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2018 NBA Playoffs Column 3: DELICATE STRATAGEMS

Dreams of excellent afternoons in which the Indiana Pacers enter the Cuyahoga River and flail into obscurity, thus bringing healing, water and restoration to the burned-out husk of Cleveland. Says the name is J.R. Smith and only missed 7 shots last night. False. He missed 8 shots last night and did not score a point over 33 minutes of play but the Cleveland Cavaliers won anyway. Speak of Cleveland like the Holy Land, he says, speak of it as if you are walking to the Emerald City of Basketball hollowed and hallowed from the iron sinews of America. Says J.R. Smith is not his real name, but would be his name if he was seen playing IM basketball the next winter.

Lives long enough and writes enough articles on sports blogs to realize that every sports article in the Twitter Decade is about the viewer. The viewer and the reader who clicks on advertisements and looks at the Lexus in the side of the browser and believes, incorrectly, that any of this is at all profitable. That viewer is the commander of the vessel. That viewer also does not understand how J.R. Smith was still +2 despite scoring ZERO POINTS on EIGHT SHOTS. Lives long enough to understand that LeBron James' 44 points and game-winning three will be immortalized long after his life has ended, stuck in a library or digital archive that will outlive the cyclical destruction of your own cells.

Lives long enough to understand the pain of losing, but still somewhat aware that for fans of the Indiana Pacers this pain of losing probably outweighed some pain of losing some acquaintance out there who would've been perfect for them and brought peace and fulfillment into every aspect of their lives but the viewer never knows that and the fans never know that the person who glances at them briefly on the Chicago El was one of the thousands of potential paths to pleasure, so as the Pacers walk off the court dejectedly the sports fandom becomes a greater tragedy when, in fact, the greater tragedy has been within us the whole time. But maybe that's why sports exist anyway, to build a less coherent and wonderfully nonsensical tragedy that can be understood. J.R. Smith missing all eight of his shots is not a tragedy. Lives long enough to understand the pain of losing everything. Have you met any Indiana Pacer? Have you ever met a Pacer? LeBron's shot goes in. Cleveland 98, Indiana 95.Dreams of agonies past and present, future and in the pluperfect. Dreams of the time he claimed he really wanted to see Eli Manning get blasted by the Denver Broncos or the Colts or some team, only to abandon the television and run into a forest with someone. Forestry! What a lovely word that sounds far more pleasant than Cavalier. Not true, there is a beauty to the word Cavalier, reminds me of the English Civil War and Sir Thomas Fairfax and Prince Rupert. Oh Edmund, oh Cordelia, oh boy this is some absurd haze of basketball and the banishment which will be embodied.

Every banishment society has endured built off the same foundational agonies and the same iridescent feeling of kaleidoscopic threat that bounces off each castle brick and parquet court that has ever existed. Court, trials, Regan, not understood within the framework of the NBA perhaps, at a surface level, but as J.R. Smith has missed yet another three-pointer and LeBron continues to put the team on his back, put the team on his back, put the team into the next round of the Playoffs just like always LeCrushing Hopes of Eastern Conferences and banishing the Pacers into the realm ofviewerWell it's not really fair to call them viewers because they are part of the game just like you are somewhat part of the story and somewhat part of every other story but also not there because it does feel like those other stories have more meaning because the people at the j-schools and the satellites claim agency over importance. It's not really fair to call the Pacers "viewers" like the one sitting at home who mouses over the advertisement on SB Nation for "Bengay," a product that you've never heard of, but they are viewers as LeBron's shot rattles through the basket. Everyone is a viewer to something at some point, even the blind, even as Lear's eyes are taken from him, he views. He only stops viewing once he despairs, and perhaps despair and fear are the true blindness and the true terror that leads people into terrible decisions. Only once you despair for yourself or a sport or a concept do you become blind to its essential elements.

Aware of other NBA games. Aware of Russell Westbrook. Aware of all the mistakes of a generation tacitly, aware of her, aware of the Raptors getting over the hump but actually not aware that the Rockets/Timberwolves series was even still happening. It's no longer happening. It's no longer a series because of James Harden, who plays very good basketball and hopes to someday knock off Cleveland. But will it be Cleveland? Who will it be? Aware of living long enough to see all you have believed in shatter, aware that you always knew that the elegant extinction of activity must come, must outgrow what is built and what is burning down in the Cuyahoga but lost now, lost in the arc of the basketball flying, lost in the Bengay advertisement lost in the lack of structure and the rapidly fading collapsing supernova of LeBron's career and your own self-control and the hollowed-out eyes and the Instagram posts and flight of fancy of a generation.Aware of Russell Westbrook.A virtue, to some.

Simply being aware of Russell Westbrook's existence is a virtue.
Simply being aware of anyone's existence is a virtue.
Seeing an inelegant vision of cavalry officers in the English Civil War falling over a cliff, but in that fall into the bloody ditch (a literal bloody ditch), you are aware that somewhere those Parliamentarians were fighting for a historical truth which is somehow bone-crushingly and stiflingly purer than your truth which you have somehow managed to spin into suffering that is only mediated by the viewing of basketball. English Civil Wars have nothing on the viewer. Statistics have nothing on the viewer.

This is fucking absurd. To be aware of anything. Also fucking absurd that the Cavs still won with Kevin Love and J.R. Smith missing everything in sight. And for those Indiana fans in despair, perhaps nothing has been in sight all along.

The Giants took Saquon Barkley. This blog needs content.

Novak Djokovic is really bad now