https://youtu.be/HXjixm-GLQ4
Early in this game, there was a stretch of about a minute and a half (broken up by a timeout) where Joe Harris scored eleven points and got two steals. I usually avoid hyperbole, but Harris basically put the game away right there. Six minutes to go in the first quarter, and the Nets were up by fourteen points, on the back of sixteen quick points from Harris. It was at that point that Celtics players started wondering when they could go back to the team hotel.
I think most fans grossly underestimate what it takes to make an NBA player fold mentally. Most wins and losses in the NBA come down to talent, not advanced mental warfare tactics. Unlike us regular losers who are overcome with self-doubt at our basketball skills, these are highly-trained and highly-skilled professionals who have mental toughness in spades. That said, it’s hard to imagine that the Celtics WEREN’T mentally reeling after Joe Harris did what he did to them. Their spirits had to have been broken after getting manhandled in such a disrespectful way, not by James Harden, not by Kevin Durant, not by Kyrie Irving, but by Joe Harris.
I would start a petition to expand the Nets’ “big three” into a “big four” so that Harris could be included, but I don’t have the energy to start circulating a paper petition, and everybody knows those online petitions are total garbo anyway. So there will be no petition, but let this be my official notice to the Nets that I want a big four. Any player who leads the league in three-point shooting should get to be part of a “big x”, where “x” is the number of stars on the roster. Harris is a star in my heart, god damn it.