If it wasn't for you medaling kids

I would never venture so far as to say that an NBA Championship is not as important today as it was previously. Or even that an NBA Championship is not as valuable as a gold medal. A lot is lost in translation.

But I will say this:

There is something very obvious about this era, known more colloquially as “The Era of Playa (player) Empowerment” and it’s that the gaze is always going to move with “them guys”. Them guys being Steph, KD and Bron: the last of the truly signature shoe-deserving men. The gaze is going to go where the biggest, bestest brands are at. Where the cameras are—where our attention is. And right now, Jayson Tatum is the most recent American NBA Superstar Champion who deserves the same kind of attention but doesn’t quite fit the bill.

It is not his time.

Yet.

And the entitlement of believing that he is supposed to be treated like one of the biggest brands simply because he has ascended and won an NBA championship is a little disingenuous. After all, we are the ones that made these other brands—the Stephs, the KDs, the Brons, as big as they are. We totally asked for this.

And so the cameras continue to move with them. The paparazzi goes with the brightest stars, even if the criteria hasn't changed one bit.

And that’s what this is all about.

The lights are the lights.

And we look where they are trained.

Team USA, this past summer, was led by 3 dudes who literally bled, bruised and battled each other in the public arena for most of the last decade in order to have a chance to call themselves royalty; a chance to call themselves NBA champions. It was a kind of distinct American theater in the mid-to-late 2010s in that we were given multiple fully-fleshed out protagonists to choose to identify with. They were three radically different black american men who seem to all have been unable to say at that point in their young lives just how much they loved and enjoyed each other in that moment of competition.

I mean, we would never let them do such a thing.

But they are each so true to the graciously individualistic generation they are a part of. So much that they fail to see—like most of us born into this generation—just how silly those conditions are. Just how unfit our millennial condition is for creating collective meaning. And those conditions have led to the indirect poetry we saw play out on the olympic stage.

The meaning came in the awkward team up. The ugly stages of collaboration. Swing, swing, swinging the ball around waiting for some other legend to do the vulnerable thing first. Not so much bad basketball as it is bad foreplay.

The meaning arrived via the wayyyy too late catharsis. Team USA coasting until they can’t coast no more. Crunch time basketball teamwork nirvana created by the condition of: “we’re not blowing this team out by 30 like we should be buuuut also we’d also very much prefer to not get embarrassed”. Confusing, but honest.

The meaning was found in the meta of these guys knowing it’s a kind of a last dance. In knowing that they covet a “Last Dance”-style documentary about this Summer 2024 moment but they also deep down know that the widespread social media coverage IS the documentary. We’re all watching the historical perspective of this moment in real time. Which sounds physically impossible… but we are doing it, technologically. Somehow.

That’s kind of a thing with us.

We can’t wait… and so we don’t.

And so I don’t want to disparage Tatum, because I think this league and the face of the American throne of basketball will be his in time. He’s actually that good, and he’s that fair to the game of basketball. But you can tell that Tatum’s biggest hold up is that he’s effectively been chasing ghosts his whole young career. He’s been punching up, mimicking the things he’s seen on TV to secure his spot in the rafters, first before any of his peers. He has the ambition of iconography that none of them have, but he’s neglecting one thing: this league and this sport, at the highest level, is just one, big going away party right now. It’s going to be a send-off for the next few years.

The recognition that you’d like to get for your objectively worldly accomplishments, it ain’t gonna happen for you, big dawg.

At least not right now.

The user-generated, crowd-sourced documentary of the Golden State - Cleveland Cavaliers fallout is still being made and it’s also being watched in real time, stealing all the eyes.

Tatum’s own love of the game has dropped him off to the party way too early, and the party is being MC’ed by some guys who just won’t let their portion of the conversation die.

But that era is dying, and the end will be here soon.

That game against Serbia was an example of this playing out in real time. As was the gold medal game against France. These guys need their send off now. It was never about a medal. They need their platform—their own stage—to show what they meant to the world. They knew that they needed this opportunity to crown their achievement of mid-2010s theater. To crown the collective ambassadorship they pioneered. All-star weekends no longer suffice. These megastars know, deep down, like most of us know, deep down, that the league play of the NBA is an insufficient arena for them to be crowned while they still deserve it, while they’re all playing incredible individual basketball at such elderly ages.

And no, not always insufficient in a good way.

Insufficient because their egos—their brands—are in many ways elevated above the leagues accomplishment track. They’ve achieved basketball immortality through the extra-curricular exposure, through their institutional relatability.

It’s too personal now.

Them 3 guys being at the forefront of the player empowerment era is what caused this prolonged curtain call. I mean, in some ways they ruined the purity of the game. There would be no need for a kind of extremely visible patriotic “team-up” if all 3 of them had fully committed to the sin of player autonomy and just teamed up together in league play. Just run the gamut with chips. Engineered a supernova. In some ways, the 2010s of championship contention was a long, flirty, talking stage between black men who truly adored each other but couldn’t say it. Men who truly wanted a part of each others’ swag but knew they’d get killed for suggesting as much.

KD, ever the heart on his sleeve, was the first and most honest to join in on the fray. The first to confess his love; his longing. From it, he netted two championships. He also netted a lot of well-measured vitriol. But: he sleeps well at night. With a Spalding tucked in next to him.

Steph, the god-fearer, man of faith… who nested (hid) himself deep within familial structures, on and off the court, to become the guy everyone knew he was supposed to be. The Golden child. You can see it on his face, and in his interactions: he’s not inherently dangerous as a man… he doesn’t know how to be. But within this 94-foot context: he’s dangerously inevitable. He is the greatness of basketball coddling, personified.

Lebron: the ideal mogul. The most dominant personality in the history of the sports world, the William Randolph Hearst of this hoop shit. The king. AND the kingmaker. Eternally controlling. Eternally present. Eternally competing. Inadvertently hilarious. He will, long after his days of playing are done, continue to win at the highest level.

And that’s the irony. In an era where these guys normalized the individualistic brand, it took the most fleeting, pageant-driven kind of team-up—a quick summer fling in a French village—to prop up their immense worth to the sport. It’s so poetic, it’s so storybook.

There is no longer a chance for their individuality to matter to winning on a “small scale” like the NBA championship. They can’t lead teams into 82-game contention alone anymore, let alone diminish their brands in order to be subservient to other, newer systems (plot twist: KD still can.) They had their chance to sacrifice the brand, and they chose up.

So this is what we’re all left with.

A glorious blip of American brilliance, via a once-in-a-four-year competition.

I’m thankful. This is what it’s all about.

Like I said, I would never suggest winning an NBA championship isn’t meaningful anymore.

But it will take some time to reset the scales, for a lot of us to come back down to earth and remember that creating history is real… and it is slow. We’re all a little hungry. A little horny. We’re all craving the catharsis that we feel we deserve.

But things will regulate.

Our millennial legends will fade, and they will be true to us and only us in time.

But, the point is that: Tatum knows this stuff all too well. His gift and his curse. He was too early for a party that was never going to see him as a rager.

And I think that’s his obvious curse.

In time, he will have to answer for it. It will 100% become his obvious gift.

Like everything in time, the lights will shift because the eyes will shift. Or, the eyes will shift because the lights will shift.

Doesn’t really matter which comes first.

—bgs