I’m far from being an insider (mostly I like sleep too much, and those guys never do), but there’s information you glean just from being proximal to the game. There are trends in questions and answers from coaches and players, plus recurring conversations with fellow media, team staff, scouts and agents. When alongside the pulse of NBA basketball, you pick up its reverberations.
One big, undeniable beat I’ve picked up on this season is the growing awareness that vey soon we’re going to start losing perennial stars. I say “we” and not only the league because the realization really does feel collective. Case in point, when the topic of the Warriors dynasty drawing to a slow, potentially quiet close comes up, it’s never solely in relation to the team.
The decline of Golden State is always held alongside the state of the league as a whole, either what it means for competition or in broader strokes, how the mechanics of the game itself will change without a dominant Steph Curry. And that detail is never explicitly mentioned. Even the most primetime of pundits have a reticence to predict when we’ll see the last of Curry, as if giving it consideration is a kind of jinx.
The counter to that is LeBron James, who cannot be discussed enough in relation to his retirement, but that endless guessing feels safe because James has proved prediction wrong so many times in what were meant to be his quieting seasons.
James has, to his credit, lulled us into a steady, safe space when it comes to deliberating his eventual departure. Much like the constancy of his skill — a rarity we take for granted in how routine it is — and how James will remind us on occasion of its veracity with a dunk that knocks the wind out of you, he’s delivered the same open reminders about his leaving. And like his skill (or more accurately, because of it), he then carries on “as usual”. At some point, and sooner now than any in the past, he’ll really do the thing he’s been setting us gradually up for all these years.
Some of the existential quality I’ve sensed this season from colleagues, plus athletes themselves, is that there has to be some official switching over in order to turn young talent into new stars. That it simultaneously won’t happen while James, Curry, plus their peers in guys like Kevin Durant, Russell Westbrook, James Harden, Chris Paul, DeMar DeRozan — the list goes on — are still around, but that when they go we’ll be bereft of replacements.
I’ve banged this drum before but that’s because the sociology of sport, in this way, is fascinating. There is no permission needed or granted in assigning the moniker of star or league leader to a player. Moreover, one doesn’t have to vanish for the next to shine — the recognition isn’t finite.
What’s funny is that my sense of this weird star-stasis we’ve plunged ourselves into has more to do with a proverbial embarrassment of riches in talent than a shortage. It’s not that there’s no star candidates to choose from, it’s that there are too many. Each one of the league’s young, leading teams this season boasts at last three star-quality players, and another two to four on the same upward trajectory. Athletes have never been more loaded with skill, more multi-talented and adept at developing even more, than they are now.
We know the shape of seasons to come. We’ve seen it in Cade Cunningham’s hypnotic handles, can sketch Shai Gilgeous-Alexander’s feathery floaters by memory. My advice whenever the hypothetical of “who comes next” is broached in conversation is: take your pick.
