Sometimes circumstances force you to conclude that God bets. And while you may choose to question the existence of a deity, or more specifically wonder who or what it is that would book those bets, the evidence is still the evidence.
So, let us walk you over to the Los Angeles Lakers, who spent the weekend getting worked over by the cosmos and its principal guide. First, Luka Doncic, in the midst of a late-season run to become the new heart and lungs of the team and a burgeoning MVP candidate, blows a hamstring bad enough that he will seek treatment in Europe in an attempt to shorten the expected six weeks' recovery time. Seemingly mere moments later, Austin Reaves succumbs to an oblique injury that the team announced on Saturday will also take him offline for a month and change. It is not relevant, or anyway we cannot prove that it is relevant, that all this happened after Reaves enjoyed this friendly exchange with a sympathetic Oklahoma City fan who may or may not have been a terrestrial representative of The Big Oom.
Under normal circumstances, we would simply note this as weirdly bad luck for a team that had lately emerged as a solid second-tier contender, if one a tick below true championship pedigree of the Oklahoma City Thunder, San Antonio Spurs, Boston Celtics, or, lately at least, the Atlanta Hawks. Doncic in particular had been ungodly before his injury, scoring a laughably absurd 600 points in the month of March, an average of 35.3 points per game. The Lakers won 15 of 17 games during that stretch, and had become worrisome to the general populace.
And then it all blew apart in Oklahoma City during what became the seventh-most lopsided loss in franchise history. The team that had been deeded to Doncic by virtue of the Fleecing Of Nico suddenly reverted to its earlier LeBronian state after the 27-year-old and the 28-year-old had suddenly been removed. This left the 40-year-old, give or take the assistance of DeAndre Ayton and the aforementioned 40-year-old's adult son, to make April last into May. At this point, the Lakers' chances cannot be viewed happily, as they may have already slipped from playing Minnesota in the first round with Doncic and Reaves to playing Denver without them.
Frankly, this coincidence seems a little too convenient. Now that we know that Jaden Ivey's knee was healed by Doctor Higher Power, it can be assumed with some confidence that our betting deity has taken a sudden interest in the sport, in a way that had only been evidenced before by the way the Washington Wizards have been cursed. And with only four games left in the regular season, there wasn't much time left to make sure this particular bet cashed.
Why, you ask, would the Cosmic Foreperson choose this particular forfeit? Why not take out LeBron too and turn the Lakers into the Grizzlies or Bucks? After all, LeBron had just finished dissing Memphis and Milwaukee as NBA markets, and who do you think invented karma anyway?
Then again, taking Doncic, Reaves, and James all out at once would look too suspicious, maybe even suspicious enough to void all bets. Plus, taking out LeBron may be beyond even the power of the mightiest, just on the law of big numbers.
But in this case, removing Doncic and Reaves is easily enough damage to cover costs, and gambling is just money management in the final analysis. And in a sport that already has discovered arcane ways of manipulating or at least affecting results, who would notice a bet from the beyond?
You see what we've done here—make up questions without definitive answers and then confidently pass them off as evidence. We cannot prove that an ethereal creature of incredible power, who may or may not exist in the first place, has found a way to bet significant money on a sporting event in which that creature could command any riches at will without even betting on events whose outcome is already known by the bettor in question, and yet we're trying to get away with it just to see if we can. This is contemporary American politics in a nutshell. In other words, vote for me.
But barring better information, that's what we're going with. Your god bet against the Lakers and intervened to guarantee the proper result. And frankly, we're fine with that. Even allowing for Vegas' historical predilection for happily taking Laker money, they were a prohibitive longshot anyway.
