Winning the NBA Without a Hall of Famer Would Make History

Assertions around which this blog will revolve :

• Atlanta, Memphis, and Toronto each currently occupies first-place in its NBA division. None of the three teams has a 20-points-per-game scorer on its roster.

• Tim Duncan, LeBron James, Dirk Nowitzki, Paul Pierce, and Kobe Bryant will earn election to the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame when they become eligible.

• Kyle Lowry, Marc Gasol, and Paul Millsap probably won’t join them in the Hall.

The Hawks’, Grizzlies’, and Raptors’ presences among the league’s elite has given rise to a new theory : You don’t need a superstar to win a championship.⁽¹⁾

This runs contrary to the sort of traditional thinking that led to the Heat’s three-headed monster taking its talents to South Beach, Jerry West’s machinations to acquire Shaquille O’Neal, and the Knicks’ recent run to the top with Carmelo Anthony. OK, that last jab wasn’t very nice. As Charles Barkley, Bob Lanier, and Stockton/Malone know, it does take more than a superstar (or even two) to win a ring. But historically, you’ve pretty much had to have at least one to do it.

No NBA champion whose complete roster has become eligible for the hall won the title without at least one Hall-of-Fame player on the team. Assuming we’re correct about our list of future inductees (which could also include Jason Kidd, Dwyane Wade, Kevin Garnett, Ray Allen, and others), that trend will continue among all the recent winners, save one.

The Detroit Pistons of 2003-04 will likely become the first NBA champs with no playing inductees (Hall-of-Fame coach Larry Brown doesn’t count). They had a great mix of stars who put up some outstanding years and went to consecutive finals, but Billups, Wallace, Hamilton and company seem real long shots to enter Springfield’s shrine without a ticket.

Historically, those Pistons show up as an amazing aberration. HoFers George Mikan, Jim Pollard, Slater Martin, and Vern Mikkelson led the Minneapolis Lakers to a non-showtime title in the NBA’s first season, 1949-50. For good measure, one of their forwards, Bud Grant, later earned election to the Pro Football Hall of Fame.⁽²⁾ That core set a precedent with three more titles.

Actually, the precedent had already been set. The Lakers, whose nickname made sense in those days, had won a title the previous season in the third and final year of the NBA-precursor Basketball Association of America. Both previous champions of the BAA boasted Hall of Famers, and half those of the league with which they merged, the National Basketball League, did. The latter number would rise if you believe one can make a Hall-of-Fame case for Oshkosh All-Stars standout Leroy Edwards.⁽³⁾

All those teams competed before there was a Hall of Fame, but they knew you needed superstars. Heck, even in the ABA, only the ’70-'71 Utah Stars won the title without a Hall of Fame player. The likes of Julius Erving, Artis Gilmore, and Roger Brown proved needed components for championships in that league, too.

Just making the final seems to require a transcendent player. Pending what Dwight Howard does the rest of his career, the ’75-'76 Phoenix Suns may stand as the only NBA runners-up without a Hall-of-Fame player (although 4.6 ppg-man Pat Riley did achieve that status for his post-playing accomplishments).

Since the beginnings of pro basketball, then, “nice" teams, plucky bands of no-names, and Don-Nelson-matchup-nightmare squads have struggled to break through a wall composed of Russells, Chamberlains, Jordans, Birds, and Magics.

Hall of Famers have traditionally stood tall, in this case Wilt Chamberlain with the author's father (left)

With only ten competitors on the playing surface at any one time, the game lends itself to individual brilliance. What could change it? How about big data?

Brett Koremenos of Sports on Earth wrote that "in today's NBA, it's becoming increasingly possible to compete for titles without elite players.”⁽⁴⁾ He did so while making the case that the Celtics might be adopting a new-school Moneyball approach to building his team.

As an aside, I feel old because I just used “new-school” to modify “Moneyball.” I remember interviewing former Oakland A’s assistant GM Grady Fuson about player evaluation tools back when there was only a book, not a Brad Pitt movie.

The last decade, however, has seen an explosion of fresh statistical evaluation approaches, ala the Moneyball premise, across all sports. The baseball A’s needed to find a way to compete with the Barry Bondses and Alex Rodriguezes. Have some of these newly successful hoops teams found market weaknesses they can exploit?

If so, you might offer the widely-imitated Spurs some credit, as they found ways to discover Kawhi Leonards and Danny Greens to take up the slack as their core closed in on aging out of MVP contention.

Better information on how a player's activity contributes to winning may result in superior player evaluation. Coaches willing to incorporate such data into their substitution patterns and floor sets may further improve their teams’ chances to get past star-laden opposition.

