Adam Mokoka, who is allegedly a real NBA player for the Chicago Bulls, had not made a shot before tonight. He had attempted nine of them and missed them all, which is a feat that any one of us could have also achieved if a coach were foolish enough to put us in an NBA game. To be honest, I didn’t even know who he was. I’m sure I had seen his name in boxscores, but, as a rule, I barely glance at the players who score zero in a game. It’s a better use of my neurons to only commit to memory things that will matter in the course of running my channel, such as how big of a bust John Wall is or what the threshold for being a “splashmaster” is (it’s shooting 42.5% from three).
However, everything changed tonight when Mokoka made six shots in five minutes to turn garbage time into “man the Bulls are really coming back, aren’t they?” time into “damn they’ve almost tied it up” time. The guy who was barely hanging on to the end of the bench with his fingertips turned into some kind of clutch-time assassin whose all-consuming clutchness filled the fifty or so remaining fans in the United Center with utter joy. With each shot he made, the chorus of cheers only grew louder.
Imagine if the Bulls had actually pulled out the win. All fifty remaining fans would have poured out of the arena in a mob and started flipping police cars while chanting the name “Mokoka”. Well, nothing’s stopping me from chanting the name by myself. I’m chanting it right now. You can start chanting it too and we’ll be chanting it together even if we can’t hear each other.