All hail the Warriors

One of my favorite sports quotes comes from, I believe, Damon Runyon: Remember, the race is not always to the swiftest, nor the battle to the strongest, but that’s the way to bet!

Of course the professional sages at outlets like ESPN can’t see it that way.  The odds of every sporting event are known to everyone well in advance; I bet you can place a bet on the coin flip at the next Super Bowl coming up heads.  But no matter how lopsided the odds, there is always a significant element at ESPN who are eager to explain to you why the odds are wrong.

There are understandable reasons for this.  If the outcome of a sporting event can be anticipated, people won’t tune in to watch it, and people won’t turn on ESPN to find out the result.  Also, if you want to develop a reputation as a sage, you can’t just “pick chalk.”  Lastly, well, that’s why they play the game.  Upsets happen; that’s why we watch sports; I am occasionally amused by how much effort ESPN puts into having experts predict an outcome when the reason sports are popular is their unpredictability.

So, many ESPN programs yesterday had multiple talking heads explaining why Cleveland was going to win Game 6 of the NBA Finals and had a good chance of winning Game 7.  Idiots.

Like I said, it was understandable.  Pardon the Interruption featured Mark Jackson explaining why the Cavaliers were going to win.  Mark Jackson’s qualifications?  He was the coach of the Warriors last season that was fired after they lost in round one of the Playoffs.  If Mark Jackson knew so much about basketball, why did the Warriors do so much better after they fired him?

Another Warrior-doubter was Charles Barkely, who picked the Cavaliers to win despite the fact that “analytics” said the Warriors had a 75% chance of winning the series at the outset.  Heck, when the Warriors were down 2-1 FiveThirtyEighty said they still had a 60% chance of winning despite being behind.  Barkley once famously said “Analytics is crap.”  As Barkley’s friend Michael Wilbon explained on PTI, Barkley has lost $10 million betting on sporting events because he doesn’t believe in analytics.

Barkley also said the Warriors couldn’t possibly win because “jump shot shooting teams” can't win in the NBA.  Of course for a rebuttal you could talk to the 67 teams that lost to the Warriors during the regular season, along with the teams they beat in the Playoffs on the way to becoming one of the top ten NBA teams of all time, maybe top three.

So we learned this from the Warriors’ championship: Charles Barkley is a big fat idiot who knows nothing about basketball and should shut up.

Most people who picked Cleveland to win had one seemingly persuasive argument: LeBron James is really, really good.  I can’t count the number of times I heard someone on ESPN say they weren’t going to bet against the best player in the world.

But wasn’t LeBron the best player in the world last year?  Did his team win?  No?  LeBron has been in the league, and been the best player in the league, for twelve seasons but has won only two championships; that makes him the anti-Celtics, who lost only two championships in one 13 years stretch.  The fact that LeBron is the best basketball player in the world has never been enough to produce a championship.  That was why he left Cleveland; they were never going to get him enough help to win.  Their attitude was to ask what was the least amount they could spend to win a championship; that kind of thinking never succeeds.  You win by trying too hard.  They finally got him the help he needed this year, but then Kevin Love and Kyrie Irving went down and once again it was LeBron and a bunch of guys named Fred.

The Warriors were going to win the NBA Championship.  Why?  Because without Love and Irving, they Cavs were a far inferior team, and a superior team will beat an inferior team most of the time (that’s WHY they are considered superior).  The Warriors were probably a better team even if the Cavs had Love and Irving, but we’ll never know for sure.

So all hail the Warriors!  Let’s see what happens when the next NBA season starts in, what, three weeks?