The New NBA Season Proves Dominance is Good for Sports
Sports fans have a peculiar, inexplicable tendency to resist dominance. The 18-1 Patriots? Cheaters. The 73-9 Warriors? Arrogant. The LeBron-headed Heatles? Inauthentic. Whenever teams take huge leaps or acquire superstars or otherwise position themselves head-and-shoulders above their competition, the public lashes out. Dominance is bad for sports. The game will suffer. Those teams deserve to lose.
Is that true? Is dominance bad for sports? On the eve of the upcoming NBA season, when it looks for the first time ever as if two teams—the Golden State Warriors and the Cleveland Cavaliers—will face each other in the Finals for the third year in a row, this question has been passed around like the hottest of take-potatoes. When the Golden State Warriors signed Kevin Durant in the offseason, they completed a starting five that, on paper, is probably the most talented in the history of basketball. Three of the top ten shooters of all time will be on the same team, and four all-pro talents will take the floor as a single unit. It’s preposterous. It’s unimaginable. It’s a rig-the-videogame scenario. The signing saw every sports pundit and analyst climb up into the saddle of their high horse, dig out their ancient bullhorns, and sound the battle cry: This is bad for the league! What about the product? What are we going to do, for god’s sake?
It’s pretty melodramatic, but it’s also pretty illogical. Dominance isn’t bad for basketball, nor has it ever been. The NBA, throughout its entire history, has been propped up and sustained by dominant teams and dominant players, and the proof is woven into the very fabric of the league. Here, look:
In the 1960s, Bill Russell and the Boston Celtics established a new template for team basketball, and Russell himself defined a new kind of selfless, sacrificial superstar. Those teams won 11 championships in 13 seasons. Dominant player, dominant team, great for basketball.
In the 1980s, Larry Bird and Magic Johnson—two top-five players ever—leveraged their on-court success (eight combined titles in ten years) and magnetic off-court presences to take basketball from a sport that didn’t even live-broadcast the Finals to something the country demanded en masse. Both guys headlined early incarnates of the modern superteam (Bird had Robert Parish and Kevin McHale; Magic had James Worthy and Kareem Abdul-Jabarr), and in their primes, nobody else could sniff a championship. Two dominant teams, two seminal players, great for basketball.
The 1990s saw Michael Jordan win six titles with the Chicago Bulls and become the unassailable Greatest of All Time. His skill was so obvious that people were calling him the best-ever before he won his first championship, and off the court, he established himself as the world’s most marketable athlete, if not its most famous, too. Transcendent player, empiric team, great for basketball.
In the modern era, the 2000s saw the Kobe/Shaq Lakers win three Finals in a row and set a ten-year precedent for how NBA teams would picture their ideal rosters (dominant big man, go-to crunch-time scorer), and in the last six years, there hasn’t been an NBA Finals without LeBron James. He’s the archetypal modern player: fluid, position-less, and physically unprecedented. While the title itself has traveled between several teams since 2000, it’s stopped in three particular cities—the Lakers five times, the Spurs four times, and the Heat three times—12 of the past 17 seasons. Are we starting to track with this?
Every historical touchstone in the last half-century of professional basketball has been marked by one or two dominant teams or dominant players. Was Michael Jordan, the most iconic athlete in the history of American sports, possibly bad for basketball? Of course not. Beyond hoops, is it possible that Tom Brady and Bill Belichick’s Patriots, one of the most adaptive and innovative professional sports teams in the modern era, are detrimental to football? Again, it sounds preposterous. Does the perennial success ofthe Yankees and Red Sox make baseball more or less popular? It sure isn’t the latter. If we want to say dominance is bad for professional sports, then we must extend that to past dominance, and when we do that, we sound dumb.
Permanent teams and permanent figures define their sports at-large. They make fans care about things outside their city and they pull our gazes away from the minutiae and into the sport’s broader cultural context. When sports have dominant figures, that sport can permeate society outside the athletic realm. Your mom might not know the Warriors lost in the Finals last year, but she knows the name Steph Curry. That’s important.
Bottom line: We all started caring about the 2016-17 NBA season just a little bit more after Kevin Durant signed with the Warriors. We all started caring a little bit more when the prospect of the Dubs-Cavs Finals Trilogy entered our minds. A transcendent scorer joined a record-setting team, and the on-court product has the potential to be an offense so efficient, so machine-like, so far beyond the capabilities of NBA defenses that it could, once again, change the way teams approach the game. That’s what dominance does. On the other hand, if it blows up and collapses and fails, it could change the way basketball teams are built. That’s what the potential for dominance does.
You can cheer against the Warriors. You can hope they lose to Lebron “Chosen One 2.0” James in the Finals again. You can call them villains and bad guys. That might not be fair, but as fans, that’s our prerogative. But we need to climb down from the high-horse saddle and cut the talk about how the lack of parity in the NBA this year is bad for the sport. Factually, it’s not. This NBA season is exciting precisely because there are two dominant teams—precisely because there is no parity.
The Western Conference houses an unstoppable force. The Eastern Conference houses an immovable object. Science says both can’t exist in the same reality. This is going to be gigantic and consequential and cataclysmic, but it’s also going to be utterly fascinating. Best hunker down and enjoy the sportspocalypse. We all might be caught in the fallout, but from this bird’seye view, the end of the world looks pretty hype.