Hoop Thought: Rings For Regular Season Champions

The Utah Jazz are a dynasty, but the league's toxic focus on championships sells a great team short

As of the morning of October 30th 2021, the Utah Jazz remain the league’s last unbeaten team. It’s hardly a surprise if you’ve paid attention to league the last few years, as the Jazz have put together a remarkable stretch of strong seasons, culminating in becoming the league’s top team last year. Rudy Gobert, in a now legendary feat we will be telling our grandchildren about, set the all time records in defensive RAPTOR, defensive LEBRON, estimated +/-, and defensive Real Plus Minus.

All of the metrics invented by niche sports writing sites agree. Rudy Gobert and the Utah Jazz are legitimate.

So why is is that they “lose” the championship every year and don’t even make it to the conference finals?

Simply put, playoff basketball is broken, a hodgepodge of willy-nilly series that neglect to create a sample size that lets us truly find out who the best teams are. Who’s more likely to be a good team? Every team that wins 77% of seven games, or every team that wins 77% of 72 games?

Since the 2004 expansion draft saw the NBA move to a 30 team league, the combined championship rate across teams is just 3.33%. That mark is the the lowest championship rate in the history of the league. It’s never been harder to win an NBA championship. Simply put, it’s too random. It’s like depending on a lottery to decide which teams have done well and which teams haven’t.

So why is this how the NBA decides who the best team is?

As those who pay attention know, it’s because those results favor the large market teams.

The biggest markets in the NBA by population are…

1. New York

2. Los Angeles

3. Chicago

4. The Bay Area (San Francisco, San Jose Oakland)

5. Houston

6. Dallas - Fort Worth

7. Phoenix

8. Philadelphia

9. San Antonio

10. Boston (24th in population, but actually 10th when you consider the racism multiplier of 1.5x)

Of the 74 NBA championships, a whopping 58 championships have been won by these teams, or 78%. This number could possibly be even higher if Miami were in the top 10 population wise, but the high crocodile and jet-ski fatality rate of Floridians going back to the 1960s (which we now know to be linked to Havana Syndrome) has kept them under represented as a “mid-size” market.

Simply put, it helps the NBA’s brand when a team from a city with a lot of people wins the championship. The league dabbles in this populism, also known as Trumpism, as their bottom line for all financial transaction. You need only see how the league caters to China to see how authoritarian communism is making its way into the NBA.

Politics of sports aside, it’s simply not profitable for there to be a good team from the 122nd largest American city. If the Jazz got the respect they deserved, the NBA’s profits would take a hit. Jazz merchandise has never been a big seller as most Utah families have a sizable financial commitment to ordering from each other’s multi-level marketing small businesses, and therefore do not have it in the budget to order a Joe Ingles jersey.

Xenophobia in other markets had held back foreign-born Ingles, who is flourishing in the tolerant Salt Lake.

So how do we fix this? How do we recognize the obvious greatness of the Utah Jazz which is clear to rate stats (which are math, so literally science), but without upsetting the mob-style financial racket the NBA has going?

Simply, put, there should be a regular season trophy, but like European soccer (football) has. This give even more weight to the regular season, otherwise known as 90% of all basketball games during the year. Not only that, it would help police the toxic culture of online discussion and help journalists and verified bloggers steer the conversation in productive ways. Trolls would no longer “dunk” on teams that underperform in the playoffs, allowing us to discuss the NBA the right and moral way, by looking at clips of screen assists and drop coverages.

Just imagine that this time next year, the Jazz are hoisting Banner #3 into the rafters while the crowd goes wild. Who cares that they lost 4-2 to the Grizzlies in the first round? That was a clear fluke. The Jazz won the record that actually mattered.

Perhaps a troll replies to a Jazz blogger that Rudy can’t win you a championship just because he can’t keep up with playoff basketball. Now, where that Jazz blogger would once pound out an alarming and somewhat confusing screed against “NBA Twitter” and the biased Irish-Italian media of the East Coast, they can now smile and point to their 59-23 banner and remind the troll that Rudy Gobert is a winner.

I don’t know about you, but that sounds like heaven to me!

SamSheehanNBA is still not verified on Twitter. If you enjoyed this article, please contact your local Twitter employee and advocate to have him verified. Change happens at a local level.