Pour One Out For This Pacers/Colts Fan Who Thought He Was Going To Be Sleeping Easy For The Next 10 Years
Things can change quickly in the world of sports. One minute you are on top of the world watching your favorite teams compete at the highest level behind the play of a young franchise player. You never imagine a world where they could potentially could be playing for another team, even though in reality we know the players are most definitely tied to a city/team like we are as fans. To them it’s laundry, to us it’s our everything. It’s why when these type of players do end up leaving fans take it so personal despite the fact that they’ve most likely never even met the athlete. We want them to care like we care despite how bananas that is.
Which brings me to this poor bastard Dr. Acula. When I saw this tweet get RT’d onto my timeline my heart felt for this guy. Not so much about the Colts because fuck them, but when you actually dig into when he fired off this tweet
you realize this was at the height of a dominant Paul George postseason run. When this all went down in 2016, the Pacers were currently up 1-0 on the Raptors after George dropped 33/4/6/4 on 12-22 shooting (4-5 from deep)
That Pacers team was a 7 seed, so to steal Game 1 on the road against TOR was pretty big deal. If you look at the timestamp of his tweet, my guess is this came right around halftime of Game 2. Now despite the Pacers losing that game, Paul George still finished with 28/4 on 8-15 shooting (2-3 from deep).
As we now know, the Pacers lost that series in 7, but George was a monster. In those 7 games George averaged 27.3/7.6/4.3/2.0 on 45/41% splits with 2.6 3PM a night. Franchise player shit. Pacers fans had every right to be over the moon that a guy who has shown the ability to go head to head with LeBron was going to be a force for the Pacers for the foreseeable future. Tack onto that Andrew Luck completing a season in which he played 15 games and thew for 4,240 yards and 31 touchdowns which is pretty good. Sure they didn’t make the playoffs but at age 27 I think everyone figured there was at least 10 years left in that tank.
And yet, here we are. Reality has kicked this poor bastard as hard as it possibly could right in the twig and berries. George stuck around for one more year after that 2016 series, got swept, and then demanded a trade out of town. Luck missed the very next year in 2o17, came back and looked good last year and now he retires out of nowhere. Naturally we need an update on Dr. Acula to see how he’s handling his new reality
Not great!
As someone who has lived through some of their favorite players leaving the teams I love, I sympathize with this guy. Granted they weren’t franchise cornerstones who I thought would be on my favorite teams for their entire careers. That’s a different level of misery. So when you get out of work tonight and crack open an ice cold beer, pour a little out for this guy, something tells me he may not fall asleep for the next 10 years.