So much of this portion of the NBA season feels sloggy and labored, even after you allow for the drama of multiple seeding battles—West places two through eight and also 10 and 11; East places four through six; the sewage gumbo of the Southeast Division—and the lopsided Vengeance Pageants being staged by Jimmy Butler against Miami and Luka Doncic against Dallas. The NBA season is very long, and never feels longer than it does right around now.
But then there are the moments of crystalline beauty at the edges of the league that catch even the most jaded fans unaware. When those happen, they should if possible include Flavor Flav.
Not only that, those moments should be explained by the protagonist pacing in front of his locker half-dressed and saying repeatedly, "I don't know what fucking happened, I don't know what fucking happened."
Here is what happened: Sandro Mamukelashvili is a 6-foot-9, 240-pound bit player for the injury-ravaged San Antonio Spurs, a nine-minute-a-game guy with a beard the size of a beehive who is either 11th or 12th on the team's active roster. He has played in 47 games this year, which is more than he's managed in any of his three previous NBA campaigns. His truest value is in offering earnest practice habits and covering the occasional extended garbage-time shift, and as such is a four-year veteran who could well eke out a decade-long career just by being who and what he is. There are worse ways to make a living. But he would need a moment to make it all perfect, and that moment came in San Antonio Wednesday night against the exhausted New York Knicks.
Mamukelashvili played 19 minutes, his third-longest contribution of the season, and took 14 shots, seven of them three-pointers because hey, everyone's a Celtic no matter what their job. He missed one of those 14 attempts and made every three-pointer he attempted; as a result, he finished with 34 points, the most ever by anyone playing fewer than 20 minutes since the league started recording minutes played in 1951. His only miss was a running layup with four minutes left in the second quarter—he only played the second and fourth quarters, because weirdly the Spurs could still steal the last play-in berth from the inert Dallas Mavericks and Phoenix Suns—and essentially ran the table so well that superannuated historian/point guard Chris Paul was working to get him the ball in the fourth quarter while keeping the Knicks at arm's length. "I don't know what fucking happened," indeed.
He almost surely thought that when Flav, who just turned 66 and met Mamukelashvili through his father and Flav's business manager, crashed his postgame on-court interview to break down the fine points of his buddy's performance. "I don't care what nobody says," the veteran hype man announced. "My man is on fiiiiiiiirrrreee!"
This is as good as it gets for anyone, let alone for someone who has no business thinking such an outcome is possible. An end-of-the-bench specialist getting a shot and coming dangerously close to perfection while becoming for one night his team's prime focus will almost certainly be the only non-Wembanyama-related highlight in what has been a difficult year for San Antonio. It will certainly be the story Mamukelashvili tells most often when his grandchildren reach the age of annoyance.
"I feel like I'm in a dream," he said in the postgame table session. "I manifested and prayed for it. I just waited for this day. I really had an out-of-body experience for a little bit there. I was like, 'Is this really happening?'"
Well, yes it did. But let's be honest here. When he was apparently manifesting and praying and waiting and out-of-bodied his way to this magic moment, we're betting that Flav wasn't part of Mamukelashvili's vision, if only because he wanted the deity he was contacting to take the prayer seriously. If it was, then we have a metaphysical genius of the first order here.
