My companion for Game 7 of the N.B.A.’s Western Conference finals was talking about the delicate process of hard-boiling eggs.
“When you put a bunch of eggs in a pot, which one is going to crack?” Fabulous Flournoy, the longtime face of the British Basketball League, asked as we watched the game on television at Valhalla, a pub in Manhattan. “And why did the egg crack? Did you drop the egg in the pan from too high up? Was the egg too cold before it went in the water? There are various reasons eggs crack.”
He was making a roundabout point about pressure, and it was essentially this: Players crack in basketball games, too.