“Welcome to the 2007 NBA Finals where it will be Lebron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers versus Tim Duncan and the San Antonio Spurs.” That is how you’ll hear ABC announce the games when they start here in a few days (that announcement will of course be followed by the “Right Now” diddy by the Pussycat Dolls, which may go down in history as the most annoying, yet addictive song of all time. It drives me nuts; yet I find myself singing it constantly). If you didn’t know any better, you’d think the finals was a celebrity death match between Lebron and Timmy, with the remaining members of the Cavs and Spurs on hand to maybe tag in if needed. That’s how the games…shoot, the whole league…is marketed, though. Nash and the Suns, KG and the Wolves, Wade and the Heat, Dirk and the Mavs, Kobe and the Lakers (though maybe not for long), Bosh and the Raptors, and on and on and on. More than any other professional sports league (of team sports), in the NBA team comes second, and the superstar reigns supreme.

Is this right or wrong? Does this help or hurt the game? What are the long term implications of a “star centered” as opposed to a “team centered” marketing approach? What do the fans prefer? What is the square root of Maine? These are some of the tough questions that immediately crop up and demand to be answered when this topic is put on the table. However, I am going to pass on addressing the tough questions, and center instead on what I do know…that is, that superstars win games, and thus earn their supreme status.

If you take the NBA championship teams from the last twenty years, the 2004 Detroit Pistons (and we’ll address their situation later) is literally the only team on that list without a bona fide, hall of fame, top fifty of all time superstar. You have Wade & Shaq, Duncan three times, David Robinson, Kobe and Shaq three times, Jordan six times, Hakeem twice, Drexler, Isaiah Thomas twice, Magic, Worthy, and Kareem a few times, and let’s not forget Larry Bird. What does this tell us? Well…if you want to win championships it helps to have a superstar on the roster. I know what you’re about to say, (like the guys in the Guinness commercials) “brilliant! To win games, get a superstar player!” It’s pretty obvious, right? Well…let me just say, “yeah, but here’s why.”

In the NBA, gaping holes in talent can be covered up with a superstar. This isn’t the case in other team sports. In the NFL, a superstar quarterback (the most influential position in the game) is only as effective as his receivers and offensive line allow him to be. It’s not like he can just call his own number in the huddle on every play and expect to win. A batter in baseball can’t drive himself in when he’s on base (unless they start implementing ghost runners), and as good as Gretzky was, I never saw him skate the length of the ice and score one on six. Lebron, though, scored dang near thirty straight points one on five to win a huge playoff game! Now, I’m not here to say that role players are unimportant or unnecessary in the NBA, I’m just saying that an NBA superstar is less dependent on his comrades to get the job done than stars in other team sports. The Cavs would have barely won 20 games this year without Lebron, but now they’re playing in the NBA Finals. With Lebron requiring so much of the attention from Detroit, a rookie like Daniel Gibson ended up looking like a hero, when in reality there are scores of players in the NBA that could have stepped in Gibson’s shoes and knocked down those open threes without batting an eye. So while it is often said that a superstar makes everyone better, the truth of the matter is that often times they just shoulder so much of the load that the impact made by the inefficiencies of the other guys is simply much less pronounced.

Another invaluable attribute of the NBA superstar is that they can be a “go to” guy for you all the time. There aren’t always opportunities to put your superstar on center stage in other sports. A-Rod is amazing, but if the order is 7-8-9 going into bottom of the ninth, he is powerless to help his team. Ladanian Tomlinson is incredible, but he is riding the pine when the other team has possession and is running the out the clock. Yzerman was unbelievable, but not on a power kill. In the NBA, in clutch situations, if you have a superstar you can simply hand him the rock and get out of the way. This is a huge point, because this very thing hurt Detroit over and over the past few postseason. The Pistons have been an extremely balance scoring team now for some time, and this is great over the course of a game because everyone can score anytime. However, down the stretch it becomes a glaring weakness. Why? Because in basketball when the game is tight and there’s not much time left, ball movement always slows down…always. I think the pressure of the moment leaves everyone thinking, “let’s do something simple, how about a 1-4 high set?” or “hey you, here’s the ball, back down your man until the shot clock almost runs out then fire up a shot.” Watch the final plays, the crunch time possessions of any NBA game, and you’ll see that every team in one way shape or form ends up giving one guy the ball and asking him to score on his man. For Detroit, a balanced scoring team with a lot of good, but not exceptional, scorers, who do you hand the ball to in that situation? I don’t know, and they don’t know, and that’s why in a low scoring, grind it out series like the one against Cleveland when every possession in the fourth quarter mattered, they ran isolation play after isolation play without success to Prince, Sheed, Rip, Chauncy, or whoever else wanted it. Ironically, the Cavs did the same thing; the difference is that they isolated Lebron…big difference.

