Start here: Are the Thunder a sexy team and a sexy champion? They’re not, even though Shai Gilgeous-Alexander just had a season for the ages and so did the other kids on his team who just took over the principal’s office.
We obsess all the time with the NBA about triples, meaning 3’s. But look at the triple SGA had with a scoring title and an MVP and now a championship, something only Michael and Shaq and Kareem have ever done. And the guy did it all as cooly as Tim Duncan once did with the Spurs. By the way? Those Spurs weren’t sexy, either. All they did was win.
Did we get cheated out of what was shaping up to a pretty wonderful Game Seven on Sunday night when Tyrese Haliburton went down with an Achilles the way Kevin Durant once did in the Finals of 2019? We did get cheated, and that will always be part of the Thunder’s story, even though they still did everything they had to do in the second half when it was as if the Larry O’Brien Trophy was sitting there at midcourt.
But as good a story as the Thunder truly did become this season, start to finish, all the way to 84 wins in all, we come out of these Finals and this entire playoff season, with a much bigger story, and that means even bigger than all the hand-wringing about the Finals ratings:
The NBA got a lot more interesting over the last couple of months.
The NBA WAS a lot, because of just how damn good the Thunder were, because of the Cinderella run that the Pacers were on until Haliburton fell down; because of Haliburton and the Knicks and even the Thunder going the distance against the Nuggets before they had to go the distance again in the Finals.
For a while, this seemed like the biggest news of the year in pro basketball would be the trade that sent Luka Doncic to the Lakers. Adam Silver’s league had finally generated some real interest in the regular season that they’ve already tried to trick up with that cheesy in-season tournament, and the only problem with that was that it had nothing to do with the games being played on the floor.
But then came the postseason we just saw. Then came Knicks vs. Pistons, what really was a blast from the past. Then came Knicks vs. Celtics. After the Knicks had been obsessing about the Celtics for the past few years, they not only beat them, they twice came from 20 points down in Boston to beat them, jumping them like that and never really letting them up. Might the Celtics have found a way to come back on the Knicks if Jayson Tatum’s Achilles hadn’t exploded? Might have. But I doubt it. And if you’d watched the first few games of that series, so should you. The Celtics were better than the Knicks, by a lot, in the regular season. Just not when the money was on the table, and not when their 3’s stopped falling.
The Western Conference? It sure was supposed to be the strong-man competition of the NBA, and the best attraction. And maybe the playoffs over on that side of the sport would have been a lot sexier if Steph Curry hadn’t gotten hurt. But he did. It’s why the NBA’s most entertaining series and most compelling in the end, even though it didn’t go the distance, was Knicks vs. Pacers in the Eastern Conference finals. That was the one that began – and maybe ended – with that crazy shot from Haliburton at the end of regulation in Game 1: Off the back of the rim and up toward the ceiling before we really did get the most famous ball-drop in New York City since New Year’s Eve.
Knick fans will always wonder if their team might have been able to throw out the regular season and get a series off the Thunder in the Finals the way they did that same thing to the Celtics. But they didn’t get cheated this spring, not with three rousing blasts from the past: Against the Pistons, against the Celtics, against the Pacers. Then they fired their coach. Hey, they might have changed their playoff narrative starting in April. Just not their owner.
But despite the way their season ended, the Knicks did become a huge part of the NBA story over these two months, and not just because of the way they lit up the Garden. But an even better story, in the whole grand scheme of things is this:
In front of our eyes, and once and for all, the league got younger, and in a big way. LeBron James, great as he still is, will never again be considered the face of the NBA and neither will Steph Curry. Maybe Durant can if the Rockets make a run next season. But the league is now about SGA going forward. It was going to be about Haliburton before he got hurt. It is about Anthony Edwards and Jalen Brunson and Cade Cunningham in Detroit. It is about Donovan Mitchell and Victor Wembanyama. And because of the city and the stage, it’s going to be about Luka, as well, Laker fans dreaming about Luka getting LeBron on one last run. You know the list of young hoops talent is longer than that. Not just one face of the league going forward. A lot of faces.
We still don’t know whether Giannis wants to leave Milwaukee or stay. Everybody who loves basketball, college or pro, can’t wait to see how good Cooper Flagg is going to be at the next level. All in all, a next-level time for pro basketball. Put me down as someone who at the start of this season felt like the league’s brand was wildly overrated. No more.
