The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,--Omar Khayyam
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.
After that pretty negative post on the 2010 Finals, it's only natural that I would have more negative things to say. Or, it's only natural that I would have something overly positive to say about some other Finals. I don't know what's natural anymore, but I know it's the second one that's happening.
How about 2011: That was a pretty good Finals. Let's associate series with Radiohead songs. Whereas the 2010 Finals was the series of "No Surprises", and the Spurs-Grizzlies series was a "Let Down" (I guess OKC-LAL last year was "Morning Bell"?) the 2011 Finals had "Everything in its Right Place" (you only need the title to get these). Wherea$ the 2006 Final$ were more like "Electioneering" (amirite?).
I'm starting to exhaust my Radiohead knowledge. Let's switch gears to Bob Marley songs. Dirk's return to the Finals and subsequent victory were a prime example of "Coming in from the Cold". LeBron was guarded by "Three Little Birds" into a decent but unspectacular offensive performance throughout the series, and his defense, while often tremendous, was not DPOY level. He didn't teach us "How to Disappear Completely" in the crucial Game 4, (Radiohead) but he certainly laid down "The Foundations"*. And therefore a series which seemed like it should have been "Burnin' and Lootin'" for the Heat ended with comebacks that left them "Waiting in Vain" for the buzzer in what seemed like inevitable victories, right until they weren't. And thus did the Mavericks make their unlikely "Exodus" from games that had seemed lost. "Get Up Stand Up," Mavericks, for you have "Satisfied My Soul" in beating the hated Miami Heat. Is "Not a Real City" a Bob Marley song? Because that's something I'd like to say about Miami to its fans, in a closing, arbitrarily petty blow completely directed by sports I'm sure you're all very nice people?
* - This is actually the band that did the song "Build Me Up Buttercup"
It was a really good series. Now, I love star turns, and part of me (maybe part of everyone, represented here by Joe Posnanski) wanted LeBron to utterly dominate on both ends like he had against Chicago and Boston, even despite the tonedeaf arrogance of "The Decision" and the subsequent parade. But somehow, the image of Dwyane Wade carrying a team that suddenly seemed like the overmatched Nets of Jason Kidd's heyday lends a sort of "Ender's Game" series's* "he was the real hero all along" kind of narrative credibility to the Heat's overtalented arrogance. It's ironic (well, ironic ignoring the collective greatness in the Mavericks' organization), but the Heat actually looked like the damaged team, and the damage actually gave the team some respect to these eyes. I guess they answered the question "Could You Be Loved?" originally posed in the title of a Bob Marley song.
* - Weirdly, but also completely reasonably, Kobe Bryant was apparently obsessed with "Ender's Game" in high school.
From the Mavericks' perspective, they won in a way that was incredibly respectable. After the Dirk injury during the season left them unable to score for games at a time, I think most of us saw the Mavericks' core as a group of talented veterans, but frankly, barely a playoff team. But they proved us wrong, game after game. They wouldn't have gotten there (or even to 40 wins) without Dirk, it's true. But Dirk couldn't buy a shot in much of Games 4 and 6*, and Jason Terry and JJ Barea's fourth quarter play (as well as Jason Kidd's perfect anchoring at the point) drove so many of the great comebacks that the Mavericks made in the postseason. Tyson Chandler's defense, the fancy (seemingly unguardable) pick and rolls started by Dirk late in the game, an offense with a seemingly inexhausitible supply of six-minute role players, Brian Cardinal matching Juwan Howard foul for flagrant foul, and so on, created a truly special series from the whole of a very top-heavy team.
* - Incredibly, Dirk's first truly bad game of the last three rounds (I didn't watch enough of POR-DAL to know) of the postseason occurred during an illness, and he still managed to hit the game-winner. But as great as it was, for the first three quarters, Dirk was "Treefingers" (we're back to Radiohead)
I think what made the series special was the narrative most of us came with that posited the inevitability of the Heat "turning it on sometime and taking the series for good," as this "sometime" got pushed back to game 5, then to game 6, then to game 7, and thence to the final realization that the Mavericks had an answer to everything the Heat could turn on, except LeBron. And in the end, LeBron, like a iterative process or a spinning wheel or a revelation, is showing us that this unknown "sometime in the future" is always already a part of his present, as inextricable from his soul as his past. Maybe this is true of all of us, that our present contains both our broken ideals and our actual futures, but it wouldn't necessarily be the overriding theme in our book of life, just as our core values aren't necessarily our ideals.
Unfortunately for LeBron, sports has an ideal as its core value, every series has to end at some point, and apparently this ideal was broken from him and this series ended before his time could ever arrive. Far from hating them, as they're so fond of saying, we have before us only this sympathetic facade of greatness that wants so bad to affirm the rest of the construction. In our own yearning and defensiveness we recognize theirs and year after failed year, a Heat title perhaps becomes palatable and then desired, for we also desire that, for one shining, possible moment, our own facades can at once unmake our flaws and limitations and give us an image of God not on our bread or in the patterns of stars but in our souls, a mark of redemption that shall not be tampered with even if the rest of the way is suffering and ridicule. Oh, God bless us all!
That said, I still think that I'd want the Spurs to win every year from this point on, and that would be much better than the Heat even once. In fact, maybe all that talk of tragedy and narrative gets trumped by the simple fact that they're the Heat, and other teams are the Blazers, Spurs, Thunder, Jazz, Pacers (much respect, George Hill), Bulls, God...even Lakers and Celtics, I guess...and still other teams that are not the Heat and would be better for most of us if they won. Personally, if the Spurs could win just once or twice, that would be nice, and would suffice. That would be great "Exit Music (for a Tim)".
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