Continued from Part I

For starters: every single NBA champion has been led by a player on this list. So if your team does not have as its best player one of these guys, or someone likely to get on the list, your chances are virtually nil.

It gets worse, or better, depending if your team has one of these guys. It is not just about winning titles; it is about getting within sniffing distance of winning titles.  All but two of the losers in the NBA finals since 1956-57 have featured one of these superstars. (The exceptions? The 2000 Pacers and the 1971 Bullets.) So dig this: only 2 of the 108 teams that have played in the NBA finals did not have a player on this list.  There is more: Eighty percent of the 108 teams that lost in the conference finals over the past 54 years ? the NBA?s ?final four? so to speak ? were led by players from this list.

In the NBA today, the relevant pool of superstars under the age of 33 in the coming season and still in their prime are James, Bryant, Nowitzki, Howard, Wade, Paul, Durant, Stoudemire, Yao Ming, Anthony, Deron Williams and Roy. You need one of these twelve guys (or guys about to get on the list like possibly Rajon Rondo or Derrick Rose or Chris Bosh) to even pretend to be a contender. That means a lot of teams are going to be out in the cold, no matter what they do.

And that barely begins to capture what a gated community NBA championships live in. The closer to the top of the superstar 101 list, the more likely a player is to being the best player on a championship team. The closer to the bottom of this list of superstars, the more likely the player is on the outside looking in. Fully 102 of these 108 finals teams had at least a qualifying silver medal superstar on their roster; i.e. basically an all-time top 60 player.  And if a team does not have a player is his prime from this list, or soon to be on this list, they have but a slim chance to even make the conference finals, let alone dream about playing in the finals or winning a title.

It is a merciless system weighted toward the superstar.

Fully 33 of these teams were led by one of the 11 platinum level superstars. On 43 of these 54 teams, the best player was one of the platinum or gold medal superstars, the elite of the elite of the elite. In basketball, more than any other team sport, getting a player for the ages is essential for championships. Mere all-stars, even several of them, ain?t gonna get the job done.

And nearly 2/3 of these runner-up teams in the NBA over the past 54 years have been led by platinum or gold medal superstars. That means some two-dozen players have led 77 of the 108 teams that have played in the NBA finals since 1956-57.

To put it in even more stark terms: the 34 finalist losers that were led by platinum and gold medal superstars lost to champions led by platinum and gold medal superstars 29 times. We are talking King Kong vs. Godzilla. As a general rule, platinum and gold trumps silver and silver trumps bronze and nobody else is even allowed to play.

And that?s not all: Almost 1/2 of these final four losers were led by platinum and gold-medal superstars.

So if a team is serious about contending, it really needs at least one platinum or gold medal superstar. Who among active players fit that category?

1. James, currently gold and about to become platinum.

2. Bryant, currently gold and likely to become platinum.

3. Howard, currently gold and has a chance to become platinum.

4. Paul who is probable to be gold and has an outside chance at becoming platinum.

5. Durant who is probable to be gold and has an outside chance at becoming platinum.

6. Wade, who is about to be gold, and has only a remote chance of reaching platinum, due to his being 28.



That?s it folks, for the next five years or so. Bryant is about to turn 32, so that leaves five guys, two of whom will be on the same team. Williams and Anthony and Stoudemire and Roy and Yao Ming may surprise, but they are most likely to have outstanding careers as silver or bronze medal superstars. There is no shame in that. They will have impressive Hall of Fame company. But on their own it is foolish to think they can lead a team to a title without another superstar or two on board. Especially in the era of the Heat.

Looking out across the horizon at the college game, high schools, and Europe, there may be teenage superstars in the distance, but it will be many years before they dominate in the NBA. In the meantime, we have the superstars we have. And in the coming years, it looks like the Miami Heat are holding more trump cards than anyone ever has before relative to the rest of the league.

Let me be clear on one point: just having the best superstar does not guarantee a title. A team needs a supporting cast, role players, coaching and experience. Without that, even the best superstar cannot win a title. The point is rather different: It is impossible to win a title without the foundation of a superstar. That is the ante for admission. All the chemistry and teamwork and experience and role players in the world do not amount to a hill of beans without superstars. Not just any guys who make all-star teams, but guys who make the list of the glorious 101, guys who are a cut above the standard all-star. NBA history is littered with impressive hard-working 50 win teams that never come close to winning an NBA title. The reason is always the same: the best player on the team simply isn?t good enough to carry the team when the competition stiffens in April, May and June.

