“Well-rounded teams like the Celtics that won a title despite not having a true blue-chip superstar.”
Calling a player who has finished top 6 in MVP voting each of the last 3 seasons, while making the all-NBA first team in each of those years, “not a true blue-chip superstar” borders on absurd. Unless you believe there are only like 3 superstars in the league, Tatum is clearly of that caliber.
In the NBA, only a few players can take over a playoff game late in the 4th, against top competition playing at maximum intensity. While Tatum has an excellent all-around game, he’s not in that group. The difference between the way Tatum manages the late 4th and the way Jokic does is painfully obvious.
Wait. Last year the Nuggets had Jokic, who was my example of a guy who can take a game over. In 2022 it was Curry - and you watched that series you saw what he did. Before that it was Giannis, a recent MVP who played like an MVP. Before that Le Bron. It’s an NBA cliche that the team with the best player usually wins the series.
If you want to define “superstar” as a top 10 player in the league, I won’t fight over semantics. Have at it. But in the NBA there’s a big gap between the very few guys who are legit MVP candidates - who can get and make their shot against top competition playing at maximum effort - and those who can’t. It really is a few guys. And while marketers have tried to push Tatum into the MVO conversation, there has never, once, been any serious analyst who ended the year saying Tatum was the MVP. Really, but for the 65-game rule, Tatum would have been 6th - second team all NBA. Really really good, and any team would want him, but not the guy who can be counted on to close the game.
That’s fair, I was being a bit reductive just using Nate’s chart - obviously there are various reasons a “superstar” might not finish in the top 3 in the MVP vote in a given year.
But I continue to believe that this definition of superstar is far too limiting.
More to the point, the Celtics have two people that are getting paid like superstars. Managing to find three other top-50 players on manageable contracts is the magic here.
That does seem to be what he’s saying because he already said The Ringer had Tatum at 7. It is probably true that most NBA champions have had a top 3 player
The most important number is 26…which is Tatum’s age. A superstar will never win a championship at 22 because no 22 year old basketball player is a good NBA player irrespective of how many points they score. Teams that draft superstars should understand that they won’t win a championship for a while and plan accordingly. Superstars need to learn how to play NBA defense and perfect their 3 point shooting and that takes time.
Do you know who Kareem Abdul Jabbar and David Robinson are?? And NBA started with Magic and Bird and nobody cares about anything before that. And Tim Duncan’s first championship was at 26 when it was his team and not Robinson’s team. The Spurs were a 60 win team before Duncan and Lakers were a 50 win team before Magic. Oh, and Ewing didn’t play in the series the Spurs won the championship.
It looks like Bird is the exception to the rule winning at 24, but Parish was the second best player and he was 27. And keep in mind that as young players improve older players get older and a big reason for the changing of the guard around 1980 was because the veteran NBA players were snorting cocaine which aged them prematurely and Bill Walton got injured. So Jordan only started winning Magic and Bird were past their prime. Winning Time and Jordan’s documentary made a big deal about the fact they didn’t even drink much less do cocaine.
They were still superstars. Kareem was hurt in game 7, and Magic, at 20, led the team to a championship. And Tim Duncan was not 26 for his first championship. He was 22; it was his second season in the NBA. Make sure you double-check your ChatGPT facts. Don’t be upset because your theory was proven wrong. Are you now trying to add qualifiers to your theory? Was Duncan not the best player on that team? He finished 5th in MVP voting his rookie year and 3rd the following year when they won the championship. He also won the finals MVP.
Jamal Wilkes finished ahead of Magic in MVP voting in 1981. But I will give you Magic winning his first championship at 25. So the two guys that popularized the NBA, Magic and Bird, won at 24 and 25 when cocaine was still ruining 30 year old MVP candidates’ careers. Now that NBA players take care of their bodies 26 looks like the earliest age a superstar can master the NBA game without cheating like the Spurs engaged in in the 1990s. Oh, Doncic will be 26 next season!
