Warriors-Celtics NBA Finals Preview (and Prediction)

Well, holy shit: my beloved Warriors are back in the Finals, four wins away from winning another chip. It’s wild. We’ve been so unbelievably spoiled: 6 Finals appearances in 8 seasons! We may never see an NBA team go on a run like this again.

At the beginning of the season, I was cautiously optimistic about my Warriors. I thought our ceiling was nabbing a #3 to #6 seed in the depleted Western Conference with the Nuggets and Clippers both mired with injuries to a few of their star players. After we beat the Lakers in the season opener, I was all smiles because it never ever gets old beating the fucking Lakers or LeBron. At the time, most of us thought the Lakers would be title contenders, so I thought, one freaking game into the season, that finishing with a #3 to #6 seed was totally plausible. Back then, I thought a Western Conference Finals run, if lots of things went right, was in play, but I realistically didn’t think we’d be back in the Finals this season. I guess I wasn’t sure if we’d ever make it back to the Finals with Steph and Draymond aging and Klay coming back from two catastrophic injuries on the wrong side of thirty.

So making it back is unbelievably sweet. Reminds me of that charmed feeling I felt when this championship core made their first Finals appearance back in 2015.

The Warriors are a different team now. Back then, Steph, Klay, and Draymond were the youngsters trying to prove to themselves that they could be champions. Now we’re like the last Spurs title teams: the cagey, veteran team with abundant experience and championship poise you can’t fake. Now we’re trying to reclaim title glory, perhaps for a final time, while desperately trying to fend off a young, hungry, battle-tested, and supremely talented team.

What a matchup.

A Fan’s Notes: Two Games into the Warriors 2022 Playoff Run

This season has been such a wild ride with exalted highs and depressing lows and it feels like this team might be cresting to its peak, good lord. After cruising to a dominant 126-106 win in Game 2 of our series against the depleted Nuggets, us Warriors fans are riding high again. The 2022 iteration of our hallowed Death Lineup is running the hapless Nuggets off the court. Before this series began, I, like many others, cautiously but pragmatically picked the Dubs to win in 6, but right now it’s looking like a gentleman’s sweep at most. There’s no reason we can’t whip out the brooms on the Nuggets. When Steph, Poole, Klay, Wiggins, and Draymond hit the court and go Voltron against Denver, poor Nikola Jokić—probable two-time NBA MVP Nikola Jokić!—looks like Timofey Mozgov in the 2015 NBA Finals.

The Nuggets are done. They have no counter. With injuries to their second and third-best players, they lack the personnel to make a move to stymie these 2022 Warriors. Our path to a fourth championship with our aging core is to play the least number of playoff games possible so we’re not putting any additional and unnecessary mileage on Steph, Klay, Draymond, and Iggy so we need to not fuck around and finish these Nuggets off.

After a 33-32 first quarter against the Timberwolves, the Memphis Grizzlies took command and responded in Game 2 after stunningly losing their home opener. The Grizzlies are still the only team in the Western Conference I fear. I’ve seen Steph, Poole, Klay, Wiggins, and Draymond lay waste to the undermanned Nuggets, but I badly want to see that lineup pitted against stronger opposition, like the Grizz and the Suns. In 11 minutes of action, they have a preposterous offensive rating of 204.3 (meaning they would score 204 points in 100 possessions) with a defensive rating of 75.0:

With Klay’s shooting basically back to classic Klay form, Steph already looking like himself in his second game back from injury (32 points in just 23 minutes in Game 2!), Draymond being Draymond, Jordan Poole looking like Monta Ellis if Steph had mentored him, and Wiggins—a former #1 overall pick—capably filling into the last spot, any team in the league is gonna have big problems trying to stop this five-man lineup. Memphis and Phoenix have the depth and talent to try to counter, but no team has had the unenviable task of trying to cover Steph, a Steph-like clone (in Poole), and one of the greatest NBA shooters of all time. Yeah, good fucking luck with that.

The 64-win Suns just dropped Game 2 to the Pelicans, who squeaked into the playoffs courtesy of the NBA’s still-new play-in format, and a realistic path back to the Finals is looking better and better for the Dubs. I think the Grizz will prevail against the Wolves, and I think there’s no way the Warriors lose to the Suns if we get past the Grizzlies. Before the playoffs started, I had no fear of the Suns; less so now. If we’re mostly healthy, I think we can knock them off in a gentleman’s sweep. No disrespect meant to the Suns, but we’re a bad matchup for them. And man, it would be outrageously sweet to send CP3 packing so deep into the playoffs! Might very well be the last time he comes so close to winning a chip.

I don’t want to get ahead of myself and look east to see how the playoff action might turn out there. We’ve still got a lot of games to play.

But we’ve got 14 more wins to go.

