There has been a growing number of people bashing the NBA recently, seemingly saying that the league is run more by the players than ever before. I’ve heard the argument that players now wanting to join forces will soon make
There has been a growing number of people bashing the NBA recently, seemingly saying that the league is run more by the players than ever before.
I’ve heard the argument that players now wanting to join forces will soon make 80 percent of the teams irrelevant, that players choosing their own destinations and hoping to bring other good players with them is bad for the league and will diminish interest.
I completely disagree.
This whole conversation seemed to begin with LeBron James deciding to go to the Miami Heat with Chris Bosh and Dwyane Wade. All of a sudden, three franchise players were joining forces, and had made their decision collectively. It wasn’t management deciding to go for broke and make a few huge trades, it was three friends who felt like playing ball together in a great climate.
It became more magnified the past few weeks as the Carmelo Anthony drama reached a new decibel level. Anthony was making it abundantly clear that he wanted to play for the Knicks, along with friend and superstar Amare Stoudemire.
Once the Nuggets made the deal and granted Anthony his wish, the firestorm of criticism continued, now with the notion that the league is operating in a way that will turn it into a six-horse race every season. The big markets are taking over and that will prove devastating, cried sportswriters and fans alike.
First of all, claiming that having only a handful of title contenders is some unseen phenomenon is just a false premise. If you can count more than five or six teams at the beginning of each season that have a real shot to win the title, then you’re giving a lot of teams more credit than they deserve.
And this is not a new construct. Go back to the 80s. Who were championship contenders? The Lakers, Celtics, Pistons, 76ers and Rockets. That was about it. L.A. won five titles, Boston won three, Detroit and Philadelphia each won one.
The 90s was the era of Jordan, with the Bulls winning six titles. During that stretch, nobody truly believed that when No. 23 was in uniform, any other team was getting a ring. There were some really good teams in that era — the early-decade Lakers, Pistons and Blazers, the Rockets team that won back-to-back championships with Jordan riding the minor league bus, the late-decade Jazz and Spurs squads — but everyone was just hoping that they could somehow catch Jordan’s Bulls while they had a bad series.
Since 2000, the Lakers have reached seven NBA Finals, the Spurs three and the Mavericks one. The Eastern Conference has been much more cyclical, with the Pacers, 76ers, Nets, Pistons, Heat, Cavaliers, Magic and Celtics all winning conference championships in the past 10 seasons.
But even with that much turnover, in any given year, only a few teams were really title contenders.
For the majority of the last decade, the Knicks, Celtics and Bulls were barely playoff contenders. Now they are three of the teams people seem to be saying are going to ruin the league. That’s having a pretty short memory.
Immediately following the Anthony trade, I read numerous columns about how now the Nuggets were going to slip into some kind of irrevocable funk and their fans would be so distraught that basketball in Denver would no longer matter. Yet the Nuggets are 5-2 since the trade and anyone who saw the players they were getting in return should have known they would stay competitive.
NBA players are good, and there are more and more that come into the league every year. They come in younger and better than their predecessors. An older generation likes to talk about the glory days when the players were more skilled, but the sheer level of talent currently on display in the NBA is unmatched at any point in history.
Look at a team like the Oklahoma City Thunder. They built from the ground up with excellent draft picks, shrewd signings and a focus on team chemistry that now has them on the short list of title contenders.
You’re telling me that’s no longer a possible blueprint for another team to follow because of LeBron and Carmelo? I can’t make that connection.
The Bulls drafted just about every major piece that has them in the hunt for a championship. Derrick Rose may very well be the league’s MVP.
Who can we blame for that?
We used to hear players bemoaned for selling their talents to the highest bidder. We wanted them to care about winning enough to pass up the big contract the bottom-feeders were offering and take less money for a good team.
Now, when this is actually happening, we make the case that they are stacking squads and creating an unlevel playing field.
The faces of this movement — James, Wade, Bosh, Anthony, Stoudemire — had all given at least seven years of service to their original teams. That’s a lot when considering how long NBA careers last.
They decided that they were looking for a change and made the move once their contracts had been completed. I hated the way LeBron made his “decision,” but he still had every right to do so.
Many of the game’s best players do currently reside on a select group of teams, but that has pretty much always been the case. And those we consider the best right now, won’t still be the best in five years. Not long ago, players like Allen Iverson, Tracy McGrady, Jermaine O’Neal and Stephon Marbury were stars. Now they are irrelevant, or out of the league.
There will always be talent turnover and the teams that are able to evaluate the rate at which that turnover is occurring will always be at the top of the standings.
So while there are great teams, terrible teams and a whole bunch in-between — which, again, has always been the case — teams can move between those groups quicker than people realize.
Don’t believe me? The Pistons made the Eastern Conference finals every year from 2003 to 2008. They are currently 22-41 and had a player mutiny two weeks ago.
Two years ago, the Oklahoma City Thunder went 23-59. They’re currently 38-22 and in fourth place in the West.
Irrelevance and dominance can both be temporary, depending on a team’s approach. Blaming players is just sour grapes.
