Outside the Wire Review | Outside the Wire Doesn’t Hold Together

Rating: 1.5 out of 5 Airstrikes

I made a little score card. In the first hour of Outside the Wire, starring Anthony Mackie and Damson Idris, we hear “beyond” or “outside the wire” three times, the phrase “all due respect” four times, and Mackie claps Idris on the shoulder or chest EIGHT separate times. If you include instances of backpacks being shoved into chests, the number swells to 10. It’s crazy how many times he does it, it’s like an SNL skit. Of course, Mackie’s character, Captain Leo, is a robot so maybe it’s strange robot behavior. Like the scene where Mackie walks 20 feet with his arms crossed. That’s weird, right? Do people walk with their arms crossed? Do robots?

I don’t think anyone has a solid understanding of what this movie is about. In the beginning, we meet Thomas Harp (Idris), an emotionless drone pilot who eats gummy bears as he deals anonymous death from a shipping container in the Nevada desert. After disobeying a direct order, he’s sent to serve on the front lines under a different kind of robot (Mackie). Here he’s supposed to learn the value of human life, but the movie quickly takes a couple of left turns and loses sight of this goal. Mackie, taking a break from his gig as a human in a bird suit to play a machine in a human suit, sees his motivation change enough times to tax anyone’s processor.

The script itself is a problem. In addition to the aforementioned repetition, it contains bizarre, dead end conversations like this one.

Leo: I’m a combat soldier. But I also have the ability to break the rules in certain circumstances. Just like you.

Harp: What kind of circumstances?

Leo: In extreme situations, I have the ability to act of my own volition.

Harp: And is this an extreme situation?

Stop

Leo: Why don’t you ask me what you really want to ask?

Harp: How come you’re so like us?

Leo: Sentient?

Harp: Emotional.

Leo: So, you equate humanity with emotion?

No more, plz!

Harp: I equate it with fault. People are stupid, habitual, and lazy. Their emotions lead to mistakes.

Leo: Maybe humans aren’t emotional enough, Lieutenant.

It’s a relief when they return to rote action movie dialog, we gotta go here, and get this thing, to stop this guy, etc.

There isn’t a likable character in Outside the Wire. Idris is a great emotionless bastard, but when it finally comes time to care about human beings, the bastard is already baked in. He never comes close to sympathetic. It’s easier to connect with Mackie, but you’re not exactly rooting for him either.

I will say this, the second half is MUCH better than the first. We get a few legitimately good, John Wick style action sequences where we finally see what Captain Leo can do. And Outside the Wire has a little more to it than what first meets the eye. It’s a blessing and a curse because while the story deepens, who’s doing what and why becomes harder to pin down. I think they were shooting for a shades of grey, no man, woman, or robot is all good or all bad type of story, but by the end it feels crammed in.

My favorite part of the whole thing was the Gumps, the less advanced, humanoid robotic soldiers who serve alongside the ground troops. Both the US and Russian versions look great, and they do most of the fighting and dying. There’s a scene in the beginning where a human solider is picking on one of the Gumps, hitting it in the back of the head with the butt of his rifle. That was the only time I felt anything during the whole two hours.

Take a pass on this one. I’m excited Netflix is releasing a movie every week in 2021, but if this is what we have to look forward to, it’s going to be another long year.

Bro! This Beowulf Translation is a Good Translation

Rating: 4 out of 5 Grendel arms

My only interaction with Beowulf prior to reading this book was seeing Beowulf 3D stoned at Universal City Walk in 2007. Given my ignorance, I found the introduction to this new translation by Maria Dahvana Headley fascinating. She gives a brief primer on the history of the epic poem and it is mysterious and complicated. It’s a thousand years old, no one knows who wrote it, and there’s an outside chance it’s actually about a talking bear.

Beowulf likely had a long oral tradition before being transcribed into what would become known as the Nowell Codex. The poem is about killing monsters and slaying dragons; an oral tradition feels true to the genre. I bet bards went from town to town blowing people’s minds with this story, excited they had a hit on their hands before repeating it so often they got sick of it, townsfolk shouting “Beowulf!” from the back row while they’re trying to tell a new story.

Two different scribes wrote the Nowell Codex sometime between 1000 and 1010. The first scribe begins the Codex and stops at line 1939 of Beowulf where the second scribe takes over. A guy is having his skin peeled off for looking at a beautiful woman on line 1939 so I like to think Scribe A was so scandalized he couldn’t continue. Although, house elf and scholar of Anglo Saxon literature Elliot Van Kirk Dobbie thinks Scribe B seemed “to belong to an older school of insular writing than its companion hand.” So it sounds like the first guy probably got fired for using that newfangled, sexy handwriting.

A fire badly damaged the Codex in 1731, and, here’s the best part, no one cared! Per Wikipedia, “no serious attempt at restoration was made until the 19th century, by which time the margins had crumbled irreparably, and the edges of many pages are now illegible.” I supposed it’s also possible they didn’t know how to restore it back then, but either way, some pages of Beowulf are wide open to interpretation because they are burned.

Maria Dahvana Headley does an excellent job updating the text. I believe her use of modern parlance and wordplay would have met with the approval of Anglo-Saxon poets. She explains her use of the word “bro” as a translation of “hwæt.”

“The entire poem, and especially the monologues of the men in it, feels to me like the sort of competitive conversations I’ve often heard between men, one insisting on his right to the floor while simultaneously insisting that he’s friendly. “Bro” is, to my ear, a means of commanding attention while shuffling focus calculatedly away from hierarchy.”

I like this interpretation even as I found it jarring. It’s off-putting to read a few lines of more traditional verse and then run smack into a “bro.” It pulls you out of the story a bit, but plants you firmly back onto a barstool, and that I do not mind. It serves the reader well to be reminded that Beowulf, at its core, should be heard as a drunken war story. Beowulf? Son of Ecgtheow? Kinsman of Hygelac? Fuck yeah I know him he’s my cousin, man. Listen to this shit. Just because something is 1000 years old doesn’t mean it can’t be vulgar and saucy.

So what of the poem itself? It’s cool, I guess. Most of it is about swords and treasure. Everyone should experience it at least once. I think getting into Beowulf would be a fun hobby. Reading a bunch of different translations, seeing how they differ, like trying to collect every single cover of Eleanor Rigby. It’s only 3,182 lines so can be done in an afternoon, but if even that is too much, the movie isn’t bad. Robert Zemeckis directed and Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary wrote the screenplay. Maria Dahvana Headley and Neil Gaiman coedited the anthology Unnatural Creatures, so there’s a weird, six degrees of Beowulf thing going on here. Headley also wrote a separate novel based on Grendel’s mother called The Mere Wife so it’s safe to say she’s a fan, and if someone is going to tell me a story, bro I want them to be a fanatic.

The Midnight Sky Review | Need Planet, Will Travel

Rating: 3 out of 5 Aurora Borealises

The Midnight Sky opens on a familiar scene here in America, an old man shuffling around in his slippers, playing chess with himself, eating porridge, and drinking whiskey. Augustine Lofthouse is on lockdown. The only difference between him and me is that he has an important job to do: get on the radio and tell a ship full of astronauts returning to Earth that the avocado has gone off. Humans have triggered a catastrophe and rendered the planet uninhabitable. The party is over so don’t bother putting on pants.

The ship he’s trying to telephone, the Aether, crewed by Felicity Jones, David Oyelowo, Kyle Chandler, Demián Bichir, and Tiffany Boone, is on the home stretch of a round trip to Jupiter and that comes with its own set of headaches. Old Augustine, played by George Clooney, gets some company when he finds a little girl in a cabinet who has been left behind at the station. Serves her right for hiding in that cabinet.

In a series of flashbacks, we learn why they selected this terminally ill geezer to be humanity’s last hope and meet Ethan Peck as the young Augustine Lofthouse. I was 90% sure they’d swapped out Peck’s voice for the real George so I kept rewinding, inching closer to the television, even listening to some of The Midnight Sky on headphones. If you want to play this game at home, here’s a video of Ethan Peck reading Too Many Tribbles for comparison. And here’s Entertainment Weekly with the answer.

The cast of The Midnight Sky is decent. Clooney, perhaps worn out from also directing, keeps it pretty low key. Inaudibly low at times. Speak up, George! The whole point of this movie is you communicating, so communicate. Caoilinn Springall plays the young girl left behind and only manages to be more subdued than Clooney by not speaking at all. Jones and Oyelowo make for good stoic astronauts, and there are a few high tension scenes both in space and on terra firma. The ship itself is beautiful as are the brief scenes we get from K-23, the habitable moon of Jupiter they went to explore.

Clooney really seems to love the brooding space opera. I wonder how many times he’s seen 2001. The Midnight Sky doesn’t really stand out amongst films like Solaris and Gravity, but I did like it. It’s a nice, tidy two hours about an aging scientist trying to reconcile with his past. The apocalypse and space adventure are really just backdrop, and they go well out of their way to avoid talking about the whole we-killed-the-planet thing.

I’m not going to insist you watch The Midnight Sky, but I am going to insist that George take this face and this beard and go remake The Perfect Storm. I mean this guy definitely belongs at sea.

Wingspan: It’s Not as Bad as It Looks

Rating: 5 out of 5 California Quails

11pm on December 31st was not the right time to teach my drunk friends Wingspan, an engine-building board game published by Stonemaier games in 2019. Having barely managed to get them to sit down, I watched reluctant heads droop lower and lower as I kept pulling boards and pieces out of the box and setting them on the table. No amount of enthusiasm on my part could save us. By the time I assembled the birdhouse dice roller, all I could see was eyes and foreheads. “Guys. I swear. It’s not as bad as it looks.”

One week prior, I myself had to watch a video to learn how to play. I didn’t want to. I would have sat there for hours, staring at the instructions, refusing to ask for help had my girlfriend not intervened. There are a lot of teaching videos for Wingspan. There’s this one with game designer Elizabeth Hargrave which I do not recommend. It runs a hefty 36:47 and has the same sort of wincing, don’t-worry-about-this-for-right-now attitude that I tried on New Year’s Eve. You might enjoy it if you’re already a fan. I like this one from rollforcrit. It teaches you everything you need to know to get started in six minutes.

Why didn’t I just show that video to my friends? I don’t have a good answer for that. I guess I was overconfident. I thought I could sherpa the inebriated safely through their first game even as one of them tried to maneuver a French bulldog onto her lap while holding a full glass of wine. A video would have at least relieved me of the burden of two people’s opinion of a very good game. I want people to like what I like. I want to be a salesman for things I believe in, and when it comes to games, I want people to play with (against). So I will try again. Guys, it’s not as bad as it looks.

A game of Wingspan is divided into four rounds. Each round, players start with action cubes that are used to keep track of which actions they’ve taken and how many turns they have left. Players take turns taking actions until all of their cubes are exhausted and the round ends. There are four actions: play a bird card from your hand, get food, get eggs, or draw more bird cards. Birds cost food and eggs to play, and can be placed in one of three habitats. Habitats are associated with three of the four actions so the more birds you play in your forest habitat, for instance, the better you get at food gathering. Then there are bird powers which you can learn as you go. See? Nothing to it.

Ok, how about this. Wingspan is a game about scoring points. Score more points than your opponents and you win. That’s as simple as it gets. Yes, there are many ways to score points, eggs, flocks, cached food, bird points, round goals, and bonus cards, but if you keep the points in mind, you’ll get it. “Why?” they kept asking me after every little thing. “Why would I do that?” The simple answer is, to score points.

I highly recommend you play Wingspan. It’s a lot of fun and once you get the hang of it, you want to play over and over. Games are under an hour and there’s a little diagram on the side of the box that shows you how to put everything away like a little puzzle. It makes cleanup fun! And if you’re still having trouble learning Wingspan, I’m teaching another class on July 4th at 3pm.

Are We Dead Yet? Overland’s Dangerous Drive

“Jesus what is that?” The van rolled to a stop outside a deserted filling station. Up ahead, a spherical creature floated above the ground, tentacles sprouting from the top and waving in the desert wind. Usually, my rule of thumb with new aliens is stay the hell away, but this one was between us and a badly needed can of gasoline. “Cat. Go take a look.”

Cat got out of the van, grim determination painted her polygon face. She’d been with us for over 500 miles – by now she knew “go take a look,” meant, “go hit that thing with a pipe.” She walked up and, with her last action point, bashed it. It made a satisfying PONG sound and exploded, throwing Cat to the ground and bathing her in fire.

Chung grabbed the fire extinguisher and put out the flames, but it was no use. Cat was gone. The rest of the team finished their sweep of the area in silence. We managed to put a few of gallons in the tank and headed out, a new empty seat in the van. There are game mistakes I can live with and others I restart. This one I lived with because it was so dramatic and because it taught us a valuable lesson. Don’t hit the round ones.

I was playing Overland, a turn-based strategy game designed by Finji and available on the app store and Apple Arcade. It bills itself as a “post-apocalyptic road trip game” and that is what it is. You start on the east coast with a character and a car and your goal is to get to the west coast. It’s a simple concept and a simple game that sits atop a deep reservoir of humanity and emotion.

Between each map, when your characters stop to rest and you decide where to go next, they talk to each other through speech bubbles. Strangers say thank you for picking them up, or one character will thank another for healing them or helping them out of a jam. After we lost Cat, Chung sat on the ground and said he hoped she had found peace. Having them react with empathy to events in the game is a small thing but it adds so much depth. It makes them feel real. These are everyday folks doing what they can to get through. They use the tools at hand. The worst weapon in most games is the best weapon in this one. You never find a shotgun.

The environment and sound design complete the emotional experience. The ambient music is eerie and used sparingly. The country is divided into six biomes, and as you move from one to the next, a short cut scene plays – just a static shot of your car navigating a lonely patch of highway, no music, just the sound of wheels on road. It’s a sound that echoes in the memory. The vastness of the great plains. Overheated in the Mojave.

As you move further west, the situation gets worse, more aliens, less people and the ones you do meet are even worse off than you are. There’s no talk of the army securing a zone, or a town out there where people are thriving. No matter how many aliens you kill, there are always more at the end than when you started. At a certain point it dawns on you: this is it. This is the end. This is a game about how we conduct ourselves during the dwindling days of our existence. This road trip is a chance to take one last look around before we vanish forever, and maybe take a couple of these wavy bastards with us before we go.

It crashed a few times and deselecting things is annoying, but do yourself a favor and play through to the end. It’s beautiful and shows us once again that good stories can come from anywhere.

PS – Here’s a list of most of the items and what they do. You’re going to need it.

Prospect Review | Prospect is the Best Episode of The Mandalorian

Inverse recommended this movie. They got to me through my phone. Their movie selections occasionally pushing up through the soil of political headlines is the most useful part of Apple news. I didn’t read the whole review, sci-fi western was all I needed to hear. No need to color in more than necessary. I did see a picture. A man in a grimy space suit with a space gun pointed at his head. The man looked vaguely like Pedro Pascal.

I sit on the couch next to my girlfriend. She likes space, too. She looks at her phone and tells me they filmed the dust in the guy’s basement. I am incensed. Why would tell me something about the movie? I cool down because it’s not plot related, but then I am consumed by thoughts of this basement dust shoot. Production staff stomping around, beating rugs.
Action!
Maybe it was dusty enough already.

“Which guy?” I say.
“What?”
“You said they shot in the guy’s basement. Which guy?” I ask.
“The guy, the directors (Christopher Caldwell and Zeek Earl), I don’t know. One of the guys.”

For the record it was Earl. She tells me it was filmed in Washington. Alright, that’s enough.

The movie is dirty. Panels rattle. Electronics pop and smoke. The stars ain’t all that pretty when viewed through a greasy window. And the dust, the dust will kill you. We learn about all of it through a custom, space-western vernacular. Firefly fans welcome. The only other thing I’ll impart is that the guns sound fantastic.

The man in the photograph was indeed Pedro Pascal. His character, Ezra, is one half of this movie. The other half is Sophie Thatcher. Jay Duplass is in there somewhere. Every second Pedro Pascal is on screen in Prospect, The Mandalorian gets worse. He is magnetic. Humble. Wily. To short his electricity behind an expressionless metal mask is an affront. There’s a reason everyone knows the name Harrison Ford and no one knows who played Boba Fett. Quiet, nerds.

The Mandalorian’s mess of clunky, too-short-for-the-genre episodes, are kept aloft by a stuffed animal while holding the stuffed animal, invisible, heard through a cheap microphone, is mutha fuckin’ Pedro Pascal. Or maybe not! Who knows if he’s even in the suit. I bet it’s a stuntman more often than you think. You want to watch a space western, watch Prospect.

I don’t know how movies like this don’t make it to me sooner. All the billions spent on algorithms, targeted advertising… cookies, and somehow this movie is released in 2018 and takes two years to get to my eyeballs. The system doesn’t work. If my apps knew me at all this would have been the only suggestion for weeks.

As a rule, I wait for people to ask me if I’ve seen anything good lately before I tell them, usually after two full minutes of trying to remember a single thing I’ve ever watched in my entire life. Prospect is the kind of movie that makes me start the conversation. “Hey watch Prospect on Netflix.”

“What? Black beans or pinto beans.”

“Pinto.”

My Octopus Teacher Review | My Octopus Teacher is Gripping

My Octopus Teacher, directed by James Reed and Pippa Ehrlich and released by Netflix in September, is not a normal nature documentary. It’s the story of Craig Foster, a somewhat stiff but likable South African gentleman, who falls in love with an octopus. For real. Seeking to escape the drudgery of his adult life and reconnect with nature, he returns to the kelp forest where he swam as a child. Slowly reintroducing himself to the freezing waters of the South Atlantic, Craig swims without a wetsuit to maintain his connection with his surroundings. One day he notices a small common octopus, Octopus vulgaris, doing something amazing. Entranced, he decides to follow it every day, and little by little, earns its trust.

Don’t come here looking to learn everything about octopuses, that’s what the internet is for, watch this film to put yourself in the fins of a human as he develops an incredible relationship with a wild animal. Don’t get me wrong, it’s funny at first, the way he talks about the octopus. I laughed out loud at lines like, “The boundaries between her and I seemed to dissolve. Just the pure magnificence of her” and “Perhaps it does give you some strange level of octopus joy.” But it doesn’t take long before you’re pulled down into the depths with him, caught up in the drama of her daily life as she hunts crabs and hides from Pyjama sharks. Before long you realize, completely and inexorably, that you’re in love with this octopus too.

It’s a refreshing change of pace from more traditional documentaries like Blue Planet or Planet Earth. The very scope of those projects renders them impersonal. We spend a couple minutes with each animal, see some incredible photography swaddled in David Attenborough’s voice-blanket, and then we move on. My Octopus Teacher is zoomed all the way in. It’s the study of one tiny patch of kelp forest. It’s like an interview with one of the Blue Planet camera people. What was it like spending all that time with these animals? What did it feel like the first time a dolphin swam up and booped your nose? Mind-blowing? I bet.

It’s also nice to hear Foster speak openly about the conflict between his roles as observer and participant. He strives to preserve the natural life cycle of the kelp forest, forcing himself to sit by while some gut-wrenching scenes play out. Of course you would want to chase those asshole Pyjama sharks away; it’s all just so relatable.

The “teaching” part of My Octopus Teacher feels a little like an afterthought, like they needed some way to frame the whole thing and going with straight up love story would have put people off. I think the most important lesson the octopus teaches Craig is that he’s part of the world of the kelp forest, not a visitor. That every creature, large or small, plays a vital role in the health of its immediate eco-system. It’s a lesson we could all stand to learn. We treat the earth like rockstars in a cheap hotel. We think we’re gonna empty the minibar, defenestrate the TV, and skip out on the bill, but there’s no where to skip to. This king bed suite is all we’ve got.

If you give My Octopus Teacher a chance, I think you’ll really like it. It doesn’t take a nature freak to recognize what a life-changing experience this must have been, and Foster does an excellent job of sharing it both with his camera and his recollections. It’s a small story, one man rediscovers his connection to nature, but it’s one that needs to be told more often.

For Laker Fans, This Championship is Totally, Probably Legit

As we sit here anticipating a likely Laker championship, it’s time to predict where this pandemic shortened season will rank among other, non-bubble seasons in the only forum that really matters: barroom arguments. If the Los Angeles Lakers win game 5 tonight against the Miami Heat, it will bring them level with the Boston Celtics for most championships by any franchise with 17.

If you’re a Laker fan, you’re certainly going to bring this up while calmly explaining to your buddy from Dorchester that the Lakers are the best fuckin’ franchise in all of sports. Then he’s gonna tell you that the Celtics have always been in Boston and are therefore “more real,” and that in 1954 the Minneapolis Lakers won the title at the end of a season during which the Indianapolis Olympians went out of business, and any championship that didn’t go through the Olympians is no championship at all!

Now cut to a not too distant or unlikely future where LeBron James has 5 titles, tying Kobe Bryant. You’re three beers into a LeBron vs Kobe debate and you hear yourself telling your friend from Ohio that Kobe is obviously better than LeBron because Kobe has 5 REAL championships, and while we’re at it one of Tim Duncan’s 5 shouldn’t count either because it came at the end of a lockout-shortened 50 game season, and then your buddy from Dorchester, who you didn’t realize was standing behind you, leans in and goes “AH HAAAAAAAAH!”

This history of basketball and the NBA is long and strange. When the Celtics began their impressive run of 8 in a row, there were only 8 teams in the league, the three point line wasn’t introduced until 1979 – the NCAA wouldn’t adopt it until 1986! – and twice the season has been shortened due to labor disputes. The players and teams play the game they’re given, all they can do is go out there and win, and the Lakers and LeBron seem poised to do just that. And this victory will count the same as any other. Unless, for argument’s sake, you need it to not.

Who Do You Think You Are, Call of Duty?

I like to buy games. It’s a thing I do. Like to keep it fresh, keep it moving – keep up with what’s coming out. I’ve written before about the challenge of a ~850 GB hard drive. I would love to replay some games, but sorry pal, no room at the inn. Gotta make way for the future. God bless the indie title that come in at less than 10 gigs. Truly, you are a gift. I was surprised to learn the PS5 hard drive will only have 825 GB at launch, but I guess it’s super fast. We’ll see.

Enter Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, the game so nice they named it the same thing twice. I have always resisted playing this game due to its realism – I prefer a more imaginative universe – and its place of prominence in Bro culture. I finally downloaded it a few weeks ago as a way to keep in touch with some distant friends, and was alarmed to learn that it weighs in at a positively insulting 144.2 GB. That’s just the multiplayer. It doesn’t include the the single player campaign, or the Special Ops pack, whatever that is. Determined, I gritted my teeth and got to work making room for it. I got rid of XCOM 2 for this!

I’ve played it a bit. It’s a well designed, tactilely satisfying game. The battle royale map, Verdansk, is huge and incredibly detailed. Some might say too detailed. Here’s a short story. I was on the street, attempting to reach my team who had parachuted onto the roof of a 15 story building. I didn’t have all the nuances down yet so did the only thing I could think of; I went inside and took the stairs. And there WERE stairs, all 15 stories of them. I couldn’t believe it, they were endless. Between floors 10 and 11 I had to stop and catch my breath. Who needs this? Why is this here? Keep in mind, none of the floors are open so it’s just a long staircase. Imagine a team, or better yet, one guy, hiding in there and the only way to reach them is to walk up, or down, 7 flights of stairs. Exciting! These stairs can go. Program the first two floors and close the rest off. There, the game is smaller already.

