This morning, a buddy of mine who plays World of Warcraft and I were having a conversation. I was getting stir crazy, as I normally get up early to get my morning basketball workout in, but it’s been raining the past two days straight and I’ve left with stretching, yoga and solo medicine ball stuff, which blows even harder since I don’t have another person in the house to simulate passing drills and a spotter for shooting form drills. We got to talking about the NBA Finals, something my buddy doesn’t watch as he’s completely averse to all sports, and he was letting me rant about how shitty I think these Finals are. When I was done doing what I do best, he unfortunately had to leave for work but as he was getting ready he made the comment that the whole Finals situation seemed like how people in WoW pay for a carry to get the current raid tier ‘Ahead of the Curve’ achievement. Having spent the rest of the day pondering this idea in between doing useful things like cleaning the apartment, laundry, making food for the week, and other odds-n-ends to keep myself from getting cabin fever, and it’s honestly the best description I’ve yet heard on the NBA Finals dilemma; props to my nameless friend for eloquently summarizing my entire sentiments of the last year.

For those who are just as averse to sports as my friend, the NBA Finals this year involve the Golden State Warriors and the Cleveland Cavaliers. This will be the third match-up between the two teams, and was initially hyped up to be the greatest meeting of recent NBA history, despite that this match-up was essentially called at the start of the regular season and everything until the Finals was a pointless, foregone conclusion. The hype was due to Kevin Durant, who originally played for the Seattle Supersonics, a team then moved to Oklahoma City and dubbed the OKC Thunder. In the off-season, he signed with Golden State, making the team the biggest collection of basketball talent to ever grace the court in possibly forever. The move was obviously divisive, and people in sports media and on sports fan sites and forums still debate the move, its impact on the NBA and whether or not it was healthy for the sport overall.

As with nearly everything on the internet, the conversation typically devolves into both sides just yelling at each other until one side gives up and runs back to its echo chamber, the winner then metaphorically ejaculating on everyone else and attempting to assert what they assume to be dominance due to their ‘win’, when in reality the audience that is left hates both sides, doesn’t give a shit, and would probably stuff both sides into a bee’s nest if it were physically possible. This is then compounded with the occasional reasoned argument on the matter by a random person, who is then verbally beat into submission by both sides for choosing to not fly a flag like moron, even if the points this random person has made are salient.

I stated it earlier, but this whole Finals situation and, by extension, this previous NBA season has been the turd in my punch-bowl. Since Durant’s decision, I’ve been extremely skeptical and very doubtful at where the NBA would go, and looking at the product that was produced during the regular season and post-season so far, it’s an unfortunate feeling to have been correct. The light at the end of the tunnel was watching the heroics of Russell Westbrook, which wasn’t as bright of a light as it should have been considering how many people kept shitting on the guy for dragging his team to the playoffs kicking and screaming, and arguing that James Harden, the NBA’s actual-fish-out-of-water, should get it over him. I probably wouldn’t have minded the Harden comparisons, as the Houston Rockets played phenomenally during the regular season, had people not constantly brought up how the Thunder landed right where the predictions said they would, despite those predictions assuming the rest of the Thunder team would’ve stepped up to fill the absence Durant left. Funnily enough, only a moron would make a prediction like that because it assumed Enes Kanter, Andre Roberson and Steven Adams would be as deadly as they had been the previous year, yet they were only so deadly because of all the spacing provided not only by Durant being on the floor, but by Serge Ibaka and Dion Waiters, who were traded and left the team in free agency, respectively. In short, people who watch sports are idiots, but that’s true for fans of anything and the media that surrounds it.

To preface everything, I don’t like the Golden State Warriors at all. I’m sure some people will think it’s because of the Kevin Durant signing, but I’ve disliked the Warriors for years now. It’s a dislike that’s definitely grown stronger over time, but it’s one that predates even the ‘We Believe’ Warriors. The franchise has always been grossly incompetent, though the recent praise of Joe Lacob would indicate otherwise, even though the man has only said stupid things during his tenure as team owner and the framework he’s now benefiting from was laid by Larry Reilly. Plenty have also praised Bob Myers, which is just as stupid considering he’s essentially mortgaged away the future of the Warriors for the core they have. In the moment, this sounds great because the Warriors are objectively fantastic, but this falls apart when you realize that the Warriors have to win and win now in order to attempt to undo decades of being terrible across the board so that they’ll be able to possibly bring free agents to their location, which is in a super-crowded area that costs too much to live in and looks like a fucking parking lot to anyone who sees California for what it actually is and isn’t just enamored by the idea of living in California. To be fair, the Cavs have also done this with their draft picks, but they have rights to older draft picks, and an owner who, despite one outburst about a decade ago, has been unquestionably solid and willing to pay to continue to win, which is a luxury the Warriors don’t necessarily have.

