NBA Finals, Again

It seems appropriate at this time to refer you to a post I made around this time last year. I think the six teams referred to in the first paragraph are the Detroit Pistons, the Los Angeles Lakers, the San Antonio Spurs, the Chicago Bulls, the Houston Rockets, and the Boston Celtics. The seventh team is the Philadelphia 76ers. In case you weren't aware, the Pistons and the Spurs made it to the finals by beating the Heat and the Suns, respectively, two teams who had no historical chance of winning the finals.

This year will mark 19 years with only 5 teams (the Celtics not counted), 22 years with only 6 different champions, 26 years with 7. Also, do you realize that in the 1980's (and the 1960's), an entire decade, only FIVE different teams even played in the NBA Finals?! 12 played in the Super Bowl and 10 in the world series. Okay, then, on the original post:

Well, I watched some of Game 5 tonight; I watched less because it was such a blowout. I enjoyed watching the Pistons a lot more than I ever enjoyed the star-studded Lakers because they play well together. However, I don't really have that much to say about the game itself. What I did note is that in the past 21 years, only six teams have won NBA championships, and slightly more impressive statistically, only seven teams have won championships in the past quarter-century. That comes out to 3.57 championships per organization. (They've also only had four commissioners in the past sixty years, but that's slightly less glamorous.) Now, in baseball, over the same period (plus one for the strike), there were 17 world champions; in football, there were 14; and 12 different teams have won the Stanley Cup since 1979.

Hockey is the only sport that even comes close in terms of domination by, not even dynasties, but by organizations. The odd thing about these statistics is that they don't measure "teams" in terms of a specific group of players, or even in terms of management, but they measure the protracted success of organizations. I haven't checked, but I doubt many of the personnel from the Lakers' 1980 team were around for the 2002 finals. In the NBA's 58 year history, the Lakers (both Minnesota and LA) have won 14 championships, and the Celtics have 15. That's exactly half the championships to only two teams. The recent numbers, from 1980 to 2004, come after the ABA folded, so that makes no difference.

The Boston Celtics won the NBA championship 8 times in a row; think about that. That's more than any team ever in the four major team sports here. The Los Angeles Lakers lost a staggering seven championships in the 1960's; they've been in 28 of 58 championship series.

The only reason I can come up with is that basketball has the smallest roster of the sports, with only five players on the court, who don't change from offense to defense. Hockey has the second fewest. Baseball has pitchers who rotate in groups of four or five, not to mention relievers, and football teams have as many as thirty different players on the field in various starting positions. So, losing Bill Russell or Michael Jordan means you've lost twenty percent of your starting lineup, but losing Joe Montana, Terry Bradshaw, Sandy Koufax, or Mariano Rivera, for example, just isn't the same. Even so, that still doesn't explain why the same basketball teams would continue to win year after year, decade after decade.