The Side Part: It’s over now
USATSI
It would make a good piece to just say yesterday sucked the same way this season sucked and move on from all these snakebites. All the waiting for health. Something about the whole thing felt like growing up. Talking about what you’d do when you got older. Like, wait till I’m an adult, then look at me. I’ll own a Corvet and live in a mansion in Los Angeles and marry Halle Berry and honeymoon in Cozumel. Only what if you just stayed a child, and never got a chance to try to make all that happen for yourself, forever bound to counting the circles between the MASH lines.
It was disappointing, this year, and incredibly so. A team that at the start of the season was one of the favorites to win the belt didn’t make the playoffs. That’s Season Four of Arrested Development. That’s seeing Dylan live. That’s Rhett Bomar. This season was Rhett Bomar.
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They battled, and fought, and kept swinging all year. All the injuries to key guys, all the games missed, all the close games almost won, still they kept on coming back, trying to rage against the night, trying to blind themselves to the inevitability that darkness was coming. They banged their heads all year against the stone wall of fate that kept getting in their way. The wall with pictures of broken metatarsals and feet and knees and ankles and hands and masks and screws and other screws. It just wasn’t in the cards this year, and everyone could see it, but almost every game — maybe only that stupid Knicks game, excepting — they showed up and gave what they had.
Russell Westbrook led that charge like a damn wolverine shark dragon. He did not stop, continually strapping the entire team to his scarred back, trying to pull them — water colored bruises, holes in his face, flecks of flesh ripped from him on rim runs — to an 8 seed. He had what will go down, when all the numbers and talk settle, as one of the greatest individual seasons in the history of the sport.
You’ve read all the numbers — go look at what Westbrook’s would have been back in the Oscar days if you allow for pace — and seen all the Vines somewhere else so there’s no point in putting them here. He deserved a shot at making noise in the postseason, but instead he’s going to be at the house, with his girl, probably listening to “Starships”, getting angrier, plotting his further ascension into the basketball stratosphere, imagining new ways that he can further burrow into our souls. Cave his face in and he won’t slow down. He might play every game with a rocket launcher next year.
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This whole year we all just kept waiting to get healthy. We kept looking at what a full roster might look like — all those weapons with all those chips on all those shoulders — and the day never came that we could see it become operational. We never got to see Fully Realized Russ, from here on called FRR, and Durant in a PnR. We never got to see Kanter draw doubles and then kick it out to watch the ball bounce from FRR to Durant to Morrow in the corner for a wide open three. We didn’t get to see the horses run, Durant and FRR and Ibaka and McGary all out on a break, sprinting, finding lanes. We never got to see FRR and Durant in all that space that would come from them playing in lineup combos with Ibaka, Morrow, Kanter, Singler and Augustine. It’s just a shame. It’s sad for fans of fun, wide open, pretty basketball. This would have been a team with so much insane firepower post-trades that they’d have made scoreboards Monstar, numbers rolling quickly like slot machines.
But then these are all what ifs, right? Someone could easily say all that is wrong, that I can’t say all that would have happened, because a season is never without struggles, even when teams are fully healthy. There would be slumps, they’d say, and periods of stagnation. Uninspired play, times where (gasp and ready the takes) Westbrook and Durant could not get along. Hell, even this year, Russ playing like a created character you gave 100’s to on all his attributes, people were still find ways to write columns that suggested, somehow, Durant would be better off playing with John Wall. People need clicks, and the columns will come no matter what. We got guys out here talking about trading Durant for God’s sake. I don’t know, people need clicks.
In both instances we’re dealing with hypotheticals, alternate timelines that nobody can really disagree with, because they didn’t happen. What did happen is the Thunder were the ninth best team in the West this year, with a record of 45-37. They played no defense, and could not get stops when they needed them. It was a bullfight out there, the Matadors all out, letting the enemy go right by them. They missed the playoffs, and they’ll have a lottery pick in the draft this year. And there will be smarter people who will write intelligent columns about how dangerous it is to allow Presti a chance at the lotto again, BUT HOW DANGEROUS IS IT THAT PRESTI HAS A CHANCE AT THE LOTTO AGAIN?
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There will be lots of talk about the future, and all its uncertainties. People rattling off microwaveable takes of how the Thunder need to win next year to convince Durant to stay. When the Thunder hit some three game slump in the middle of January, all the morning show talking heads and Twitter accounts will shout songs of “COULD HE LEAVE OKC I DONT KNOW MAYBE.” It’ll all be speculation, and none of it will really matter until the dust settles at the end of next year, and everyone sees how far they got.
What we can know right now is that the Thunder — assuming everyone is healthy, which, you know — should be very good next year, and that the league should be very scared. This will be a starving team, with tons to prove. Here’s hoping these guys get one healthy run at it. Just one. Please?
