Two of my favorite teams have recently won championships, the Green Bay Packers and the Los Angeles Lakers. While both experiences were undoubtedly extraordinary and have a permanent spot in my memory, I realized that one was more special to me than the other. And if you know me, you’d be surprised by which one I’m talking about. The Packers’ Super Bowl affected me more than the either of the past two Laker championships. Part of it might just be that the Lakers win a lot of championships, but I think there are larger, more encompassing reasons why Green Bay’s victory meant more. It all has to do with process. We’ve all heard that the journey is half the fun, but I think in sports it might be worth even more than that. That’s where the disconnect between NBA triumph and NFL glory arises. The path to the title is so totally different in the two leagues.
In the NFL, building a championship team is a meticulously detailed, long process. Sure there are instances of teams going from worst to first, but the last team standing is usually one that has been trending in a positive direction for a number of years. A team’s management must handle salaries just right, draft extremely well, release good players that might cost just a little too much, and match the coaching staff perfectly with the personnel to build a great team. All of these things take time.
The building process is also what makes the NFL Draft such a spectacle, such an event. Teams have a chance to add somewhere between 5-10 new players to their championship recipe, and you never know which round a star player might come from. Players come from all different schools, conferences, and divisions in the NFL draft, and no one’s ever really sure how good they are until they step onto an NFL field. In the NBA, the draft isn’t about team building at all unless you have a top-5 pick. There are rarely hidden gems, steals, or sleepers in an incoming NBA draft class. The Lakers hardly care what happens on draft day, because they’ll be lucky if the players they pick even make their roster.
On an NBA team only five guys are regular starters, and whether or not a prospect has pro-level talent is pretty easy to judge. In the NFL there are twenty-two starting positions to be had, and guys get injured all the time, meaning drafting for depth is paramount. Smart drafting allowed the Packers to accumulate a great bench that fit perfectly into their scheme, which helped them sustain success even in the face of catastrophic injuries.
The NFL is so specialized these days that the draft is the single biggest indicator of team success. Franchises must get guys that fit their system, meld into a 53-man locker room, and complement the other talent on the roster. In the NBA you basically need to get the most talented player, regardless of system, and tailor your gameplan around that person. Calling someone a great system-guy in the NBA is code for untalented. Even if a team has players very familiar with their scheme, it won’t matter unless they are elite talents.
In my opinion the ten best basketball players in the NBA are LeBron James, Kobe Bryant, Dwight Howard, Kevin Durant, Dwyane Wade, Derrick Rose, Dirk Nowitzki, Deron Williams, Chris Paul, and Carmelo Anthony. Excluding Deron Williams, now traded to the Nets, all of these players are on playoff-level or even championship-level teams. The Jazz were in playoff contention before the Williams trade though.
Now let’s look at the best NFL player at each position: Peyton Manning, Chris Johnson or Adrian Peterson, Andre Johnson, Ryan Clady or Joe Thomas, Halogti Ngata, DeMarcus Ware, Darelle Revis, Troy Polamalu. It’s not a perfect comparison because NFL players play just one role on a team, but that’s also kind of my point. It takes much more than a single superstar to be great in the NFL. Only four of the ten players I just listed made the playoffs this past year.
In the NBA there isn’t much process to building a championship. Or, better stated, the process isn’t very fun to watch. For instance, the Knicks now have Carmelo Anthony and Amare Stoudemire, a legitimate foundation for a championship, but the process to get to this point didn’t really involve shrewd management decisions, meticulous team building, or brilliant drafting. What the Knicks did was shed salary for the better part of four years, accumulate some decent players as trade assets, and rely on the magnetism of New York City to forge their superstar duo. Most of the players the Knicks accumulated during this “process” are now gone and no longer part of the journey. They used the cap space gained from cutting players to land Stoudemire and dealt every decent player they had left for Anthony. Sure the team is sexy now, but the roster bears little resemblance to what it was three months ago, much less three years ago.
In the NFL teams build slowly. Even one, huge free agent signing—unless it’s a quarterback—does not guarantee a team turnaround. The Albert Haynesworth deal actually ended up hurting the Redskins. When the 49ers signed Nate Clements to an $80 million contract, they effectively sealed their grim fate for the next few years.
That rarely happens in the NBA. If you sign LeBron James, your team is instantly competitive. Not just that, it can vie for a championship. Not too long ago the Heat were 15-67. With the signing of two players, they now have the second best record in the East. When the Lakers traded for Pau Gasol (for an expiring contract and some picks) the Lakers immediately went from 7 or 8 seed to making three straight Finals appearances. One player can mean everything in professional basketball; in the NFL one player might mean one extra win, or just as easily, could make your team worse.
The other issue with the NBA is that bigger markets with more money can simply afford to pay players more and are more attractive to free agents in the first place. In the NFL there is a hard salary cap meaning teams essentially have an equal amount of money to pay out to players. This creates a level of parity which makes the detailed team-building process necessary. In football, if your team stinks, you likely have cap room because you aren’t paying elite players. This means you have more money to pay free agents and improve your team, whereas good teams likely have high payrolls and thus have less money to shell out. In basketball the Lakers and Knicks can simply pay the league’s luxury tax and spend to their hearts’ content. This makes the race for NBA free agents unfair on two fronts. First, these guys want to go to bigger markets in the first place, and second, those big markets can pay them more.
So when we think about why the NFL is more popular than the NBA, we need to think about more than just the difference in the games themselves. In the NBA you’re either bad while you’re waiting to hopefully acquire those one or two transcendent players, or you already have those players and you’re competing for championships.
In the NFL, there’s always a sense of hope yet never a sense of invincibility. No lottery style draft will take the top pick away from the worst team. No singular signing will crush one team and anoint another for a decade. No team will commandeer the league’s best 2-3 players and cripple the rest of its division. In the NFL you’ll have to draft, have to wait, and have to build, but at least every team in the league knows they are building toward something and not waiting idly to be crowned or crushed.
--from Adam
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