NBA Games of the week: Thanksgiving edition

This group of NBA games of the week is brought to you by our sponsors, Thanksgiving, because there’s no such thing as “No politics at the table.”

Thanksgiving is traditionally a football holiday. In the NFL, the Detroit Lions play every year. In high school, it’s rivalry week, where a school plays its oldest opponent. For my local paper, I covered the Salem-Woodstown game. At the time, it was the 104th Thanksgiving game between the two schools. The roots of football and Thanksgiving run that deep.

But that doesn’t mean the NBA can’t be involved. The league understands how ingrained football and Thanksgiving are. There are no games scheduled on Thursday, something the league can get away with because of their synchronicity with Christmas. Fortunately for us, I don’t work for the NBA, so I don’t subscribe to the unwritten rules.

A Thanksgiving day can be broken down into seven parts:

• Starting your day: Every Thanksgiving begins waking up to your extra warm house because of the cooking turkey. You may even lay in your pajamas until your guests arrive. Or, you’re not cooking and the weight of responsibility has been replaced with the start of your four-day weekend. Either way, it’s always a great start.
• Thankfulness: This skips a few meandering parts of the process like having the kids set the table or you stealing a few bites of stuffing. This is the part where you and your loved ones maybe name something you’re thankful for. And, if your family is as fun (and dysfunctional) as mine, this is also the part where everyone cracks jokes while you’re doing it.
• Eat: Pretty simple. Eat until you can’t anymore, then go a bit further. I won’t say I plan on puking, but I plan on feeling full until next week.
• Argue about politics: It’s inevitable. Someone is going to make that offhand comment, or the tryptophan is going to blurr some judgments. If you’re not involved, keep your head down and keep eating.
• Sleep: A must.
• Eating seconds: Because a holiday centered around food isn’t complete without your second trip to the table.
• Dessert: I’ve never been a huge dessert guy, but for some reason, on holidays, I can’t wait.

With these seven steps in mind, here are the games of the week to match each one. Two things before I start: To all you retail workers entering month two of Christmas music, I suffer with you. And if you want to see just how closely humans are to wild animals, observe people in line right before Black Friday begins.