I gotta preface this by saying I’m big on celebrating greatness for what it is, not tearing it down for what it isn’t. Don’t get me wrong I’m still a hater and if I don’t like something I’ll say it, but life is about balance. And that being said our sports discourse is way outta balance.
This is part 1 of a series of posts where I explore how and why I think sports discourse went left and how maybe it could be done differently.
I think the worst thing that ever happened to sports conversations is using team results to evaluate individual performance. We can watch games and see how a player performed and what impact it had, and we have statistics to record what we’ve observed. And yet culturally we keep resorting to this shorthand of team results as the main factor in evaluating player performance.
The best example is how we evaluate Quarterback play. We’ve seen Lamar Jackson dominate football the past few years. Day in and day out he’s shown he’s an excellent quarterback. Yet all of a sudden, his team’s results in the two or three weeks a year that happen to be the playoffs are meant to determine his status as an all time great? When we’ve all seen how well he plays and he’s given us plenty of evidence that he’s among the very best in the league today, if not THE best.
In the interest of fairness, I do think Dwyane Wade is a good example of when this tendency works in the player’s favor. He was, in his prime, arguably the best guard in the NBA. We loved watching a guard who got to the rim, wasn’t afraid to play physical basketball, and who was excellent on both offense and defense. It didn’t take a championship to confirm what we could all see with our own eyes.
Getting Shaq onto that Heat team ultimately got the team where it needed to be so that they could compete for a ring, and Dwyane Wade was excellent once the team got to the finals. But the timing of his performances and the rest of the team’s play and abilities got them there. He could just as easily have been dropping 40 points in the second round of the playoffs had the Heat not made the moves they did.
And this over-emphasizing of team results when we evaluate a player’s performance I think caused the super-team/big 3 bullshit! The players hear the way “legacy” is spoken about and want to accrue the accolades that supposedly make you one of the greats, because clearly your on-court performance isn’t enough. And yet still the team results are apparently expected to occur on the team’s timeline, never the player, or else the accolades “don’t count” because it was a “super team”.
I mean look at Carmelo Anthony — he never went to a “superteam” and you never hear fans honoring him for it. If anything he gets boxed into being “selfish” or “just a scorer”. As a sports viewing culture I’m not saying things need to always be rational but it starts to actually negatively impact the sport itself when the conversations about how good these players are stray so far away from what is actually happening on the court. We all want our teams to win but it’s frankly complete bullshit to tell us that a player isn’t an all time great unless they are a “winner”.