Darren Collison patiently fielded questions from reporters after the game. Most of the questions were astounding in their banality, the same questions that every player was asked after every game. Now, yet another no-name hack was asking him another one.
“How do you feel about your four assists this game? Were you looking for your shot out there with Chris handling the ball?”
“Four assists!?” Darren exclaimed. He thought he only had one. “Oh yeah, four assists. I was just, um, you know, letting the game come to me and not force anything. We got the win, so we just gotta carry this over into the next game.”
This satisfied the reporter, who wandered away to harass another teammate of Darren’s. Soon, the gathering of recorder-wielding apes went their separate ways, and Darren was able to procure a stat sheet for the game that had just taken place.
Scanning down the list of names, Darren found his own statline. Reading from left to right, he found the reporter hadn’t been lying. He had recorded four assists in the game. Searching the furthest corners of his brain, he couldn’t recall any passes he had made that had led to scores, other than Blake’s dunk.
Getting out his phone, Darren navigated to ESPN’s play-by-play recap of the game. The inaccurate account on the page made him sick to his stomach. He had been credited with an assist for his hand-off to Danny, but even worse, he had been the assistor for Blake’s stumbling foray into the paint, a foray which had been interrupted partway through by a fumbled ball. It was madness. Pure madness.
Darren sprinted out of the locker room, down hundreds of feet of corridors, until he reached the staff parking lot. There, he noticed the scorekeeper, Craig, getting into his beat-up-looking car. “Hey, Craig! Wait up!” Darren shouted.
Craig looked a little distrustful as he got his leg out of the car and closed the door. “What’s up, Darren?” he asked.
Wasting no time with formalities, Darren reared back and punched the bespectacled 40-something. Having not had a chance to steel himself, Craig’s limbs went slack, and he hit the concrete of the parking lot with a thud.
“That’s that you get for fudging the box-scores,” Darren said sternly to the groaning man. “If you don’t fix it by tomorrow, you’re going to get a lot worse than a punch to the face. Don’t forget, Craig.”
As Darren left the scene, he turned and saw Craig still on the ground, weeping silently. The Clipper smiled to himself. He was cleaning up the NBA’s corrupt stat reportage, one punch at a time.