Saturday, June 9, 2018

It's not fair...

In the NBA finals for 2018, we witness once more the obliteration of the Cavs of Cleveland by the Warriors of Golden State.  A graceless dominance...a one-sided affair; the battle between the last two teams standing was competitive only in spurts with no question as to the better team.  The two decade long disparity in the talent levels of the Eastern and Western Conferences since the retirement of Michael Jordan has reached its zenith with an Eastern Conference team being swept out of the Championships for the first time since 2007 - which happened to be LeBron's first Finals berth.

While each of the previous three matchups between these teams had their own flavor to it - LeBron without Love or Kyrie vs a virgin Warriors team, LeBron the underdog vs a 73-win juggernaut, KD and the Warriors avenging their defeats at LeBron's hands - this matchup had much less in the way of tactics or strategic dynamics at work by either squad.  Watching the games there was a strong sense that the Warriors didn't have to play their best to win and yet they did win and win in a fashion that was laughable and embarrassing.

In sport, we seem to want outcomes that are both competitive & definitive, and yet, we love the narrative of the underdog.  We love the idea of underdogs rising to the occasion and felling those who 'should' win.  But we also have a strange distaste for matches that are 'unfair' where the dispararity between two competitors is too vast.  This is a strange contradiction: the only way to have a meaningful underdog is when the talent disparity is overwhelming.  One would think that anyone that liked rooting for an underdog would also like seeing a team badly outmatched in a competition.  But it raises another, more profound paradox for those with even a passing concern for what is fair or right: why would it be more satisfying or fair for a bad team to prevail over a good team than for a dominant team to perform in a dominant fashion?  

Clearly this seems to fly in the face of definitive results and in basketball in particular, a definitive result can and has been reached in many seasons - when the team with the best record in the regular season is also the team that has the best record in the playoffs i.e. the team that wins the Finals.  Only in these conditions can a team be said in an unambiguous way to be the best team in basketball, and in a perfect world any team that doesn't do both of these things couldn't be the most winningest team and therefore would have a questionable claim to being the best.  In 2017, the Warriors had the best record in basketball and lost only once in the playoffs - the best team was clear.  In 2018, the Warriors had the second best record in basketball and was pushed to 7 games against the team with the best record, the Rockets of Houston, and prevailed while that team was missing its second best player, Chris Paul.  How could they clearly be the best team in basketball when those doubts remain?  Would they have even gone to the Finals had Chris Paul not been injured or if the Rockets hadn't achieved the statistically improbable feat of missing 27 consecutive 3-pointers in the decisive game 7 in front of their home crowd?

Thus, despite wanting definitive results and fair matchups, we see that not only can definitive results only come from unfair matchups but also that one type of winning - playoff or 16-game winning - is clearly seen as more important that another type of winning - consistent 82-game winning.  This creates this strange disatisfaction with the underdog win whereby the Cavs who won in 2016 have people saying that their win was due chiefly to luck, as people say of the Warriors in surpassing the Rockets this year.  This is the strange dichotomy that comes from wanting in the first place - that the underdog inspires us and reminds us that anything is possible yet at the same time it discomforts us that even the strong, the talented and the hard working can be felled by lesser rivals, by circumstances and the world around them.

Karate, like life, has little concern for what is fair.  LeBron is to individual athletes what the Warriors are to professional sports teams.  LeBron is a mixture of skill with overwhelming physical prowess; the Warriors are a mixture of system/culture with overwhelming basketball talent.  LeBron is going to finish with the most points in basketball history, cementing his claim to greatest of all time.  What is the signature move of his that helped him get all those points?  Is it the Duncan high-off-the-glass jumper?  The Hakeem dream-shake?  The Kareem sky-hook?  The Jordan fade-away?  The Iverson cross-over?  The Ginobli euro-step?

It is none of the above.  LeBron scored that many points without one go-to signature move because for his entire career he's been able to get to the basket at will based on sheer athleticism and strength alone.  This is something that absolutely no one has been able to do as well or as long.  This is a genetic reality that was apparent from his first days in the league.  "He's bigger and faster than the guy in front of him" has been the foundation of his 30000+ points.

Likewise, the Warriors could play the most skillful basketball but they really don't have to.  They have, on average, more people on the court who can score, score at a high percentage, and manufacture their own shot than perhaps any team in NBA history.  Only USA men's basketball teams have been better and the Warriors are currently better than some of those teams.

In a very real way this is 'unfair' by any definition of fairness.  It is interesting then that those who marvel at the seeming unfairness of the Warriors don't similarly remark about LeBron.  In a game such as basketball, where skill should be the determining factor, it isn't 'fair' that he can bully his way to the basket whenever he wants but that's the reality.  Some of us are born with gifts that others aren't.  

Kevin Durant - gifted in ways parallel to LeBron - felt the brunt of that 'unfairness' when his Thunder team fell to LeBron's Heat team in 2012.  The Warriors felt the brunt of that 'unfairness' in 2016 when they similarly fell to LeBron's Cavs.  Them teaming up to visit unfairness upon LeBron is something that only a non-karateka could complain about.

All of these ways in which people react to sport is revealing of the degree to which the average person lives under the illusion of fairness - the illusion of right.  To the karateka, complaining about fairness is missing the mark.  It certainly doesn't make us stronger or keep us safer.  Life is what we make of right and justice when it doesn't exist - what these things cause us to do.  How we perform and what lengths we are willing to go to in spite of an unfair world.  LeBron was 'unfairly' outmatched yet again and he opened his effort with a sublime 51 pt performance that made everyone for a moment question what was possible, wasted largely through a mental error on the part of his teammate, JR Smith.  But did he reach those heights again to see if the outcome could be changed?  No, he didn't and perhaps it is impossible to ask that.  Perhaps it is asking too much.  But this is a question that only LeBron can answer - a test that only he can take.  All of us have the choice of trying even harder tomorrow or satisfying ourselves that what is asked of us is impossible.

Wanting or expecting what is fair generally causes us to do the latter and not the former.

No comments:

Post a Comment