The 'what-if' plays

"One bounce, or gust of wind, or malfunctioning headset, or even a piece of dust in a referee's eye can turn a game, and by extension, a season into crap... you never know when that gust of wind will come along and blow away your chance for this feeling again."

I know, I know. Woe is me! My NBA team (a league that not many of my friends care about, and a team that I have no geographical ties to) lost a game they could have won. But this play happened last night, and I was reminded of something. Another of my teams won the championship this year, and had to make a lot of these types of plays. They are the little plays, the ones that can go unnoticed when you win, but stand out when you lose. Here's the play:

As you can see, Rondo missed Pierce who was wide open for a lay-up. Now, this is maddening on several levels. The most basic one is that Rondo has proven to be an incredible basketball visionary who would miss this pass only 1 out of 1,000,000 times. But he missed it this time.

But here is the way that it tortures my mind: What if Rondo makes that pass and Pierce makes the lay-up? There are so many possible outcomes past that. Maybe nothing changes, maybe everything does. But I feel like the game would have swung. Pierce was out of rhythm all game, and sometimes it just takes a simple shot to get you back into it. Also, and more importantly, the game is now tied. The Celtics had fought and clawed to get the game close again, but they never tied or took the lead. For all the talk about mental toughness, I think the Lakers have some, but are as apt to fold as they are to hold leads. Their poise shrinks in a big way if the score is tied, I believe*.

*And with reason, The Lakers, for all the media hype about how they are so much mentally tougher than they used to be, are still the same team that was up 3 with 4 minutes to play in Game 2 and gave up a 11-0 run with the "best closer in the game" (rubbish) going 1-4 with 3 turnovers.

The point I'm making is this: there are big things that separate great teams from regular ones. There are little things that separate great teams from other great teams, and sometimes those little things are controllable and sometimes they aren't (yes, the officials were horrendous last night). Several months ago, I made this point about how fragile Alabama's season was - in the quote above - and how these little things can separate a great championship team from a great team that could have won it all but didn't. I feel like the Celtics are on the other end of this after Game 3.

Know what the worst part is? There are moments like this out there in every single game. And if you let yourself think about it for your team, you'll be tortured too.