The NBA season is over and it ended with the inevitable. The Golden State Warriors are NBA Champions after beating the Cavaliers in five games. Kevin Durant is Finals MVP and LeBron James gave everything he could to try and beat the Warriors but it wasn’t enough.
Fans are complaining this season was boring. Everybody knew which two teams were going to be in the Finals, barring an insane injury crisis, and which team was the favorite to win it all.
But even though we all knew this was coming, does that mean the season was really boring?
No.
So much happened from October to June to get us here and it was incredibly entertaining. To call this season boring is bitter, and it’s probably rooted in some disappointment that one’s favorite team can’t compete. So, instead of blaming their team, they’d rather blame the system. Or, it comes from some other ridiculous rooting passion like trying to say NCAA basketball is better because they have March Madness and the single elimination brings incredible unpredictability (I’ll rip apart this ludicrous rhetoric at another time).
So, let’s review everything that happened this season, and I’ll remind you why it has been an amazing one.
Early Stages:
The Warriors actually looked human at the beginning of the season and it was really fun because it made all their keyboard-warrior (pun intended) fans calm down for a little bit.
They played the Spurs on opening night and not only did they lose, but they got completely obliterated. The final score was 129-100 and Kawhi Leonard finished with 35-points and Jonathan Simmons dropped 20 off the bench. Simmons made his first six shots including a three at the end of each of the first two quarters. Oh yeah, and LaMarcus Aldridge played well against the Dubs and I truthfully don’t think I’ve ever said – or written – that sentence before and probably never will again.
The Warriors got their act together for the next four games, and then something crazier than their opening night loss happened.
They lost to the Lakers, by 20 and Larry Nance Jr did a thing.
And at this point in the season, the Lakers looked like a functioning NBA team and not a YMCA team. This win against the Warriors brought them to a .500 record and they stayed on that track 20 games into the season. Luke Walton had many of us fooled and there were talks of if this team possibly making the playoffs.
But then the Lakers came crashing down to earth quicker than a Vine celebrity and lost eight games in a row. For Lakers fans, it was fun while it lasted. For everyone else, the fun had just begun.
The other entertaining thing that happened in the early stages of the season was that we met the man, the myth, and the legend that is Joel Embiid.
Embiid sat out the first two seasons of his career due to injury and all we truthfully knew about him before his debut was that he was really funny on social media. While that was cool and all, we were really hoping the guy who was the third overall pick of his draft could actually ball. And boy could he.
Embiid took the entire league by storm and was Eastern Conference Rookie of the Month for games played in October and November, and won the same award for the month of December. He had a 33-point explosion against the Brooklyn Nets and the whole world was in awe of Embiid and craved more of him.
Sadly, we didn’t get much more on-the-court action because of a torn meniscus which sidelined him for the rest of the season. We did get some more of his off-the-court antics though, and those are always entertaining.
Meanwhile, we take you to Joel Embiid’s IG story from earlier today ?@JoelEmbiid and @samhinkie have something special
#TrustTheProcess pic.twitter.com/2VaDOBibny
— Def Pen Hoops (@DefPenHoops) May 18, 2017
Middle Stages:
After a slow start to the season, the Washington Wizards sorted themselves out and became one of the best teams in the East. This was fantastic for two reasons. The East earned another good team and we received a rivalry that could sustain a number of years.
The Wizards-Celtics rivalry dates back to last season where Jae Crowder and Randy Wittman – who was the head coach of the Wizards at the time – went at it. Then this summer, both teams were in heavy pursuit of Al Horford. Ultimately, the Celtics signed him and this added fuel to the fire.
This was all just fumes, but then John Wall lit the spark that ignited this rivalry when he rocked Marcus Smart in the fourth quarter of their first meeting this season.
The flames were burning, and the second match-up of the season just added more gas and the fire just continued to grow.
Bradley Beal and Smart went at each other, and then after the game, Crowder and John Wall got into it.
