Let's Talk Ourselves Into This NBA Finals Matchup

The NBA Finals would seem great to someone who only recently decided to care about NBA basketball. You’ve got your dynastic bulletproof Golden State Warriors, currently minus injured cornball virtuoso Kevin Durant but otherwise as monstrously dominant as ever. You’ve also got the Toronto Raptors, a long-thwarted franchise with a pathologically devoted fan community that includes a goofwad rapper who hops and claps on the sidelines every game and a postseason history that was basically a five-year-long skateboard slam video before the arrival of Kawhi Leonard. The Warriors are the Warriors, and currently are Warriors-ing in the pre-Durant classic style; the Raptors are also the Raptors, and yet they just finished cooly wiping out the Milwaukee Bucks, a well-coached team that plays with an actual god on the floor most of the time. That matchup definitely sounds cool, provided you don’t know enough about how this all works to fear the Warriors’ wrath above all things.

Drew and I know enough to know better, but we are also dopes and our big dumb hearts want what they want—large Italian sandwiches, mostly, but also a decently competitive Finals. And that was how we came to spend the better part of this Deadcast trying to talk ourselves into the possibility that the NBA Finals might be more fun than we fear:

That’s a lot of delusion, even by our usual standards, but we did not spend the entire podcast gassing each other up about the possibility that these NBA Finals might be something other than brutal. There was more important work to be done, which is why we also spent some time on the many other possible names that we could be calling the Toronto Raptors, virtually all of which are better than “Toronto Raptors” on their merits but several of which are also funnier.

And there is, always, the Funbag. Waiting, dark and cruel, the promise of thoughts unimaginable and forbidden. This week they involved the possibility of baseball adding a totally new type of pitch and the image of Donald Trump striding, purposefully and without acknowledgement, from a bathroom that he has just destroyed. It’s like this every week, and yet every week we return. Delusion is the common thread, here as everywhere else—the possibility that this time, maybe, no one will ask a question about Donald Trump’s horrific fortnightly dumps. But they always ask. Maybe the Finals will be a surprise, at least.

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