Published: December 9, 2009
Everybody has days where things just don’t go their way. Sometimes you find yourself in the doghouse with your girlfriend over something you said. Or maybe your boss is in a grumpy mood and you manage to draw his wrath.
Or, if you’re a professional basketball player, your shot isn’t falling and you find yourself in foul trouble.
This was the kind of day Antoine Wright was having tonight as he was a miserable 0-5 from the field while picking up four fouls. Hardly the kind of game that would draw the attention of anyone for good reasons.
So when Wright hoisted up a three-point attempt late in the game it was understandable when the majority of fans in the Air Canada Centre gasped in shock.
However, just as soon as his shot found the bottom of the net those cheers turned to cheers as this was the bucket that iced the game for Toronto.
After the game Jay Triano talked with the media about trusting his players even on off days which provided me with the perfect opportunity to bring up Wright’s big shot near the end of the game.
“We had DeMar (DeRozan) in the game for awhile but they weren’t really sticking on him in the corner so we were having a hard time driving to the basket,” Triano explained to me. “Things were getting clogged up so we just went with a veteran guy more for defense than anything else. I’ll be honest, I was thinking of putting Marco (Belinelli) in if we had a stop for defense. But we gave the ball to (Hedo) Turkoglu and he did a nice job of driving and they left Antoine (Wright) alone in the corner.”
Further adding some intrigue was a nice sense of irony attached to the shot which Jarrett Jack shared with me after the game.
“The shot was great because he had been coming to me telling me I had a couple of looks,” Jack told me after the game. “He was telling me to be ready to shoot and then he came into the game and he was ready to shoot. He took his own advice and was able to knock down a bit shot for us.”
So after being jeered by fans did Wright want to celebrate his big shot? Not a chance. In fact, after the game he wanted to down play the shot.
When asked about his shot he told me, “It wasn’t nothing, really. Just a small shot in the game.”
True, it was just one of the 26 shots Toronto hit, but it’s timely nature was what made it huge.
Even if Wright wanted to be modest, this shot was the difference in a game in which both teams struggled finding the bottom of the net.
