In terms of sports heartbreak, it doesn’t get any worse than losing Game 7 of a championship series.
Unfortunately for the Indiana Pacers, who already had to deal with Tyrese Haliburton’s devastating Achilles injury, that’s exactly what they experienced after falling short at the hands of the Oklahoma City Thunder in the NBA Finals on Sunday night.
One player who seemed to take the Pacers’ defeat extra hard was backup point guard T.J. McConnell. The veteran floor general laid his heart out on the line all postseason. He made every hustle play. He stole so many inbounds passes. He seemingly made every shot he took every time he was on the floor. And McConnell was especially effective against the Thunder in one of the best Finals series we’ve ever seen.
Ultimately, McConnell’s and the Pacers’ efforts weren’t enough to get that fateful 16th playoff win, and they fell short. That’s sports. Heck, that’s life, sometimes.
As a clearly dejected McConnell walked off the court, though, an ESPN camera followed him all the way into the tunnel, where his mother, Shelly, quickly ran over to embrace him. While McConnell’s mother comforted her child after the toughest loss of his entire basketball career, the ESPN camera lingered on the scene. This is where she drew a line for her son by asking the cameraperson to stop recording and go away.
What a powerful scene:
In terms of ESPN’s general all-around bungling of its NBA coverage this postseason, this sequence with McConnell and his mother probably lands lower on the list of screw-ups. McConnell’s mother was more being a loving mother than the person handling the ESPN camera being outright tasteless. Nonetheless, they did linger a little too long while a player was trying to be comforted by their parents in a raw moment, and Shelly McConnell responded accordingly.
Sometimes, above all else, you gotta read the room a little bit.
