Wow! This is incredible. We have just witnessed two consecutive good basketball plays in a single NBA Eastern Conference play-off game. It is 10:19 p.m. on a wet Tuesday night in America. The top-seed Detroit Pistons are more or less leading the quasi-dangerous New Jersey Nets, champions of the NBA East. Ho ho.
The score is 78–76, a repulsively low total for any NBA game with two minutes left in the fourth quarter. It is a shameless mockery of what the NBA used to look like at play-off time. These teams Suck. But do we really deserve five more minutes of Overtime in this ratbastard game? This is bad, bad, ugly, ugly basketball. Fuck overtime. We don’t need any more of this brazen chickenshit. Get it over with.
Yes. Thud! There it goes, oozing away in the dimness of itself. The Nets win, by two, 88–86. And good riddance. The NBA East is a low-talent, low-rent tribe of carpetbaggers, and the TV moguls who foist this cheap, phony dung off on any sports-wise TV audience should be killed. Yes, Virginia, there really is no Santa Claus—and things will never really turn out Right in the end.
What? One of these dumb yo-yos on TNT just compared the New Jersey Nets somehow to the showtime LA Lakers of 1985–88, etc. That is ridiculous. Only a fool would say a thing like that. Who was it?
Well, we know it was not Magic, because he was there on the set and laughing the insult off. And we know it was not Charles Barkley, because he is too smart to make such an ass of himself.… So that leaves Kenny Smith and Ernie Johnson, who both jabber and babble too much, so either one of them could have spit out something like that, without even being conscious of it. They are professional jabberers—while Magic and Charles are real-life heroes who are also real-life smart and quick and knowledgeable about the game. And Johnson shoots free throws at half-time.
Right. And so much for that, eh? The only truly shocking game of the play-offs so far was San Antonio’s hopeless collapse against Dallas on Monday night, when the Mavericks came back from 18 points down to win the vitally important first game of the West finals by three little points, after trailing for all but the last seconds of the game. It was a disaster.
The last second was bad enough, but the last-second loss of the favored home team was utterly demoralizing to the proud and prancing Spurs, who self-destructed after Tim Duncan got his fifth foul. It was like watching the tortoise run down the hare, right in front of our eyes. Snap, crackle, POP. Even Jack Nicholson had to feel a twinge of sympathy for a first-class team like the Spurs—brought low by a seed of tragedy in themselves.
Tim Duncan is an agreeable, no-fun kind of guy who scored 40 points in a losing cause against a bone-tired Dallas team that had just finished playing 7 incredibly savage, draining games against Sacramento, obviously the best team in the NBA until they lost the best player, unanimous all-pro Chris Webber, to a season-ending injury about halfway through the playoffs. That was IT, once again, for the snakebitten Kings, who have been the best team in the league for the last two years but got bushwhacked both times by crippling injury or wretched hometown officiating.
I weep for Sacramento, but so what? It was like betting on a three-legged horse. And if San Antonio hadn’t blown that game against Dallas on Monday, they would almost certainly have been the Champions of the NBA this year.
And they may still be—but things are different now, and the Spurs are suddenly looking a little weak, a little more vulnerable than they did after terminating the Lakers.… Hell, all Don Nelson and his conquering thugs had to do was deliberately and continually foul the worst free-throw shooter on San Antonio’s play-off roster every time he touched the ball, and sometimes even sooner.
It was a crude and disgusting way to play the game, but it worked. The Spurs got rattled and taken rudely out of their game. They lost their rhythm, and that is usually fatal, especially in the play-offs.… Dallas is now the smart-money favorite. Suddenly this looks like a keenly competitive six- or seven-game series.
Good. That is the way it should be, according to my calculations and public predictions—except that I had the Spurs winning, if they could navigate the rest of the play-offs without major injuries.
I did not even think about the chance of one team’s resorting to flat-out public thuggery as a secret winning strategy, and that makes me feel vaguely stupid. How could I have been so silly? So naïve?
Ah, but I am being hard on myself again. My overall predictions are looking pretty suave, so far. I even had Dallas plus nine in game One—which sounds a bit fishy, on the surface.
Indeed. How could any self-respecting gambler give Dallas plus 9, in a play-off game?
The answer is he doesn’t—except maybe for halftime bets, like mine. So take a tip from a shameless hustler, folks. Make your most desperate bets at halftime, when one team is so far ahead that it looks like a certain massive beating. That is the time to pounce. That is the moment to sink your fangs into half-bright fans who are not really paying attention to this onesided farce.
Yes. That is the moment to slip the dagger between their ribs. After that, it is only a matter of time before you will want to twist it. That is what a true gambler loves—the fleecing, the Whipping, the cruelty, the stabbing. They barely even feel it, until money changes hands and there is no escape from the sleazy truth. That is when you can physically feel their pain. That is what makes sports gambling so fun. It is wonderful.
—May 21, 2003