I can’t begin to express how irritated I am with Houston for choking away their chance to give us a finals matchup we haven’t already seen three times in a row.  There’s some debate about what “choking” means, to me it means that you fail to accomplish a task you normally should be able to accomplish.  For example, Scott Norwood’s famous “wide right” miss of a 47-yard field goal at the end of Super Bowl XXV is often considered one of the greatest chokes in sports history.  To me, it’s not a choke at all.  A 47-yard field goal is not a kick that Norwood would “normally” make – it was the upper end of his range and there was an approximately fifty percent chance he’d make it under any circumstances. You might as well claim that someone “choked” while calling a coin toss.  This is what choking on a field goal looks like.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5HSvWf4R5DY&t=49s

As for the Rockets, what is the chance that they would miss 27 three-pointers in a row? At their normal rate of hitting 36.2% of their threes, it’s approximately 1 in 186,000.  Some folks, like my recently canonized buddy St. Rawman here…

…are insisting that it’s actually 1 in 10,000.  But that’s simply the odds of whether any sequence of 44 shots (which is the total number they took in the game) would include 27 misses in a row.  I’d contend a better measure is just the pure 27 shots in a row question, because it’s a pure distillation of the question: once they started missing, what were the odds that they would keep missing all the way up to 27 times in a row?

Anyhow it sucks, because now we’re stuck with another Warriors-Cavaliers final that the Warriors will easily win because, no matter how superhuman LeBron James happens to be, there’s only one of him, and he’s simply not surrounded with enough talent to beat the superteam that was assembled by the Warriors.  Which is a bummer, because I was hoping the finals would at least be interesting after a pair of conference finals that only included two fourth quarters that were even worth watching.

On to the music.  This week’s top pick goes to DJ Taj, who dug deep into his bag of tricks to pull out the 80’s classic “Tell That Girl to Shut Up” by Transvision Vamp.  As always, here’s the Spotify link.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQccBwTLbiM&list=PLM8nWenhx6H87yXEcTdkdCmHnDpz5d7k7