The NBA That Will Be, and the One That Never Was: David Roth's Weak in Review

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

With the exception of the odd guttural "oof" or a string of blurted awe-powered profanity, it can often seem as if there's nothing left to say about Steph Curry. This isn't quite right, if only because "holy shit" so reliably delivers when you're responding to someone who just hit a heroically well-contested 35-foot three-pointer. But, in the same way the Golden State Warriors often appear to be playing a type of basketball that the rest of the league won't even be able to play for another few years, the lyrics and the music just don't match here. We do have words for all this, but they don't work.

It is one thing to say that Steph Curry is having a season utterly unlike any that's come before, or that he's shredded the basic geometry of the game, or that he spent the entire year absolutely clowning the dickens out of the best basketball players in the world. Those are all reasonable things to say, and they've been said a lot. But the difference between me telling you that Steph Curry scored 17 points in an overtime period and Steph Curry scoring 17 points in an overtime period is the difference between me telling you why people enjoy Beethoven's Ninth Symphony and actually listening to Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.

This gap between what Curry is doing to the NBA and the words we have to describe it is never more apparent than when the people paid to talk about basketball on television try to talk about it. Shortly after that merciless and ineffable 17-point overtime eruption, Curry was named MVP for the second straight season and, for the first time in the league's history, it was by unanimous vote. If anything, "unanimous" undersells the (wholly earned) lopsidedness. Add the vote tallies of second- and third-place finishers Kawhi Leonard and LeBron James and Curry would still have won with room to spare. Again, none of this—the vote totals, the season stats, the scorched-earth adjectives deployed so reasonably and with such futility to describe that supernova overtime—quite captures it. But at least it tries. This is more than can be said for the professionals tasked with contextualizing it all.

Charles Barkley has never quite been a believer where Curry or the Warriors were concerned. Both have already put the lie to his drowsily revanchist claim that Golden State, as a "jump-shooting team," could never win a championship; characteristically, that hasn't moved Barkley much. For someone who is paid to talk about basketball on television, Barkley doesn't appear to watch much of it, or even seem terribly interested in it. In a way, this helps him. Barkley is fighting a thwarted and desperate rearguard action against modern basketball, and it is easier to talk about things in the way that requires—in terms of a golden age that overlapped with Barkley's prime, and the softening and general creeping wimpery that has followed it—if you insist on sitting with your back to the show.

The past is frozen and heroic; it's when Barkley and his buddies ruled the world, their hairlines still at high tide. The present, and its protagonists, is notable mostly for not being that. Barkley is not the only person who thinks or talks or acts like this, of course. History's parade route is lined with salty grumps slumped in folding chairs, shaking their fists to beat the band. At least half of America's national politics is dedicated to this, and to the service and flattery of righteous grouches and their refusal to be confused by the facts.

Barkley's battle strategy is known only to him; it is easy to wonder, while he maunders pissily through some forgetful, long-voweled disquisition on the decline of thus and such short-sighted, sharp-elbowed verity from his own era, if there is indeed a strategy at all beyond a sort of lazily vengeful impatience. Barkley's response to Curry's unanimous MVP was that it illuminated how "watered down" the NBA is. "The worst I've ever seen it," Barkley told Dan Patrick. It's a harsh assessment, one that admittedly would sting a lot more if anyone thought Barkley made a point of seeing much NBA basketball. Denial would seem to be a strange, small, rather jarringly insufficient response to one of the most undeniable seasons in recent memory. It would be, if what Barkley (and Tracy McGrady, who echoed the assessment later in the week) were actually trying to respond to it. They're not.

Which seems odd, given that Barkley, McGrady, and their peers in the brotherhood of very good basketball players turned less essential commentators are paid talk about NBA basketball, and do much of that talking before, during, and after NBA games. There are very few people on earth who can speak from experience about the high-intensity pathologies of elite athletes, or the culture that's created when a dozen of them are in a room for months on end. Barkley can talk about both in an entertaining and intermittently insightful way, but the perspective that Barkley has is incidental to the character he plays. That character's response to the future is always going to be an invocation of the past. It's a character whose broad and bellicose narcissism inverts and shrinks everything into a grade schooler's compare-and-contrast essay on how things used to be In The Nice Days and how they came to be so fucked now. This is not a new or especially interesting character, to be honest, but it is one that has proven to work in studio settings.

Barkley's job is to have an opinion, not a perspective; to the extent that the latter involves synthesizing and analyzing things and the former involves saying them as loudly as possible, it's clear that this is a pretty nice break for him, workload-wise. But it sure is a stupid way to talk about the present, let alone address the pyrotechnic future that's already rushing up.

The rock fight in the Eastern Conference semifinals between Toronto and Miami notwithstanding, the NBA is in a very good place right now; the fun is in watching the game change. Curry is making shots that no one even dared take five or ten years ago. LeBron James is still a basketball player unlike any other that's come before him. Come to think of it, finding analogues for Russell Westbrook or Kevin Durant is difficult, too. The San Antonio Spurs refined team basketball into something more reasonable and rhythmic than any vision in memory, and then the Oklahoma City Thunder set it on fire. Even the league's relatively minor stars are miracles of self-belief in action.

Not to belabor the point, but this is all extremely good shit. There is no reason at all to make any of it a referendum on the past, or to turn the conversation, again, toward the virtues that the last generation retroactively arrogates to itself. The NBA's present is more interesting than its past, and its future looks more interesting still. The chaos that is coming will increase the possibilities of a game whose appeal has always had so much to do with openness.

Barkley and his peers will do that anyway, because they are bored with anything that is not about them. That this is the same fundamental human awfulness that also curdles our culture and injects pure poison into our politics doesn't excuse it, but it does at least put it in context. All this softheaded sternness and flabby tough talk is embarrassing. (Witness the mercilessly feckless dressing down to which Dwight Howard, an arch cornball who is by every metric a far superior player to Barkley, was subjected earlier this week.) But to the people doing the carping, and those happy to gorge on the cheap calories it provides, it is still somehow more compelling than the chaotic renaissance that's happening right in front of us. In politics, where glib talk of values and easy virtue can shape policies that warp things ruinously, this is dangerous. In sports, it's just a shame.

That said, all this windy and willful backwardness makes the NBA's current confluence between future and present look that much more appealing. The players currently changing the NBA don't disrespect the players that came before them, and they honor the game by changing it. It's not surprising that the previous generation can't be bothered to see that. It would be hard for them to notice, given their refusal to look. So, here as everywhere: the last generation's great and boring narcissists can have their mirrors and, sadly, their microphones. For the rest of us, there is at least the future—and the mute button.