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The NBA is so much bigger than one player these days
I’ve never cheated before. It’s a point of pride for me. I mean, it’s not like it’s something that I want to do and I just haven’t done it. I genuinely just don’t want to. One, I don’t want to hurt my partner. Two, I don’t want to feel the overwhelming feeling of guilt weighing on my conscious. I’ve felt that feeling before. It’s not fun.
I never felt it in the form of cheating a on a partner, but I did feel it in the form of cheating on my sports team. I grew up a Detroit Pistons fan. I love that team and as a fan of that team, I’m supposed to hate everything that goes against it. But I had a dirty secret. It was Michael Jordan poster on my bedroom wall. I felt so dirty about it that I even put it in a place that you couldn’t see it if you poked your head into my room and glanced around.
How could I not love Michael Jordan though? I know he’s supposed to be public enemy number one my Pistons, but he was just so damn cool. The guy had cool shoes, cool hamburger commercials, cool Gatorade commercials and even the cologne that bared his name smelled really good.
It’s because his greatness allowed him to transcend the game and all its fickle fandom rules. Michael Jordan was the face of basketball at a level that had just never been seen before, Sure Magic Johnson was popular int he ‘80s and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Bill Russell and Wilt Chamberlain had their moments too, but nobody cast a shadow like Michael Jordan. The shadow was so big that everyone tried to cast it on just about every young player for years in hopes to find the next Michael Jordan like figure. It just felt like the NBA needed a face.
When Jordan retired the first time, the world seemed to pin that hope on Pistons rookie Grant Hill. Jordan came back and that didn’t wind up panning out. After he retired a second time, the world turned to Kobe Bryant. The similarities were there in spades and Kobe was definitely prolific, but the world never felt the same way about Kobe as they did Jordan.
Finally there’s LeBron James. Nobody has ever come closer than LeBron. The NBA definitely wanted him to be the face of the league and it’s safe to say that he is. The problem with here is that LeBron can’t do anything in his career without being compared to Michael Jordan. It hasn’t stopped him from being the perceived face of the league, but it does hurt is legacy in a small way when the first thing that comes up when he loses in the finals is “Michael Jordan never lost in the finals.”
In the last few years I’ve noticed a change in basketball. It seems like the whole “face of the NBA” conversation is nearly nonexistent. The basketball world doesn’t have a singular idol anymore. There isn’t one guy that we all look to. There’s like 20 of them now. We have a hard time simply telling who the best player in the league is right now.
I have some theories. The first one is that the NBA is just more talented now than it’s ever been. Look around the league. You know you’re going to get a great game from Giannis Antetokounmpo, Stephen Curry, Trae Young, Kevin Durant, Nikola Jokic, Jayson Tatum, Luka Dončić, Ja Morant and more. It’s like every NBA team has a superstar at this point.
Another theory is that the player empowerment era has made it so too many guys are teaming up with each other and it feels like you don’t get to see an individual player shine anymore. Gone are the days when you would see a player will his team to victory on his own spectacular performances. Now a superstar can just kick the ball out to one of his fellow superstars on his team. This theory makes me feel like an old man yelling at the sky and complaining about how it was back in my day.
What about the addition of players from around the world? That infusion is still relatively young. There was a time when there were just a handful of players from around the world in the NBA. Now there’s a handful on every team. While you might be popular in America, may not be as popular in Slovenia, because they have their own superstar player in the NBA. Basketball is so global right now that it’s hard to imagine one player being the most popular player in the entire world.
The final theory is the basketball is bigger than it’s ever been before. We live in a world where the NBA isn’t the only option. You can watch college, G League, EuroLeague and even high school basketball whenever you want. It’s all at your finger tips. The world didn’t know too much about Kevin Garnett and Kobe Bryant when they were coming out in the NBA draft. They were just the high school kids that scouts and NBA experts on TV knew about. Now a days you know future first round picks in high school or even earlier. I remember watching Chet Holmgren highlights from his 8th grade year. They were hilarious because everyone was so much smaller than him.
With all that in mind, is it good that this conversation is dead? I think it is. At the end of the day it’s all about the game now. Everyone can be a superstar and the conversations about who the is the league’s best is a lot more fun because everyone can bring a different player to the argument and it’s hard to count anyone’s opinion as wrong. It sort of makes basketball more entertaining than ever.
