The Side Part: Interesting

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The thing that teachers tell you when you begin improv classes is to not worry about trying to be funny. It’ll come off desperate, like you’re pandering to an audience. Instead, they say, just worry about giving the audience something interesting to watch. People are inherently funny, they say, so the humor will come if you just react honestly and be honest with yourself and your scene partner. It’s the interesting thing that’s so hard to come by.

This is a gross generalization, but its mainly pretty much true. You watch enough scenes you start to see the same ones over and over again. One roommate drank the last of the other roommates’ milk. A couple is breaking up. A couple is getting together. The Mom is not around and so now the Dad has to raise the kids. The Dad is not around and so now the Mom has to raise the kids. Two people are stretching and preparing for a race. So on.

A lot of people just keep doing the same old stuff over and over. It gets super boring to watch. The idea is that 99% of things are very average and not at all worth seeing on stage but there is that 1% that you should always try to operate within. That 1% is the really interesting stuff. The stuff that surprises and excites. The stuff that is new.

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You’d think after so many years of playing together, a team headed up by Kevin Durant, Russell Westbrook, Sam Presti and Scott Brooks would, at a certain point, cease to offer up any new surprises. You’d think that they’d all just settle into a business as per the usual type setup and allow everyone to relax and know what they were getting into. That is not the case at all.

The yearly occurrence that is The Unholy Shaking Up Of The Thunder Lineup Due To A Devastating Injury To One Of Their Most Important Pieces came (much) sooner rather than later this year and now we’re all left to play a guessing game about just how this team is going to look.

One option is the most fun to think of: Russell Westbrook takes over the world. Wolverine mask, fireballs in the pockets of his overalls, that one part in “Live Fast, Die Young” where someone goes “…and I wanna show you how you all look like beautiful stars tonight,” playing on a loop throughout Chesapeake. He averages something like 35, 7, and 7 for the first two months of the season. Has lots of television shows that need things to talk and exaggerate about asking questions like, “Is Russell Westbrook the best point guard in the league?” Meme generators across the nation find a greater sense of self worth. Westbrook Frames becomes a division of Warby Parker.

Another option is this: Disaster. Westbrook makes the offense more predictable, collapses in on himself like a dying star, Perkins is playing 30 minutes a game, Steven Adams can’t stay out of foul trouble, Jeremy Lamb winds up on milk boxes, more disparaging of the ownership group and their refusal to spend money, more “ummmm yeaaaa…or they could’ve just amnestied Perkins”, think pieces galore about how Clay Bennett and Aubrey McClendon don’t deserve a player like Durant and the whole world outside of Oklahoma City hopes he leaves because those two cheap men don’t deserve a player of his magnitude. Lots of Grantland pieces on Russell Westbrook’s struggles. Very original jokes all throughout Twitter about how he does not pass the ball.

The third option is somewhere between the two, which is where I imagine we’ll land. Westbrook and Ibaka are great enough to keep the team more than above water while the Kevin Durant lifeboat gets its underside repaired so he can be more ready for the rocky seas ahead. A season is very much a marathon and one bad month does not mean the end of everything, just the same way one good month does not mean the gaining of everything.

This year will be very interesting and while I’d just as soon like to be able to make a blanket statement like “this year will be great,” interesting is not altogether bad. Interesting is synonymous with the dramatic. You want to watch interesting and, if nothing else, this year will be that.

Tyler Parker is a contributor to Daily Thunder and BallerBall. Follow him on Twitter, natch.