Five Reasons To Root For A Thunder/Celtics NBA Finals

If your team is still alive in the NBA playoffs, then a) bully for you and b) you're exempted from figuring out precisely which potential Finals match-up is most aesthetically appealing to you.  You want whatever opponent will be most advantageous for your team to face, and while that choice may be debatable from a tactical standpoint, that sentiment governs your wishlist for the last series of the season.  For the rest of us, I suspect what pairing we desire depends on exactly what type of NBA fans we are.  (Note: I am not endorsing or deriding any one of the first three philosophical outlooks presented here.)  In no particular hierarchical order:

Thunder/Heat.  If you love star power and welcome the potential for explosive lunacy running rampant, this is your series.  This is also they way to go for those who hope to witness the young, humble, "built-the-right basketball way-through-the-draft-and-smart-trades" kids from OKC smoke those egomaniacs from South Beach.

Spurs/Heat.  If you enjoy LeBron and D-Wade (and maybe if he's healthy Chirs Bosh) doing their thing in transition, hucking oops and rocking rims, you want this to go down.  San Antonio is still a formidable defensive team, but they're not the lockdown kings of Spurs iterations past.  The Heat would put on a show in the open floor.  Conversely, if the Spurs could knock off Miami via Tony Parker righting his personal ship and by unleashing a deep bench (who really need to start playing better if they want to even make the Finals), there will be a deal of jubilation from those who can't wait to point of how a sound team concept and superior coaching can trump supernova-bright stardom.

Spurs/Celtics: For the nostalgia set.  Veteran squads, last hurrahs, and the two best coaches left in the playoffs.  This would be the ultimate slow-to-a-crawl, defense-first showdown.  And the NBA Marketing Team's worst nightmare incarnate.

Undoubtedly, any of those matchups would provide plenty of compelling basketball, and a few additional story lines to those mentioned above would emerge as they do over a finals series.  But the most compelling possibility by far, in my humble opinion, is Thunder/Celtics.

This would be my preference for a number of reasons which I will now enumerate in depth. 

1. Perk.  When the C's traded Kendrick Perkins at the deadline two seasons ago, they could not possibly have foreseen Jeff Green's heart troubles or how badly they would miss his scowly interior presence, but suffice it to say the Thunder got the better of this trade by an Oklahoma farm-country mile.  The chance to go up against his old cronies, with the potential to wind up with more titles than at least three future Hall-of-Famers, might propel him to even more incredible heights than his 15-point, 9-rebound WCF Game 4.

2.  The Great PG Battle.  Rajon Rondo and Russell Westbrook are undeniably two of the best young point guards in the league, albeit in entirely different ways.  More than that, though, they are eerily reminiscent of one another in temperament.  In many respects, Westbrook is almost a reverberation of Rondo's past, an echo from four seasons ago being sonically re-imaged into the now, but slightly distorted from its original waveform.  Think about how we describe the Thunder's dynamo PG: Good kid, interesting skill set, but somewhat problematic.  Petulant, erratic, and unpredictable.  Inexplicably lapses into deep funks, but can also carry the team.  Not the best player on the floor, but the linchpin off of which everything else is keyed.  A study in contradictions, given to sullen fits and non-replicable displays of genius.  Isn't that essentially a carbon copy of our perceptions of Rondo a few years back?  This matchup would be utterly fascinating; watching Rondo stare down his own ghost would be a delight, and if that ghost can evolve along similar lines and up the ante, so much the better for the rest of us.  

3.  If the Thunder can advance past San Antonio, much will be made of the torch-passing, old-to-young theme.  If they can beat the Spurs and Celtics, they will have knocked off the winners of every Finals since 1998 save the '04 Pistons and '06 Heat ... in a single postseason run.  It's difficult to envision a more declarative way of announcing the league's New Undisputed Alpha Dogs.  They have to actually pull it off first, but still. 

4.  You want to watch Paul Pierce give Kevin Durant firsthand basketball lessons of slickest, super-craftiest variety, right?  Of course you do.  It'll be like Crash Davis and Nuke LaLoosh, only with the desire to hoist the Larry O'brien Trophy coming between them instead of a Poetry and English Composition professor.  "This is how you draw contact, Kevin.  Jot this down ..."

5.  The oldest franchise in the league against the youngest, and I don't mean the median age of their respective rosters.  I am literally talking about The Celtics, the winningest and most storied team in professional basketball history, playing opposite a team that essentially manifested overnight in a fly-over state because some wealthy people decided they didn't give a damn about the city of Seattle.  (You know, where Ray Allen used to play.)  Oklahoma City is still, collectively, a new-born, wide-eyed, punch-drunk basketball entity, from the ownership  to the players to Scott Brooks to the fans to the folks who work concessions at an arena the likes of which they probably never thought they'd see in their town.  Stepping into the NBA Finals for the first time against Boston, where they've bled hoops for generations compared to OKC's few seasons, will make for an interesting contrast. 

