Pain and no Gain

It has been said that more often than not, you get what you deserve. If you want it, you have to earn it. Tonight, I regretfully must admit that the home team got what they deserve…… reaped what they sowed. That in fact was a extremely pitiful offensive showing in a championship game. The Cup, the prestige and the big prize money was all at stake and the Thunder basically choked. This was a nightmare performance by a supposedly top tier, number one offensive team. I struggled to continue watching this game until their play continued to be so awful that I had to switch off the game or risk losing my sanity at the way they had played. You cannot win a game when you allow the opposing team to score buckets and even your best, most reliable players cannot put the ball in the hoop, keep missing left and right and basically may as well have been playing with blindfolds on. This had to be their sorriest showing so far this season and aside from the play and scoring of Isaiah Hartenstein, the rest of the team basically sucked at putting points on the board. One would have thought the ball was bigger than the basket for the Thunder because they just could not get shots to fall the entire night.

There’s no glory in losing the way they did on this night and no moral victory. This was not the OKC Thunder that I have been so proud to be a fan of. If you would talk about a matchup nightmare, clearly this is a prime example of that tonight. I don’t even know at this point what the final score was because I couldn’t stand to watch anymore of it with just over five minutes left in the game and the Thunder down by double digits. I can certainly live with a loss if the team has played well throughout all four quarters but this was not the case tonight. They deserve to walk out of the arena with paper sacks over their heads for the way they played this game. A little harsh, one might say. But I’m just calling it as I saw it from my easy chair. If not for Maggie, coming to the rescue, jumping up on the chair next to me and trying to lick the color off my face, I may have been a little more upset than I was. I’m calm now. The game is over, the Cup goes home with the other team, no $515,000 payday for our players (particularly the ones warming the bench and not making a significant amount yet). For the loser,…….that’s OKC…….at least the players get the “runnerup” payday of about $206,000 dollars, which is still a pretty nice chunk of change for many of them. So,…..they did well enough to make it to the finals but did not play like they are normally capable of doing, shot poorly as a team and added another number into the loss column. Lick your wounds, hang your head because you choked tonight, talk about what could have been, think about being favored by over 70% to win, before the game, trying to figure why most of the team could not get a ball to fall in the “hole” all night and get ready for the next game. Thunder sucked. There’s no other way to honestly spell it out.