Last week, the NBA regular season ended and the NBA Playoffs began. So while everyone was playing the best basketball they could as the season wound down (with the possible exception of the Utah Jazz) (lol), there was plenty of badness to go around in the early games of the first round of the postseason.
The Week in Worst: Don’t be so angry, it’s only basketball
It’s time again for the worst plays of the week. In GIF form.
Bill Hanstock is a writer, author and Emmy Award-winning producer. He began writing for SB Nation in 2011.
More than badness, there was also madness. As in anger, not as in insanity. Although possibly some of that as well. So let’s look at some GIFs and celebrate some basketball players getting angry, making one another angry and almost certainly making a bunch of poor, defenseless NBA fans angry. If this is how things are kicking off, just imagine how heated things will get by the end. We can’t wait.
Here are the worst NBA plays for the week of April 15-21.
Worst Airballs
Date: April 20
We start with just mild agitation, most notably felt by head coach P.J. Carlesimo, who had to have been wondering about Jerry Stackhouse’s shot selection. Wait, maybe “shot selection” isn’t the correct term. Maybe the correct term is “being awful at basically everything.” But man, that parquet floor in the Barclays Center is so pretty. Legit gorgeous. Just focus on that. Not the crummy shots.
Worst Pass
Player: Avery Bradley
Date: April 20
Look how irritated everyone is after this terrible attempt at some sort of quasi- alley-oop! Avery Bradley even seems to express anger at Courtney Lee for not, uh ... having bigger hands? I dunno Avery, seems like this one is sort of on you.
Worst 3-Point Attempt
Player: Klay Thompson
Date: April 20
Klay? More like KLAY-NG, am I right? Like ... the sound of that ball CLANGING off the side of the ... ? Awww, forget it.
Worst JaVale-ing
Player: JaVale McGee
Date: April 20
This was called goaltending? Was it? Not sure, but you should probably call plays differently against JaVale Mcgee than against other players, because he is a big weirdo who doesn’t understand how anything works. We’ve covered that here before.
Anyway, it was called a goaltend and JaVale got angry. How angry? This angry:
Not super ticked off though, more incredulous/unbelieving-angry. We’ll get to rage in a couple of minutes here. For now, just enjoy JaVale being JaVale. Because it’s always great. By which I mean “awful.”
Worst Save
Player: Courtney Lee
Date: April 20
”Okay Courtney, just let that one g-- NO DON’T SAVE IT YA--
”FOR MERCY’S SAKE AT LEAST DON’T THROW IT TO THE KNICKS BECAUSE--
“Ugh, Courtney, why.”
Worst Hands
Player: Zach Randolph
Date: April 22
just gotta ... gotta get to the ... lemme get at that ... should be a simple matter of ... hup ...
just gonna put my reachin’ hands on this spheroid here and ... hoo boy ... this is uh ... this is NOT going well ...
as long as ... as long as I can get to the dang thing before the ... before the Clippers ... wooo, gettin’ a little winded here ...
aw nertz
Worst Anger Management
Player: Keyon Dooling
Date: April 20
Keyon Dooling was running low on patience and didn't much care for the way Ryan Hollins was guarding him. So he opted to wang the ball at Hollins' thigh. That's not very sporting. We've now entered white-hot rage. Calm down, Keyon Dooling. It's not worth it. Hopefully by the end of the series you'll have learned to count to 10 before losing your temper. It sometimes worked for Donald Duck, however. And if there's any metric Keyon Dooling should use to make his life decisions, it's "things that occasionally worked for Donald Duck."
More from SB Nation:
See More:
