At the end there will be a parade, and maybe a coronation, and possibly an absolution.
The NBA Finals get underway — finally — on Thursday night, and by the time the Boston Celtics and Dallas Mavericks conclude their best-of-seven series, we’ll know which is the best team in the NBA this season.
The winner will get the parade.
And through that process, there’s a very good chance that one of the two best young players in the league will be minted, crowned or made — choose your euphemism — as an all-time great. Winning a championship isn’t a prerequisite for being recognized as such: a generation of superstars locked out of a championship by Michael Jordan’s Chicago Bulls still made their way to the Naismith Hall of Fame, as Karl Malone, Reggie Miller and Patrick Ewing can attest.
But a championship ring — and usually more than one — is often the tiebreaker when it comes to discussing who belongs on the shortlist of the league’s very best.
Mavericks guard Luka Doncic, 25, has done everything possible in his six-year NBA career to serve notice he deserves that kind of consideration. He was rookie of the year in 2018-19 and has made first-team All-NBA every year since. He led the league in scoring this season and finished third in MVP voting. He helped the Mavericks to the Western Conference Finals as a 22-year-old in 2021-22. This is his first Finals appearance, but he’s been leading teams on the biggest stages since he won a EuroLeague championship with Real Madrid as an 18-year-old.
At 26 and in his seventh season, Celtics star Jayson Tatum is a five-time All-Star coming off his third consecutive first-team all-NBA nod. He’s been in the playoffs every season and helped the Celtics to five Eastern Conference Finals appearances, twice advancing to the Finals.
Doncic versus Tatum is a perfectly valid lens through which to view the 2024 NBA Finals: elite young players in the early stages of their prime with an opportunity to add “NBA champion” to the bottom line of their already glittering CVs.
Whoever is on the winning side when the Finals wrap up will be well on his way to being recognized as a generational player and have a leg up when the basketball cognoscenti begin compiling their best-of lists.
But perhaps the most compelling — and telling — storyline that has emerged and could end up defining the 2024 Finals has been the basketball resurrection of Kyrie Irving. The 32-year-old Mavericks guard’s path to NBA legend status went off the rails starting with his stint in Boston back in 2017-18 and 2018-19, and yet has seemingly resumed seamlessly since arriving in Dallas as damaged goods at the trade deadline a year ago.
Irving’s talent has never been questioned — by anyone. All you have to do is watch him play to understand his combination of basketball skill, athletic grace and competitive confidence is eye-poppingly rare. In a league full of one-in-a-million talents, Irving stands out.
“I would call Kyrie ‘The Wizard’ all the time,” LeBron James said on his podcast Mind the Game with JJ Reddick, in reference to Irving, who James teamed up with for three Finals appearances and the 2016 NBA championship when they played together in Cleveland. “There was nothing on a basketball floor that Kyrie couldn’t do.”
It’s a statement that’s impossible to corroborate, but tellingly, hasn’t drawn significant blowback. Irving is that special.
James added: “He’s the most gifted player the NBA has ever seen.”
He’s also one of the NBA’s greatest flakes, for lack of a better term.
In Game 7 of the 2016 Finals, Irving hit one of the most memorable and most clutch shots in league history — the go-ahead three-pointer with 53 seconds left that completed the Cavaliers’ come back from down 3-1 to beat the 73-win Golden State Warriors.
He helped Cleveland to the Finals again in 2017 and averaged 29 points a game while coming close to putting up 50/40/90 shooting splits from the field, the three-point line and the free-throw line along the way.
But then came a six-year mid-career swerve of oddness that is almost unmatched in league history.
He requested a trade out of Cleveland, in part because he no longer wanted to play second fiddle to James. He lasted just two years in Boston, clashing occasionally with his teammates. After reneging on a promise to re-sign with the Celtics, Irving instead decided to create a superteam in Brooklyn with Kevin Durant. Injuries, Irving’s refusal to be vaccinated for COVID-19 and his public support for a documentary that featured antisemitic tropes, were prominent in his truncated years in Brooklyn. He requested a trade from the Nets too, in an attempt to force his way to the Los Angeles Lakers before opting into the final year of his contract and eventually being traded to Dallas for a first-round pick and a pair of role players.
Irving was considered damaged goods.
