NBA Finals highlight false narratives

It’s funny how narrative works in sports. Win a championship and you’re a legend. Lose one and you’re a choker.

At least that’s how it is in today’s social media age. Look at LeBron James. He was the ultimate choke artist in Cleveland until he bolted for Miami and became the biggest traitor since Benedict Arnold. He then won two championships and got rid of the “choke artist” title before returning to Cleveland, and on Sunday he became the “hometown hero” once again by leading his Cavaliers to a championship, the city’s first since 1964.

The false narratives have followed James like none other throughout his 13-year career. He’s the next Michael Jordan. He can’t deliver in the clutch. He’ll never win a championship in Cleveland. He needs two superstars around him to win a ring. He’s arrogant, selfish, not a team player, soft, a crybaby and on the wrong side of 30.

And in a span of two weeks, he took all of those scorching hot takes and extinguished them for good with an NBA Finals performance for the ages. With his team down 3-1 in the series, he scored 41 points in back-to-back elimination games and then poured in a triple-double — 27 points, 11 rebounds and 11 assists — in a Game 7 win on the road, beating a Warriors team that hadn’t lost three straight games since 2013 and had lost four times at home all season. With the game tied late, his chase down block on Andre Iguodala — taking away a sure layup — that led to Kyrie Irving’s go-ahead 3-pointer is one of the greatest championship-defining moments you will ever see.

In these two weeks, James has taken his legacy and raised it higher than the sky, re-established himself as the best player in the league and shown that the king is not dead — he is very much alive and still doing incredible, non-human, groundbreaking basketball things.

As high as James is flying right now, the Warriors have gone on a free-fall twice the distance. As someone who has followed the Warriors since I knew what basketball was, to see the narrative around this team right now is very conflicting and painful. I will spare you the details of the horrid basketball that I watched growing up, but if you told me before 2012 they would make the playoffs four straight years, much less two consecutive Finals, I would’ve laughed.

But 2015 was the year they burst onto the scene as the cool new toy and this season was supposed to prove they were worthy of legendary status. And everything was going so well. They broke the 1995-1996 Chicago Bulls’ regular-season wins record with 73, a feat that may never be touched again.

I was lucky enough to cover one of their games and attend two more as a fan, and it was like the circus coming to town every night. Crowds would gather just to watch Stephen Curry’s pre-game warm-up routine. It was like the intro to the real show, and boy was it a show. The Splash Brothers would celebrate 3-pointers prematurely and you couldn’t do anything about it because they went in. Draymond Green would taunt and trash talk and get under your skin and you couldn’t respond because his team was running circles around yours.

By the end, after 48 minutes of a barrage of 3-pointers and relentless Harlem Globetrotter-like ball movement, the question for a team that started the season 24-0 and set nearly every record in the books was not whether they would win, but how much they would win by. They were arrogant because they could be, and they had everyone convinced they were invincible.

Until they weren’t. Until the Oklahoma City Thunder had them down 3-1 in the conference finals and it took Klay Thompson’s heroics to raise them back from the dead. Suddenly, they were beatable. And then, inexplicably, they blew a 3-1 series lead in the Finals, the first team ever to do so. Quite literally, the Warriors are the best team in NBA history to not win a championship, a dubious honor that just screams, “choke artists.”

And with it come all the narratives, true or untrue. The Warriors are so overrated. Biggest choke job ever. Last season was a fluke. Curry is soft, weak and undeserving of a unanimous MVP award. Winning 73 games means nothing. Charles Barkley was right: jump-shooting teams can’t win.

I could go on — Twitter experts are great. But the bottom line is that narratives are dumb. If James doesn’t block that layup and if Irving misses that 3-pointer, we’re talking about how James is still a choker and will never end Cleveland’s championship curse and dubbing the Warriors as the greatest team of all time.

It is entirely possible to believe that the Warriors had an incredible season while James played out of his mind and the Cavs pulled off an upset for the ages. But that would be too logical for social media, where takes must be made instantly and James fluctuates between “hero” and “choker” faster than the speed of light. I can’t wait for these two teams to meet again in next year’s Finals and for more narratives to come.

Eric He is a rising sophomore majoring in print and digital journalism. His column,  “Grinding Gears,” runs Wednesdays.