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“There’s one in ‘win’,” replied Michael Jordan |
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Written by Constantine Scionti
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Saturday, 15 March 2008 |
This is the response Jordan is reputed to have given Phil Jackson after Jackson said, “There is no ‘I’ in ‘team.’” I love this response for two reasons: first, because I believe that motivational aphorisms should always be met with sarcasm and a withering glare; and second, because he’s right.
Among the things David Stern hopes you won't notice is this interesting fact: since Michael Jordan retired in 1998, there have been nine championships, and only one of them was won by a team that did not have either Shaquille O'Neal or Tim Duncan.
It gets worse: in the previous eight years, every single year that Michael Jordan played the whole season, the Bulls won the championship. Put together, that means that three players have split fourteen of the last seventeen championships, and fourteen of the last fifteen in which at least one of the above three was at peak form.
Wasn't basketball supposed to be a team sport? Well, yes, and it still is, but while a team formerly had to have three great players to win it all, for the last seventeen years, it has only taken one all-time great player and, as Jordan said, a touch brusquely, "[a] supporting cast."
Think about the rosters of the champions of the 80's. The 76ers had Moses Malone, Julius Erving and Maurice Cheeks in 1983. The Lakers had Earvin Johnson, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and James Worthy. The Celtics had Larry Bird, Kevin McHale, and Dennis Johnson, and each of those teams had a few more players who were legitimately very good players.
Then something happened in the late 80's that changed what you need to have in order to win it all. Since Larry Bird and Earvin Johnson were winning championships, the NBA has expanded from 23 teams to 30 teams. This started in 1988 and 1989 with four new teams (CHA, MIA, ORL, MIN), two more in 1995 (TOR, VAN) and finally—so far—with CHA again in 2004 (the first Charlotte team had moved to New Orleans by then) so the league got watered down, and just as the Bulls were ascending in the early 90's, the effects of having four new teams were showing themselves.
This was about the time that players drafted in 88-89 were becoming skilled veterans who could have become part of a championship nucleus, had they not been spread all over the league.
Even ignoring the expansion drafts and free agency, consider a few of the players drafted by teams that did not exist in the mid-80's: Shaquille O'Neal, Alonzo Mourning, Christian Laettner, Penny Hardaway, Kevin Garnett. The downside to spreading a limited talent pool around an ever-expanding league (though it’s good for parity) is that no team can assemble a roster with more than one superstar and a supporting very good player (Jordan and Pippen in Chicago, O'Neal and Bryant in L.A. and then O'Neal and Wade in Miami, Duncan and Robinson and then later, Duncan and a few supporters, like Parker and Ginobili). I'm exaggerating, of course, the "supporting cast" players I just mentioned are all excellent players, but the rest of the roster of each of those teams drops off in talent much more rapidly than with the great teams of the 80's. The fourth best players on the Celtics and Lakers were Robert Parish and James Worthy, respectively. Or maybe Cedric Maxwell (then Bill Walton) and Byron Scott.
Not only did this reduce the quality of the game in general, it also had the effect of making the top two or three players even more important than they had been before. All O'Neal has needed to collect a handful of rings is one guy on his team who is good enough to keep his opponents from double and triple teaming him the whole game.
There is reason to hope that this period of NBA history is coming to an end. With the increasing number of extremely talented players coming from abroad, maybe the talent pool will grow to the point that we will once again see teams with three or more legitimately great players. Twenty years ago, when this expansion started, teams were leery of drafting a foreigner into the NBA. Dallas went out on a limb early, acquiring Detlef Schrempf and Uwe Blab; foreign players have come a long way since then, giving us many great players, too many to list here.
So, perhaps we are already coming out of this era in NBA history. The best teams this year do have a number of great players: there are the New Big Three in Boston (yes, “New,” at least until they hang a flag in the (New) Garden) along with Bryant, Bynum and Gasol in L.A.; Nash, O’Neal and Stoudamire in Phoenix, etc. It’ll be nice when there are more than two guys wrestling over the championship at the end of the year.
Two Open Pleas To The Celtics Management:
Save Gino!
As anyone who has been to a Celtics game this year can tell you, “Gino” has become a very popular figure. At the ends of games when the Celtics have the victory in hand, they play a series of clips from American Bandstand showing people dancing. It’s from the late 70’s, and it’s pretty funny. Well, there’s one guy who is wearing a skin-tight shirt that says “Gino” who is a crowd favorite, always getting cheers and laughs. Unfortunately, in the last couple of games, management has realized that some people are sticking around longer than they otherwise might, in order to see “Gino” (I put that it quotes because no one knows who this guy is, or what his name is, but they do know that the “Gino” on his shirt is from a concert by an entirely different Gino).
So now they are doing the only reasonable “look, Ma, I got an MBA” thing: they tease the crowd to make us wait longer than we should, just to keep the butts in the seats. Against Seattle they did not show the clip until the final timeout, with less than three minutes left in the game (the game was well over at the end of the third quarter). Please stop doing this—Celtics fans won’t put up with this blatant manipulation for long. If you keep this up, guaranteed you’ll break it, it will no longer be quirky and funny, because now it will be just one more marketing ploy, and no one will care about “Gino” any more. That would be sad.
5,000? Really?
This one has me madder than a boiled owl. On Wednesday, the Celtics gave out Kevin Garnett bobbleheads. But only to the first 5,000 people through the gates. I think this is really shabby treatment of the fans, honestly. As any kindergarten teacher will say, “If you didn’t bring enough to share with everybody…” So approximately two-thirds of everyone who showed up at the game did not get the doll. What’s the big deal? Ask the twelve year old kid who is a huge Garnett fan, has the t-shirts, the posters, etc., who is so excited to get a KG bobblehead but is number 5,005 in line. “Sorry kid, we ran out.” Great. |
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Random Hoops
“CBS televised 40 hours, 51 minutes of tournament programming. Factoid
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