NBA Playoffs 2020: 5 reasons the Milwaukee Bucks can win it all

1. Giannis Antetokounmpo

The ride no longer exists at Disney World’s Magic Kingdom, but at one time it was there in the bottom of that murky Fantasy Land lagoon. They took it out piece by piece, I think, and set up a photoshoot with Ariel. Then again, I have not been to Disney World in quite some time and they are likely to have changed the park’s terrain again. That park is always changing.

The ride was a submarine ride based on the film 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, which was a 1954 film starring Kirk Douglass. The film was based on the 1870 novel by Jules Verne. At the end of the film, the Nautilus and its crew are attacked by a Kraken-sized squid in the ocean’s deep and watery depths. The tentacles are huge and rubbery and horrifically splendid in a drive-in movie theater sort of way. That is the end of the movie. That great climactic battle between science and biology, between history and the unknown.

The first scene, though, is what sucks audiences into Jules Verne’s imagination wrought larger than life on the silver screen. In that scene, after the camera frames the boring text of Verne’s novel, a steamship sails gently over the ocean blue as sweeping romantic music plays. Then the music switches over to mad villainy and something emerges from the deep with glowing eyes and gathering momentum. The swell speeds toward the freighter. Shadowy and luminescent in its destructive charge this is an explosive beginning — like blowing up Alderon after the opening credits scroll. Cut to a belligerent, loudmouthed know-it-all declaring loudly: “I say there ain’t no monster, but we need men!” He offers to pay these men. He pays them to line up for a death-defying mission.

Giannis’ acumen for the game of basketball — and yes, his athletic gifts too — capture the imagination in such a way. Try and stop him at your own peril. Hunt the thing you don’t understand. Hunt the thing that is actually hunting you. And yet something else out there lurks in the deep. You mistake the submarine for being the monster — for being the only freak in town —  and yet something else out there lurks with longer tentacles, no clear motive, and a total disregard for humanity, much less basketball.

The Bucks can win it all, but how likely that is may just depend on how likely any basketball gets played at all.