Toe no! Nets know it’s game of inches
What might have been but for KD’s foot just touching line
You can throw all the superlatives you want to now at Giannis Antetokounmpo, and he won’t have to swat away a single one like it’s another weak shot from the Suns. He is the kind of player Dr. J would have been if he had been nearly seven feet tall, and he didn’t just play as thrilling a close-out game as his sport has ever seen, he played as thrilling a closeout game as any sport ever saw. That’s what we saw in Milwaukee the other night when Giannis dropped 50 on the Suns and officially became the face of his sport, and king of the world, not the guy in the new “Space Jam.”
Giannis led his team back from 0-2 down in the NBA Finals the way Bill Walton, when he was the most gifted young big man in the NBA, did in 1977 in Portland. Walton was 25 that year, before injuries began to change everything for him the very next year, when the defending champ Trailblazers were 50-10. Giannis is still just 27. And on a night when it was all on the line for him and his team and the lights were as bright as they had ever been, he was a taller version of Michael. And dominated a closeout Game 6 the way Magic Johnson did when he had to step in for Kareem Abdul Jabbar at center in 1980.
Fifty for Giannis, 50 years after the last Bucks title, when Kareem was the center in Milwaukee. A perfect sports story in so many ways, and a perfect ending, at least there.
And when it was over, on the night when the Greek Freak played like a Greek basketball god, he had a lot to say about his team and his city, about the league, about winning championships. He had the floor on Tuesday night, and not just the basketball floor.
“It’s easy to go somewhere and go win a championship with somebody else; it’s easy,” Antetokounmpo said after Game 6. “I don’t want to put anybody on the spot, but I could go to a superteam and just do my part and win a championship, but this is the hard way to do it, and we did it.
We f---ing did it. We did it, man.”
They did. And they did it because they beat a so-called superteam from Brooklyn along the way.
But only by a few inches. The Bucks beat the Brooklyn Nets in Game 7 of the Eastern Conference semifinals on a night
when it was Kevin Durant who looked like the best guy his size in basketball, who looked like he would come out of this season as the face of the sport, who nearly played the 50-point game with it all on the line for his team that Giannis played against the Suns.
Durant scored 48 that night, a night when he looked as if he had scored 49 after dropping one more bomb on the Bucks from the outside, in the moment when he seemed to have won Game 7 for his team at the Barclays Center.
Only Durant’s foot was on the three-point line. It was a two, not a three. The Bucks and Nets were still playing. They went to overtime and it was the Nets, with a wounded James Harden and with Kyrie Irving sidelined with a bum ankle, who seemed gassed. Giannis ended up with 40 that night and not 50 and Khris Middleton was the kind of wing man for Giannis Antetokounmpo that Harden and Irving were supposed to be for the Nets this season. The Bucks won. The superteam from Brooklyn went home.
It is supposed to be other sports that are games of inches. This time, though, it was basketball. This time an NBA season changed and Giannis was on his way to becoming an instant legend because Kevin Durant’s foot was on the three-point line and not behind it.
Nobody would ever dispute that Giannis and Middleton and Jrue Holiday – in the end they were as much a Big 3 as the Big 3 the Nets thought they had in Brooklyn – won this title the hard way. The Big 3 from Milwaukee went into Brooklyn, and won a rather epic Game 7 on the road, even against a diminished Nets team. Then the Bucks survived Giannis crashing to the floor the way he did against the Hawks. Finally they came all the way back from 0-2 down against the Suns, winning all the big moments and big possessions after that until Giannis carried them across the finish line with one of the most historic performances in the history of his sport.
Without question they are worthy champions, in one of the
best American sports cities. Monty Williams, the Suns coach, talked about the “other side of hard” when the Finals were still going on. In the end, the Bucks went over to the other side of hard and took the thing from Williams’ team.
But what happens if Kevin Durant’s foot isn’t on the line?
What happens if Game 7 isn’t a game of inches in the end? What if there’s no overtime against the Bucks and they beat the Hawks in the next round, which I believe they would have even without Kyrie, and it’s them against the Suns for the O’Brien Trophy?
Would the Nets have beaten the Suns the way the Bucks did? Maybe, maybe not. Durant wasn’t going to get as much help from Harden, with a bad hamstring, as Giannis did from Middleton and Jrue Holiday? But go back and look at what we saw from Durant against the Bucks before his foot was on the line and tell me that you’re sure the Nets wouldn’t have done what they were built to do, which means win it all this season.
So you know what the lasting conclusion is about what Giannis and the Bucks just did? There isn’t one, no matter what Giannis says. It was a super player who won this time. But it was a superteam that won less than one year before with LeBron and Anthony Davis, more than a decade after LeBron had assembled the first real superteam in Miami with Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh.
And Durant went and got his ring with Steph Curry and Klay Thompson and Draymond Green and the Warriors. And after that Durant thought he could do it again in Brooklyn with Kyrie even before Sean Marks pulled off the trade for Harden. Durant had won with one superteam and thought he could win with another and still might in Brooklyn before he’s through.
The superteam Nets didn’t lose because they weren’t good enough, or because they took the wrong approach. They lost because they were hurt. Because another super player’s foot was on the line one night in Brooklyn.