DownToBuck has always been a proponent of giving credit where credit is due, except in cases where I want to take the credit for myself or assign it to some scrub role player who didn’t actually do anything. But in this case, I’m giving lot of the credit is going to Andre “Retirement Home” Iguodala, and I’m doing it eagerly, because he deserves it.
Iguodala had only scored twenty points in a game once during the regular season. That was on Christmas day, with the whole world watching (not to mention the newborn baby Jesus and his mommy and daddy). It’s like he picks the biggest games to go off, and then relaxes for the rest knowing that his old man body wouldn’t be able to handle it if he went hard 100% of the time. And I get that. You don’t want to be the guy hobbling slowly into Denny’s asking for the senior discount. You want to stride in their confidently, look the methhead waitress in the eye, and say “I’ll have the senior-sized breakfast platter and a senior coffee with extra senior cream, please.”
I’m also giving credit to Iguodala because I had not yet made a highlight video for a Warriors role-player in these Finals. It was going to look real dumb if somebody went back through my archive of videos and saw that I seemingly only paid attention to Raptors players. I suppose I could have, as an emergency measure, demoted DeMarcus Cousins to role-player status, but I didn’t feel like doing that. My “Exclusion List” is locked in by the time the Finals start and there can be no modifications. So, big props to Iggy for stepping up when the next-best role-player performance from a Warrior this series was, like, Quinn Cook scoring nine.
Since this is the final Warriors highlight video of the season, I would like to address something: when I repeatedly stated throughout the season that Warriors fans deserve nothing but anguish and pain, I didn’t mean for it to be like this. Losing both Durant and Thompson to injuries that will likely cause them to miss all of next season is way beyond the amount of despair that Warriors fans deserve. If there is some kind of deity or cosmic overforce out there pulling the strings, that deity should remember that a much fairer punishment for Warriors fans would have been a game-seven buzzer-beater loss at the hands of Kawhi Leonard. Not serious injuries to their best players. That’s a bitch move.