Upcoming series has the makings of a Hollywood blockbuster
The Rockets are winning the NBA Finals. If they can beat the Warriors. That’s what it already feels like, right?
We have to wait almost a week for Game 1 to begin. The league’s No. 1 seed and reigning champion will then take seven days to play the initial three contests. And a cross-country battle that has been hyped since last summer could last from May 14-28, requiring the full seven games and leaving the eventual victor exhausted by the time the real Finals roll around.
But what a battle this should be.
Somewhere between the Super Bowl, an old-school heavyweight fight and “The Avengers versus Thanos” on the Richter scale. Taking over your TVs, radios, social-media feeds and daily conversations as long as the 65-win Rockets and the superpower from The Bay are both still alive in 2018.
And for the first time in a long time, James Harden, Chris Paul and Co. against Kevin Durant, Stephen Curry, Klay Thompson, Draymond Green and Co. actually doesn’t feel overhyped.
I stayed up until 2 a.m. Wednesday watching the same second-round highlights and Western Conference finals previews over and over. Then I woke up immediately thinking
about Warriors-Rockets and spent the rest of the day planning for it.
The only person in basketball America who isn’t overjoyed by the potential of two weeks of overanalyzed, made-forTV drama is the Warrior who Rockets fans love to hate.
“We won two championships in three years. We don’t have to run around talking about how bad we want to play somebody,” Green told reporters late Tuesday, looking cool and sounding colder after Golden State also won its secondround matchup 4-1. “We want to win another championship, and it don’t matter who is in the way of that.
“If you in the way of that, then you happen to be in the way. … We’re not about to run around like, ‘Yeah, we want to play them in the conference finals.’ For what? It don’t matter to us who we play.” Heck, yeah. Minor trash talk. Almost a week before Game 1 even begins!
Just imagine what it’s going to be like when these two teams play a couple times, then have a four-day window until Game 3 arrives.
This has all the makings of a Hollywood summer blockbuster and a future multi-part TV documentary.
The team that earned home-court advantage and is coming off the best regular season in franchise history is an underdog and being professionally disregarded by some of the biggest talking heads on the tube.
“I want to see the Warriors get pushed. (The Rockets) are the only team that can push them,” TNT analyst Charles Barkley said. “I would love to see a six-, seven-game knockdown, dragout series. I don’t see it.”
Outside of Houston, most don’t. You hear Warriors in five or Golden State in six.
I’ve got the Warriors in seven —and I gladly will be wrong on that one.
I absolutely know this: It should be one heck of a series and could end up as an all-timer.
We often talk about how real rivalries have faded out in modern sports. The Rockets only played Golden State three times this season and the two last met Jan. 20. It also has been three long NBA years since 4-1 Warriors over the Rockets in the 2015 conference finals, when Dwight Howard was the current version of Paul and a still-developing Harden was surrounded by limited weapons.
I’ve often thought back to those first two games at ear-pounding Oracle Arena. Golden State took both, but only by a combined five points. It was tied at 97 with 5 minutes, 28 seconds left in Game 1, and the Rockets were within 87-85 with 5:31 remaining in a heartbreaking Game 2, which saw Harden lose the ball in the final seconds and fall to the floor as The Splash Brothers held on to a tight 99-98 victory and took a 2-0 series lead.
A year later, the Rockets fell to the Warriors 4-1 in the first round, during a highly disappointing season that saw Kevin McHale fired and Howard later depart.
Ever since, general manager Daryl Morey has been tinkering with his roster and fine-tuning the team’s approach — hiring Mike D’Antoni, adding defense and proven role players, trading multiple pieces last summer for Paul — in an attempt to get another shot at the franchise that keeps standing in the Rockets’ way.
“All that stuff is cool,” Green said. “You can build your team — obviously you want to build your team to beat the defending champs, because that’s usually (how) you’ve got to go to get a championship, the way you’ve got to go. All understandable. That stuff has been said for about a year now. It’s time (to) play.”
In years past, the Rockets simply weren’t good enough. Harden had to learn. The team around him had to improve.
Now, it’s only fitting that for D’Antoni, Paul and Harden to win a world championship together, they must eclipse the Warriors.
Erase Golden State and the NBA Finals could end with another parade in Houston.
Game 1 — and all the drama — can’t get here soon enough.