The NBA’s super team era has placed championships over individual awards

There is more information in basketball today than there ever has been before. There are also more dollars in the NBA than ever before. These factors have coalesced to create the super team era.

Teams have years of evidence proving that the best way to win championships is to accumulate as many perfectly fitting stars as possible on the same team. This summer, striving toward that goal, a half-dozen teams threw their hat in the super team ring, adding players who increase championship odds while simultaneously threatening to marginalize their new teammates and potentially ruin their chances to put up numbers or earn individual accolades.

Those individual accolades are now completely at odds with the way NBA teams win. In previous eras, when the league had less talent, players and fans considered championships an individual achievement. We counted Michael Jordan’s six rings and compared them to Kobe Bryant’s five.

While star power consolidates around the league today, it’s clear that has changed. There’s a through-line of legends teaming up throughout the history of the NBA, but over the last decade the explosion of talent has made it so that nearly every team features at least one star-caliber player. In response, the guys with the flexibility and power to do so have joined forces.

Kevin Durant, who left the Oklahoma City Thunder for the 2015 NBA champion Warriors last summer, told Bleacher Report’s Howard Beck that he hopes eventually these changes will be normal. “I hope and pray that they make a decision that’s best for them, and nobody else,” Durant said.

This summer, the rich got richer: the Western Conference, supreme for as long as most NBA fans can remember, added four new stars. Paul George, Jimmy Butler, Carmelo Anthony and Paul Millsap all moved westward to join better teammates in better competitive situations.

George and Anthony will join last year’s MVP Russell Westbrook in Oklahoma City, and bring with them concerns about sharing and respect. Minnesota added Butler to the league’s rosiest young franchise. Denver found the perfect veteran for their roster and avoided the trade market completely, signing Millsap to a team-friendly deal.

Only Millsap truly made the leap of faith Durant talked about, but each of these players earned enough power in their respective locker rooms that we can assume they were involved in the mechanics of their respective departures.

In Houston, the brightest new face will not be a player leaving the East, but a former foe joining forces with last season’s MVP runner-up instead of opting into free agency. Chris Paul joins James Harden with the potential to render the rest of these Western Conference moves unimportant, if all breaks right.

And let’s not forget that the two best teams in the Eastern Conference, the Cavaliers and Celtics, added talent as well. Power has been redistributed, but the NBA is indeed top-heavy.

In the same Bleacher Report piece, former Nets GM Billy King describes the new championship math as simple, saying players are simply “doing what’s best for them.” No longer are they hypnotized by big individual prizes, and they’re armed with the freedom to play with their friends, win games and earn respect.

Yet we still choose MVPs. We know it takes more than one great player to make a great team, and we’ve watched as franchises have responded by constantly trying to find smarter ways to mix them together. We can better quantify the value of “glue guys” like Draymond Green, and we’ve seen the failed efforts to replicate his all-around productivity. Still, at the end of every season, a group of peoples votes to determine who the best and most valuable players in the league were that year.

How do we reconcile individual brilliance within this era? Last season, we saw two superheroes do battle for the MVP vote in an all-time contest. Behind them sat perhaps the two best overall players in the league, Kawhi Leonard and LeBron James. Those two top finishers have added All-NBA teammates, while the teams around Leonard and James mostly stood pat.

The players with the least overall support are the ones who win individual awards — we saw this in Oklahoma City and Houston last year, and we may very well see it in Cleveland or San Antonio this year. It’s simply become a competition of who makes the most of the worst situation. Last year’s Thunder were the worst team to breed a MVP since Moses Malone’s Rockets in 1982. The Cavs can squeak toward 50 wins while still showcasing James’s value.

Leonard and James sit second and third in Westgate’s MVP odds, behind 2017 Finals MVP and two-time regular season MVP Kevin Durant. Guys like Giannis Antetokounmpo and Anthony Davis fill out the list, along with Westbrook and Harden. The best players always force their way into awards conversations, but the realignment of talent has forced voters and fans to reconsider what greatness means.

It’s more likely that the players sitting alone on barren rosters without second stars will be rewarded with these accolades than individual parts of more competitive super squads. Of course, there are still broader team awards like All-Star and All-NBA that will reward excellence over value. But this trickle means, powerfully, that rings will continue to reign over conversations of greatness.

Durant is chasing LeBron is chasing Kobe is chasing Jordan.

Team-building has turned into an arms race — the 2015 NBA champion Warriors added 2015 NBA MVP Durant to the roster that finished 73-9 and one win from a championship repeat, and proceeded to win again in 2017. Several teams maneuvered their way into the championship conversation this summer, emerging overnight with the acquisition of a second or third elite player.

We move further from parity each July toward the league that modern superstars have tried to build.

Teams are smarter than ever, too, protecting their cornerstone players by resting them, managing their workload and allowing them to conserve energy through the regular season. Players forced to overextend themselves will win awards (like Westbrook last season or Durant in 2015), but players in the best situations with the most support will become champions.

After the Warriors sealed their second championship in June — Durant’s first — The Ringer’s Sean Fennessey described, in hindsight, the Finals MVP’s desire to join the Warriors as a “pointed decision to lean into history and away from loyalty,”

Perhaps we can count loyalty, too, as a gone-away byproduct of the league’s new hierarchy. But we’re nearing a balance where the best teams and players win, more often than not.

Since Bill Russell, championships have been the way we compare historically great players. But now, with the MVP award watered down and the pool of elite teams deeper, the ability to make the right decisions — and stomach the myriad consequences– is what legends will be judged by. Harden and Westbrook have still never climbed that mountain. Their individual greatness is unquestioned, and each has the hardware to back it up. We’re just waiting for what’s next.

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The balance the NBA’s superstars have struck has tossed away personal accolades like the MVP trophy in favor of a more reliable judgment system for them and their peers. The game now rewards excellence more staunchly.

Some guys have stayed their course, regardless of these changes. But the smartest, and the ones this era will remember, understand that the right decision is quieter and counted in wins rather than votes.