The Night’s Watch - When The NBAtv Series Is Fun

I love it when they get the NBAtv playoff series wrong. Nuggets, Spurs, who cares? Should be easy for Denver, and not very interesting for anyone else. Ha! I think a lot of NBA fans believe Denver’s record flatters them a bit, and that they pulled some real bush league crap to play San Antonio. Well, Denver, you’ve got them. Old Red Eyes is back!

Because playing the Spurs is like playing Dracula. He’s been around a long, long time. He’s seen everything you do, and much much more besides. He’s still here, in the playoffs. Always in the playoffs. Their systems seem antiquated? Well, they’re still here, and what are you going to do about it?

The Miami Heat, one of the most talented teams ever assembled, got lucky one year and won. Dracula came back the next season and laid waste to their dreams, laughed madly as “Not one, not two, not three” vaporized into a gray and black miasma and yet another back door cut.

So good luck with your choice, Denver. You have the greater talent. So did the Rockets a couple of years ago. But after getting a stake into the Spurs in the first game, the Rockets didn’t cut out Dracula’s heart. So he knocked James Harden upside the head (a classic Spurs playoff tactic) and turned into a swarm of rats, biting him constantly. Thus a very fine Rockets season ended, and another very selective data point was born.

If you assume the Spurs are going ever be easy to beat, you assume incorrectly. That’s why I wasn’t terribly thrilled when various posters wanted to play them. Given time, they will configure themselves to cause your team the most possible pain. Your team may win, but won’t enjoy it.

This is the schadenfreude series of the night.

For the pure schade series, we have Toronto and Orlando. I have no ill will towards Toronto, their suffering at the hands of LeBron James is absurd, almost comical. If they get upset by Orlando, well, it’s even sadder. But the Raptors losing the first game of a series at home is tradition now. Orlando is happy to make the playoffs, Toronto needs something more, and I hope they get it.

For the nightcap we have the Portland Trailblazers and Oklahoma City Thunder. The first game was one of the better contests of the first round. The second will probably be pretty good, as well. But Paul George appears to be actually hurt (though not against Houston, because drama) and OKC is certainly lining up a wall of excuses for a first round failure. The rest of the country doesn’t seem to have noticed that Portland is, in fact, the higher seed, and is so for a reason. That reason is they’ve been as excellent as the Rockets since the All-Star break.

The irony if Enes (Kant Play) Kanter is the player who breaks The Only Real Threat To Golden State (besides a couple of former Rockets) would be delicious.