We live in an era where it’s all about the #ringz. As Grantland’s Zach Lowe wrote late last season, there’s a misconception among some basketball fans that an NBA title is the only piece of hardware that designates a great player or a great team. Except, only one team wins each year, and it’s a monumental disservice to the other 29 teams when we relegate them to the has-been group. That’s just not the case, as LeBron James made clear when he filmed a spontaneous Uninterrupted for Bleacher Report on Tuesday.
NBA TV was showing the 2000 Western Conference Finals between the Portland Trail Blazers and Los Angeles Lakers, and LeBron could not contain his glee at watching the match-up, or how passionate he seems about the game (we miss basketball, too, LeBron). Our favorite was after he listed the players out on the floor and told his fans, “You ain’t about to sh*t on someone because everybody gonna make you play. Man, this is true basketball right here, man.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JkXbRvZTbjg
That Blazers team ended up losing in Game 7, and L.A. went on to win the first of their triumvirate of titles to tip-off the new millennium. LeBron wants to make clear that any student of the game should be aware of all the great players and team who didn’t win a title.
“If you don’t know the history of the game, man, you will forget how many great teams didn’t win championships. And, that doesn’t mean they wasn’t great, though.”
He’s right, of course. A whole generation of players in the 1990s failed to capture a title because of the GOAT. LeBron himself has played on a pair of 60-plus win teams (one in Cleveland and one in Miami) who didn’t win titles.
During the segment LeBron was watching when he recorded his video, the 2000 Blazers team had Scottie Pippen running point-forward, Steve Smith as an off-guard, Detlef Schrempf at small forward, Rasheed Wallace at power forward, and Arvydas Sabonis at center. That’s a long, talented team, with five guys who can pass, cut and understand the spacing and nuance of a half-court game to a degree some of today’s teams can’t even fathom. That’s forgetting to mention how strong defensively each team was. Yet L.A. had Shaq at his apogee, Kobe coming up on his, a still effective Glenn Rice, Big Shot Bob, and future coach, Brian Shaw, out on the floor.
Any student of the game knows just how tight the series ended up being, with either team worthy of moving on.
And that’s the larger point LeBron James tries to drive home in his video. While we all want our favorite players to bring home the Larry O’Brien Trophy every year, winning a championship in this day and age is tremendously difficult and requires almost as much luck as talent, coaching and heart. Look at the San Antonio Spurs and their five titles under Duncan and Popovich. Not once were they able to repeat, and it wasn’t for lack of trying. It’s just really hard to win a title.
Ask LeBron. The best player in the game today has been to the NBA Finals the last five years. He’s only got two rings to show for it. Does that automatically demarcate his other three Finals teams as failures? It shouldn’t, but for a lot of NBA fans, it does.
