Woe to the hooper who offends the basketball gods! Those invisible, omnipresent deities ruling from that big basketball court in the sky. For generations, people have denied their existence, mocking the overly superstitious athlete who warned of their fury and scoffing at the television color commentator who didn’t know how else to explain why a 96 percent shooter bricked a free throw. But the basketball gods are real, and they are making their presence felt.
Have you not watched these NBA playoffs? The gods must be angry.
Though they are an impulsive bunch, adding in new commandments whenever they feel the urge to mess with us mortals, the basketball gods expect their capacious rule book to be obeyed. Listed somewhere between Remember the Christmas Day games and keep them holy and Thou shalt not cherry pick on defense comes this directive: Stop trying to make superteams, you fools. Bless their souls, the Phoenix Suns paid dearly for this transgression.
In Phoenix, the rich young ruler who bought the team believed he could purchase his ticket to the NBA Finals by trading for Kevin Durant to pair with Devin Booker. When that didn’t work, owner Mat Ishbia doubled down and added Bradley Beal — three all-stars with max contracts complemented by teammates found in the league’s compost bin. However, this particular trend in roster building has become passé as more organically constructed teams such as the Oklahoma City Thunder and Minnesota Timberwolves have ascended to the top of the Western Conference. Even the No. 1 team in the East, the Boston Celtics, made room for solid players (but not superstars) in Kristaps Porzingis, Jrue Holiday and Derrick White to go with homegrown studs Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown. Learning from their previous stumble of selling their soul for Kyrie Irving, the Celtics built a roster that makes sense. While the Celtics are on the verge of taking their first-round series with the Miami Heat, the Suns got swept by the Timberwolves.
But when the basketball gods close a door, they open up a window — so the owner can throw the head coach out of it. The Suns just might need a sacrificial lamb; Coach Frank Vogel, perhaps?
Even that might not appease the gods — the Milwaukee Bucks know how unforgiving they can be. The 2021 champs are still facing judgment over casting two of their coaches into the fire. In April 2023, they lost in the first round of the playoffs and fired Mike Budenholzer, who had led the franchise to its first NBA championship in 50 years. Then, after starting this season 30-13 and rising to second in the Eastern Conference with Adrian Griffin, the Bucks abruptly banished him in January. The Bucks felt things could have been going better with their resident all-NBA players, Giannis Antetokounmpo and Damian Lillard. They were wrong.
Just days before the postseason, the basketball gods answered with hail and lightning, sending Antetokounmpo to the floor with an injury to his golden calf. And then, they struck Lillard with pain in his Achilles’ in Game 3 of Milwaukee’s first-round series against the Indiana Pacers. With Doc Rivers now on the sideline but without their stars, the Bucks managed to stave off elimination with a Game 5 win Tuesday night. As they always say: Giannis plans, and the basketball gods laugh.
But the gods are patient. Not because they are kind. Simply because they like to keep receipts. They waited all season to get back at the New Orleans Pelicans after 2019 No. 1 pick Zion Williamson committed the unpardonable sin of coming into the year out of shape. Although Williamson literally gets paid to do cardio for a living, he began his fifth year about 25 pounds heavier than he should have been. That’s the amount of weight he reportedly lost after December. Before then, however, Williamson was busy “taking … the back seat” on his team when he should have been the Pelicans’ bus driver. He eventually shed the excess pounds and played the best basketball of his career — and just as he was dominating in a play-in game, he hurt his hamstring. Williamson didn’t play a minute in the first round as his Pelicans got swept by Oklahoma City. That’s right: They were purged by Thunder.
Those parables seem tame compared with the wrath of the basketball gods felt by one particular baller, though. His name was Jake. Jake loved basketball, but he would forsake its rules. He was the teammate who blasted his industrial techno playlist every time he controlled the aux in the gym. He was a black hole on offense. He called touch fouls in pickup and yelled AND ONE! on every drive, even when he didn’t convert the layup. Jake cheated the game and, worse yet, he angered the basketball gods.
And so they turned him into Jake … from State Farm, eternally damned to be an insurance salesman.
Unlike Brad Paisley from Nationwide, the Mayhem man from Allstate, the emu from Liberty Mutual or the Farmers Insurance guy (bum ba bum-bum bum bum bum!), Jake from State Farm never gets to go home after a long day of trying to convince an unbelieving public he’s a good neighbor. He’s Sisyphus. But rather than being condemned to roll a boulder back and forth from the pits of the underworld, Jake is trapped in an endless loop of cross-marketing with NBA and WNBA players (a.k.a. “hell”). It’s a fate worse than those replays of that “What a Pro Wants” ad. Sure, he’s being paid to wear red every time he’s strategically placed backstage at real-life events, where he pretends to be besties with the No. 1 draft pick. But make no mistake: His life is a Greek tragedy because no self-respecting person cares about bundling their home and auto that much.
The basketball gods are savage. They might punish you with a first-round sweep. They are pitiless, and in an instant they could strike down your star players with strange and unforeseen injuries. Above all, they are real, and they might just send a false idol named Jake to ruin our basketball-watching experience forever. Never, ever offend the basketball gods.
