So what did the Toronto Raptors, now down and doomed three games to zero to LeBron James and the Cleveland Cavs, face in even getting to the NBA Finals this year?
Well, let's look at NBA teams that have won without a superstar/'Top 67' player...
I expanded the NBA's Top 50 at 50 list because it came out more than 20 years ago or so, adding players rather than subtracting and adding to the top 50. I came up with 17 more. So the next 17 for me would be the following:
LeBron James, Steph Curry, Kevin Durant, Chris Paul, Steve Nash, Kevin Garnett, Paul Pierce, Ray Allen, Tim Duncan, Dirk Nowitzki, Reggie Miller, Dwyane Wade, Tony Parker, Russell Westbrook, James Harden, Jason Kidd, Dwight Howard...
Unh...
Last team to make a Finals without a Top 67 was... the Detroit Pistons in 2005.
And the last team to win without a Top 67 was those same Pistons in 2004.
But that team had All-Star players having career years (Ben Wallace, Richard Hamilton, and Chauncey Billups), one freak who could have been an All-Star if he felt like it (Rasheed Wallace), a great coach (Larry Brown) and a completely dysfunctional Lakers team to beat in the Finals...
Before that?
Maybe the 1978-79 Seattle Supersonics. But they had one player better than anyone the Raps have this year (Dennis Johnson) and two really good players (Paul Silas and Gus Johnson). They also played a team that had beaten them the year before, the Bullets, which had two HoF/borderline top 67ers of its own (Wes Unseld and Elvin Hayes were on the top 50 at 50 list) but not much else.
Before that?
Um, that's it.
Even teams that make the Finals without a superstar are rare.
Even the 40-42 Houston Rockets of 1980-81 who lost to Bird's Celtics, the only Finalist in NBA history with a losing record, had Top 50 Moses Malone in his prime. The Portland Trailblazers, who lost to the Bulls and the Pistons in the Finals in the early 1990's? Clyde Drexler was a Top 50 at 50.
So yeah. Top-heavy league.
The Whore of Akron: One Man's Search for the Soul of LeBron James by Scott Raab (2011): Scabrous, totally involving screed/lament by 59-year-old writer Raab about LeBron James, Cleveland sports, fandom, and the wonders of parenthood. NBA star (and Akron native) LeBron James put on one of the most baffling, horrible performances in sports history when he turned his 2010 free-agency decision into a one-hour ESPN show called The Decision.
There and then, after weeks of build-up, , he announced that he would leave the Cleveland Cavaliers, for whom he'd played his first seven professional seasons, for the nouveau-riche Miami Heat. LeBron is the central foil here, though Cleveland, sports fandom, fathers, and loyalty are Raab's larger themes.
Decaying, depopulating, Rust Belt Cleveland hasn't won a professional sports title since Jim Brown's Cleveland Browns did so in 1964. And then hometown hero James got drafted by the usually moribund Cleveland Cavaliers, with James soon becoming the best basketball player in the NBA. And then he left as a free agent, which might have been liveable without the televised spectacle of The Decision, a sporting event unimaginable until the last ten years -- a sporting event involving no actual sports but plenty of humiliation and hubris.
Raab decided to follow James's subsequent first year in Miami with the announced intention of writing a book. The Miami Heat soon made it clear they wouldn't grant him press credentials despite his twenty-five years of writing for magazines that include GQ and Esquire. Raab didn't care -- actually, the weaselly Miami PR people get skewered in the book along with everyone else. What would happen to Miami and LeBron at the end of that 2010-2011 season couldn't have been scripted: it was too ridiculous, too appropriate.
Raab writes with profane, obscene elegance and wit. This is, as the cliche goes, laugh-out-loud funny. But it also lays bare Raab's own demons with honesty and clarity, along with the (much) different demons of the celebrity and money-obsessed hellhole that American sports has become. Like Raab, I ended up feeling a wee bit sorry for the gormless, weightless manchild James, a basketball player whose ability to quit during a tough game baffles other great basketball players past and present. He's a grotesque, over-inflated Bartleby the Scrivener, only with more public whining and no self-knowledge. Highly recommended.
