Available excuses had no chance.
To his credit, Woodson did not resort to the expanding list of readily available excuses, beginning with Tyson Chandler's illness, Iman Shumpert's season-ending knee injury, Baron Davis's assorted ailments and the cloud that has settled over Stoudemire's career two seasons after the Knicks gave him $100 million.
The Spurs just totally and utterly outplayed the Heat, there's no "we outplayed ourselves" excuse available for Miami's Game Five performance.
There are excuses available should they want them.
Venues always have some way of plausibly denying accusations, and there's no shortage of excuses available to management to brush away any claims from patrons who believe they've been discriminated against.
Where one or another type of excuse is available, the specific type of excuses that are available mitigate in one or another specific way the subject's responsibility for the occurrence of an action or its consequences, and so the extent to which the action is to be counted as free.
"But with all the clean, batch-tested options now available, there is no excuse for an athlete to test positive from a supplement – and from my experience, any athlete using this excuse is either lying or stupid".
And even when no religious, ethnic or political excuse is available, a lot of Indonesians still get killed by mobs furious over some minor piece of misbehaviour.The outside world has watched these events with concern, but also with hope.
With so many options available, there is no excuse for anything less than perfection, and when less than perfection is what you end up getting, the fault must be yours.
Where an act is performed, and where no excuse is available, the action is one for which the actor counts as fully responsible.
