The NBA is supposed to be all about winning championships – that’s what every GM says they are trying to do, and every fan wants their team to achieve. And each season the moves that are or aren’t made are heavily scrutinized with this single objective in mind (unless you are a Clippers fan, of course) – does it give us a shot to win the title this season, or sometime in the relatively near future?
But the problem is that if you look at NBA history, almost every move most teams make is entirely irrelevant in the pursuit of this goal. The recipe for a championship, far more often than not, is to have one of the *real* alpha dogs in the league (one of the top few players), combined with either at least one other superstar – or potentially a small collection of star talent. So long as one competitor has that recipe working, others generally do not have a chance – and getting one of those alpha dogs is either impossible, or comes down to pure luck, for most teams.
Just take a look at the history of the last few decades. There’s Magic and Bird with some Hall of Fame talent surrounding them. There’s Michael Jordan and his six rings – with a squad around him good enough to seriously compete in the playoffs even when he took a couple of years off. There’s The Dream and Drexler. Shaq and Kobe (or Kobe and Shaq, if you prefer). There’s Duncan being so good that even a young Parker and Ginobili were enough for a few rings, and while the Garnett/Pierce/Allen combo strayed from the formula a bit, it’s more similar than not (with Garnett being the alpha dog galvanizing the defense, and Pierce and Allen sharing crunch-time killer roles). For the most part, if you don’t start the season with one of the alpha d0gs, there is just no way you can realistically compete for a ring if someone else has the model right.
But then, there’s Chauncey Billups. For six straight seasons, he was the point guard for a team that didn’t follow this traditional mold – no real alpha dog to be found, even in relation to the one major exception from the previous few decades (the Isiah-led Detroit Pistons). Not only did they win a title, but they were in serious contention for it for six-straight seasons – you could realistically believe that they could win it all in each one of them. Then this season he ports over to a Nuggets team that has never moved beyond the first round of the playoffs, and has just given away a center long in the defensive player of the year discussions – and they realistically have a chance to win it all again. That’s the kind of story that can give every fan in the NBA some hope.
Now I’m in no way crediting all of this success just to Chauncey. While I think he’s been a big part of it, there’s been a lot of luck involved. Notably, the Pistons enjoyed their run in a remarkably weak Eastern Conference – if they’d been playing in the West I don’t think we’d think nearly as much of them now. And he had the good fortune of leaving the team right as it was on the cusp of falling from it’s perch (i.e. Rasheed Wallace et all going A.W.O.L), and joining a team poised for a rise with a young star (Carmelo) ready to break out. Legacies are often about having the right kind of luck to go with your talent, and Chauncey seems to have had that in spades.
I could go into that more, but the reality of the situation is not what I’m interested in. Rather, it’s that the story of Chauncey’s last seven years in the NBA is what, more than anything, can give fans of every team that doesn’t have one of the alpha-dogs hope. Maybe, just maybe, our team will be the one that has the magic formula that will allow us to take down the teams led by the likes of Lebron, Wade, and someday soon Durant – even if they end up with the types of supporting casts the legends enjoyed during their careers.
And that’s why I might potentially consider him the most important player in the NBA. While the league loves it’s stars, and I’m sure Stern is salivating over the prospect of a Cavs-Lakers finals, it’s the presence of the Nuggets in the competition that gives every fan that little bit of hope – which rightly or wrongly, can be seen as flowing out of the presence of a player of Billup’s caliber. Maybe your team can’t get a Kobe or a Lebron, but maybe they already have the player that will become the next Billups – because the fact his career started out so poorly helps in the hope department too.
