Thirteen years ago this summer, the Miami Heat held a welcome party. It was a twist. Press conferences for free agent introductions were normal. A full-on celebration of titles not yet won? That was new. Somehow, just six years after the Malice at the Palace, three guys on a stage immediately became the most infamous scene in NBA history for a lot of fans. The idea that players could simply choose to win titles by teaming up and forming the best roster was frustrating, a shortcut which stole all hope from fans of middling teams with no free agent magnetism. The fact those players claimed those titles—Not one, not two, not three…—without having ever even practiced together? This was infuriating. Mostly because we feared they were right. Mostly because we feared the NBA could be broken. This would be bad for the NBA.
The Nuggets won the NBA Finals last night, and as happens with these things, a lot of us typists and talkers are looking back at the map they drew to see what it says about winning a title. What does it say? A homegrown 1-2 punch headlined by the best basketball player alive, surrounded by role players gifted in specific skills, and led by an established coach who cultivates a particular culture makes for a good team. See: Bulls, Chicago; 1990s. It’s not really new. It’s not really surprising. It’s surprised a lot of us, Nikola Jokić didn’t win the MVP this year *because* of how surprising voters thought it would be to see him succeed in the playoffs, but it’s a fairly simple recipe. Amass enough talent to get in the same room as the trophy, cultivate a capable-enough culture to grab the trophy after enough tries once you’re in the door. This year’s Heat had the second part, but they couldn’t quite get in the same room. The Suns have the first part, but the culture has routinely been a mess.
It’s the talent piece that gets more attention in the NBA, for evident reasons. It’s easier to follow the movement of talent than it is to parse what is and isn’t effective about a coach and a front office’s interpersonal style. It’s more exciting to follow personalities than it is to hypothesize about what happens behind closed doors. It’s more engaging in the offseason to follow which free agents are staking out with other free agents’ houses than it is to read one human interest article about Michael Malone traveling to Serbia to better know his best player. Also, there’s the matter of importance. The talent piece is more of a prerequisite for contention than the culture side. Talent alone will get you farther in the NBA than culture alone will get you, this year’s Heat being a startling exception. You do need both to finish the job, but if you can only have one and the goal is to have an exciting season? You’d prefer talent. Winning in the NBA is about talent and culture, and talent comes first.
A result of this is that the NBA is an individual player-driven league. It helps that there aren’t many players in the league (fewer than half those in the NHL, MLB, or NFL at any given time), but the truth is that free agency and the trade market and the draft do really matter, and in more visible, immediate ways than they do in the rest of the Big Four leagues. Of course we follow these things. They’re a big deal, and they’re the arena in which the foundational moment of this era—LeBron James taking his talents to South Beach—happened.
It gets amplified. The preferred image for many NBA players is to be the leaders themselves. It’s a point of pride to not only be a great player, but to be seen as the guy running the team. This happens from time to time in other sports (there are reasons the two best quarterbacks of the last twenty years each underwent a late-career breakup with his franchise), but while it’s isolated elsewhere, it’s prevalent in the NBA, and it made Steve Nash’s old job very different from Andy Reid’s current job. The most effective coaches in today’s NBA do their work in the background, some even going so far as to look from afar like useful idiots, like Erik Spoelstra from 2010 through 2014, perceived to be rolling the ball out and getting out of the way. Spoelstra was not a useful idiot, but it was useful to him to appear that way at a glance.
This is really where the “superteam” label comes down. Because the real innovation of LeBron James going to Miami wasn’t the construction of a three-headed beast—the Celtics had traded for Ray Allen and Kevin Garnett to join Paul Pierce three years earlier, and even earned a title for their trouble—but that it was so openly player-led. The Heat, to hear the narration, weren’t courting LeBron James. Dwyane Wade was courting LeBron James. This wasn’t exactly true, but this is how the story was told: LeBron James, Dwyane Wade, and Chris Bosh sat down together and said, “Let’s go break the NBA.” Then, they went and told ESPN they were going to break the NBA. Then, they went and held a big party in Miami to celebrate the impending breaking of the NBA. Then, they lost to Dirk Nowitzki.
It wasn’t just the player-led aspect that we didn’t like. That was how it happened, but that wasn’t what we disliked about it. If Joel Embiid and Jimmy Butler were to team up this offseason in Miami, it would go over much differently than if Kevin Durant were to somehow join the Warriors again or join the Lakers. Players liking one another and wanting to play together is one thing. Players seeing free agency as a shortcut to pick up rings is not something most sports fans want. Intent matters. In a sense, you could say there have only been three superteams: The LeBron James Heat, the Kevin Durant Warriors, and the Kyrie Irving Nets. There have been other machinations—Anthony Davis finding his way to Los Angeles rates highly there—but a full-fledged superteam seems to require this “break the NBA” line of thinking, and it’s not just that breaking the NBA is the goal. It’s that breaking the NBA is the assumption. One that’s worked out, but at less than a 50% clip.
