Here’s to the hope of mystery and intrigue in the 2018-19 NBA season

The role our brains play in religious belief continues to be hotly debated. It has a rather long history, well before Karl Marx’s accusation that it was the “opiate of the masses” and today, legitimate scholars very seriously consider the possibility there are structures in our brain making us susceptible to belief, very generally. I won’t go into it, it’s not relevant, don’t ask me any more questions. But my favorite part of the debate is what is called “agent detection.”

Agent detection is the idea, which seems basically true, that we are cognitively inclined to assume the existence of “agents” in response to certain kind of phenomena. I don’t mean Arn Tellem, or whoever, I mean that our ancient Neanderthal ancestors were pretty good at knowing if they heard a twig snap in a forest this might have been caused by an agent, viz., a bear, and that it would therefore behoove them to hurry on by, or become a bear’s brunch. Useful stuff. But then, say, the fire in somebody’s cave gets out of control while everybody’s asleep and there is a terrible tragedy. If your brain is already trained up to connect twig snap to bear, who do you connect out of control fire to? It must be the gods. And so on and so forth.

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Let me ask you something. Do you believe the Boston Celtics COULD have defeated the Cleveland Cavaliers, whom they took to seven games, in last year’s playoffs? Or do you believe in every single case, the Cavaliers ultimately win? Now, do you believe there’s a universe in which that’s the second round matchup, rather than Toronto vs. Cleveland? And do you believe Toronto could maybe have beaten Boston, even though they could never solve the LeBron James conundrum? All of that strikes me, at least, as reasonable, and if you believe that, then you also believe it would have been perfectly possible for the Toronto Raptors to make the NBA Finals last year.

Instead, they didn’t, and while nobody has to be “blamed” to trade your best or second best player for Kawhi Leonard — one of the best players in the league — it’s still more or less fair to say DeMar DeRozan took the blame. He is the agent in this detection scheme. Why did the Raptors fail again? DeRozan simply wasn’t good enough. Time to try something else.

Stories like this all run rampant across the NBA, and every season has them. Do you believe that the Warriors, up 3-1 on the Cavalieres in the 2016 Finals COULD have won Game 5 in some alternate universe? In that case, there would be absolutely no evidence that the Cavaliers, who lasted a total of nine games in the last two Finals, were nearly on the same level as the Warriors. Would LeBron have, therefore, left earlier? Do you believe the Thunder, who lost to the Warriors in seven games in 2016, in the Conference Finals, could have beaten them? Would Kevin Durant still be a Thunder? And so on and so forth.

There may be other universes out there, but we only get the one we inhabit, so we aren’t privy to what lies on the other side of the coin flip. On this side of it, general managers have to make decisions about whether this group of guys has “it,” could have “it,” or has reached its potential. So do free agents. Coaches and players alike are judged on what edge the coin falls down on because they are the agents we detect behind the potentially meaningless static of a 4-3 series loss, here or there.

I’m just not sure it means all that much. I mean sure the last few years mean the Warriors are better than everybody, but not that they were always better than the Cavaliers, Thunder or Rockets. And after that, I think on any given day, something else might have happened. We’re pushing a lot of paper, bringing in a lot of guys, hoping this thing turns out, or that one, but have you ever considered we might just be in the hands of an indifferent God? Should we, in Camus’ phrase, lay our hearts open to the “benign indifference of the universe?”

I say yes. This year, I’ll be rooting for mystery, and magic, for the old gods and for silence. For the unexpected, and the inexplicable. To be confounded, amused, astonished, alarmed, and to be fooled again into thinking this is anybody’s fault. I hope you’ll join me.