Lincicome: These NBA Finals lack serious star power

Don't know the Denver Nuggets. Don't know the Miami Heat. Their fault, not mine. Each one thinks I should know them, you should, we all should. No one respects them. Poor them.

For some of us the obligation to become acquainted with the last two NBA teams standing, and running, and dribbling and, inevitably parking in one corner or the other to shoot a trey, is accepted without complaint. Well, maybe a little complaint.

For others, of course, The Finals - a designation the NBA persistently hopes will catch on but will not - the question of who will be the temporary holder of the ugliest trophy in sports seems less vital than, say, the end of Mrs. Maisel or the ascension of Tom Wambsgans - oh, come on, really? - to the top chair in "Succession," either one of which will likely outdraw The Finals.

Would we rather see LeBron James capping a career with one final rush to the finish? Or the Boston Celtics, all historical and habitual, the Warriors, famed and familiar or Milwaukee, yes even Milwaukee, taking another bite? Of course, maybe, sure and why not.

But a Miami team without a star - I know, Jimmy Butler is what he is and was with the Bulls, too, still the cashew in a can of mixed nuts, but Miami's basketball pedigree has always depended on whether James was coming or going, Shaq, too, I guess, basketball roots as exposed as a mangrove.

Or a team from - as a columnist friend of mine persistently calls it, "a dusty old Cowtown," - in a forgotten time zone where basketball hibernates between snow and thaw, or as I once wrote myself, "basketball is far down the list of realists and realtors."

Having worked in both places, I may have a bit more insight into the plight and pride of each outpost, but never in my time did anyone nudge me at the King Soopers checkout line and ask, "How 'bout them Nuggets?"

It is an old story in sports. Don't get no respect. Or maybe that was stand-up. Maybe it is just easier to look for one Rodney Dangerfield than it is for two Cinderellas.

Miami should be the stuff of fairy tales and legend when instead it is a sulky grouch, moaning about lack of respect and of being the object of great neglect. Instead of being proudly defiant, Miami is annoyingly grumbling, sort of a self-limiting snapshot of basketball itself.

The Heat should not be here, of course, entering from the debris of the play-in tournament - beating the Bulls - and knocking off their betters in a row, nearly blowing a 3-0 series lead against Boston - but here they are and who should be waiting but the Cubs of basketball, the Nuggets.

At least the Cubs have won something of late but not enough to tarnish their myth or to dismiss Steve Goodman's forever sigh, "doormat of the National League."

The Nuggets have never won a title, in 47 years, but once again to remind the Cubs took 71 years between pennants and 108 between titles, so a mere 47 is not so much pain as impatience.

I once asked one of the Nuggets first round draftees, a Georgian 7-footer (the country, not the state) named Nikoloz Tskitishvili why he was happy to be in Denver. "Fresh air and mountains," he said, reasons familiar for my being there myself, and, by the way, neither of us was much of a basketball player.

When LeBron James took his game "to South Beach," I assume he had similar geographical incentives, but James could play and while I, too, appreciated South Florida's beach and fresh air I left for the unforgiving climate bordering Lake Michigan.

I have also offered the opinion that "Denver is to basketball what toilet paper is to a high heel," and I'm not sure I even know what I meant. But that is the kind of insult that is now inspiring both the Nuggets and the Heat, each in their own happy if different pockets of paradise, neither of them needing basketball for authentication nor for full hotels.

Basketball has come to this. Whiner take all.