It causes me physical pain when Marcus Smart has a good game in defiance of all the mean things I’ve written about him. Actual physical pain, akin to having your chest skewered with knives. Celtics fans will tell me all about his defense and that’s easy for me to ignore since there are no box-score stats that measure things like on-ball defense or help defense, but then Smart will go and have a good game scoring/distributing the ball and that hurts me because there are stats for those things. And in this game, the stats were 6-of-12 from the threezone and eight assists. I can’t just dismiss his good game like I can when he only plays good defense and does nothing else. I have to confront these numbers head-on. Hence the pain in my chest, which hopefully isn’t a heart attack.
Smart’s three-point shooting is now sitting comfortably at 30%, which is right on the line where he shouldn’t even get to take them. That’s a stat that Celtics will pretend can be nullified by his good defense. They might even be right about that, but I don’t care about defense and I can only evaluate players based on box-score stats, so I really wish they were wrong about it.
Speaking of being wrong, I’m not so sure that I’m not actually having a heart attack right now. Does anybody know what number you’re supposed to call on your phone when you want the ambulance people to come to your house?