Right down to the guaranteed holiday TV slot

The Knicks WERE the Lions, only with this weird combined local and national insistence on pretending they were the Packers

Dang, the Spurs were plus-17 in Keldon Johnson’s 16 minutes

Bump

Bleakest moment of the Finals was when the announcers were like "The Knicks need another Larry Johnson four-point play" and just like: let go, move on, they have guys who can lift their feet off the floor now

Everyone can stop pretending those Chris Childs teams were any good now

Shout out the man with the shopping cart of bags of empties scooping up all the new empties while the fireworks went off

Game Six at MSG with Wemby suspended would be the biggest trap game of all time

All through the series these announcers have a wildly inaccurate idea of how interesting a possible two-for-one is

Facebook friends, here is Indignity Vol. 6, No. 51, THE STAIRS, Chapter 31, by @tomscocca.bsky.social www.indignity.net/the-stairs-c...

Can’t be anybody happier this morning than Josh Hart

Spurs were outscored 73–47 from the moment they decided to stop playing basketball and start fouling as a smirky optimization gambit

Well.

Went into the Finals thinking that whichever of these fine teams won it would be a triumph for the sport of basketball and now the Knicks have quit before halftime and a Chipotle commercial is on because the Spurs are doing the cheapest game-stopping off-ball fouling with a 25-point lead

Shameful how the refs refuse to rotate or close out on defense

My Subway Take is nobody ever looks cool or comfortable pinching one of those fussy tiny microphones whether you clip it to a prop or not

Lots of casual talk about this or that guy "playing like a man possessed" but this truly could be a clip from a movie about someone signing control of their body over to a Basketball Demon www.youtube.com/shorts/z6c6u...

Super, going great

A funny thing about watching the stretch run of Game 6 from 1998 is that Michael Jordan pretty much stunk before it got into the final minute

Hey the expected value of Mitchell Robinson's 6 free throws was only 2 points rather than the 3 he got, so really the Spurs tied the game

Love to stop the final two minutes of a slugfest

Replay is always bad

Basketball!

Disgraceful, might as well have let OKC through if you’re going to play cynicball

Facebook friends, here is Indignity Vol. 6, No. 49, SERIALIZED FICTION DEP'T, The Stairs, Chapter 30 by @tomscocca.bsky.social www.indignity.net/the-stairs-c...

The eternal split between the people who see bubbles as magical aether and the people who see bubbles as soap spatter

OK but I'd rather have mosquitoes than bubbles

When I saw Pedro in 1996 I suddenly understood why the Boomers wouldn't shut up about Koufax, and if this Knicks team stays on this run I think I might get why they've spent half a century stuck on 1973

Basketball!

[Shakes hands with every NBA and ABA commissioner, alive or dead, and closes tab in an avalanche of spotlit confetti]

Made an 82–0 team that gets bounced in the conference finals

There is no degree of deliciousness to which you can toast the bun and assemble the toppings if you're going to stick a chunk of styrofoam in between and ask me to eat it to agree with you that the styrofoam burger is not a real burger

If you quote blocks of AI text you're losing; one thing you're def losing for instance is my eyeballs

Reply guy vs. reposter/subtweeter

🎶 "...That FLASH at the SOUND of LIES..." 🎶

Each man on that list got 4 rebounds tonight

Mmhmm

It worked

If I were the Spurs looking to make halftime adjustments I would simply think about starting to try to get the ball when someone misses a shot

It’s so funny to see a beefy seven-footer grapple and throw his weight around on defense and then have to sneak around looking for Tony Parker bunny shots at the other end

That WSJ screenshot is a hoax and/or gag, friends

I regret to announce that the winner of the contest to see what song would get lodged in my head by the Great American State Fair fiasco is "Bust a Move"

Facebook friends, here’s Indignity Vol. 6, No. 47, Chapter 29 of THE STAIRS, a serialized work of fiction by @tomscocca.bsky.social www.indignity.net/the-stairs-c...

I feel like most professional writers have their own laptops and it would be unusual to just grab someone else's to do a little work on

"Do stop grumbling, Ed," said Susan. "Ten to one it'll clear up in an hour or so. And in the meantime we're pretty well off. There's Wi-Fi and lots of Robux."

Skill issue

Indignity Vol. 6, No. 45, The Stairs, Chapter 28 by @tomscocca.bsky.social www.indignity.net/the-stairs-c...

The math part of that particular assessment is counting down from 100 by sevens

Difference was Bill Laimbeer had to weigh all that chipping and hooking against the chance of getting himself punched in the face

My kid's piano teacher told him how much he'd hated the Bad Boy Pistons and Bill Laimbeer so I was trying to explain how Bill Laimbeer made everything loathsome and then tonight I could just point at the screen