Chauncey Billups knows: The cliche is crapola. The harder part is faking it after you’ve made it.
“The biggest thing, and me being in that position and having been there before, the biggest thing is just — don’t get bored, man,” Billups, the Denver hoops icon, former Nuggets point guard and current Trail Blazers coach, told me recently when our convo turned to the reigning NBA champs.
“That playoff run is so intense and every game is just incredible. And you come back to a regular season where it’s just like, ‘Oh, here we go, (these are) regular season games. I want that fire and intensity.’ Well, you won’t get that again until the playoffs.”
The summit smells of cigar and champagne. The ascent smells of stale Auntie Anne’s airport pretzels between back-to-backs at Brooklyn and Charlotte.
Mr. Big Shot’s Detroit Pistons won it all in 2004. The next fall, they opened up with a record of 7-7 after 14 games. They were 13-12 at Christmas.
“So a lot of times you get bored with that process,” Billups continued, “and it’s hard to defend against that. But I think obviously, they’ve got the players and the coach to do it. But that’s the biggest thing — you just can’t get bored.”
If the NBA’s bored of them, the league sure as heck hasn’t shown it. The Nuggets freak people out so much right now that the Bucks traded for Dame Lillard, the Celtics traded for Jrue Holiday, and the Suns shipped Deandre Ayton out of town in favor of Jusuf Nurkic and an upgraded bench.
Nikola Jokic and Jamal Murray are buried so deep inside the Sixers’ collective noggins that Philly’s holding training camp this week at CSU, roughly 1,785 miles from home and approximately 5,000 feet above sea level — or 4,975 feet higher than Pat’s Steaks.
“We’ve gone from being a team that’s hunting the teams in front of us,” coach Michael Malone reflected Monday during the champs’ annual preseason media day, “to being the hunted.”
The NBA’s postseason is America’s best reality television show, a stage where the narratives eat and the stars shine, a long soap opera in sneakers.
The NBA’s regular season is just … long.
“The hardest thing for trying to repeat is just keeping the team together,” noted Nuggets guard Kentavious Caldwell-Pope, who also earned a ring with the Lakers at the Orlando bubble in 2020. “It’s one of the hardest things for any organization that’s won a championship. You have guys — Bruce (Brown), Jeff (Green), Ish (Smith) … other teams pull them apart from us.”
It’s up to the new pieces to combat that boredom, in addition to keeping the line moving. Second-year swing man Christian Braun vowed that he’d spent the last three months polishing his jump shot, ballhandling and beard, although said beard was nowhere to be found Monday. Peyton Watson, another young, critical piece with new responsibilities, said he added 20 pounds of muscle and has shoulders broad enough for whatever weight rolls his way.
“I know what’s ahead of me,” Watson said. “I know we’re here to defend our championship. And I’m ready to go.”
Chasing All-Star love is another cure for the boredom blues, although the Nuggets eschew individual goals, a Jokic mantra that’s burned into a franchise’s gilded, propitious DNA. Although even “team guys” have families. And agents. Agents who will remind them how much money the Pacers just chucked at Brucey B.
“Of course we’re mad at him,” the Joker teased Monday when asked about Brown, the Finals MVP’s trademark deadpan already in midseason form. “Maybe we don’t give him a ring.”
Hey, whatever it takes to float the boats until New Year’s. Since the 2011 lockout, only one defending champion has sported a losing record on Christmas Day of the non-COVID season that followed, and that was last winter’s Golden State Warriors.
The average record for the last 10 champs — save for the ’19-20 Lakers, as the coronarvirus forced the ’20-21 season to start late — on Dec. 25 was 22-9 (.710). Two of those 10 pulled off repeat crowns.
“I always use the same reference,” Murray said. “If a fighter goes into a fight (and) he’s not ready to fight, he’s going to get knocked out. So you’ve always got to be the hunter just based on that.”
Those targets on your backs are real. But they’re only as heavy as you allow them to be. No matter how steep the climb.
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