Looking back over recent champions, two of the four preceding the Nuggets bear anatomical similarity to Denver’s team this year. Both the 2019 Raptors and the 2021 Bucks built around an MVP-caliber player, ultimately bringing a title to a non-traditional market for an NBA champion. Looking back more broadly, seven of the thirteen champions since that Heat Welcome Party have been centrally homegrown, if you include the Cavs in LeBron’s second stint and the Warriors before and after Durant (which I do, given the best players on each team wouldn’t have been playing for those teams had they not been the teams which drafted them). Expanding our scope further, only four of those thirteen champions fit our definition of a superteam. It can work—four of thirteen is a pretty solid rate of winning rings—but it isn’t can’t-miss like those three guys on the stage said it was thirteen summers ago. You can’t actually break the NBA right now.
What do the Nuggets ultimately say, then, about NBA champions? They say firstly that the Nuggets are the champions. The Nuggets earned this, they were the best team in the best conference in the regular season and the best team anywhere in the playoffs. The Nuggets were so good that it’s boring to talk about the Nuggets just yet, and we’re forced into these conversations about whether they’ll be a dynasty or what they say about the NBA at large. But to that second point: The second thing the Nuggets say is that when it comes to roster construction, there are a lot of ways to win a championship. You can draft well. You can draft well and develop. You can pursue one ideal player and build around him. You can hope a roving band of ring-chasers choose your arena to build their nest. You can revolutionize the game of basketball. However you do it, you need to reach a high overall talent threshold, and you need the culture to capture the thing when it’s there for the taking. But to that first end, there are many, many ways.
Which is great for the NBA.
Hockey and Baseball Do Exist
We listen to the Mark Titus Show here, because we are animals and we follow the hands that feed us, and I got a big kick out of Titus’s producer T.J. saying today that national sports are over for the year. I get it, it’s a basketball podcast, but come on, brother. Hockey and baseball do exist. Your show’s host loves the Cubs!
It’s interesting, though, how uncontroversial this sounded at first listen. The way sports media works when you come at it from one sport is that you care about your sport and you care about football, and everything else is niche. Your sport is niche too, of course—the NBA is a big niche, but it’s still niche—but it isn’t to your eyes because you’re surrounded by your industry. Also, with the NBA’s value overindexing among young white affluents, especially in more liberal areas of the country? The NBA is a really big niche in blog and podcast circles.
Still, baseball and hockey press on. Stanley Cup Finals Game 5 tonight, College World Series beginning this weekend, the trade market in Major League Baseball about to start heating up ahead of the playoff chase. There is no offseason, and if there really is for those of us who are college basketball-centric, it’s been going on since the beginning of April.
I was disappointed by the ending of Texas vs. Stanford last night on the ballfield—that series deserved better. I was likewise disappointed to see Southern Miss fall to Tennessee. This year’s Tennessee baseball hasn’t been as bad, but last year’s was so unlikable that it’s stuck with me. Still, one hell of a College World Series is lined up, as is always the case: On the Friday side, Oral Roberts plays Cinderella and opens things off against TCU before 2nd and 7th seeds Florida and Virginia meet in a clash of baseball’s two best leagues. On Saturday, top-ranked Wake Forest faces institutional power Stanford before LSU and Tennessee play a conference showdown, one hopefully started by Paul Skenes. Add in the U.S. Open, and we’ve got a great summer weekend ahead.
Hayden Wesneski Isn’t an Ace
The Cubs did what we hoped they’d do, with Marcus Stroman pitching well and Kyle Hendricks more than showing up, earning the Northsiders a sorely needed series win in San Francisco. They remain projected to win 76 games by FanGraphs, just about at their preseason projection. The next step in their journey to the All-Star Break begins tonight against the Pirates at Wrigley, and we remain optimistic, hoping on them to grab another series (all three pitching matchups should turn out winnable) and cut that division gap to five and a half games.
There is, though, a pitcher who didn’t show up, and while we were hoping for just one or the other, it’s time to talk again about Hayden Wesneski.
Hayden Wesneski entered the year surrounded by audacious hopes. The Cubs needed and need an ace and he, as a highly-touted prospect, had a good enough median projection accompanied by enough uncertainty for us to assign that hope to him. So far, we haven’t seen it, with his performance so rough so far (6.06 xERA, 5.97 FIP) that it’s pulled his career numbers up past 4.00 in all categories after throwing a 2.18/2.18/3.20 ERA/xERA/FIP split in six outings last year.
It’s possible Wesneski will go on to work out. We’re dealing with a very small sample, and the man is only 25. But at the moment, he’s not looking promising, and after Caleb Kilian, he’s the second starter to follow that path in the last twelve months. Also, and this is important: If Hayden Wesneski turns into a reliable fourth or fifth starter down the line, that will be success for the Cubs. If Hayden Wesneski turns into a good reliever down the line, that will be success for the Cubs. Pitching prospects don’t need to win a Cy Young to “work out.”
Still, it’s easier to find reliable depth starters in free agency at an attainable price than it is to find an ace. Good relievers, even at their best, are fickle and fleeting. That’s what makes these lottery tickets so enticing, especially with the Cubs constructed in such a way where they could really use a top-10 pitcher on their roster and run in such a way that simply purchasing one isn’t as likely as it looked in 2015. On to Ben Brown we go, then. Hopefully his recent command issues settle down. Hopefully the Cubs’ existing rotation performs well enough that we don’t see him this year.
