Asterisks are wonderful things. With a simple little star after any word, one is enabled to write outrageous things all over the internet while maintaining plausible deniability. The asterisk is the weapon of the careful.
No matter how accusatory, how unresearched, or how ridiculous, the asterisk gives the writer an out. In the NBA, asterisks are often used as a weaponized extension of the way they are employed statistically — to note some context in a footnote about a stat; to show it was an outlier. Only, in NBA discourse, instead of contextualizing, they’re usually used to minimize, a textual grenade to lob at (and troll) whatever team just won the .
Right now, . The refrain is something I’m sure everyone is familiar with; some description of , a rehashing of , and perhaps some , a name that has become synonymous with questioning championships. What’s really going on is organized bitterness mixed with the impulse to compare.
The just earned the title of “Best Team in the League in 2024,” but the nature of NBA discourse necessitates some kind of additional commentary. Where do they rank among historical “Best Teams in the League?” Did they earn their accomplishment by outworking everyone else, or did the seas simply part for them and they walked through? It’s all very unnecessary. Putting asterisks on championships isn’t a particularly high level of NBA discussion, and as far as I can tell, no serious national pundit has tried to do so (depending on how .
