It Hurts to Cry: Phoenix Suns versus San Antonio Sterns Game 2 By Jason Kelly
04.23.2008 - Updated on 04.23.2008
|
I watched the second half of the game last night from my Emergency Room bed (yeah, I have good insurance coverage). I got wheeled in right before half and saw the Suns up in a high-scoring game in which Amare Stoudemire had 25 points on 11-14 shooting. I was feeling great.
The emergency room? Broken nose. In several places. My Washed-Up World Cup league had a game at 6:00, and the tip was set for 6:30. Knowing that it would probably start late and that my game ended at 7:00 (indoor soccer), I figured I’d miss a couple of minutes, listen on the radio and be home by about 7:15 to watch the rest.
At about 6:45, with less then ten minutes to go and up by three, I decided to focus on defense because of the game situation. Sadly, I am one of the leading playmakers (I get a lot of the assists (mainly) and a few of the goals, on my team. I say “sadly” because that is a bad sign for our team. On defense, I slid over to get in front of a player who had beaten my teammate (help defense). I got my foot on the ball and blocked his shot, but he kept moving forward – forehead right into my nose. He was slightly out of control, but it was a fair play. He was overdoing it a bit, getting the full push-off from his plant foot so he had all his weight behind the shot. That’s the type of play you get in the Washed-Up World Cup.
When he originally heard my plan, Bluntman told me not to go. He said a super-fan wouldn’t miss the first few minutes. I told him not to worry, that by halftime Shaq and Amare would have at least 4 fouls combined and the score would be 40-something to 40-something.
I’d be fine: wrong.
4 fouls: wrong (it was three).
40-something: wrong.
It comes in threes, so I figured that the Suns were in good shape. Until the third period. The Suns scored 11 points, largely because of Shaq’s 5 of 6 free throw shooting during Pop’s implementation of Hack-A-Shaq. If that plan had not backfired, the Sp*rs would have been up by even more during the fourth.
As fate would have it, I was rolled out for a CT-Scan between the third and fourth periods. I only missed the beginning few minutes of the fourth period.
I’m no basketball genius and I wasn’t concentrating on the game a whole lot (I had some stitches put in during the third), but how does Amare go from 25 at half to only 33 for the game (which included a desperation 3).
The series is far from over, and it would not be homeristic optimism to say that the Suns will win the next two. I’m not saying that, just because I’m in an overall depressed funk. But, it is not unfathomable. Game 3 is the dreaded “must-win” game. After that, the Sp*rs will have a series on their hands.
See you at Seamus McCaffrey’s before the game.
[top image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/seen_it_/]
