Buzzkill
Phoenix Suns coach Monty Williams choking up after losing the NBA Finals will wreck all your good feels about the Bucks
On Tuesday night, the Milwaukee Bucks won the NBA Finals. It was the team’s first NBA championship since 1971. It proved you don’t have to be from Los Angeles or Miami to be relevant in the NBA. It proved you don’t need to be a super team to win. It proved all the Giannis Antetokounmpo haters wrong. Quite frankly, Tuesday night—as over 65,000 Milwaukee residents flooded the streets—was one of the best feel-good stories in recent NBA history. It reaffirmed all the good things about the Association and showed that, with the right combination of effort and belief, the bad things could be overcome.
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But in sports, there’s always a loser, and today that loser is the Phoenix Suns. For long stretches of the NBA season, they looked like the team to beat, but up 2-0 in the NBA Finals they hit a wall, dropping four straight to plummet from the cusp of immortality to the depths of irrelevancy. Nowhere was that sudden change in fortune made more clear in Monty Williams’ postgame press conference, where the Suns’ coach was so choked up with remorse that he had to remove himself from the podium. You know all those good feelings you were feeling about the Bucks? Go ahead and toss them out the window.
Hoo boy. That is not an easy watch. Williams has been a part of the league as a player and coach for 27 years. In that time he has played for five teams and served four in a coaching capacity. He’s paid his dues, and while he was part of a championship team as a coaching staff intern in San Antonio in 2005, this was the one—this was the moment to validate all of that and it didn’t happen. That’s a tough pill to swallow and to watch Williams choke on it in front of a room full of reporters is the exact opposite of a good time.
So there you go, that’s your downer for the day (and we didn’t even get into Chris Paul coming up short yet again). Have a good one, everybody. Go Bucks.