Innovative salary cap management can play a role, too. Paul Georges, Bill Waltons, and Derrick Roses get hurt sometimes, and superstars do cost a lot. Not every all-NBAer will injure himself, however, so a new power can still expect to face its share of Stephen Currys and Chris Pauls come playoffs.

Can the upstarts deal with the powerhouses? They might. The ’03-’04 Pistons did. So did the ’70-’71 Stars (their coach, Bill Sharman, had been a Hall-of-Fame player) and the ’48-'49 NBL champs Anderson Duffey Packers.

Still, a one-year wonder might prove possible. The trick, I think, might be how to make it more than a limited phenomenon, since teams that have big-time players can take similar approaches. In baseball, the big-market franchises began to pay attention to Bill James, good teams started to spend big on prospects, and defensive shifts began to reduce BABIPs across the big leagues. History does not rest comfortably on the side of the Hawks, Grizz, and Raptors.

Unless, that is, you go back to the Akron Firestone Non-Skids. No Hall-of-Famers, back-to-back champs.

They did it in the NBL. In 1939 and 1940.

Rush Olson has spent two decades directing creative efforts for sports teams and broadcasters. He currently creates ad campaigns and related creative projects for sports entities through his company, Rush Olson Creative & Sports.

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Footnotes

Note : Statistical records drawn from http://www.basketball-reference.com/

⁽¹⁾ Ian Levy  “Does A Team Really Need A Star To Get To The NBA Finals?,” FiveThirtyEightSports.

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/does-a-team-really-need-a-star-to-get-to-the-nba-finals/ (accessed February 25, 2015)

⁽²⁾ Andrew Astleford “From hardwood to pigskin: Bud Grant understands basketball skills translate to the NFL,” Fox Sports Florida. http://www.foxsports.com/florida/story/from-hardwood-to-pigskin-bud-grant-understands-basketball-skills-translate-to-the-nfl-051714 (accessed February 25, 2015)

⁽³⁾ “NBL alums snubbed by Hall,” apbr.org. http://www.apbr.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=2058 (accessed February 25, 2015)

⁽⁴⁾ Brett Koremenos “THE CELTICS' INNOVATIVE REBUILD,” Sports On Earth. http://www.sportsonearth.com/article/109916244/boston-celtics-veteran-contributors-nba-draft-isaiah-thomas (accessed February 25, 2015)

7 Reasons Why You Should Read This List of 7 Reasons

Reason #1) It’s A List

We can tell that people like lists because we see them all over LinkedIn, the blogosphere, late-night television, and every marketing website ever created. When I was a kid, I had a roll of “Book of Sports Lists” toilet paper. I owned the book, too, incidentally.

Reason #2) Organization

A list must stay at least somewhat organized, by its very nature. Paragraphs can ramble. Sentences can run on. With a list, the author had to at least consider in what order he or she would make his or her points.

Reason #3) Reason #4

Even if reason #3 is terrible (as this one is), It’s only one point of several. You can easily move on to the next one.

Reason #4) Minimum knowledge

If a person writes an article, you can’t be sure they know a darn thing until you’ve read a bit of it. A 12-item list, though, implies the creator certainly knows a minimum of a dozen things about the topic (in this case, lists).

Reason #5) The Count

We Americans all watched Sesame Street. The show's mathematically inclined vampire taught us to love counting things. Admit it, you can hear Count Von Count’s Transylvanian accent in your head whenever you read a list, saying “Five! Five Reasons to Include Yik Yak in Your Content Marketing Mix!  Hahahahaha!”

Reason #6) The Cute Photo

Reason number 6 includes a picture of an adorable child wearing a shirt advertising one of my projects.  Generally speaking, at least one entry per list has some image, animated gif, or infographic embedded in it. Look! Pretty colors!

This young film enthusiast has I Am Douglass on her list of must-see movies

Reason #7) It’s Finite

When you read an article, it can drag. You find yourself scrolling down to see if you have a chance of making it to the end of the prose before your children are grown. Even with a stupid list like this one, you at least know it will come to an end once it has reached its appointed number. Listmakers seem to have a really good track record for honesty. If they say their list will have ten reasons, you can feel pretty darn certain it won’t have eleven, or twenty-six, or a hundred-forty-seven. When it’s over, it’s over. As this list thankfully is.

Rush Olson has spent two decades directing creative efforts for sports teams and broadcasters. He currently creates ad campaigns and related creative projects for sports entities through his company, Rush Olson Creative & Sports.

