The Beauty of the Super Team
Ben Ripley says to stop being so selfish about your own team and embrace the greatness of LeBron and the Warriors.
Before the start of the 1983 NBA playoffs, Moses Malone was asked how he thought his Philadelphia 76ers would do.
His response has become legendary.
“Fo’, Fo’, Fo’.”
At the time, due to their high seeding, the 76ers only had to win three rounds to win the championship. Skip ahead to the 2017 NBA Playoffs and we have for the first time ever two teams win their first eight games of the NBA Playoffs.
We are at Fo, Fo.
The Golden State Warriors and the Cleveland Cavaliers are on a collision course to do something else historic. No two teams have ever met in the NBA Finals in three consecutive seasons.
Moses’ 76ers did lose one game in the 1983 playoffs, so they ultimately ended up going Fo, Five, Fo. Can one or both of these teams do what Moses couldn’t and go Fo, Fo, Fo on their way back to The Finals? Do we care? Is it a good thing or a bad thing if they do?
Golden State and Cleveland are certainly both capable of sweeping their next opponents. They are the class of the NBA, and every basketball fan has been hopeful all year that these two teams would meet again in The Finals, save for their own favourite team pulling a miraculous upset.
Everyone needs to suck it up and accept that the Warriors vs the Wizards or Celtics would feel like we were robbed of something special. Cavaliers vs Rockets or Spurs, although likely a good series, would pale in comparison to the dream match-up.
Do we care if they continue to sweep their way to The Finals? Yes and no. We don’t care if they sweep their way to The Finals, we just care that they each get there. However, isn’t the story that much better if they both go undefeated on their way there? Warriors vs Cavs 3: Battle of the Undefeated. It already sounds crazy, but we are eight winnable basketball games away from this being a reality. We should all want this.
The real question is this; is it a good thing or a bad thing if the Cavs and Warriors both sweep their way into The Finals?
It is undoubtedly a good thing.
Here’s a bit of truth for you; nobody really wants the underdog to win unless it’s their underdog.
Why should we root for some other team to get in the way of a confrontation of such epic proportions. Super teams are good for sports leagues. They get more people excited. They make us rethink what we believed to be possible for one team to accomplish.
In the NFL, you get maybe one super team a decade. Hockey and baseball present them with even less frequency. The NBA, however, produces them all the time. It’s a function of basketball that a few players can make such a dramatic impact.
We have a chance for the same two super teams to face each other in the NBA Finals three years in a row, and on top of that, they could be equally rested and healthy thanks to the ease in which they are dispatching their opponents.
For the first time ever two teams are through two rounds of the NBA playoffs with four game sweeps in the same year. We should all be excited about this. We should cherish this.
We should all be hoping for Fo, Fo, Fo, Seven.
Ben is a multi-sport writer for theocho.ca. He’s an avid fan of all things post-secondary, along with any sport you can name. Follow Ben on Twitter at @benny_sauce.
