With the NBA season getting ready to start, here is one token basketball article. Don’t expect more.
I don’t care about basketball. I tolerate March Madness, and that is because college ball is a team game, complete with both game plans AND defense, novelties which do not exist in today’s NBA. Last season I was in the Philippines during March Madness and only caught the Final Four and Finals (both were fantastic: competitive and exciting) after I returned to North America. In the Philippines they adore basketball, but they only watch the NBA and PBA (Philippine Basketball Association), which features most of the top professional Philippine players. However, in light of Golden State’s historic year, I feel it is apt to have a brief look at Lebron’s year before dragging you on a trip down memory lane to remember the 1995-6 Chicago Bulls and to look at how they compare to last year’s Warriors.
Firstly, Lebron James became the youngest player to reach 25000 points on Monday November 2, 2015, with roughly 8:10 remaining in the game between the Cavaliers and the Philadelphia 76ers at the Wells Fargo Center. James finished an alley-oop from Matthew Dellavedova to accomplish this feat at nearly thirty-one years old. That breaks Kobe Bryant’s previous record of thirty-one and a few months. As Jason Lloyd of the Akron Beacon Journal noted, he had previously broken Kobe’s records as the youngest to 10,000, 15,000, and 20,000 points.
I have never really given James the respect he deserves. Or any respect. Or even paid attention to him since he was drafted. There is no denying he has been a very talented player throughout his career, a sometimes champion, and that he even found a bit of humility this year in response to Kobe’s retirement and comparisons to Michael Jordan. But if basketball is boring, he is the most boring. The best player on the court most nights, Lebron hasn’t won enough to get me excited, and has definitely whined too much for me to pay attention. Basketball players are predominantly freaks and whiners, but this record certainly puts him in the discussion of best ever. He deserves recognition as such.
The Golden State Warriors went 73 – 9 last year, and how they did it was astonishing. First they won twenty-four games to start the season. The previous record was fifteen and they seemed like they might never lose. During this run, they also broke the longest winning streak to start the season in any professional sport, the twenty straight wins of baseball’s 1884 St. Louis Maroons, one of the longest-standing records in all professional sports. The team also set an NBA record with their 54 consecutive regular season home winning streak, which spanned from January 31, 2015 to March 29, 2016. They were absolutely dominant.
Steph Curry broke numerous three point records this past season as well, including his own NBA record for three pointers in a season of 286; he finished the 2015 – 16 season with 402. He made a three-pointer in 151 consecutive games, also an NBA record. Then, on February 27, 2016, Curry tied the NBA record of twelve three-pointers in a game, and shares that record with Donyell Marshall and Kobe Bryant.
The 1995 – 96 Chicago Bulls were the first NBA team to ever win 70 regular season games, and dominated the entire NBA. The Bulls then swept Miami in the first round of the playoffs, defeated the Knicks in five games in the second round, and swept Orlando in the Conference Finals. It took them six games to defeat Seattle (whose incredible performance that year was entirely overshadowed by the Bulls) in the finals, where they won their fourth NBA title in six seasons. The Bulls had their weakest month in February of 1996, where they lost three of fourteen. Jordan averaged over thirty points per game in both the regular season and the playoffs.
My memory of the Bulls that year (and that was one of the two years I actually paid attention to NBA basketball) was that it didn’t matter what the score was going into the fourth quarter, Jordan would keep them in it and then run away with the last four minutes to erase any deficits they may have accumulated. Jordan did not break a number of individual records that year, the way Curry did last year, but the Bulls won almost every game all year and throughout the playoffs. There was no doubt from the first day of the season as to who the best team in the NBA was. The Warriors, however, had doubts cast upon them since pre-season. Through it all they kept winning, but the only reason to have watched the NBA playoffs was that there were no Canadian teams in the NHL playoffs. I do love sports history in the making, and it’s too bad they lost. However, losing in the finals to LeBron is enough to prove to me that no matter how good Curry and the Warriors were, they will never be Jordan and the Bulls.