This vignette from Verizon Center during Friday's Wizards-Cavaliers playoff game might be exactly what the NBA needs - a reminder to wayward fans that the game today is worthy of comparison to the memories those fans cling to so jealously.
In the media workroom, about a dozen reporters were packed around a monitor watching the final seconds of overtime. Gilbert Arenas had just missed the two free throws that eventually cost his team the game and the series, and during the ensuing timeout, a replay aired that prompted this multi-speaker exchange:
"Did LeBron James say something to Gilbert after the first free throw?"
"Whatever he said must have worked."
"It's a Scottie-Mailman thing!"
"That was Game 1, right?"
"Yeah. The Fist-Pump Game."
"The Original Fist-Pump."
That quickly, the link was made between two classic moments from the same legendary NBA postseason game and not just one, but two, classic moments in this year's playoffs.
(The translation: Game 1, 1997 NBA Finals, Scottie Pippen whispering to Karl Malone, "The Mailman doesn't deliver on Sundays" just before Malone missed a pair of critical late-game free throws, then Michael Jordan draining the game-winning jumper and punctuating it with the fist pump - which, five days before the LeBron-Gilbert incident, Kobe Bryant had imitated after his game-winning shot against the Suns.)
An obsession with the past isn't necessarily healthy. But if this one helps stragglers realize that the game they had abandoned in recent years was rising to a breathtaking level and earned comparison to the greatest-generation era of the 1980s and '90s, then it's worth it.
It would be a shame, after all, if those who can't let go of the Michael-Magic-Larry era, who still blame the players for the flop at the 2004 Olympics, who are still spouting decade-old criticisms of the NBA, miss out on the evolution taking place in this year's playoffs.
Because for all the references to vintage moments of yore, there's a lot going on that has no real precedent. LeBron James, for instance, is carving out a legacy of his own, jump-started by the two last-second game-winning baskets in the Wizards series.
Same for Dwyane Wade, who did a fair Willis Reed impression when he came back from a painful hip injury in the middle of Game 5 against the Bulls, to drag the Heat and a then-sluggish-looking Shaquille O'Neal out of a dire circumstance.
