Greatness

Sorry, Toronto, you are not great. (Comic from https://www.facebook.com/nbapls/)

AS HAS been said many times here before at In Play Lose, you need stuff that sucks to have stuff that’s cool. But the inverse is true as well. You need stuff that’s cool to have stuff that sucks. In order to develop a keen eye for failure, you must also be able to appreciate, and embrace, success. True ability to discern that which is bad comes, first and foremost, from the appreciation of that which is good and even great.

We have a great matchup in the NBA finals this year. We have the ideal matchup. It’s the completion of the trilogy, the third go-round between the Golden State Warriors and the Cleveland Cavaliers, each of whom have won one championship before. It gets no better than this. The Warriors are, quite simply, on one of the greatest runs which has ever been seen in the NBA. Cleveland, meanwhile, possesses LeBron James, who is the greatest player in the history of the sport of basketball.

And I make those two sentences being fully aware of the legacy of Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls from the 1990s. We continue to be inundated with 90s nostalgia about the NBA for a simple reason – most of the former player pundits dominating the airwaves came from the 1990s, which was the point in time when NBA basketball went from being simply a sport in this country to transcendant entertainment. Those guys developed star power and as such, their version of NBA history carries weight in the modern day. But the truth is that the game has been radically altered and shifted in the times between the Michael Jordan Bulls and the Steph Curry Warriors. Players today are so much better. My god, are they ever better. Players are faster, are more athletic, are better shooters and technicians, and the basketball IQ is off the charts.

I’ve pointed this out before but it bears repeating: watch any New York Knicks game where the players are running The Triangle offense. Ignore, for the moment, the fact that the Knicks, as presently constructed, wouldn’t look good running any offense at all, but just think about the philosophy and the ethos and the approach of the Knicks compared to what everyone else is doing in the league. The Knicks look prehistoric. What they’re doing makes no sense at all in the modern game. Okay, well, the Knicks prehistoric offense was cutting edge in the 1990s when the Bulls were running it. It was a schematic advantage on top of a talent advantage which turned the Bulls into 6-time champions. But today? It’s so old school as to be worthy of being condemned to the dustbin of history. Every team in the NBA learned from the Bulls, just as every player learned from Michael Jordan and improved upon it. I find any and all discussions about “MJ vs. LeBron” and “1990s Bulls vs. 2010s Warriors” to be laughable. If they played head to head, the Warriors would sweep the Bulls and wipe the floor with them. And so would the Cavs, for that matter.

It’s too bad that, in order to get to this point, we had to endure almost two months of terrible playoff series. The NBA playoffs have been terrible, mainly because of injuries. The Cavs faced Toronto without Kyle Lowry and Boston without Isaiah Thomas. The Warriors played Portland missing Nurkic, Utah without Hill and without a healthy Gobbert, and San Antonio minus Kawhi and Tony Parker. Attrition was brutal this year. But that happens sometimes. This contributed to the fact that both the Cavs and the Warriors rolled through the playoffs: the Cavs went 12-1 in their three series, while the Warriors went 12-0 and are riding one of the more astonishing streaks imaginable – they last lost a game where their four All-Stars played significant minutes on Feb. 4 against the Sacramento Kings.

So the playoffs were garbage, but the end result is great. It’s absolutely great and I want to see it. On the one side, you have LeBron, who is the best ever, and Kyrie Irving, who is the most creative shot maker in the NBA. On the other, you have four All-Stars and the most fearsome collection of talent in league history. This is what I want to see.

But apparently, this isn’t what a lot of people want to see.

I’ve read countless articles and hot takes claiming that the Cavs and, most especially, the Warriors are “ruining” the NBA. How exactly are they doing that? By being great? In the case of the Cavs, I do think they dogged it a little bit during the regular season. Or, more to the point, the Cavs conserved their energy. The Cavs can only go as far as LeBron can take them, and LeBron plays more minutes per game than just about anyone in the NBA, and has done so for most of the past 14 seasons. LeBron needs to conserve energy, and necessarily does so during the year on the defensive end of the floor – an understandable move on his part. As such, an already not very good defense became a bad one, and the Cavs lost a lot of games during the season. It’s still a bad defense, mind you – one which is going to the Cavs beat in this series – but a locked-in, full throttle LeBron on both ends of the floor can be devastating, and has been in these playoffs. It’s a stars’ league, in the end, and no star is greater than LeBron. His performance in last season’s Finals is enough to make people conveniently forget about the ways in which his opponent this year has upgraded. “Hey! LeBron was down 3-1 last year and won, so obviously he can do it again!”