David Robinson was a superstar and it was his team that was winning 60 games a year before Duncan was drafted. So if a superstar gets drafted by a team with a superstar in their prime that tanked to get a lottery pick…and then plays in a fluky strike shortened season with everyone playing awful basketball…and gets super lucky playing against a team without their HOFer center and still loses one game to them…after Jordan retires prematurely…then maybe a 22 year old superstar can win a championship. Learn some history and don’t rely on ChatGPT! 😝
That’s another rule now that Ben Wallace is in the HOF—every NBA championship team has had at least one HOFer in their prime with the vast majority having two or more. 2011 Mavs had Kidd playing like he was in his prime and so that leaves 1994 Rockets as the only team with one HOFer…unless you count OJ Simpson who I seem to remember playing in the series. ;)
> The very best players in the league were once underpaid — worth considerably more than the maximum salary — but that’s becoming less true under the league’s new-ish supermax rules, which pay veteran stars something at least approaching their market salaries.
I'm glad to have more parity and variety of champions now, but this detail makes me a little sad - I want to feel like individuals can still be so damn awesome that a championship is almost inevitable. But it may turn out that, say, Luka never wins a title because he's just paid too much. We may need to reconsider whether having multiple championships is a prerequisite for being an "all time great" too.
Difference this year was the guard play of the Celtics was superb and were shut down defenders and quick to the ball. But really looking at the individual talent clouds the fact the Association was not strong this year to take nothing away from the Cs. On another topic, Nate are you going to write more about the June 27 debate ( know you did previously) and how the format, date, and the dynamics of Biden really going unscripted. While the format will cut off the candidates that might hurt Biden as it removes the side show and focuses completely on Biden. While many of my friends say Biden has done this, prep and all, if he could do it why doesn’t he hold a press conferences? During presidential debates getting facts mixed up is penalized severely. What are the chances on June 27 that the “ Emperor has no Clothes “?
Watching Tatum when he was younger, before his first trip to the Finals (in which game 4 might be the greatest individual performance ever!), my view was that if I had to build a team around one guy, it would be Tatum. I think I’d still take him first. He’s only going to get better, which is pretty amazing to contemplate.
Utter nonsense. Another NBA pundit looking at season long statistics as if that tells the whole story.
The Mavericks weren’t some fluke 5 seed who had a lucky hot streak in May. They were the best team in the NBA after the March trade deadline - statistically and in terms of on-court results - with the sole exception of the Celtics. They won 16 of their last 20 games (2 of the losses were games 81 and 82 where they rested their starters). Luka had an MVP season (just didn’t win because he’s a hot-headed Euro). They manhandled the 1,3, and 4 seeds in the West in the playoffs. If they weren’t so gassed at the end, and had Luka not lost his mind for 5 minutes at the end of Game 3, it might have been a better series.
The Celtics win is well-deserved. A fantastic champion…who earned their trophy by beating the best team in the West and the second best team in the league. I’d say that qualifies as elite.
I'm not sure what I'm missing. Suppose you have rows A-Z. If you get rid of rows A and B and rename, you now have rows A-W. So you lose rows Y and Z at the back, but the new rows A, B, C, etc. are still as close to the edge of the court as the old rows A, B, C, were. I don't see why you would lose any of the premier seats. Now obviously total capacity would go down by a few hundred of seats but I don't see that a big deal.
I enjoyed this recap way more than any NBA games in recent years. But I think you’re totally right, a lot of the Celtics success has come from building a complete of good and above average players, instead of going all in on a superstar. Very seldomly had a team found success when they have a single superstar, surrounded by below average players.
Yeah, the Celtics weren't lucky, other than a cakewalk injury-ravaged opposition in the East and then pulling at best the 3rd best team in the West in the finals. Other than that, no luck at all.
As a stats nerd and strategy junkie, I get it. As a student of institutional design who would love to design "fair" systems, I get it too: why should the glamour markets always get the advantage?
