Anthony Davis leads one of basketball’s most exciting young teams. Blake Griffin co-captains a perennial championship contender. LaMarcus Aldridge is teaming with Tim Duncan to make a recent title-winner even more formidable. And Pau Gasol, Zach Randolph, Chris Bosh, Kevin Love, and Paul Millsap are all integral cogs for teams with varying degrees of realistic championship hopes.
Those nine stars dot NBA 2K16’s list of the top-10 power forwards in basketball.
The top 10 power forward ratings in #NBA2K16. We'll be posting up new top 10's everyday at 10AM PST! RT! pic.twitter.com/q6LsRtYKR7
— NBA 2K (@NBA2K) September 20, 2015
Who’d we miss? Dirk Nowitzki, who will try his damnedest to lead the Dallas Mavericks to a futile postseason appearance after yet another summer of disappointment. It didn’t have to be this way for Rick Carlisle’s team, of course; Dallas nearly won the summer by stealing DeAndre Jordan from the Los Angeles Clippers.
But that’s how thin the line between legitimate contention and outright mediocrity is for many teams in the NBA. It can be a change of heart in free agency; a minor injury to a key contributor; or even something off the court that might be affecting a given player on it.
What could plague the championship hopes of the majority of elite power forwards is normal basketball minutiae. And while the unexpected and mostly arbitrary nature of those dealings is indeed daunting, harboring them with title aspirations is certainly better than Nowitzki’s alternative of doing so without any.
The Mavericks will be competitive in 2015-16, but it won’t be enough. For grander historical purposes, then, this season will be about Nowitzki trying to stave off Father Time – and he’ll be doing it against an accomplished group of opposing power forwards who happen to play for teams much better than his.
