There is still lingering resentment over the draft that has to be worked through our collective psyche. We have to just cope with the trauma of it, and it's going to take some time. Over at Ballerball.com, Chandler Goodman has assembled some random thoughts on the Cavs that help. They are a mixture of pretty much all the various stages of grief. Smack dab in the middle of it all however is what seems to me the most important thought: that basically, if they screw this up, they'll never hear the end of it. "It doesn’t seem possible that they draft one of these three guys, become a 50 win team and fringe contender for the next decade, then retire quietly into the annals of history," he says. This pick has brought their saga to another level. It's no longer mid-market drama being played out anymore: it's the rest of the basketball community suffering until Cleveland gets its damn act together. That is, it's not a local farce, it's a national disaster. We simply can't have this happen this many times and dismiss the problems of this organization as sort of sidelights: with them, the fate of many things larger than them--what it means to rebuild a team, what it means to exist as a small market team--now seems entwined. As Goodman puts it:
"It seems like they either add a second star, sign a third in free agency, hire a Hall of Fame coach, and win 2-3 titles, or they become the first team in the history of anything to whiff on back-to-back number one picks, re-hire Mike Brown because why not, strike out in free agency, Kyrie and Dion fight to the death, Tristan Thompson switches back to shooting jumpers with his left hand before giving up on offense all together, and Johnny Manziel eventually starts running point in a marketing ploy gone horribly wrong. These are the only two ways this plays out in my mind."
In short, if they blow this, they're toast. They're far surpassing any other team in the pantheon of NBA stupidity and incompetence and failure, and they're doing so not just on some sort of small stage--they're not some backwater anymore after getting this much luck, they're now the United States of America's small-market disaster. And they either need to put up or shut up. We may always remember Portland choosing Sam Bowie over Jordan, but if they make mistakes, we'll never, ever forget how the Cavs dropped the ball after getting 3 number one picks in 4 years. I'll be doing something random a couple years from now--peeling an orange or something--and just do the biggest facepalm and curse the Cavs to high heaven for being so incredibly dumb and letting a great city (actually a whole great region) down. And I won't be the only one.
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But the draft is the draft, and it's not ultimately as exciting as what's going on on the court in these Playoffs. The real story of today is the Spurs, and Manu, Timmy, and Tony surpassing Magic, Kareem, and Michael Cooper for most trio with playoff wins ever. Ever. This is indeed historic. And the challenge for the writers today was to somehow give people some sense of just how impressive this is.
I've been interested myself in just how we keep trying to come up with metaphors for the Spurs, and keep failing at getting at them. Maybe that is a testament more than anything to what they are: we keep thinking we've got the right way to understand them, and then they do more and more of that thing, and it looks like something we've never seen before and have no name for. We have the feeling continually that we should have a name for this--but find out we don't. Machine is just about as close as anyone has gotten, and yet I'm feeling a consensus growing that the word itself is inadequate: that what they do is much more than mechanical, if it produces these kinds of results.
Over at Ballerball alongside Goodman's piece is Jason Gallagher's stab at trying to do beyond that static, mechanical analogy. He makes a comparison between the Spurs and "24," trying to give us a sense that what we are seeing is really a form of reliability. In this, he compares them to Jack Bauer--and I think the comparison is apt because it gets at how Jack is sort of boring, since he fills out the role you expect of him, and yet continually surprises you with his ability to insert himself at every moment he needs to be present at. The show has played on this for so long, in so many different contexts: Jack will be unreachable at some moment, we see a cell-phone dropped on the ground and someone yelling "Jack! Jack come quick!" out of it... only to see Jack break down a door and return to kick ass. You can always count on Jack--and you feel like you should kick yourself for every time you doubted him. "It’s like we fall in and out of coma every year, completely forgetting about the reliability of Jack Bauer and the San Antonio Spurs," Gallagher says:
"Have we ever seen anything as reliable as Jack and the Spurs? Yet, we constantly doubt them, making excuses based off of false narrative for why these two have “lost it.” It’s the same old story every season on 24, and sadly… every season in the NBA. We doubt the Spurs. We gravitate towards cooler teams, ignoring the thing that rarely ever lets us down. We realize the Spurs are still reliable and we should have trusted that all along. Rinse and repeat. America needs to wake up."
Matt Moore doesn't see reliability in their consistency so much as determination. At Eye on Basketball he writes a panegyric to Tim Duncan's sweat, making the excellent point that the Spurs have never, like other dynasties, had to shake things up at some point, and shuffle things around. They never had to, Moore says, because of the particular character of the trio's work ethic, and how it shows in everything they do on the court in games:
"I always tell friends my favorite part of any Spurs game is before it," Moore says. "Tim Duncan, NBA veteran beyond eons, comes out and goes through his pre-game warm up with an assistant. And it's not 'getting some shots up.' He's not lazily joking with staff or fans while tossing up threes. He goes into a series of blistering, killer post moves that could knock through a brick wall. He sweats. He grunts. He claps his hands and screams... when he misses a hook shot in pre-game warmups."
SBNation's Mike Prada has a wonderful little breakdown of one of the most beautiful pieces of execution we've seen all playoffs. For him the magic word is something like rigorousness:
"Many NBA guards can make this pass at the perfect moment," as he puts it. "Only Ginobili can make it one-handed and on target at the perfect fraction of a second. Before anyone knew it, Green had a wide-open three." The Spurs are the entity that can push players to take advantage of that kind of skill level, can make that type of unique skill into an integral part of a consistent offensive threat.
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Finally, Joe Freeman and Casey Holdahl have post-season Blazer news for us Rip City fans! I've been bad at representing the Blazers here recently with all the playoff action going on, and I promise a couple pieces on them in the next few days--along with a lengthy look at Wes Matthews I've been working on all this time. But in the meantime these guys have done the work for me, making a new podcast yesterday (I should also mention that Holdahl a couple days ago also wrote a great piece looking back at the season as a whole, also very informative). The main highlights include some great evaluations of the players and their plans for the summer given in their exit interviews, talk about where the Blazers go from here and what they do next year, and answers to readers questions. These, strangely, have a lot to do with the draft--to which Joe and Casey just have to reply politely that the Blazers have absolutely nothing to do with this Draft, not just because they made the playoffs of course but also because they have all the pieces in place they need to move forward, and it will be just a question of adding and filling spots. I'll make their point perhaps more directly: people, they've taken care of everything this year, and you should be thankful for that, because lord knows the Draft isn't our forte. It's just a matter of tweaking and adding pieces. It's only after next season that any big shifts can happen. Thank the little baby Threesus, we're solid, finally, and on the way to something really, really good next year.
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