RushOlson.com

Linkedin.com/company/rush-olson-creative-&-sports

Facebook.com/RushOlsonCreativeandSports

It’s Just Deflating

In some shocking news from Melbourne this morning, authorities disclosed that Andy Murray was under investigation for tampering with the tennis balls used in his Australian Open semi-final. Seeking to negate Thomas Berdych’s power, Murray apparently surreptitiously replaced the regular lively Wilson-supplied balls with dead practice balls. ⁽¹⁾

The report comes on the heels of a similar scandal in another major sport. In an effort to slow down the high-scoring Golden State Warriors, Spurs coach Gregg Popovich supposedly snuck in partially deflated basketballs for the teams’ most recent meeting in San Antonio. As Popovich rested some of his tricenarian stars, the coach reportedly felt balls capable of bouncing only to the Warriors’ kneecaps would help his D-Leaguers compete. The ploy did not succeed to the degree Popovich may have hoped, as Golden State prevailed 23-21 in overtime. ⁽²⁾

After the Detroit Red Wings' use of a germanium-powered syringe to hollow out pucks, the Yankees de-cored baseball incident, and the North Korean badminton team's lighter-than-air shuttlecock fiasco, the sports world has now lost complete trust in the integrity of its spheroids, cylinders, and those rocks with the handle on top.

So why did I just make up all of the preceding malarkey? Because it occurred to me just how difficult it is to futz with the balls in any professional sport besides American Football. In pretty much every other pro sport, some neutral official selects and monitors the game balls to a greater degree than football. Baseball umpires even rub them with mud. Home field may confer many advantages, but the ball won’t be one of them.

In pro football, however, the team selects the balls, breaks them in during the week, and supplies them for their team’s offense to use during the game. Theoretically, this practice should improve offensive performance, since players should perform better using a ball with which they have a comfort level. The officials do check the balls, but the New England Patriots have allegedly found a way to circumvent the inspection.⁽³⁾

So how to deal with the problem (if, in fact, the Patriots are guilty, which is not certain⁽⁴⁾)? Several solutions present themselves :

·      Make the Pats forfeit their next game if they are guilty. Unfortunately, a bunch of people planned parties around said game and Katy Perry probably moved tour dates to be there, so you may have to do something else.

·      You could punish the offending team and its personnel by taking away a first-round draft pick and fining them $750,000. That’s a pretty stiff penalty that would almost certainly serve as a deterrent to cheating, as it did the last time the NFL imposed it, on the 2007 New Engl . . . oh, never mind.

·      Another deterrent : let the opposition choose the footballs the Patriots use next season. At least a chocolate football would taste good.⁽⁵⁾

·      Use only Nerf footballs.

·      Have the league supply all the balls and the quarterbacks and receivers will tough it out. The only drawback : paying for an extra bag of checked luggage when the officials fly the balls to the game. Non-profits like the NFL can find it tough to pull extra petty cash for such an unbudgeted item.

·      Get rid of the rule altogether. Play with the ball however you want it. If a team thinks it can gain a competitive advantage by pounding it flat as a frisbee, do it. If your receivers can’t catch anyway, freeze it solid and avoid interceptions.

Of course, other sports do have plenty of cheaters. It’s just tough for them to do it through the ball itself (with Baseball Hall-of-Famer Gaylord Perry a notable exception). The best solution to all of those problems comes through sportsmanship. Teach children cheating is wrong and they won’t grow up to believe it’s okay to win through violating the rules.

The latter solution faces exceedingly long odds against succeeding, and that proposition is what’s truly deflating.

Rush Olson has spent two decades directing creative efforts for sports teams and broadcasters. He currently creates ad campaigns and related creative projects for sports entities through his company, Rush Olson Creative & Sports.

RushOlson.com

Linkedin.com/company/rush-olson-creative-&-sports

Facebook.com/RushOlsonCreativeandSports

Footnotes

⁽¹⁾ Made-up story – no footnote

⁽²⁾ IBID.

⁽³⁾ Jeff Pini, “A Lot of Hot Air? Here Are The Facts About Deflategate,” boston.com. http://www.boston.com/sports/football/patriots/2015/01/31/lot-hot-air-here-are-the-facts-about-deflategate/Ae6bx4CTvqk5rj3kgSvDCK/story.html  (Accessed February 1, 2015)

⁽⁴⁾ Ian Rapoport “More details on the investigation of Patriots' deflated footballs,” NFL.com. http://www.nfl.com/news/story/0ap3000000466783/article/more-details-on-the-investigation-of-patriots-deflated-footballs (accessed February 1, 2015)

 ⁽⁵⁾ “Chocolate Football,” Phillips Chocolates.

http://www.phillipschocolate.com/prodinfo.asp?number=CHFB (Accessed February 1, 2015)