Surely, that question may abound for this week's cover. Take a jump to get a little back story.
With Game 6 of the NBA Finals potentially being the last game of the series, yielding our Dallas Mavericks to be the victors over the Miami Heat, we knew that we'd have less than 48 hours to conceive and produce a memorable ode to the first-time world champs. Not a lot of time, at all.
Come early Monday morning, after a night of frenetic celebrating, the crunch began for not only the cover but the inside feature story as well. Still high on the win, we came up with more than a dozen cover variations, using the token shots of Dirk Nowitzki and his teammates hoisting the Larry O'Brien Trophy in the air on the Heat's home court, natch. Swapping different headlines to match different images, and searching for more unique images than what surely everyone in town would be inundated with by the time today came around became increasingly harder. Plus, sticking with the goal of being truly alternative was also becoming more difficult to achieve using what the whole world already had at their disposal. Moreover, the desire to join in on the fanfare was just too easy. That's when we remembered how Mark Cuban himself reminded us what we said on April 28, 2011. As we put it, "We should really be used to this shit."
Whoops...
Yet there it was. That was our unique angle to the the whole thing. Now that the Cuban and his Mavs made believers out of everyone, we had to own up to our loss of faith, and give credit were credit was due. And after our boys deplaned upon arrival back home, we were given an image of the loudest, proudest owner in the NBA with his new golden bosom buddy, that is quickly becoming iconic around the interweb.
So that's what we went with: a textual representation of our own premature bailing on the team as the centerpiece, with a nod to their awesome accomplishment in the bottom right. Hope you like looking at it; we had fun making it (and witnessing the double-take reactions to it).