The management of the franchise is a very small part of why I don’t like the Warriors, despite the length and depth of the prior statement. Why I don’t like the Warriors is the same reason I don’t can’t get behind the Clippers: team mentality. Up until very recently, the Warriors have been chippy, which is a term used for a team that complains to the refs about anything and everything. A good swath of people who are watching these Finals and have been watching the Warriors since they began playing extremely well don’t remember this stuff for two reason:

1. They don’t want to acknowledge that the players are not spotless in every way.
2. They are bandwagon fans from other sub-par franchises or bandwagon fans simply jumping onto a popular fad.

Take a look at this video. I watched this ‘fight’ happen live, and it was just four years ago. That’s how recent the new ‘humble and honest ‘Warriors are, and yet the narrative has been how genuine and good-hearted the guys are.

Speaking of that, that’s some shit I can’t fucking stand in general. Being an asshole on the court has no reason to be excused just because you portray a ‘nice dude’ off the court. Draymond Green is the perfect example. Last year he gave Michigan State a huge check to help start a scholarship endowment fund and get the school better athletic facilities. The guy talks massive shit constantly and acts like a complete chuckle-fuck when he’s playing, yet his off-the-court demeanor overshadows his moronic on-court persona. This past year, he got arrested for a physical altercation with some nobody, essentially shattering all that ‘good will’ was built up in spite of him running around, trying to remove his opponent’s dicks with his shoes. Frankly, I wish he would just own up to being the equivalent of that annoying little brother who keeps talking a lot of shit just to beat you, and then does because you took the bait, which he then follows up with a bunch of gloating and shit-eating grins. At least then you wouldn’t have to curate a whole semi-false life that has the added stress of falling apart in an instant when you don’t play the role you created for yourself.

Anyways, it’s not just this whole sentiment of ‘wholesome, good dudes playing basketball’ that irks me. It’s this goddamn narrative that everyone on the team just gets along, the whole atmosphere is pretty much perfect, and that they’re only out on the court to have fun. What kind of ridiculously disrespectful shit is this?

First, the constant assumption that the team is ‘perfect’ is madness. Any professional sports team is full of alpha dogs who have beaten out millions of other possible candidates over a period of years to ensure they are at the top of the basketball food chain. You don’t get there by being someone like me, a person who simply rolls with the punches and makes lemonade out of the lemons live gives, alone, and you definitely don’t get to be the best team in the world by having an incredibly lax and lasseiz-faire attitude; behavior like that leads to you becoming a dipshit like me, who plays video games and rants online. Even if they were a bunch of dudes who were still cutthroat but also relaxed a ton of the time, it’s absurd to think they all just want the best for everyone else and never want to be selfish. I know that’s nit-picking to some extent, but the ‘good guys’ narrative is fucking pervasive, and it’s bullshit on every level.

Second, this narrative implies that the only way to be as good or better than the Warriors is to go out and ‘just have fun’. This pisses me off all over the place even more than the over-hyping of the ‘greatness’ of the team and their chemistry because it’s essentially saying that if you take the game of basketball seriously, you’ll never be the best and are an asshole for taking a game seriously. Fuck man, these are professional players. Yeah, it’s a game, and enjoy it, but it’s also you’re fucking job. Nowhere else is this acceptable. Have a less than stellar day working the construction crane, causing the back half of the building frame to topple and shatter everywhere? Fired, and rightfully so. Have to compete for a business deal, and then have shitty celebratory dances that look like you’re having a seizure while claiming you’re the best? Kiss that deal goodbye! This isn’t to say that I get professional basketball and sports in general aren’t a different medium than blue/white/tie-&-jacket work, just that it’s really absurdly fagacious to insinuate that if you aren’t having fun at all times on the court, you’re a loser. Shit, would you call Kobe, a man who worked relentlessly on his skills and thought of every single game as a Roman Coliseum battle, a loser? No, you wouldn’t. Nobody would, yet in this modern era, if a team isn’t as busy and adept as the Warriors are at patting each other on the back and emotionally masturbating each other so they always all feel good, it’s completely accepted to call that into question, the team chemistry into question and assume the team is in goddamn shambles.

