The Chosen Ones

The Dallas Mavericks just days after winning their first NBA title.

Let's put it this way: basketball is a team sport.

Needless to say, we've been hearing that cliche over and under the rim since it became a part of professional basketball. And no matter how many times we praise and worship these basketball gods on and off the court, at the end of the game it is still the final score that matters most, or more specifically, which team won the game. It is still the team, regardless of its culmination, that takes all the credit, in as much as the players, not just their usual All-Star teammate, gets the nod every time a team wins.

The NBA Finals has just ended. And it has witnessed a competition that lends justice to a game that is fast becoming an individual sport instead of relying solely on the rotation of its players. The Heat-Mavericks series, with all intents and purposes, showed us what basketball is all about: it is still a sport that takes on a communal effort for it to secure a victory. And the Dallas Mavericks, a veteran team no less, played exactly like one, playing against probably the best player ever to play the game, and yet still (old as they are) end up as champions, dismissing the prevailing notion that it only takes a King's Decision to occupy the best seat in the house.

We saw a great team playing against a superb player, and the outcome was almost anything but static. When LeBron James jilted his hometown by taking his talents to South Beach, the prospect of Miami winning multiple rings was so close to being treated as a birthright, that we can now claim the Heat as the next basketball dynasty with their own self-proclaimed King leading the way, alongside resident knight Dwayne Wade and a silent squire in Chris Bosh, everything seemed Kevin Garnett-possible for them moving forward. But the Mavericks had other plans, crashing LeBron's entourage with a Dirk and a Germanic tribe of fade aways and three point bombs, leaving perhaps the Miami kingdom all in ruins. So complete was the destruction that we are witnessing a seething display of team effort played out loud as the series progresses, while wondering to a scathing meltdown of a superb player when the game was on the line.

After years of struggling in the playoffs, foremost among them was with the same team they have defeated earlier this month when they lost to the '06 Finals after taking a 2-0 lead in the series and that humiliating exit in the first round to an 8th seed the following year, the Mavericks finally lifted that burden convincingly with a more complete team than the one they have assembled five years ago. And they were a transformed team heading into the playoffs, that their bench (which has been labelled non-existent come playoff time over the years) played a key role in turning the tide against LeBron and company, proving nonetheless to be the winning formula against that seemingly formidable run of the so-called Heatles. Team play and chemistry made all the difference between a team everybody thought would win it all and a team nobody thought would go the distance.

The Mavs showed why, even with all the hype and hounds of that Big 3 in Miami, and especially with LeBron declaring before the season started that the Heat would go on winning titles more than Michael Jordan could possibly handle, that playing as a team will eventually take care of itself. During the course of the recently concluded playoffs, this team, more than once, finds itself in a ditch, trailing behind by 15 points with barely 6 minutes left in the game in that Thunder series, but the Mavs remained resilient and methodically erased the lead before shocking the young, inexperienced Thunder with a championship finesse that started even in the previous series when they swept the defending champion Lakers in their semifinals match. And it proved to be a pattern all through out the playoffs, enabling critics and even non-Dallas fans alike that this team is capable of winning it all.

Nobody has given a thought about the Mavs surviving in the playoffs, let alone going back to the Finals. For years, this team has a reputation of being soft, and that their self-effacing superstar, Dirk Nowitzki, was just an afterthought, if not a failure, when it comes to big time basketball. The Mavs suffered a career low when they found themselves getting crushed by their former coach in Don Nelson when his '07 Warriors humiliated what could be the best season for the Mavs in years, but turned out to be a dud in the end. Fresh from their Finals meltdown a year before, the league just found it necessary to hand Nowitzski the MVP price to somehow diffuse the beating he and his teammates got at the hands of the Warriors. Forward to 2011, the Mavs again suffered the same descending pattern, only this time in their first round series with the Blazers, when Brandon Roy lead a double-digit comeback, erasing an 18 point lead at the start of the 4th quarter, and went on to tie the series at 2-2. Somehow the Mavs recovered from that game, but the stigma of past failures haunted them immediately after silencing Portland and even before facing the Lakers in the semis.

Memories of '06 still haunts Dirk and Jason.

The 2011 Mavs is an assembly line of wounded veterans hungry for their first title, some has-been superstars doing one game at a time while still focusing on the ultimate goal which is to play in June. Nowitzki and Terry, two of the surviving Mavs of the '06 debacle were playing with a constant chip on their shoulders, perhaps still reeling about their recurring failures more than their critics thought. Jason Kidd, at 38, still chasing that ring that eluded him twice in Jersey, has remained a steady point guard throughout the season. Shawn Marion, who failed to reach his potential during his stint with the Suns has resurfaced into a reliable wing defender alongside the resurging DeShawn Stevenson, two ballers who alternately pestered LeBron into an absentee landlord in the Finals. Tyson Chandler, after years of obscurity and uninspired basketball in Chicago, came out firing on the defensive end. Peja Stojakovic, who suffered heartbreaking defeats at the hands of the Lakers as a member of the Kings, was again clicking on all cylinders at crucial moments in the playoffs. J.J. Barea, now finally having that recognition as the catalyst of the Mavs' drive to that mountain peak. And Brian Cardinal, nicknamed "The Janitor", who elevated himself alongside Brian Scalabrine as the luckiest players in the world. Not to mention their coach, Rick Carlisle, who might have been recovering still from the trauma of that Palace brawl several years back. These Mavs, as well the injured Caron Butler, Brendan Haywood and the rest of the crew, suddenly found themselves going back to that team concept which they so convincingly displayed all season long, not in taking their talents exclusively in the middle of July with all that premature confetti around, but in spreading the floor for the entire team in the middle of June for that maiden banner.

There was so much at stake involved with the Mavs than with the Heat, where only a single man's suffering was highlighted. Whether LeBron was allegedly pressured by the Mafia or was simply an extension of his inability to close out games like he did in Cleveland, his was just an unravelling that was too childish, ignorant to some, as Dirk once hinted, when compared to the sufferings inside the Mavericks locker room prior to their championship pedigree, and too disconcerting even for their fiesty owner, Mark Cuban. Cuban knows that the window of oppotunity for his Mavs is simply closing out, and that any miscalculation, including his equally fiesty mouth would undoubtedly suffer a terrible consequence. And his unbearable silence all throughout the playoffs did pay some serious dividends, as his team dominated the playoffs quietly into the Finals.

The Mavericks will remember this one for a very long time. But as for LeBron James and the Miami Heat, this summer will be a long painful process to go through, now that a lockout season is presently being considered. And the 2011 NBA Finals will be remembered as a complete package of fun, fire and festivity rolled into 6 grueling games. Definitely one for the ages, as the series wherein a clash of probably the best assembled veterans in a team collided with the best young talents ever to play for a single team. Collective finesse against individual superiority as the NBA season comes to a close.

LeBron James may be the Chosen One, the King of the Hill, but all eyes are now fixed to the Dallas Mavericks. In the end, it was a bittersweet victory for the team, remembering all the glory days that have gone empty with disappointed and despair, past players who have retired and traded to other teams such as Steve Nash, Rolando Blackman or even an Eric Dampier, who incidentally was with the Heat in the Finals. The Mavs saved their season by going back to the basics, playing team basketball straight up without looking at its sidetrails of Twitter accounts and mocking a cough. They did it by sticking themselves to their coach, making the extra pass and doing an embargo on Cuban's loud mouth. And it takes an entire team to do just that.

The King exiting the American Airlines Arena after a Mavs victory.