Brook Lopez’s second quarter vs. the Cavaliers was as bad as it gets

“Is it possible to delete an entire quarter of basketball?”

It’s only a matter of time until Brook Lopez fires that text off to commissioner Adam Silver, since he would probably know things like this. It might happen at halftime!

See, Lopez had an extremely bad second quarter, all things considered. He checked in with 6:08 left in the frame, and he played the next five minutes despite extremely bad things happening to him.

It started with two missed free throws. Um, like, missing the rim:

Those are two free throws, not one. He airballed them both. We would expect that, maybe, out of a free-throw shooter like Shaq or DeAndre Jordan, but Lopez is a career 79.4 percent free-throw shooter. How the hell did this happen? (During halftime warm-ups, a few Cavaliers fans hilariously chanted, “Airball.”)

This was quickly followed by:

Oh no. Oh nooooooooo. Lopez didn’t even get that alley-oop above the rim, at any point, during that attempt.

Lopez did one good thing in that second quarter: He got the hell out of the way of a streaking LeBron James:

Imagine how much worse this quarter would have been if Lopez airballed consecutive free throws, got hung on the rim during a dunk, and was posterized by the best player in the game. Three strikes, and you have to retire — them’s the rules. That’s what Silver is probably texting him back.

It was a business decision, and Lopez made the right move. He has enough shame to deal with after this abominable five-minute stretch.