The worst part of all this is that saying you don’t like the Golden State Warriors immediately makes you a pariah.  Think that Draymond talks a ton of shit for being a generally mediocre player who gets away with illegal screens, elbow shots, dick kicking and overly handsy defensive playing that would be called on nearly anyone else? Piss off, you shit-pile; you and your mountains of video evidence are wrong because that’s not what fits the narrative! Look at this shit:

God, I fucking hate having to reformat comments.

People like this exist everywhere, which is fucking frightening because Darwinian theory should have bred this level of stupidity and flag-waving out of our gene pool. First, there was no ‘hype’ around LeBron passing Jordan for playoff point totals. It was an inevitability that would’ve happened next year if not this one. Second, the whole notion that LeBron is not the best player in the world currently and that people actually buy into this is insane. There is no better player currently in the NBA who has the ability to score, drive, pass, play-make, lead, shoot and scheme better than LeBron. This isn’t just my personal opinion, it’s a goddamned fact. The man has gone to seven straight Finals. He alone keeps an entire conference out of ever hoping to sniff even the achievement of getting to the Finals. His skill set is the most rounded skill set we’ve ever seen from a player. Every year his opposition gets tougher, and yet he always shows up for it. For fuck’s sake, the man beat the objectively best team last year.

Third, and probably most important the most overlooked fact by morons like the guy I’ve quoted, there is no drama in this Finals. If LeBron wins, he’s the fucking messiah of the NBA and will sit atop the mountain alone. If he loses, whatever. The Cavs are in the top five teams this past year, likely an objective lock on #3 in the entire league, and they are facing a collection of raw talent that’s never been faced before. Nobody expects them to win. There is zero goddamn pressure on LeBron, and there was already zero goddamn pressure on him considering he brought a title to a city that hasn’t won fucking anything in nearly fifty years. He’s the hero of the city who actively pays for kids scholarships and makes his city better just by being himself. Nobody will think less of the Cavs if they lose, except for the people like this guy who are likely part of the shitty bandwagon the unfortunate long-time Warriors fans now have to deal with.

The last thing I want to touch on before getting back to the whole Durant decision which I said I was going to go into about two-thousand words ago is that I hate how much the Warriors celebrate for being the ‘best of the best’ and abusing shit like refs not calling carrying, palming, double-dribbling, traveling, illegal screens, and overly physical/slappy defense. Sure, they did the same shit back when they were irrelevant, and it was annoying then because they were danc-sorry, seizuring despite being down by twenty on average. Now, it’s unbelievably frustrating to watch because it’s the kind of winning nobody likes: sore winning. Yet, it’s completely acceptable because the Warriors play great basketball and society embraces behavior like frittering away days watching reality TV, humble-bragging, embracing retarded conspiracy theories, and just being shitty in general.

If I’m honest, I enjoyed the fuck out of them during their 2014-2015 championship season, which flies completely in the face of what this entire piece is about. It was really easy to get behind them since they only dickhead was Draymond, he wasn’t being a dickhead that often, and the team played like they had a goddamn purpose. That’s the kind of team I want to see win, not a team that’s doing the basketball on-court equivalent of a rich person showing up somewhere and flaunting their money to all the regular-ass people. The best way I can sum all this up is in this old-ass Lewis Black bit where he goes on about how much of a braggart the American people were as a collective in the last decade were. That’s what the Warriors have been like last year and this year, and with adding Kevin Durant, it’s become even more goddamn obnoxious.

So how is the Kevin Durant signing similar to someone buying the ‘Ahead of the Curve’ achievement? In World of Warcraft, a common in-game practice is for talented and purposeful guilds to charge players for carries, which means that the guild subs in the player paying for the carry during a raid session, takes them through the entire dungeon and they get the achievement. In exchange, the guild takes a player’s gold as recompense for the guild’s time. It’s obviously not a one-to-one comparison, but it’s pretty apparent that Kevin Durant signed on to get a easy ring, as the Warriors were a championship-caliber team without him, and with him a championship was, more or less, set in stone.

