So the finals are now over.
The Cavs played very well in games 3, 4 and 5 and still lost, because they had to expend TONS of energy to compete with the MUCH MORE TALENTED Warriors team.
That's right, Kyrie Irving, Bron, KLove and a solid bench got beat.
You can debate the particulars of the series if you want to, maybe Kyrie expended way too much energy with all the flash, maybe Bron and KLove didn't assert themselves enough offensively, maybe Korver just missed a few open 3's he would normally make.
The macro is this:
What Kevin Durant did in the off season is symptomatic of our culture. He took the easy way out, he didn't care about the means, he only cared about the ends.
Our culture is only concerned with appearances, hence our obsession with social media, hence the rise in narcissism.
People do not seem to realize the sheer oddity of a player of Durant's caliber deciding to join a 73 win team that basically was already the best team in the league by a sizable margin. Especially since his team was up 3-1 and had he and Westbrook figured out how to play a decent 48 minutes they would have met Cleveland in the finals.
Now the Warriors are about to sweep the field, and it happened because a player was allowed to tip the balance of power in an extremely lopsided manner.
The fact is that this has never happened before. LeBron went to average or lottery teams and made them contenders, he didn't JOIN a contender to make them a super contender. He still wanted to show that HE was a major part of the reason that his team made it to the top of the mountain, he relishes the JOURNEY.
Durant just wants the outcome. Its like a dude who can't lose his virginity so he hires a hooker. All that matters to him is busting a nut, not a meaningful connection.
We no longer seem to be interested as a culture in an authentic meaningful experience, we just want the outcome that we imagine will make us happy. Our instant gratification culture has bled into major sports now, with this move being defended and glossed over as okay and justified with various precedents.
I am reminded of when I was a teenager and we would go to my cousin's house to play Risk. He would always win, which seemed odd at the time. Years later he admitted to us that he always stacked the deck so that he would always have more soldiers than we did.
The NBA is now a sport where the team with the best shooters wins, by virtue of the fact that officiating is skewed towards the offensive player. When the game is less physical it becomes purely a matter of offensive ability. The Warriors, already having the best offense in the league were allowed to add the best offensive player not on their team onto their team.
And now the anticlimactic result of the Warriors winning has happened, and they will of course win again next year, barring a major choke job or a major injury. They will have home court and will be damn near impossible to beat in a best of seven series.
The Cavs will retool and arm themselves up even further so that they can compete, cementing a fourth straight finals appearance of the same two teams. What a snooze fest.
The reason people are touting around as to why Durant made this move is that supposedly players are only measured by whether they won a championship and by how many they have won and so he did what made 'sense' to cement his legacy...
In essence what they are admitting is that our culture has become so shallow and transparent that we only care about the end result, not the journey, not the details.
We only care about cliff notes, not actually reading the book.
We judge people based on meaningless numbers, not the details.
We read our news in bite size chunks because we lack the patience for meaningful content.
Our news articles contain fewer and fewer facts and more conjecture and propaganda.
Championships are the measure of greatness, not actual skill or impact. It matters not that this was a cakewalk, what matters is the outcome.
I myself have no desire to watch the NBA anymore, no parity, no post play, all threes and layups, every team is adopting the same style of play. The league is becoming homogeneous and what makes matters worse is that the officiating is as terrible as its ever been.
What is the point of watching something if you know the outcome?
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