SUPREME EDITORIAL: The weakness of numbers and the triumph of individual heroism
All throughout the 2015-2016 NBA season, the Golden State Warriors was my favorite team to watch. They blew out teams with stunning regularity. They obliterated records and made three-point shots look as easy as lay-ups. They played in beautiful synchronicity, cutting, setting screens, switching on pick-and-rolls, and rotating defensively with psychic awareness of each other’s movements. Their style can be best described as high art resulting from machine-like efficiency, like great architecture. But on the last day of the season, I found myself rooting for the Cleveland Cavaliers.
I’m not a front-runner, and if I was, the safe bet was on the Warriors: they were the best team all season, they were playing at home, and history was on their side. Only three teams have won on the road in a Finals Game 7 and no team in NBA history had ever come back from a 3-1 deficit to win the title. I love underdogs, but that doesn’t fully explain why I suddenly wanted the Cavaliers to win. The decision came from some place deeper, more primal.
I came of age as an NBA fan in the early ‘90s — the heydays of Barkley, Malone, Ewing, Olajuwon, and one Michael Jordan. Basketball then was a battle of proximity. The goal was to get as close to the basket as possible, which put a premium on height, strength and — in the case of Jordan — the skill and will to penetrate the defense. It was in this era when the league’s mainstream popularity peaked and when its conventional wisdom was set in stone. To get as close to the basket as possible, to win, required physical dominance and toughness.
The Rise Of Math
The current state of basketball is supposed to have changed so dramatically that its ‘90s iteration now seems like a different sport. We can derive clues of this shift from the emergence of fancy phrases like “advanced stats,” “small-ball” and “pace-and-space,” all invocations of one undeniable fact: that conventional wisdom is being challenged by math. I don’t mean the sophisticated kind used in new metrics like PER (Player Efficiency Rating) that measures a player’s worth in novel ways, although that’s certainly part of the “revolution.” I’m talking about simple arithmetic, like three points being greater than two. It took four decades, but the league finally discovered the strategic advantage of the three-point field goal. No longer a mere emergency move or a specialized assignment, the three-point shot is now a basic staple of an NBA offense, a mathematical reading of a sport eager to maximize its finite number of possessions. Distance is the new proximity.
The retired players of my hallowed youth have complained about this new game they call “soft.” Steph Curry wouldn’t be this good back in the day, they claim, with some even suggesting that he would’ve been knocked out cold. Players today lack “toughness,” they say, bewailing the changes to what they view as a “grown man’s game.” I find their rants ridiculous, having learned to love this new NBA, but I can also see the yearning behind their rebuke because it’s one that I share. It’s a yearning, not necessarily for the way things were, but for something more palpable, something more human. And that yearning drew me to the Cavaliers.
By Game 7, the Cavaliers essentially devolved into a ‘90s team. LeBron James’ outside shooting stroke, so reliable when he won championships in Miami, has deserted him since his return to Cleveland. His teammates, red hot from beyond the three-point line in the playoffs, suddenly went cold. The Cavaliers were six of 25 from three for the game, a disastrous output compared to the Warrior’s 15 of 41. That’s a difference of 27 points from the league’s new favorite distance and the Warriors’ weapon of choice. They won a record 73 games in the regular season and have destroyed teams through sheer math. But the Cavaliers won the title through means that were supposed to be out of fashion and boring. They won through physical dominance and toughness.
Hard Rules
NBA conventional wisdom can be summed up by any of its most common aphorisms: “You have to want it more,” “Gotta be more aggressive,” “Championships aren’t given, they are taken.” But NBA conventional wisdom is not so much a set of hard rules and bylaws as it is a rough-hewn collage glued by sweat. There are images of Jordan, blowing past a phalanx of Knicks defenders, dunking over Ewing. There’s James Worthy clutching Larry Bird’s jersey to deny him the ball (he failed). There’s Isiah Thomas limping on his sprained ankle to a foul-and-one. The reason former players extol the virtues of physicality is that the game, to them, is a physical memory; it bumps, it shoves, it grabs, it hurts.
Watching the Finals, I could just feel the Cavaliers more. The series became emblematic of the dichotomy between old school and new school, one that was already expressed by the teams’ respective slogans. “Strength In Numbers” means a lot of things for the Warriors: the fan support, their deep bench, their adherence to math. It also means that, if you were rooting for them, you were rooting for numbers, for the law of averages, for the purity of a 73-9 record that would be rendered meaningless by a Finals loss. The Cavaliers’ slogan sounds like an old-school NBA platitude. There’s no clever subtext, no winks at the stats movement, just pure locker room grunting: “All In.” It’s an echoing of LeBron James, promising to give everything he has to a city he’s failed, a city of sports failures, a city he returned to for redemption, the city’s and his. To root for Cleveland is to root for this struggle.
This dichotomy bleeds out to the teams’ respective superstars. Steph Curry’s improbable three-pointers are essentially battles between him and space, away from the trenches of human bodies. LeBron faces less abstract challenges. No active NBA player can match his eye-popping odometer (13 seasons, 46,861 minutes played, six straight Finals, 43.7 minutes per game in the last two) and you could see it in his slightly diminished athleticism. His game is more grounded now, more reliant on strength. With his fading shooting touch, he’s also relied more on penetration. He’s Jon Snow climbing up a pile of dead bodies, while Curry flings Ramsay Bolton arrows from a safe distance.
Individual Heroism
The entire Cleveland offense revolves around the gravity of individual heroism, almost in defiant opposition to the Warriors’ motion offense. The closing minutes of Game 7 were basically the antithesis of the entire 2015-2016 season: the Warriors missing open threes created by ball movement, LeBron and Kyrie Irving making contested one-on-one shots, LeBron impossibly stopping a highly-efficient textbook 2-on-1 fastbreak through sheer physical superiority. Platitudes rehashed by basketball elders become gospels of truth in the crucial moments of a deciding game. In the case of James, “wanting it more” and “leaving it all on the court” are all that’s left when your entire legacy rests on the last few possessions of a game. All the efficiency stats and the X’s and O’s must’ve dissolved in the background as his career flashed before his eyes: leaving Cleveland, seeing his jersey burned, coming back, failing again.
In those final minutes, the Cavaliers’ caveman basketball reached a fugue state wherein math and all of the game’s intricacies ceased to matter. The Warriors’ offense is basketball symphony when it works, but the chaos was more conducive to the Cavaliers’ punk rock offense, repeating the same hard-hitting riff over and over until it cracked the game open. It was an ironic way to end the season, but in a lot of ways, it was perfect. The soul is not in the notes. It’s in the way you play them.
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