Monday, June 13, 2011

City Stunned by Basketball Coincidence

DALLAS - Even though the NBA Finals ended Sunday evening, mathematicians are still trying to explain an incident experts are calling, "the most perplexing coincidence since evolution". On June 9th, nearly 19,000 Dallas Mavericks fans showed up to game 5 of the NBA Finals wearing identical blue Mavericks t-shirts. "Most television viewers probably assumed this was a promotional stunt or t-shirt giveaway, which is common around the [NBA] during the playoffs" said Mavericks marketing director Murray Davidson. "But this was not planned at all. We don't know how this happened." LeRoy Gravelston, PhD, a mathematics professor at Cal Tech, put the incident in perspective, "Just the numbers alone are staggering but when you consider the sheer number of people who attended that game last week, all coming from different walks of life and backgrounds, who all happened to put on the exact same shirt, that puts the odds of an event like this happening somewhere around 1 in 934,532,263,174,108,001. You don't have to be a mathematically genius like myself to know that those are slim odds." The phenomenon had repercussions on the court as well. "It was really hard focusing," said a teary-eyed Dirk Nowitzki after the win, "with all the [Heat players] saying things like 'didn't get the memo about it being blue shirt day' and all." Lost without a rational explanation, Nowitzki sought for answers within his Germanic heritage. "I don't know what we would have done to the great god Baldr for something like this to happen." Others were inconsolable as a horror-stricken Jason Kidd added, "What does this mean?" before crawling back under a folding table in the Dallas locker room. Experts agree that the city of Dallas is no stranger to freak circumstances. In a press conference over the weekened, mathematicians unveiled a plan to stay in the metro area through December in hopes of discovering how it is possible that, despite a large payroll, the Dallas Cowboys are so terrible year after year.

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