A Dark Prophecy, LeBron, And Pain: The Corbin Smith Review Of Basketball Highlights

This article is part of VICE Sports' 2016 NBA Playoffs coverage.

The NBA Playoffs. The Anna Karenina of yearly sporting events—a lengthy, twisty, journey with hundreds of characters and plot lines, many of them hard to keep straight, and rich in examinations of political and personal values. In June, the story will get narrower and narrower, until it's just two teams in a room, Anna and Levin, across from each other in a cosmic coincidence that recontextualizes everything that happened before. But for now, it is still messy and expansive, a nebulous narrative form struck through with unhurried passages about threshing wheat.

We begin with chaff.

Once, when I was waiting at the Amtrak Station in Vancouver, Washington, a crow flew into my head. I was just standing there, looking at some rhododendrons in bloom, when he collided with my dome, flipped out, and flew away.

I don't think the crow meant me any particular harm. He was probably just looking for corn, or carrion. I do not resent the crow, and in fact respect him taking the path laid out for him by the universe. But, ever since that day, my person has been clouded by a lurking spiritual presence; it hums in the background of my life.

That bird flying into my head it was not a true accident in the purest sense. Many things are accidents, you know: 70 percent of any given baseball game, for instance, or where we are born and live during our childhoods, or the identity of the person we meet, love, and marry. There is so little out there that is driven by any specific, definable force. But when a crow flies into your head while you're just standing there, looking at flowers? That is not a coincidence.

That is the universe telling you that you have been marked. Somewhere, down the line, maybe soon, your harvest will be set upon by waves of metaphorical inky birds; they will make the sky blotted and black, and cover the ground in half-eaten corn kernels stolen from some other irate farmer. All the wealth you have ever collected, all that you have, will be decimated by this ravenous flock. The question is when. Sometimes I think the torture of being marked by nature itself is worse than the misery to come. After Monday night, I suspect the Oklahoma City Thunder are thinking the same:

Raymond Felton is the harbinger. If your team signs him, a dark harvest is coming. He vibrates with universal misfortune. With Felton behind the wheel, Charlotte spent four years struggling in the creamy, shitty middle of the league, struggling to make the playoffs and falling short time after time without ever finding a way out of mediocrity. In Portland, his turnover-prone aggression and terrible conditioning lit the match that destabilized that team, which collapsed in on itself and went through a two-year rebuild. A decent year on a 50-ish win New York team was followed by an immense destabilization that put the Knicks into a stop-and-start rebuild that continues to this very day. Dallas, aging, only relevant by dint of an unusually weak back end of the Western Conference, is slowly getting older than Older. Felton is there, now, and the team's fate is clear, if they sign him or not.

The harbinger leaves no one, and nothing, behind.

And so, here we have the pure manifestation of basketball misfortune—a totem to the universality of missed shots, bad turnovers, malcontent interviews—putting a weird stiff-arm into the chest of the Oklahoma City Thunder. Absorb his unnecessarily high dribble on the perimeter, his lucky isolation shots that make no sense. Try to come to terms with a player who has been so, so misfortunate in his career; watch him find the audacity to fist pump when the world has seen him at his basketball worst on so many occasions. To find that kind of fire in yourself, even if it's absurd, is inspiring.

To sign The Harbinger is, of course, a terrible decision. But to become his victim, to see him ball out on you in the playoffs? That is an even deeper curse, it tells of terrors to come the likes of which a rational person can't comprehend. Watch him make a perfect play and finish at the rim to take Dallas' last lead of the game. Raymond Felton, The Round River of Ill Fortune, remade for one second as a hero, sinking a layup and pumping his fist.

Was it then that the Thunder were struck, deeply and surely, by a sense of hopelessness? Did they understand Felton, working as nature's cruel servant, condemning them—to a second round exit, to the departure of Kevin Durant and then Russell Westbrook. Could they feel their bodies born up and away on a tide of misfortune?

Or did it strike the Thunder after Felton proceeded to miss two of the most important clutch free throws of his life, just totally beef them, and they lost the game? Felton's mild misfortune at the line must have felt like a breath of air from the universe, a sign that the Thunder were meant to plow right through the heart of Planet Spurs and on to face the Golden State Warriors as true equals in a noble series. "Ha," they might have thought in that moment, "Raymond Felton isn't here to destroy us: he is, as ever, here to destroy himself!"

Steven Adams even tipped in that last shot; it was possible, even then, for Oklahoma City to believe they were unmarked, not doomed. But they were wrong. Felton had already injected his sickness, his destruction, deep in their collective. The call is reversed. Spirits fall, and the Warriors and the San Antonio Spurs appear again as unstoppable juggernauts in the refracted light. The colony collapse is imminent. It cannot be stopped. There is no arguing with prophecy.

The NBA tide has turned, and public perception of LeBron James as a golden basketball god amongst sweaty mortals is on the wane. "Steph Curry This," speaks the rabble, "Steph Curry That." Because LeBron has continued to be blazingly, crazily great in Golden State's supernova shadow, we will explore one quality Lebron highlight a week:

Is it possible for a pass to be sarcastic? James shuttles the ball to a cutting JR Smith, who uses a screen from Kevin Love to shed Steve Blake and get a clear path to the open baseline. Andre Drummond is watching Love at the elbow and doesn't rotate. Smith Dunks.

The emotional components of this highlight comes from the ease and the flair with which James executes, and its contrast with Steve Blake's exhausted attempt to follow the cut and Drummond's complete failure to protect the rim. James puts so little effort into the pass, just his good eyeballs and two flicks of the wrist for two points, while Blake and Drummond loaf around and get mired in the Cavs Horns Set.

James' pass in this context reads more like a one-line insult than a basketball play. He sees loafers on the screens, all discombobulated, reacts quickly and eloquently. It's a "hey dummy," leaving his opponents marching back on defense with soda all over their pants, damp, sticky, soda pants. Gross. Change your pants, guys.

Basketball is terribly painful. It hurts your back, your feet, your face and your heart. For most of the year, we don't think about it. The stakes are low on a given night in an 82-game season. But during the playoffs, the deepest inlaid agressions of even the mildest of men come exploding to the surface. Observe The Birdman, given over to this spirit

The thrill of the contest creates so much piss, vinegar, and horseradish in the Birdman's soul that he subconsciously siphoned some of his extra energy into Dave Joerger's crumbling 42-year-old elbow socket. The overflowing quantities of feeling must flow somewhere.

Patrick Beverly is in the NBA to hound his opponents to an early grave, to stick his face in their face, his feet near their own. He came up from perdition itself, two years at Arkansas and four toiling in obscurity in Europe; the exile sharpened his spirit, tempered it with fire and ice. He waited only for his NBA ship to come in, so that he could highjack that ship, then toss his opponent off the ship and into the water.

The pain of Draymond's screen means very little to a man of pure will like this. Beverly does not fear warnings or retribution. He only fears paying EU taxes on his checks. He will absorb anything to escape that pain. Even this.

A small man spilled. No points awarded. How many times has Isaiah Thomas taken the full force of a giant man's chest? Does he even remember? If my head snapped back when I did my job, I would fucking quit, but I am lazy and uxurious. Isaiah is a quester, a man on a journey to transcendence.

It is inspiring to see a person take punishment because it was what their dreams asked of them.

Baseball, the other acceptable mass market American sport, is now in the throes of its season. Every week, we will present a brief highlight from the game and attend it with a Haiku that captures its purest essence.

A wall within self

Ball suspended in a bounce

Warm success half baked.

Thank you for reading. God willing, an Eventful Week in the NBA 'Yoffs will be explored in this space again next week.