When LeBron James made his infamous Decision to join the Miami Heat 11 years ago next month, he was lambasted (fairly) for the crass commercialism of the televised event that ended with LeBron doing an advertisement for the University of Phoenix and (unfairly) for exercising his personal, hard-earned power as the greatest basketball player in the world to play for whatever team and in whatever city he wished. But for all the revisionism about the Decision in recent years, the lasting takeaway remains the most obvious one: Stars always want to play with other stars and will do whatever they can to make that happen.
Remember, James was blasted for this too, by no less than Michael Jordan, who said, “There's no way, with hindsight, I would've ever called up Larry [Bird], called up Magic [Johnson] and said, 'Hey, look, let's get together and play on one team … In all honesty, I was trying to beat those guys." (It is also worth noting that most journalists at the time did what I just did: Cut out the part where Jordan also said, “I can't say that's a bad thing. It's an opportunity these kids have today.”) LeBron was supposed to want to win a title on his own, not go to a team that already won one without him, like Dwyane Wade and the Heat had.
Even if he wasn’t quite the first to microwave a superteam—three years earlier, for instance, Kevin Garnett and Ray Allen joined Paul Pierce on the Celtics and won a title in their first season together—the way LeBron took sole ownership of his Decision switched the old way of thinking immediately, among players and teams. Stacking superstars together via blockbuster trades became the central organizing principle of the NBA, leading to Kevin Durant signing with the Warriors, Kawhi Leonard with the Clippers, and Anthony Davis to LeBron’s Lakers. Since then, nearly every title team, with the exception of the 2019 Raptors and arguably LeBron’s 2016 Cavs (they drafted Kyrie and LeBron!), has been the result of a collection of superstars. It’s quicker, it’s flashier, it plays to the NBA’s marketing embrace of player personalities. It’s just the way things are done now.
But the perils of the strategy have become apparent during these playoffs. Most notably, Davis’ injury and to a lesser extent LeBron’s doomed the Lakers’ title defense. And on Sunday afternoon, the primary issue with building your whole team around two or three players reared its ugly head again: When one (or two) of those players get hurt, you are lost.
Kyrie Irving, the most eccentric and fascinating of the Nets’ triumvirate, sprained his right ankle against the Bucks, taking him out of the game and, potentially, the rest of the series. (X-Rays were negative, but the degree of the sprain is still not known.) Without Irving—and Harden, who has missed most of the playoffs so far with “right hamstring tightness”—the Nets had no chance, and a series that once looked clearly in their control was suddenly tied 2-2. Game Five is in Brooklyn on Tuesday night, and it’s difficult to imagine that Irving will be ready to play. Harden is unlikely to be back either. That leaves Durant, really for the first time in his career (he had Russell Westbrook and briefly Harden in Oklahoma City and Stephen Curry and the gang in Golden State), on his own.
Everything had been set up perfectly for the Nets, who aggressively rested their three stars during the regular season so that they would be healthy for the playoffs. But this compressed season, with so little time off after the end of last year’s bubble, has been marked by a stunning number of injuries, and the Nets, it turned out, were not able to evade the reaper. Now, any team is going to struggle when they lose one of their best players; if Giannis lands hard and sprains his right ankle, the Bucks are going to be in trouble too. But the teams that remain in these playoffs, other than the Nets and Kawhi’s Clippers, have been built in the “traditional” manner, with draft picks, roster construction and an occasional supplemental free agent.
Yes, the 76ers’ well-documented Process of deliberately losing hundreds of games in order to get superstars via high draft picks is extreme in its own way, but it still entails building a team from the ground up. The Suns, Hawks and Jazz all have deep rosters with considerable flexibility. They all have great players, of course; that’s how you make it this far in the playoffs. But if any of those teams win the title, it will be a rebuke to the “give up all your assets in a trade for a super-duper-star” strategy of recent vintage. It’s worth keeping in mind for teams like, say, the Knicks moving forward. Superstars are key, but top heavy teams are not the only way to win a title. All it can take is just one snapped ankle, to one guy, and it can all vanish.
One of the most awkward MVP presentations in NBA history was in 2007, when Dirk Nowitzki had to be handed his trophy not on the court in front of cheering fans, but in an anonymous conference room.
The reason? Dirk’s Mavericks, a No. 1 seed, had just been upset by the No. 8 seed Golden State Warriors, knocking them out of the playoffs and leaving Nowitzki looking like a rather feeble MVP indeed. Later, when he retired, Dirk spoke about how unpleasant the experience was. “I wanted to leave. I wanted to get out, he said.” I felt embarrassed, I think, more than anything.”
The MVP that Nikola Jokic won this year will always feel a little controversial, not because Jokic wasn’t great, but because his win felt more like a victory for analytics (advanced stats people were insistent that a vote for anyone other than Jokic was embarrassingly stupid) than the individual spectacular play we are used to from our MVPs. Jokic is an NBA star unlike any other, brilliant but awkward and lumbering, whose highlights never feature him posterizing chumps or hitting last-second game-winners from the logo. There just seems something off about Jokic being considered the best player in the NBA, even if, statistically, he clearly was this year. His defenders often do him no favors either, as memorably satirized by my GQ colleague Tyler R. Tynes.
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It isn’t Jokic’s fault that the Nuggets just got swept out of the second round by the ascendant Phoenix Suns, who may finally be giving Chris Paul the team and the moment that has always eluded him. We’ll never know what the Nuggets could have been had Jamal Murray not torn his ACL in April. (It’s also of note that they got a round farther than Nowitzki’s Mavericks did. And Nowitzki’s MVP was retroactively justified when he won a title four years later.) But the way that Jokic’s big MVP season ended—with the Nuggets swept, and Jokic ejected in the final moments after a big scuffle which he largely caused—will forever be a part of how we discuss it. He may have deserved to win the MVP this year. But I bet, in 15 years, when we look back at it, it still feels a little surprising that he did.
Will Leitch is a contributing editor at New York Magazine, national columnist for MLB, a writer for Medium and the founder of Deadspin. Subscribe to his free weekly newsletter and buy his novel “How Lucky,” out from Harper Books now.