David Roth's Weak In Review: Playing Pretend In The NBA Finals

You awaken in a darkened, climate-controlled screening room. Your seat is well-cushioned and the restraints binding you to it, while sufficiently tight to hold you in place, are made of a soft fabric. A door opens in the back, and Quentin Tarantino enters, taking the seat next to you; he's eating a hot dog, but not in too gross a way or anything. Tarantino produces a remote, and Kill Bill: Volume I begins playing on a large screen. QT polishes off his hot dog—a little bit of relish gets on his shirt, which leaves kind of a gross pale green stain, but again it could have been so much worse—and pauses the film after maybe a minute.

At which point Tarantino turns to you and, his breath heavy with nitrates and yellow mustard—which again is not ideal, but you are restrained in a chair in Quentin Tarantino's home, hot dog breath is fine as a worst-case scenario—begins to explain in that rat-a-tat Jolt Cola way of his that this particular shot is a reference to a similar shot in Giulio Petroni's Death Rides A Horse, which is this totally, like criminally, underrated 1969 Spaghetti Western with Lee Van Cleef in it, and what was so great with Lee Van Cleef was that motherfucker was just, like, what's the word for it, he was just so cruel. And so on and so on for the entire duration of the film, Tarantino interrupting the story every 45 seconds, and then giddily interrupting his own interruptions to explain references and homages and stylistic echoes. At some point, he gets up to get another hot dog, and you finally have a moment to weep.

Thankfully, there is no crime on earth heinous enough, and no court ruthless enough, that someone would be sentenced to this fate. But watch enough sports for long enough—or too much for too long, maybe—and you risk a similar experience. So it was this week, when the NBA Finals swung from one seeming inevitability to another over the course of just a few days. It was very clearly LeBron's Merciless March To The Sea after Cleveland's win in Game 3, and then it was, just as clearly, the Warriors All-Devouring Perpetual Motion Device Back In Action after the Warriors rolled in Game 4. It was all happening too much and too fast, there was more to parse than there was brainpower to parse it with. And so I, and maybe you, powered down and turned things over to the part of my brain that asserts and believes, instead of the part that reasons and edits. The pedantic citations made themselves, and it really was just like when Kobe did this or Iverson did that or LeBron himself did something similar. In the absence of any other way of understanding the series' swings, I went full, feral Tarantino.

More disturbingly, there were these sudden zero-gravity moments in which it became possible for reasonable people to achieve the sublime un-enlightenment of the most irritating people in sports—to be totally certain about one thing at one moment, and then equally certain about the exact opposite thing in the very next. We can laugh at, or turn discreetly away from, the zipless braindead zero-sum certitudes of Skip Bayless and the thousands of copycat sub-Skips co-hosting "Skree And The Dong" sports-talk shows across this great, awful nation. We should, we do. And then the NBA Finals goes ahead and makes us just as sure, and just as dumb.

This sounds more unpleasant than it is, although to be fair it is difficult to imagine something more unpleasant than spending even a moment inside the consciousness of Skip Bayless. (I imagine it being like the storage locker from Silence of the Lambs, but so much louder.) In the moment, there's something intoxicating about knowing for sure that the way a given game is going is the only way that it and all remaining games could go, that every moment is the decisive moment with all the consequences stacked up cleanly behind it. It's all false, of course. We don't know know how these Finals are going to shape up, at least not any more than Skip and them ever know anything. But it's easy to see why it works for them. It is a retreat into the land of make-believe, but it's a natural defensive response when being confronted with something as legitimately new as these NBA Finals.

And there is something new happening, here, although I won't presume to guess at what it is just yet. The Warriors came into the Finals as a juggernaut without any aesthetic precedent—a totally rational machine that, when functioning properly, somehow resulted in Stephen Curry icing 29-footers off the dribble. A year after the San Antonio Spurs won what will probably stand up as the most reasonable NBA title in history—that is, their mechanized conquest never for a moment made anything but the most bulletproof sense—the Warriors rolled into the Finals with a system that functioned just as elegantly, but churned out Steph Curry whammy-bar runs and guiltless Klay Thompson heat checks instead of staid corner threes. Also they got there by playing protean, brilliant defense. But I am not coming up with any metaphors for that, so just know they played really good defense, too. The Warriors were weird, but they were inevitable.

And then suddenly they were not, at least for the period stretching between the tip of Sunday's game in Oakland and the deafening end of Tuesday's in Cleveland. During that period, LeBron James smashed every quirky beautiful thing that the Warriors had made with his sheer refusal to Stop Going In. The Warriors played gutted, doubtful basketball and LeBron's hammer-on-nail progress to the rim repeated and repeated and it was all so clear—this was not about that, but about this. Yes, the Warriors nearly pulled out both the games in which they were shredded by LeBron, but this was just more proof of the new inevitable thing, which was that LeBron could win a whole NBA Finals by himself even if he was surrounded by creaky humps and questionable specialists and all manner of Dellavedovae. This never felt quite as ironclad in its inevitability as the Warriors, to be fair, but in the giddy moment even the fact that it was suddenly plausible felt like an invitation to believe in any possible craziness.

Golden State's convincing win in Game 4 was, after this week of strange belief, the equivalent of an alarm clock. We are not waking up into the certitude that ruled after Game 1, when it was clear what kind of NBA Finals this would be and how it would go; we are also not awakening to the wild possibilities that were everywhere after Game 3, when it seemed almost likely that LeBron would show us something we had never seen before en route to writing a different ending for a very different kind of NBA Finals. We are, in some ways, where we started: a great team against a great player, this time in a best-of-three series.

We learned this week that our old comparisons do not work here, that our referents don't translate. We learned, in the process of adopting and discarding a pair of equal and opposite certainties, that we really do not know much. We learned that basketball is wilder and less knowable than we remember, and were reminded that we are not watching this series so much as we are chasing it. If all we know about the rest of the NBA Finals is how little we know about it, we know plenty.