Far more often than not, the team that wins the NBA Finals is a team that has on its roster at least one of a handful of the most talented, most productive players in the league.
Once in a while, a team wins the NBA Finals that does not have one of the very best players in the league on its roster. Yet these "outlier" teams nonetheless invariably feature a player who is among the best 10-15 players in the league, and make a run to a title as a result of good timing, good luck, and having a player or two play the best month of basketball of their career.
So, to have a shot at winning a title you need to have a player who is among the 10-15 best players in the league. If you want to have a really good chance of winning a title, you need to have one of the best of the best, i.e. one of the players in the conversation for MVP of the league.
If you are a fan that defines your enjoyment of your team based on a journey to win a title, then, your criteria for whether the team is exciting must be whether the team currently has or appears to have a plan in place to acquire a player who is among the elite of the league.
Absent a player of that kind, your team simply isn't ... relevant. At least not as far as winning a title is concerned.
The media seems to treat teams this way as well. Sometimes there are teams that make for good stories, despite not having a chance at winning anything significant. The resurgent Sacramento Kings are fun. But everybody understands they aren't winning anything important this year, and they don't have anybody on their roster who appears likely to become the centerpiece of a "relevant" team anytime soon.
But if you ask a Kings fan if they're enjoying watching this Kings team, I'd bet the answer would be an enthusiastic affirmative.
This gets me to the question I've been thinking about a bit lately: Would you rather be fun or be relevant?
Certainly you'd prefer to be both.
The Golden State Warriors, at least until the 2016 Finals, were arguably both fun and relevant. They played with joy. They played a style we hadn't seen before. They had a signature franchise star with an ability to shoot never seen before in NBA history.
Then they blew a 3-1 lead. They lost to the GOAT in Game 7 on their home court.*
*Or if you prefer, LeBum ... in any case a top 5 player all-time who you are free to rank ahead of or behind Russell, Kareem, Jordan, Bird, Magic ... I don't really care*
They signed Durant. They became an ultra-dominant super team.
They became the team that "should" always win.
They were no longer fun. They were also, from one standpoint at least, the only "relevant" team in the league any longer. Who's going to beat the Curry / Durant Warriors? Nobody.
I've been thinking about this "Fun vs Relevant" spectrum lately because this year's Celtics team has been such a frustrating, unsatisfying conundrum to follow.
They came into the season with 60+ win expectations. They came into the season with at least four, maybe five players on the roster that reasonable non-Celtics-fan observers thought might play at an All-Star level.
Playing in the shadow of those expectations, the Celtics have been an up and down disappointment. Every time they lose, it seems, there is a referendum on practically everything about them. Who is the best player? Who is essential? Who should be playing? Who should be getting shots?
Who will even be on the team next year?
These Celtics have been, in short, not fun.
But they're relevant, even as they've been up and down. They have Kyrie Irving, one of the signature players in the league. Kyrie is, by any reasonable estimation, a top 10-15 player in the league.
Kyrie is not good enough, at least from a historical perspective, to make the Celtics one of the favorites to win the title. That would be true even in a version of reality where two of the best 3-4 players in the league were not on the same team.
Yet Kyrie is good enough to give the Celts a chance to become the next 2014 Spurs, 2011 Mavs, or 2004 Pistons. In theory.
Anthony Davis is even better than Kyrie Irving. If the Celtics manage to trade for Anthony Davis, they will become even more relevant. Anthony Davis is one of the top players in the league, if not quite on the same level as LeBron or Curry. He's an MVP candidate. He's a title centerpiece type player.
If the Celtics trade for Anthony Davis while holding onto Kyrie, they will be expected to win even more than they were expected to be the best team in the East this year. Whenever they lose, it will be a failure.
If Kyrie Irving leaves this summer for the Knicks, or wherever, and the Celtics don't trade for Anthony Davis, the Celtics will cease to be a "relevant" team.
They'll still be relevant to us fans, of course. But they won't really matter for the purposes of discussing which teams will matter in the playoffs.
Would that be the end of the world? Would that completely ruin the team for those fans that measure everything by title contention, or the possibility of same?
Even lacking relevance, the Celtics might be more fun to watch. The players themselves might play with more freedom. They, and we, might enjoy the whole experience a lot more.
Except when the playoffs roll around, I suppose.
I don't know. I don't have an answer.
I think I'd always prefer for my team to be in serious title contention. Yet in the NBA the list of teams that are seriously in contention to be competitive in the Finals is a very small list. This year's Celtics team, in a best case scenario, are probably a long shot to win more than a game or two against the Warriors.
Even in a normal league, i.e. one without a juggernaut like the Warriors, the Celtics would probably be a title longshot by virtue of the fact that they don't have an MVP caliber player.
If we can't have a team with a really great shot at winning a title, would it be better to have a team that's fun? That seems to enjoy playing together, and that we as fans can enjoy without the burden and the angst of worrying about whether they're going to shame us by falling short of the expectations we've placed on them?
Or is the concept of a "fun" team just a consolation prize for fans of teams that, in the big picture, really don't matter?
I'm interested to hear what people think about the tension between "fun" and "relevant." Again, I think we would all agree that it's best when a team is both. But that's pretty rare, I think.