This is where the similarities end. I’m obviously not a fan of the move, and it’s not just because I don’t like the Warriors. As I said at the opening of this wall of text, the move had me doubting the health of the NBA, which this article from Variety indicates that less people are watching the regular season despite tons tuning in for the Finals. Nielsen ratings are obviously highly suspect, as the definition of a ‘viewer’ is very ambiguous. We don’t know if being a viewer means watching a game to completion of airing, if it simply means tuning into the channel during the broadcast after which the ‘viewer’ can leave immediately and still be counted. We don’t know if it takes into account TiVo stats, streaming stats, people who put the game on as pointless background noise and never actually watch the broadcast, people who have to stay on a channel to ensure other TiVo’d shows don’t get lost, people watching multiple games and recording multiple games at once and essentially increasing the viewer ratings incorrectly; it’s a poor measure.

It is logical and reasonable to assume that the viewership is actually lower; go to a streaming website during a game that has a chat window which counts watchers, and you probably will see counts in the high thousands to low tens-of-thousands; higher counts will obviously happen during marquee regular season games and playoff games. Go to the main NBA sub-reddit and you’ll see that game threads can have anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand comments per thread, which increases during the playoffs and Finals. Sure, these are likely people who are in the very niche part of the viewer-base who would watch a game when it’s on regardless of who plays, but the point is that we know these numbers, and they’re very low, thus it’s reasonable to assume that if the dedicated fan-base for NBA basketball is small, the actually fan-base is probably smaller than what the Nielsen ratings indicate.

Why is this important? The regular season pays for the entire NBA. Sure, playoff and Finals games will get lots of surcharge income, but the estimated 30.8 million views from last years Game 7 Finals pales in comparison to the potential 2.9274 billion views that the Nielsen ratings say the NBA garnered over this most recent season. Lost regular season revenue is why the NBA started putting tons of games on NBA TV, which you can only get with a hefty extra purchase, and why they’re doing the advertisement/sponsor pins on jerseys. More importantly, it’s partly an indicator that teams full of absurdly good players actually isn’t healthy for the NBA since nobody is going to watch their team get stomped by the top dogs.

This would be fine if the NBA aired the lesser contenders on high profile channels, but as stated earlier, the organization is moving towards the premium model to capitalize on its niche audience as they are guaranteed income rather than the flippant casual viewer. However, the niche audience isn’t going to give a shit about teams like the Wizards playing up-and-coming powerhouses like the Trailblazers if they have to pay an absurd fee for it. Plus, the viewing audience for basketball is teenagers and people in their twenties, who are a part of the population who generally will avoid paying for shit in general due to not having steady income/any income at all and aren’t paying for cable subscriptions. The whole situation is a giant loss for both the NBA, as they aren’t getting as much money as would be possible since they can’t tap into more viewers and are losing tons every day, and for the viewers who have to pay extra to watch mildly competitive basketball between teams that either outright suck and are trying to get high draft picks, or teams that will get steam-rolled come the time when good play matters.

This conundrum is what fans of the NBA will call the ‘lack of parity’. Shitty teams get rewarded for being shitty with high draft picks and the potential to become great, and great times get rewarded by going to the playoffs and receiving the accolades that come with this. The rest of the NBA, which comprises the most amount of teams, are essentially doomed to mediocrity where they either accept their lot in NBA life and wait for the good teams to become shitty, or constantly play basketball chess to get either better or worse to get some kind of benefit. This was already a problem and has been for years, as high draft picks for sucking has been an ancient practice and is extremely criticized, yet nothing is done to fix this. In recent years, creating teams of the best players in order to get extremely easy access to winning a ring has become another phenomenon that, while practiced by the league in its entirety (or at least tried to be practiced) and highly frowned upon, nothing is done to stop it.

The Kevin Durant move is obviously the latest and most prolific in this case, though it’s far more divisive than simply creating a ‘super team’, as it was a top five player moving to a championship franchise, creating an unstoppable juggernaut. While plenty of folks, especially those who are fans/bandwagon fans of Golden State, will say you’d be a moron to not take a near-guaranteed ring along with money and a Bay Area mansion (and they’re technically right), this mindset completely ignores the fact that the entire point of the NBA is to sell the idea of competition to its viewers. Sure, people will tune into see David vs Goliath in June, but nobody is going to watch Goliath beating up on the equivalent of small children during the regular season because there is no competition.

