On Sunday, Tom Brady won his seventh Super Bowl, only further solidifying his case the greatest quarterback in NFL history. Even more impressive is how he did it, at the age of 43 with his new team in Tampa Bay after spending the first 20 years of his career with the Patriots.
That type of longevity and championship hardware makes his case as the GOAT nearly unimpeachable. But it isn’t just the sheer number of championships alone. In the NBA’s GOAT debate — the one pitting Michael Jordan against LeBron and whoever else — the number of championships has become something of a sticking point.
Fans often point to a player like Robert Horry as emblematic of the championship fallacy, arguing that if we use number of titles as a central metric, then Horry (a really solid player but not exactly a franchise cornerstone) would have a case in the GOAT debate. None of this is particularly new or insightful, and Horry, for his part, has quite frankly tired of being brought up in the debate in a negative way.
Via Melissa Rohlin of Fox Sports:
“A part of you gets mad because I don’t think people outside the NBA family — and when I say ‘NBA’ I’m saying coaches and players — they don’t really respect what I did and they don’t really understand what I did and what I was able to accomplish,” Horry told FOX Sports. “It’s always, ‘Oh he was a part. Oh, he was a part.’ Yeah, I was a part, but I was a significant part.
“You can’t have Kool-Aid without sugar, and I was the sugar to most of that stuff.”
“More than half the time, I feel slighted because I don’t think people really appreciate what I did,” Horry said. “Even [Monday], with me tweeting [about Brady], there’s always people going, ‘Oh, this, this, and this.’ I don’t pay any attention because if it was one of my teammates that would’ve said it, then it would’ve had some meaning.”
Horry was referring to a tweet he sent congratulating Brady on joining the “7 Chip Club,” which prompted a few petty fans to try and diminish his incredible accomplishments. Horry won titles with the Rockets, Lakers, and Spurs during his 16-year career, along the way earning the nickname “Big Shot Bob” for knocking down several game-winning shots in huge playoff moments.
(Via Fox Sports)