No matter what, we should soak up the basketball we have left before it goes away until November, but if the sports gods are feeling benevolent, I hope they grant this humble request: Thunder/Celtics Finals, seven games (pretty please), and all the drama and pyrotechnics we can stand.  It's not too much to ask, right?  Now, let us pray.

Backs Against The Wall.

I remember with perfect clarity the first time I stepped into the arena proper within the TD Garden.  That the Celtics were not my team was immaterial at that moment.  As a lifelong NBA basketball fanatic, suddenly the "Celtic Mystique", that threadbare and nondescript phrase, made a lot of sense.  You raise your eyes to those seventeen championship banners and that litany of retired jerseys.  Then you lower them and gaze at that parquet floor, transported to its present location in order to preserve the surface upon which the sneakers of generations of basketball titans trod and squeaked.  You share all of this with the pregame crowd jostling around, reeking of beer and high-wattage excitement; the understanding that the place holds a specialness is transmuted through instant osmosis.  It's the feel of the thing that counts.  Sure, the ghosts are there, even if they had to follow the parquet across town to make it.  But the ghosts aren't the point.

Older Boston natives will undoubtedly scoff at the preceding paragraph.  They sat in the original, non-air-conditioned, sightline-obstructed Boston Garden, and I'm sure they'll regard an outsider's reverence of the new incarnation with disdain.  (As they regard pretty much everything about outsiders.)  Nonetheless, I was there and I know what I saw and felt.  Maybe TD Garden ain't THE Boston Garden, but it is most definitely the metaphysical heir thereof.

All of which is to say: I know exactly what my beloved Hawks are up against tonight.  They have to contend with Kevin Garnett's vicious intensity and Paul Pierce's essential Truth-iness.  They're dealing with Ray Allen's pristine jumper and Rajon Rondo's all-around ingenuity.  They're certainly pitting a heavily over-matched Larry Drew against Doc Rivers.  And, tired as it sounds, they're up against that "Celtic Mystique."

It's not a figment or fabrication, either.  It isn't magic or voodoo or ephemeral haze.  When I said earlier that the ghosts aren't the point, what I meant is this: the "Celtic Mystique" isn't the last whiff of Red Auerbach's cigar, it's the crowd.  They define, in the lexicon of passion and fervor, that long-vaunted aura of invincibility.  Whatever crowd happens to fill the seats in the TD Garden, just like the crowds in the old Garden, carries with it a specific emotional resonance.  They are single-minded and obsessed, and they are legion.  I have been in that building for a playoff game, and I can tell you as a neutral observer that it's a minefield for the opposition.  There's a symbiosis between the crowd and the team, a reciprocal fulfillment of shared hopes that hums and quakes over the course of a game.  The only function of the folks in the stands is to demoralize those wearing the visitors' uniforms and elevate the guys in green and white.  For the duration of the clock, every Celtic is a god, every foe is a devil, and every ref is vilified or sainted depending on how his whistle blows.  That sort of ubiquitous and unrelenting psychosis can wreak havoc on the interlopers.

The Hawks have two things going for them tonight.  First, the core of this team has been in that building, under very similar circumstances, before.  On the losing side of the effort, but still.  Second, and more importantly, they have their anchor back.  Al Horford is the beacon, the nucleus around which the erratic and disparate natures of Josh Smith and Joe Johnson and all the rest can revolve without total dissolution.  His reemergence last game was a reminder of what this team was intended to look like before injuries decimated the frontcourt, and that image is somewhat wonderful.  I've been watching the game as I type this (I beg your pardon for the late finish to this post), and the second quarter is just underway with the Hawks up 28-25.  I can only hope the lead will ultimately hold.  I can only hope the TD Garden Crowd, the heart and guts and true curators of the Celtic Mystique, won't fulfill their traditional roll tonight.

Tonight, with our backs against the wall, I hope the Hawks can close their ears to the deafening roars of history and mythology and sheer Bostonian dickheadedness.  To diffuse the Celtic Mystique, we must shut it out.  We must be deaf, and we must also play a masterpiece of a game.

Come on Hawks, let's go Beethoven on their ass.    

Splashdown.

