The Side Part: Week 30 – Mario Kart

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The snowball becomes a snowman which turns into an army of snowmen which then turns into an avalanche and then it’s this army of avalanches ripping through a Sherwin Williams factory that only cans black and silver paint.

But the army of avalanches doesn’t slow down. It rips on and coats the world in silver and black, everyone bruised and wondering not what — because the black and silver avalanche army made themselves known — but how that just happened. One second I had a house. The next second I had a pile of brick dust.

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Save moments in the first halves of these games where the Thunder haven’t looked altogether lost, for the most part this Serge-less team has looked completely helpless. It almost seems as if once the lead gets to 10, it has to get to 25. There is no in between. The Thunder are either right with them, or in another hemisphere entirely.

It’s like the Spurs are playing Mario Kart and every time they ride through a rainbow question mark they somehow get both a star and a lightning bolt. Everything else on the court is slow and flattened and rendered obsolete and they zip around Rainbow Road with infinite turbo and not a care in the world. They had the first player controller so they already have a leg up on everyone having been able to just go straight down to get Yoshi who EVERYONE knows is the best character to play with.

It’s like the Thunder are stuck with Luigi and Luigi’s got a flat tire and a busted engine and there’s a permanent banana peel in front of their kart at all times. This analogy is probably losing steam.

To watch the Thunder thus far this series is to see a team in alien territory, playing without their rim protector for the first time ever. It’s weird adjusting as a fan, even. Seems like most every lineup we throw out there now is one that you wouldn’t see unless foul trouble dictated otherwise.

The Thunder are as lost as I’ve seen them and it would seem that nothing will work. The Spurs are a buzzsaw and we’ve run into them and they’ve Fargo’d us into the wood chipper two straight games. I don’t blame anyone for counting the Thunder out of it. Nothing at all suggests that they’ll come back and win this thing. It seems that they  have few answers for this killing machine. What’s more, I don’t know that they can even understand what questions the Spurs are asking.

But this team will fight. We’ve seen them on the mat before and they’ve always gotten up. They’ve always risen, inevitably, chest heaving, and taken more swings. They go down, but not without making the other guy bleed a little. And if they go, they won’t go quietly. A Durant-Westbrook team ultimately knows no volume other than ear splitting. And maybe they breath life into themselves. Maybe Durant and Westbrook go Nuclear Captain Americas and everyone looks up at the end of next week and everything is different. Maybe.