…so the Spurs can kick your ass.
Injuries are the shittiest thing about sports. Fans of teams with injured stars have to live with agonizing lost opportunities, fans of teams that beat them have to live with tainted victories, and both sides are left to wonder just how things would have gone down if everyone had been healthy and how much greatness we were robbed of by that bitch known as Fate.
Would the Spurs have repeated as champs in 2000 if Timmy hadn’t been injured? Would they have won in 2003 if their road to the Finals through a difficult Western Conference hadn’t been made easier by injuries? Well, at least we Spurs fans can console ourselves with those three O’Brienses (For some reason, the word “O’Brienses” puts me in mind of a punctuation issue: how do you show possession for a word that’s already possessive? I’ve always wondered about shit like that. Burgers from Burger King are “Burger King’s burgers,” but what are burgers from McDonald’s called – “McDonald’s’s burgers”? Another question I’ll probably never have an answer to.) on display in the SBC (soon to be AT&T – don’t you love it when corporate giants become corporate behemoths?) Center.
Enough long-winded parenthetical musings. On to the point: I feel bad for “Push-ups”* Amare and for NBA fans, because he is an incredibly exciting young player with the potential to be one of the greatest ever. I hope that future is not altered by this injury, and I hope Amare can get back to full strength in time for the Spurs to administer another ass-stomping in the playoffs. I’ll suffer no tainted victory this year.
* Addendum: If anyone’s wondering why I called him “Push-ups,” it’s because he did push-ups during a game against the Spurs to celebrate a good play he’d just made. Amare seems like a decent guy, but the Spurs don’t take that kind of bullshit. Both times players have done that to us, they’ve lost the game.
The moral of the story: do NOT make Tim angry.
It is illogical to celebrate when you are about to lose.
Thanks to the unknown photoshopper who did this.
For similar reasons, let’s hope that Shaq and Dwayne Wade can stay healthy this year. I still believe that the Heat, and perhaps the Pacers, were better teams in the East last year, and more deserving opponents for our Spurs.
I would love, love, LOVE for the Spurs to have a chance to take down that Shaqass in the Finals. But it will be tough even for a team as stacked as the Heat to get out of the East, with the Pistons and Pacers in their way. I think those three teams are better than any team in the West besides the Spurs, now that Amare has gone down. The Cavs and Nets will be better this year as well, and the Wizards and Bulls are impressive young up-and-coming teams. The East doesn’t have the quality depth that the West does, but it has definitely improved.
By the way, those undeserving Pistons did take us to seven games. If not for Horry’s pulling a miracle out of his ass in Game 5, who knows what would have happened? In a sense they may have been undeserving of representing the East, but they were still worthy opponents. And the same charge of being undeserving conference champs could be leveled against the 2003 Spurs.