In the year since my writing It’s A Great Day To Be A Fairweather OKC Thunder Fan, several things have changed.
Firstly and most importantly, the Oklahoma City Thunder has won its first championship, elevating Oklahoma to the tenuous and terrifying position of number one in the National Basketball Association. Secondly and not as importantly, my dog has stopped humping things. (This will likely change with the seasons.) Thirdly, and most unnervingly: I have, against all odds, become not just a Thunder fan, but a fan of NBA basketball writ large.
A few nights previous, apropos of nothing, I asked my girlfriend: “Do you want to turn on Pistons/Magic?” Yes, that’s right, dear reader: I wanted to watch a playoff game that did not involve the Thunder. I wanted to, as it were, take the temperature of the playoffs.
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I spoke those words as if in a foreign language I’d recently learned. They would have meant nothing to me a year ago. The idea that I would want to watch a game between other NBA teams would have been as distant and as impossible as the promised return of Christ.
And yet, here I am, walking into the backyard, plaintive and somber, wondering about another promised return, that of Jalen Williams, and giving soft, sad barks at the cold waxing moon.
When I think about the stupid and unlikely yet oft-discussed possibility of Shai losing MVP to Victor Wembanyana—a merely tall man who finished 13th in scoring and only put up 11 points in 40 minutes in a loss to the Timberwolves earlier this week and who has spent less time with Buddhist monks than I have—I feel a surprising and incongruous swell of anger, like a volcano whose eruption is caused by the gravitational pull of another planet. The happenings of the National Basketball Association have begun to mean something to me.