Magic, Technology, And Steph Curry In The NBA Finals: David Roth's Weak In Review

There are boats, if you are the sort of overlord who is into boats, and with them the opportunity to give your boat an obnoxious name like Iterator or Killer App or Literally John Galt or whatever. There are the vacation homes and the truffle supplement at dinner and the thrill and obligation of retaining a full-time staff dedicated to ensuring that you never, ever have to pay a dollar in taxes. But mostly, when I think about the queasy benefits of membership in America's overlord caste, I think about the ludicrous high-intensity hobbies, which are so grandiose at their upper end as to only faintly qualify as fun, and which generally look more like complete delusional breakdowns with uncommonly high production values.

One of the lesser Koch brothers, for instance, lives on a ranch with a meticulously reconstructed 50-structure Wild West village that he won't let anyone visit. Peter Thiel has been engaged in an extremely vigorous non-stop full-dress Lex Luthor cosplay session since maybe 2007. Joe Lacob, in what qualifies as a relatively savvy move, just bought the Golden State Warriors, and today lives blithe and secure in the belief that he and he alone saw the disruptive, game-changing possibilities of employing the best player in basketball as a member of your team. If some of this reflects the single-mindedness and titanium-reinforced self-belief that propelled these people to success, it finally converges Sheriff Bill Koch jingle-jangling in historically accurate spurs through a solo game of cowboys and indians. For all the many great and small ways in which extreme inequality corrodes our culture, it doesn't really seem to do much for the mental states of those at the top, either.

While they're certainly not above messing around in the politics and day-to-day scuffling of the rest of us down here, our plutocrats spend their days in a sort of VIP room of the mind. In there, they are free to congratulate each other on their richly deserved success, lend each other money, place side bets on the goings-on in the dreary, parlous, Keurig-breathed world below, and presumably exchange esoteric complaints about the pros and cons of private jet ownership. The Olympian dispatches we get from up there tend to be plummy and laughably self-regarding, but again: it is difficult to maintain perspective while clomping around a Wild West Village of one's own.

Affectations come and go among this class; the brutish Power Football approach to extreme wealth modeled by the NFL's owners is antique, but it's an approach that is never totally out of style. But for our moment's ascendant overlords, whose wealth comes from drafting off and collecting a percentage from technology, there is something more aspirational at work. These men make their money on gadgets and gewgaws and novel ways to squeeze new rent out of old things, but they have leveraged their worldview on the idea that all of this is less about money than it is about Changing The World. The game is to reverse-engineer a grander purpose and worth into that work. If you owned the Golden State Warriors this season, you might start to believe this shit a little bit, too.

Lacob's tendency is to conflate his team's beautiful basketball and his own venture capitalist vision; in his more over-the-top moments, over the course of several extremely fluffy profiles at the end of Golden State's historic regular season, he seemed almost to claim Stephen Curry's pathbreaking play as an invention of his own. If this is ridiculous, and it is ridiculous, it's at least easier to understand than the whole Private Wild West Ghost Town thing. What Curry did to the NBA this year really did feel world-changing and expansive, and it would stand to reason that someone who believes himself to be in the world-changing business might want to claim a little bit of the credit for that exquisite creative destruction.

It makes sense in another way, as well, and one that speaks more directly to the way in which Silicon Valley and its turtlenecked lordlings have arrogated the future—both in the sense that they believe they are and will continue to create it, and in the sense that they see themselves as its rightful owners. This season, Curry really was playing futuristic basketball, mostly by making shots, regularly, that no one had previously dared to take. It was not just that, though. The pressure that he put on defenses both expanded and inverted the game—there were suddenly several more feet of basketball court to defend, and in a game that doesn't have a great deal of slack in it, that really is revolutionary. Even excellent NBA defenses would be stretched drum-tight trying to cover an offense like Golden State's; stretch it that much more, to defend this little spindly dude who is hitting 30-footers with apparent ease, and that fabric tears right down the middle. There is just only so much give in it.

One of the science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke's three laws is that "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." For much of this season, Curry's play really did have the upside-down gravity and spun giddiness of magic. Of course triumphalists like Lacob would look at that, work backwards, and decide that actually this was technology—pure progress, the natural result of a big idea and an efficient process. With Curry limping through a second straight NBA Finals, we are seeing the other side of this. The process only works when it works, and a missed 25-footer of the kind that Curry has tossed up with regularity since injuring his knee earlier in the playoffs looks…well, it just looks like an ill-advised shot when it doesn't go in. If the pressure that the Warriors exert is rational, it is also dependent upon a generous helping of magic. Without it, they're just a basketball team, and their coach is smashing whiteboards.

Of course, they're still a very good basketball team. Even with Curry at less than his best, the Warriors will likely be fine, if only because of the strain they put upon a Cavaliers team that has perhaps a few too many pressure points. The NBA Finals got interesting with the Cavaliers blowout win in Game 3, but more in a macro sense than an immediate one; the games haven't been close, and they've mostly felt even less close than they actually were. All of which is kind of a long way to say that the games have been pretty dull, and that the little moments of grace they offer are mostly of the humble Huh, Richard Jefferson variety. Each team has a dominant win over the other, but in both cases the awe of it was mitigated somewhat by the sense that the other team was capitulating, or at least totally lost.

Even though it never quite goes this way, it was hard to escape the suspicion that the whole postseason might have gone like this, with the Warriors styling futuristically on every opponent that moved up the bracket, and everyone watching left to find new words for "awesome." With the Warriors, this year, there was always the sense that they were out ahead of not just the league, but the game itself—that they were playing a version of basketball from a couple years in the future, and which no one else had quite figured out how to play in the present. In Curry's case, this meant he appeared to be playing a sport that was different and easier than the one everyone else was playing. Had Curry and the season just gone on like this, it would have been historic, but also deadly dull. It hasn't exactly been fun yet, but the Finals are at least not happening as predicted.

And while it's hard to say the Finals are better with Curry flailing and decoying and generally looking like a skinny shadow of himself, there is some comfort in the way they've skipped the rails. We tell ourselves stories about progress, or we let other people tell them to us—that it is linear and righteous and efficient, that whatever is, is right. We non-overlords live in the disproof of that; necessarily, we have a more complicated experience of progress than those for whom it is mostly a way to justify their profits. Stephen Curry was always a lot more the result of magic—and of work and genius-level talent and teamwork, too—than some righteous and inexorable technological system of basketball. With the magic gone, we are seeing the gears grind. We are seeing the work, and something more like the truth of how difficult and how long this season is. It's not beautiful, or even pretty, or at least it hasn't been yet. But it at least seems honest.