Game 3 of the Eastern Conference Finals was the third consecutive lopsided game of the series, this time seeing the Cavaliers dominate in a 30-point blowout of the Celtics back in Cleveland.
As is often the case in a blowout, the TV broadcast on ESPN went into time-killing mode pretty early in the third quarter. The booth of Mike Breen, Jeff Van Gundy, and Mark Jackson always has a tendency to go off on tangents barely related to the game happening, but in a blowout of this nature, they really tested the limits of what counts as calling the action. This started by bringing in Steve Javie for a solid five-minute conversation about a foul from Game 2, because there wasn’t an incident from Game 3 to talk about.
Then Van Gundy delivered some strong takes on the royal wedding, which was actually pretty funny, and then, it was time for some good old fashioned native advertising in the form of a shoutout and camera cutaway to Chewbacca sitting courtside before a quick promo for Solo.
After the game, spirits were high in the Cavs locker room and the mood was a bit lighter than after the last two, so Kevin Love decided to joke around with Kendrick Perkins about Chewie’s presence. Perkins, well, he didn’t quite get the reference and chalked it up to him not keeping up with “new stuff.”
Kevin Love: “Are you going to go hang out with Chewbacca?”
Kendrick Perkins: “Who is that?”
(Love shows Perk a photo on his phone of Chewy sitting courtside at Game 3)
Perk: “Oh, I don’t really keep up with all that new stuff.”— Dave McMenamin (@mcten) May 20, 2018
Now, Solo is certainly new, but Chewbacca has been around since the original Star Wars films in the 1970s, so it’s a rather impressive feat for Perkins to have avoided Chewbacca and likely all things Star Wars for his entire life. We don’t know a lot about big Perk off the court, but we can now cross off “Star Wars enthusiast” as a possibility for what he does in his spare time.
