There’s No Such Thing As An Inevitable Team In The NBA

Hoopheads across the nation begin their annual vigil Wednesday in anticipation of receiving the thing they most crave in all the world—a new team to admire, love, fear, and hate simultaneously. And you can't really blame them for their baffled antipathies. Their favorite sport is both defined and repelled by dynastic teams and the silly little debates they shape, which are always on the menu as a kind of bland and ubiquitous comfort food, the sort of tastes-the-same-everywhere sludge you can eat and regret along any of the nation's highways. And these fans are starving for it; they haven't had that level of reliability in this sport in nearly a decade now. But they live in hope, and dread, that a new dynasty is upon us, this one governed by Wemby The First (and so far Only) and sure to run for 10 years, since that is the most common span of time employed in the sentence, "He's going to be unstoppable/the face of basketball for the next X years." This is the natural response of the basketball intelligentsia when confronted with something new and temporarily indomitable, and if it is generally doomed and dull, it's also not totally wrong—any sufficiently good team will make it difficult to imagine any other team knocking them off. But for most of the last decade, that is just what has happened, followed by either the resentment that comes from being right or the dismissiveness of being wrong, because basketball fans work very hard to want the next big thing until it arrives and then to become sick of it shortly thereafter. Victor Wembanyama is called an alien, and that is the highest of compliments until it becomes a condemnation. Often this will happen in the same conversation. And so the new working theory is "Wemby has come to save us and then rule us as a cruel overlord." There are, to be fair, relatively fewer fears that the New York Knickerbockers, against whom Wemby either will or will not begin his reign of benign terror, will become a repeat champion. That's not really a knock on the Knicks so much as it's largely due to the fear that imagining the Knicks as a dynasty is to imagine their fan base into an army of vampires who shriek perpetually into the night seeking bare vulnerable necks, with the only wooden stake available to the nation as a whole being Tony Brothers.