But then there's the basketball purist in me, the one who wants to see the sport become the biggest in the world. What hooked me (and most other die-hards) on basketball -- beyond its perfect mix of athleticism, skill, grace, and synchronicity -- was its narrative power. Not the endless GOAT debates, but the hero's journey, the epic duels between top talents, those mythic moments (see what's happening with Caitlyn Clark with the WNBA, it's not a race thing, it's a generation of fans latching on to a character). Sure, we've been told these duels are against the ethic of team sport. But let's be real, they're what pull us in. The lack of that thrill in today's game -- thanks to both on-court and off-court rules -- makes the league feel dull compared to the glory days from the '80s to the Heatles era.
Some of this is due to our fragmented attention spans and modern mass media. The league gets this, and maybe even fears it. They've been trying to hype up players like Ant as the next Jordan, but it all feels prematurely forced and cheap. The game has been watered down through its rules -- the overemphasis on the three-pointer and the lack of physical contact make it feel like a gimmick. It props up the statistical value of players who wouldn't even get picked in a pick-up game of pros.
The latest CBA, in a twisted way, doesn't even help underdog teams like the Thunder. Even if they wanted to keep their homegrown stars and go over the cap like the '90s Bulls, they can't. Sure, it discourages long-term tanking, but it also kills the joy of watching players and teams grow. We're missing out on the thrill of following a team secure its place in the story of the basketball. It's like we're witnessing the "middening" of basketball, the "end of history" for the sport.
I should add: some of this might also be down to the analytical complexity of the sport. Basketball, especially at the defensive level, is complex. But at the offensive level feels solved. Pairing that with the number of games, it lends itself to spreadsheet micromanagement to produce very _predictable_ outcomes.
As a contrast: such micromanagement has crept into the NFL too. However the smaller "inventory" of games and sheer brutality/number of moving parts give us enough chaos/noise to still have moments of wonder. Even the explosive offenses of supernovae like Mahomes and Lamar (notably very different strategic paths to their levels of excellence, something less common in NBA) have been countered to the point of those players re-inventing themselves. Does it make it harder for front-office execs and coaches to hold on their jobs and take credit? Yes. But it also makes for a far more compelling sport.
A nice essay, but in describing the Mavs as "good-but-not-elite", both they and the Celtics, by extension, are being sold short. Ordinarily, focusing on metric season-averages provides sufficient guidance as a measure of team strength. The Mavs however improved dramatically over the course of the season. In the last quarter of the season (ignoring the final two games where they sat their stars) they bested their opponents by 10.05 ppg, essentially identical to the Celtiics' margin of 10.1, a margin suggesting "eliteness", not "goodness". Of course, the rejoinder then is "it's a small sample size and all that". However, this measure explains the "anomaly" of the Mavs having handily beaten three successive "superior" teams on their route to the Finals. And bolstering the point, though the Cs did beat the Mavs 4-1, their average per game MoV was only 2.4 points (leaving the score differential variance issue aside for another day...)
Sorry in advance as a West Coast (San Diego) resident. MVP (and most/all similar) awards, have a serious East Coast bias. Been tons of great players and teams out West that get left out in any subjective "contest".
As an aside. It would be interesting to see how Fed policy is skewed due to Fed regions not being remotely representative of US population, as they have not been updated in decades.
Does Tatum age? It feels like we've been talking about how young he is for ten years now.
I know this isn't an 'ask Nate' column, but is there any data or anything that shows how much an nba player improves after year four in the league. I'm sure there are some examples of guys getting significantly better, but it feels like very much the exception. It feels like after four years you are what you are and will only improve marginally at best. (Even if you are just a itty bitty wittle baby boy—they're so cute at that age!)
Also wondering if you mean Tatum is better than Isaiah Thomas? Maybe he is, but it still sounds crazy to me.
Great insight. As a Pacer fan I’m hoping we can resign Siakam. He and Halliburton would be our two stars. With a better team around them the Pacers could be an upper echelon team. But only if…..
“Well-rounded teams like the Celtics that won a title despite not having a true blue-chip superstar.”
Calling a player who has finished top 6 in MVP voting each of the last 3 seasons, while making the all-NBA first team in each of those years, “not a true blue-chip superstar” borders on absurd. Unless you believe there are only like 3 superstars in the league, Tatum is clearly of that caliber.
