A dunk into the best and worst of 2014

By Robert Silverman/The GuardianThe Spurs dance round OklahomaThe San Antonio Spurs won their fifth title in the last 17 seasons, and have rattled off an unfathomable winning percentage of .686 since Gregg Popovich was named head coach in 1996. It’s the closest the NBA has seen to a dynasty on par with Bill Russell’s Celtics of the 1960s. Considering Red Auerbach never had to navigate the salary cap you could make the case that this run is even more impressive. For years, the Spurs were dismissed as “boring,” but as they transformed from a grind-it-out, low post offence to the apotheosis of Mike D’Antoni’s then-revolutionary pick-and-roll, pace and space churn, they’ve honed their craft such that it can seem as if they have unlocked the secret to near-perfect, unselfish ball. This year’s Spurs model might be the best. They ran rampant through a brutal Western Conference playoff gauntlet, and topped it off by slicing up LeBron and Co with a tsunami of perfectly executed passes, dogged, deft cuts and precise rotations on defence. There are literally hundreds of YouTube’d clips and/or gifs you could select to sum up the totality of this magnificent team, but I’m going to go with this sequence against Oklahoma City in which the ball and the players practically dance in unison. If you have a friend or colleague that isn’t much of a hoops fan, show him or her a few of these. See if they don’t get hooked.The end of Donald SterlingWe already knew who and what Donald Sterling was well before his ranting, bile-strewn ‘conversation’ with his then-mistress was leaked by TMZ. For decades this leathery, unreconstructed bigot ran every business he’s owned like a modern-day plantation, Justice Department and sexual harassment lawsuits be damned.Of course, there’s a difference between culling the back pages of the sports section to read that Sterling would routinely bring women into the Los Angeles Clippers’ locker room and lecherously declare, “Look at those beautiful black bodies,” or delving into depositions to discover out that he’d asked of one of the tenants of his slums, “Is she one of those black people that stink?” and actually hearing his racist dreck for yourself. Thankfully, even a phalanx of lawyers and bottom feeding ‘investigators’ couldn’t prevent him from being booted from the league for good, and the team was sold to ex-Microsoft honcho Steve Ballmer after his estranged wife Shelly had Sterling declared mentally unfit to own the Clippers.The Silver King is enthronedSpeaking of which, not much was known about NBA Commissioner Adam Silver before he ascended to David Stern’s throne, but he came storming out of the gate, acting quickly decisively to quell an impending wildcat strike and sponsor-based rebellion in the wake of L’Affair Sterling, and working out a new $24bn agreement for the league’s broadcast rights with ESPN and TNT starting in the 2016-17 season, close to three times the annual amount of the previous deal. But it’s worth remembering that press conference in which he banned Sterling for life was far from the obvious or expected decision. Save for the always-outspoken Mark Cuban, no owner was willing to say so it publicly, but you have to imagine that the idea that they could lose their team because of a private conversation didn’t sit very well with the other 31 millionaires. It didn’t matter. And while we’ll never know what backroom negotiations were held to maintain consensus, Silver brought down the hammer, ditching a litigator’s calm veneer and sounding downright enraged. Good for him.The players get a worthy leaderEvery time the National Basketball Players’ Association has gone toe-to-toe with the league, they’ve got whomped like the Washington Generals. We’re a long way off from the next potential work stoppage (the collective bargaining agreement is set to expire after the 2016-17 season) but the new head of the union, Michele Roberts is already staking out her turf. In response to Silver’s assertion that a third of NBA teams aren’t profitable, she said, “I initially just started laughing, to be honest with you.” If nothing else, Roberts is debunking all of the old pro sports labour myths. From the validity of the salary cap: “I don’t know of any space other than the world of sports where there’s this notion that we will artificially deflate what someone’s able to make, just because. It’s incredibly un-American” to the age limit: “There is no other profession that says that you’re old enough to die but not old enough to work.”None of this means another work stoppage is inevitable, but Roberts at least gives the players a general that is willing to put up a fight.LeBron’s homecomingAfter four straight trips to the finals and two championships brought back to the shores of South Beach, LeBron James shocked the basketball world by deciding to return to his hometown Cleveland Cavaliers. “Before anyone ever cared where I would play basketball, I was a kid from Northeast Ohio. It’s where I walked. It’s where I ran. It’s where I cried. It’s where I bled. It holds a special place in my heart,” James explained in a Sports Illustrated article he wrote with Lee Jenkins. “In Northeast Ohio, nothing is given. Everything is earned. You work for what you have. I’m ready to accept the challenge. I’m coming home.”As was the case when LeBron joined up with Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh in 2010, the results out of the gate have been mixed at best. But LeBron’s paean to the place he grew up was so nakedly human and vulnerable, if practically Hollywood-scripted, that you couldn’t help but root for him to succeed, and finally bring a title to long-suffering Cleveland fans.The tankAt the other end of the spectrum, we have the Philadelphia 76ers, losers of a record-26 consecutive game. Sure, everyone knew that they’d be awful; that was never in doubt. But even after a scorched-earth campaign last season, they