Absolutely no one would argue that Randolph is in Gasol’s league in terms of talent, attitude, or anything else. But there is one important similarity between them – they make almost the exact same amount of money, playing the same position, with contracts that expire in the same year. In turn, the team more or less swapped Gasol for Randolph, a couple of mediocre players, and some late first round picks, and rendered the only possible reason this trade could have worked out for them useless. Imagine they either still had Gasol, or alternatively swapped him this season for some real young talent?

Ridiculous. More than anything, it should remind us that that “total number of rings acquired” is a flawed measure of a players career. I think Nash is right – if Wallace handed Gasol to basically any of the Western contenders, they’d probably be the champs now, and Kobe would still be thought of as the guy that couldn’t win without Shaq.

Here’s a few data points:

As a starting guard in 08/09: 33 minutes, 15 pts, 7.6 assists, 4 boards, 1 steal, 44% FG, 78% FT

Last month of 08/09 (7 games): 32 minutes, 14 pts, 10.4 assists, 5 boards, 1 steal, 45.5% FG, 93% FT

Last month of 07/08 (10 games – of a total of 17 played that year): 11.5 pts, 11.3 assists, 5 boards, 1.5 steals, 42% FG, 74% FT.

Now he doesn’t shoot 3s or block shots, and his TOs can pile up – those are the negatives. But there’s only 10 guys who averaged more than 7 assists last year – Paul, Williams, Nash, Calderon, Kidd, Rondo, Davis, Wade, James, and Duhon. Eight of those guys will be gone in the first two rounds. Rondo is on a lot of people’s radars. And that leaves Duhon – who also happens to play on the Knicks.

But reports abound that they want to get rid of him, and that he got worn down last year while dealing with a bad back. And to put it bluntly, he’s not that good, nor that exciting. If the Knicks get Session, there’s an easy case to be made he’ll be on the court a LOT. If he gets the burn, he could win a lot of fantasy pools for people. Of course, he could flame out all together. He’s a high risk, huge reward pick – and one well worth bumping up your board, particularly if you have a mid-to-late round pick.

The reason for this is easily explained by pulling up the stats from last year, but with a slight twist. The numbers below are Dirk and Granger’s full season numbers, and Durant’s numbers as a starting forward – which was basically the last 62 games of his season after the SG experiment ended. So this is how they compared as forwards last year:

Dirk: 25.9 pts, 47.9 FG%, 0.8 3s, 89 FT%, 8.4 REB, 2.4 AST, 1.9 TOs, 0.8 Steals, 0.8 Blocks.

Granger: 25.8 pts, 44.7 FG%, 2.7 3s, 87.8% FT, 5.1 REB, 2.7 AST, 2.5 TOs, 1 Steal, 1.5 Blocks.

Durant: 26.1 pts, 48.1 FG%, 1.5 3s, 86.4 FT%, 7 REB, 2.9 AST, 2.9 TOs, 1.4 Steals, 0.8 Blocks.

Any way you slice it, those 3 players were really, really close to each other. Using Dirk and Durant as a starting point, Dirk nabbed you more boards and less TOs, and Durant got more 3s and steals – everything else was more or less the same. So it looks like a bit of a coin flip, until you remember that Dirk was born in 1978, while Durant was born in 1988 – and Dirk is heading into his 12th season, while Durant heads into his 3rd.

Why that matters is obvious – the odds of Dirk improving on those numbers are roughly zero, and there’s a decent chance they will decline. The odds of Durant improving on his are quite good (as they tend to do for players in their 3rd season, that are clearly the dominant player on a team likely not competing for the crown).

Dirk himself was once a great example. In his third season, he went from 17.5 pts to 21.8, 6.5 boards to 9.2, Similarly, the guy we haven’t talked about much – Granger – went from 13.9 to 19.6 pts, 4.7 to 6.1 boards, and 1.3 to 2.1 3s – and did so as a much older 3rd year player than Durant is.

So given that Dirk and Durant were basically a wash last year once you focus on Durant’s performance as a SF, and Dirk is at his ceiling – why take Dirk over Durant? It doesn’t make any sense to me. It would not be shocking if Durant jumped to over 30 ppg this season. It would not be shocking if he dropped an extra 3 a game. With the state of OKC’s frontcourt, it would not be shocking if he grabbed more boards. An extra block a game isn’t out of the question, nor is a further increase in FT attempts. If he doesn’t… you don’t really lose anything by taking him over Dirk anyway. The only reason not to take Durant over Dirk is if you suddenly expect him to get worse, which seems unlikely.

Granger vs. Dirk is a little bit closer – but again, Granger still has some upside left (at least in terms of points, and potentially boards) while Dirk doesn’t. He also has the advantage is steals, 3s, and blocks, which I’d personally take over Dirk’s lead in FG%, boards and TOs. But neither, in my mind, should be considered ahead of Durant – don’t give away upside for nothing.