The Warriors, meanwhile, have ruined basketball by constructing a super team. Okay, so, let’s review how that super team was constructed, shall we? And this is an important point in a modern NBA where far too many people are obsessed with the folly that is potential you can obtain through the NBA draft to the extent that teams are tanking for 3-4 years in order to amass draft picks. The Warriors, indeed, drafted three of their All-Stars: Steph Curry was the 7th pick in the draft, Klay Thompson was the 11th pick in the draft, and Draymond Green was the 35th pick in the draft. That, right there are three of the 20 best players in the NBA, and 50 players went before them in the draft. Seriously, go ahead and look up those three NBA drafts and tell me how many of the 50 players selected before Steph, Klay, and Dray, you would actually want. There are some good ones, of course, but nobody, and I mean nobody, could ever foresee Steph morphing into the transcendant, game-altering, geometry-altering talent that he became.

Now, of course, at the beginning Steph contributed to the endless Warriors malaise by being hurt all the time. He was hurt so often that he signed a contract which was the best he could get at the time, one which makes him, without question, the single-most underpaid player in all of professional sports – which, combined with a spike in the NBA salary cap, freed up the Warriors to sign Kevin Durant. The Warriors signed 2015 Finals MVP Andre Iguodala as a free agent only after dealing away multiple first round picks to the Jazz in exchange for the Jazz being willing to take on the terrifyingly bad contracts they had doled out to Andris Bedrins and Richard Jefferson. The bench is full of reclamation projects: Shawn Livingston suffered the worst injury I’ve ever seen (I refuse to link to the video), Javale McGee was nearly laughed out of the league, Ian Clark was a D-Leaguer. And what does it say about the stupidity of the infatuation with the NBA draft that the Golden State Warriors put the 38th pick in the 2016 draft, Patrick McCaw, in the starting lineup for a couple of playoff games and he looked like he actually knew what he was doing, which could scarcely be said of the bulk of the 37 guys picked before him? Yes, that’s right, the Warriors have constructed a super team, alright, and done so in the worst way imaginable, which is by being smarter than everyone else.

But fans will continue at the Warriors and continue to be sore at KD about exercising his collectively bargained right for determining where he wants to work, because fans always seem to be pro-owners when it comes to the player/owner dynamic of labor negotiations, never stopping to consider what it is that they are actually watching when they go to the arena (hint: it ain’t the owner, no matter how vainglorious he is). Me personally? I love great teams and great games. I didn’t care a whit that it was always Celtics-Lakers in the 1980s. They had the best players and were playing the greatest basketball that had ever been seen on the planet. Give me greatness. Give me the best that the game can offer. That’s not ruining the league. That’s enhancing it. That’s why I want to watch the game.

The NBA is not a league where upsets frequently occur. Quite honestly, I’d say last year’s win by the Cavs was one of the greater upsets in history. If you want upsets, go over and watch the NHL playoffs, which are a crap shoot. The NHL is high variance, the NBA is little to no variance. Which is worse? I don’t know. I found it amusing when, on the eve of the Stanley Cup Final between the Pittsburgh Penguins and the Nashville Predators, I came across an article speaking to the “brilliant roster construction” of the Nashville Predators. (His words, not mine.) Now, let’s take a step back from that for a moment. The Nashville Predators regular season record was 41-29-12: 41 wins, 29 losses, and 12 losses in overtime. So, basically, they were a .500 team. 50% of their games ended in losses during the regular season, and they were a bottom seed in the playoffs who got hot. So, basically, the GM in Nashville constructed a mediocre team which happened to get hot at the right time. And how, exactly, is that brilliant? And that’s not a knock on what Nashville has accomplished in the playoffs, which is cool, but anyone who thinks that’s little more than a so-so club riding a hot streak for a few weeks is kidding themselves.

The NHL playoffs are a high-variance format where, oftentimes, lesser teams beat superior ones simply by gumming up the works and making life miserable. I should know this, because I went to two Stanley Cup Finals games in 1994, a series between the Vancouver Canucks and New York Rangers many around the game consider one of the great Stanley Cup Finals series of all time. The Canucks came a crossbar away from winning a Cup that season – a Canucks team that was a game over .500 and was a #7 seed in the playoffs. And given the two previous years, when the Canucks had 100-point, division winning teams which couldn’t get out of the second round of the playoffs, you can see why a seasoned, vet-laden team like that Vancouver one came to not care a whit about the regular season. So long as they got into the playoffs, they knew they could compete in the postseason tournament – a tournament which, ultimately, is the only thing in the sport that matters.

