Basketball Jones

Timeout. The Miami Heat are better. What? When did this happen? Why? They aren’t supposed to get better, they’re supposed to have been lucky to win last season and their time was over, it’s our time.

This team wasn’t even supposed to win last summer, the Thunder were a better team and had the talent to beat the Heat. 

The forecast never said Heat, only Thunder in Oklahoma City in June during the NBA Finals.

Strangely enough, the Thunder have lost to the eventual NBA champion in each of the last three seasons, the only three seasons our favorite group of guys from Bricktown have been in the playoffs. The Lakers, the Mavericks and the Heat have defeated Oklahoma City respectively, the last three versions of the NBA Playoffs. The Heat doing it in The Finals in only five games, after the Thunder won the first game and the world thought we had arrived.

Now all of the sudden we, Oklahoma City, find ourselves in an awkward position of having to prove to the entire world that we haven’t taken any steps backward and are in fact a better team. A special thanks to James Harden for what he did here, however, I hope you find a nice television in Houston to watch next summer’s edition of The Finals.

In an offseason in which the Heat and the Mavericks and the Lakers all “Got better,” the Thunder, according to some, made the biggest mistake of their young history and traded away Harden.

Umm, not exactly.

Photo by Cyn Sheng Ling, The Vista

Miami is better, this we now know. Dallas is better it appears, despite losing a Hall of Fame point guard and a thrilling, sixth man of the year winner of their own. The Mavericks ran through the Lakers on Tuesday night, literally, Elton Brand ran through Pau Gasol on a play and emphatically made a statement that Dallas is going to be a force to be reckoned with. Dallas beat LA 99-91 and now for a moment some of the attention will be shifted away from Oklahoma City and our front office moves, and focused on the Lake show and how they acquired some pretty hefty players and suddenly they might not be the least bit a better team.

When speaking of the upper-echelon of teams in the NBA, these four teams are always going to be in the argument. Alongside, Chicago and maybe Boston, there aren’t really any other teams that are serious contenders this season. San Antonio is always a contender whether serious or not, usually not talking about them fuels the Spurs to a number one seed in the playoffs, but we’ll find out tonight whether or not they have a team worth mentioning.

Halloween means one thing in my household, and that is that it’s basketball season. And with that comes all sorts of thundering up. The rollercoaster of a season in which each and every week the media will flip-flop on who the best team is and what’s wrong with the team that we thought were the best. It’s basketball season, charge up that cell phone and put on your seat belt, we are in for a long ride.