Isn’t it entirely possible that LeBron could turn out to be Karl Malone, one of the greatest players of all-time who happened to be unlucky enough to play in the era of Michael Jordan?

I suppose it’s possible, but the argument just doesn’t hold up to even the lightest scrutiny. What’s happened in this series is not Dwight being better than Lebron. It has been Dwight’s supporting cast being better than Lebron’s. By a country mile.

Just look at the game last night. Yes, Howard’s heroics in overtime make for a great story line, but here’s another important stat – between the first six minutes of the game, and the start of overtime, Howard scored a total of six points. Six. Yes, the double teams he commanded helped free up Orlando’s shooters, but it’s pretty hard to argue that the attention Lebron attracts doesn’t free up his Cavalier teammates as well. And if Lebron had scored just six points during that same time frame, Cleveland probably would have lost by 20 or 30 points.

He just doesn’t have the option to not dominate offensively for 42 minutes, or even games at a time – Howard does, as he’s done time and again. Notably, he took a whopping 8 shots in each of games 2 and 3. In the wins against Boston, he took 12, 8, 16, and 9… in order. Could you see Cleveland winning a series if Lebron took 9 shots and scored 12 points in a game 7? C’mon. To have a chance in games against Orlando right now, Cleveland needs Lebron to score around 40 points, get 7 or 8 assists AND boards, and guard Orlando’s most dangerous weapon – whether they play the 1, 2, 3 or 4. Orlando needs Dwight to be a powerful presence /threat inside, score points when available, and guard someone who’s either basically immobile (Big Z), offensively weak (Varajo), or offensively non-existent (Wallace). Slightly different.

That’s the real story here. Delonte West and Mo Williams, the starting backcourt, went a combined 12 for 30 last night, and 0 for 6 from 3-point land. The Magic shot a whopping 45% from 3-point land, including 6 of 12 from Rafer. The first time the game was REALLY on the line it wasn’t Howard carrying the team – it was Rashard Lewis hitting that amazing 3. And if he wasn’t doing it, Turkoglu might have. Or Peitrus. Or Alston. Or Lee. This theme has carried on all series – Orlando has a lot of people that can score right now, and Cleveland doesn’t – with Mo William’s shooting percentages of 31.6%, 33.3%, 31.3%, and 33.3% in the first 4 games (and 6 of 27 for 3s overall) as the most glaring example. And as mentioned in the Yahoo! player notes, this isn’t great defense – Orlando is daring him to shoot. They’re just not going in.

We’re down to four teams in this playoffs. Three of them – Orlando, L.A., and Denver – have a superstar surrounded by an amazing supporting cast. Cleveland has Lebron supported by very little, relatively speaking. Some people seem to have forgotten that. The fact that Cleveland is even in the discussion for the championship is a testament to the fact he plays on a different level than everyone else in the league – and if he ever gets a real supporting cast (say, joined in the starting line-up by Bynum, Gasol, Ariza, and Fisher, with Odom et all coming off the bench) a dynasty will be upon us.

So while much of the league should be afraid of the Magic for the forseeable future, what they should really be afraid of is Lebron getting proof-positive from this series that his teammates in Cleveland just don’t cut it – and going to find some that do in about a year.

It’s simple really. I truly believe they are the better team right now, and if not for some idiotic out of bounds plays and other silly mistakes would be in clear control of this series. But I’m also convinced (hardly going out on a limb here) that Kobe can will the Lakers to at least one victory on his own in the next couple of games. And as I’ve watched the antics of Martin and Smith, they often devolve into some rather strange behavior that lies somewhere between acting like a thug, and acting like a child, at very peculiar and inopportune times. I don’t know when, and I don’t know exactly how, but I just feel that one of those two is going to do something remarkably stupid, at the exact wrong time, to cost their team the series.

Towards the end of game 4 was case in point. The Nuggets had that game all but locked down,  but they kept shooting themselves in the foot to give the Lakers a glimmer of hope – particularly with technical fouls that were giving away points with the clock stopped. While they still pulled out an easy victory, it just seems that they can’t help themselves – with Kenyon Martin being the clearest example. While I hate how the refs are calling the games as much as any one (and when Van Gundy is calling out the league on national TV, you know something is very wrong), his “tie up” with Gasol was stupid. His reaction was worse – and propping himself up on the sideline with that sarcastic grin to show up the refs was the icing on the cake (note: if you’re not happy with how refs are calling games, showing them up is not going to help). And as much as like how “Smitty” decided to play, he always seems to be teetering on the line of doing something stupid as well – as he’s already done a couple of times.

So I don’t know what it will be – a series of stupid fouls, some ill-timed technicals, an unneccesary flagrant foul, or an Artestian total meltdown – but I have this sense something bad is going to happen, in a game that’s just a little bit closer, and it will be the difference between winning and losing. While coach Karl has clearly said “those are things we’ve got to grow up and get by“, and with all due respect to the leadership of Billups, I just don’t trust the mental space several of the players continue to play from. I hope I’m wrong, but history just has a way of rhyming along…

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.