Big 3’s are so 2010. Welcome to the new generation of Big 6’s. LaMarcus Aldridge sent shockwaves through the NBA when it was reported Saturday that he would be joining the Brooklyn Nets on a 1 year veteran’s minimum following his buyout with the Spurs. Initially linked to Miami, Aldridge’s camp evidently liked what they heard from the Nets more than their Eastern Conference rivals.
If earning himself a championship ring was the biggest driving factor for Aldridge then Brooklyn was a no brainer. Already the Vegas favourite to hoist the Larry O’Brien trophy at +280 odds, Brooklyn now looks as close to a lock to make the Finals as a team can be (most sports books have yet to release their “post Aldridge signing” betting odds, but you can rest assured that you won’t be finding anything close to +280 moving forward).
Further complicating matters is the fact that LeBron is out with a high ankle sprain, and Embiid is currently sidelined with a left knee injury, meaning that two of the biggest threats to Brooklyn are suddenly looking extremely vulnerable. Yes Miami acquired Victor Oladipo at the trade deadline, and Giannis is still playing at an all world level in Milwaukee, but each of their roads to the Finals just got significantly tougher Saturday afternoon.
If previous iterations of Big 3’s took a while to gel before winning a championship together, then it would stand to reason that a Big 6 would ostensibly cut this wait time in half, right? At least that’s the logic Brooklyn is banking on by bringing L-A to the Barclays Center.
You’d be hard pressed to find a team in NBA history whose resume stacks up to what the Nets have assembled for this title run. Durant, Irving, Griffin, Harden, Jordan, and Aldridge boast a combined 41 All-Star Appearances, and 31 All-NBA honours between them. They also now have 3 of the 6 highest scoring active NBA players on the all time points list in Harden, Durant, and Aldridge (James, Anthony, and Westbrook would be the other 3). How they ultimately play together when all 6 are healthy remains to be seen, but on paper that’s an imposing lineup.
Aldridge will reportedly see most of his time at centre which was arguably the team’s one weakness over the course of the season. This move will allow Jordan to slide to the bench and become more of a role player/insurance policy if one of the starters gets in foul trouble. It will also take some of the pressure off second year forward Nicolas Claxton who was quietly having a nice season up to this point as well. Ultimately it makes Brooklyn a deeper team, and depth is something the Nets haven’t enjoyed much of this year with Durant out for long stretches of time due to injury and Irving being less than “all in” in 2021.
Yet as massive a signing as this is in terms of how it affects the Eastern Conference landscape, the real losers in all of this is likely the Lakers. Not only did they recently lose LeBron to the aforementioned high ankle sprain, but Anthony Davis has also been limited to just 23 games this season. With their two superstars battling injuries, the Lakers front office made a hard push to sign Aldridge, reportedly meeting with his camp several times over the last few days. Their efforts however, fell short once more, bringing back memories of their failed “Bring L-A to LA” attempt in 2015.
Adding insult to injury is the fact that he ultimately wound up with their biggest threat (on paper) to repeating this year. Aldridge joining Brooklyn will make 6 bonafide stars (you can argue amongst yourselves about how much some of them may have left in the tank) with Bed-Stuy across their chests for the stretch run and playoffs. Keep in mind, this is taking place in the same league that a mere 10 years ago vetoed the Chris Paul trade due to competitive balance issues (though David Stern would later try to spin it as Dell Demps not having permission to make that trade as the reason it didn’t occur). Something Lakers fans were quick to point out in the aftermath of the Aldridge signing.
Which begs the question, are superteams now the only way to compete in the modern NBA? And if so, when did this become the new norm?
If we go back through the list of NBA champions from the past decade, only four stand out as being teams built through the draft: Dallas (2011), San Antonio (2014), Golden State’s first title (2015) and Toronto (2019). The rest, ironically, feature two of the players who have been most involved in superteams over the course of their HOF careers in KD and LeBron. That 40% rate is pretty similar to the 2001-2010 stretch as well depending on which way your view of the Lakers Shaq/Pau titles lean. Which means you can point to right around the year 2000 as the tipping point for when the “super team” concept became in vogue.
For those of you doing the math at home, if we take the number 2000 and subtract 18 from it (the age players would be coming out of High School) you get 1982. Coincidentally, the 1980’s are precisely when two gentlemen by the names of Phil Knight and Sonny Vaccaro took a vested interest in the AAU basketball scene. They began signing AAU and College coaches to shoe contracts, to ensure specific basketball programs would be wearing their shoes. Other companies took notice, and it wasn’t long before AAU basketball teams began having major shoe companies sponsor their teams and shower them in gear.
Now, if you’re a young family of modest means, who happens to have a son or daughter who is exceptionally talented at basketball, you have a choice to make. Do you have your child play on a team where they have to purchase their own shoes & clothes, and play a local schedule? Or do you get them on a team where they’ll get more gear than Foot Locker and get shuttled across the country playing on exclusive “circuits”?
You already know which one those families are choosing. And do you want to know the best part? If you don’t like the team your son or daughter is on, or feel like they aren’t getting enough playing time, you can just pull them from the program and hop on a new team, with a new shoe deal. Wash, rinse, repeat. Most “elite” level players have played on more AAU teams, and for different high school/prep school programs than they can count by the time they’re NBA eligible. Heck we’re even seeing it now at the college level, with record numbers of players entering the transfer portal in recent years. The grass is always greener on the other side right?
So it shouldn’t come as a surprise, when you start looking at the birthdates of the players involved in these super teams (James 1984, Aldridge 1985, Jordan 1988, KD 1988, Harden 1989, Griffin 1989, Kyrie 1992), that they would have been entering the AAU scene at the height of the sneaker industry wars in the 90’s when Nike’s competitors wisened up to their scheme. They’re a product of the system they were raised in, it was only a matter of time until we started to see it creep into the professional ranks.
If there’s one thing that was made abundantly clear from watching The Last Dance documentary, it’s that the players in the early 90’s and earlier wouldn’t be caught dead trying to jump ship to greener pastures (a sentiment KD, in a moment that seems to get worse by the signing, tried to echo when he was with the Thunder, before falling victim to the dark side himself):
To this day Jordan and Isaiah still aren’t on good terms. Could you imagine Pippen or Jordan jumping ship and joining the Pistons because they couldn’t get past them? Absolutely not. But they were also raised in an era where it wasn’t commonplace to change teams as often as your underwear. So unless you see Adam Silver instituting a rule preventing this type of player movement in the future, the superteam concept is likely here to stay.
The Warriors and Durant alike caught a ton of flak when he signed with them following their 73 win season. But if you thought that was going to be the height of the superteam craze, Brooklyn just lapped the field this year. Expect boos, expect hostility, expect all sorts of armchair GM criticism from NBA fan bases around the league. If you thought people were actively rooting against Golden State a few years ago, then buckle up.
It’s almost fitting that Brooklyn wears all black uniforms as they’ve come as close to embodying the Evil Empire as we’ve seen on an NBA court recently, perhaps ever. With KD at the helm of both that Warriors super team, and this latest iteration on steroids we see in Brooklyn, I suppose that makes him the Emperor. And with an attitude that seems to get more prickly as he ages, maybe that’s just how he likes it. Brooklyn vs. the world. Welcome aboard the Death Star LaMarcus.
-Kyle Skinner
Twitter: @dynessports