It is to our sorrow that even though the magnificent and manic Timberwolves-Nuggets hoop orgy started later and had a 50-point(!) overtime to sustain its value as post-holiday entertainment, the news of the day was earlier, far more mundane, and could not even cover you through peak family burden time. In that way, at least, the NBA regained the upper hand on Christmas from the ever-rapacious NFL.
This probably isn't sustainable, to be fair, because the NFL is a remake of The Blob, swallowing and smothering every part of every broadcast and streaming day—a far more terrifying version of Stranger Things: The Musical. But the league tripled down on Christmas this year with its tentpole not being the ever-tedious Dallas Cowboys but everyone's preseason darlings, the Detroit Lions. What they got instead were the drab, almost paralytic pre-Campbell Lions of yesteryear, the equivalent of wool socks with the elastic stretched beyond utility. Despite being granted the coveted watch-during-family-dinner spot on Netflix, the Lions were forcibly removed from our sight by the profoundly inertial Minnesota Vikings in a 23-10 wastebucket of a game that seemed to undo all the goodwill the Lions had earned the previous two calendar years.
And that's giving them all the best of it. They were genuinely awful, as befits a team with only one signature victory all year, a Week 2 blowout of the not-yet-fully-formed Chicago Bears. They were unable to take control of a game in which the other team was quarterbacked by a guy named Max who guided an offense that totaled 161 yards. And when we say "unable to control," we of course mean "gave the ball away six times and did nothing on the Vikings' side of the field." And when we say "did nothing on the Vikings' side of the field," we mean that their only touchdown of the day came on an impossibly turgid 19-play drive in which they needed 13 plays from inside the Viking 45 to get that score, but otherwise gained 11 yards in 15 plays in Minnesota territory.
The electric blue Lions and their electric offense were nowhere to be imagined; Thursday's 392 combined yards by the two teams was the fourth-lowest of the entire NFL season, and since two of those other three were also Vikings games, well, all we're saying is that we cannot feign too much surprise. This isn't about the Vikings, though, who had been dead and buried long before this; their biggest play of the day, a 65-yard run by wide receiver Jordan Addison, was 14 yards longer than Max's total passing output. They did their part, which was to be visually repellent.
And yet they beat the sport's Last Next Big Thing by two scores, and were never threatened in a game the Lions had to win because just when they finally got our fullest attention, the Lions reverted to their own accursed history, when people complained that they were ruining Thanksgiving every year. Now they also have "ruining Christmas" on the resume, and if that feels unfair to a team in which we all invested our fantastical notions of the meek and their inheritances, well, if you watched it, you know. Christmas is not for the pitiable. Either do Santa right or shove off.
Much of Detroit's collapse from NBT status (they are now 8-8, the same record as the comprehensively ass Vikings) can be attributed to injury, which is always a handy default in a game where everyone eventually gets taken off on a cart. What made this more noticeable is that the Lions had been among the vanguard of the new fun-watch NFL—biting kneecaps, applauding players for throwing up during a postgame speech, always going for it on fourth-and-Albania, and winning 42 of 54 games between the middle of 2022 and the bye week this year, by an average score of 30-22. They scored 40 12 times in that stretch and were, even allowing for the last embers of Patrick Mahomes, the most satisfying viewing experience in the entire league, which means the entire broadcast schedule for all the networks. And this would be the year it would all coalesce into incandescent glory.
Well, that's what you deserve for getting your hopes up. The Lions were not only a disappointment all year, but the downer on a grim NFL Xmas-ibition—a ponderous slog dominated by field goals (of which the Lions had one) and turnovers (of which the Lions had all) and rushing yards (of which the Lions had 68). Compared to all that, Nikola Jokic went 56-15-16, and the Nuggets and Wolves combined for 280. All you had to do was figure out a way to stay up for it.
Instead, you got the Lions in all their decomposing ennui—Black Friday a day early. Hope all that feigned family time was worth it.
