The "Ring" Argument

[QUOTE=brandonislegend]:roll: LeBron joins 2 of the top 15 players in the league wins, same shit doesn't mean shit[/QUOTE]


LeBron is the best player of the Miami Heat. Bosh is not a top 20 player this year.

Championships are only meaningful.... to teams/players/fans, its a team game, its a team sport, championship is what it is all about.... but to measure a players greatness based on the number of rings is impossible...

This is not tennis, this is not 1 on 1........ hell even technically a player doesnt get the Championship trophy, the team gets the Championship trophy, the player gets a RING... as in: "Here, you were a part of this team accomplishment, this tiny piece is the proof / to remind you".... and not: "Here is the trophy, YOU won the championship"....

You cant measure a single players greatness based on rings, its completely about the context, its about the ROAD towards that championship, you can still be a winner even if you didnt end up getting that championship.... did you know that?

Ask yourself this, what individual was greater here?

Player A - Averaged 35-10-10, is the best player in the game, takes the worst team in the NBA to the Finals and loses....

Player B - Averaged 25-10-3, is not the best player in the game, takes the most stacked team in the NBA to the Finals and wins......

Player A was greater
Player B was "the winner"

If we didnt know about the context here then all we would see is:

Player A = 0 rings, "Choked/Loser"
Player B = 1 ring, "Amazing/Winner"

Fans know this, they aint stupid, i truly believe they arent.... but they have to, because rings might be the only way of trying to catapult a LESSER player over a GREATER player.......

Take Russell for example, "The greatest winner of all time" they say... Well you are out of your god damn mind if you think Russell would win more championships than Wilt if they had the exact same supporting casts.......... why? Because Wilt was a GREATER player..............

The [B][U]ONLY[/U][/B] way for you to logically & factually figure out who was greater based on rings is if ALL players had to work with clones of supporting casts.......... then YES, you can surgically, microscopically figure out exactly how impactful the player was compared to anybody else, how greater he made his teammates, his leadership and so on....

[QUOTE=Djahjaga]I think in general this is a fantastic post, but I do have my problems with it.

Take this how you want (and it will most likely be met with ridicule), but I think winning a championship in the NBA is so nebulous a series of chances that just because you don't win one doesn't mean you couldn't have.

This isn't to say that it's more luck than skill and execution, because it's obviously not, but, at the highest level, so little separates the teams that win from the ones that don't that it's ridiculous to say that someone like Nash couldn't win a title as the main guy. Ditto for Barkely or KG or Ewing or Robinson.

I love the distinctions you made and I think agree with even the ones that I've argued against my entire time as a serious basketball fan (the KG one is causing me a lot of heartache right now. I'm still going back and forth with it.), but at a certain point, I think the way we think about players and basketball itself is just so governed by little things that it makes no sense to make such sweeping claims.

It was thought that teams couldn't win without a dominant big, to the point where people made serious predictions based on that piece of conventional wisdom, but the Bulls came along and disproved that 6 times. And now Miami, as well. Chuck says you die by the three (something I still tend to agree with), but Dallas certainly lived by it. Maybe they got really hot when it mattered, maybe not. That's the kind of stuff I'm talking about. Same with the Bulls. Maybe they captured lighting in a bottle and really stuck with it. Maybe that lighting was Michael Jordan.

As much as I love stats (specifically APBR metrics), basketball, nor any sport (even baseball), is a science. So, repeated events can't be used to create any sort of law that can be then used to make flawless predictions. Can you win with Kwame Brown as your starting center? Yes, if everyone else fits amazingly well around him. Will it likely happen, probably not. But that doesn't mean it can't. (I think we know enough to say you can't win with him as your first option, though, obviously haha. There are clearly things we can know.)

Again, I'm not saying the Bulls got lucky. Or the Mavs. Or anyone that won. But if you really think that something fundamental prevented Nash from winning, as opposed to something trivial, then you're just subscribing to the BS that ESPN and the like perpetrate.

I know you said it's harder to build around these players, and not that they can never win titles, so I doubt you think that way (the ESPN, Lebron just doesn't have "it", whatever the f*ck "it" happens to be this week). Just giving my two cents.[/QUOTE]

The problem is that generally the best players of all time have had the great fortune of playing with great help. Was Shaq hard to build around for his first 7 years? Or Lebron...who is probably the most versatile player ever...was he hard to build around before Miami?

It is a slippery slope when you start to credit and blame players for the front office moves a franchise makes. Surrounding a player...doesn't matter who that player is...with all nba players is on a team.

The problem I have with some of the posts is that they just disregard the simple fact that the location and prestige of a franchise determines far more than the star player. Lebron is a perfect example of this.

Does anyone actually think that if the Knicks drafted Lebron that they would have struggled as much as the Cavs did to surround him with help? I hope not.

[QUOTE=DMAVS41]that is just stating the obvious. the best team wins...you could always say that.

don't really get the point.[/QUOTE]
Here's the point...

The whole "he had a good enough team to win" argument is fundamentally flawed.

People always say "why couldn't player A win with that cast? Player B won with less". Unless you're talking about the exact same season, that holds no water.

You could say dirk won with less than Durant lost with. The difference is that the 2012 heat was a much tougher opponent than the 2011 heat. It's not an equal comparison.

There's no "good enough". If a player isn't a member of the best team, there's no reason to expect them to win and there's no reason to penalize them if they don't.

Even with superstars, rings doesn't automatically beat no-rings. Some guys go their whole career without ever being a member of the best team. There's no reason why they should have a ring. A guy like Kobe has been on the best team in the league plenty of times. More times than he's won championships. He probably should have more than 5 rings.

[QUOTE=Lebron23]LeBron is the best player of the Miami Heat. Bosh is not a top 20 player this year.[/QUOTE]

He was when they first signed.