Raging, Machines, and the NBA Playoffs: David Roth's Weak in Review

This article is part of VICE Sports' 2016 NBA Playoffs coverage.

For all the avant-garde personal stupidities that youth allows, there is a hangover. Not necessarily in the literal sense—hangovers are more of a breakfast-compromising abstraction until the approach of your thirties, at which point they can no longer be treated effectively with ibuprofen and eggs and instead require a medically supervised course of treatment in a sensory deprivation tank; once the mid-thirties are in sight, nothing less than a complete blood replacement will do it. The youth-hangover is more a hangover of the soul, and there is not exactly a cure. As with any hangover, you just limp through it, and try to hold your tenderized head as high as possible despite the very clear memory of the time you went on the subway tracks to win a one-dollar bet or got fired from a temp job seven hours into your first day. To name some, uh, examples.

Making peace with the metaphorical (and, for an unlucky multitude, literal) JNCOs in our closets is maybe the greater part of growing up. We don't necessarily need to reconcile the version of ourselves who spends years backing and blundering and property-damaging towards adulthood with the person we wind up becoming. It's more a matter of recognizing the elements of that pre-person in our later selves, and then figuring out how to negotiate the difference. Still, it can be tough not to wonder where that thrashing nightmare person has gone, and what he or she was so fired-up about.

I am by no means reconciled or debugged, and to the extent that I've figured anything out in my thirties it's mostly a matter of channeling the things that used to fuck up my life in directions where they won't harm anyone else. Maturity as a series of underground nuclear tests doesn't sound fun, necessarily, but it's at least safer than conducting them in bars three times a week, or at family get-togethers. I know, too, that there is in me, still, a person who is not very much like myself. He's angrier and makes worse choices. He's maybe more hopeful, but he is also drunk and has been eating nothing but pan-fried pork dumplings for like, 36 consecutive days (honestly, it would've been healthier for me to have just taken up hard drugs). So who the hell knows what he's thinking, really. He looks a little like me, but I don't really know if we'd be friends.

That guy absolutely hates the San Antonio Spurs.

I disagree with him, but I understand where he's coming from, to an extent. That version of me is a New Jersey Nets fan, and he remembers watching the Spurs' affectless disassembly of the Nets in the 2003 NBA Finals, and remembers it with some saltiness. But also he's both a young person and an idiot, and in those Spurs, which were no less rational and laser-calibrated than this year's model, there are a number of things that are easy to oppose.

This is maybe more true when they're applying their gravitational brand of inevitability to a team you care about not wisely but way too well, but nonetheless, in San Antonio's inexorable reasonableness and the way they coolly apply best practices until arriving at a solution or an open corner three, there is a vision of adulthood that does not look like much fun compared to its more mercurial alternative. Watching a team defined by pyrotechnical improvisation and quicksilver virtuosity get pinned, helpless, beneath the rubber sole of San Antonio's biz-casual loafers, can—for someone suitably grandiose and dumpling-addled—feel almost like a sort of death. Not in the disappointed-fan sense but in the way a rainy Tuesday morning's commute is smothering precisely because it is so rote and nonnegotiable.

The best basketball teams can take on this sort of gravity, and it is a heavy thing to pull against. The Golden State Warriors are that good, and so when the Portland Trail Blazers, a team whose strength lies in its ability to get extremely weird within its very reasonable scheme, open a lead against them, the game takes on a sort of thumbnail existential significance. It's a less-good team against a good team, but it is also Hope against Likelihood, or a scratch-and-win ticket against a proprietary Wall Street trading algorithm. Playoff underdogs are mostly just less talented or seamless than their opponents, but the right kind of underdog—the inexplicably overachieving in Portland's case, or the dazzlingly chaotic in Oklahoma City's—can seem like something more than that. Of course, the Nets were more than an underdog to me, because I had been investing frankly baffling amounts of my emotional wellbeing in them for most of my life. Contrasted with the Spurs, they were nothing less than the unceilinged possibilities of youth, trying to crash through and jump over and otherwise evade the even, meticulous procedures of the adult world. The romance of that is mostly in how doomed it is, but there is some romance in it.

The Thunder inhabit this role well. It's too early in what promises to be a fascinating series to say that the Thunder are similarly doomed. They were vaporized in the first game, and it demeans their effectiveness in the second to say that they won only because the last few seconds unfolded in a psychedelic upside-down universe ruled by Dion Waiters, even though they did. But in their unpredictability and straining uncoachable youthfulness, the Thunder represent something like the opposite of the Spurs, who appear to be successfully negotiating an impossible dynastic succession in real time. The series is more evenly matched than the first game made it appear; this rivalry is, as Jared Dubin wrote last week, almost impossibly competitive. But the magic of the Spurs, and the thing that makes them so detestable at one age and so beautiful at another, is the inevitability they bring to things.

This is not the unkillable Rasputin-esque imperviousness of the Warriors, who can erase a ten-point lead in a matter of seconds and appear to have an unseemly amount of fun doing it. The Spurs, at this point in their evolution into a machine of pure basketball reason, do something more like what the Kansas City Royals did to the New York Mets in the last World Series—they simply keep coming, with no more mercilessness than water finding its level. Opponents are either able to withstand this pressure or they are not. From one perspective, this can look almost cruel; the crystalline, probing ball-movement really is pitiless in its search for a weakness. If you are betting against that, for reasons of partisanship or hope or blind and defiant youth, beauty and exertion can somehow cancel the tides, it will break your heart. You see your future in it.

Or you think you do, anyway. The most singular and strange thing about growing up, at every age, is that you don't necessarily notice it happening. Things recede and rise, quite naturally; you do not wake up different one day, but you do wake up differently. At some point, it becomes possible to see that these games we're watching are stories with more than one thing to show us. There is beauty in the underdog's defiance and a self-belief beyond reason, and there is also beauty in the subsumed and communal thing that the Spurs do, and in the playful merciless expansion that is the Warriors' game.

There is something to admire in the quest to break the Spurs' stainless machine, or to trash the Warriors' heedless party—in denying the inevitable and asserting a little bit of fuck-you unreason where it's needed. But when the best teams are this close to perfect, there is also something to admire in that, and in what they do together. Nothing in basketball is inevitable, really, except for how elusive and uncatchable the game itself is, and the way in which it is never fully revealed or quite as reasonable as it seems. The teams play each other, but they are all pursuing something—an impossible perfection, an endlessly retreating finish line—that cannot quite be caught. That quest has not changed, and belongs to every team. It's hard to say how watching this changes, exactly. But, at some point, you start watching the pursuit more than anything else.