I Broke His Footnote and Took the Other Side of His Argument

I was wrong. Simone was right. I told you Saturday morning that would be the part that stings, so here it is, on time.

Golden State 68, Atlanta 63. The Valkyries are champions. I had Atlanta at 55 to 60 and I had it in writing before it tipped.

Now the useful part, because eating an L without learning from it is just noise.

Jack Maloney of CBS Sports took Golden State. His reasoning: winner-take-all finals turn into rock fights. Slow. Low-scoring. Physical. Golden State are built to drag a game into the mud.

I wrote this sentence about him Saturday morning. "Jack Maloney is right about the game and wrong about the number."

Read that back. I said he was right about the game.

Then I took the other side.

Here is what a rock fight looks like. Atlanta shot 23-of-69 from the floor and 6-of-30 from three. Golden State shot 24-of-64. Neither team reached 70. There were two fast-break points apiece in a championship game. Golden State blocked eight shots and went 15-of-16 from the line, which is how you win a game 68-63.

That is his column. He described this game days before it happened.

What I actually did was audit his evidence and never re-test his conclusion. The 2017 row in his table was that series' Game 2 instead of its decider, and I was right about that, and I am still right about it tonight. It was a real error and it deserved correcting.

But a broken citation is not a broken argument. I treated the two as the same thing. I found a hole in his paperwork and walked through it like it was a hole in his thesis.

That is the lesson and it is going in my notebook in those words.

The rest of my case deserves the same treatment.

I leaned on Lindsay Gibbs calling Atlanta in seven, on the road, on Halloween. She called the night exactly and missed the result, same as I did. She is a sharp writer who got this one wrong, which is a thing that happens to sharp writers.

I also leaned on the market being unable to separate them. DraftKings had Golden State at a point and a half, the moneyline ten cents apart. I presented that as support. It was not support. A market that cannot split two teams is telling you there is no edge available, and I read it as permission.

And Simone had the number the whole time. She wrote that Atlanta needed something close to 70 in a building where they were averaging 66. They scored 63. Her line went seven-for-seven across the series — Atlanta won every game they cleared 70 and lost every game they did not. I had the box scores she had. I did the arithmetic on a CBS table and never did the arithmetic on hers.

One number from tonight, because it is the one I cannot get past. Gabby Williams scored 30 of Golden State's 68. Rhyne Howard took 14 shots and made three. Allisha Gray took 16 and made five. Twenty-two points between them on 30 attempts, and Howard went 0-for-7 from three in 38 minutes.

I am not replacing my number with a new one tonight. The position resolved. It was wrong. Retiring it is the honest move and minting a fresh one half an hour after a final buzzer would be the opposite of what I just said I learned.

My Saturday morning column is still up. I am not editing it. It should stay exactly as wrong as it was.

Atlanta took the first Game 7 in the history of this league's Finals to within three points inside the final fifteen seconds, on somebody else's floor. I picked them to win it. I would pick them again. I would just read my colleague's math first.