Before Luka Doncic left the ward limping and with the help of an assistant, X-rays ruled out major ailments in his left ankle. The kink had been very ugly, but he had some choice to play. Ahead of a time trial that, according to ABC, started that same morning at the hotel with the first treatment session. A career that ended with 43 points, 17 rebounds, 13 assists and a triple winner over the horn. A memorable performance that already has a place next to other great deeds of an injured player in the history of the playoffs.
On Saturday morning, after passing the daily coronavirus test, Doncic underwentrecovery sessions. One at 10.30 and another at 12.30. After lunch, I work without impact in the pool, light session in the weight room, and more rehab. At five in the afternoon, another X-ray to see the evolution of the ankle. At 6.30pm, and every two hours until 10.30pm, more sessions with the Dallas Mavericks physios. I work from sunrise to sunset so that the Slovenian could get to the game.
On Sunday, as soon as they get up and fulfill the obligations of the bubble (each morning, the players measure their temperature and oxygen saturation before leaving their room to pass the daily test), more work in the pool. And after the pre-game meeting with the whole team, more make-up work until the kickoff. An hour before the game, the Mavs announced that Doncic was ready. What happened next already belongs to history.
Doncic takes over the game as few players, less than 21 years old, can. The Slovenian has an amazing ability to read the match and make it his own. Impose your own pace. It’s bouncing, reading, footwork, and body control. It is the courage to move outside the height of the moment. It didn’t matter that he had a title contender in front of him, the Clippers; that one of the most dominant players in the NBA, Kawhi Leonard, give you an answer; or that he did not have his second sword by his side, Kristaps Porzingis.
Luka Doncic led the comeback of some Mavs who lost by 21 points in the first half. In the third period he generated only more points (25) than all the Clippers as a whole (19). Jug 46 minutes out of 53 possible, more than in any other game of his career. The few times he did sit, he was still receiving treatment on the bench. And in the last minute of the extension, she lost her mind. A board penetration, a reverse and that already unforgettable triple on the horn.
El ‘Flu Game’ de Jordan
When the phone in his room is at three in the morning, Tim Grover I knew it could only be bad news. “Come running to Michael’s room.” That night Jordan had been late for dinner and had ordered a pizza to eat alone. According to Grover, word had gotten out which hotel the Bulls were staying at and five guys had shown up for pizza. “This smells bad for me”. “Bah, fuck you,” Jordan said. When Grover entered the room, he was found writhing on the floor in a fetal position.
It’s worth stopping here: in the extensive mythology about Game 5 of the 1997 Finals between the Chicago Bulls and the Utah Jazz, there has been much speculation about the reasons for Jordan’s indisposition. In its day it was said that it was a cold, and that is why it is remembered as the ‘Flu Game’, but in ‘Playing For Keeps’, the best biography about Jordan, the pulitzer David Halberstam He already claimed it was food poisoning, as confirmed by Jordan himself in ‘The Last Dance’. Other theories spoke of a night out and even a golf marathon.
In what there is no doubt is that, when the bodyguards alerted Chip Schaefer, the Bulls’ physical trainer, Jordan was in bed, buried in blankets in the middle of June and with almost 38 fever. He had spent the night with nausea, vomiting, and a headache. Schaefer treated him all day, but Jordan arrived at the pavilion barely able to stand. The images of the warm-up and rest show him extremely weak. “Jordan has quite black skin and that day it was a mixture of white and gray.”
But Jordan, with a competitive instinct that has only been replicated in Bill Russell and Kobe Bryant, dominated a vital game for the Bulls. ‘His Majesty’ finished with 38 points (15 in the fourth quarter), 7 rebounds, 5 assists and 3 steals. The indelible image of that victory (90-88) is that of a completely exhausted Jordan, surrendered on the shoulder of Scottie Pippen, unable to walk on his own foot.
‘Ah come Willis!’
It was 1970 and there were no cell phones, so Knicks fans flocked under the marquees of Madison Square Garden waiting for news of their captain. Willis Reed he had been injured in the fifth game of the Finals, he had not played the sixth, they had lost to the Lakers, and nobody knew if he could be in the final. Although the newspapers said that he had a severe blow to the hip, the result of a bad fall, in reality that was the least. Reed also had a tear in his cudriceps and could barely walk, but he had already made up his mind: “Even on all fours, I play.”
Reed received two injections before the game, one of cortisone and one of mepivacan, an anesthetic to numb the area, and he went out to test himself. There were a couple of hours until the game and the only audience was his coach, Red Holzman, a group of journalists, and a head that stood out above the rest: Wilt Chamberlain, who hadn’t stopped asking if anyone had news. Reed tried a few free throws, without even moving from the spot, and went back to the locker room. “What? How do you look?” Chamberlain asked him. “Well, not very there.” When he was gone, Reed’s smile escaped. Wilt was nervous.
Minutes before the game, with the warm-up already underway, a roar shook Madison: Willis Reed limped out of the changing room tunnel ready to play. “I will never forget the faces of three of the best players in history. Chamberlain, Elgin Baylor and Jerry west. They were made of stone. They stopped heating up and just stood there, staring at Willis. There I said to myself, ‘We already have these’ “, he recalled decades later. Walt Frazier. The outburst was only greater when Reed, playing on one leg, made his first two shots of the game. If there are stage victories, that one was.
Luka Doncic’s feat in the fourth round of the series against the Clippers belongs to these measures. A performance that already belongs to his future legend
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