The NBA Finals And Whatever Comes Next: David Roth's Weak In Review

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

There are an infinite number of ways to be wrong about sports, which is one of the things that gives me hope for my future as someone who writes about sports; I don't expect to start being right anytime soon, but there's no reason why I can't be wrong in different ways each week. But in this galaxy of endless twinkling wrongnesses and uncountable sucking black holes, there is a lodestar that shines brightest. This particular way to fail stands out both for its popularity and its obvious ham-headed dopiness. It is versatile, and can be used in ways that are both genteel—think of Joe Buck grandly framing up a baseball game's narrative in the bottom of the fourth—and… whatever the hell Stephen A. Smith is going for in his more thunderously opaque moments. Among all the ways to be wrong about sports, the surest shortcut to showing your ass is to talk about them as if they've already happened, and you saw the last episode.

It's not just that you'll be wrong more often than you won't be, although there is also that. It's more that talking about sports with a sense of Olympian certitude is the most high-handed and boring way to be wrong. It's watching the postgame show and skipping the game. It's scrolling through a story and going straight to the comments. It's reading a Vox explainer about anthropogenic climate change instead of going outside. It is not, strictly speaking, in the job description for people who write about sports, although you could be forgiven for thinking that it was.

It's also a stupendously bad look—declaiming windily on What It All Means before you actually know what the "it" in question is, let alone how it will end, is prideful and, on balance, not a very savvy play. But if you're going to make a claim to authority, there's a certain fake-it-til-you-make-it pragmatism to speaking authoritatively. If it leaves you out there—if, and please do not consider the literal possibility of being Dan Shauhnessy here, but if you're Boston Globe columnist Dan Shaughnessy on the radio casting the NBA Finals as a contest between a plainly immoral style of basketball and a team fighting to give Cleveland "a reason to go on," then… well, then you're Dan Shaughnessy. Again, sorry about that.

To give the actual Dan Shaughnessy the benefit of the doubt, let's assume that he was born this way, and that for the duration of his life he has been the victim of violent mood swings and a potentially life-threatening allergy to ambiguity of any kind. It cannot have been easy for him, perpetually veering as he was between soupy nine-beers-at-a-wedding tears and livid, trembling rage depending upon the outcome of a given Red Sox home stand, and in some ways his life can be viewed as a triumph, if only because he's allowed to write in a major American city's newspaper and operate a motor vehicle despite being the way he is. But if you were not born this way, and are just someone who wants to watch and think about sports and catch a little bit of a contact high from the emotion they throw off, why would you choose to live in this whipsawing panic state of urgent, dead-certain bipolarity? Especially when the alternative is just watching the NBA Finals.

The short answer to that question is that making sports mean something more than they mean—not seeing ways in which it all points up or reflect things from the broader world, but inflating everything until it is a bloated, shiny alternate world in its own right—is a common tic among fans. At some level, there is something silly about caring this much about all this; at some level, this is a thing that everyone who cares that much knows. We can either find a way to make this caring more owned, or we can just pretend that all this really is as vitally important as it feels.

It is not that important, of course, which is what lends a laughable uncanniness to the sort of thumbnail narrativizing in Shaughnessy positing that a Cavaliers win will give Cleveland "a reason to go on," or in the idea shared by sports media's more barnacle-encrusted members and some salt-baked ex-jocks that there is something not just soft and suspect but actually dishonest about Golden State's basketball revolution. That last part gets its purest expression in Mark Jackson, among others, worrying that Steph Curry squashing contested 32-foot three-pointers is somehow corrupting our youth. It is an act of elite dipshittery to make this observation in the course of actually watching the Warriors play, as Jackson has done. Credit where it's due, there. But for most everyone else, who is under no professional personal obligation to talk about a thing that's happening as if we already know what it means, it is hard to make that sort of pronouncement while also keeping an eye on the game. Jackson can do this both because he has always had excellent court vision and because he knew what he thought long before the ball was tipped.

If that's Mark Jackson's job, then he's the right man for it. But given that there is so much that we do not know in this Finals rematch, even and maybe especially after Game 1, it seems foolish for anyone else—and for Shaughnessy, Jackson, and their soothsaying peers—not to just enjoy the process of figuring it out. That is the most interesting part, in the end, or at least the broader compelling thing that rides over the little individuated moments of superhumanity from the various individual superhumans involved. There are some things we can know with some certainty in the moment; for everyone but Andre Iguodala, there was something almost soothing about Matthew Dellavedova socking Andre Iguodala in the nuts, a sense of homecoming and a reminder that some things have not changed.

But when it comes to everything else, we are mostly guessing. What carried the Warriors to the summit last year, and helped them survive LeBron James' sublimely ornery attempt to prove that one person can win a Finals by himself, was a willingness to change; they discovered the Death Lineup that way, while searching for the answer to the fundamental basketball question posed by LeBron's LeBron-ness, and teams still haven't discovered a way to beat that lineup. For all the smuggo management-suite newspeak that the Warriors' owners have wrapped around the team, there really is something iterative about Golden State's approach, and a constant and awe-ing willingness to experiment within and without the boundaries of the game's possibilities. Given that the team is talented enough to knock out any opponent, it seems almost unfair that they're also such brilliant counterpunchers. (In retrospect, it's hard not to wonder about the great basketball we missed when the Warriors were playing per the crabbed and paranoid stubbornness of their previous coach.)

It looked like the Oklahoma City Thunder had a line on a cure, at least for a while, although it's hard to call Have Two Of The Best Players In Basketball And Surround With Them Superathletes a practical solution for the rest of the league. Golden State is Cleveland's problem to solve, now, and we might as well wish them luck, because that is honestly one motherfucker of a problem. There are some different ways the series might go, and some solutions to the problems each team presents that might work more effectively than others, but we are only now getting down to work in earnest. The only useful lesson to take from The Leandro Barbosa/Shaun Livingston Game, really, is that sports are extremely difficult to predict.

The thing that's so thrilling about this moment, in the series but also in the NBA, is how new it feels, and how useless convention and custom are in this new atmosphere. The Warriors are not inevitable, because nothing is inevitable; the very idea implies an end, when the whole point of Golden State's revolution is that there is not an end, that there are new ways ahead. They are winning because they are playing a dazzling and authentically novel of basketball, but the test of that will come when the next new dazzlement emerges. The Cavaliers may or may not have that answer, but be assured that the rest of the league—and, if you want to get Spiritual about it, the restless essence of basketball as a living thing—is hard at work on whatever comes next. There's no sense in pretending to know what it is, where it's coming from, or what it will be. Given how bracing and strange and astonishing it is to watch it happen, it seems like the purest possible waste to pretend to have seen the future coming all along.

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