Day: June 9, 2025

Pacers

Well, the Thunder showed up Sunday evening. As has been routine in these playoffs, the Pacers missed a ton of open looks early as they fell behind. The difference in game two was that I don’t think it would have mattered. OKC was absolutely locked in from the beginning and once they took the lead on a 10–0 run the result was never in doubt. The 42–21 run in the second quarter was too much for the Pacers Devil Magic to overcome.

What amazes me most about the Thunder’s D is how it is actually good defense. With one exception, they don’t foul a ton. They are just in your shirt through effort, speed, and talent. They refuse to let you get by, doing so because they move their feet faster than you move yours. They get their chests into you and leave their hands off, saving those to swipe at the ball rather than grab and hold like so many other teams do. Which makes it even tougher because you can’t complain to the refs in hopes of getting some calls to ease their pressure.

As I said, there’s one exception, and that is Alex Caruso. That dude fouls 15 times on every play. His hands are always on whoever he is guarding, wrapping them up, pulling them, etc. The Thunder might not be in the Finals had the refs called him even occasionally for how he beat up Nikola Jokic in the Denver series.[1]

That wouldn’t have made a difference last night, either. The Thunder were better and more focused while the Pacers missed their chance to stay close early then let OKC’s pressure get most of them sped up.

Tyrese Haliburton was a little passive early. Which brings me to my complaint about the announcers, especially Richard Jefferson. He kept ranting about how Hali needed to be more aggressive, take more shots, insert himself into the action. Which I agree with a little bit. At the same time I wondered if Jefferson had watched the Pacers/Hali at all during the regular season. That is never their game. Hali gets on hot streaks but it almost always happens in the second half. Not because he’s passive, but more because he’s a pass-first point guard and the Pacers spend first halves spreading the ball, getting everyone involved, breaking down the defense, and then Hali pounces when they get tired and either over-help or get lazy. I agree the Pacers need to play a little out of character if they want to win this series. But you can’t be something you’re not. Hali taking 35 shots is not a recipe for winning in OKC. Still, he probably needs to take more than three shots by the mid-point of the second quarter.

The Pacers lost far more because most of the other players stunk Sunday, regardless of what Hali did.

My other big takeaway: SGA is incredible. That dude hits shots that just don’t make sense all night long. Like from a physics standpoint. He’s not a small dude at 6’6”, but he is so wiry you don’t expect him to have the strength to hit turn-around, fade-away jumpers from 20-feet after putting three moves on his defender. It’s outrageous.

Thankfully the refs have yet to bail him out with the weak calls he tends to draw in the regular season. The Pacers have also done a nice job of being physical with him up until he throws his foul-drawing moves at them. I like that they’ve let both teams be physical without it ever getting out of hand. Let’s hope that continues and SGA isn’t shooting 15 free throws a night the rest of the series.

Bummer of a game, but the series is tied coming back to Indy, which is the best the Pacers could have hoped for. Just as the Thunder have bounced back from each of their playoff losses, so too have the Pacers. They’ll have the crowd the next two games, along with the comforts of home. They need to find a way to better attack the Thunder and withstand their pressure if they want to go back to Oklahoma with a chance to still win the title.

French Open

I was an occasional watcher of the French Open over the past two weeks, but Saturday I watched every minute of the fantastic Coco Gauff – Aryna Sabalenka final. It was an intense and entertaining match. Just like when they played in the US Open final two years ago, Sabalenka was dominant early before Coco righted herself and stole the match. One of the things I found most fascinating about the match was that the older, more experienced player was the one who lost her shit while the younger one played almost without emotion. It’s like Coco knew Sabalenka would crack if she could stay in the match long enough. She just keeps living up to the crazy hype that accompanied her arrival on the scene seven years ago.

I was in-and-out for the mens match Sunday. I was passing through the room when Jannik Sinner was sitting on three match points, so I turned the TV off and went outside to deal with a pool issue. Several hours later when I glanced at ESPN I was amazed to see that Carlos Alcaraz had come back and won. HOW?!?!?! And he won the closing tiebreak 10–2??? Holy shit! An NBA writer said that was like opening an overtime period with seven straight alley-oop dunks.

Pool

I thought I was having one pool issue late last week. It turned out to not be an issue, but rather a sign that a much bigger one was slowly presenting itself.

The bottom of our pool started looking green last week. Slowly, in the corners of the deep end, but getting bigger each day, and spreading to an area in the shallow end, too. I assumed it was green algae, something I’ve never had, so took a water sample to the pool store and got a diagnosis. They put me on a 36-hour schedule of intense sanitization to kill off the algae.

By Sunday the green was still there, but seemed contained a bit. So I decided to vacuum all the crap on the bottom of the pool out into the yard, bypassing the filter in hopes I could kick it back on and the water would return to normal quickly. As I vacuumed I thought it was strange the “algae” seemed very thick and heavy. And still very green. Shouldn’t all those chemicals have killed it, and shouldn’t it be kind of light and amorphous? I vacuumed it all out, backwashed my filter, and kicked things back on. Green material immediately started pouring out of the return jets. There were already large deposits on the pool floor. WTF???

I killed the system and decided to scoop out whatever was in the bottom of the pool for a closer look. That wasn’t algae. Instead it was the glass media we use in our filter. I had no idea it was green. Had I known that I would have realized a week earlier something in our filter was slowly failing and allowing the glass to return to the pool with the filtered water. And that failure was getting bigger each day. And I shot a couple hundred bucks of brand new filtering media into our grass.

It also should have been a clue that despite these fields of green on the pool floor getting larger, the water was remaining clear.

I texted back-and-forth with our pool guy, who seemed confused by what was going on until I sent him pictures of the glass I had removed from the pool. That’s when he confirmed something in the filter has failed. He’s going to do his best to get here today to take a look, then hopefully it’s a quick/easy/cheap fix that doesn’t involve ordering parts that take a week to get here or, God forbid, replacing the entire filter.

We’ve been pretty lucky with our pool over the six seasons we’ve had it. Eventually, though, they are like boats and become money pits. We already knew this was likely the last season for our current liner. Looks like that won’t be the only cash we’ll be pouring into the system this year.

Grad Parties

Saturday was C’s biggest day of grad parties of the year. She had seven on her calendar.

She began the day heading 45 minutes south to a co-party by two of her closest friends. When she returned home S and I joined her for the next four. The first was 35 minutes east of our house. The second 10 minutes west of that one. The third 15 minutes back east. Then the fourth was back near our home. We did quick pop-ins at the first two. We aimed to do the same at the third, but as there weren’t many people there we felt kind of bad and spent more time chatting with the parents than we expected to. They are nice, that was fine, but it meant we only had 15 minutes or so at our last one, which was the one S and I wanted to go to most. We hustled home and then C realized she didn’t have time to make the next one, so we called it a night and ordered sushi. Had we known that was the case, we would have stayed longer at that last party. There were a bunch of families we love from St P’s there, all of whom sent their kids to different high schools so we don’t get to see them very much.

After dinner C was off to one more grad party and then a normal party. She has one or two more on her calendar later this month, but the bulk of her friends are now out of the way.