“A lot of bullshit happens in this country. But a lot of great things happen, too.” – Kevin Durant, speaking in Paris. Not initially sure which country he’s referring to, between the host and his own; anyway, he’s right.
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It’s about Jaylen and Jayson, to be clear, but we’ll return to them. Everybody else involved with this Celtics run made it possible. To follow the blueprint for what the Spurs and Sixers were looking for in essence, and then pull it off as efficiently as they did, has to be maddening to detractors. Nevertheless, Boston was the best team in the league all season. It turns out: that means all season.
After seven years of will-they, won’t-they together, Jaylen Brown and Jayson Tatum finally put it together, albeit with the help of Jrue Holiday and Kristaps Porzingis, as well as mainstays returned or otherwise in Al Horford, Peyton Pritchard, Sam Hauser and Derrick White. Brad Stevens ran his game on the rest of the NBA. Now, finally, the Boston Celtics are the NBA champions.
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There was no foreseeable way this would keep up, and indeed, the cracks are beginning to show. However: every other night in New York City, you can expect to catch a competitor. It’s been a decade since the Knicks and Rangers were so similarly relevant that they warranted the ice-to-hardwood changeover videos of Madison Square Garden to return.
Last Tuesday, an exhaustingly frantic game down the stretch saw the Rangers blow the lead to the Carolina Hurricanes, favored in the series. Former number one overall pick Alexis Lafrenière, previously a scapegoat who just enjoyed his best season in the NHL, scored twice, but the night’s dough was only on the rise.
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“You’re doing it for your teammates, you’re doing it for the team, you’re doing it for the fans, and you’re doing it for yourself.” – Willis Reed
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In a manner of speaking, anyway. We like hearing about troubling things, acknowledging them in our own ways (“Jackass” or “Ah, damn,” usually) and moving on as soon as the tribute spot on the television allows us.
If you had the remote in your hands, you would want to bypass that, but – oh, dear! Sorry – the sponsors paid for guaranteed placement during the primetime slot, which means you have to sit through it. What was that person’s name again, and what happened to them?
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At some time between revolutionizing his position and casually accumulating scoring nights the likes of which would be almost any other player’s career highlight, Steph Curry re-inverted the basketball court. As singular as he is a shooter, playmaker and scorer, his exploits have influenced the way teams play, even beyond his own Golden State Warriors.
A hallmark of the Warriors dynasty – and, accordingly, a window into NBA team assembly prior to and during Golden State’s run – has been a lack of a dominant center in the traditional sense. Because the Warriors typically shoot more threes than any other type of shot and tend to eschew the midrange and rim, and because they have a nontraditional big man, Draymond Green, act as center in their most important lineups, the notion of a center in the Shaq or Hakeem mold never made sense for the Warriors; many other teams tried to follow the blueprint, to mixed results at best.
If Curry was the endpoint of the NBA’s first three-point revolution, he was also indirectly the catalyst for revitalizing the center position. Even as we are inundated with reminders that the NBA’s position classifications are antiquated and, in cases where contract bonuses are tied to honors and awards, harmful, they nevertheless remain useful as a contextual foundation for what a player could be on offense, a foundation, even if that doesn’t pan out: Luka and Giannis are point guards in the bodies of forwards; Russell Westbrook is essentially a tiny center; Karl-Anthony Towns is a massive, volume-scoring shooting guard.
Through this lens, no single player in today’s NBA represents the return of the center specifically better than two-time defending MVP Nikola Jokic, whose pursuit of a threepeat this season has already taken shape. As his Denver Nuggets press for top playoff seeding in the Western Conference, Jokic, nominally a center, is among the league leaders in assists, something only Wilt Chamberlain has previously done as a center.
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Not so fast – To focus on the “sudden” rush to the bottom for Victor Wembanyama and, especially after their recent matchup on national TV, Scoot Henderson is to overlook what lies directly before us this NBA season. In what was bound to be a year of questions surrounding contenders, we’ve returned to another slate full of them.
In any case, we return, steeled to run directly into the fire. Who knows what awaits this caravan? New stats, new players, a continuous flow of publicly-available scandals: it isn’t all here, but we’ll make do. Forget STOCKS, or AST:TO ratio. The new way to identify player efficacy is assists+steals+blocks divided by/turnovers. Get used to it, identify your new Point Gawd, and get ready for tip-off.
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He wasn’t the inspiration for the logo – he couldn’t have been, not at that time, nor under those circumstances. That was inevitably going to be the territory of less outspoken, likely fairer-skinned players, the kind who bowed knee to the ownership class and played into media narratives about themselves at a time when the league needed characters.
Even after eleven championships as a player, including two as the first Black head coach of a team in the four major North American men’s sports, Bill Russell was never destined to be what the league wanted the logo to be. By the time of its introduction in 1969, Russ, who passed away Sunday at the age of 88, was already so much more.
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The days are getting longer. They look short but continue for ages. At once, a new day will be upon you and gone almost before it happened. They pile up, the days, and the blurring of colors at dusk can just as easily be the memories of events that slip between the cracks, regardless of importance.
When we think about the things that are familiar, we can have a sense of present-nostalgia: yes, I know that deli; of course, I’ve seen that player many times; indeed, I fell out without ever actually falling in with a group of people during that game. We think we know who we are, and we assert that to the world, only for the world to remind us of a different reality.
For a time almost destined to be locked inside of itself, quarantined or otherwise, the Philadelphia 76ers are a perfect emblem. The sense of what the Sixers are, or were, or will be(?) has shifted in the various allegedly-conscious organs of fans and onlookers nearly by the minute ever since Ben Simmons essentially ruled himself AWOL. Joel Embiid is currently enjoying an MVP-caliber campaign, this time as earnest as ever, but – thanks to old pal Daryl Morey – here comes James Harden, and the bevy of his flavor in seeming full force.
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Jesse D. Garrabrant/Getty Images
In the grand scheme of these playoffs, it is a singular moment that, taken to any other end, wouldn’t have mattered. The capital-A Adult Jimmy Butler shot just preceding it had tied the game at 90 apiece, meaning it would have gone to overtime anyway. Like the Damian Lillard shot against Oklahoma City before it – but also, so very unlike the Damian Lillard shot against Oklahoma City before it – the fortune of the shooter’s team would, at the very least, have been no worse in the moment after had he missed.
When Kawhi’s moonshot clinked-clanked-clunked-and-clinked-again before dropping in, sealing the Toronto Raptors’ 92-90 victory and sending the representatives of the lone Canadian outpost in the NBA to the Eastern Conference Finals, the basketball world stopped, if only for a brief respite. Now, with that ball through the hoop and the Raptors on to a date with the Milwaukee Bucks, as many questions have arisen as were answered.
Tuesdays With Horry 