Kevin Love's Beautiful Pass Couldn't Exist Without Avery Bradley's Ugly Shot

Hey y'all, wanna see a cool basketball play? Here is J.R. Smith snatching a rebound and shuttling it to Kevin Love, who used his mighty forearms to sail the ball across the court, just over the extended hand of Marcus Smart. The ball dropped neatly into the right hand of Lebron James, who laid the ball in.

Distance, accuracy, an embarrassed Celtic splayed out on the ground: all extremely cool shit. But more than that, it was an honest basketball play, featuring the combined talents of a superior squad coming together in a flash of light, the kind that surpasses the mere confines of "Basketball" and crosses over into the glory of universalist sport. A perfectly executed and digestible moment whose truth and beauty run so deep that anyone—your mom, your uncle, hell, some animals—can see and understand.

This hefty pass is a world record sprint, a between the legs tennis shot, an outfielder riding up over the wall and stealing a home run from his pitiful opponent. It is a moment when purity of skill and the whims of the universe collide to make a perfect sports play. In a fair and just world, its perfection would be a harbinger for the Cavaliers, a sign that this game belonged to them, that the universe blessed them with a victory, etched in the stars.

This truth is how I wish to remember last night's game, which went along as destiny and the laws of basketball dictated for two-and-a-half quarters before the Celtics—especially Marcus Smart, a career .291 three-point shooter who shoots with a form he appears to have acquired from the bottom of a Cracker Jack box—began heaving one three pointer after another, and unleashed Jonas Jerebko to vindictively shove the Cavs around the court. Through this confluence, Boston managed to close the 20-point gap and win on the most bullshit back iron rim-in shot I've ever seen in my life. I mean, watch this thing:

This shot was so charmed that its essential terribleness—bouncing to-and-fro on the rim, a little fart noise emanating with every bounce—helped kill off enough clock that the Cavs had to forfeit the last possession because there is literally nothing you can accomplish with .1 seconds remaining on the clock. It was such a piece of shit that it has all the import of a buzzer-beater, without the defining quality of one. This shot, strung together from psychic threads of luck itself, was the polar opposite of the Kevin Love pass, a monstrosity and an abomination that existed only to rob this victory from the team that the better angels of light determined should have been the winners on this day.

Here, we see that Sports is a two-faced animal. On one side, we see the beautiful visage of a noble contest of skill: Kevin Love heaving that perfect arc of a pass that gently sails into the hands of THE generational NBA talent and is converted into a pair of perfect points, the height of skill and athleticism moving us to tears.

Then the animal spins around and we see the side we would all wish to ignore: Hideous, welted, open sores all over, growling and spitting and screaming, an eyeball that has fallen out of its skull and dangles morbidly by its optic nerve. It is the face of luck—dumb, stupid luck—and it reveals a game that can be swayed by arbitrary and goofy forces that have nothing to do with truth or beauty or skill and everything to do with nothing at all; a black hole to Kevin Love's sun.

One cannot live without the other, for better or for worse.