At times in the arena of sport, there are certain games that come along that just captivate you. Games that produce the highest of drama, with two teams trading blows and counterblows, baskets and counter baskets, until they both drop to the mat like Rocky Balboa and Apollo Creed in Rocky.
Game 4 between the Portland Trail Blazers and the Golden State Warriors was that kind of game to watch. The first half was advantage Blazers, as they held off the Warrior charge with great shooting. The game got ugly, with fouls and intentional fouls and technical fouls and ejections and referees reviewing any foul that had more than the minimum of physical contact. It felt like a game in the NBA Finals, not like a game between the best regular-season team in history and a plucky underdog that was projected as a 27-win team by experts at season’s start.
It was electric to see Portland maintain both their hot shooting and their mental advantage. After Shaun Livingston got ejected, forcing the returning Stephen Curry to play well beyond his 25-minute limit, I thought the Blazers had a real chance to win Game 4, and go back to Oakland tied at 2-2 in the series.
The second half saw the Warriors force their way back into the game. At that point, the Blazers could have folded, admitted defeat, and let the Warriors trample them into dust. They’re young, mostly untested, and definitely not used to the kind of pressure that comes with playing games like this.
But they didn’t fold. They matched the Warriors shot for shot, they didn’t buckle, and they stood in there with the defending NBA champions until the clock reached 0:00, and overtime started.
Once overtime began…understand something about the Warriors. While they’ve been successful without Curry, there were cracks starting to form in their armor after Game 1. They needed their home crowd and a Blazer meltdown to win Game 2, and the Blazers steeled themselves for Game 3, and burned the Warriors defense like dry leaves in a forest fire. Coach Steve Kerr needed to do something to shift the series in his team’s favor, and he had to reactivate Steph Curry. Without him, the Warriors are a very good team. A very good team that risked getting into a dogfight with a group of young guns with absolutely nothing to lose, and absolutely everything to gain.
It’s like seeing Jeff Hardy take on the Undertaker for the WWE Championship 14 years ago, when Hardy was just a young kid known for being a reckless daredevil and Undertaker was a bad guy destroying everybody as champion. Hardy had talked his way into a Ladder Match for the title, and Taker was just kicking his ass all over the place. During the closing moments of the match, however, Undertaker brought a steel chair into the ring, intending to hit Hardy with it to punish him further, and Hardy kicked it into his face. With the champion down, the ladder set up, and Hardy starting to climb, the crowd went insane. As the fans cheered Hardy on during his slow, painful assent up the ladder towards the richest prize in pro wrestling, legendary commentator Jim Ross screamed, “Climb the ladder, kid! Make yourself famous!”
Undertaker then smacked Hardy in the back with the chair, climbed the ladder, and pulled the belt down. As he left, Hardy, who had somehow grabbed a live microphone, yelled into it, “Get back here, Taker! We ain’t done yet!”
Everyone expected Taker to murder Hardy on the spot, but instead he raised the kid’s hand, shook his head in admiration, then walked away. That match made Hardy’s career, just like this series with the Warriors is making the names of every rotation player on the Portland Trail Blazers right now, win or lose.
They were climbing that ladder in Game 4, reaching for a second straight victory over the best team ever, as myself, 20,000 people in the Moda Center, and millions watching on TV were screaming for them to climb that ladder and make themselves famous.
Then Steph Curry, who got stronger as the game went on, smacked the Blazers in the back with a steel chair, scored nine straight points in overtime, and pulled the win down for his team. That sequence ended one of the greatest games of basketball I’ve ever seen, one that not only was the most exciting out of a series of three excellent games between these teams, but livened up an NBA postseason that has, quite frankly, been a stinking sack of you know what so far. The Raptors and Heat are playing an ugly series marred by injuries, the Cavaliers destroyed the Hawks with three-pointers, and the Thunder-Spurs series had crappy officiating blight its beginning before Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook brought OKC within one win of the Western Conference Finals.
The Blazers and Warriors series will likely end tonight, with Curry fully returned after his incredible performance Monday. It still will be the best played and most exciting series in these playoffs to date, and everyone on the Blazers can and should hold their heads high.
And if there were any doubts about Steph Curry’s fitness to be a back-to-back MVP and to be called the best player in the world, he squashed them with his overtime performance. Sure, LeBron James is still great, Anthony Davis is the Evolutionary Tim Duncan, Durant and Westbrook are both top-five players, and Kawhi Leonard is a two-way monster.
But I doubt any of those guys, except maybe LeBron, could go 15 days without playing a game, come off the bench during the biggest game of their team’s season, start off by shooting airballs and dribbling balls off their feet, see the guy who started in their place get ejected, then play the highest of high-leverage minutes at the peak of their abilities. And single-handedly win the game in overtime.
The kind of fortitude that Curry has is just unreal. He’s the reason why the Warriors went from a very good team in a dogfight with a plucky underdog, to the best team ever dominating the game during its most important moments. He’s the reason why Golden State is favored to win its second straight championship. He’s the reason why the Trail Blazers lost Game 4, and now face the end of their season.
In the weeks and months to come, plenty will be said and speculated on where Portland goes from here, how they’ll build on this momentum, and what lessons they took from the defeat suffered at the Warriors’ hands.
If you’re curious about Jeff Hardy, he eventually did reach the top of the WWE, winning the WWE Championship and being a main-event performer. Unfortunately, he was also a voracious drug user. Drugs derailed his career, and led to the WWE releasing him. He landed in Total Nonstop Action Wrestling, where he won their World Title, but drugs again claimed him. He was stoned out of his mind when he went out to main-event TNA’s biggest Pay-Per-View event in 2011. After he was shoot-pinned (he struggled to kick out, but he was deliberately held down by his opponent), he was fired. It was such a bad scandal, TNA refunded the money of everybody who bought their PPV.
Hardy’s now in his forties, dealing with myriad knee injuries and struggling to stay clean.
I doubt the Blazers will end up like that, but that doesn’t mean bad luck in another form won’t claim them; the Portland franchise has been the most snake-bitten franchise in the NBA, basketball’s version of the Chicago Cubs, lovable losers to the end. But we have all summer, and years afterwards, to worry about that.
Today, I just want to say that Game 4 hurt me as a Blazer fan, and made me so, so happy as a basketball fan. Thank you Damian Lillard, CJ McCollum, Al-Farouq Aminu, and every other Blazer who played for your incredible performance. It wasn’t just a game to me. It was art. It was the living embodiment of what it means to be a fan. It was a hell of a ride.
The Blazers lost their chance to defeat the Warriors in the series. They came up just short. But the kids still made themselves famous.
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