The last time Kendrick Perkins was in the NBA Finals, he wasn’t in the NBA Finals. We’re probably going to have to be mindful of that moving forward. Prior to last Tuesday’s Game 1 — a game that saw heaps of Twitter chatterers roundly criticizing the play of Kendrick Perkins both in game and following — the last time we saw the man in front of that massive Finals logo he was sitting on the Boston Celtics bench after tearing knee ligaments in Game 6 of the 2010 NBA Finals. This means Perkins had to sit out Game 7. This means he had to watch, as Pau Gasol’s crucial offensive rebound pushed the series’ deciding game in Los Angeles’ favor. This means he was as helpless as any one of the Boston rooters that weren’t amongst the five on the floor at the time.
This means we’ll have to take it easy on Perk, while he vents and complains, following yet another game that saw the Oklahoma City Thunder go away from him in the final minutes. The final 18 minutes of the contest, to be exact, a jaunt that saw the Miami Heat outscore the Thunder by two points while Perk watched from the sideline. Which had to be hard, considering the team was +11 with him on the court for the first nine minutes of the first quarter, even if we attempt to forget the fact that the team was -7 with Perkins on the court in that six-minute third quarter turn. Whatever we remember, or forget, Perkins is a wee bit upset. From Daily Thunder :
“I just don’t understand why we start out the first quarter the way we did, with the lineup that we had, and all of a sudden we change and adjust to what they had going on. So they won the last three quarters, and that’s what happened.”
Jun 202012