"Australia won the NBA!": Why is this a thing?

When the Golden State Warriors defeated the Houston Rockets in the Western Conference Finals last week, it locked in an amazing inevitability – Australia was going to win an NBA championship for the second year in a row.

Either Andrew ‘Dunkaroo’ Bogut or Matthew ‘Outback Jesus’ Dellavedova were bringing home the Larry O’Brien trophy.

It all washed over me in an awesome wave, knowing that our country had succeeded in kicking arse in world sport yet again.

But that got me thinking – why exactly do I, and many other Aussies, feel like an individual effort within a team is a win for Australia?

It makes sense for individuals or teams actually representing Australia, draped in the green and gold. From the dominance of the national team in cricket, to the individual brilliance of Ian Thorpe, Cathy Freeman and Dawn Fraser, these athletes have long been lauded, and rightly so. They represent our nation in their respective sports and a win for them is a win for Australia.

But there’s a distinct change when it comes to those individuals who play in team sports overseas. By and large, they will be on rosters where they are the only Australian, representing a franchise rather than their country.

However, should they win a major championship or title, a back page spread awaits, littered with superlatives about ‘our Matthew’ or ‘our Dan’, regardless of their contribution to the team’s success.

And perhaps that’s where the real problem starts. Once in the hands of the media, are these achievements justifiably reported on or exaggerated for sales and views due to Australian involvement? If it’s the latter, what has led to this? Were we always crying out for more coverage of Aussie players performing in overseas teams, to the point that the mass media had to generate a near-constant stream of fluff articles? Or was it the media that ignited this super-concentrated patriotism in the first place?

It’s a chicken-egg scenario with no easy answer. One thing is certain though – the patriotic hyperbole is absolutely rife and shows no sign of slowing down. Your Facebook feed is undoubtedly clogged like a festival port-a-potty with clickbait articles exaggerating the importance of Aussie players.

Don’t get me wrong, Patty Mills did well in last year’s championship run for the San Antonio Spurs, but the way the press hammed it up, it seemed like Mills and Aussie teammate Aron Baynes had destroyed the Miami Heat off their own bat while piggybacking the likes of Tim Duncan and Kawhi Leonard.

Unsurprisingly, this tactic – used by outlets that will not be named but rhyme with box snorts – is grinding collective gears. A comment on a recent article regarding tennis player Sam Groth sarcastically reads “Great story. But what does this have to do with Jarryd Hayne?” A similar comment from a Matthew Dellavedova joke account writes “You haven’t posted an article about me in four hours. What have I done wrong?”

Hilarious, yes, but is it a telling story of a systemic trend responsible for nationalising individuals in team sports?

But maybe there are reasons we assume a win for them is a win for Australia.

Maybe it just comes down to an unspoken bond that we share as residents of this great country. We yearn for one of our own to do well and need to know it about it. They are always representatives of our country and by extension, when they win something, our country wins it too.

But if they don’t do well, we either discard them, ignore them, or in more extreme cases, say they’re from across the Tasman. That’s obviously why Academy Award-winner Russell Crowe is from Australia, while assault-with-a-hotel-telephone Russell Crowe is from New Zealand.

Or perhaps it’s been thrust upon us, the result of the media press ganging our sporting exports into every possible channel available, eliciting from us a genuine emotional response towards these players as extensions and representations of our country.

I honestly don’t know why, and why the phenomenon itself is so intrinsically Australian. But what I do know is that when the Larry O’Brien Trophy is held aloft amid raining confetti, I’ll still be happy for either Andrew ‘TV Week Golden Bogey Award’ Bogut or Matthew ‘Aeroplane Delly’ Dellavedova.

Even if I won’t really understand the reasons why.