Part III?The New Math of the Miami Heat Era

What the combination of James and Wade has done is blow up the idea of a team having one platinum or gold medal superstar and then a bunch of really good players in the supporting cast. Had James gone to, say, the Knicks or the Nets or even the Bulls, things would be different. James, Bryant, Paul, Durant and Wade could have each had a fiefdom with a supporting cast. The NBA could have had a situation where there were four or five or six teams each with a legitimate shot at the title. It would have made basketball in May and June heavenly.

That is not going to be the case now. Look at the following table, where we note how many superstars there were on the two teams in the NBA finals every season since 1956-57. We only include qualifying superstars, so Gary Payton?s year with the Heat in 2006, for example, is not included.

Again, I want to remind readers that this system is not meant to be definitive. For example, Kevin Garnett had a qualifying season in 2009-10 as a gold-medal superstar, but he was a shadow of the KG who ruled in the preceding decade. Also the teams that still have active players will need to be revised as the players? status changes. If Kobe Bryant becomes a platinum-medal superstar and Paul Gasol becomes a bronze-medal superstar, it will make the 2009 and 2010 champion Lakers look more formidable as this chart is revised. Likewise, if Rajon Rondo becomes a bronze-medal superstar, historically a logical expectation based on his play and the team?s success behind him, the Cs 2010 team looks that much stronger. So this is an inexact exercise, meant to provide broad brushstrokes.

P = Platinum medal superstar
G = Gold medal superstar
S = Silver medal superstar
B = Bronze medal superstar
T = Total number of superstars

In the past, when confronted with the Superstar Theory, many fans instantly pointed to the handful of teams that won NBA titles without an apparent dominant superstar. These eight teams that have won titles without a platinum or gold medal superstar are often called ?ensemble? teams because they had a cast where the fourth or fifth player was not that much worse than the first or second player.

A close look at these eight ?ensemble? champions demonstrates that hoping to build such a team is extraordinarily difficult and requires immense luck. Two of the eight ?ensemble? champions were the ?70 and ?73 Knicks; they were led by two silver-medal superstars, one of whom, Willis Reed, barely missed gold status. There are precious few teams in the league with two silver medal superstars together.

Two other ?ensemble? titles were won by the ?89 and ?90 Bad Boy Pistons. But this was an immensely talented team with a silver medal and two bronze medal superstars. Again, very few current NBA teams outside of Miami can match or trump that combination today. Likewise the ?04 Pistons lacked a platinum or gold medal superstar. But they had a silver and bronze medal superstar. It wasn?t like they picked a bunch of guys up off the docks.

The three truly weak ensemble champions all came from the mid-to-late 1970s: the ?75 Warriors, the ?78 Bullets, and the ?79 Sonics. It seems clear this was a fluky time in the NBA that had never been seen before or since. The league was ?between? superstars, great careers were being wiped out or diminished by cocaine, injuries or ennui, and the merger created great roster turnover and instability. By 1980 the league was back on its axis, and the days of such relatively weak teams winning titles were over. They are not coming back.

Indeed, most championship teams have at least two players from the glorious 101 list on their roster. (The dynasty Celtics of the 60s had as many as five in a single season, topped off by Bill Russell. No wonder they could vanquish a Lakers team with platinum and gold medal superstars Jerry West and Elgin Baylor and, later, Wilt Chamberlain. If Bill Russell had never been born, those Laker teams probably would have won five or six titles in the 60s.) It is striking how many teams have two superstars of at least silver status.

This point deserves some elaboration. We are entering an era in which one team will have a soon-to-be platinum superstar along side a soon-to-be-gold superstar. One is arguably the very best player in the game, and any way you slice it, both are on any credible list of the five best players in the game. As noted both are entering their primes. I have termed this arrangement ?unprecedented,? but that is clearly not entirely accurate. What is the history of NBA teams that have two superstars of the platinum and/or gold variety together, and teams where there is a combination of a platinum superstar with a silver superstar?

There have several ?dynasty? teams accounting for 68 distinct seasons since 1956-57. They include: the Russell-Cousy Celtics; the Russell-Havlicek Celtics; the Baylor-West Lakers; the Baylor-West-Chamberlain Lakers; the West-Chamberlain Lakers; the Kareem-Robertson Bucks; the Bird-Archibald Celtics; the Erving-Malone Sixers; the Kareem-Magic Lakers; the Jordan-Pippen Bulls; the Barkley-Olajuwon Rockets; Duncan-Robinson Spurs; and the Shaq-Kobe Lakers. Every one of these ?dynasty? teams, except the Baylor-West Lakers and Barkley-Olajuwon Rockets won at least one NBA title. And, as noted before, the Baylor-West and Baylor-West-Chamberlain Lakers had the misfortune to play in the same decade as Bill Russell.

