By BRENDAN HALL
Welcome to the National Basketball Association. where princesses and prima donnas rule the land.
True professional basketball fans envy the golden days where Larry Bird, Magic Johnson and Michael Jordan grabbed teams by the throat and tore them apart limb by limb. When players wanted to be “the guy” who would single-handedly conquer the league and propel themselves into the elite.
And all we have is the Three Amigos in Miami. Come on, their name isn’t even cool.
Nowadays the top players in the league cannot fight off the insatiable urge to form a “super team.” Instead of building a team and leading it to a championship, they need to recruit other elite players to help them because they can’t do it themselves. Some say that demonstrates selflessness, but it is really just a cop-out.
By forming these power teams, all players like Lebron James or Amare Stoudemire are saying is that they’re not good enough to put a team on their back and carry it to the NBA title, that they lack the killer instinct to wrench a championship from the great teams in the league. Instead, they have to call up their superstar buddies and gang up on the league. What is this, sixth grade pick-up ball?
One of the great aspects of professional basketball is being able to watch the game’s best players compete against each other on the highest level. Nobody wants to see the NBA All Stars beat down on the New Jersey Nets every night.
Upcoming players should look at Lebron James as the antithesis of how to go about winning a title. He made a mockery of the city of Cleveland and his teammates and in one hour went from the face of the NBA to its bad guy.
The problem is that powerhouse teams aren’t good for the league. The more concentrated great players are, the less franchise players there are to build teams around. A huge gap forms between the contenders and the jokes.
Hopefully, this recent trend will stop and upcoming players will revive the cutthroat mentality. As painful as it is to say, the NBA needs more players like Kobe Bryant, who can put a team on his shoulders and get the job done, and fewer Lebron Jameses.
That means you, Kevin Durant.