When Derrick Rose crumpled to the floor on Saturday and took Chicago's title aspirations with him to the locker room (from whence neither would return intact), my first thought was that the road to the Eastern Conference Finals had just been rendered easier for the Hawks.  My second thought was: "those poor bastards."  If you follow sports with any devotion at all, you had no small amount of empathy for what every Bulls fan felt in that instant.  We've all been there.  Injuries can change the entire complexion of a season with vicious finality, and few things will sucker punch a fan base like witnessing the immediate decimation of hope.    It's a sickening, dizzying feeling when you can see everything you thought you knew evaporating in the blink of an eye.  Season: done.  Do not pass go.

Along with all other Hawks fans, I went through this when Al Horford went down with a torn pectoral early in the season.  Without our steadiest on-court presence and defensive anchor, it seemed like the season was pretty much shot.  Improbably, even after losing Zaza Pachulia depleted their entire supply of quality bigs, the Hawks continued playing above-average basketball most nights and eked out home-court advantage for the opening playoff series with Boston.  I figured that was about as far as we were taking this ride, and picked the C's in seven in my round one preview.  Then we took game one.  With Ray Allen's ankles acting their (advanced) age and Rondo getting a DNP: "I stupidly chest-bumped a ref and got myself suspended, thus forcing my team to start Avery Bradley and Mickael Pietrus as the back court in a playoff game," there was suddenly the very real possibility that we could win game 2 and head to TD Garden up 2-0.  Nobody's kidding themselves that we could knock off The Heat in a series, but getting to the Eastern Conference Finals seemed feasible.  Rondo aside, the Hawks are decidedly younger and faster than Boston, and with the compressed season having exhausted the league more than usual, it was possible that we could trump a superior team by just running them out of the gym. 

You have to understand how much that would mean to Hawks fans.  Boston-Atlanta is not a rivalry, per se.  Certainly no Celtics fan would acknowledge it as such.  But the C's are always the team standing in our way come playoff time; they are the authors of our misfortune.  (Or co-writers, I suppose.  We're pretty good at scripting our own basketball disasters in Atlanta.)  A brief history:

In 1986, an electrifying Hawks team featuring the diminutive (and totally awesome) Spud Webb and the massive (and totally awesome) Dominique Wilkins (and point-guarded by Doc Rivers of all people) made it to the Eastern Conference Semifinals.  Atlanta was delirious.  The Falcons were awful, the Braves stunk, the Flames had left for Canada in '80, but here, finally, was a modicum of sports success for one of our teams.  Then we ran into the perfectly-attenuated basketball machine that was the '86 Celtics.  Bird, McHale, Chief, DJ, Walton.  They absolutely took us apart, magnanimously allowing us a solitary victory in one of the most lopsided playoff drubbings of all time en route to the title.  It was a stylized execution, and not even 'Nique's most thunderous jams could mitigate the humiliation and futility of it all. 

In 1988, we met Boston again in the Eastern Semis.  To say we acquitted ourselves better in this one would be an egregious understatement.   We pushed the C's all seven games in a truly spectacular series that became an instant classic.  Game seven is immortalized in the NBA canon simply as "The Bird/'Nique duel."  I still remember sitting on the couch with my dad watching that game in total awe, enraptured by the heights of excellence to which those two guys pushed each other.  Seriously, click the link.  That was a phenomenal game.  Which, you know, we lost.  It is positively soul-crushing to watch your team play that well and still come up short.  Stupid Celtics.  Stupid Bird.  

...

(Insert long gap where neither Boston or Atlanta were any good at professional basketball.)

...

2008.  The Hawks snuck into the eighth seed on the strength of a promising young core (Horford, J-Smoove, and Joe Johnson) that became the nucleus of our current iteration.  The newly reconstructed and revitalized Celtics, a 66-win juggernaut of a team, regarded this as a perfunctory exercise at best; a mere formality.  Atlanta showed them differently.  We scrapped and clawed and gave Boston all they wanted for seven games.  Joe Johnson shot the lights out.  Josh Smith did Josh Smith things.  Zaza Pachulia endeared himself to KG and the Garden crowd.  (Not really at all.)  Truthfully, it may have been the greatest totally-inconsequential-in-hindsight series ever played.  And, of course, we lost.  Again

It always goes that way with us and Boston.  Which is why I wouldn't care if we got swept in the second round it we could, just this once, beat the Celtics in a playoff series.  I don't think that's too much to ask from the sports gods, right? ... Right?

