Here's Joakim Noah Proving That Sometimes The Best Things In Life Aren't Free

SCREAMING at this Joakim Noah airball FT and his reaction pic.twitter.com/8Tjpxcu10L

— CJ Fogler (@cjzero) January 24, 2017

All due respect to 'The Beatles' here. I don't know if they were familiar with the NBA or if their glory days coincided with an era in which front court players could take foul shots without completely embarrassing themselves. What I do know is that Joakim Noah's "free" throws are for the birds (and bees). Honestly, the worst part about that attempt is that his form didn't look any different than it usually does. He can scrunch his face like he just drank the most bitter of beer, but that shot was as legitimate as it gets. The ball didn't slip out of his hand. He wasn't distracted by a scantily clad woman in the front row. He simply took a deep breath, focused on the basket, and then missed it so wide left that it would have made Scott Norwood feel all-right.

I haven't played a basketball video game in quite some time, but they used to have the little meters that went back and forth when you were at the foul line and you had to hit the button when they met in the middle for an accurate shot. The only explanation for the result of Joakim Noah's trip to charity stripe would have been if he were being controlled by some college kid who picked up the sticks after coming home blind drunk at 3 o'clock in the morning. A professional NBA player that makes $18 million dollars a year just botched the most routine of play so badly that it was basically the basketball equivalent of the kid from 'The Sandlot' trying to to throw a baseball for the first time. That uncovered 15 footer was so comically misguided that it looked like something that one of DeAndre Jordan's teammates would throw up during their over-dramatized imitation of him. I know that even the most well compensated of athletes lose focus sometimes, but an 8 year old with ADHD could have put forth a better effort than that.

Lastly, I don't want to say that a certain price point is cursed, but if my job security was predicated on the success of professional athletes then the contracts they signed would never have $72 million on the bottom line. Sometimes it's better to just play it safe, and that means avoiding the dollar amount that was given to the biggest free agent flops in both the NBA and the NFL. That "free" throw that made Stevie Wonder look like a dead-eye shooter was about as utterly mortifying as every single wounded duck that Brock Osweiler blindly tossed up this season. Maybe that's a complete coincidence, but if I were a General Manager I certainly wouldn't want to the one to do the research necessary to find out.