In the NBA, only a few players can take over a playoff game late in the 4th, against top competition playing at maximum intensity. While Tatum has an excellent all-around game, he’s not in that group. The difference between the way Tatum manages the late 4th and the way Jokic does is painfully obvious.
Maybe, but again that’s an awfully restrictive definition of superstar. No wonder all the teams that have won titles lately don’t actually have one.
Wait. Last year the Nuggets had Jokic, who was my example of a guy who can take a game over. In 2022 it was Curry - and you watched that series you saw what he did. Before that it was Giannis, a recent MVP who played like an MVP. Before that Le Bron. It’s an NBA cliche that the team with the best player usually wins the series.
If you want to define “superstar” as a top 10 player in the league, I won’t fight over semantics. Have at it. But in the NBA there’s a big gap between the very few guys who are legit MVP candidates - who can get and make their shot against top competition playing at maximum effort - and those who can’t. It really is a few guys. And while marketers have tried to push Tatum into the MVO conversation, there has never, once, been any serious analyst who ended the year saying Tatum was the MVP. Really, but for the 65-game rule, Tatum would have been 6th - second team all NBA. Really really good, and any team would want him, but not the guy who can be counted on to close the game.
That’s fair, I was being a bit reductive just using Nate’s chart - obviously there are various reasons a “superstar” might not finish in the top 3 in the MVP vote in a given year.
But I continue to believe that this definition of superstar is far too limiting.
More to the point, the Celtics have two people that are getting paid like superstars. Managing to find three other top-50 players on manageable contracts is the magic here.
That does seem to be what he’s saying because he already said The Ringer had Tatum at 7. It is probably true that most NBA champions have had a top 3 player
Don't forget Payton Pritchard.
The most important number is 26…which is Tatum’s age. A superstar will never win a championship at 22 because no 22 year old basketball player is a good NBA player irrespective of how many points they score. Teams that draft superstars should understand that they won’t win a championship for a while and plan accordingly. Superstars need to learn how to play NBA defense and perfect their 3 point shooting and that takes time.
Tim Duncan was 22 and Magic was 20 when they won their first championship. Bill Russell was 22. Kareem was 24.
Do you know who Kareem Abdul Jabbar and David Robinson are?? And NBA started with Magic and Bird and nobody cares about anything before that. And Tim Duncan’s first championship was at 26 when it was his team and not Robinson’s team. The Spurs were a 60 win team before Duncan and Lakers were a 50 win team before Magic. Oh, and Ewing didn’t play in the series the Spurs won the championship.
It looks like Bird is the exception to the rule winning at 24, but Parish was the second best player and he was 27. And keep in mind that as young players improve older players get older and a big reason for the changing of the guard around 1980 was because the veteran NBA players were snorting cocaine which aged them prematurely and Bill Walton got injured. So Jordan only started winning Magic and Bird were past their prime. Winning Time and Jordan’s documentary made a big deal about the fact they didn’t even drink much less do cocaine.
They were still superstars. Kareem was hurt in game 7, and Magic, at 20, led the team to a championship. And Tim Duncan was not 26 for his first championship. He was 22; it was his second season in the NBA. Make sure you double-check your ChatGPT facts. Don’t be upset because your theory was proven wrong. Are you now trying to add qualifiers to your theory? Was Duncan not the best player on that team? He finished 5th in MVP voting his rookie year and 3rd the following year when they won the championship. He also won the finals MVP.
Jamal Wilkes finished ahead of Magic in MVP voting in 1981. But I will give you Magic winning his first championship at 25. So the two guys that popularized the NBA, Magic and Bird, won at 24 and 25 when cocaine was still ruining 30 year old MVP candidates’ careers. Now that NBA players take care of their bodies 26 looks like the earliest age a superstar can master the NBA game without cheating like the Spurs engaged in in the 1990s. Oh, Doncic will be 26 next season!
