This article appears in the July 2017 issue of Potato Grower.
By the time this magazine finds its way to your mailbox, the NBA Finals will have just concluded, presumably with the Golden State Warriors and Cleveland Cavaliers having engaged in a highly contested, hard-fought, drama-filled six- or seven-game series. Though I hate to use a word that has been almost stripped of significance through overuse by my own generation, I’m fairly certain the Finals will deserve being deemed as epic.
Of course, I’m writing this in late May, and the Cavs and Warriors still have to make it through their respective conference final series to advance and face each other. But anyone who even casually follows NBA basketball knows full well these two juggernauts have been destined to collide in the Finals since well before the season began. Everything prior to the Finals has been a mere formality for these two squads.
I love high-level basketball, and I probably spend an inordinate amount of time and energy consuming NBA news. And for the past eight months (too long a season? Heck no!), I have read and heard countless pundits offer up the same opinion: Golden State’s and Cleveland’s superteams have made the NBA boring, having rendered everything leading up to the championship round meaningless. I wholeheartedly disagree.
Let’s get real here: Even in the most egalitarian of seasons, there are perhaps only a half dozen of the league’s 30 teams with a realistic shot at a championship. Perhaps more than any other sport, the NBA’s championship outcome is fairly predictable. Individual efforts by star players dictate the outcome of a basketball game more than in any other team sport. And the best-of-seven postseason format leaves little room for upsets and Cinderella runs. The vast, vast majority of fans are kidding themselves if they think their team has a real shot at a championship in any given year. And in a season like 2016-17, when two all-time great behemoths are ruthlessly plundering their way through the league like dual Mongol hordes, crushing dreams before they can even be formed, well… I guess if your definition of entertainment is sustained suspense regarding who will meet in the Finals, the NBA season could be kind of dull.
But there are some 1,300 games across an entire NBA season; whichever two teams meet in the Finals play each other in only six to nine of those. I’ve shared in this space before that I am a lifelong fan of the Utah Jazz. I knew going into the season they had absolutely no shot at a championship. They were a young, promising team that offered more than a little hope and intrigue. And they delivered on that. Gordon Hayward continued his steady rise to stardom. Rudy Gobert morphed into the league’s best rim protector. Joe Johnson provided veteran oomph, and Joe Ingles was among the league leaders in three-point field goal percentage. Most importantly, the Jazz returned to the playoffs for the first time in five years, advancing to the second round before bowing out to the Warriors. It was a great season to be a Jazz fan; no one can convince me otherwise.
Does every team need a championship to legitimize itself? Well, does a farm need to have a bumper crop and buy a couple of the neighbors’ fields every year to legitimize itself? The answer to both questions is, unequivocally, no.
Of course, every grower wants to make as much money as possible. That’s obvious, and it’s no more or less than anyone expects from his or her occupation. But there’s so much more to it than that. If growing potatoes—or any other crop—were just about being the biggest and best, only the most massive, too-big-to-fail operations would remain in business. There’s a lot more to it than that, and deep down, we all know that.
In less profitable years, would it have been best to simply sit out the farming game? Financially speaking, the answer might be yes. It should go without saying that of course growers want to make money. But if all agricultural decisions were made based on short-term financial outlooks, the entire industry might be extinct in a decade.
Heaven knows it would be easier to get out of farming and pursue some other career. But easier isn’t always better. The most significant part of being a sports fan is the righteous suffering you go through when, year after year, your team falls short of expectations. Likewise, you might gain the most farming in the lean years; that’s when traits like perseverance, loyalty, honesty, nothing-can-break-us faith, and we’ll-never-sell-out self-assuredness are built.
A wasted season? There’s no such thing.