We learned in our reading yesterday that the Detroit Pistons are now a fully fledged power in the better-than-we-thought Eastern Conference, and well worth the notice both for what they've already accomplished and for the wonders that the exceedingly springy Jalen Duran works on his own.
It's a nice story told well, but also they are not the Oklahoma City Thunder. If they're much closer than most expected, the Pistons currently fall among the NBA's narrow tier of closest-but-not-that-close teams. The Thunder are threatening the most dangerous résumé in sports—that of the 2016 Golden State Warriors, the most mocked great team in NBA history.
The Warriors, you may recall, won the 2015 NBA championship by rising from decades of 33-49 seasons to become an enduring national brand under the auspices of W. Stephen Curry. They are a national brand today because of that year and the three championships that followed in 2017, 2018, and 2022. They set a record for best winning postseason percentage by going 16-1 in the 2017 playoffs, and they remain a national brand by trying to win another one with their current Jurassic Park-style roster.
But it is that 2016 team that brands them, unfairly but persistently. You remember it: That team won their first 24 games en route to a league-record 73 wins, then blew a 3-1 series lead in the Finals against the Cleveland Cavaliers. In Game 7, the Cavs made one of their last nine shots and the Warriors made none. That's morgue-cold ball, just Grizzlies-level dreadful, and it has adhered to the Warriors ever since like a psychopathic limpet even as they otherwise have cruised into history as the defining team of their era.
It is the year that retaught the concept of not wasting excessive effort on the much-maligned but still immensely lucrative regular season. The Warriors, in stomping through the regular season before stumbling at the finish, helped create the idea that a team can win too much, by too wide a margin. Through 18 games, this Oklahoma City team is 17-1, and winning games by an average score of 122-105; through 18 games in the 2015-16 season, those Warriors were winning theirs 116-100.
There may be a lesson in all this, and then again there may not. It's sports, remember, where all things are equally false. Either way, we are loath to apply it here. The question leads to the tiresome matter of whether it is good for a team to take the odd night off for long-range tactical reasons; that's part of the greater load-management debate that has done so much to erode the otherwise sky-high standards of sports-talk media. That conversation is a cousin to the largely debunked theory that tanking leads to triumph, when in fact it has mostly led to firings followed by more tanking. Either way, it feels wrong to worry that the Thunder are winning too much when there are currently more objectively terrible teams than at any time in league history. Given that Friday night's Wizards-Pacers game is already being discussed in legal circles as an entertainment hate crime, the Thunder's average win margin qualifying as a blowout seems like a minor problem.
Still, the talk has to start somewhere, and assuming the Thunder win tonight's game at home against Minnesota, theirs will be the fourth-best record after 19 games in NBA history. That sort of thing will make people talk. A lot. Some months from now, we'll find out who was the least wrong.
Compare this to the Colorado Avalanche, who, like the Thunder, are on a nine-game winning streak. Through 22 games, they are 15-1-6, very clearly the best team in the National Hockey League and possibly one of the best in that league's considerably longer history. Nobody, in this case, is worried that they are winning too much or by too wide a margin, because the NHL's regular season is styrofoam to the postseason's titanium. Having the best record means nothing come spring, and the President's Trophy, which goes to the best regular season team, is regarded with the same prestige in the league as a twice-filled Kleenex.
The NHL does its label-making in the playoffs, and prefers length to momentary spikes. The Montreal Canadiens of 1976-79 are still the best team ever, not because they had four of the best starts in league history but because they won the Stanley Cup in each of those years; they won, somehow, 48 of the 58 playoff games they played in that stretch. Nobody is warning the Avs off continuing to win, even though the history is clear.
But the Thunder are easing into that don't-be-the-Warriors zone because ... well, not "because" so much as "despite." Ignoring their current 78-win pace as patently unsustainable—there's nothing much in the game tape that suggests it isn't, but 78-4 just looks wrong—the Thunder still are on the kind of trajectory that produces rather than repels championships. Of the 20 teams in history with a mere 65 wins, 15 ended up as champions; of the five that didn't, you never hear anyone taking swipes at the 2016 Spurs, who went 67-15 but ducked out in the second round. The Warriors let those Spurs off the hook when they chose the worst possible moment to miss every shot during the back stretch of Game 7. That and that alone made this a Warrior-centric mark of shame, but it's one with serious emanations. That will only grow as the Thunder continue to mow through opponents of wildly variable skill and desire levels.
So you may well ask, why is this true, even though it so clearly isn't? Because our historical memory is minimal, as fans and as Americans, and because the passage of even a decade, let alone one as jarring as the last, causes our brains to spit up all over themselves. It's fun to mock the Warriors because they didn't win that one time. That is because our national character is so deeply defective, and because we are as a society such a king-hell drag to be around. If anyone is rooting against the Thunder, that would be why.
But have a happy Thanksgiving anyway, you deeply unworthy louts.
