by
Josh Smith
The reason we keep coming back night after night, to watch basketball or hockey, to keep tabs on extra innings on the west coast, to catch the final few frames of the women’s NCAA bowling championship, is because in the world of sports, we truly never know what is about to happen next.
You might think you do, but more often than not, your vision or idea of what the sporting future holds will be proven very, very wrong.
Never was this sports rule of thumb more evident than Thursday night in Los Angeles. The Clippers, up 3-2 in the series, held a commanding lead at home over the Houston Rockets. The visitors looked gassed, they trailed by 19, and with just a little over a quarter to play, it was soon to be curtains on their 2014-15 season.
You’ll never guess what happened next.
Josh Smith entered the game...and started launching threes...and was burying every damn one of them.
At night’s end, he’d be the man responsible for leading the most improbable comeback of these NBA Playoffs.
Seemed Unreal
Even as it was happening, it didn’t seem entirely real. The Rockets were behind 89-70 with two minutes to play in the third quarter. How in the world were they going to wiggle out of such a predicament? League MVP runner-up James Harden was completely ineffective throughout the night, missing 15 of 20 shots.
But as ridiculously silly as it sounds, the Rockets still had Josh Smith and his 3-point stroke on their side. Generally, that would be a punchline to some weird NBA-related stand-up set. But in this case, it was as serious as a heart attack, a feeling the Clippers became all too familiar with while being demolished by a score of 40-15 in the final 12 minutes.
The pivotal point in the game probably took place right around the seven minute mark. The Clips still led comfortably by nine. Just get a few stops, put in a couple buckets, and it’d be on to the Western Conference Finals for the first time in franchise history.
But doing something we frankly never saw from Josh during his abbreviated stay in Detroit, he started raining triples.
Clippers Heart Gone
Nothing but net from the right elbow. Chris Paul would answer with a hoop only to see J-Smoove come right back with another bomb. A few minutes later, he’d slice to the hoop for a lefty layup, then find Corey Brewer streaking on the break for a dunk (a gorgeous bounce pass in traffic) and the game was deadlocked at 102.
The Clippers heart was gone. Just for good measure, with the Rockets trying to ice it down the stretch, Josh Smith set up shop behind the arc and found twine one more time.
All told, it would be a 14-point final quarter for the former Piston, almost outscoring LA (15 points) all by himself.
For anyone that watched Josh Smith in Detroit, the whole scene was outright bizarre. For pete’s sake, the guy’s most memorable on-court sequence as a Piston was bouncing in a lucky 3 at the horn to win a pre-season game.
The defining moments in this do-or-die playoff game, a game quickly being bandied about on late-night sports shows as the “most shocking of the post season,” was flipped almost entirely because of the deadeye marksmanship of one Josh Smith.
Will he muster a repeat effort in Game 7 on Sunday? Probably not. His jumper is still a giant question mark and his overall effort can flip the wrong way at any moment.
But tonight, none of that matters. Josh Smith became a Houston legend overnight, and he currently sits atop the basketball world.
Just when you think you’ve got this game figured out, a home team blows a near 20-point lead in a potential clincher because one of the league’s worst shooters, a guy deemed so troublesome by his former club that they were willing to cut him loose without receiving anything in return, catches absolute fire and dominates the final minutes while his teammate (Harden), one of the league’s preeminent stars, sits and watches from the bench.
Next time someone asks why you don’t click off the game, come to bed and turn out the light, just tell ‘em very simply, “Because you never know what might happen.”
On this night, truer words were never spoken.
