When Amazing Doesn't Happen

I'm kind of enjoying the fact that the NBA finals is looking more and more like it won't be a Kobe/LeBron matchup but a Magic/Nuggets final. The NBA's great strength and it's great weakness is that it's star driven. We don't really root for teams as much as we root for players, most of whom we refer to in first person and treat as one would any celebrity. This is good for the NBA because the stars become mega-stars and because it adds a sort of soap-opera quality to it as people examine and analyze each stars every move and every game as if they're characters in a book. Does Kobe still hate his teammates? Is this start of the LeBron ascendancy and if he loses, will this mean that he's not as good as Jordan and will it mean that he'll move to New York or anywhere that isn't Cleveland? Is Dwight Howard too nice and is his bruising style in the playoffs a reaction to all the criticism? All of this is great fun and it's why the NBA often has the best storylines, but it leaves out the main fact that sports essentially isn't about one player but a team as it's not the player that wins but the team that does.

Case in point, what we're seeing now. Kobe and LeBron get all the attention because they're the best players in the league but it's become apparent that they're not on the best teams in the league. Oops. Now you would hope that at the end, you'd get a finals between the two best teams (that's what everyone says they want) but what everyone really wants is to see the two best stars. Which is fine. But if it's really what the NBA wants, then maybe they should just forgo the whole basketball part of the season and just have LeBron and Kobe play H-O-R-S-E for the finals. If nobody watches a Magic/Nuggets series, then the NBA has nobody to blame but themselves.

And just for the heck of it, it's the same problem that baseball has in that everyone has decided that the Yankees and the Red Sox are the only two teams that matter so when the playoffs come and neither team is that involved, nobody cares.