We’re having an NBA Finals trilogy
Threesomes. The Godfather. The Christian deity. Who doesn’t like treats in threes anyway?
Another wild National Basketball Association (NBA) off-season is in the books, but if you zoom out your logic lenses just enough, the rookie draft and free agency fireworks appear to be merely sideshows distracting us from a perhaps unpopular fact: That the finalists of the last two years remain firmly lodged atop the world’s best hoops league.
Just eight weeks ago, we all witnessed LeBron James finally bring a championship to the sports-cursed city of Cleveland. But we need our year-round NBA news cycle like we need oxygen. We might as well call October to June the on-court season and the period between the off-court season. Nike coined “Basketball Never Stops” and there has never been a more relevant hoops slogan since.
We are served with craziness all the time, and NBA craziness is the entertainment we deserve. Because why not? Our sheer fandom has had a hand in making the NBA emerge as a billion-dollar industry.
Predictably, the league delivered. A year after the Los Angeles Clippers performed a heist for the ages, this year’s festivities were started by that “other L.A. team.” The Lakers jockeyed for position and prevailed over imaginary teams for the right to give NBA Finals bench-warmer Timofey Mozgov a whopping payday, because you know, being a (once!) starting center can get you places. It doesn’t matter that a guy named Draymond Green and a dude named Kevin Love played at same position in the closing seconds of last June’s ultimate series.
To put it in perspective, Mozgov stands to earn $4M more than Golden State’s back-to-back Most Valuable Player Steph Curry next season; so will new Portland Trail Blazer Evan Turner, by about $5M more. We now live in a world where Miami Heat reserve and former NBA D-League pickup Tyler Johnson basically has the same salary as Curry. At least Mozgov has won the same number of championships as the reigning league most valuable player, right? The middle class of NBA players has benefited the most from the salary cap spike that enabled teams to throw dollars without guilt at whomever they fancied.
Free agency’s biggest prize, Oklahoma City Thunder forward and The Players’ Tribune deputy publisher Kevin Durant, joined the best regular season team the NBA has ever seen. He now plays for Golden State to team up with Curry and fellow all-stars Klay Thompson and Green, along with supersub-slash-tech-startup-investor Andre Iguodala.
Naturally, Durant’s former sidekick Russell Westbrook became the new patron saint of small market NBA franchises, as he re-upped with Oklahoma City for at least the next 2 years.
His predecessor, San Antonio’s Tim Duncan, decided to retire while catching up on Season 2 of “Daredevil” on Netflix (The Punisher is heavily involved), the exact opposite way Kobe Bryant bid the league adieu. Cleveland’s James finally(!) became the league’s highest-paid player in his 13-year career.
It was fun and all, but barring any injury or any unlikely blockbuster trade that can shift the league’s balance of power anew, the status quo is that defending champion Cleveland and a burgeoning dynasty in Golden State remain unopposed in their respective conferences, not to mention the fact that the Warriors just theoretically beheaded their greatest rival in the West in Oklahoma City.
The New York Knicks fancy themselves as being at par with the Warriors as one NBA’s super teams. Or maybe only in Derrick Rose’s eyes. Whatever.
Boston has improved, but there’s only so much an Al Horford acquisition can do to try to unseat the Cavaliers. And while Toronto Raptors’ top-four finish last year was a great addendum to the Canadian basketball lore, they haven’t upgraded their roster after losing defensive center and breakout playoffs star Bismack Biyombo. After all, he had 72 million reasons to leave move to Orlando.
Atlanta now has Dwight Howard to replace Horford at the 5. 31-year-old Paul Millsap is aging like fine wine (he’s been a three-time All-Star since joining Atlanta in 2013). But I see no reason why James can’t sweep them again in the postseason. That is, if they even get matched up again.
Miami’s current franchise player is Hassan Whiteside, only two years after that title belonged to James.
Oh. the Bulls? They didn’t even make the playoffs last year.
As for the other side, you can talk yourself into Duncan-less San Antonio or even the frustrating Clippers, but if you believe Golden State isn’t far and away the best team in a defanged West, then I have no reason to discuss an alternative outcome with you.