Paul Pierce recently had an interview where he likened the move to ‘a nerd who gets beat up with his nerd friends by a bunch of bullies, then joins the bullies and beats up on his own friends’, and much like the ‘Ahead of the Curve’ analogy, I think this speaks to the entire situation perfectly, and to everything that’s happened this past season. Kevin Durant and the Oklahoma City Thunder faced the Golden State Warriors last year and had them on the ropes. Durant then proceeded to shit the bed and perform the greatest choke-job the NBA had ever seen, eclipsing the collapse of the Clippers the year before. Everyone would remember this had Golden State not shit the bed even harder against the Cavs. He joined the Warriors as a free agent, which, as I’ve redundantly stated here, ended any effective competition the Warriors could face. The story could’ve ended here and people would’ve probably gotten over it; I certainly would’ve tabled my sentiments had it just been Durant trying to cross off ‘Get Ring’ from his bucket list like a random dude playing WoW crossing ‘Get Ahead of the Curve’ off his achievement list.

Instead, what happened was Durant left Oklahoma in the lurch, giving radio silence the entire time. This forced the team to mortgage perfectly good players and assets to try and make the best of a shitty situation, which anyone who watched the regular season this past year would know it did not work out well for them or anyone involved. He cold-shoulders Russell Westbrook, a dude who was his best friend on the team and the guy who consistently spoke highly of him, and the rest of his teammates. He then has someone on his media team write ‘The Hardest Road’, a clear attempt to ape LeBron’s ‘I’m Coming Home’ essay from two years prior, and people completely buy in, despite how nearly illiterate his self-run social media is and how there is absolutely zero context in which his decision was ‘the hardest road’; people in fact start looking for non-existent context and making up context like the essay is ‘Catcher in the Rye’. As the season goes on, he continues to make statements where he puts his foot in his mouth, and actively shits on his former team, which his teammates obviously take exception to. During games against the Thunder, there is visible tension and awkwardness between Durant and Westbrook, and he even gets into ‘fights’ with the very teammates he shit-talked, carrying what I can only call as arrogant bravado, which is something he has never displayed before. Meanwhile, he and the team are busy celebrating with seizure ‘dances’, ridiculous gestures, and antics that toddlers typically display while they’re busying stomping on competition that, in most cases, doesn’t even care.

I’m sure my waxing poetic above sounded pretty nice, but it’s honestly exasperating to think that this is the product the NBA commissioner Adam Silver thinks is ‘good’, and overall, that’s the worst part of all of this. It’s not that the team is that the team is basically the embodiment of a spoiled rich kid that gets extremely sad when things don’t go his way, but is super great when shit is going according to plan. It’s not that they abuse the rules and rarely get called for it. It’s not the egregious illegal screens and chippy attitudes they still have despite being the best thing since sliced bread. It’s not how Kevin Durant is now acting like a super-alpha tough guy despite him never being that kind of person until he was getting carried to a trophy. It’s not the media narrative that has painted the team as goddamn unassailable. It’s not the cancerous fan-base that continues the perpetuate all the bullshit I’ve mentioned so far. It’s not how many times the team will sign a player with an extremely dirty history, and that history will be thrown out the window because of absurd fucking flag waving. Man, it’s not even the fact that a fucking professional basketball team can somehow succeed without any of its players having anything close to a complete basketball skill set.

It’s that everyone is okay with such unadulterated garbage.

I get that not many people are like me. I understand that most want to simply turn on a game and be entertained like old Roman emperors. Very few watch games for dribble-penetration moves, team passing, offensive and defensive schema, footwork and shooting form mechanics. I’m completely fine with being in the minority of a minority of a minority, but none of that changes that when you take away all the possible reasons for watching or using a product and simply take a hard, objective look at the quality of the product itself, the current state of the NBA is mind-blowingly bad. When there are professional players on the best teams in the world who cannot dribble the ball without putting their hand on the bottom hemisphere performing what is known as a ‘carry’ every time they hold the ball, an action that someone like myself who is a complete fucking amateur is capable of not doing, then something is very wrong. When the biggest set of games in the entire season of a product that is all about competition has no goddamn mother-fucking competitive stakes whatsoever, perhaps it’s time to step the hell in and fix what’s going on.

To wrap up, I’m sure my raving is just that: some nobody yelling at a cloud. I honestly hope it is, because I love basketball. A lack of quality control won’t stop me from enjoying the sport or playing it and getting better, but it sure will give me pause on whether or not I decide to tune in and spend my time watching a pile of crap when I could be doing something infinitely more productive and useful with my time.