Hello again and welcome back to another thing of words. I missed you, and by that I mean you personally and no one else. Everyone else doesn’t matter. It’s just you and me in this world, we’re going to make it.
I wanted to wait a couple days to write this so as to make sure I wasn’t overreacting. Well, it’s been about 36 hours. I’ve been to therapy, done some meditating, and maybe crushed it a couple times just to make sure I’m of the soundest mind. All that said, I’m convinced.
The only way I can explain it is to show it to you through my eyes. This is going to be terrifying, but you are coming with me. It’s okay. I’ll hold your hand the whole way. That won’t make it any better.
Now let your mind drift down the Rutkowski River with me. I would like to take you back in time to the best basketball game I’ve ever watched. It was two days ago. I’d like to say it all started with about 6:00 minutes left in the third quarter, but by most accounts, the game started much sooner than that.
After a longer-ish day of work and a couple of errands, I asked my wonderful Fiancee Briggy what game she wanted to watch. After I listed off all of the wonderful options league pass had to offer, and after a bit of deliberation, she decided the Chicago Bull vs. the New York Knicks. I was skeptical of this choice, and I voiced it to my best friends in the whole wide world:
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Well, I do indeed love her in a gross, overindulgent, cheesy way, so I granted her her choice with my computer of romantic gesture.
To my surprise, I was into it.
I celebrated my joy by mentioning a former Magic player to a current Magic fan named Chris. Mario doesn’t have an island like Dion Waiters. He has the Hezonja Helicopter. He has nowhere to land, and he’s running out of fuel.
In about a half hour, I was fully bought in. I was going to make public my joy. Only God can judge me, I said to myself.
I should at this point explain what I mean by “best basketball game.” If you think “best basketball game” means “high quality, competitive display of the best of the best at their best,” then you might think I’m an idiot. I’d agree with you. In most cases, regardless of context, I agree with you. I’m a fool. I’m a big silly dimwit. However, I like fun, and that makes me likable.
This game had fun. It had so much of it that it couldn’t be contained to just four quarters. There were made shots, and missed shots, and everything in between. I decided the best way to celebrate this was to freak out on Twitter for about an hour.
Some people were skeptical, but we must give them pity.
I also made a really good tweet containing really good ideas.
Lopez was then like “Wow, that tweet was good. Let’s celebrate this by giving Matt more excellent basketball.”
These things happened!
Jacob Goldstein is a smart stat man. Since you probably trust smart people, trust me agreeing with him.
Did I tell you lately that I’m bipolar and lately I’ve been dealing with some psychotic delusions? This isn’t one of them, but it’s important to be able to poke fun at yourself, I think, as long as you’re comfortable with it.
It was when I wrote this tweet that I realized I had written my next article in real time, and I just needed timestamps and pictures to share it all.
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My fiancee is the best.
Anyway. I decided to reach out to some people to see if they had any thoughts on the game. I mainly just asked people who had seen about of much of it as I did to decide if they were as correct as I was. In general, people did quite well. Jacob Goldstein had this to offer.
He wasn’t wrong. Nekias “Nate” Duncan added this:
Another not wrong person.
Matt Moore mentioned this without prompting. Now, if you pay attention to the timestamp of this tweet, it appears as though it’s about a game that was finishing later than Bulls-Knicks, so don’t do that. Instead, pretend it’s about Knicks v. Bulls so it seems like another, more respected writer is agreeing with me.
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Jameelah Johnson offered this actual analysis which I found intimidating. I was taken aback by the force of it. Look, I had fun. It was fun. It was extremely fun, and you should have been there.
I told my fiancee that it was the best game I had ever seen. She asked if that was really true.
“As far as basketball as entertainment versus basketball as a showcase of talent? That was a masterpiece.”
“So other people just don’t understand it then?”
“Kind of. I can’t say that 100 percent genuinely because people will laugh at me. But if I say that tongue in cheek, it’s okay.”