Exiting, quietly

I know I shouldn't be this way. I know it's a function of age and general crotchetiness and resentment that the world has changed and moved on without me, even though I recognize that change and the world moving on is an essential component of human existence and always has been.

Still. Sometimes I feel like Walt Kowalski, the embittered Korean War vet portrayed with splendid old-guy surliness by Clint Eastwood in "Gran Torino."

Maybe you missed it, but last night the Miami Heat closed out the Milwaukee Bucks in the Eastern Conference semifinals of the NBA's weird 2020 coda/2021 warmup ... thing. The Heat did it in just five games, which wasn't supposed to happen because the Bucks were everybody's favorite to get to the Finals of the coda/warmup.

This is because the Bucks have Giannis Antetokounmpo, one of the two or three best players on the planet.

Oh, wait. They didn't have him, on account of he sat out Game 5 with a sprained right ankle.

Sat out an elimination game. Linchpin of the whole team. Sat. Out.

The crazy part of that?

It wasn't even the Greek Freak's call. It was the ballclub's.

"I wanted to play. You know I wanted to play. My coach knows I wanted to play," he said afterward, clearly unhappy with, well, not playing.

I know what you're thinking. It's the same thing I'm thinking in my crotchety Walt Kowalski way.

He shoulda just said, 'Hell, no, I'm playing. We lose, we're done. So tape me up and get the hell out of my way because there's NO WAY you're gonna stop me.'"

In the movies, this is how it happens. And then he goes out and drops 40, 15 and 12 on the Heat, and the Bucks live to fight another day.

But this is not the movies. This is corporate professional sports in the third decade of the millennium.

In the third decade of the millennium, players are not players; they are financial assets. They are  expensive long-term investments. And so short-term heroics of the sort us geezers recall went out with Jack Youngblood playing the Super Bowl on a broken leg, and Willis Reed limping onto the floor at the Garden to save the Knicks in the NBA Finals.

So quaint, all of that. So old-timey, the way doilies and ice-cream socials and gazebos in the park on a summer's day are old-timey.

No, today, it's the medical staff and the organization who makes these calls. The player has very little say in it. If the docs and corporate say you don't play, you don't play.

Even if it makes your organization look like a bunch of quitters. Which it kinda did.

But the long view of this is Antetokounmpo's deal is expiring and he'll be a free agent if the Bucks don't re-sign him, which everyone agrees they'll try to do. The presumption is they'll offer him a supermax deal that could be worth $220 million, a good deal more than he could get as a free agent. So in that context it made sense for them to sacrifice 2020 to the franchise's future.

Plus, it's a chip on their pile that they put the Greek Freak's health above the team's playoff prospects.

"That's big," Antetokounmpo conceded.

I know. I'm snarling, too.