Screw Your Shitty Hot Take

(Note: For the sake of not being dubbed a "stat masturbator" or "Bill Simmons youth", I largely held back from using specific stats in this piece.) 

The Golden State Warriors completed their remarkable Western Conference Finals comeback with their 96-88 win over the Oklahoma City Thunder in game 7 last night and are now headed to their second straight NBA finals. This comeback seemed damn near impossible just last Tuesday when they fell behind 3-1 in the series after getting blown 118-94 in Game 4. The Warriors quest to build on their historic 2015-16 regular season with a championship and join the likes of the 1995-96 Bulls and the 1985-86 Celtics in the greatest NBA team of all-time conversation seemed destined to come to an ugly, untimely conclusion.

The minute the Warriors appeared to be on the verge of elimination, writers and talking heads across the country wasted no time pumping out their SCORCHING HOT TAKES about their seemingly imminent demise. Some questioned the leadership skills of Stephen Curry, Klay Thompson and Draymond Green. Some questioned their mental toughness. Some declared that Curry had officially lost his magic 3-point shooting touch and deeply pondered if he was still going to be able to make an impact without his trademark potency from the beyond the arc. Some questioned the legitimacy of their championship run a season ago. Some people even went as far to say that they were the most overrated team in the history of the NBA and their recording-breaking 2015-16 regular season was merely a fluke.

Now that the series is over and didn't have the outcome many people predicted, the narrative will conveniently change. In the next 48 hours, you will see a flood of thinkpieces and rants from talk radio hosts and NBA analysts focusing on how the Thunder choked. Russell Westbrook and Kevin Durant will be accused of not stepping in big game situations. Billy Donovan will be criticized for the coaching mistakes he made along the way and it will stated ad nauseam how a more seasoned NBA coach would've been able to get his team to close out this series without even breaking a sweat. There will be endless amounts of speculation about where impending free agent Durant will land this offseason since he once again came up short of capturing a title with the Thunder. Not one word of praise will be uttered for the Warriors and not one of the people who had this team buried last week will admit they were wrong and legitimately backpedal from their premature strong opinion.

I'd be lying if I said I thought the Warriors were going to rally in this series. I figured they would get one more win at Oracle Arena before losing a closely-contested contest when the series returned to Oklahoma for Game 6. That being said, I also never doubted the Warriors ability to come back and win the series. One of the very few things I've learned in my brief time on this planet is to never count out a deep and talented team that is playing with their backs against the wall.

While high-profile sports media figures across the country were busy creating their masterworks of mindless verbal diarrhea speculating at what internal force was responsible for killing the Warriors' dominant, dream-like season, they should've been looking at what the Thunder were doing to take them off their game. The Thunder were disrupting the passing lanes and forcing turnovers, constantly getting to the free throw line, dominating the paint and not allowing any of their premier shooters to get into a comfortable rhythm. The consistent tenacity and precision they played with allowed them to beat the Warriors by a combined score of 359-301 in Game's 1, 3 and 4.

In the final three games, the Warriors made the necessary adjustments to overcome the Thunder's formula for success. They didn't allow the far bigger and stronger Thunder frontcourt to gain a substantial advantage on the boards, their rapid ball movement and intelligent passing came back into the fold,and the open 3's that weren't falling in their three losses started to go down, which forced freuqent mismatches (ex: Steven Adams, Enes Kanter or Serge Ibaka covering Curry and Thompson) and subsequently caused the Thunder's poor perimeter defense to be exposed. The Warriors weren't imploding in their losses, they were simply being out-executed by a talented team that was playing their best basketball of the season and once they re-calibrated and recognized the mistakes they were making, the team that the NBA had feared all season long re-emerged and went onto make the highly improbable comeback that almost no basketball fan in the world expected them to make.

I get that "hot takes" make for fun fodder and high ratings, viewership, readership, etc in the ADD-and Twitter-fueled sports climate of 2016, but people need to hold off on producing them until a team has ACTUALLY been eliminated from the playoffs. The Warriors will not be the last team to make these egomaniac, attention-whoring blowhards look like imbeciles, but they are the latest reminder that forced, premature hot takes are a dumb sports trend that needs to come to an immediate end. 

P.S: I'm eagerly awaiting to see what excuse my hometown of Boston's resident moronic hot take fountain Tony Massarotti (aka the "Bill Belichick orchestrated Deflategate" guy) of the god awful "Felger and Mazz" show on 98.5 The Sports Hub produces this afternoon to undo his two-part "The Warriors just aren't very good/they didn't beat anyone last year" rant last week. The callers are once again going to spend four hours owning him and his thin-skinned ass is going to blow a gasket trying to produce dozens of poorly-realized, detail-free arguments as to why he wasn't wrong and the caller is the true moron. If this isn't the sports radio event of the year in Massachusetts, I'm going to be extremely disappointed.

2015 NBA Finals Prediction

Like any championship series, the matchup between the Golden State Warriors and Cleveland Cavaliers has no shortage of story lines. LeBron James vs. Stephen Curry. A team that was mostly built through the draft and lacks a traditional superstar vs. a team that was built around signing a superstar then recruiting assorted role players from around the league to join him. Anyway you look at this NBA Finals, it's full of intrigue and it's the matchup a majority of basketball fans wanted as these two teams were the best in their respective conferences all season long. The Warriors and Cavaliers are pretty evenly matched as both teams can put point up a ton of points in the paint or from three-point land and screw up an offense's rhythm with stifling defense. What I believe this series will come down to is the health of Cavaliers superstars James and Kyrie Irving. They may have had a week and a half to rest before the start of this series, but James and Irving been battling lingering injuries and that may not be enough time for their health to improve by a notable margin. James should continue to solider on through his back injury without much drop in production, but if Irving's foot injury keeps his offense limited to isolated three's and outside jump shots, there could be some serious issues. Guys like Iman Shumpert, J.R. Smith and Matthew Dellavedova can't be counted on to make strong scoring contributions night after night and when James puts too much scoring responsibility on himself, the team has suffered. The let James fire away strategy may have been worked against the Hawks in the Eastern Conference finals, but the Warriors are too physical and aggressive on the boards and too good at capitalizing off of turnovers (the Cavs averaged 11.8 turnovers per game in the Eastern Conference finals) to allow the Cavs offense get away with being sloppy with the ball and score a ton of second-chance points like the Hawks did. I also believe the Cavs don't have an answer for the Warrior's bigs. Draymond Green has been playing lights out for the entire playoffs, containing the likes of Anthony Davis and Marc Gasol defensively and putting up consistently strong offensive showings with his combination of strong post play and a surprisingly decent outside shot while Andrew Bogut has backed up his reputation as one of the toughest defensive players in the NBA with his excellent rebounding and shot-blocking ability. Tristan Thompson and Timofey Mozgov are solid players who are no slouches on the boards and can put up points when called upon, but they lack the offensive fluidity and high-motors defensively to hang with Green, Bogut and Festus Ezeli for an entire series. 

Prediction: Warriors over Cavaliers in 6
Finals MVP: Stephen Curry