Hey NBA! Thanks For Ruining My Sunday!

I had been looking forward to game seven of the Western Conference semi-final between the Denver Nuggets and OKC Thunder since game 6 ended on Thursday night. It was perfect! The game would be on in the middle of the afternoon so I would not have to stay up until midnight or watch the game after recording it. It would be great match-up of a more talented, deeper but inexperienced team at home versus a banged up, veteran team who is one season removed from winning a title. It also meant the two finalists for the MVP award, Nikola Jokic and Shai Gilgeous-Alexander would face off in a winner take all game. Then I heard a key player, Aaron Gordon, would most likely not play for Denver. I felt a bit deflated as I did not think we would get a true measure of that great match-up.

No way this would have been called a foul today

Even with this injury news, I still made it appointment viewing to be in front of my television at 2:30 so I could watch live and text my buddies as we watched. Then to my surprise I discovered that Aaron Gordon was going to start despite a grade 2 hamstring strain (which is basically a tear). OK. So I might get close to the match-up I wanted. Could the nerves of the more talented, deeper young OKC team get int the way of defeating Jokic leading a team with a 1 armed guy (Porter Jr.), 1 legged guy (Gordon), and a zero brain guy (Westbrook)?

Because I think Jokic is the most amazing basketball player I have seen in a long time, going into this series I was slightly rooting for Denver. But I would have been completely happy getting to see the young guns of OKC trying to climb their way to the top. I just wanted to see a great series culminating in an awesome game 7. For the first few minutes of the game, I got what I was hoping for... a very exciting game.

And then OKC made an adjustment. They decided to foul Jokic on every single possession. If you watch the 2nd and 3rd quarter of the game, I challenge you to find a single trip where Jokic was not fouled at least once. Normally this would not be a very good strategy. Jokic is a very good free throw shooter and each player only gets 6 fouls so eventually people would foul out and hurt OKC's depth. Here's the problem... the refs called almost none of the fouls. I LOVE Alex caruso but not even I am biased enough to overlook the fact that he was literally wrapping Jokic up on every play before Jokic even touched the ball. He was literally pushing Jokic on every play. When Jokic would over power the smaller Caruso, it gave the help defender time to rotate over to foul Jokic... which was also not called. It became simply unwatchable.

If the strategy of not calling any fouls against OKC didn't work, I believe this was the NBA's next strategy.

Now granted, everyone not named Jokic or Braun had terrible games, but Jokic did exactly what he was supposed to do while his teammates are finding their shots. He took over and tried to dominate the paint. Sadly he was not allowed to play basketball so it turned into an unwatchable blowout.

The worst part about all of this for me is that it has really tainted the rest of the playoffs for me. Although I came into this game not really caring that much which team won, after seeing something so unfair, it makes it hard for me to root for OKC moving forward. I probably won't even watch much of either of the Conference Finals. Which might be a good thing since I watched so many games of the Western Conference playoffs already. Going to bed before midnight doesn't sound like too bad of a consolation prize.

Who do you think will end up in the NBA Finals?