I’m gonna blow a gasket. My left heart ventricle can’t take it. I can’t believe it. Another 1 point loss, this time in overtime to a Wizards team without their All Star. They can’t keep doing this. The simulation is breaking. I am going to break out of the Matrix and come after whoever is making these basketball decisions. All it took was an overtime loss to the Wizards for me to discover that I am, in fact, Neo.
I’m a very sad man and there is nothing else to say. But I will continue to say ~500 words more.
Stop me if you’ve heard this before. The Pacers let the other team go on a run and take the lead in the second half. This defense stinks. STINKS. They are made up of average to good individual defenders with a few exceptions. But they absolutely suck at team defense. I think I am just going to go back into denial and revert to my theory from last season: Every team has their best offensive game against the Pacers, and it’s not because they are bad at defense; it is because whoever they happened to play that night happened to have their luckiest game of the season. (How is that for a run-on sentence? No way any of that punctuation is correct.) That’s gotta be it.
Every team got lucky last season and that is why the Pacers lost so many games. It’s not because they ranked 26th in the league in Points Allowed per Game. And it is CERTAINLY not because they gave up the most Offensive Rebounds in the entire league which in turn led to them giving up the most 2 Point Attempts. There’s no way that it is because they ranked 26th in Personal Fouls which led to them ranking 26th in Opponent Free Throw Attempts.
The Indiana Pacers can’t be bad at defense. If they are so bad at defense how comes Myles gets all those blocks? And TJ gets all those steals? HMM?? Riddle me that mystery man.
No but for real, the Pacers’ defense has a long way to go before they are ready to compete with the upper echelon of the league. In good news, the offense is still firing. Myles Turner had a career night scoring 40 points on 68% shooting while pulling in 10 boards. Brogdon and Sabonis looked really solid as well with 28–8–8 and 28–9–7 stat lines respectively. Superstar future hall-of-famer Chris Duarte seemed to come back to earth a little as he had 15 points on only 38% shooting from the field. He can’t blast the shit out of the building every night folks.
In closing, I still can’t believe the Pacers lost that game. I am getting mad all over again. I calmed down and had some caffeine free orange and chamomile tea, now I’m getting all worked up again. We failed miserably as a unit, myself included. There has to be something that I can personally do to help this team win basketball games. I don’t know what it is yet but I will continue to experiment and explore my options, because clearly I am not playing the simulation well enough to have my sports team win games.
I slept on the couch last night in an attempt to reset the Juju in the entire city of Indianapolis. I am going to the Pacers’ home opener tonight at Gainbridge fieldhouse and I wanted to make sure that we have a complete blank slate of Juju in the city. I will be channeling all of my mental focus to try to help the Pacers make shots tonight. If we suffer another brutal, heart-breaking loss you have my word that I will take a 3 game moratorium from being a fanatic of the Indiana Pacers.
