On the NBA: A Fan’s Wonderings

The realest question of the Eastern Conference Finals is this: what does it take to turn Miami up to the level of unbeatable? And can any team (by now we can only hope it’s the Spurs) mitigate their effort enough to defeat them in a series, or even push them to seven games? Perhaps tonight will prove otherwise, but it seems that the epic barn-burners of games 1 and 2 were a thing to be seen only before the Heat’s attention was brought totally to the series; it seems that one loss is all it takes, anymore. At that point, they’ll ratchet their team game up to a point that’s downright scary. The hope that the Pacers could be a real competitor for them looks lost after game three’s Indianapolis smattering, and you’ll have a hard time convincing me that the only reason we felt any differently, the only reason we believed in Indiana as a true threat, for a moment, was that we’ve been trying so hard to believe in the kind of cinematic showdown that so suddenly seemed possible in this series. But, in the past two seasons, when has Miami really allowed any of those to happen? They always push extra hard on the gas before things get legitimately frightening, and they never tolerate an interesting distance between themselves and their enemies, deep into any series. The Celtics took them closest to the brink in last year’s ECF, but LeBron turned game six into a non-game before it had the chance to get interesting, and then we were back to South Beach for a contest that was never in question.

Can the Spurs bring enough nasty to make this any different? Only time will tell. And San Antonio can be thankful that they’ve bought themselves at least a week of it with their sweep—yet another instance of them proving their skeptics dead wrong. It’s because of this trend that I’ll not partake in the folly of predicting what will happen in the finals. And, I realize, such a prediction would only be the result of my hopes for a compelling series.

My more pressing desires lie in what happens this off-season—my team has been extinguished, already, and so has yours. I’m back to the never-ending long-play schemery of the NBA’s new realities. I’m back to doing silly, imaginary salary math, and hoping that the increasingly impactful injury bug tilts my team’s way for an entire season. I’m hoping for the development of players into irreplaceable defensive gears, and shooters effective enough to open up the paint. Is my team working hard this off-season? When do they start? What’s their routine? Can I go with, and make sure they’re doing it right? Please?

Can I have a job with the team? I promise that I’ll be helpful; irreverent sabermetricious leanings, new perceptive angles into the game; I swear I’m the wave of the future, I am. I’m worried about the game coming too close to college’s, like you should be, too—Tom Thibodeau’s been offering too much proof of what a tautly-engineered system can do for you in this league, regardless your level of talent. And the Heat, the seeming exception, have a coach who aspires toward such comprehensiveness—and it’s not LeBron who takes them over the top (just ask Cleveland how that works) but the depth of young players, and wise veterans, whose basketball culture’s been starkly defined.

And, really—mostly—they’ve found their way around the biggest wall of all, and just figured out a way to pay their guys so much less than the rest of us. Free Agency may soon destroy this dynasty, but, for the moment, they seem more attune to the concept of investment (and Team) than so much of the rest of the league. Their bevy of disarming role-players seem to be staring down the barrel of recent history, and see that there was a decade in which the most decisive playoff-shooting came from Steve Kerr and Robert Horry, and that no doubling of their salaries elsewhere would equate to the value that such a legacy brings. Just ask Kerr, who’s quickly compiling one of the more impressive post-playing resumes of his generation. The Heat are loaded with role-players who, similarly, see the tremendous value in sacrificing some salary to be part of a successful franchise.

No, I’m not able to stick to a topic, because Yes, it’s that time again—that time where the games begin to dwindle and fate hardens, with less and less concrete, on-the-court happenings to analyze. Just take a look at how much slower your “Top NBA Stories” list is filling in, and how much more often the ghosts of MJ and Phil need be evoked, to fill it. It’s nearly the off-season (for most of us invested fans, it already is), that time when the irreversibility of another year gone turns us, again, into the most nostalgic, most ambling of philosophers.

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