Just like in literature, movies, and television, basketball is an ever-changing narrative landscape. Plots that felt novel and unique in the 90’s are now weathered tropes that probably get solved with a cell phone. Seinfeld and company aimlessly walking through a parking garage is solved by a simple glance down at your iPhone’s parked car feature. So too have we seen some of our beloved NBA Playoffs tropes eroded to extinction with the passage of time and evolution of the game.
One of my favorite dead tropes is that “jump shooting teams can’t win the title.” While Steph Curry and the Warriors were the beginning of the end for this one (and maybe the end of the end in 2022), every modern NBA team would qualify as a jump shooting team when compared to the early 2000s.