But we all love these sorts of high-variance playoff runs when it happens to benefit our team, of course, just as my beloved Canucks benefitted in 1994. In a more recent past, the San Francisco Giants last World Series win, in 2014, came when they were an 87-win team that was the lowest seed in the playoffs, and I loved every minute of that postseason. On the flip side, however, I started to sour on the entire concept of the NHL playoffs when the L.A. Kings pretty much dogged it through the entire regular season, finished with a sub-.500 record, won a Stanley Cup, and proceeded to win another Stanley Cup while basically following a similar path. Some of this is my long-standing hatred of the Kings, of course, but when you do something like that, then why do the 82 games beforehand even matter? Why would a fan want to go and watch some meaningless game in February? We have this strange infatuation with the playoffs, when in the case of both football and hockey, it’s really just a small sample size indicative of pretty much nothing they did throughout the year. In that light, what the Pittsburgh Penguins are doing is pretty remarkable. Their 4:1 win on Wednesday gives them a 2-0 series lead over Nashville and they appear headed to their second consecutive Stanley Cup. In the NBA, you can become good enough to overcome the variance. In the NHL, you win in spite of it.

But we’re infatuated with success and championships, of course, so we’re also infatuated with playoff results, even though the entire structure is flawed. It’s nothing like the regular season. There are entirely different dynamics and variables in play. In the NBA, you get to exploit matchups for two weeks in a 7-game series that you would never have much of a chance to do in the regular season. This is why a team like the Toronto Raptors is useless in the playoffs. They are ruthlessly efficient at what they do, which is why they can win a lot of 1-off games during the season, when every team is running their basic sets, but they’re one of the most uncreative offensive teams in the NBA, and in a 7-game series where you have a chance to focus on them and scheme for them, they suddenly become easy to guard. Matchups are everything in the NBA playoffs. The Cavs had more trouble playing against Indiana than they did against Boston and Toronto for a simple reason – Indiana has Paul George, who is 6’9” and a badass and forces LeBron out of his comfortable free safety defensive role, which leaves Kevin Love to look like a defensive doofus and Kyrie Irving to get lit up by Jeff Teague. Neither Boston nor Toronto possessed that sort of player at that position, which meant LeBron could roam around and steal passes and block shots and create mayhem, much as he did against the Warriors in the NBA Finals a year ago – which, above all else, is the reason the Dubs went and got Kevin Durant.

The Cavs would be in the NBA Finals regardless of who they played in the East playoffs, in my opinion, simply because the East was crap – not a single East playoff team had a winning record against the West’s playoff teams during their 16 games in the regular season – but the Bucks and the Buzzards would have been better matchups against the Cavs, possessing the types of players who can give Cleveland problems. As it was, the East was a laughable mess, and Cleveland’s fire power was so superior to who they faced that it could mask the fact they played pretty lazy defense against Boston and could get away with it, as the Celtics couldn’t throw it in the bay and missed an ungodly number of open shots. But there is something to be said of knowing your opposition. As bad as Toronto and Boston played – and both of them played badly, make no mistake – Cleveland has been so spectacular, particularly on the offensive end, that Toronto and Boston playing well might not have made that much of a difference.

And I’m okay with Cleveland being in the Finals, because I appreciated what they did last season in coming back from 3-1 down to win the championship, and because, above all else, I want to see the best. I love great competition. It gets no better than this. There are seven legit NBA All-Stars on the floor in this series. In LeBron, Steph, and KD, you have three guys who will hang up the sneakers and walk straight into the Hall of Fame in Springfield, Mass. You have two of the greatest collections of shooters ever, two teams contributing the most to the very ways in which the game is changing in terms of how its played. What’s not to like about that? You get to see innovation on display in the NBA Finals. You get to see Steph Curry and Klay Thompson stand 30 feet from the basket and actually have to be guarded, which is ridiculous. You get to see the weirdest and wackiest offensive set ever in the league, which is LeBron playing point guard with four snipers stationed 23 feet from the basket, ready to strike a three. This is all great. This is what we should want to see in the finals. Honestly, would the Clippers or the Bucks being at this stage in the playoffs actually be interesting?

The homer in me wants the Warriors to win in four. Hell, I want them to win in three. If they do win in four, however, it’s likely that they do so because they do something great – Steph goes nuts, or Klay drains eight threes, or they decide to play direct and Durant torches everyone. As it is, I think that the Warriors will win the series in five games, simply because Cleveland has at least two terrible defenders on the floor at all times, and I don’t think the Cavs can get enough stops. But I could see the series going longer, simply because LeBron is the greatest player ever and Kyrie makes the most absurdly difficult shots that I’ve ever seen, and because Cleveland is capable of making 20 threes in a game to steal one. I’m not buying any narrative I hear from basketball punditry, all of whom have had far too long to think about this series and have started to try to convince themselves that the Cavs can win, much as football pundits do during the two weeks before the Super Bowl when they conjure up notions like, “oh, yeah, Denver could beat the Seahawks, sure they could.” But I do think the series will be short in terms of games but not in terms of competition. I want it to be great. Even if the Warriors do win in five, it wouldn’t surprise me if many of the wins are close. And in some ways, I want it to go longer. There is so much talent and skill out there on the floor, so much shooting and playmaking. This is, ultimately, what you want to see if you’re a basketball fan. It doesn’t get any better than this.

Let’s ball.