My Top Ten Favorite Children's Books

In 2017, my wife, Maria and I welcomed our rainbow baby, Miguel, into this world. It would also serve as an introduction into the world of children’s books, particularly board books and picture books.

Maria and I are lifelong readers. Not surprisingly, we’re picky about our reading material, including children’s books. I have found that we’re both sensitive to language and a book’s illustration style. We’ll pass on a book if either element is lackluster.

As a parent, especially when your child becomes attached to a book, you will read it over and over and over and over again so my favorite children’s books have to be ones that are not nauseating to read. (It’s okay if one or two parts of a book are a bit cheesy, if you’re asking me.) They must also be aesthetically pleasing. And since you’ll read them, night after night after night, my favoritest children’s books tend to provide teeny visual details to point out and remark upon to enrich the reading experience, or have a number of characters that lends itself to reading them in playful voices. For me, it’s all about finding different wrinkles to keep the readings from becoming stale.

Without further ado, here’s my top-10 list in chronological order from Miguelito’s infanthood to his present surly toddlerdom:

Pandemic Recap (Thus Far) - Part Three

December 2020

December 2, 2020, the U.S. reported 2,760 COVID-19 deaths.

 

Eric Feigl-Ding, an epidemiologist and health economist and a Senior Fellow at the Federation of American Scientists in Washington DC tweeted this image:

Pandemic Recap (Thus Far) - Part Two

June 2020

Before the pandemic, my three-year-old son and I had time to ourselves during our weekly grocery store trips. That was our thing, our dedicated time together. And I missed it terribly.

 

Before the pandemic descended upon us, our son was already far more attached to my wife. But his attachment to her became more extreme during the pandemic. If she wanted to run an errand, she would have to sneak out of her parents’ house without him noticing because he would otherwise cry and wail if he knew she was gone.

 

During his early years, I saw my son cry on many, many occasions. Early in the pandemic, when my wife would try to leave the house to go to the store, he would wail with what felt like fearful despair. He would stop as soon as she stepped back into the house. It was a different type of crying. If we had tried to explain the pandemic to him then, he couldn’t have comprehended what was happening, but he knew something was terribly wrong. I have no doubt.

Pandemic Recap (Thus Far) - Part One

January 2020

On January 10, 2020, the first SARS-CoV-2 genome sequence was posted on an open internet depository by Chinese researchers, confirming that the pneumonia-like outbreak in Wuhan, China—reportedly occurring since November 2019—stemmed from a coronavirus. The Chinese government denied the virus was spreading among humans until January 19.

 

On January 21^st, a Washington state resident who had recently traveled to Wuhan became the first person in the United States with a confirmed case of the novel coronavirus.

 

Two days later, the Chinese government locked down Wuhan, a major transportation hub and city with a metropolitan population of 11 million people.

 

On January 31^st, the first confirmed case of COVID-19 in the San Francisco Bay Area, where I live, was identified in Santa Clara County. It was a man who had recently traveled to Wuhan. That same day, the World Health Organization (WHO), for only the sixth time in its seventy-three-year existence, declared a public health emergency once the worldwide death toll from SARS-CoV-2 passed 200 and after an exponential jump to more than 9,800 cases.

 

February 2020

A few days later, the second confirmed COVID-19 case—unrelated to the first one—was identified in Santa Clara County. She had also just returned home from Wuhan.

 

On February 6, 2020, 57-year-old Patricia Dowd—a resident of San Jose, CA—was the first known death caused by COVID-19 in the United States. She had no foreign travel history.

 

At the time, I worked at a community health clinic in Fremont, a sprawling suburb bordering Santa Clara County. A standing sign at the clinic’s main entrance posted information about the novel coronavirus. It warned patients about the virus and noted that all patients would be screened for any recent travel to China, or contact with anyone who had recently returned from China.

Little Charlie’s Travels

Before my wife and I brought a child into this world, we had Little Charlie.

Little Charlie is a small teddy bear. He appears to be of the Ursus maritimus species. My wife, Maria, nicked him in 2011 at a fiber optics convention she attended for work. He was one of the free giveaways at the General Photonics booth, which is embroidered on Little Charlie’s fuzzy chest. She feigned interest in their products just so she could get him. Maria brought him home around the time we started dating. She named him after Charlie Chaplin because she imagined him to be a rambunctious scamp. This is all noted in a short story I got published in Prairie Schooner.

For years, Little Charlie was like our pretend kid. Under the guise of our spirited little rascal, Maria would write me cutesy goofy notes and leave them on my backpack when I would wake up at her apartment before I would head home. In turn, I would slip notes from Little Charlie under the bathroom door when Maria was taking care of her business. I don’t know who started that, but it was a thing we did, and all the notes were in Little Charlie’s child-like scrawl with backwards Rs and misspellings (like “pikturs”). In our teddy bear epistolary, Maria was “mama” and I was “papa.”