Nov 19 2008
Come On! or Recap of Portland at Golden State
Come on!
I mean, what? Seriously?
So many emotions come to mind with this loss. There’s the totally irrational anger that a game-blowing call does to someone. When you see your guy showing off the red marks on his chest after the game to anyone who was nearby, it just makes it that much more painful. The fact we were in the middle of an insane comeback for the ages makes it even worse. The fact they gave Rudy a technical after he was done speaking is just inhuman. The fact that’s it will be clear as day on every replay I ever see is just that much worse; and if the Warriors end up a game ahead of us at the end of the season - that will be the worst. All because of one stupid call.
Then the rational me comes in. We didn’t deserve to win he says. We were playing horribly. The only reason the game was even close was the volume of threes we were hitting. We were lethargic out there, with the only guys really coming to play (Roy, Oden, and Rudy) keeping us together the whole time. No one realized that you can just go around the Warriors. Not to mention the horrible game management by Nate. Before the infamous call, there is the call to go for two when we have no timeouts left with 14 seconds. Then, there’s the Warriors. They were playing way over their heads. They were hitting contested shots constantly, and they broke every rule of probability in the way they shot free throws over the night.
You know what, though. Being rational for something as irrational as that call was is just naive and insulting. The team was at the end of a massive road trip and worked their asses off in one of the more hostile arenas in the NBA and right when they started making their own luck, the refs and the refs alone stole that away from them. How either team plays up to that moment does not matter when the refs make that moot. There’s only one moment in this story that counts; the rest is prologue. That call is the moment, and unfortunately, it did not go our way.
Hopefully there’s a protest, but I doubt it will do anything. Either way, there’s a game tonight against the team that took Tyrus Thomas off our hands so nicely, so maybe we should go easy on them. Or just take out some righteous anger.
