When I started looking at tonight’s box-scores and saw that Trae Young had a career-high 36 points to go with ten assists, I was mildly excited. The video would be long, but the toil suffered in creating it would be worth it. Then, my eyes scanned over the list of stats, and I saw that Young made sixteen free throws to help him reach his total of 36 points.
That’s when I legitimately got angry. Not only on behalf of myself, for having to slog through the arduous process of creating a highlight video which contained entirely too many free throws, but on behalf of the viewer, who would click on this video expecting to experience wonderment at Young’s scoring and passing, only to get dragged into a soulless abyss where the only thing that exists is fouling and shooting foul shots. This is not the way a career-high highlight video should be experienced. Far from it. If people wanted to watch free throws, they would put James Harden highlights on replay all day. And we know that people don’t do that.
How fitting, then, it was for Young to miss out a new career-high of 37 (rather than just tying his career-high of 36) by missing his last free throw attempt of the game. To have that achievement snatched away from him by the same mechanism that got him within striking distance of the achievement in the first place, that’s some kind of poetic justice right there. That lessed my anger to the point where this video description is semi-coherent and not just a jumble of random characters that were produced while I banged my head on the keyboard and screeched.