The ingredients are there. The beginning has already been beyond promising. Could the NBA and basketball fans–hell, sports fans–be in for something classic, something that lasts?
Could Spurs-Heat II earn its place along iconic moments in the NBA’s often over-celebrated past? Through two games it’s got potential, and it’s about time.
Nostalgia is a powerful thing that makes for warm memories, but in the NBA it’s hurt the league’s appeal more than it’s helped. Nothing the kids of today are watching compares to their parent’s NBA, they keep hearing. It’s hogwash, but it persists. The league David Stern built thrived thanks to two consecutive eras of competitive greatness that have always remained the standard for the teams and players that have come since, and an obstacle for fans to climb over before they can fully appreciate what they have now.
Get too swept up in Kevin Durant or Chris Paul or LeBron James and there is always someone who wants to hit you over the head with Bird, Magic and Jordan, with a little Dr. J drizzled in.
The Heat couldn’t possibly compare with the Bulls, even if they could be more than halfway there in a week’s time, if they can beat a team with more battle-tested veterans than anything Jordan ever dealt with. James vs. Jordan? It is always Jordan, even if James’ accomplishments are nearly in lockstep with Jordan’s through the same stage of their careers.
Stern’s NBA thrived in the ’80s thanks to the ready-made, easy access storylines – black vs. white; East vs. West; Celtic grit vs. Lakers glamour. But the heights it reached seemed even more dramatic given the league was lifting itself from a base of its own stereotypes: too black; too drug laden, too not-ready-for-primetime viewing.
In the ’90s, with the table set, Michael Jordan swooped in and provided a league with global ambitions and a media machine on the cusp of going 24-7 digital, the easiest, most compelling storyline of all: the best basketball player of all time and (arguably, which made it fun) the best there has ever been in any sport.
All of this happened in the space of perhaps 15 years. It didn’t hurt at all that those years – say 1980 to 1995 – coincided with the taste-defining baby boomers arriving at their sports consuming peak, investing their time and money into their nostalgia too. But it couldn’t last forever. Bird and Magic retired. Jordan did too, more times than he should have.
And for much of the next two decades everything the NBA has offered has been choked by the glory of what came before.
It’s time for that to stop. Just because the most recent past was great shouldn’t mean it can’t be surpassed. It happens in all spheres of life. Is there a car on the road today that wouldn’t blow away the best of what was on offer 20 years ago? There isn’t a consumer on the planet who thinks computers were better when software came on floppy disks.
But in sports we can’t help ourselves. Even as the sport industry gets wealthier, the incentives greater and the training regimes more sophisticated – all market-type factors that should inevitably make today’s athletes better at everything – the tendency is to look at basketball played by a bunch of skinny guys from one country in the 1980s as somehow superior than the global talent meet being played out in the NBA (and other sports) today.
What the Heat and Spurs are doing should help change those perceptions. With some luck, the two back-to-back Finals could go down as the best of their kind. No two teams have ever played consecutive seven-game series in the NBA’s so-called modern age (post-1979); only once have they played 13 games over two seasons.
The last time NBA Finals opponents met in consecutive seasons was in 1997 and 1998 when Michael Jordan and the Bulls completed their second three-peat over a relatively ordinary Utah Jazz team that couldn’t push Chicago past six games in either case.
And while Finals rematches happened with some regularity in the 1980s, they didn’t often deliver on drama: the 1989 Pistons extinguished the Lakers 4-0 in their rematch; the Lakers and Celtics met three times in four years beginning in 1984, but only the first series required seven games while the second time around for the Philadelphia 76ers and the Lakers resulted in a 4-0 sweep for Dr. J and Moses Malone.
The first Spurs-Heat series went seven and provided nearly unsurpassed drama as Miami narrowly survived Game 6, and Game 7 was only decided when LeBron proved his mettle in the clutch by stepping into a jumper with 27 seconds left that put Miami up four and ahead for good.
It’s risky to predict how a best-of-seven series will shake out after two games, but at the very least, Spur-Heat II, through two, has delivered moments that could be ingredients in the making of an epic. The Heat trailed Game 1 by two with 4:09 left when James had to leave for good because of severe leg cramps and the Spurs exploded for a 16-3 run — a rapid-fire rendition of their five-parts-moving-as-one orchestra that leaves basketball purists giddy.
James’ absence down the stretch in turn left the ignorant or misinformed two days to tee-off on the supposed character flaws demonstrated by his body involuntarily shutting down in response the extreme heat and humidity in an AT&T Centre without air conditioning. All of which set the stage for the Heat star’s tour de force in Game 2, when he scored 25 of his 35 points on 11-of-14 shooting over the second and third quarter to dig Miami out of an 11-point hole, and yet still found it in himself to hit an open Chris Bosh for a corner three that gave Miami the lead for good with 1:18 left.
It’s just two games in, but they were an exceptional two games where the two broad competing themes were on full display – the individual dominance within a team setting that is James’ calling card vs. the Spurs and their whole-hearted commitment to five equal parts making a greater whole.
It could be a series for all time. If it is, it will be better than anything that even the giants of the recent past could claim.
The time is now. Don’t let anyone tell you differently.
