As the fact that I picked against Miami each of the past three years when predictions are made for the final round indicates, I have enjoyed rooting against the Heat as much as the next non-Floridian or Cleveland resident. You know that I was sharing some of the giddy joy in that bar on Tuesday night when the Spurs were less than a minute away from a fifth title. Alas, that legendary game bears so much resemblance to another Lone Star State Game 6 meltdown, the Texas Rangers twice being within one strike of winning the 2011 World Series. I'm relatively certain that at this rate, it's either going to be the Cowboys, the Texans or maybe even the Stars choking away a title in 2015.
While I think a good majority of this NBA season unfolded pretty much as expected, the way it finished was spectacular. And at this point, you are either ignorant or bitter to deny giving credit to the Miami team that ultimately delivered the championship it was favored to win all season long. This team has been a deserving favorite for the past three years, and—barring an unprecedented trade or dramatic overnight rebuilding of some other entire roster—will almost certainly be favorites next year and maybe three more after that. As I remarked to a co-worker today, now I guess I know how other fans in other cities felt during the Jordan years.
Now you might have read that last paragraph and said, "How can you say 'pretty much as expected' when you got the last series wrong?"
Valid point ... except for me having picked the Heat at the beginning of the year, of course. Looking back on those predictions now, I only got the final places in the division standings correct for 11 of the 30 teams. However, I had 13 of the 16 teams that made the playoffs correct. I got five of the opening round winners and three of the losers right, two of the winners and one loser correct in the next round, and I nailed the winner and loser of the Eastern Conference. In the round-by-round picks for the playoffs, I finished 12-3 with six series predicted in the exact number of games, a mark that I'm sure is one of my better records of recent years.
On the one hand, the conclusion I draw at the end of this NBA season is that there is very little we get in the way of surprises. In essence, most everybody will pick the Heat to come out of the East and the only real question is what team they presumably beat in the NBA Finals. On the other hand, we should probably be grateful any time we're treated a series like the Heat-Spurs Finals we got this year. If you're a fan of good basketball, then I'd say in the end, you got competition of the highest quality.
Ever since David Stern levied his ridiculous fine against San Antonio when Gregg Popovich sent his own "big three" home before a nationally televised game in Miami, I had been rooting for the Spurs to win it all this year. They are a team I have always respected, enjoyed and defended when talking to the seemingly countless supposed basketball fans who can only call Tim Duncan or the team "boring." I can understand the disappointment that fans in that city must feel, but they have nothing to be ashamed of. I saw more than 1,000 of their fans greeted the runners-up at the airport today, which is great. My immediate tendency is to believe that those aging veterans who still have a very rich history of success and multiple rings to go with it could have a very hard time getting over this loss, but there were still plenty of reasons for Spurs fans to remain optimistic—namely one Kawhi Leonard.
Going forward, there will inevitably be continued outrage at the Heat and especially at LeBron. However, what he and the team deals with is probably worse than that Jordan era I referred to earlier. As the Palm Beach Post's Ethan Skolnick put it today on the radio, the four-letter network I lovingly borrow Dan Patrick's reference to as "The Mothership" has created what he referred to as "argument television." And that network's power then carries over to Twitter, to Facebook, to everyday conversation in which many try to draw sweeping conclusions about legacies from single, otherwise mundane incidents. I can't cite an example off the top of the head, but I am almost certain that I at some point in this blog's history—hell, probably even at some point this very season—I have done the same thing.
If I learned nothing else this year though, that's going to end. I can gripe about how Dwayne Wade is holding up three fingers in that photo in the center of the graphic above while his teammates are holding up two (not to mention his asinine insistence at the subsequent press conference that he actually be addressed as "Three" instead of his given name), further demonstrating some of the ego problems that have made this team so unpopular. But I can no longer deny that the players, the coaches and the executives that have made this Heat team repeat NBA Champions did not earn the success.
Sure, I can root for some other team to upset Miami just for difference's sake, but the reality now is clear: This is LeBron's world, and we're all just living in it. I used to laugh about how arrogant it seemed when James said in reference to titles at that ludicrous July 2010 pep rally, "Not one. Not two. Not three, not four, not five, not six ... not seven."
That got repeated a lot, but he immediately added, "And when I say that, I really believe it." After this latest championship, "only" his second (so far), he has proven why there's reason we should all start believing it too.
No comments:
Post a Comment