How I learned to stop worrying about the Warriors and love the NBA

Fatalism can be hard to avoid. Maybe I’m speaking more confessionally than generally when I say that, but it’s easy to fall into old habits of thinking and being, to assume that the patterns that have defined things for you in the past, whether near or distant, will continue defining your life in the present and the future. I pay lip service to hope, to its value and beauty and necessity, but often struggle to find a tangible place for it in my heart and mind. I think resignation just feels like an appropriate response to the times that we live in and that trying to transcend that feeling is also one of the more challenging, and important, tasks confronting us.

There are a lot of reasons we watch the NBA. Speaking as a fan, as someone who loves the game as much as I love anything, I’m entranced by the beauty of it, the instinctual improvisation that happens every night, and by the larger than life personalities who just happen to be among the best in the world at their craft. For many others, though, sports are a distraction from the less than savory elements of our lives. We are able to luxuriate in our team’s victories, letting their successes raise us to a plateau we are rarely able to journey to alone. It’s supposedly a sanctuary from the real world, a place where anything can happen on any given night.

This is why sports still garner such high ratings even as seemingly every other form of television languishes in the age of DVRs, Netflix, and Hulu. It’s an unscripted drama that plays out live and while we can certainly predict who will win, we are often wrong about that, and even more often are wrong about how that ending will come about. But now, with the Warriors again looking poised to win the NBA Championship, the sense of joy and unexpected drama feels absent to many fans this upcoming season, at least on the macro level. If they indeed achieve what essentially everyone expects them to, it will be their fourth championship in five seasons, which would make them just the third team in NBA history to achieve such a feat and the first in half a century.

We like to be awed, overwhelmed by beauty and novelty, but what once seemed revelatory can come to seem domineering if we see it over and over again. Seeing a team unexpectedly rise to greatness is a delight, but seeing that same team remain great may quickly deflate the prior enthusiasm we felt for them. We have a desire for newness, for the next new thing that will offer us the chance to see something we have not seen before. I get the resignation and the general unhappiness about this seeming inevitability. I don’t share it, but I get it.

I don’t think the answer to resignation or fatalism is necessarily combating it with false hope or the naive, and often quite harmful, belief that things will not necessarily play out the way we expect them to. If that’s our response, we’re going to be wrong a lot of the time, only reinforcing whatever cynicism underlies our original feelings to begin with. What may be most useful for disengaged fans is not to ignore the season outright, bemoaning the Warriors’ hegemony, but to look elsewhere for delight. If you’re a fan of, say, the Phoenix Suns or Sacramento Kings or Brooklyn Nets (my condolences, by the way) a successful season is not winning the championship, but showing incremental progress that makes future playoff success appear more likely than it did a year ago.

It kind of sucks to cheer for a team with no real chance of playoff glory. I know what that’s like, I mean, I’m a Cleveland Browns fan. The NBA season is about far more than how it ends, though. There are little dramas in miniature played out every single night around the league, every single possession honestly. Every night contains the chance to see something revelatory — a new move, a new wrinkle added to a star’s game, a strange lineup choice that borders on the avant-garde. I admit that I’m in the minority when it comes to not really having a favorite NBA team, but even those that ardently root for a single team don’t watch the NBA season night in and night out solely to see if their team will pull off the victory that night. Instead, unrecognized as this may be, we all watch the NBA because we love the game itself, the personalities, the subtle beauty of a well-executed pick and roll and the dynamic transcendence of a 360 dunk on the fast break.

If you take a more panoramic view of the league, you can see that in a lot of ways, the NBA is in a better place than ever before. It is no longer a league fighting for survival or its place in the American landscape as it was in decades past, but a league on the upswing, with a talent pool as deep as ever before. There are innumerable young players who look poised to take the baton from current stars whose primes are drawing to an end, and a promising rookie class that contains both players whose style is a throwback to the past alongside players who have the potential to push the game forward into new horizons.

These young players who will come to run the league in coming years likely won’t do much to undermine the Warriors this year, but the seeds are being sown for their undoing with each passing game. If the NBA is indeed an unscripted drama that plays out on a nightly basis from October to June, a joyful thing that can distract me from the resignation I feel about the world in my more despondent moments, then perhaps honing in on these little moments — the great backdoor cuts Gary Harris makes on a nightly basis or the passes Anthony Davis makes out of a double team in the post — are a way to transcend the feeling of fatalism one may feel about the league as a whole.

The Warriors may run roughshod over the rest of the league this year, waltzing to a relatively easy championship. It’s no guarantee, but it seems at least a bit likelier than anything else. But even that is not as joyless a prospect as it may appear on the surface. Stephen Curry remains one of the most exciting players ever, a player whose off-ball movement can be as fascinating as another player’s crossover. Draymond Green is one of the few defensive players who you can’t keep your eyes off of. There’s also the lethal equanimity of Klay Thompson and Durant is good for at least a few plays per game that no one else on earth can recreate in light of his unique combination of height, length, skill, and dexterity. Also, Boogie will be back eventually!

I can’t convince you to love the Warriors, and I don’t really have any interest in doing so. What I want to do is to prompt you to both narrow and broaden your focus. The former is done by focusing on the micro-dramas that are enacted every night, the breathtaking plays that occur in even the worst games. The latter is achieved by looking beyond this season, seeing that the Warriors reign will not last forever and that the players who will eventually overtake them are, this very moment, developing into the Giant Killers they will eventually become. Joy and hope are not contingent upon the world being different, but just upon seeing it anew.