LuessiT wrote:There are also other aspects introduced with the salary cap. When every team has the same money available it matters how you maximize the talent with said money. Star players represent huge value contracts and the bigger the star the better. When Westbrook makes as much as Harden, when Middleton makes as much as AD. When you can get an all NBA player like Doncic on a rookie contracts - there is a huge imbalance between money and talent. These are the contracts you need to jump 29 other teams on a level playing field. Now I'm not saying you can't have non-rookie non-max value contracts but it's very hard to get these repetitively. So the easiest way is getting stars.
Yeah, I've always believed that too. Having superstars just makes it so much easier to build a team for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is the artificial cap on how much you have to pay them. That still doesn't mean they should get all the credit though. They get more than enough credit from all sides, and probably a little too much from a lot of casual fans, for how much they actually add to their team's net rating and win total for their on-court contributions in a vacuum. A team led by Giannis and Khris, for example, could probably win anywhere from 40 to 75 games with the worst or best supporting cast of any NBA team we've seen this century. So clearly guys like Jrue and DDV (and last year's Brook, Bledsoe, and Hill) deserve credit for their contributions even though they're not the primary factor in making the team a contender.
It's also harder to build a team without a superstar because you have to get a bunch of good players AND make sure they all complement each other perfectly, whereas you can always find role players to surround Shaq and Kobe. But again, that's the indirect benefit of team-building, not the direct effect of ratings and wins impact via production, plus you have to remember that Fisher, Fox, and Horry were good players in their own right who sacrificed numbers to win titles.
