Is Luka the Best in the World? Plus Nine Other NBA Finals Questions Burning a Hole in Our Brains

Photographs: Getty Images; Collage: Gabe Conte

At most, there’s only seven games left in the NBA season. But rather than the scarcity breeding clarity, we arrive at the end of the road with lots of questions that still need answering. To be sure, this is one of the most compelling NBA Finals in recent memory—the Celtics skated through the season as the league’s consensus best team, while the Mavericks flirted with the play-in tournament, and yet it doesn’t look like a total mismatch! But several narratives still need tying up.

Before the ball is tipped on Thursday night, we’ve identified five pressing questions for each team, centered around a simple concept: What happens if they win?

If the Celtics win…

Do we finally have to take Jayson Tatum seriously?

Everyone can agree that Tatum is very good. No one can agree on just how good he is, though. Depending on who you ask, he’s one of the five best players in the NBA, a brilliant scorer who needs to be paired with a true alpha, or an overrated fraud that had the easiest path to the Finals ever.

The easiest way to cultivate agreement is to win—it wasn’t that long ago that people doubted LeBron’s bona fides, after all—and Tatum is still somehow just 26 years old. Winning tends to beget more winning, so a Larry O’Brien could not only get the haters to zip it, but also put him on course to collect a few more before he hits his thirties. The last time we saw Tatum in the Finals, though, he put up an ugly 6-for-18 shooting line with five turnovers as the Warriors clinched the title. A repeat of that would be nothing short of a catastrophe for Tatum boosters.

Does Jaylen Brown become a consensus top 20 guy?

Perhaps the more confounding legacy belongs to Tatum’s teammate. While Tatum has shown that he can be the top dog on a contender, Brown has mostly played second banana on these Celtics. Which is fine—it’s just that Brown signed a record-breaking $304 million contract last summer. That’s obviously an eye-popping number for anyone, but especially for someone who is widely considered the second-best player on his own team.

A strong Finals from Brown would do wonders for his reputation. The man has been in the league for eight years and, despite the dollars, has just one All-NBA nod. (He does, of course, have a fresh Eastern Conference Finals MVP trophy, too.) Would securing a title officially put him ahead of ringless contemporaries like Devin Booker, Paul George, and Jimmy Butler?

Is Jrue Holiday a Hall of Famer?

Listen, it’s not as crazy as your knee-jerk reaction indicates. Bringing it home this year would give Holiday two championships, six All-Defensive Teams, and two All-Star nods. He’s also the proud owner of an Olympic gold medal. Look, the answer is almost definitely no, but his resume isn’t too far off from that of Mitch Richmond, who was inducted in 2014.

Are these Celtics the best non-Warriors champions of the last 10 years?

Expect talking heads to whack this question around like a badminton birdie. The Celts’ 64 regular-season wins are already the most by an NBA Finals team since the 2016-17 Warriors rattled off 67, and 10 years ago, the Spurs’ artistic brand of basketball blew up LeBron’s Miami era. LeBron rebounded by piloting the immortal 2016 Cavs. Could the 2024 Celtics hang with any of them?

Start with the Cavs. Similar to Boston this year, the bulk of Cleveland’s scoring that year came from its two superstars. The question—if you’re really trying to get in the weeds here, which we obviously are—is whether the Celtics’ next four guys (Holiday, Derrick White, Kristaps Porzingis, and Al Horford) are better than Cleveland’s (Kevin Love, J.R. Smith, Tristan Thompson, and Richard Jefferson) were in 2016.

If you say yes, then it comes down to the 2023-24 Celtics vs. the 2013-14 Spurs. We’d lean toward peak Kawhi surrounded by three Hall of Famers and arguably the best coach ever. But it’d be a delicious series nevertheless.

Joe Mazzulla will do the Fenway heist

This is not a what if, but rather a definitive fact. The Celtics’ head coach is alarmingly obsessed with the 2010 thriller The Town, in which robbers hit a lick on Fenway Park. If Joe Mazz is able to get the C’s another banner, we can only assume law enforcement officials in Boston will just let him do this.

If the Mavericks win…

Is Luka the best player on Earth?