Last night wasn't much of a surprise.  Anyone who is even tangentially familiar with the Hawks will tell you that we have a horrible tendency to play mediocre basketball when we think we ought to win a game without too much trouble.  (See: getting smacked down, at home, by a Raptors team starting three guys on 10-day contracts.  God, that game was awful.)  True to form, we came out flat and stayed that way for most of Game 2.  Also, when Paul Pierce is at his utmost Truth-iness like he was last night, there's just not much you can do.  Number 34 smoked us, pure and simple.  The loss I can handle.  Or could have, if not for that sickening, dizzying feeling I was talking about earlier. 

I wasn't expecting to feel that way again this year.  We've already had more than our fair share of injuries this season, thank you very much.  So when the first inklings started filtering into my brain, I did my best to ignore it.  Josh Smith was clearly not 100% last night.  Hell, he hasn't been for much of the season, but he's soldiered through because there were stretches this year when he was our only reliable offensive weapon and we needed him.  As he dragged a bad left knee around through much of the fourth quarter, I started to worry.  Without Smoove, it would be categorically impossible to advance past Boston.  But if we could just get through the game and give him a few days' rest, it might be alright.  And right about then, that damnable feeling crept up behind me and every other Hawks fan with a neat length of lead pipe and started laying to.  With a shade under five minutes left on the clock, Josh Smith collided with Kevin Garnett, and was promptly taken to the locker room for the remainder of the game.  On the replay, you could clearly see that left knee giving out on impact.  Not much, just a tic, but it was moving in a way that normal knees do not. 

The official word from the Hawks today is that J-Smoove has a sprained left knee, but no serious structural damage.  He is questionable for Game 3.  If we lose that game, I'm 99.9999% positive we will lose the series.  Even if he can go, a less-than-healthy Josh Smith is a worrisome proposition. The man's entire game is predicated on explosiveness and preternatural athleticism.  If that knee prevents him from flying around the court in his accustomed manner, he will become a very ordinary basketball player, and possibly something less.  And the Hawks cannot win with that version of Josh Smith on the floor.  We need the high-velocity, high-altitude monster that put up 16 points, 12 boards, and 5 dimes last night before that ill-fated fourth quarter.  Otherwise, we don't have a prayer. 

So I'm pouring one out for you tonight, Chicago.  (Pounds chest in solidarity.)  Smoove may not be quite the same caliber as D-Rose, but our outlook is equally bleak without him.  If we see you in round 2, let's hug it out before we try to knock each other off.  After all, when our teams get snake-bitten like this, we all deserve a little sympathy.      

Phased Tension Hypnotique: Rajon Rondo and Steve Reich

Like the vast majority of NBA players, Rajon Rondo is on record as a Hip Hop and R'n'B aficionado. This is the soundtrack of basketball, the underpinning of identity and atmosphere that serves as a sort of secondary unifier, outside of the game itself, for those who ball. Even when the league attempts to dampen or subjugate the more overtly "thug" (and that term should be taken with a whole silo full of salt) elements of its persona, there's no divorcing basketball from its musical/cultural conjoined twin.* Rondo's top five list in the link above is as good an example as any of inextricable symbiosis. Undoubtedly, if NBA players could select entrance music the way batters and relief pitchers do, he would pick the hottest, most slammin' Jay-Z or Drake track possible, and feel like a total badass as he strutted onto the court while it thumped over The Garden's PA system.

But I submit to you that Rajon Rondo's personal backing tracks, if one were to compose a score to accompany his game and on-court demeanor, would not consist of beats and MCs. In fact, the perfect auditory representations of Rondo-as-unique-basketball-entity were first performed and recorded several years before he was even born. The man who wrote the music of Rondo's essence? The grand poobah big daddy of the 20th-century Minimalist movement, pioneer of phase music and looping, and America's finest living composer, Steve Reich.

If you're unfamiliar with Reich's work, I urge you to take the time to listen to this and this. (I know the second selection cuts off early, but you get the idea. Ignore the videos, by the way, they're irrelevant.)

I know, I know. This music is about as far removed from Hip Hop swagger and the dynamism of Rondo's play as is possible, but just bear with me for a moment here. To my way of thinking, two things are the hallmarks of Reich's particular compositional voice: the incredible variety and constant permutations he derives from the barest of musical elements, and a brutally unrelenting sense of permanent tension. Those two elements also happen to be the defining characteristics of Rajon Rondo's game.

No one in the NBA does more with less than Rondo. For a perimeter player to lack any semblance of a jumper (he's averaging 30% FG on shots more than 3 feet from the rim this season) is limiting. For that same player to also struggle mightily at the stripe (59% this season), especially when he's as gifted at getting to the rack as Rondo and should be using that ability to draw contact, would paint the picture of an ineffectual offensive component. Yet the man is a threat to notch a triple-double every time he sets foot on the court. Defensively, he's an unpredictable but potentially lethal quantity. And he does all this with only a trio elements at his disposal: an intuitive, unique interpretation of the court, world-class athleticism, and the sort of length (not just his arms but the freakishly huge hands** attached to them) that makes bloggers and commentators overuse the word "wingspan" 36 times a sentence.

