NBA Draft Potential Primer

NBA Draft Potential Primer

That the league is now better than it has ever been and getting only better from here is the kind of genuinely exciting that is only possible when tremendous potential meets contemporary appreciation. Typically the swell of great currents shift and rise outside the hive mind and crash into it to become a zeitgeist. The NBA on the other hand has been steadily building through the sheer power of its steady, dominating excellence.

Only marginally at the expense of a sport that shares many great traits just with less spectacular humans (football, and in the US, soccer).

Mostly at the expense of the brutality vs beauty argument by, ironically, beating the brutality sports to death. At a time when actual brutal sport becoming high art (Anderson Silva begets Conor McGregor and George st pierre begets Jon Jones and Demetrius Jonson) lead to its ascendance. And at a time when the less beautiful sports of brutality suffered by falling from memory like the national byproduct of the concussions they foster on a minute to minute basis.

So here now the moms and dads cant in good conscience recommend the NFL to their kids and America isn’t even entirely into the idea of watching it die gracefully while its talent finds news outlets to express sheer human potential.

I mean basketball, as a long time prime fan, the one who put it above all the others, has always had the appeal of individual excellence couched in an aesthetic framework of a team. A group of hunters that did not have to mute the best talent behind anonymity (masks, muted expression, never rocking the boat in controversy) to function.

This sport is just being played at the level that coaches dreamed were possible only in the realm of fantasy. They literally dreamed this stuff was not possible in reality. And now it can be played at that level in the finals.

And as new fans continue to come in and don’t have to remember the slow steps on the 80s and the brutal pounding steps on he 90s, the overhyped euro steps of the 2000s, they get to see what all that dreaming hyper real forward momentum of players like magic and Jordan birthed out of the chaos of what was possible and through sheer force of will started to terraform into reality, if a kind of unreplicable reality: namely, that this was excellence unsurpassed and unique.

The problem with that mythologizing is that today the game is played at such a level of sophistication that to be exceptional now simply means more. Players are in better shape and are more skilled, and players with less skills, but one great skill, are used more effectively.

And at the elite levels where there are few weaknesses that don’t spell doom, the carnage at the margins of the scoreboard don’t even matter as much as the spectacle of watching the struggle. The cavaliers were interesting even as they lost because the best player ever was having the best 5 game stretch of his career offensively against one of the three best defensive teams ever (the warriors are that good when they want to be; they can put the NBAs best offense on the court at any time, through any number of line ups, and then bring on 5 players that would be the NBAs best defense also).

And lebron went down inevitably and valiantly. And KD rose to the occasion. And Steph Curry is still the greatest NBA alien (he cannot be made into a video game because his actual shooting stats are too good, he is the only player that must be nerfed before he can be digitized). And we get to see excellence unfold in real time. And watch the youth dream and execute and carry the legacy forward.