A Sports Narrative Palate Cleanser

Can we please all just shut up and let the games speak for themselves for once?

We watch sports for the highs and, if we’re honest, for the lows too.

We watch it for the moments. For those times when your entire timeline is flooded with incoherent strings of A$%HVG*@S, when everyone talks at once but sports has rendered us all speechless. We watch it for Cinderella, and we watch it for greatness. We watch sports for sport.

Twitter is an incredible place to watch sports. There’s an entire community of fans around the world all watching the same moment at the same time and reacting the way you can only react to sports.

Sports have a way of telling incredible stories, stories that even the most creative and daring of writers would never dream up.

So why do we insist on telling our own stories instead?

The NBA playoffs have been amazing, even filled with blowouts and leaving us with the two teams we expected all along. Cinderella stories are fun for awhile, but didn’t we ultimately want to see the best from the East and the West fight for the championship belt seven times with everything on the line?

This has been an incredible NBA season. As many as 8 of 30 NBA franchises will note this as a year that something extraordinary happened with their team — the Blazers, Hornets, Celtics, Raptors, Spurs, Thunder, and yes, both the Cavs and Warriors regardless of Game 7. Each of those 8 did something remarkable this year, more special than their fans might have dreamed.

So why on Sunday night will we end up focusing on a team that has “failed”?

The Thunder were unstoppable at times this summer. During one stretch they won 7 of 9 against the mighty Warriors and Spurs, two of the greatest regular season teams in history. Kevin Durant led the entire playoffs in scoring until the other day, and Russell Westbrook still has 49 more assists than any other player. All of that culminated with the Thunder leading the Warriors 3–1, as close as Oklahoma City has ever come to a professional championship.

So why is the prevailing story that the Thunder failed?

Why is it that Kevin Durant choked, when he is the biggest reason they held the 3–1 lead in the first place? Why do we immediately assume KD will leave when OKC was a couple jumpers away from being Finals favorites? Why can’t we just appreciate that a great team beat another great team behind great performances from great players?

The Spurs choked too. Their regular season was wasted when they crushed OKC in Game 1 before gagging away the series, never mind their opponent almost took down one of the best teams ever just after.

The Blazers choked away a big opportunity from the Warriors. Forget the fact that Portland started 4 of 5 new players all year and parlayed it into a 5-seed and a second round playoff berth in the West.

The Washington Capitals had a great year, but they choked in the playoffs. Just like the Capitals always do. Just like Washington teams always do.

Speaking of always choking, remember the Cubs last year? Just make sure you forget that a team half-full of rookies made a playoff run a year or two before they were supposed to and beat their biggest rival soundly to get there.

My two favorite teams are the Chicago Cubs and Minnesota Vikings. My entire sports fandom is defined by negative narratives and choking.

The Cubs and Vikings never really succeed. We just prolong the choke job.

Why is that? Both the Cubs and Vikes just had young, fun, talented teams make surprise playoff appearances. The Cubs dominated two division rivals there and won about half of the NL awards. The Vikings beat the rival Packers to win the division and dominated a dynastic Seahawks team before getting unlucky. By all accounts my two teams had fun, great years, the best for either team in half a decade.

So why does everyone insist that both failed? Did the Vikings “choke” because variance means kickers miss sometimes? Did the Cubs “blow it” because our wildcard team ran into hot pitchers and a temporary Babe Ruth? And why don’t the Mets and Seahawks get credit for big wins instead of just being other losers along the way to It’s-America-And-There-Can-Only-Be-One-Winner?

Somewhere along the way, negativity became the overriding story in sports. I’m not sure when it happened but the Web 2.0 era, 24-hour news cycle, and constant Twitterverse reactions sure pushed it along.

It barely even matters anymore who won the game. All we care about is who lost and why they lost and did they choke. And did the refs blow it. And what happens next for Sad Franchise A and Forlorn Player B.

And if we do notice the winning team, didn’t they get lucky getting all the calls and playing the injured team and seeing the other stars choke? Never mind their own defense and heart and effort and finishing.

