There’s been an awful lot of hand-wringing about just how underwhelming the NBA Playoffs have been so far, and much of it is perfectly justified. With a few exceptions, it’s mostly been an excuse to showcase the historic dominance from the Cavs and Warriors, but let’s also not act like this isn’t precisely what many of us have been pining for all along.
When Game 1 tips off on Thursday night, it’ll mark the first time in league history that two teams have met in the Finals in three consecutive seasons. Given the circumstances, it’s hard not to put this looming trilogy right up there with some of the greatest rivalries of all-time. And let’s not forget that these two teams have real antipathy for one another.
For the past two years, we’ve seen all sorts of passive-aggressive shots fired across their respective bows: there was Steph Curry saying he hoped the Cavs’ locker-room still smelled like champagne, LeBron’s ‘RIP 3-1 Lead’ Halloween decor, the Warriors’ cheeky Super-Villain-themed party, Draymond Green admitting that he wants to annihilate the Cavs, and so much more. There’s also the added wrinkle that each of the past two championship series have been, in significant ways, altered by injuries and/or suspensions.
The Cavs were without both Kevin Love and Kyrie Irving in their first meeting, Curry was still recovering from a knee injury last year, and Draymond had to sit out a critical Game 5 after surreptitiously smacking LeBron in the cojones.
The 2017 NBA Finals will presumably – knock on proverbial wood – feature two completely healthy teams operating at their full capacity. There’s no excuses for this one. But no matter who emerges from the smoldering rubble cradling the Larry O’Brien trophy, this almost certainly won’t be the end of it. Not by a long shot.
Both of these teams are set to contend for many years to come. The Warriors are young and have one of the greatest collections of talent ever assembled. The Cavs have LeBron James, who in his 14th NBA season is playing the best basketball of his career (he’s also surrounded by comparatively-young talent). It’s easy to imagine these two teams meeting in the Finals several more times before all is said and done.
And there are so many other reasons why Cavs-Warriors, Part 3 is good for the fans and the league as a whole, not the least of which has to do with ratings, which will be a tremendous boon for the NBA’s macro-level growth, and by proxy, its overall economic health. The 2015 NBA Finals were the highest-rated Finals since Michael Jordan’s sixth championship in 1998, and the 2016 Finals was the most-watched championship series since they began airing on ABC.
Beyond that, story-lines abound, and they’re infinitely compelling. Every series needs those players who elicit a special kind of hatred from opposing fans, and this one features some of the league’s most aggressively-divisive superstars.
People love to root against LeBron. That one’s a given. It’s one of our unalienable rights as American citizens. Life, liberty, and the freedom to extract great personal joy from LeBron’s failures.
But for Durant, it’s a whole new dynamic. KD said recently that, win or lose, he’s absolutely certain he made the right decision to join the Warriors. Winning, obviously, would be vindication. But if he loses, the trolling will never cease. It will be vile, vicious, unrelenting, and endlessly entertaining.
Curry is likewise entering unfamiliar territory. After being named the first-ever unanimous league MVP following a record-setting, 73-win season that ended with his team blowing a 3-1 lead in the Finals, the whole basketball-watching world has been forced to re-evaluate his place in the NBA’s pecking order.
Among a certain subset of fans and media personnel, a Warriors loss would also be a further indictment on the over-reliance of three-point shooting, regardless of whether that argument is rooted in reality. And then there’s Draymond Green, everybody’s favorite pariah outside of the Bay Area, he of the incessant chatter and unnatural body movements.
Another thing that can’t be overstated is just how insane it is that LeBron James is making his seventh-straight Finals appearance. He’s made no secret that he’s chasing the ghost of that one guy in Chicago, and the accolades he keeps racking up along the way make it increasingly-difficult to keep him out of the conversation as the Greatest of All-Time.
What’s even crazier is that the defending champion Cavs are considered the underdogs heading into these Finals, according to the Vegas odds-makers.
That’s just how good the Warriors are, arguably even better than they were last year during their 73-win season. Their 12-0 record through the first three rounds of the playoffs is the best postseason start in league history and has some wondering whether they can be the first team to ever sweep their way to an NBA title. The reasonable answer is “probably not,” but it’s remarkable that it’s still technically a possibility, however remote.
Of course, there’s a contingent of fans and media who see the Cavs-Warriors three-match as indicative of everything that’s wrong with the league, in terms of its lack of parity. They certainly have a point. The way they’ve steamrolled through their respective competition has rendered the regular season almost moot.
A lot of us just want to root for the little guy, and let’s face it, most of our hometown teams – actual or adopted – are emphatically the little guys when stacked up against these two Goliaths. So it’s hard to get excited about a series when you don’t really have a dog in this fight.
Except for one big caveat: with the immense collection of talent set to take the court on Thursday night, we’re primed to witness the game of basketball played at its absolute highest level. That should be more than enough to get even the most ardent and/or jaded basketball purists excited.
As an unapologetically-dismissive Durant said recently, you can simply turn off your television if you don’t like what you see, but we have a pretty good feeling most of you will be glued to the tube for every minute of it, just like the rest of us.