You know what else is interesting? The team without a superstar is often assumed to have less ego related issues. This was said about the Pistons time and time again, “we have no egos here. No superstars. No egos.” Let me first say this: everyone has an ego…period. Also, on a balanced team like Detroit “ego management” (another word for that could be “coaching”) is actually a bigger challenge. The reason for this is a simple numbers game. I’m sure you’ve heard that two heads are better than one, well if we’re talking about egos, anything with two heads is a monster…and five heads, well you get the picture. For instance, Lebron is the star of the Cavs and no one is confused about that. If you keep Lebron’s ego satisfied and in check, everyone else’s ego will be in check by default. It’s not like you have to keep a close eye on Eric Snow; because like everyone else on the team, he knows who the man is. With the Pistons, though, they all share the success and the stardom evenly. Again, on the surface level this seems like it would be a positive thing; the thinking being that since no one is a big star, no one will develop a big ego. However, it is, in fact, the very opposite. Let me use an economics analogy to explain. Socialists frequently harp about the inequality of capitalism; there are some making a lot of money and some making only a little. However, the truth of the matter is that while capitalism does create some inequalities, it is the unequal distribution of wealth, while socialism is nothing more than the equal distribution of poverty. In other words, in a socialist society it’s great that everyone is equal; it just sucks that everyone is equally poor. For the Pistons, it was cool that four to five of the starters got to equally share the spotlight as stars; it’s just too bad that they all developed the corresponding superstar ego as well. Finessing the egos of professional athletes is not an easy task (see: Kobe and Shaq); in fact, it’s such a delicate thing that there generally isn’t enough room for more than one superstar per team. Even with Pippen and Jordan it was clear who was Batman and who was Robin. Therefore, on a conceptual level (like socialism) the idea of everyone on a team being stars together sounds great; however, when you end up with five players who think they’re superstars but aren’t, you wonder if you would have just been better off with one Lebron and a handful of guys who know they aren’t Lebron. (As a side note: I was a huge fan of the Pistons “social experiment” of the no superstar championship team. It was great while it lasted; however, success did go the collective heads of the players, they’ve taken the ship as far as it will go, and I just think that in today’s NBA they might be better off wheeling and dealing this summer to land someone big).

The last point I want to make is simple: you can build a team around a superstar. While that point is simple (and ironic), the explanation of it is a little more lengthy…so bear with me. In the NBA, like many other leagues, there is a salary cap, and in addition to a cap on what a team spends in total, there is also a cap on what you are allowed to pay any given individual player. To elaborate, I’ll continue to use Cleveland and Detroit as examples. If you’re Detroit you’ve built your team using a number of good, but not superstar caliber, players. You’ve had success, and you can credit this success to several different players uniformly. The problem is that as the years go by, each player brings his over inflated ego to the bargaining table and demands an over inflated contract, i.e. Ben Wallace. Ben Wallace was basically asking Detroit to pay him over five years a salary that is not too far under what Kobe, or Wade, or Lebron would make with the league maximum. Ben Wallace!!! Aside from his great defense over the years, and all he’s done for the Pistons, he shoots 40% from the line and averages like 4 points a game! Billups is a free agent this summer, and it quite possibly could be déjà vu when Detroit tries to resign him too. Now, Billups and Wallace combined aren’t worth a Lebron, but since they’ve been in the spotlight with the superstars, albeit as a group, they’ll ask for that superstar’s salary when the time comes. What will Detroit do when they come asking? What can they do? It’s impossible to pay superstar salaries to five different guys at the same time, and it’s unfortunate that they’ll be asked to, but that’s how it works in the NBA. This isn’t baseball, and the Pistons aren’t the Yankees. In a nut shell, on a team like Detroit, as each player’s salary ends that player will ask for too much money and Detroit will either let him go with nothing in return (like with Ben Wallace) or they will overpay that player sacrificing both the present and future of the team. With the Cavs it’s different. When you have a superstar like Lebron, you should be willing to pay him whatever the league maximum is because you don’t have to worry about the other guys. If a guy like Drew Gooden asks for too much money when his contract is up, you simply turn him down and replace him with one of hundreds of other role players that can fill in while Lebron does his thing. The great thing too is that Gooden probably won’t ask for too much, because (as afore mentioned) he probably knows that he doesn’t deserve it. He knows he’s not the reason he’s in the Finals, Lebron is, and he’s just happy to be along for the ride. The bottom line is that while the role players can and will change, if the superstar is constant, you will always remain a contender. Look at the Bulls from the 90′s or even the Spurs over the last 8 years or so. The constants were Jordan and Duncan, and the rest barely mattered as it fluctuated.

Look, don’t get me wrong, basketball is a team game. Teamwork is an important and vital part of winning an NBA championship; I’m not trying to belittle that fact. I guess it’s just easier to win as a team when one member of that team is a superstar. Is that right or wrong? Does it help or hurt the game? Are there long term implications to the league’s “star centered” as opposed to “team centered” marketing approach? What do the fans prefer? What is the freaking square root of Maine? You know what, I don’t really know. I will tell you this, though; down on the court where wins and losses are decided, in the NBA it’s the superstar that reigns supreme.