The most satisfying series finales in NBA history

No. 1: 2011 Dallas Mavericks

It’s kind of ironic that the Dallas Cowboys, who play in the same city as the Mavericks, have long been dubbed “America’s Team.” If ever there were a moment that the entire country banded together in unison to root for a single cause, it was in June of 2011.

Well, that’s technically true. Yes, everyone outside of South Beach – people who loved basketball, people who only sort of liked basketball, or people who happened to be in a bar where Game 6 was on and overheard several variations of the same “now he’ll never be in the same class as Jordan” soapbox rant as LeBron James played hot potato with the rock – was rooting for the Mavs in that Finals.

But the collective euphoria felt across the country after Dallas won was largely the result of who most people were rooting against, not for. LeBron James had committed basketball treason, and the basketball gods made him pay for his sins. That it played out in such a way where we witnessed the greatest player alive unable to or unwilling to take advantage of the diminutive J.J. Barea in the post was merely dessert for the trolls (of which I was proudly one at the time).

And if that were all this championship was, it might still be number one on this particular list. But as Ian Thomsen detailed beautifully in last year’s The Soul of Basketball, this was about so much more. Real basketball fans – those of us who love the sport for the deeper meanings we go out of our way to extract from ten guys running around trying to put a ball in a hole – got so much more out of this one. We got validation that sticking with one team, year after painful year, could pay off for that once in a generation star who embodied the ethos we crave from our athlete role models when we’re little kids in our bedrooms. We got a payoff for the slow climb. We got our fairy tale ending.

We were satisfied.