Then this week, season 6 comes out, and for some reason, I can’t download the update. Not enough free space it says. What a surprise. Let’s take a look. Hmm, I’ve got 95 gigs free, and yet you’re telling me I need 33 more to download… an update? Let me get this math straight. Squatting on my hard drive, you take up 144 gigs and then, to keep you all nice and current, I need an ADDITIONAL 128 gigs of free space? ARE YOU FUCKING INSANE? In order to worship at the altar of Caaaall of Duuuuty I have to keep 272 GB free!? A full third of my available game-space??? The nerve of this thing…

I found an article online to help the poor gamer manage the file size, but you must really love this game if you’re willing to put this much work into keeping it, and I don’t. Good-bye, CoD, you corpulent asshole. You’re like a Judd Apatow movie, decent but in desperate need of a good editor.

I Want to See a Nikola Jokić/Mason Plumlee Lineup

Last night the Denver Nuggets blew their chance to become the first team in NBA history to win a playoff series after being down 0-3 by beating the Los Angeles Lakers in game three of the western conference finals. Jamal Murray led the way with 28 points on 10-17 shooting and 12 assists. Nikola Jokić scored 11 in the first quarter and then slowed down a bit finishing with 22 points, 10 rebounds, and 5 assists. Lebron James notched another playoff triple-double, his 26th, with 30 points, 10 rebounds, and 11 assists. He’s now 5 away from breaking Magic Johnson’s record and becoming the all-time playoff triple-double leader.

My general rule of thumb is, the shorter the description of a record, the cooler it is. “Most championships.” 2 words, very cool. “Most hits by a 3rd baseman in September.” 8 words, not that cool. “Most playoff triple-doubles” contains a hyphenate which we’re going to count as one word bringing the total to 3 words, pretty damn cool.

Denver led 93-75 at the end of the third quarter only to watch the Lakers cut the deficit to 3 with a furious push in the 4th. Rajon Rondo just took the ball away from Denver whenever he wanted and LeBron kept sprinting down the court for dunks, but all that effort cost them, and an 18 point lead is its own kind of defense. The Lakers ran out of gas and the shots started coming up short. Murray found Millsap under the basket for a dunk, and buried a pair of threes to put the game out of reach. But here’s what I want to know:

How on earth is Paul Millsap logging the kind of minutes he’s logging? Surely this time could be used to develop Michael Porter Jr. who is already giving you a more efficient contribution off the bench. I get it, Millsap’s a veteran, he’s steady, but he’s not hitting 3’s and while he generally seems competent getting to the rim, he’s clueless when he arrives. To be fair, most of the Nuggets appear a little lost when they meet the Laker shot-blockers. Only Jerami Grant and Murray have figured anything out; Grant manages to finish or get fouled, and Murray pulls up before he meets the second line of defense.

In close is where I think Plumlee could be a real asset. He’s got a limited skill set to be sure, but he has good hands, he hustles, and most importantly, he plays big. Just imagine if Jokić had an actual big guy to pass to inside and didn’t have to whip the ball to the three point line/out of bounds all the time. The other potential candidates, Grant, Millsap, and Porter Jr., are all obsessed with the perimeter. Plumlee is the only one who likes to mix it up in the paint, and, unlike Jokić, can actually dunk.

For bigs the Lakers have all-star Anthony Davis, who’s big-ish, and Dwight Howard and JaVale McGee who are both awful. McGee started last night’s game and played 8 minutes and Dwight Howard’s main contribution at this point is baiting Jokić to commit dumb fouls. Make LA keep one of those guys on the floor. Think about it Michael Malone. Why not experiment? I know you’re trying to go down 1-3 anyway, so try some goofy lineups. Get Dozier back in there, have some fun. Lose game 4 and then you’ll have the Lakers right where you want them.