A Vengeful Deity Is Smiting The Lakers

Sometimes circumstances force you to conclude that God bets. And while you may choose to question the existence of a deity, or more specifically wonder who or what it is that would book those bets, the evidence is still the evidence. So let us walk you over to the Los Angeles Lakers, who spent the weekend getting worked over by the cosmos and its principal guide. First, Luka Doncic, in the midst of a late-season run to become the new heart and lungs of the team and a burgeoning MVP candidate, blows a hamstring bad enough that he will seek treatment in Europe in an attempt to shorten the expected six weeks' recovery time. Seemingly mere moments later, Austin Reaves succumbs to an oblique injury that the team announced on Saturday will also take him offline for a month and change. It is not relevant, or anyway we cannot prove that it is relevant, that all this happened after Reaves enjoyed this friendly exchange with a sympathetic Oklahoma City fan who may or may not have been a terrestrial representative of The Big Oom. Under normal circumstances, we would simply note this as weirdly bad luck for a team that had lately emerged as a solid second-tier contender, if one a tick below true championship pedigree of the Oklahoma City Thunder, San Antonio Spurs, Boston Celtics, or, lately at least, the Atlanta Hawks. Doncic in particular had been ungodly before his injury, scoring a laughably absurd 600 points in the month of March, an average of 35.3 points per game. The Lakers won 15 of 17 games during that stretch, and had become worrisome to the general populace.