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The high-five is ubiquitous in sports. It happens so frequently in the NBA, players give each other high-fives even after they mess up, or badly miss the iron on a shot. It’s a way to keep a team together through thick and thin — or some other poppycock aphorism about teamwork.
But, as anyone who has gone through middle and elementary school can tell you, that high-five can be missed, deliberately ignored, or even faked. Sometimes, teammates just don’t see each other, and the Internet might overreact and read too much into it. There’s a lot happening in an NBA game, and sometimes a DAP denial happens because teammates just don’t always see each other.
We think the above interaction between Tristan Thompson and J.R. Smith falls in the latter category. Thompson was fouled and LeBron got the high-five, but Smith’s extended palm was missed. To his credit, he leaves it up there, and doesn’t try to play it off like he’s fixing his hair or checking to see which way the wind was blowing inside The Q.
For a Cavs team that’s appeared to gel as a group over the last month of undefeated playoff basketball, this was just a tiny, inadvertent infraction on an otherwise close-knit group. It’s still funny to watch.
