NBA Playoffs…Where NO EXCUSES Happens

I love the perception of limitation as opposed to actual limitation. I mean the NBA playoffs is a great example. There’s no real rest for the weary, no extended reprieve after a grueling first-round series with the Oklahoma City Thunder and no subsiding of expectations from fans. The latter is particularly true here in LA where I’ve never seen the Staples center crowd resemble a literal sea of Gold because everyone wore the same color shirt in honor of unity and unmitigated support for the home team.

The limits of human performance, human capacity for injury and human threshold for mental/emotional/spiritual strain are tested during the course of a season that begins in October and ends officially in April. But then the elites, the cohesive and the peculiar find resolve to play past 82 games. If you’ve ever done anything to fatigue and been exasperated in addition to exhausted then you know that limits can become palpable to a degree that such limits stand in front of you with one palm extended your direction as if to say, “You shall not pass.” Take the Denver Nuggets who surged throughout this past season and threatened to derail the Los Angeles Lakers if they faced them in the post-season. This band of phenomenal athletes met an unexpected but true limitation when coach George Karl was forced out of commission with cancer. There was a marked change in their play following Karl’s unfortunate departure.

Is anyone built for media swarms, 9-month travel itineraries, dehumanization by superficially adoring spectators, so forth and so-on? Probably not and yet NBA players still in competition in May are finding it within themselves to play that 89th and 90th game  game. Am I the only one who wonders about the source from which such fortitude stems? Despite the mystery that is post-season play, one given fact is that the perception of limitation is not always an accurate rendering of human capacity.