What’s the point of all this?
Not just the last 12 games of this Dallas Mavericks season. They’re probably going to lose a lot of those games, so you’re not watching for the thrill of victory. A lot of the players on the team right now will likely be gone after this summer, so you’re not seeing the beginning of some blossoming young team.
I’m going to watch at least half those games, if not more. Why?
It’s the same when the team is good, too, even when they’re great. Take a moment and think about all
the great teams who didn’t win a championship, and then broke apart within five years. If you’re a Golden State Warriors or San Antonio Spurs fan, you’ve seen four championships in the last 25 years. That means 21 years of disappointment for fans of the most successful teams. For fans of less successful teams…well, it’s a lot of disappointment.
But we keep coming back. We watch championship teams, mediocre teams, lottery teams. Mostly it ends badly, sometimes even heartbreak. So why do we do this?
One easy answer is to see Cooper Flagg’s development. It looks like he’s going to be a superstar, and it’s always fun to be there for the beginning of something like that.
There’s also the other young guys, Max Christie and Ryan Nembhard. They’ll likely be role players at best, but it’s fun to get to know players like that and see if they become more.
There’s the chance that Jason Kidd will awake from his slumber and show a human emotion once or twice during a game. Maybe he’ll even raise his voice and get ejected, just for fun or sheer boredom.
If Dwight Powell gets enough minutes, he might break the career record for getting hit in the face with a basketball. Or he might break a real Mavericks franchise record simply by being around for a while (he’s less than thirty rebounds away from passing Erick Dampier for eighth all time).
Maybe you’re in full tank mode and are rooting for them to lose every game for the rest of the season so they get a better pick. That’s one way to stay entertained! Make sure you’re staying up to date on all the mock drafts.
You might just like seeing Klay Thompson shoot 3-pointers. He likely won’t pass any more historical marks this season, but he’s got a great shot, and it’s fun to see him when he’s shooting the lights out. Maybe Thompson has a game where he goes on an absolute heater and hits double digit 3-pointers.
Maybe around mid-March the players will just be sick of this season and get in a fight with another team. It’s not what you’re watching for, obviously, but it would break up the monotony of one of the weirdest and blandest seasons in years.
Maybe the best reason to be here, watching these games, caring about what’s going on, is the relationships you build through this dumb team. It creates bonds with your parents, your kids, your brothers and sisters, your friends, that will likely never go away. It’s why we get so happy when this team succeeds, and why we get so despondent when a historically incompetent GM trades away a top five player for almost no return.
So we keep showing up to see them lose by twenty to a championship contender, or lose by two to a fellow lottery-bound team. We watch the good games and the bad, even if we turn it off and go to bed early sometimes (especially those West Coast games with late start times).
Maybe there’s no real legitimate reason to watch a soon-to-be deconstructed team finish out a miserable season, and we’re all some sort of addicts. Addicted to basketball, whether it’s in it’s best or worst forms. If you stop and think about it too long, it really doesn’t make sense. We’re going to watch this team finish out 2-10, together, for fun?
But here we are, getting excited about Flagg making a play way too advanced for someone his age, or getting mad about Daniel Gafford’s lack of rebounding, or just getting bored. But we’re in it together, in this basketball purgatory together, thinking about better days on the horizon.
