This bandwagon has snacks.
by Ben Collins
“The thing I like about Sister is that every hurt she mentions, every hurt she has, she gives it back twice in love. She beats the hell out of my wife, who looks like somebody on television.”
Oh, I don’t know, it’s just been ten years.
You watch a guy like this for this long and it happens. You get invested. Dirk Nowitzki works and works. “He’s too thin!” He gets bigger. “He’s soft!” He gets tougher. “He has no postgame!” He gets a postgame. “He can’t operate without Steve Nash!” Steve Nash leaves, he goes to the Finals. He has terrible knees. Nobody knows. His wife was a criminal. Nobody knew. “He can’t carry a team!” He picks this thing up, this mangled, bloodied group of old men who’ve never won a championship, and he drags them—all attached on his now-bigger shoulders—to the NBA Finals, all by himself.
This team had gums and baby teeth a month ago. I walked into the visitors locker room after Game 1 of the West Semis, when Kobe went off and they beat the Los Angeles Lakers anyway. Now they have some real teeth. It’s because of him.
And then, at the end of the day, the commentators say, “You’re looking at the best seven-foot jumpshooter of all-time.”
That’s like saying about JFK: “He was the best 6-1 boater on Martha’s Vineyard.”
He looks like Michael Jordan out there. It’s the closest thing.
I grew up at the peak of the Yankees-Red Sox bullshit. I never got the booing and hissing. I just played along. I bought the tee shirts, cursed with friends.
Everybody sounded like dogs.
Pardon me for two weeks. I’ll be showing my teeth.
***
“Miami is a hell of a team. They’re Hollywood as hell, but they’re still very good. You’ve gotta give credit when credit is due. It’s just tough to be in this position. Yes, they are Hollywood. But they are very good.” – Joakim Noah
If you pick up a paper in Hollywood today, it says this.
Even Hollywood is saying, “Hey! Leave me out of this!”
***
There are reports of Miami’s new Big 5. Mike Miller and Udonis Haslem are the other two. They’re averaging five points per game in these playoffs.
Combined.
Stop.
Don’t overthink it. This is about if LeBron James and Dwyane Wade are better than Dirk Nowitzki and his enormous, indomitable guts. That’s all it’s about.
Let’s get this out of the way: JJ Barea is short. Peja Stojakovic and James Jones can shoot. Jason Terry’s pretty good. Jason Kidd is one of the greatest ball-control point guards ever, and he’s like that right now. Chris Bosh can be a superstar if he wants to. The Heat’s bench sucks. The Mavericks have no second option.
These are things I know to be true. They won’t mean much of anything.
***
I’m not objective. I won’t recuse myself.
Sorry. But at least I’m saying it out loud.
What’s objectivity? Is it hanging out with a team and becoming friends with its actors in order to get scoops in exchange for favorable coverage?
Guess what? The guy who did that, Chris Broussard, is picking the Heat in five.
No shit.
So what’s objectivity?
***
I have some LeBron James shirts lying somewhere in the back part of my closet. He’s wearing a Cleveland uniform on all of them.
It’s not that he left. It’s not how he left, either.
They have cliques. Umpteen-person cliques—wearing the same hats, same shoes—that follow around the profitable tall guy in the middle. They have cliques with shadowy ringleaders who plant ideas in the tall guy’s head. “Maybe we should be wearing different hats,” he says, and then he starts a business.
They have cliques that really shouldn’t exist, but their team allows it anyway because they know how important the tall guy in the clique is to their city.
They have cliques, and one of those cliques guts that team for no reason, just to do it.
You’ve seen this happen in life. At school when you were younger. At work later. You’re unsure about that whole dynamic, but you play along because everyone else is playing along. Everyone else has that trust.
Then they make you feel like an asshole. They make you feel small.
Being decent is knowing you can do something vicious and not doing it at all.
They’ve billed themselves as anti-heroes. It’s time to start treating them like anti-heroes.
***
There was a story today that the Finals format, 2-3-2, makes it statistically harder for the lower-seeded team to win. Twenty-seven percent chance, as compared to 33 percent in the conference finals.
I remember when the Heat came back to Dallas. They just won all their home games. That’s all they did. They were up 3-2. The whole goddamn city had given up. And that’s a city with fans that care about their team.
You think if the Heat go back to Miami down 3-2, having lost their last three games, people are even going to show up?
What if the Mavs just win their games at home? What if the Mavs just win their games at home?
***
“The thing I like about Sister is that every hurt she mentions, every hurt she has, she gives it back twice in love. She beats the hell out of my wife, who looks like somebody on television.”
Not to get all literary here. That’s from “Ray” by Barry Hannah. But, you know, it also isn’t.
Mavs in 5.
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