Three Down…
OMG OMG OMG!!!! The Indiana Pacers are playing for the NBA championship Sunday night! Thursday was a wonderful night of professional basketball. At least if you are a Pacers fan. They started out slow, missing like their first 100 shots, and trailed 10–2. From then on it really wasn’t much of a game. The Pacers destroyed the Thunder in pretty…
A Bummer Of A Game Five
After a nearly two-month dream ride, the Pacers run might be over. It wasn’t just that they lost game five in Oklahoma City last night by 11, after trimming an 18-point deficit to two midway through the fourth quarter. It wasn’t just that they routinely threw the ball away. It wasn’t just that they missed open shots when they could…
Weekend Notes
A full, fun weekend that had healthy doses of sadness and even a little fear. KC Trip As mentioned Friday, I headed back to Kansas City for the weekend to attend the memorial service for Jack N, the father of one of my closest friends. We’re at the age where these are happening more frequently, but no matter the circumstances…
A Night Of Hoops
A full evening of basketball with some big moments worth sharing. Pacers WOW! Up 2–1 on the massive favorites thanks to two amazing quarters. Oklahoma City was the better team for two periods Wednesday, the first and third. Sadly for them, the Pacers were even better in the second and fourth and now lead the NBA Finals. I only saw…
Weekend Notes
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…
Playoff Miracle, Vol. 186
I have a very busy day, but still want to squeeze in some quick words about game one of the NBA Finals. It started about how I expected: the Pacers were sped up and nervous and when they could get shots, were missing thoroughly makable ones. The Thunder were also nervy at the beginning, but their defense found its footing…
NBA Final Preview
The NBA Finals have arrived. I’ve been listening to podcasts previewing the series all week, and reading everything The Ringer has posted on the topic. Since I know most of you are 1) far busier than me and 2) don’t care as much about the result as I do, allow me to offer a summarization of all that content: the…
Hell Yes ‘Cers!
Holy shit, it happened! The Pacers are in the NBA Finals! I gotta be honest, I was angry Friday morning. And worried. After the Pacers played like ass in New York Thursday it meant little to me that the series was coming back to Indy for game six. It seemed like the Knicks had figured out how to contain the…
OMG In MSG
Normally on a day like this, after what happened at Madison Square Garden last night, I would have hopped out of bed early and banged out 25,000 words about the latest inexplicable Pacers, come-from-behind win. Funny thing happened last night, though. If funny is a proper synonym for infuriating. At 7:59 I set aside my small screen where I was…
Pacers-Knicks
The long wait is over: the NBA Eastern Conference finals begin tonight. The Pacers have been sitting around for more than week as the Knicks closed out the Celtics and then the stupid NBA calendar got situated. Somehow the Western Conference finals started before the Eastern, even though the Thunder just finished their series against Denver on Sunday. Dumb. Anyway,…