Hoopheads across the nation begin their annual vigil Wednesday in anticipation of receiving the thing they most crave in all the world—a new team to admire, love, fear, and hate simultaneously. And you can't really blame them for their baffled antipathies. Their favorite sport is both defined and repelled by dynastic teams and the silly little debates they shape, which are always on the menu as a kind of bland and ubiquitous comfort food, the sort of tastes-the-same-everywhere sludge you can eat and regret along any of the nation's highways. And these fans are starving for it; they haven't had that level of reliability in this sport in nearly a decade now.
But they live in hope, and dread, that a new dynasty is upon us, this one governed by Wemby The First (and so far Only) and sure to run for 10 years, since that is the most common span of time employed in the sentence, "He's going to be unstoppable/the face of basketball for the next X years." This is the natural response of the basketball intelligentsia when confronted with something new and temporarily indomitable, and if it is generally doomed and dull it's also not totally wrong—any sufficiently good team will make it difficult to imagine any other team knocking them off. But for most of the last decade, that is just what has happened, followed by either the resentment that comes from being right or the dismissiveness of being wrong, because basketball fans work very hard to want the next big thing until it arrives and then to become sick of it shortly thereafter. Wemby is called an alien and that is the highest of compliments until it becomes a condemnation. Often this will happen in the same conversation.
And so the new working theory is "Wemby has come to save us and then rule us as a cruel overlord." There are, to be fair, relatively fewer fears that the New York Knickerbockers, against whom Wemby either will or will not begin his reign of benign terror, will become a repeat champion. That's not really a knock on the Knicks so much as it's largely due to the fear that imagining the Knicks as a dynasty is to imagine their fan base into an army of vampires who shriek perpetually into the night seeking bare vulnerable necks, with the only wooden stake available to the nation as a whole being Tony Brothers.
The eventual champion will, for a time, be the only team afforded any deference, because they'll be the only ones who didn't end their seasons with a loss (we don't count Dallas and its epic 149-128 win over Chicago on the last day of the 82-game preseason). But these two teams are also the latest in a series of first-time Finals matchups in a near decade of debutantes that nobody saw as potential champions. Spurs-Knicks is the latest in a series of unanticipated matchups in an eight-year stretch that involves 13 separate teams making the Finals; every one of those other champions were going to win multiple titles because of their inherent value, worth, and divinity. None of them have done it yet, although the Warriors' win in 2022 is easy to read as the last splash of the dynasty that ruled the back half of the previous decade.
Some of this is because winning even one NBA Championship is very difficult, and requires a great deal of luck in a great number of places. The Thunder were supposed to be a dynasty after their win last year, and that narrative lasted one contentious season, a period marked by the midwifing into common parlance of the detestable phrase "ethical basketball." The year before that, the new dynasty was supposed to be Boston and its ultra-optimized approach, and the year before that Denver and Nikola Jokic seemed set to terrorize the league with only minimal help. Before that, it was Stephen Curry making the impossible plausible by refusing to age, which came right after the irresistible rise of Giannis Antetokounmpo, and right after LeBron James riding the COVID pony in the bubble. Kawhi Leonard's Raptors championship came before that, and if no one really foresaw a dynasty there—Leonard was off to save the trees with Steve Ballmer that offseason—it was nevertheless a convincing win. Any dynasties there? Let us help you with that. No.
The last time the league was this jumbled was the barren 1970s, after the Celtics' decade, and that league was even more stratified than this. Nine teams went to those 10 Finals; to your certain horror, the team that achieved that the most times was the Baltimore/Washington Bullets. Yet nobody talks about the Bullets dynasty, and not just because the Washington dynasty everyone recognizes is them being the worst team in basketball since 2009.
This, then, is the least settled time in NBA history when it comes to the one thing its most depraved customers want most—a ravenous overlord they can all be sick of. That was going to be Oklahoma City before everyone decided that the Thunder worked the officials more than they dominated their fellow franchises; the general glee at their failure last weekend is still vibrating through the sport. Now it is Wemby, whom nobody has quite figured how to deal with without invoking the Bad Boy Pistons. It is to his pending discomfort that the Finals are typically played with a level of physicality that could best be described as "dry-land hockey."
Many of the people living in fear that Wemby will roam the land as an all-consuming dragon imagine that he is the new Bill Russell, plus eight inches in altitude, two feet of wingspan, and 30 extra feet of usable playing area extending from the basket. This ignores some important countervailing truths—that opponents mature and adjust tactically and strategically, that rosters change and injuries happen and micro-level salary cap issues and macro-level CBA ones always arise. The league economy created by the most recent CBA, with its onerous and inflexible cap rules, would not look much different if it had been designed to prevent the establishment of a dynasty; even a team like the Thunder, which is near-perfectly constructed under those circumstances, has to take itself apart somewhat every offseason. Most of all, the true dynasties in the game are still found with the tanking teams (hello again, Washington). Basketball is a movable feast, even if the food is sometimes unsatisfying and leans into being past its sell-by date, and there won't be any verifiable decision to made on Wemby until 2035, by which time the planet might be a smoking ruin with any luck.
But if this is the true beginning of the Wemby Era—if it really is the replacement for the abortive Shai, Luka, Jokic, Giannis, and Kawhi mini-eras, and before that the actual LeBron/Curry era—we will learn to hate that, too. As much as fans find repeat winners to be comforting, we also find them boring and ultimately loathsome. The NBA is a best/worst times proposition at all times, and the uncertain legacies of the moment are bad for the game right until they are replaced by another Lakers/Celtics era that everyone who hasn't whored their souls to the media rights gods will hate as well.
In sum, these games had better be damned good, because we're going to hate the outcome whatever it is. It's like the Stanley Cup Final in that regard, only everyone agreed ahead of time to hate both Carolina and Vegas. Some narratives need time to develop, while others are stone-cold locks at the national anthem.