This take has been simmering on the stove throughout the playoffs, and has been turned up to a boil since Nikola Jokic—the incumbent best player—was knocked out. Doncic is certainly the best player in this series, and it’s not just his postseason numbers that have sparked the Best Player Alive conversation—it’s the way he’s been putting up those numbers.

The only things missing from Doncic’s case are an MVP award and a championship trophy, two laurels Jokic earned on his way to the top. Well, here we are, four wins away from crossing one of those tasks off the list—which, by the way, would probably make him the MVP favorite heading into next season. The Mavericks also will not win this thing unless Doncic plays like the baddest dude on the planet, so the only way out is through. A Luka masterclass in the Finals, plus the added narrative bonus of taking down the NBA’s cream of the crop, would firmly cement him as the guy moving forward.

Luka and Kyrie are the best backcourt since...?

Another inescapable take from the last two months of basketball are that Doncic and teammate Kyrie Irving are the most talented backcourt of all time. Coach-turned-broadcaster Stan Van Gundy specifically has been beating that drum…and he might be correct! But, there’s a few guard pairings that have an iron-clad grip on being better than Luka and Kyrie, if not more talented.

We don’t have to look too far into the past to find one of them. Steph Curry and Klay Thompson merely won four chips together and completely revolutionized basketball while doing so. In the modern game, there’s no really debating that the Splash Brothers are the best backcourt we’ve seen. You can definitely debate whether they’re more talented than the Mavs’ current heroes—shooting is a talent, mind you—but the quartet of championships and everything else they accomplished puts Steph and Klay atop the list of best backcourts.

Here’s where the bickering gets interesting. Does a championship vault Luka and Kyrie—who, admittedly, have only been teammates for 14 months—ahead of Chauncey Billups and Rip Hamilton? Derek Fisher and Kobe Bryant? Where do Rajon Rondo and Ray Allen fit in this conversation? (For the Celtic fans screaming at their computers right now, Bob Cousy and John Havlicek only overlapped for one season. Calm down.)

Isiah Thomas and Joe Dumars are certainly up there, but was Dumars really better than Irving, or just more accomplished? Those early days of Russell Westbrook and James Harden in OKC were great, but extremely short-lived, and famously resulted in zero rings. What to do with Tony Parker and Manu Ginobili, who made plenty of magic together, though much of it with Ginobili coming off the bench? Same for Jerry West and Elgin Baylor—the latter was listed as a small forward for his entire career. If we’re limiting the discussion to starting backcourt duos, Irving and Doncic may have a better argument than you think, especially if they emerge victorious.

Does Dereck Lively get a retroactive spot on the All-Rookie first team?

Sorry, Brandin Podziemski. You had a great rookie season in The Bay, but your team didn’t get past the play-in round. Lively, meanwhile, has maybe been the third-most important piece of a Finals team. You have to switch spots with him.

Is the PJ Washington-Daniel Gafford deadline haul the most useful of the 21st century?

Unlike in baseball, where every champion typically gets there on the back of a deadline deal, it’s not that common in the NBA! The most notable in-season trade pickups who went on to hoist the trophy that year are Rasheed Wallace in 2004, and Marc Gasol for the 2019 Raptors.

The Mavericks are absolutely not here without the services of Washington and Gafford, who were acquired in separate trades on the same day this winter. Should they lead Dallas to victory, they have a real claim to being the most impactful deadline dudes of the new millennium.

That’s quite the year for Dallas sports!

The Dallas Stars center has been strutting into arenas in a custom duck brown two-piece—complete with the Detroit workwear stalwart’s iconic leather patch.

Lastly, we have to salute the city of Dallas for producing some stellar sports teams this year. It’s not just limited to the Mavericks and the World Series-winning Texas Rangers, though. The Stars made it all the way to the NHL’s Conference Finals, and the Cowboys won 12 games for the third year in a row. Don’t sleep on the WNBA’s Wings, either. While they haven’t totally found their footing yet, there’s a long way to go, and they have the inimitable Arike Ogunbowale, who’s putting up a league-leading 26.6 points per night.

For so long, Boston was considered the best sports town in America. How poetic would it be for the Metroplex to snatch that title from them by beating their beloved Celtics?

Originally Appeared on GQ

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