i used to say, in those disappointing post-2011 years when gillis was still here, that maybe there's a silver lining to losing as heartbreakingly as we did in 2011. i used to make the comparison to the crookedly reffed 2006 NBA finals, where the dallas mavs, who were up 2-0 on the miami heat in the finals, both mentally collapsed and saw the refs let dwyane wade hurl himself into defenders and gave him free throws every time he did that. rumour has always been that the league and its higher ups had a vendetta against mavs owner mark cuban. but the mavs, and their european superstar dirk nowitzki, who had often been criticized as soft and a choker, finally won their championship in 2011, in a gloriously poetic rematch against wade, the heat, and now also lebron. i never even liked the mavs but it was a beautiful moment, and incidentally exactly what i needed to see in the week after the canucks' loss to boston. good defeated evil, and a flawed but talented team, led by its flawed but honest and hardworking superstar, prevailed over a crooked league that had rigged many playoff games against it.
but that was cloud talk.
i now understand that the real analogy should be to the steve nash-era suns. out of nowhere, a guy that nobody believed in established himself as an upper echelon superstar and won back-to-back MVPs (sound familiar?) that team, while extremely talented and incredibly fun to watch, was also thought by many commentators to be not built for the playoffs. and that team, in its best shot at the title with the mavs inexplicably bounced in the first round by warriors, also fell victim to questionable officiating and the league siding against it, when robert horry clotheslined nash, and then amare stoudemire and boris diaw were both suspended for a game for basically standing up (vancouver still <3s you, stu jackson). they had won two straight to tie the series 2-2 against the spurs, who would go on to coast to the championship, destroying utah and cleveland in the last two rounds. but that game 5 without its leading scorer and best bench player (their rotation was only seven guys that night), plus their MVP hobbled, shifted the momentum and they lost in 6.
that year, GM bryan colangelo left because he couldn't work with the meddling owner anymore, and was replaced on an interim basis by coach mike d'antoni. this was followed by a comedy of errors by new GM steve kerr (of all people). some of that was incompetence (trading shawn marion for shaq's corpse); some of it was meddling ownership, which in this case was literally selling first round draft picks to other teams (goodbye, rajon rondo); but they kept being bad but not bad enough to rebuild, and kept taking on older declining guys while hemmorhaging draft picks, until one by one all of the glory years guys left or faded away. the ugly end of steve nash's career, sorry henrik and daniel.
ugh.