David Robinson was a superstar and it was his team that was winning 60 games a year before Duncan was drafted. So if a superstar gets drafted by a team with a superstar in their prime that tanked to get a lottery pick…and then plays in a fluky strike shortened season with everyone playing awful basketball…and gets super lucky playing against a team without their HOFer center and still loses one game to them…after Jordan retires prematurely…then maybe a 22 year old superstar can win a championship. Learn some history and don’t rely on ChatGPT! 😝
What about Darko? He won a ring at 18.
That’s another rule now that Ben Wallace is in the HOF—every NBA championship team has had at least one HOFer in their prime with the vast majority having two or more. 2011 Mavs had Kidd playing like he was in his prime and so that leaves 1994 Rockets as the only team with one HOFer…unless you count OJ Simpson who I seem to remember playing in the series. ;)
> The very best players in the league were once underpaid — worth considerably more than the maximum salary — but that’s becoming less true under the league’s new-ish supermax rules, which pay veteran stars something at least approaching their market salaries.
I'm glad to have more parity and variety of champions now, but this detail makes me a little sad - I want to feel like individuals can still be so damn awesome that a championship is almost inevitable. But it may turn out that, say, Luka never wins a title because he's just paid too much. We may need to reconsider whether having multiple championships is a prerequisite for being an "all time great" too.
Difference this year was the guard play of the Celtics was superb and were shut down defenders and quick to the ball. But really looking at the individual talent clouds the fact the Association was not strong this year to take nothing away from the Cs. On another topic, Nate are you going to write more about the June 27 debate ( know you did previously) and how the format, date, and the dynamics of Biden really going unscripted. While the format will cut off the candidates that might hurt Biden as it removes the side show and focuses completely on Biden. While many of my friends say Biden has done this, prep and all, if he could do it why doesn’t he hold a press conferences? During presidential debates getting facts mixed up is penalized severely. What are the chances on June 27 that the “ Emperor has no Clothes “?
Watching Tatum when he was younger, before his first trip to the Finals (in which game 4 might be the greatest individual performance ever!), my view was that if I had to build a team around one guy, it would be Tatum. I think I’d still take him first. He’s only going to get better, which is pretty amazing to contemplate.
As a Cavs fan with deep psychic wounds from The Decision, I find this hypothesis to be a very hopeful one ...
“…a good but not elite Mavericks team…”
Utter nonsense. Another NBA pundit looking at season long statistics as if that tells the whole story.
The Mavericks weren’t some fluke 5 seed who had a lucky hot streak in May. They were the best team in the NBA after the March trade deadline - statistically and in terms of on-court results - with the sole exception of the Celtics. They won 16 of their last 20 games (2 of the losses were games 81 and 82 where they rested their starters). Luka had an MVP season (just didn’t win because he’s a hot-headed Euro). They manhandled the 1,3, and 4 seeds in the West in the playoffs. If they weren’t so gassed at the end, and had Luka not lost his mind for 5 minutes at the end of Game 3, it might have been a better series.
The Celtics win is well-deserved. A fantastic champion…who earned their trophy by beating the best team in the West and the second best team in the league. I’d say that qualifies as elite.
I'm not sure what I'm missing. Suppose you have rows A-Z. If you get rid of rows A and B and rename, you now have rows A-W. So you lose rows Y and Z at the back, but the new rows A, B, C, etc. are still as close to the edge of the court as the old rows A, B, C, were. I don't see why you would lose any of the premier seats. Now obviously total capacity would go down by a few hundred of seats but I don't see that a big deal.
I enjoyed this recap way more than any NBA games in recent years. But I think you’re totally right, a lot of the Celtics success has come from building a complete of good and above average players, instead of going all in on a superstar. Very seldomly had a team found success when they have a single superstar, surrounded by below average players.
Yeah, the Celtics weren't lucky, other than a cakewalk injury-ravaged opposition in the East and then pulling at best the 3rd best team in the West in the finals. Other than that, no luck at all.
I'm not so sure this is "good" for the sport.
As a stats nerd and strategy junkie, I get it. As a student of institutional design who would love to design "fair" systems, I get it too: why should the glamour markets always get the advantage?