These 68 teams have won 28 NBA championships or over half the titles since 1956. They went to the finals another 13 times and the semi-finals 13 other years. These dynasty teams made at least the conference finals 80 percent of the time. Here is another way to look at it: These dynasty teams either won the NBA title or lost to a similar double superstar dynasty team 55 percent of the time.

So the odds look good for the James-Wade Miami Heat.

But it is even worse than that, unless one is a Heat fan who revels in a lack of competition. What makes the current Heat virtually unprecedented is that in most of the above dynasty combinations, one of the superstars was young and on the way up while the other was aging and on the way down. Almost never were the superstars peaking at the same time. In the case of the Barkley-Olajuwon combination, both were approaching their mid-30s and their games were in decline.  Frankly, if just about any of these dynasty teams had their superstars peaking at the same time?e.g. Robertson and Kareem, or Duncan and Robinson, or Olajuwon and Barkley?it is difficult to imagine how they would have ever lost, except to another dynasty team.

It was only the Baylor-West Lakers and the Jordan-Pippen Bulls where the two superstars were roughly the same age and peaked together. The Lakers lost six hard-fought finals to the Russell dynasty Celtics and the Bulls won six NBA titles.

James and Wade easily will be at least the equal of West and Baylor. As much as I admired the 60s Lakers, neither West or Baylor was ever regarded as the very best player in the league or elected MVP. James has won two consecutive MVP awards. Whether James and Wade can equal Jordan-Pippen is another matter, but certainly plausible. Leaving aside the matter of whether James can approach, equal or even surpass Jordan, Wade is simply a superior player to Pippen, anyway one slices it. The Heat also have Chris Bosh, who can be a top 5-10 player in the league. If he is, then we are truly in terra incognita.

Aside from injuries, the only factors than can derail Miami will be internal dissension and similarly powerful dynasty-type competition. I think the former is unlikely. These guys are friends and have played together on the national team. They are all about winning. If they wanted to just throw up crazy stat sheets they could have gone in a different direction. They understand and embrace the notion that they are expected to win six consecutive titles. Anything less than that will be unacceptable. It is not at all unlike what would have happened if Larry Bird joined the Lakers in 1983, or Hakeem Olajuwon joined the Bulls in 1990.

People lambast James for being a coward, and not having the guts to be ?the man? on his own team and kick Wade?s butt. That seems like either macho posturing or crybabying over spilt milk. It seems more likely that James and Wade (and Bosh) simply enjoy playing together and they want to see if together they can play the game better than any team has ever played the game in the sport?s history. They have set the bar high for themselves.

What NBA history demonstrates is that the only thing that can derail a focused and healthy dynasty team of this caliber will be another dynasty team. This is not at all out of the question. If Andrew Bynum is truly healthy ? a very big if, I know?he may provide what is necessary with Kobe and Gasol for a good challenge, at least as long as Kobe can play his A game, maybe two more years. Bynum would have to play at silver-medal level and Gasol continue at bronze ?level, and hope the match-ups would work to their advantage.

Otherwise, there is considerable attention to the remaining superstars, all of whom can see the writing on the wall. Expect Carmelo Anthony and Chris Paul and Deron Williams and even Dwight Howard to demand that their teams get another superstar or ask to be moved. At some point Kevin Durant may get frustrated, too. Expect the Thunder and the Magic and the Knicks to be burning the phone lines to get Chris Paul. History shows that the difference between Russell Westbrook or Jameer Nelson and Chris Paul is the difference between a really good team and a team for the ages. These superstars understand that they cannot defeat the Miami Heat on their own. When a new dynasty team or teams happen, it could create some exceptional rivalries. At this point, most NBA fans are hoping it will happen.

For GMs around the league, the new math is stark. Wade, James and Bosh are under contract through 2016. There is a distinct shortage of prospective superstars of the gold and platinum variety. If your team cannot get one or two of them, it is facing many years of futility. There is not another generation of James and Wades?i.e. a class of 1984 or 2003?entering college this year. The next wave of fresh young superstars probably won?t rock the NBA until deep into the Miami Heat era, if then. If history is any indication, talent of this nature comes along once every one or two decades.

For GMs with a genuine superstar, all attention must go to getting a second, by any means necessary. Otherwise you may lose your superstar to free agency or a trade demand.

For those GMs without a superstar, the options are not enticing. Put crudely, the choice will be to emulate the Milwaukee Bucks or Atlanta Hawks and spend a lot of money winning 50 games and getting eliminated in the 1st or 2nd round of the playoffs for four years and then going back into the lottery. Or taking the long view and accumulate young players, draft picks and cap space for better times down the road. That is a colossal roll of the dice, with no guarantee of long-term success, and a distinct chance of getting the GM fired. Neither is an especially appealing course?and most teams will try to work both sides of the street?but it is the basketball landscape we now inhabit.