If he wins people will start the KD is the best player in the world, just watch. People are so in the moment it's ridiculous. Lebron is being talked about as potentially the goat but he didn't win with that trash in Cleveland either, he had to join the heat with Riley and wade and when he went back to Cleveland he had the Avengers assembled.
The fact is at the end of the day people remember winners. And if you win with one team and never jump ship you are forever immortalized with that fan base. Look at Jordan and Kobe..one team through thick and thin.
Various:
100% agree with the winner comment.
But some of the rest deserves attention.
MJ played with Washington and also detoured into baseball. During his detour into baseball Chicago was a high level playoff team.
MJ lost plenty early on including being swept TWICE in playoff series. NO player plays or wins alone.
But I'd still say MJ is the best. He pretty much introduced a different level of year round skill work and athletic develoment to the game and especially his team.
He pretty much invented Kobe and LeBron.
Kobe put in MJ level work and had the closest ML level skillset but he never won without A LOT of talent around him.
Kobe also decided to force max salaries on the Lakers knowing he was crippling that franchise and his own chance to win anything his finals couple of seasons.
He chose money over winning so no one can ever sell him to me as the very best.
But he might the guy I'd most want to be (minus whatever happened in a Denver hotel room).
LeBron dragged that CLE team he was drafted to from worst in the league to a deep playoffs team. With basically no help.
He had the good sense to leave and cement his legacy by winning. --see your last point.
LeBron has now been to 7 straight NBA Finals. That's simply insane.
KD is a heck of a skilled player (and still one of my faves) but this playoff run has been aided by him doing next to nothing(by star standards) this NBA season. Missed tons of games and never had to carry that team. They had a marvelous win percentage with him out. So no, I don't think anyone can call KD the best anything. He'd definitely lose any 1v1 match up versus LeBron if they had similar casts around them.
End of the day IMHO no one outside OKC should fault KD for choosing to win with things basically equal financially.
It's the league's fault not his that he was put in that position to make the decision he did.
The league and players association need to fix the issues with finances and roster mgmt.
The NBA is a game where is about your top 3-5 guys 99% of the time so money tied up in that top 3-4 players should be limited in some way even with Bird rights.
IMHO a team more than 15M over the cap should have to forfeit Bird's rights unless used solely for trade purposes.
The last thing the players association should focus on is higher salaries for it's top 20 players. Those guys have massive endorsement deals and will be rich forever.
It's the guys 6-10 on rosters who are getting murdered by the new salary structures.
Just foul @ will...don't get called.
