This Week In GIFs: There is everything to cry about

Welcome to THIS WEEK IN GIFs, y’all! I conferenced with my fellow GIF enthusiasts up in New York, Matt Ufford and Dan Rubenstein. These are our favorite GIFs:

Voting will remain open, as usual, until 11 p.m. Sunday. Enjoy!

(Via @TPBadam)

When I was 19, my roommate proposed a theory: that hockey fights can be largely explained by how immensely frustrating hockey is. Footballs make unpredictable caroms and baseballs slip out of a split-finger delivery, but at least their athletes have control over their own persons. They can move as naturally as they could if they were hunter-gatherers out in the prairie.

In hockey, you’re a missile. No matter how good you get at skating, it ain’t runnin,’ and there’s a loss of control at work. The same principle, he argued, went for automobiles and helped to explain road rage. When your freedom of movement is compromised, you get pissed off, and you fight, and you sacrifice your balance for the sake of smacking your stick into the door because you’ve had a terrible game.

I really don’t know whether my roommate was right about that. Anyway, lol tuukka rask

BIRDMAN. In slow motion this looks like such a gentle dunk. Like, not a dunk so much as dispensing something in a receptacle, like a kid timidly trying to solve a puzzle in a Nickelodeon game show. HERE GOES CHRIS HE REALLY WANTS TO WIN IT FOR HIS TEAM. GO CHRIS! YEAH YOU GOTTA PUT THE BALL IN THE BUCK -- NO, THE BUCKET. NO YOU NEED TO PUT THE BALL IN THE BUCKET CHRIS

Wait, the Bulls have started Kirk Hinrich every game? Like, the 2013 Bulls? Have started 32-year-old Kirk Hinrich? Alright. Well anyway, here he is bear-hugging LeBron out of a shot opportunity. Not a bad way to go if you really really really want to make sure he doesn’t get a shot off.

The thing is, LeBron did somehow find a way to get the ball in the air anyway. GIF-of-the-year candidate, had it gone in.

(Via Barstool Sports)

Context is necessary to make this GIF even more remarkable. Mr. Ward rips off his earpiece and chucks it into dude’s beer, right? Well, the Bruins have provided a different story: that the missile that landed in the beer was not the earpiece, but rather a capsule of smelling salts that a player errantly threw over the glass.

I think I buy it, because the Bruins would have no reason to make such a thing up, and because the angle of a) the earpiece and b) the beer-bound projectile appear to be flying at different angles. Anyway, that beer probably didn’t taste awful. Light beer, plus ammonia. If you’ve ever had a shitty homebrew, you’ve had that beer.

yeah man i was upset when Artie left too

FGCU gave me plenty of GIFs to choose from this week, but I had to go with their most violent dunk. Double-digit seeds who over-achieve are always endearing, but they’re usually too busy just being “Cinderella” to actually take on a personality of their own. Florida Gulf Coast laughs, chicken-dances, and absolutely dunks the shit out of the basketball. Unbelievably, I don’t think of them as a 15-seed first anymore. They’re just the team that stunts all over you.

(Via Bill Hanstock’s Week in Worst)

Bogans’ pass isn’t inexplicable -- Brook Lopez was there to receive it until the very second it was thrown -- but it certainly looks stupid as we see it. The real star is the ref at the bottom, nimbly avoiding the ball. It’d be nothing without the run-and-point at the end. So terribly dignified.

VOTE!