This called for police to be positioned between the two teams locker rooms after the game. Then, in the final match-up which took place 13-days later, the Wizards wore all-black funeral attire and won 123-108.
This culmination of events built a fantastic rivalry that gave us the best playoff series of the postseason. It wasn’t anywhere close to boring.
This wasn’t the only entertaining event in the middle stages of the season. There’s no way we could forget about the Miami Heat’s dramatic turnaround.
At the halfway mark of their season, the Miami Heat were 11-30. They had lost 10 of their last 11 and were ten games out of the playoffs. It looked like it might be time to bring in the cavalry, a.k.a start tanking.
Nobody would’ve blamed them because the move would’ve made perfect sense due to some injury issues they had, the strength of the upcoming draft class, and the amount of cap space they had for this coming summer.
But then something crazy happened. After playing like the Miami Freeze for the duration of the season up to that point, they got hot again and returned to being the Miami Heat.
They won 23 of their next 28 games. From January to mid-March, they had the best record in the NBA. At one time during that stretch they were the best three-point shooting team in the league and averaged 109.5 points per game, a feat the LeBron James-led Heat never pulled off.
This stretch also included a 13-game winning streak where they beat the Houston Rockets and the Warriors, thanks to Dion Waiters doing this.
The Heat didn’t make the playoffs, but their second-half surge was surreal. They gave us an incredible storyline that went from low to high and ultimately ended in disappointment. It was a storyline that only the NBA could bring us.
Final Stages:
This is where things really started to climax for the NBA season. The Cavaliers decided to take on a bold strategy of not playing defense and they paid the price for it. They finished the season poorly and the Celtics ended up being the number one seed in the East.
Although anyone who wasn’t blinded by bias knew that wouldn’t stop the Cavs from making the Finals, it gave us a little bit of a twist and provided plenty of opportunities for hot takes.
The Blazers scrapped their way into the Western Conference playoffs thanks to the help of the Bosnian defensive stalwart that is Jusuf Nurkic, who they acquired from the Denver Nuggets for a bag of hammers at the trade deadline.
And lastly, the MVP race went off-the-rails in a good way.
This guy named Russell Westbrook averaged a triple-double. In most cases, that’d be enough to end the discussion. But, this season couldn’t be filed under “most cases” because of the man down in Houston: James Harden. Mike D’Antoni turned James Harden into the bearded Steve Nash which allowed Harden to resurrect the careers of Eric Gordon and Ryan Anderson.
Then the best two-way player in the league, Kawhi Leonard, led the Spurs to a 61-21 record and the two-seed in the West. He did this without smiling, laughing, showing any emotion or doing anything to disprove that he’s a basketball robot created by Gregg Popovich and the mad basketball scientists within the San Antonio Spurs organization.
In short, this season brought us arguably the best three-horse race for MVP of all-time and not one of the three candidates was LeBron James, the best player in the league, or Steph Curry, the guy who was coming off back-to-back MVP’s and won the award unanimously last year.
Does that sound boring in any way at all?
If you’re somehow still answering “yes” to that question then allow me to bring up some other storylines from the season that were fantastic.
- The Milwaukee Bucks became the freakiest team in the league led by the freakiest player in the league, Giannis Antetoukounmpo
- Nikola Jokic evolved into a point center and almost led the Nuggets to the playoffs
- Demarcus Cousins got traded for Buddy Hield
- Serge Ibaka got traded for Terrence Ross
- Phil Jackson clearly became the Donald Trump of the NBA
There’s more, plenty more, but I’ve said enough. This season was clearly an entertaining one, and to call it boring because it had an inevitable conclusion is very close-minded and embarrassing.
The post-season was an average one, I’ll cede to that. But the playoffs and the champion aren’t the only storylines the NBA has to offer. It may be the main one, but just because it wasn’t the best one doesn’t make the season as a whole was boring. There was plenty to be entertained by this season, you just have to be open-minded and allow it to entertain you because I promise that if you do that, the NBA will always deliver for you.