And now we have reached Sports Narrative 2.0, an even worse world.

We don’t even wait for the game to end anymore to find a negative story line. Next day #HotTakes will not do. We need our takes now, immediately, while the game is still on, and we need them hotter than ever.

Now in Game 6 of a series the Thunder still lead 3–2, we must find someone to blame for a potentially imminent loss, and if that someone is Durant, let’s start speculating whether he should leave or if he’s even a superstar anymore.

Sports Narrative 2.1 is here too.

These are the people seeking out potential 2.0 hot takes and pre-whining about them before they even exist. We’re so set on conspiracy theories that we conspire to create something that never even happens. “I’m already mad about the Is-Player-X-Falling-in-the-Draft-based-on-this-game takes.”

It’s all narrative. It’s story. Humanity craves stories.

Watch, let’s just clear the air on all the negative Warriors and Cavs narratives that are no doubt on their way, depending on which team loses Game Seven.

If the Warriors lose…

• Stephen Curry is no MVP. He’s a fraud, a choke artist.
• Draymond Green’s emotions ruined the perfect season.
• A jump shooting team can’t win a title, at least not two in a row.
• 73–9*
• The Ws shouldn’t have gone for the record. Steph and Iggy and Bogut got hurt and cost them the chip.
• Cleveland won a title*. They only got lucky cuz of all the injuries.
• The refs won it for Cleveland. The NBA is rigged.

If the Cavs lose…

• LeBron is overrated. 2–5 in NBA Finals, loser can’t close the deal.
• It’s Kevin Love’s fault.
• Tyronn Lue wasn’t ready for the big stage.
• The Cavs need to blow it up.
• Kyrie and Love don’t have championship heart.
• God hates Cleveland. The city will never win a title.
• The refs won it for Golden State. The NBA is rigged.

Pretty exciting stuff, huh? You’re liable to find half of that stuff littered on Twitter and across articles over the next week.

It’s lazy and it’s stupid.

Never mind that Golden State has two generational players single-handedly changing the way the game is played and that Cleveland may have the most talented player and maybe athlete we’ve ever seen.

Never mind we got to watch the two brightest stars in the sport playing winner-take-all, each the best ever at what they do, guys we’ll tell our grandkids about.

Never mind that for a couple of these guys, what happens Sunday night will be in the first paragraph of their Hall of Fame plaque someday.

Never mind that we’ve played 1315 NBA games this season and still need a 1316th to determine a winner.

The most amazing thing about sports is the way the stories tell themselves.

For all our creative #HotTakes, none of us dared to dream up Leicester City or Buster Douglas or the Miracle on Ice. The cruelest of writers wouldn’t have penned Chris Webber or Greg Norman. Even the most audacious story tellers could never have sold us on Franco Harris or Kirk Gibson.

The greatest sports narratives don’t need narratives at all.

Just a team. Just a name. Just an image.

For all its great writing, some across the interwebs have almost certainly already guessed the ending to Sunday night’s big Game of Thrones episode. We all solved Breaking Bad together. Lost was so ultimately disappointing, if we’re being honest, because so many of us guessed the ending so easily.

You could watch 9,999 sports games in your life filled with 999,999,999 sports moments and still in the next game see something you have never seen or imagined before, a literal one-in-a-billion moment.

Sports are thrilling because we can’t even try to dream it all up.

The players don’t need our help. The sports don’t need a script.

Maybe it’s time to stop pre-writing the narrative and let sports write itself.

On Sunday night we get to watch the 2 best teams and the 2 best players play 1 game to win it all. We’ll either witness the culmination of the winningest season in history or the local kid returning home to bring Cleveland a championship for the first time in over half a century.

And despite that, somehow, neither of those will even be among the top 5 things we’ll witness together. Something unexpected will happen. Some role player will rise up. Some star will come through. Some sport will sport.

Hopefully something will leave us all typing A$%HVG*@S at once.

The thing about sports narratives is that the story tells itself.

All we have to do is shut up and watch and enjoy.

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