There are no great NBA teams this season.
There are some pretty good teams - Chicago, Orlando, Houston spring to mind - but no great ones.The reason? Expansion.
This is not an isolated viewpoint. All around the league, people are saying that the NBA, in its rush to take advantage of an expanding fan base, has diluted its product.
The prime evidence is in Chicago. The Bulls are on their way to a 70-plus win season, causing some people to call them a great team.
Bulls forward Dennis Rodman, for one, won't be impressed if Chicago smashes the NBA record of 69 wins in a season, set by a great Laker team of the early '70s.
"This league is so filtered and watered down, we can beat anybody with our eyes closed, pretty much," Rodman said.
Charles Barkley and Larry Bird have expressed comparable sentiments about the way the league has thinned out; Bird even used the Jazz as an example, and people in the Jazz camp have a hard time disagreeing.
"You look at the overall picture, it is diluted to some extent," said Jazz coach Jerry Sloan, whose team is in Los Angeles preparing to meet the Lakers on Friday night. "You can get by with three great players on a team, and have a chance to win it all. Before, you had to have four or five great players, and some good players around them."
Compare Chicago, for instance, to the great teams of the '80s. The Bulls have two great players, Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen, a great rebounder/defender in Rodman, and then what? Toni Kukoc. Ron Harper. Luc Longley. Steve Kerr. Bill Wennington.
"They have some players who play their roles very well, but I don't think we're talking about the same caliber of player (as on the top teams of the '80s)," Sloan said.
Orlando is almost identical to the Bulls. The Magic have two great players in Anfernee Hardaway and Shaquille O'Neal, a strong rebounder/defender in Horace Grant, and good outside shooters in Nick Anderson and Dennis Scott. But their bench consists of Jon Koncak and Brian Shaw.
Now, think back to Boston's championship teams of the '80s. A frontline of Larry Bird, Kevin McHale and Robert Parish. Dennis Johnson in the backcourt. A supporting cast that included, at various times, Danny Ainge, Nate Archibald, Bill Walton, Jerry Sichting, Cornbread Maxwell.
"The talent level now nowhere compares to what it was eight years ago, and obviously it's because of expansion," said Jazz broadcaster Ron Boone.
What the NBA has done is add six teams since 1988. Some would argue that expansion only took away the bottom one or two players from each team, but that means more players in the league who would have been in the CBA. And when a team suffers a couple of injuries, suddenly that 11th or 12th player is the sixth man, or maybe even a starter.
In addition, the fact that there are 29 teams now means the great players are spread out more. That should make for parity, with more teams having a chance to win a title, but that hasn't been the case. Houston won the last two NBA titles, Chicago the three before that. Unlike the '80s, when the Lakers and Celtics and Sixers took turns winning titles and played some magnificent series, we now get the Rockets blowing out the benchless Magic in four games.
There are those, however, who think that expansion hasn't diluted the NBA. At least one, anyway. Jazz assistant coach Gordon Chiesa argues that there were always guys in the CBA capable of playing in the NBA, and that expansion simply gave them a much-deserved opportunity.
"Even on lesser teams, there's very good players," Chiesa said. "The reason they're not winning is they don't share the ball and do what it takes to win. Some players have a hard time breaking old habits."
In rebuttal, one might point out that expansion has prolonged the careers of those players who can't rid themselves of bad habits. A decade ago, they would have been out of the league. Now, teams hang on to them, hoping someday they'll come around.
Sloan said that expansion has changed the game from an emphasis on height to an emphasis on versatility.
"With 29 teams in the league, there are not that many centers to go around," he said. "You have to play a different brand of basketball."
What Boone worries about is talk of even more expansion. He says the NBA is already a league of guys who can run and jump but don't know how to play the game.
"What I'm concerned about is the lack of good shooters," he said. "Guys are more athletic now, but they're not fundamentally sound. How much more expansion can they do?"