The fixation that the NBA has on championships is bad for the game

CHARLOTTE, NC - APRIL 28: LeBron James
CHARLOTTE, NC - APRIL 28: LeBron James /
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Michael Jordan’s perpetuation of the ring culture with his reasons for why he ranks Kobe Bryant ahead of LeBron James is bad for basketball.

Michael Jordan just said that Kobe Bryant is better than LeBron James because Kobe has five NBA championships compared to James’ three. That’s pretty ignorant for His Airness to say.

That is, unless he also believes Bill Russell is better than he was because Russell has eleven rings compared to Jordan’s six. At least then, Jordan would be consistent in his message.

Jordan, whose comments sound much like Scottie Pippen and Charles Barkley’s opinions on the subject.

It’s interesting to consider where Pippen, who while one of the best all-around players the game had ever seen, is a career sidekick, would rank himself all-time considering that he never won a ring without Jordan. Behind Robert Horry and his seven rings? Technically, shouldn’t Jordan and his six rings be behind Horry too?

Where does Barkley, who never won a ring, rank himself? Behind Derek Fisher and his five rings?

Wait, is Fisher a better all-time player than James too?

You would think that players would have more of an understanding that championships are a team award rather than an individual accolade considering how eleven rings have went to Russell, who had the best team in the league for a decade, and eleven rings went to former head coach Phil Jackson, who implemented an offense and enforced a style of defense that made his teams formidable from the 1990s through the 2000s.

Seven of the last NBA Finals have featured James, who is the best player in the world but also has teamed up with a four of the best basketball players in the league to reach the Finals. He’s faced and lost to the Dallas Mavericks, San Antonio Spurs and Golden State Warriors in that time. Two of those teams have dynastic traits, while the Mavericks were a team devoid of multiple superstars but were a championship-caliber club with players who fit on and off-the-court.

While Jordan won six championships, he’d hate if people put caveats on his victories as Jordan consistently faced lesser teams in the Finals, unlike James. James has had the better team twice in eight Finals appearances and lost once, to that Dallas Mavericks team.

It would seem like there’s a lack of respect given to James that’s unwarranted. Perhaps it’s because there are those individuals that hate him for teaming up with other talented players to win a championships, as if any player has ever won a ring alone. Perhaps it’s because James failed to live up to expectations in the 2011 NBA Finals.

Could it also be that those players don’t want to admit that what they’re seeing in James is a transcendent force never seen before. A player who can score in volume like Jordan, pass like Magic Johnson, dominate inside like Shaquille O’Neal and has the basketball IQ of a head coach. A player whose physique, physicality and ferocity allow him to look like a man amongst boys.

Jordan’s comments about Bryant being better than James, despite James having surpassed Bryant in nearly every statistical category and having better numbers in terms of both traditional and advanced metrics and it being plain to see from the human eye that James is the more dynamic player, is bad for basketball.

The whole idea that rings trump everything else is bad for basketball. That doesn’t mean that rings are irrelevant but that there are more factors to determine where a player ranks all-time than the number of championship rings they’ve won in their career.

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