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I'm thinking I might start posting recaps of This Week In The NBA. Because even people who don't actually like watching the sport should be able to follow along, the NBA is the best entertainment drama going.
Before I get into updates, though, there are so many existing storylines to bring people up to speed about.
So. I've picked my favourite team as the starting point, but some of this will only even make that much sense when I've done some more things on other teams and players, but bear with me!
Canon Background #1: The Golden State Warriors
Back when I was a kid, I went through a significant Basketball Phase. Mostly, this being the early 90s and US teams not being broadcast in Perth, I was into the Perth Wildcats, but we followed NBA teams, mostly through monthly magazines.
My team of choice was the Golden State Warriors, because they played in blue and gold (like the West Coast Eagles).
This decision was made just before the rise of the Michael Jordan Bulls, who would win six of the next eight championships (in two sets of three). You may in fact have heard of Michael Jordan even if you don't like sports.
The Warriors, meanwhile, would... well.
A site called Grantland ran a column called How To Annoy A Fan Base In 60 Easy Steps detailing the ways in which the Warriors would do basically everything wrong and get quite unlucky to sustain a historically long stretch of being really, really bad.
It was published in 2012. At that point, the Warriors had made the playoffs once in eighteen years. (The We Believe Warriors may get their own post at some point, it's a heartwarming feelgood storyline with some hilarious comedy denouements featuring the German villain who will go on to be redeemed into a beloved fan favourite Good Guy.)
So. Circa 2012, the Warriors were the long-standing comic relief character, the bumbling idiot who does everything wrong and gets really unlucky the few times he did something that wasn't actually stupid. In TVTropes terms, the Warriors were somewhere between The Chew Toy and Blessed With Suck. Nothing ever worked out right.
As of 2012, they were booing ownership on Chris Mullin Night, a night meant to celebrate one of the handful of heroes the Warriors had left.
And then something magical happened.
Steph Curry, who'd missed most of a season for surgery and rehabilitation on his ankles, because he was a talented young player balanced on ankles made of spun sugar, reworked his movement and biomechanics and muscle development and learned to stay healthy for most of the season.
He and Klay Thompson got to play together more. They're both amazing shooters who became known as the Splash Brothers.
After another player was injured, second-round draft pick Draymond Green blossomed into a defensive powerhouse.
The Warriors started to click.
In 2013, they made the playoffs and got to the second round.
In 2014, they made the playoffs, and were heartbroken to lose in the first.
They fired their coach, Mark Jackson, and hired a first-time head coach in Steve Kerr.
In 2015?
They won a championship. And Steph Curry won the league's Most Valuable Player award.
Some of their opponents through the playoffs and Finals had injury problems, so that summer, people were downplaying their achievement. People were calling another player, James Harden, the "real" MVP. (Harden won the Players' Association MVP award that year.)
The Warriors were not impressed. Their centre, Andrew Bogut, got his championship ring sized for his middle finger. (Yes. Really. He's Australian.) And unlike most defending champions, the Warriors came out for the next season...
Hungry.
They won their first 24 games in a row. Which was a record.
This season opening is a montage of spectacular success... amid some worrying scenes of their coach Steve Kerr having spinal surgery, and complications, and having to miss their games in agony.
Kerr eventually returned to coaching, but looked decades older than he had, haggard, and still visibly plagued with migraines all season.
The rest of the season is intense. Every team is coming out to beat the Warriors like doing so is as good as a championship. Almost none of them succeed. At no point do the Warriors lose twice in a row. If I remember right, they don't lose a single game at home, either. (If they did, they lost no more than one.)
The Warriors win 73 games, and lose 9, breaking the Jordan Bulls' record of going 72-10.
Along the way, Steph Curry blows the whole league out of the water with the most spectacular individual offensive season the League has ever seen. At some point I'll probably do a whole post on Steph Curry, but suffice to say: no-one was saying anyone else was the MVP that year.
Steph Curry wins the first unanimous MVP in the history of the NBA.
And then in the playoffs?
Steph gets hurt.
The Warriors make it through the first round. Steph comes back in the second. They go down 3-1 in the Western Conference Finals and come back to win (it's best-of-seven). They go up 3-1 in the Finals... and then they lose. (These series could sustain their own posts but this is already long.)
After the greatest regular season in history.
Yeah... people said things.
Meanwhile, that offseason, Kevin Durant, generally agreed to be the second-best player in the NBA and an all-time great, is entering unrestricted free agency, and he doesn't seem entirely happy with his team, the OKC Thunder.
Kevin Durant also deserves his own post.
He signs with the Warriors.
His first season with the Warriors has a clear period of adjustment, but come the playoffs, the Warriors are unstoppable. They go 16-1, losing only one game, total, which they lost to the Cleveland Cavaliers in the Finals. (The Cavaliers were only marginally worse on playoffs record; they lost one game in the Eastern Conference Finals, to the Boston Celtics, that was it.) Kevin Durant wins Finals MVP.
His second season with the Warriors (we're now at the 2017-18 season), the Warriors have a rough ride. Injuries keep hitting the team - at one point the entire starting lineup is all out at once - and the Houston Rockets are on a tear. The Rockets end up with the best record and the first seed.
The Cleveland Cavaliers have lost Kyrie Irving, one of their stars, and somewhat struggled all season. They're not looking good.
People are talking about the Western Conference Finals as the "real Finals", and they're not wrong.
The Houston Rockets take the Golden State Warriors (feat. Kevin Durant) to seven games.
And are leading in the seventh game going into the third quarter.
Houston proceed to miss 27 three-point shots in a row, which is unheard of.
The Warriors win.
They proceed to sweep the Cavaliers (winning four games without losing one). Kevin Durant wins FMVP again.
The Warriors have now won three of the last four championships. (The fourth, if you ask Warriors fans, is mildly controversial, at that, but the AU in which Kelly Olynyk didn't break Kevin Love, the Cavaliers win in 2015, the Warriors win in 2016, and Kevin Durant doesn't join the Warriors at all is a whole other thing.)
The bumbling, failtastic Warriors are now an all-time champion team, because after all of that failure, all of that frustration... they're heroes now.
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