Is the NBA Boring? And Other Stories
The NBA Finals, the Stanley Cup, and the Houston Astros
NBA:
I mentally made a note to clear time on Thursday and Sunday nights to watch the first two games of the NBA Finals. After a long, disappointing streak of playoff games and series, I hoped that the league’s finale would provide more excitement. “The lights shine brighter,” “the stage is bigger,” and all the other usual cliches applied to my mindset as I hoped for the tension and stakes of last season’s championship series.
Needless to say, these games were anything but close and now the Cleveland Cavaliers are starting down the barrel of a five-game series or sweep at the hands of the Golden State Warriors. The usual comeback to those (like myself) who doubt the long-term competitiveness of this series is that the Warriors held this lead at this point in the Finals last year, too. I’m not convinced. Golden State looks too talented, too insurmountable, too inevitable.
At the most important part of the NBA season, this series still has value. LeBron James is still in it, and there’s a fascinating storyline in the Warriors’ dominance of their once-feared foes. But I’m not sure that’s enough. Everyone who follows the NBA expected this championship showdown since early July of 2016, and the promise of competition was all that got many fans through series after series of meaningless prelude. Now, it looks like that wait was for nothing more than a vicious beatdown.
If there is anything left to watch before the champions hoist the trophy, we’ll see it on Wednesday night. If LeBron James has another superhuman level in him, we’ll see it. Cleveland has built its entire team around this one elite player, and until now their formula looked nearly-unbeatable. This team is beautifully built, and is, in truth, much better than it has looked so far. And if they’re going to push this series further than four games, the team needs to show it now.
NHL
I don’t watch hockey regularly, so I won’t pretend that I know anything substantive about the Pittsburgh Penguins or Nashville Predators. But I do know that I love ridiculous things in sports, and it doesn’t get much more ridiculous than this:
I also know that the Stanley Cup is now tied at 2–2, and from my Twitter feed has been much more competitive than the NBA Finals. I won’t take league-to-league comparisons any further than this, though. I just wish I could watch something approximating the beauty of the 2016 playoffs.
Through my Twitter account and several blog posts, I’ve run the idea of competitive balance and parity into the ground. In one sense, it doesn’t matter that much. The NBA is healthy, its numbers are good, and plenty of people are watching Cavs/Warriors III. So if I say that the lack of competition is bad for the league, it has to be in a way that I can’t quantify or even really define in my own writing and on the platform I have. But I know I’m not alone when I bemoan the state of the NBA playoffs.
I don’t want to diminish the accomplishments of the two teams in the Finals. The Warriors may be the best team of all time, and their beautiful destruction of other teams has an undeniable aesthetic appeal. Ball movement, three-point shooting, and speed all make for great TV.
But all sports rely on tension and suspense to make their marks. That’s why this year’s College Football National Championship, the Super Bowl, and the 2016 NBA Finals were all so great. The closing minutes of these contests captured every point of their respective seasons and distilled them into a dense moment of athletic perfection. Remember Clemson’s final drive? Kyrie Irving’s three-point shot to seal it? These moments are what make competitive sports so fun to watch. It can’t be that great every year, and we’re seeing that this time around.
MLB — the Houston Astros
Of course, the beauty of summer is that there is also a fully-functioning baseball league to watch. MLB is in full swing right now, and is roughly a third of the way through its season. And I was reminded of that when I checked the standings and saw just how dominant the Houston Astros have been.
Baseball is unlike other sports in that there isn’t a huge gap between the best teams and the mediocre ones. The New England Patriots and Golden State Warriors can be expected to reliably destroy weak teams as a matter of principle. In baseball, it’s entirely possible that the San Diego Padres could win a series against the Los Angeles Dodgers. It isn’t likely, but the reliable possibility of it is taken for granted.
That’s why the Houston Astros’ record (and place in the standings) is so surprising:
42–16 is an elite number for a basketball team. In baseball, that type of win percentage is nearly unheard of. It means that the second-place team in this division — sporting a decent record by most standards — has nearly no chance at winning. For the Astros to hold a 14-game lead at this point in the season is ridiculous.
Now, in fairness, everyone knew that Houston was going to be good. The team’s strange mediocrity last season looked more like a blip than a trend, and the success that the Astros found in 2015 has more than multiplied this time around. They can’t keep up this record. No team can. Regression will come at some point, and Houston will lose several games in a row as the season’s inevitable randomness takes its toll. But to win this many games so early will always be a great accomplishment.
Lots of good teams aren’t meeting expectations. The Cleveland Indians, the Boston Red Sox, and (most surprisingly) the Chicago Cubs have all struggled this year. But the Astros haven’t. This is a good team, and they could be around for a while.
I’m experimenting with a new format for this blog — broad views of multiple sports at once instead of minute, detailed breakdowns of one. If this worked (or didn’t), let me know below!