But then there's the basketball purist in me, the one who wants to see the sport become the biggest in the world. What hooked me (and most other die-hards) on basketball -- beyond its perfect mix of athleticism, skill, grace, and synchronicity -- was its narrative power. Not the endless GOAT debates, but the hero's journey, the epic duels between top talents, those mythic moments (see what's happening with Caitlyn Clark with the WNBA, it's not a race thing, it's a generation of fans latching on to a character). Sure, we've been told these duels are against the ethic of team sport. But let's be real, they're what pull us in. The lack of that thrill in today's game -- thanks to both on-court and off-court rules -- makes the league feel dull compared to the glory days from the '80s to the Heatles era.
Some of this is due to our fragmented attention spans and modern mass media. The league gets this, and maybe even fears it. They've been trying to hype up players like Ant as the next Jordan, but it all feels prematurely forced and cheap. The game has been watered down through its rules -- the overemphasis on the three-pointer and the lack of physical contact make it feel like a gimmick. It props up the statistical value of players who wouldn't even get picked in a pick-up game of pros.
The latest CBA, in a twisted way, doesn't even help underdog teams like the Thunder. Even if they wanted to keep their homegrown stars and go over the cap like the '90s Bulls, they can't. Sure, it discourages long-term tanking, but it also kills the joy of watching players and teams grow. We're missing out on the thrill of following a team secure its place in the story of the basketball. It's like we're witnessing the "middening" of basketball, the "end of history" for the sport.
I should add: some of this might also be down to the analytical complexity of the sport. Basketball, especially at the defensive level, is complex. But at the offensive level feels solved. Pairing that with the number of games, it lends itself to spreadsheet micromanagement to produce very _predictable_ outcomes.
As a contrast: such micromanagement has crept into the NFL too. However the smaller "inventory" of games and sheer brutality/number of moving parts give us enough chaos/noise to still have moments of wonder. Even the explosive offenses of supernovae like Mahomes and Lamar (notably very different strategic paths to their levels of excellence, something less common in NBA) have been countered to the point of those players re-inventing themselves. Does it make it harder for front-office execs and coaches to hold on their jobs and take credit? Yes. But it also makes for a far more compelling sport.
A nice essay, but in describing the Mavs as "good-but-not-elite", both they and the Celtics, by extension, are being sold short. Ordinarily, focusing on metric season-averages provides sufficient guidance as a measure of team strength. The Mavs however improved dramatically over the course of the season. In the last quarter of the season (ignoring the final two games where they sat their stars) they bested their opponents by 10.05 ppg, essentially identical to the Celtiics' margin of 10.1, a margin suggesting "eliteness", not "goodness". Of course, the rejoinder then is "it's a small sample size and all that". However, this measure explains the "anomaly" of the Mavs having handily beaten three successive "superior" teams on their route to the Finals. And bolstering the point, though the Cs did beat the Mavs 4-1, their average per game MoV was only 2.4 points (leaving the score differential variance issue aside for another day...)
Amen.
Sorry in advance as a West Coast (San Diego) resident. MVP (and most/all similar) awards, have a serious East Coast bias. Been tons of great players and teams out West that get left out in any subjective "contest".
As an aside. It would be interesting to see how Fed policy is skewed due to Fed regions not being remotely representative of US population, as they have not been updated in decades.
Does Tatum age? It feels like we've been talking about how young he is for ten years now.
I know this isn't an 'ask Nate' column, but is there any data or anything that shows how much an nba player improves after year four in the league. I'm sure there are some examples of guys getting significantly better, but it feels like very much the exception. It feels like after four years you are what you are and will only improve marginally at best. (Even if you are just a itty bitty wittle baby boy—they're so cute at that age!)
Also wondering if you mean Tatum is better than Isaiah Thomas? Maybe he is, but it still sounds crazy to me.
Great insight. As a Pacer fan I’m hoping we can resign Siakam. He and Halliburton would be our two stars. With a better team around them the Pacers could be an upper echelon team. But only if…..
Complementary*