Hey, do you think Jason Terry can jump as high as LeBron James? No, me neither. As we learned during the second quarter of Monday night's marquee matchup between the streaking Miami Heat and the Boston Celtics, though, the man they call "JET" thought he could fly as high as the reigning MVP.
He was wrong.
And so Terry joins Brandon Knight, Greg Monroe and Nikola Pekovic as this year's premier attempted but unsuccessful dunk defenders. You few. You (not-so) happy few.
With the Celtics up 13 on the East-leading Heat past the midway point of the second quarter, Miami decided to turn up the defensive heat on Boston in the hopes of generating some turnovers and easy baskets to trim the deficit. It worked, as Heat star Dwyane Wade caught up to Terry on the trap and poked the ball loose from behind, saving it to guard Mario Chalmers, who quickly tossed it over to backcourt partner Norris Cole as Terry retreated to try to prevent a quick bucket. Cole looked up, though, and saw that he had a trailer — a pretty big one, in fact, barreling his way down the lane.
So Cole lofted the pass, James jumped to catch it and Terry jumped to contest. He did so bravely and gamely; did not do so effectively, as James brought the hammer down for a very loud two points and drew a foul on the play. James also received a technical foul for taunting following the dunk, although he didn't appear to say anything — I guess taking one step toward a dude you just dropped from mid-air to the floor constitutes making fun of that person in the officials' eyes. That seems excessive; if they wanted to see what making fun of Jason Terry actually looks like, they should have just done a Twitter search.
Weirdly, what's most amazing about the dunk (well, except for the impact, that is) is something that The Basketball Jones' Trey Kerby noted — that it seemed positively normal in the context of the game in which it occurred.
We're talking about a Heat team that's won 22 straight visiting a Boston team that's won 11 straight at home and that is playing the 22-straighters five years to the day after snapping the Houston Rockets' 22-game winning streak back in 2008, and we're talking about a game that had seen the celtics make 20 of their first 30 shots, including 8 of 10 by Jeff Green, who apparently woke up today thinking that he was LeBron James en route to a 26-point, six-rebound, two-block first half of play. The LeBron dunk was also immediately followed by a huge Avery Bradley chasedown block on Cole that led to a Paul Pierce 3-pointer that wrested the momentum back for Boston as if the massive alley-oop never even happened.
But it did. And while it might not even be the best dunk-on-someone of LeBron's career (I'm partial to him eliminating Damon Jones), it was still pretty amazing ... even if we're now fairly used to amazing things happening when Miami meets Boston.
Video via Beyond the Buzzer.
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