Miami is a team that endures, partially, by figuring out how to outlast an opponent. An issue here is the Celtics are an especially challenging team to outlast. This, I think, is why the series has swayed so much from game to game, almost like each game is a full round of a boxing match in which one fighter is exhausted from the previous round and just trying to stay upright.

I'm not saying I'm excited watching the Heat score a single point for several minutes, or watching the Celtics fumble away a series of costly turnovers. ...

But I'm excited about the buildup of such a series, one that seems destined for a Game 7, filled with haymakers.

I hope he's right. Everybody in the damn world predicted Beans in six. I'd like them to be wrong.

I came up loving ugly Eastern Conference basketball, which doesn't necessarily mean I came up loving bad basketball. Ugly basketball isn't always bad, and bad basketball certainly isn't always ugly...

I find myself newly rooting for the Celtics, in part, because Jayson Tatum is, for me, the rare player who can make the work look both easy and challenging, all at once. To guard Tatum one-on-one is to be trapped in a seemingly endless tunnel of moves, some of them more effective than others, but all of them appearing simultaneously smooth and immensely laborious. When he's on, he is impossible and when he's off, he is equally impossible. ...I don't care much for a "pretty good" Tatum game. I prefer the ones where he either appears to be in orbit, entire solar systems beyond anyone who dares to challenge him, or the ones where he is way off, puzzled by his own struggles but still firing away.

 Who the fuck is this guy? Listen real carefully and you'll hear the voice of the late Frank DeFord. This is lovely writing.

...

What makes this series especially great and especially exhausting is that it is a series of virtually no prolonged momentum. There are in-game bursts, of course. But nothing seems to carry over from one game to the next. Each new tipoff, it's like both teams have had their memories wiped of each other, and they spend the first act of the game figuring out how to play again. Which, I suspect, has led to the lopsided first-quarter performances in all games beyond Game 1.

I suspect this series will end with a flourish, but in order for that flourish to pay off, I am sorry to say that we have to endure this part. The part of it that mostly looks like immense and ugly...There are many ways this series is decidedly not a throwback to the days of brawling, intense matches that felt like walking through slowly accumulating quicksand. But it wears the costume well. ...

Okay, WHO is this writer?  Hanif Abdurraqib. Never heard of him. "Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet, essayist and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. His most recent book, "A Little Devil in America," was a National Book Award finalist. In 2021, he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship." Oh! Well, that explains that! Genius writing. Hanif, write more on ball? Please?