doubled down, punting on the 2014 NBA draft altogether by selecting two players that, either via injury or because of overseas commitments, won’t be suiting up until the 2015-16 season at the earliest. The degree of their awful-by-design-ness even prompted the NBA to try to change the lottery rules mid-stream to thwart their fiendish plot, which points to the larger question here: Whether or not you accept the conventional wisdom that dumping assets in the hope of accumulating draft picks is the way to rebuild – even if said strategy hasn’t really been shown to work – the fact remains that the NBA as it’s currently structured rewards failure.Kobe’s highlight reelAnd then there’s Kobe Bryant. It’s hard to pick out one moment that encapsulates this late-career heel turn. As he’s proved more vulnerable to injury, and lost a step or two, the Kobe-ness of his personality has come full force, calcified into something else; something meaner or harder, as if he could stave off the ravages of time by sheer force of will. It’s almost as if he’s become a parody of himself, sniping at ESPN over the perceived indignity of being ranked the league’s 40th best player. Following team-mate Nick Young’s pre-season injury he dismissively grumped, “You reach, you’re going to get hurt.” You can practically taste the raw, simmering rage with which he described how he’d be ‘mentoring’ rookie Julius Randle, “It means he can’t [expletive] it up. Seriously. You [expletive] this up, you’re a really big idiot.”Or the leaked snippets of him berating his team-mates during a practice, and barking at GM Mitch Kupchak, “I thought we’re supposed to practice to get better, Mitch. These [expletive] ain’t doing [expletive] for me.”Even while basking in the glory of passing Michael Jordan on the scoring list, he ascribed his success to the teachings of Anakin Skywalker: “That’s just the reality of it; you can’t get to a supreme level without kind of channelling the dark side.”The Lakers are a mess, and if nothing else, watching Kobe’s unquenchable competitive desire come face to face with that reality – the Lakers are actually significantly better without Kobe in the lineup – has made for great theatre.Jason Collins, doing workOn 23 February 2014, Jason Collins became the first openly gay athlete to play a pro game in one of the four major US sports. What he did on the floor was in no way remarkable, and more or less the same as during his 13-year career; he played solid, rugged defence in the low post, using all the unglamorous tools of his trade to nudge bigger, stronger, more athletically gifted opponents a few inches away from their preferred slots on the floor. And... nothing. Save for a rumoured slur or two, there were no massive protests or “distractions”. Collins wasn’t shunned like some kind of social leper nor did he set the world aflame with archaic panicking about showering with other men. The painfully slow arc towards justice bent just a little bit, as sports fans watched him go about the daily business of his job and maybe, just maybe came to the realization that gay people are, well, people. But the fact that ‘nothing’ occurred should in no way diminish the importance of his actions. “Jason Collins is living, screen-sliding, proof. This is news because we need it to be news. This is news because your children, or friends of your children, or children that your children know, or children that you might be coaching in a rec league, need to know that Jason Collins will become a productive player on a pro basketball team. While liking who he likes. While loving who he loves,” Kelly Dwyer wrote at Yahoo. “Because conflicted teenagers need to know that it’s just fine for men to love other men. That while this stuff shouldn’t matter at all, in these early stages we should make ‘news’ out of it.”A star is bornThere’s something special about witnessing a highly touted player begin to harness his full potential. But the best thing about watching Anthony Davis is that we don’t even really know what his ceiling might be. “It’s been over a decade since a player of any age has averaged at least 20 points, 10 rebounds and three blocks. It’s been two decades since a 20-year-old player has accomplished the incredible feat — the last under-21 player to do it was Shaquille O’Neal,” SB Nation’s Drew Garrison wrote. “Only Hakeem Olajuwon and David Robinson have ever finished a season also averaging at least 1.5 steals per game on top of the rebound, scoring and block averages.”Shaq, The Admiral, The Dream. Yeah, that’s pretty good company to keep. But the best Anthony Davis moments come when he just plain seems to defy the laws of physics themselves, his Plastic Man-like arms extending higher and higher to snag an alley-oop attempt that seemed destined to land in the pricey seats.He stretches (often literally) the boundaries of the possible, and the anticipation or hope that anything can and will happen, makes slogging through a meaningless mid-November game against an also-ran absolutely worth it.Damian Lillard in the nick of timeA Spurs-Mavericks tilt that went the full seven games, with Vince Carter turning back time to drain an incredible, game-winning fadeaway three pointer. The dazzling brilliance of Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook versus the grit and grind, brutish Memphis Grizzlies. The Warriors and the Clippers fighting tooth and nail while the world awaits Sterling’s demise.2014 gave us the best first round of the playoffs in NBA history, with every night an endless parade of the league’s greatest players, eye-popping performances and unforgettable moments – a never-ending euphoric cycle of goodness for NBA junkies. And the absolute cherry was Damian Lillard’s series-winning bomb with nine tenths of a second remaining as Mike Tirico bellowed, “It’s Lillard … HE GOT THE SHOT OFF … LILLARD GOOOD. GOOOOOOD. And the Blazers win the series ... for the first time in FOUR-TEEN-YEARS!!!!!”