Game #55 Recap – Next

Typing this recap is taking longer than I would like. Part of it is because I’m typing without the use of the index finger on my right hand. It’s nothing major. It’s just that last Thursday, I foolishly sliced my finger open with a mandolin slicer.  As a result of that stupidity, I spent several hours sitting around an emergency room bleeding and lost uncounted minutes to correcting the gibberish that occasionally results from touch typing with just seven fingers.

The other part of the reason is that it’s not really worth spending a great deal of time talking about what should be.  I mean, the sun rose in the East this morning.  Do we need 1,000 words on it?

The Pacers beat the Wizards tonight, and that’s how it should be.  Indiana took the floor, and after dithering in the first quarter, seized control of the game and demonstrated for the rest of the night that they were the better team.

And that’s the way it should work at this point in these two teams’ life cycles.  The Pacers are flirting with being decent, while the Wizards are embroiled in a torrid love affair with being terrible.  This will not always be true, but it is now, so why dissect the obvious?

Tonight’s win was the equivalent of me successfully cutting the potatoes and making dinner last Thursday.  The Detroit loss was the Pacer equivalent of taking a mandolin slicer with safety features six ways from Sunday, and still figuring out how to do grievous bodily harm to themselves with it.  Stupidity gets the word count, competence does not.

So the lesson from tonight’s game is – that’s what is supposed to happen.

So…next?

A Couple of Notes

• John Wall does not like our Power Forwards – or something like that.  In the Pacers loss in December, Wall received a technical after Josh McRoberts flattened him.  Tonight, he and Tyler Hansbrough were assessed a double technical after some jaw-jacking.  Two data points do not make a trend, but we’re gonna pretend they do anyway.

• I have to be careful what I write about Paul George here – for fear of waxing rhapsodic for 1,500 words – but I’ve noticed something late in games.  When George is paired with Price, it appears that Vogel has given him the ball.  I’d say he’s “running the offense,” but it’s not entirely clear (yet) that an offense is being run.  It’s an interesting dynamic that I find reminiscent of the way Jalen Rose and Travis Best played together under Bird.

• The Pacers host Detroit in Conseco tomorrow night.  You should expect a low word count.

How do you get stitches from something like this?  Practice, baby.  Practice.