But with the Mavericks, there has been a revival. There have been no off-court issues or on-court drama. He’s meshed seamlessly with Doncic and his basketball skills — which have never been in question — have been front and centre again.
And that might be the wild card in the Finals.
The common wisdom is that in a closely matched series, the single best player on the floor can often swing the balance over seven games. It’s not entirely true — James has always been the best player in his 10 Finals appearances, but he’s won “only” four titles. There are plenty of examples of players among the top 10 or 15 of all time coming out on the losing end in the Finals. But the premise stands: when all else is roughly equal, individual brilliance can make the difference.
It’s not clear that the Celtics, who have gone 12-2 in the playoffs after compiling a league-best 64-win regular season, have an equal. With Tatum, Jaylen Brown, Jrue Holiday, Derrick White and Kristaps Porzingis, Boston has a starting five that brims with skill, shooting and defensive chops. Tatum and Brown can take over games offensively.
But Dallas — which remade its rotation at the trade deadline — finished the regular season on a 16-4 surge. The Mavs followed that up by knocking off the Los Angeles Clippers in the first round and the No. 1-seeded Oklahoma City Thunder in the second round before bullying the No. 3 seed Minnesota Timberwolves — who had eliminated the defending-champion Denver Nuggets in seven games in the Round 2 — in five games in the Western Conference Finals.
They are battle-tested and they have Doncic, who shook off a shooting slump early in the playoffs and is coming into the Finals averaging 29.1 points, 10.5 rebounds and 8.4 assists over his past 10 games, while shooting 44 per cent from three. He closed out the Thunder with a pair of powerhouse performances in Games 5 and 6 of their series and did the same to Minnesota on the road in Game 5 of the conference finals.
In those three series-defining games, Doncic averaged 32 points, 10 rebounds, and nine assists while shooting 59 per cent from the floor and 56 per cent from three. He’s widely considered indefensible, given his size and his ability to manipulate defences with his passing and mid-range bully ball, where he uses his six-foot-seven, 230-pound frame to overwhelm smaller defenders. When his three is falling, there is no answer.
It’s why ruling out a Mavericks upset over the rightly favoured Celtics is foolish. Players of Doncic’s pedigree are always a threat to find a way. And if Boston is going to finally earn their record-breaking 18th championship, Tatum will have to be Doncic’s equal. The Celtics star is certainly capable, and he’ll have plenty of help.
But then we get to Irving.
In the six years since the Mavericks guard was last in the Finals, the focus shifted from his on-court performance. But now that the off-court noise has quieted, the appreciation for Irving’s game is having a renaissance.
He’s an athletic genius in his own right, and with the clouds cleared, it’s come into focus again.
He averaged 25.6 points, 5.0 rebounds and 5.2 assists on superstar-level efficiency. Only four players in NBA history have averaged more than 25 points a game while shooting at least 40 per cent from three, 50 per cent on two-point field goals and 90 per cent on free throws in a single season: Larry Bird, Kevin Durant, Steph Curry and Irving, who did it for the fourth time this season. Only Curry, a two-time MVP and four-time champion, has more such seasons, with six.
Had Irving met the 65-game threshold required for All-NBA recognition (he played 58 games this season), he would have been a safe bet to earn all-league recognition for the fourth time, but the first time since 2021.
And Irving’s performance has translated to the post-season, as has always been the case with the former No. 1 overall pick out of Duke. He’s averaging 22.8 points a game during the Mavericks’ run and doing it even more efficiently than he did in the regular season.
Taken as a whole, it’s very reminiscent of Irving’s performance alongside James in Cleveland when they won a championship together in 2016.
All of which raises the question: Do the Mavericks not only have the best player in the series in Doncic, but the two best players, with Irving playing at this level?
It’s a scary thought for the Celtics, who are well-equipped to handle almost anything, based on the depth and diversity of their rotation. But brilliance often finds a way in moments like these.
It will be up to Tatum to match Doncic, with each young superstar fighting for a chance to add the most difficult accolade of all: NBA champion.
But coming up the inside is Irving, whose strange mid-career swerve is already fading into the background as he plays some of the best basketball of his career again at age 32. His performance is the stuff of basketball redemption.
If the mercurial Mavericks star remains true to his current form, he could lead Dallas to an upset victory, and the start of a new conversation around a one-of-a-kind career.