The playoffs are tightening. It went chalk for the most part, the higher seeds, the purported better teams, won in three quarters of the bracket — No. 1 seed versus No. 4 seed or No. 2 seed versus No. 3 seed.
Except in one little portion of the West. Instead of having the No. 2 vs. No. 3 matchup of the Houston Rockets (RIP) and the Los Angeles Lakers (also RIP), the Minnesota Timberwolves as the No. 6 seed will be playing the Golden State Warriors as the No. 7 seed.
You can’t really call this an unlikely matchup. Though the Lakers made the Luka Dončić trade this year, they were quite bare behind their starting five. And even their starting five needs help. And the Rockets? They’re young. One hopes they’ll be back.
On the other hand, the Warriors never die. Steph Curry will scare me until the day he trips on stage at a Paramore concert, inadvertently crowd-surfs, and gets carried into the ocean by 25 superfans singing “Ain’t It Fun,” none of them ever to be seen again. And Minnesota is just scary, man. They don’t feel like they win basketball games. They feel like they take them. “This is mine now.” And it’s over.
And uh…
Yeah…
I’m trying to delay talking about this, but I can’t. Draymond Green is facing Rudy Gobert now
Remember when this happened?
Yeah. Draymond Green doesn’t like Rudy Gobert. Draymond probably thinks Rudy has a few Defensive Player of the Year awards that he feels should belong to him. How you get from that point to choking another person seconds into a basketball game is a bit hazier, but that is, invariably, how Draymond Green’s mind works.
Now we’re getting at least four games of them facing off against each other. Golden State tried a few minutes with a different big on the floor instead of Draymond (once again, not a super deep team) but for the majority of the time, you’d think Draymond would be the big against Rudy.
It is a clash of styles. Draymond is short. Rudy is tall. Draymond is American. Rudy is French. Draymond is dirty. Rudy is stupid.
It’s everything you could ever want, and once again we have at least four games of it! Draymond could go back to the choke hold, or maybe even put on an arm bar. Rudy could get support from RFK Jr. and retweet it. Draymond hasn’t punched anyone in a while, as far as we know. Is he due? What if Rudy eats an entire basketball?
AAAAHHHH
This is what I imagine other people felt when they found out someone had a crush on them. I bet that was nice.
The likelihood of something sinister and/or dumb happening in this series between these two players is very high. I don’t like predicting things, but I will predict this. What kind of mistake it will be decided on the court.