It’s been a most surprising NBA season, and not just locally. Before it started, very few in Celtics Nation would’ve figured that when it ended Brad Stevens would be out as coach, Danny Ainge would be out as GM and Kemba Walker would be out of town. That happened after the Celtics delivered their second dumpster fire season in three years, which was a bad surprise to many.
But outside of a rash of injuries that sidelined a lot of big-name players during the playoffs, league-wide the surprises were mostly of the good kind. At the heart is the predictability factor saying you can’t win a title without a Top 5 player taking a direct broadside hit. It quieted talk that only three of four teams have a real shot winning in any given year. It went along the line that that’s because it immediately eliminates 25 teams right off the bat. Though with the Lakers having LeBron and Anthony Davis, that makes it 26 teams with no chance. But that hasn’t been the case in 2020-21 in two ways.
First because with the arrival of some new, young stars, I’m not sure we know definitively who the Top 5 are anyway. Kevin Durant certainly showed he’s one of them, but his team, helped by injuries, went out in Round 2. With Steph Curry and Golden State barely making it into the play-in round despite his sensational season and the aforementioned Lakers getting dusted by Portland in Round 1 that’s four of the thought to be Top 5 players when the year started. It may be just an aberration, but maybe there’s just been a leveling off of the talent at the top and the Top 5 theory should be expanded to be more like having a Top 10 player now gives you a real chance.
Second, this year was more like the NFL, which rigs its schedule to give bad teams from the previous year an easier schedule the next season to help them make big one-year jumps into contention. Like the Patriots going from 6-10 in 2000 to 11-6 and World Champions the next. That never happens in the NBA. At least until this year when Phoenix and Atlanta jumped into the Final Three after being 34-39 and 20-47 respectively a year ago. As I write this column for an early holiday-induced deadline, Milwaukee led Atlanta 3-2, so I don’t know who’s in the Finals from the Eastern Conference. But regardless of who survived, the Bucks will be a big story for getting there with Giannis Antetokounmpo (the last of the Top 5) missing Game 5 at least and likely being significantly hampered after that at best. If it’s the Hawks, they’ll be a library of stories starting with having done it with Top 10’er Trae Young missing crunch time in Game 4 and all of Game 5 at least. It also will have happened after the 14-20 on March 1 Hawks fired their coach to spark a 27-11 tear that let them finish the year 41-31 and be the 5-seed. And, oh by the way, it’ll be their first time they’ve been to the NBA Finals in 60 long years, which I’ll get to in a bit.
As for Phoenix, they’re in the finals for the first time since the heist of Charles Barkley from Philly in 1993. Before losing that one to MJ and Chicago in the days when Scottie Pippen seemed sane, it was when the 42-40 Suns somehow knocked off defending champion Rick Barry-led Golden State in 1976 to make the Finals, where it was tied 2-2 with the Celtics before losing the epic triple-OT Game 5 thriller and Game 6 to end their Bill Murray-like Cinderella story (“17th at Augusta … it’s in the hole”). Thus they’re still looking for their first title, so a win is history. For Milwaukee it’s their first time back since 1974, when they also lost to the Havlicek-Cowens-led Celtics. That was an epic seven-gamer where the visiting team won all seven times in the other guy’s gym! That never happened before or since. There’s also real symmetry if it’s a Bucks and Suns final, since they entered the league together as expansion teams in 1968. Both finished last in Year 1, but 27-win Milwaukee got lucky in capital letters to win the coin toss for the first overall draft pick, which gave them UCLA all-time all-timer Lew Alcindor. They shot to 56 wins in 1969-70 and, after trading for Oscar Robertson in another heist, NBA champs in the now Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s second year. Meanwhile the Suns’ consolation prize was center Neal Walk, which, trust me, was a lot worse than the Celtics coming away with Chauncey Billups and Ron Mercer after losing out on Tim Duncan in 1997.
For the Hawks, the last time they were in the Finals was 1961, which for the mathematically challenged is 60 years ago. They were still the Hawks, but after being Milwaukee’s first NBA team, long before the Bucks, they were then living in St. Louis and led by the first great power forward, Bob Pettit. It was the last of four Finals meetings between Boston and St. Louis over five seasons, which started after St. Louis (thankfully) traded Boston the rights to Bill Russell because the NBA’s southernmost city didn’t want Black players. The C’s won three times including the first in 1957 when rookie Tommy Heinsohn went for 37 points and 23 rebounds in one of the (forgotten) great Game 7 performances in history as they won their first of 11 titles over 13 years. The Hawks won in ’58, by taking a doozy of a Game 7 (110-109) behind Pettit’s 50-point, 19-rebound night for their first and last title.
So with predictability out the window and some history to be made, we’re on to the new/2021 version of the NBA Finals.