Basketball will break your heart.
It’s Saturday, April 5. Duke is up double digits on Houston. It’s feeling inevitable. Duke is the most talented team with the most talented single player in all of college basketball. Cooper Flagg is doing whatever he wants. Aran Smith, the proprietor of this fine website, is texting with me, asking how many NBA guys would be off the market in a trade for the 2025 No. 1 pick. We came up with six: Wemby, SGA, Jokic, Giannis, Luka (unless Nico Harrison is your GM), Edwards. Everyone else is at least worth considering the offer.
Then all hell broke loose.
Duke suddenly forgot how to inbound the basketball. Sion James and Tyrese Proctor suddenly tensed up. Proctor, in particular, struggled with Houston’s unreal pressure defense. The more Duke tried to fight against Houston’s swarming defense, the deeper they sank. Flagg ended up on the wrong end of one of the worst foul calls you’ll ever see. Free throws fell short. The score in the final 35 seconds: Houston 9, Duke 0. And just like that…it was over.
The internet overheated with “Duke chokes” memes and GIFs. The “White Lotus dad with the Duke shirt and the gun to his head” image took on a life of its own. Cooper Flagg’s college career ended in a way nobody could have predicted.
Basketball will break your heart.
It’s Monday, April 8. The Denver Nuggets fired coach Michael Malone and general manager Calvin Booth. Just two years ago, Malone coached this team to the NBA title. It’s the only NBA head coach Nikola Jokic has ever played for.
Malone did not like Calvin Booth, however. And the feeling was more than mutual.
It’s hard to imagine a situation more toxic than the one that led to the Memphis Grizzlies unceremoniously firing Taylor Jenkins with nine games left, but the Nuggets brain trust said “hold my Coors.”
Malone and Booth had opposing viewpoints on how to run and build this team around the best player in the world. Malone favored veterans and continuity, just as every coach would in his position. Booth, under a directive from ownership, sought to build a long-term, financially responsible supporting cast around Jokic’s unique gifts.
Fans can nitpick all day about who was right and who was wrong. Both men shoulder some of the blame, but in my viewpoint, Booth’s shortcomings far outweigh Malone’s. But it is clear that after a decade in the head chair, Malone was perhaps being tuned out by many of his players, particularly on the defensive end.
This team wasn’t playing well enough to win a title, but cleaning house less than a week before the end of the regular season signals toward deeper institutional issues – organizational rot, even.
I have been following this team my entire life. We never have, and never will have, a better player than Nikola Jokic. If you came up with 100 different scenarios for how to run your organization around him, this current version would be in the bottom 10.
Basketball will break your heart.
It’s Wednesday, April 9. Luka Doncic is back in Dallas for the first time in a Laker uniform. I can’t even describe how absurd this is. This never should have happened. I am looking at a series of images that should not exist. The fans in Dallas have put up with so much nonsense from their idiot billionaire owners and idiot millionaire front office execs who talk down to them and patronize them and completely miss the point of why people root for sports teams in the first place.
The arena was full of Luka fans wearing various shades of Mavs blue/white and Laker purple/gold. There wasn’t a dry eye in the house for the Luka tribute video – including Luka’s. It was a surreal, emotional scene the likes of which NBA fans haven’t witnessed before or since. Typically, the return game for a star of Doncic’s caliber is at least somewhat tense, because the star is almost always the one who decided to leave.
After the feelings came the buckets. 45 points worth.
It was Luka’s best game as a Laker – the kind of game these fans used to cherish, but now elicited mixed emotions at best. Dallas Mavericks fans will never love basketball the same way they used to – not quite.
So why even bother? What’s the point?
Because at its very best, basketball will save your soul.
It’s Monday, April 8. Florida and Houston are competing for the national championship. For the first 25 or so minutes of this game, it is all Houston. It’s a close game, sure, but the tempo is Houston’s, the physicality is Houston’s, the entire vibe is Houston’s. Games take on a personality, and this one had Houston’s fingerprints all over it. After strangling the life out of Duke two days before, it felt inevitable that this team would finally win its first national title.
The Cougars hounded Walter Clayton Jr. – the tournament’s best non-Flagg participant – into his worst game of the season. The consensus All-American and notorious big-shot taker/maker was 0-from-the-field and had absolutely no rhythm. The driving lanes were absent. The double teams came early and often. But Clayton never quit – he absorbed every trap and made every correct pass and kept biding his time.
You see, game-winning plays – the historic kind, the forever kind, the YouTube kind – are often crazy shots or buzzer-beaters or ridiculous chase-down blocks. It’s superhuman stuff, the kinds of plays coaches try to coach out of younger players because only the select few, the chosen, can even attempt something so brazen.
Clayton’s game-winning play, however, was nothing but straight-up hustle and fundamentals.
Quick aside: You ever watch a youth basketball team work on close-out drills in a practice? It is the ultimate test of patience and endurance. The only way to get good at closing out on shooters is through repetition – again, and again, and again. If you’re late on a close-out, the ramifications are often costly. You’re either getting blown by or giving up an open shot or fouling – sometimes all at once. A good close-out is the kind of winning play that never shows up in the box score, but it makes all the difference when the game is on the line.
Walter Clayton Jr. executed the single-greatest close-out in NCAA Tournament history on Sunday night. This play – in the midst of his worst statistical game of his season – clinched the national championship for the Florida Gators. Salvation.
On the other side of this moment, of course, was heartbreak.
Emmanuel Sharp had it. It’s the moment you repeat over and over in your driveway – title is on the line, down by two, clock’s ticking. The ball swings around to him with just a few seconds left. Sharp lines up the game-winner and before it can even leave his fingertips, Clayton is flying from out of nowhere.
That kind of close-out is never part of the fantasy.
Sharp dropped the ball and let it bounce for what seemed like an eternity before the final buzzer sounded. The poor guy sunk to the floor. Inconsolable. Clayton knew – he came over to console him in a moment of true sportsmanship. It wasn’t that fake “keep your head up” kind, either. This was real. This was two young men who knew better than anyone else what just happened. They spoke the same language. They felt the extremes – heartbreak on one side, salvation on the other – knowing full well that the situation could have flipped in an instant.
It’s basketball. There’s nothing else like it.
