seems like all these guys are all about themselves. And again, that's not particularly new, but in the old days it seemed like they were out for themselves as it pertained to basketball.

Are they thinking, oh, we'll just get into the playoffs and then turn it on? Or do they hate each other? Poor Melo. :(

Between the Lakers and and the Nets, I feel like we're witnessing something... odd. Neither one of those teams would be the first "superteams" to publicly fail in a spectacular fashion, but something about this season and these teams feels different. We all know that throwing a bunch of superstars together on a team doesn't always lead to a championship, but it's hard to imagine a scenario a few years ago where a team starting LeBron James, Russell Westbrook, and Dwight Howard with Melo and Davis would have a < .500 record. On paper the Nets should have been first in the east; currently they're 8th.

Over the past couple of years we've seen big changes due to COVID. We've seen shifts toward social efforts, BLM, and other off-court interests. Maybe a team with hungrier players will rise up. Sometimes I wonder if there are any hungry players left.

Mostly unrelated, but I've never had a chance to share this story until just now. Many years ago I found some arcade games for sale online and ended up driving to Kansas to pick them up. The games were in a warehouse owned by a local operator, but he was old and cranky and didn't want anything to do with the internet so he had hired another guy (the guy I met) to handle all the online sales and stuff. The guy was almost 7' tall and so I mentioned basketball and he told me he had played in college, didn't get drafted, and ended up playing in some professional French league for a few years before returning home. It kind of sounded like a BS story but before I left he went back in his office and gave me one of his trading cards. I can't remember his name and have long since lost the card, but I always thought that was pretty cool. 0% chance that guy is in Fast Break Basketball.

I was playing a long-running game of Fast Break Basketball 3 the other day and I happened to check the draft preview for the upcoming 2009 NBA draft. The projected order had Ty Lawson listed as the predicted top draft pick ahead of players like Steph Curry, James Harden, DeMar DeRozan, and Jrue Holiday. (Actual top 2009 draft pick Blake Griffin appears to not have declared for the draft this season in the game.) I thought to myself, "That's probably a bad call there." Granted, almost anything can happen in FBB3. Yao Ming lead the Bucks to multiple championships in my game world while I've put together a lot of great teams that have failed to make the playoffs.

Anyway, this got me curious enough to look up Ty Lawson to find out what he's up to now. He's been playing internationally for the past several years. In 2020, he was banned for life from the Chinese Basketball Association for making inappropriate remarks about Chinese women on social media. Apparently, he praised Chinese women for their "cakes," and he wasn't talking about their rice cake baking skills. This was too extreme for China so off he went. He's currently playing for US Monastir, a Tunisian basketball club with a celebrated history.

Ice Cream Jonsey wrote: Thu Dec 16, 2021 6:12 pm Is Kyrie really gonna just never get vaccinated?

Kyrie posted a video on Instagram of himself putting on basketball shoes earlier this week which lead to two theories -- one, that he's about to rejoin the Knicks, or two, that he was about to be traded. (It's not a league rule that's preventing him from playing -- it's a New York rule.) In the end, neither of those things happened. The Knicks continue to struggle while Kyrie is apparently working out somewhere else offsite by himself. It makes me so mad when he says he's not anti-vaccine but that he's protesting the mandate, which is not true because he didn't get vaccinated when there was no mandate and he had nothing to protest. It must be nice to be so rich that you can take a stand against science and lose millions of dollars in the process for no reason. Even if he weren't losing the money and ruining his legacy, what kind of dick joins a team to play with his best friend and then flakes out when he gets there? In what world is Kevin Durant the voice of reason? I just don't get it, I really don't. How would you like to go from "top 10 player in the league" to completely untradeable? Pathetic.

One interesting thing about Steph Curry is that he hasn't just surpassed Ray Allen and Reggie Miller in three pointers made, but he also shoots a higher percentage from behind the arc than either guy. This surprised me when I checked the stats, particularly in Ray Allen's case. I think my perception was skewed by just how many threes Steph takes per game. I've seen x Steph Curry games in my life and y Ray Allen games in my lifetime, and that includes games when the guys had off shooting nights. It happens to everyone from time to time. The difference is that when Ray had a bad night he might have missed 4 or 5 threes while when Steph has a bad night he could miss 8 or 10. The stats don't lie, though: Curry is a sniper, not a chucker. He's objectively a better three point shooter than JJ Redick and Ben Gordon at this point which isn't something I thought I'd ever say. We'll see if he can keep it up as he enters the grizzled veteran stage of his career.

I watched that Knicks-Warriors game partly to witness history and partly because I thought it could turn out to be a pretty good game. I figured the Knicks would have a decent chance to steal the game because the moment might get to Curry a little bit. That didn't happen, and it wasn't a particularly good game to watch. Lots of missed shots and messy play. One really smart thing the Warriors did is give Curry the opportunity to break the record early...he did it by about the halfway mark of the first quarter with I believe his second 3 of the game. The pressure was off from that point. Curry got a little time to enjoy the moment, and it was off to the races from there. The Knicks were clearly a team battered by players missing due to COVID protocols, including RJ Barrett and Obi Toppin. They also played like a team that's been losing lately and has little confidence. Julius Randle kept missing mid range jumpers early on and most of the other Knicks seemed content to chuck up 3s ad infinitum. It wasn't a winning strategy. Alec Burks shot 2/10 and Immanuel Quickley shot 2/9 from three point land. Those are bad Steph Curry night numbers which goes to show this really is the league that Steph has partially remade in his own image. For the Warriors, Andrew Wiggins, Draymond Green, and Nemanja Bjelica helped Curry out a lot. The Knicks could really have used someone like Green who is so good at creating opportunities for other players and can change the momentum of the game with defensive and hustle plays. Derrick Rose came the closest in terms of getting other players involved, but even he was mostly content to feed Randle when he wasn't on the attack.

Speaking of Rose, he's simultaneously the Knick I enjoy watching the most due to his energy and flair and also the Knick who is the main reason I won't be watching many Knicks games this year. I think being credibly accused of gang rape and offering as your defense that you didn't know what consent was is about as bad an asterisk as any athlete can have attached to his name. If I were Barry Bonds, my strategy to get into the Hall of Fame would be to simply note I never gang raped anyone that we know of and I also knew what consent meant from an early age. I'd carry around a dictionary and study it whenever possible so I could whip out the definition of consent at a moment's notice. Sure there will always be an asterisk attached to Barry's name, but at least it isn't a Derrick Rose-sized asterisk. The pity is D. Rose could be lighting up the prison leagues right now and justice would have been served. I'd watch that with zero guilt. Who wouldn't want to see Kobe and the Rapid City Rapists take on Derrick and the Helena Hoodlums?

Is Kyrie really gonna just never get vaccinated?

Also, in case you missed it... Steph Curry broke Ray Allen's 3-point record and is now the record holder for the most 3-point shots. As they said during the same, Curry has changed the way the game is played. It's estimated that he'll play another 4-6 seasons barring an injury, which means that number of three buckets will only continue to go up.

Keeping your players healthy has taken on a new meeting in modern times. In years past that meant not racking up injuries before the playoffs; in today's world, it means preventing a COVID outbreak. As of right now, the Lakers have four players out (including Dwight Howard and Russel Westbrook). Earlier this week the NBA announced the next to Chicago Bulls games will have to be postponed as they have so many players out with COVID that they can't play. These guys practice and play in such close proximity that if a player isn't immediately quarantined after contracting COVID, there's a good chance they'll spread it to their teammates. I guess every locker room has the potential to become a "super spreader event" at this point.