On Blowouts

I'm lucky enough to have NBA League Pass, so I'm flipping back and forth between Orlando-Philly and Cleveland-New York. Both of these games are pretty much blowouts, although they're of different degrees.

The Magic are blowing out the Sixers by shooting the lights out. When the Magic click, they will rain glorious threes upon your head as they work the inside-outside game. This is not necessarily predicated on the idea of having Dwight Howard in the game; Marcin Gortat is more than serviceable and finishes reasonably well around the basket. I'm refraining from making a "Polish Hammer" reference here, but just know that it was definitely on my mind. The addition of Dwight Howard adds a nigh-unstoppable post defender in the mold of Mutombo or Wallace (although he reminds me more of Alonzo Mourning than anyone else, but that's neither here nor there.) Generally speaking, when a team gets on a hot streak shooting threes, the opposing team will generally panic and start taking horrid shots (including my favorite, the running jumper in transition), culminating in a lead deepening. Before other teams started abusing the Suns' porous D, Phoenix was running teams into the ground and luring them into taking bad threes, building the lead.

When your team begins a blowout, it generally starts with some poor decision-making by the other team. NBA players are (generally speaking) the highest quality basketball players in the world. Given that fact, there is a natural parity, and losing by more than 10 points is a pretty rare occurrence. However, after a certain point, when a team has a flaw exposed, the team that exposes it will begin to abuse it. San Antonio can't crash the boards, Kobe's ego will cause him to take too many shots, Juwan Howard came off the bench for George Mikan, or whatever. The flawed team will begin to make poor decisions under pressure. The truly great teams do not always win a game, but they do always try to get back into the game, and they know that panicking and taking bad jump shots is not the way to do it (unless you're Roger Mason Jr.) Showing calm under pressure may seem like (at best) saving face or (at worst) cool indifference, but if the team starts to freak out during a blowout, well, that's where the Meatloaf song meets the analogy.

This is why, since I started writing this post, the Knicks deficit has grown by 9 points over the course of three minutes.