What lies beyond perfection? Which scalable mountain? Though the Golden State Warriors’ 16-17 season was not without flaw, it came damn close to being so. Losers of just one playoff contest and historically dominant whenever it mattered, their first season with Kevin Durant erased any reasonable doubt that they’re the best team in the NBA, and that any competitors are miles behind.

It’s okay if this bores you. It bores me too. While each moment of the Warriors’ liftoff, those instants in which they go on their run to put the game out of play, hold their thrills, and Durant getting to celebrate a championship with his mother on network television is certainly iconography we can all agree is “nice”—and while the audience ratings for their close-out game were actually terrific—they haven’t left us with a whole lot to talk about, have they? These Warriors are too good, too peaceful with each other, too unchallenged. They have flattened the discourse. The thought experiments done to imagine an NBA in which they have a worthy rival (Carmelo Anthony and Paul George both joining the Cleveland Cavaliers after the front office debacle of David Griffin’s exit, say what?) have become a fume-like sort of Virtual Manager Mode unreality into which NBA-think descends in this context.

Genuine, lasting intrigue, as such, has to come from the Warriors themselves—from within them. Like James Joyce after he wrote Dubliners or Miles Davis in the wake of “Kind of Blue,” Golden State faces an opportunity to follow up their attention-getting, unimpeachable performance with something more gnarly and auteurist and novel, now that everyone’s watching. If you knew that the audience was granted and that victory was too, what strange subconscious demons might you unleash onto the canvas? Do these Warriors know how to be a more provocative spectacle, and do they care to be? Perhaps their dominance is indifferent to the entertainment of conflict; a more pure, less analyzable form of excellence. Are the Warriors building a basketball monolith, too monochrome and gestalt and predictable in its victory to usefully scrutinize? What if the only way to really receive this team is to just shut up and watch?

The unpredictable still looms, of course. Someone on Golden State could get hurt or simply regress.  Someone else in the league (Giannis Antetokounmpo?) could develop with unusual speed toward MVP caliber. Or maybe one of those Manager Mode fantasies will come true in the coming weeks when a free agency session with a ton of dynamic, untethered variables at play kicks off. The Rockets already got to work on that before July 1st by trading for Chris Paul.

More likely, though, is that the Warriors excessive talent will not only allow them to rest strategically and stay extra swole for each spring—the unstoppable specter of their “death lineup” front five should also continue to attract glory whore veterans chasing rings, as David West just did; Vince Carter, immune to time and the ailments that chiropractors preach about, has already signaled interest in joining the team.

None of this falls under the category of “unfair,” as some are wont to deem this series of windfalls. Though Golden State has certainly had its lucky breaks, what is more impressive is their skill of never squandering any of these catches. They have maximized everything, and with the purchase of the apple of their draft eye, Jordan Bell, from the Chicago Bulls in the second round, it appears likely that they will continue to. The Warriors’ stale excellence is not their fault—it is that of the rest of league, beset and enslaved by their own cultural and managerial farting. Owner Joe Lacob’s adage about being “light years ahead” is, indeed, true in an NBA where organizational dysfunction creates as much daily content as clips of slam dunks.

No, this coming monopolization of O’Briens is not an issue of competitive ethics, but only one of dramatic interest. Where can conflict come from at this point? The Warriors pushing the boundaries of what a team can be—putting their hands meaningfully on the lines that define a team of their celebrity stature—is more likely to create curiosity than anything that happens in one of their 17-18 games. A dismissal of an invite to the White House, in this spirit, would be the start to a Warriors conversation worth having. Their rivalries within the league all settled and their core of talent historically wealthy, what do they have to lose in refusing deference to age-old institutions that have never respected them? Basketball squabbles in their rear view mirror, the Warriors have an opportunity to elevate a more righteous ideology.

This, of course, is not “expected,” and the Warriors will not be wishy washy men if they do pay the bumbling autocrat Trump a visit; every champion before them has done similar things, and projecting morality onto sports is a generally pointless exercise. It is simply the case that if the Warriors set themselves toward only achieving traditional sports goals—more trophies, more scoring, more awards—that they will succeed in doing so, and that this will be rote and predictable. Here’s to wondering what, with their great powers before them, they might do that is not.