How’s this! Reckon on this day, back in 2012, Patty Mills — aka Patty Thrills, aka Patty Cakes, aka the Torres Strait Terror — truly cemented his place in the NBA and on the way to being an all-time dead-set Aussie ledge, as, in only his 4th ever game for the Spurs, Patty did more work than a Townsville truckie’s thermos on a long haul to Tuggeranong!
See, before leading Tim Duncan, Manu Ginobili, Tony Parker and co. to the 2014 NBA title, Patty had eventually returned to the NBA after stints playing with the Melbourne Tigers and the Xinjiang Guanghui Flying Tigers in China following the NBA lockout. And once he got the tap on the shoulder from the San Antonio Spurs, Patty, unlike the local milkbar on Sundays, delivered.
In only 22 minutes Patty Cakes shredded the then-New Orleans #Hornets to the tune of 6-of-9 (NICE!) shooting — including 2-of-4 from 3 — on his way to 14 points, proving more of a spark than the time in my old sharehouse that one time when friggin’ Shane plugged his bloody space heater into a double adapter on top of another double adapter on a bloody powerboard and nearly burnt the entire place down! Bloody Shane, I’ll tell ya.
Anyway. Patty also had 2 rebounds — snared with such cunning guile that he could be a character in a John Birmingham spy thriller — and 4 assists so exquisitely handed off that Tony Parker immediately tried to hit on them.
The best part were Patty’s 2 steals though, which were swiped with such impressive thievery that Patty was called in a script consultant on a reboot of ‘The Great Train Robbery’ starring the shit one from ‘Entourage’.
Of course, Patty being Strayan meant he also fell foul of those mongrel refs, who slugged the poor bugger with 2 fouls when all he did was look at the fella! Anti-Strayan bias writ large I reckon.
Anyhoo. The key for Patty was that this came after a big performance three nights prior when he had 20, proving to that surly old bag of spanners Gregg Popovich that he could be efficient and trusted to go out and flog harder than Damien Oliver down the last 200 metres at Randwick.
There you go! A 14/2/4/2 night in only his fourth game for the Spurs! Not bad for the best thing to come out of Canberra since my dad’s mate Steve came back with a load of skin mags and fireworks in ’95!
#ONYA Patty Cakes!