In "Violin Phase" (the first piece linked above), Steve Reich takes a single, disconcertingly serpentine two-bar loop and, instead of traditional compositional development, he evolves the piece based upon the temporal relationship of that loop to an accelerated version of itself. Variations emerge as the elements of the loop come in and out of phase with each other, and each acceleration reveals a newly juxtaposed counterpoint. It's creating something complex and whole out of a handful of rudimentary tools: a single musical phrase, its repetition, and what transpires when that repetition is shifted in time. Rondo achieves an equally complicated and enthralling outcome via the creative application of a similarly limited range of assets. Devoid of some important, more conventional skills (the aforementioned shooting difficulties, a certain eccentricity of style that occasionally hampers his play), he has parlayed this combination, flawed though it may be in some respects, into a customized weapon on both ends of the floor. His game, like that violin riff, is lacking in diversified aspects yet can still produce myriad variations of beauty when properly utilized, and nobody utilizes his gifts quite like Rondo.

"Six Pianos", the other Reich composition linked above, exhibits many of the characteristics just discussed. It uses iota-sized fragments of musical thought; short patterns in a propulsive, rhythmic drive. Ideas emerge and recede, evolve and devolve, shifting around and into each other. We experience this as a series of subtle changes. Moments flash lucid only to be deconstructed, the whole work slowly migrating through a few tonal centers, but the piece never once leaves the pitch classes of the D major scale. And that last sentence is the key to the other regard in which Steve Reich is Rajon Rondo's musical patron saint. The piece starts furious and hypnotic, and it stays that way. The tonality shifts according to the bass emphasis and voicings, but we never leave that D Ionian scale. Harmonic motion of any kind is nonexistent. We start with a tension that is never increased, lessened, or resolved. It is altered yet undiluted throughout the progress of the composition, and persists until the sudden, and still unresolved ending. Watch Rajon Rondo's face, attitude, and demeanor sometime over the course of a whole game: he is the physical embodiment of this trait of Reich's music.

From opening tip to final buzzer, Rondo is a coiled spring that stays coiled. 30-point blowout or nail-biter affair, he is permanently tensile. No play great or terrible, no momentum shift or foul or occurrence of any kind alters this quality. He has the perpetual look of sprinter in the starting blocks, the tiger just before the pounce and kill. The invisible wire within him is always taut, always one instant from either snapping or going slack, yet it never does either. Every second of game clock, Rondo conducts himself with the same hypnotic intensity, actual circumstances be damned. The effect of listening to "Six Pianos" and that of watching Rajon Rondo play a basketball game is differentiated only by the sensory medium through which we process it. The perpetual, unresolved tension is identical in either case.

Hip Hop is the medium and voice of the NBA, and the preferred choice of Rajon Rondo. Nothing could make more intuitive sense. But in terms of compositional ethos and auditory representation, Steve Reich pretty much hit the unintentional nail on the head in mirroring Rondo's identity on the court. Even if they have nothing else in common, both understand the value of tension and creative use of limited thematic material. This makes them wonderfully unique in their respective fields, and wonderful uniqueness is a damned fine thing to witness.

* The most obvious example: when David Stern implemented the league dress code in an effort to curtail Hip Hop's aesthetic impact on the presentation of his product. Instead of merely accepting it, fashion-oriented players like Dwyane Wade immediately seized upon the moment, subverting the NBA's new sartorial rules and using them as a platform to redefine "swag."

** One of my all time favorite Rondo moments involved him standing perfectly motionless on the right of the floor, roughly parallel with the top of the key. Paul Pierce tried an iso possession that got shut down by the arrival of a help defender, and he fired a bullet of an overhead cross-court pass back to Rondo. The pass sailed on him, elevating well above Rondo's head and traveling at or close to the highest velocity ever achieved by a basketball. Without moving any other muscle, Rondo extended his right arm straight up and, with one incredibly huge hand simply snatched the ball out of the air and held it raised above his head. I repeat: THE BALL WAS GOING A ZILLION MILES AN HOUR WAY OVER HIS HEAD AND THE DUDE ABSOLUTELY SPIDERMAN'ED THAT SHIT ONE-HANDED! It was ridiculous. Most NBA players can palm a basketball, but Rondo's got to be the only one who could do THAT without batting an eyelash. Sheesh.