The Narrative Structure of NBA Coverage is Flawed

Between preseason, regular season, and playoffs, the Miami Heat played 110 games this season. That seems like more than enough space for a comprehensive narrative arc, a beginning, middle, and end. Basketball media certainly wraps around that structure—months of previews and prognostications slide seamlessly into a rising tide of analysis, all pushing towards the crest of the playoffs and a receding wash of recaps and reviews. Right now the Heat find themselves caught in this post-season undertow, being pulled back out toward open water.

It is assumed that their Finals loss to the Spurs marks some sort of endpoint for The Big Three and their era in Miami. An enormous loss to an old foe happens to overlap with the opportunity for all three stars to opt out of their contracts this summer. It seems obvious that their mystic power has been undone and it is time for a rewrite. All of those questions are real, but it is the chronological artifice of an NBA season that presents this as the end of something, with a new beginning to follow. The truth is we could just as easily be in the middle of this story.

An NBA season is a structural contrivance that creates an easy shorthand for storytelling. The Spurs find themselves facing the same artificial endpoint. They appear to have penned the final chapter on a stunning season of dominance, but it doesn't take much imagination to recognize that this story really began last season. For the Spurs, last year's Finals was the rising action, a struggle and defeat setting the stage for the climax of last Sunday. Their championship run was made infinitely more compelling by the shroud of last year's loss. Ray Allen's three-pointer in Game 6 last season was not a narrative back-breaker, but a turning point. It just took a year for resolution to arrive.

But even that may be taking the narrow view. Perhaps this story is not so much about this particular iteration of the Spurs as it is about Gregg Popovich and Tim Duncan and a journey that began seventeen years ago. Maybe we are reaching the closing stanza of an epic cowboy poem that now spans three decades. And the Spurs fall prey to the assumption of impending dissolution every season. As Duncan, Tony Parker and Manu Ginobili have aged, every season has been framed as the last hurrah and as the one in which Father Time finally collects his pound of flesh.

The point is that narrative cycles are our own malleable creations and, as much as we dote on them, they don't have the power to dictate the future. You can see each individual season as its own story or as a chapter in a larger tale, but either way we build them around actual events, not the other way around.

Perhaps The Big Three, having been deconstructed on the court, are prepared to deconstruct themselves off the court as well. Maybe they see the writing on the digital wall and recognize that their collective utility has expired. But it seems just as likely that they are building towards something else, a different sort of ending (or continuation, or whatever). There is the lurking shadow of Carmelo Anthony. There is a moderate amount of money to be spent as Mario Chalmers, Shane Battier, Ray Allen, Toney Douglas, James Jones, and Rashard Lewis all see their contracts end. There is the hope-springing-eternal spectre of a healthy Greg Oden and the opportunity to rebuild this team into something different. The Heat have stared their inadequacies in the face in these Finals. Who is to say they will kowtow to them, rather than rise up and throttle them?

The Spurs spent 82 regular season games preparing for their penultimate challenge, a challenge that had been laid before them in exquisite detail last June. It would seem to me that there is something of a template in that process for the Heat to follow. Heroes need nemeses and the Heat and Spurs have each other (put that on a t-shirt Ryan Gosling and Macaulay Culkin).

Are we so sure there aren't more epic battles just over the horizon?

I don't pretend to know what LeBron James or any other NBA free agent will do this summer. But whatever happens with him, his compatriots and the Miami Heat it will be part of a larger story, with narrative strands stretching in all directions, past and future, and far beyond this particular moment in time, these finals, and the end of this season.