punyweakling

Tag: rants

  • Don’t Call It A Choke

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    Photo credit: ESPN

    After The Oklahoma Thunder lost Game 6 to the Golden State Warriors, tying the series at 3 all, the “choke” echo chamber started firing up.

    Honestly, I’m completely over the ‘choking narrative’.

    It’s lazy.

    Why analyse the series when you can just yell “CHOKE”, right? Seven games worth of defensive rotations, pick and roll coverage, cross matches, game-to-game adjustments, shooting slumps – don’t worry about it. Just yell ‘choke’.

    It’s dismissive.

    The choke narrative completely ignores the fact that another team (The Warriors) was actively trying to beat them. And it completely minimises the sacrifice and hard work that the OKC players and coaches and staff made, not only for this series, but for the entire season.


    It’s myopic.

    Klay Thompson shot an NBA record 11 threes in Game 6. Klay and Steph beat the Playoff record for threes in a series, each. Yeah, OKC ‘choked’ though. The choke narrative ignores context.

    It’s arbitrary.

    What’s an appropriate number of wins or losses before a team chokes? If OKC went up 3-2 after a 2-2 tie and lost, is that still a choke?

    It’s dickish, and do we really need more dick behaviour in the world?

    If you’re a genuine GSW fan you’re excused, but for the rest of you: ease up. You just witnessed an incredible series in which both teams laid it all on the line in a Conference Finals matchup for the ages. Maybe take some time to appreciate it.

  • Twitter’s Mobile App Timeline is a Clusterf*ck

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    I had to leave work early on Wednesday and with just over a quarter left of the Thunder vs the Warriors game I thought I’d stream the rest of the contest on my commute. Sadly, I had no such luck as the NBA app doesn’t stream video on Android N at the moment (sadface).

    So I decided to follow along on Twitter.

    I’m rubbish at curating Twitter lists (the concept and execution is pretty obtuse, which doesn’t help) but I follow a bunch of great NBA Twitter profiles, so my timeline lights up during these Conference Finals playoff games.

    Instead of using Falcon Pro, my go-to 3rd party Twitter client, I thought I’d give the native Twitter app a shot to enjoy those sweet, juicy in-line Vines people share during the game. What I experienced instead, was an avalanche of fail as Twitter bombarded me with everything BUT the tweets I was interested in.

    Let’s take a quick look. (more…)