“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,” begins Robert Frost’s famous poem “The Road Not Taken,” the story of a man at a crossroads both on his walk and in his life. The same could be said for most NBA teams, thanks to the world champion Golden State Warriors, a seemingly unstoppable monolith serving as an impossibly large measuring stick for the rest of the league.
If you peek down one road as far as you can, to where it bends in the undergrowth, you’ll see signs of an arms race. Fully-loaded teams are reaching for even more talent, as if the Cavaliers need a Jimmy Butler or the Spurs a Chris Paul or Kyle Lowry.