We don’t even know who’s going to be in this year’s three-point shootout that is anually held during the All-Star festivities (we do have a few vague rumors coming from nebulous sources), but I’m already getting ready for Tyler Herro to be snubbed. By “getting ready”, I mean drafting the threatening emails I will send to all relevant NBA employees and readying my army of hacked IoT devices to flood twitter with the relevant hashtags and tweets. The Internet will know of the snubbing, and DownToBuck will be the one to inform them.
Sure, it’s probably not really much of a snub considering there are only 10 spots in the contest and there are tons of reasonable selections for those spots, but still. It’s Herro. I’m hyped for him. I never realized how important it is to have role models who look like you (in this case, extremely pale from Wisconsin), but now I do realize, and I have attached a worrying amount of my self-image to Herro. If he fails, I fail. If he doesn’t get selected to participate in the three-point shootout, I don’t get selected to participate in the three-point shootout.
On the other hand, why should I care if he gets invited to some meaningless exhibition display? The REAL three-point contests happen every night in arenas all across the country during real NBA action. I’ve always thought that way about dunk contests (give me in-game dunks over dunk-contest dunks 100 times out of 100), so why shouldn’t I think that way about three-point contests? Herro had 6 threes tonight, a night where the defense was actively trying to prevent him from him making any threes at all. And that might be more impressive than just standing still at 5 spots and shooting with no hands in your face.