Why greatness isn’t always a good thing
By mid-week, we’re going to know if we’re really seeing what we think we’re seeing.
What we think we’re seeing is the reigning NBA champions and easy winners of the league’s Eastern Conference, the Cleveland Cavaliers, not even able to seriously compete with the Golden State Warriors, winners of the Western Conference, in the NBA final.
Whether this is actually true still has to be proven on Cleveland’s home court. If LeBron James and Co. can’t get any closer than 19 points there, as was the case in Oakland, well, there won’t be much more to say.
Except there will still be lots to talk about.
As in, is this possibly good for the NBA?
See, this was supposed to be the final that would rescue the NBA post-season, which has been filled with lopsided wins and one-sided series. You probably wouldn’t have thought while watching the Raptors knock heads with the upstart Milwaukee Bucks in the first round that you were watching what would be one of the most competitive series of the playoffs, but you were. Boston and Washington went seven games, as did the Clippers and Utah. And that’s been about it.
The always quotable Charles Barkley, who shared a podium with Wayne Gretzky and Paul Coffey in Nashville on Monday, suggested the NHL playoffs have been far more entertaining this spring.
“It’s not been a lot of fun broadcasting (NBA playoff ) games this year,” said Barkley.
Cleveland dozed through the regular season, letting the Celtics steal first place, but then raced through three rounds with only a single defeat. In one playoff game against Boston, the Cavs led by 41points — at the half. Golden State was even better, going 12-0 before the final against the Cavs began.
This is the third straight meeting between these two teams, supposedly the titanic grudge match. This would be no Rocky III, Clubber Lang letdown. This would be epic, and the NBA’s answer to all the complaints about the post-season.
Except it hasn’t happened that way. The Warriors won the opener at home by 22, and then pasted the Cavs again in Game 2 by a 132-113 score despite the fact Cleveland made fewer turnovers compared to Game 1, forced more turnovers and created more fast-break turnovers. That was all wiped out by the fact Klay Thompson, quiet in the opener, went off for 22 points.
At the moment, all that’s left of any hope that this series will still be memorable is the memory of last year’s series, when Cleveland charged back from a 3-1 series deficit to claim the title.
But as a tuckered LeBron James pointed out repeatedly after Game 2, the Warriors are a “different team” than last year. No kidding. The Chicago Blackhawks had to take an axe to their roster every time they won the Stanley Cup this century for salary-cap reasons. The Warriors? They went 73-9 last year after winning the NBA championship in 2015, but after losing to the Cavs went out and added Kevin Durant, possibly the second-best player in the game.
That would have been like the Hawks winning the Cup as they did in 2015 and then not only keeping their roster intact, but then acquiring Evgeni Malkin or Ryan Getzlaf.
Such is the difference between the NHL’s “hard” salary-cap system and the NBA’s “soft” cap.
The two systems — based on this year, at least — have created very different worlds. In the NHL, there are no great teams any more. The Hawks were probably the last team that could be described that way, and that was partly because years ago they were able to sign stars Duncan Keith and Marian Hossa to a type of contractual arrangement that’s no longer legal.
That hard-cap system — which also includes a cap on entry-level salaries and on the maximum salary any player can earn — has produced unprecedented parity. There was no clear Cup favourite going into the playoffs, and the team with the 16th-best record going into the post-season, Nashville, has made it all the way to the final.
The NBA, by contrast, has no similar parity, at least not at the top. Everyone expected the Cavaliers and Warriors to lap the field and meet again for all the marbles, and they did. If the Warriors, who are wildly entertaining to watch, can keep doing what they’re doing, they’re going to be compared with the greatest NBA teams of all time.
So is a glimpse of greatness better than parity?
It depends what you like, and probably where you live. In the NBA, it’s already assumed that Cleveland and Golden State will again be the favourites to win their respective conferences next season as well. Boston has a good young team and the first pick in NBA draft in the East, while San Antonio is rumoured to be courting Chris Paul as a way to challenge the Warriors in the West. But right now, they would be long shots to upset Cleveland or Golden State.
The gap is that significant, whereas the gap among the very best NHL teams and those that barely miss the playoffs is relatively slender. In a very low-scoring league, there is no powerhouse capable of doing anything remotely close to what the Globetrotter-like Warriors are doing. So again, it depends what you like. In Washington, D.C., the Capitals won 55 games while the Wizards won 49. The Caps had a competitive shot to win it all, while the Wiz had no shot.
An even better example would be Toronto. The Raptors went into the playoffs as a more accomplished and successful team than the Maple Leafs, but the Leafs probably had a better chance of doing what Nashville ultimately did, while the Raps knew they could never beat Cleveland.
Greatness makes for wonderful poetry, but parity creates interest in more markets. It’s wonderful to be a Golden State fan and a basketball historian, but not so great to cheer for Utah, Portland or Memphis, cities with quality teams but not in the same competitive universe as the Warriors.
Parity excludes greatness. But greatness excludes widespread competitiveness, and you have to wonder if that’s bad for business in 2017. Damien Cox is the co-host of Prime Time Sports on Sportsnet 590 The FAN. He spent nearly 30 years covering sports for the Star. Follow him @DamoSpin.