We’re down to Chicago and Miami in the East with Dallas awaiting the winner of Memphis and the Thunder out here on our side of the country. My dream of all dreams would be for Memphis to somehow pull off the unthinkable and at least get to the Finals, though I know it could never happen. Memphis success would validate the Morey blueprint of amassing talent at every position and hoping it can come together and overwhelm. (Ironic because they got here by just sucking enough to draft Pau [and trade him for what became Z-bo and Marc], Mayo, Gay, Conley, and Thabeet [Battier].) Memphis as a team is just absolutely fascinating to me. But I’ll get to that later.
So first we have the East where the Heat will beat the Bulls in 5. You’ll see Lebron and Wade take turns on Rose and a lot of nice headlines hyping that up. (Dwyane Wade is the most underrated player in basketball right now.) So the Heat will win and no one will really care because they stand nothing to gain from any of this. It’s not even really an accomplishment for that team to win the title. (This is also something somewhat fascinating – why do you pick a team where winning would not be an achievement? Is it because twenty years down the line, when you have eight rings, no one will remember?)
I can’t see either of OKC or Memphis getting past that Dallas team. And I also feel pretty bad for Dallas playing without Caron Butler. Same goes for the Grizz I suppose without Gay. I almost always immediately feel pain/sympathy for teams experiencing success while with their stars injured because I immediately recall how I felt watching the ‘Stros in the series without Pettite. Even though injuries completely alter team dynamics (who knows if Memphis would be this good without Tony Allen getting so much burn), there are few things in life that burn the mind more than ‘what ifs?’. Also, Dirk is the most underrated superstar of the modern era.
That Memphis team is absolutely fascinating to me as I said in the opening. They’re built around skill in the paint with force on the perimeter, the complete inverse of most teams. Tony Allen is just so, so, so utterly raw. Everytime I see him do something, I keep thinking back to that underground clip from the lockerroom where he blurts out, “I’m a Boston Celtic,” and saying to myself “yes, you are, and you just infused some Boston Celtics into what was once a pathetic franchise.” (Sidenote: before they traded Perk, to me personally, there wasn’t another phrase in basketball like “Boston Celtics” that immediately meant something. When I heard the phrase “Boston Celtics,” I just thought of manhood and raw grit. You just took a chunk of that and put it into two franchises.)
O.J. Mayo is also an interesting individual given that he was pretty much Lebron at the junior high level and then turned out to not be as big or athletic as previously believed, and also not a point guard. I also like the name O.J. Mayo. I would not trade Courtney Lee for him however.
The inevitable Dallas-Miami Finals will be gut wrenching for Houstonians in particular; I do not think Facebook will be bearable if the Mavs somehow pulled out a championship. We would also lose our sole trump card: see, right now, we have nothing on the Spurs. But despite Dallas’ immense superiority in the win column in the past decade, we can always say “we have titles” as a saving grace in discourse with MavsFan. With a title, that is gone. You can’t say “we have 2, you guys have 1.” That holds little weight as recency trumps quantity when the difference is only one title.
