A Brief And Obvious Point About Team "Windows"

Oh Noes

Drum roll please...

They don't exist.

Now, I get why people so badly want them to exist. They fall into the casualty and narrative aspect of humanity, and as people, we are so completely tied into story, it has to be there for us. It's so much more satisfying to look at an aging roster and add a sense of dying poignant urgency to the game we're watching.

But it's all, well, illusion and story and stuff and nonsense.

Even age, which seems like such an open and shut case, isn't really a perfect indicator, since so much of that can be mimicked by injury. San Antonio looked completely done a few years ago when teams like the Grizzly and Thunder went through them, only to come within a miracle Ray Allen three from winning it all last year. Football windows are a pointless exercise, since injury is ever-present, and every team pretty much has to shuffle the deck every off-season with at least 20% of the roster. Baseball windows aren't discussed very often, assuming you aren't a fan of an MLB- team, at which point it's much more about contract caps than anything else.

Still, you are going to see this for just about every NBA team left alive right now. If the Pacers lose, their window will be closing because David West won't be able to get it done any more, and Lance Stephenson is a ticking time bomb of instability. If the Heat lose, their window will be closing because the back end of the roster will be lacking, LeBron James might leave, and Dwyane Wade will be aging fast. The Spurs have had their window close for the better part of a decade now, so much so that winning a championship will also be taken as the sign that the window is closing. And the Thunder, why, that's all kinds of windows-ish, since Kevin Durant might leave someday, and Russell Westbrook and Sege Ibaka can't stay healthy.

If you want to say a team is on the rise, fine. If you are ready to write a team off for any reason, OK cool, you might actually then back it up with some form of factual statement. But this whole notion that teams enter into years or playoff series with Calvinist pre-destination, only to soldier on bravely against the inevitability of the tides, or that they bring some extra measure of desperation to the end of one season, as opposed to the end of any other season...

Well, you might want to get some mints in your mouth.

It'll help with the odor.