I really thought that playing in Roy's basement was worth 10 on the wire to James, and I thought that he had an outside chance to win this, but home court wasn't nearly enough.
Of course, when you play Filler, you'll sometimes get carved up into little pieces, and that's what happened here. Aranas is a fantastic player with a load of talent, but he's not good enough to beat the most elite in tough action more than occasionally. He is to be admired for his courage, but he'll need to start looking for an easier matchup than this one.
Of course, this match didn't tell us anything we didn't already know. As we so often note on this forum, at the very top of our sport are JL Chang, Josh Filler, and SVB. There are a few who can put a scare in them from time to time (as we saw in 2019, Jayson Shaw got 91 games in his race to 100 with SVB), but these three are the crème de la crème. We all ache for matches involving any two of them, but who knows when such matches are coming, especially with our game and our lives suddenly in suspended mode.
