I came across a photoshopped image of Damian Lillard in a Miami Heat uniform, flanked by Jimmy Butler and Bam Adebayo.
The caption reads: Who can defeat this?
The answer, to this and to all the other teams posturing after acquiring a new “superstar” during the NBA free agency: A lot.
For the very simple reason that a superstar, even two or three of them, is never invincible. Not even an automatic championship contender. Ask Karl Malone or Steve Nash when they joined the Los Angeles Lakers, or James Harden when he joined Kyrie Irving and Kevin Durant in Brooklyn.
Nobody knows if the long-rumored marriage of Miami and Damian Lillard will finally come true, as much as nobody knows what will become of Miami with the inclusion of Lillard.
What’s fast becoming obvious is the imminent decline of the super team paradigm. No one’s scared of super teams anymore.
Not Denver, which eliminated a star-studded Minnesota (Anthony Edwards, Rudy Gobert, and Karl-Anthony Towns) in the first round of the Playoffs before slaying a more formidable four-headed beast in Phoenix (Kevin Durant, Devin Booker, Chris Paul, and DeAndre Ayton) and completing a sweep of a Los Angeles Lakers unit that included LeBron James, Anthony Davis, Dennis Schroder, Rui Hachimura, Malik Beasley, and D’Angelo Russell.
That Miami fans clamor for Damian Lillard is, to some extent, a slap in the face of the basketball culture that Erik Spoelstra is nurturing in Miami, especially after the team was able to reach the NBA Finals on the backs of players, whose salaries were peanuts compared to the paycheck of superstars that failed the franchise during the finals.
It was the players with meager paychecks that kept Miami in the thick of the fight throughout the post-season. Now, Gabe Vincent and Max Strus are gone, off to greener pastures now that they are coveted.
You’d think Denver will keep its core in preparation for a tough title defense come the 2023-24 season, but they let a key member of their rotation leave. Now, Bruce Brown is an asset to the Indiana Pacers.
The departure of Vincent, Strus, and Brown became relevant only after what they were able to prove. Nobody cared when they were acquired by their respective teams, and nobody cares right now about the movement of low-salary role players because, despite the lessons of the past, fans (and the front office) remain star-struck.
And so the question lingers, teeming with arrogance it starts to sound puerile if you read it over and over again: Who can defeat this?
Is there something else here? A coded dispatch perhaps? A deeper message hidden beneath a façade of simplemindedness?
Is it a warning to the Miami Heat – and other teams treading the same path — to not stray away from what it had done in the 2022-23 season that gave the team success despite the net value of the team at the start of the season?
Is it a challenge to fans who understand the pitfalls of chasing superstars and to make their voice heard, to be the voice of reason among those blindly following the free agency herd?
Maybe I read that Facebook post wrong. Maybe the “who can defeat this” question is not (just) about a potential Lillard-Butler-Adebayo triumvirate, and the potency of this trio when on the court together.
Maybe the statement is a mockery of our obsession with super teams. Maybe this is a gauntlet thrown at the person reading the post. And the challenge is to find the strength and wisdom to rise above accounting for the superficial merits of an untested team just to satisfy the need to find a hero to save us and the team we support.
Maybe the picture and the caption combined is a reminder of the true enemy of good basketball, and that is the problematic strategy of chasing superstars many of whom promise nothing more than a Pyrrhic victory, leaving the team shortchanged eventually.
The big names on the roster make the team popular. But bereft of the cadre of workhorse men scrapped to make room for a superstar (or superstars), it is nothing more than men in uniform on a scheduled series of exhibition games, paid performers stuck on an annual circus calendar, our expectations of which should not exceed entertainment.
At least that’s how it felt watching Brooklyn when the Nets turned top-heavy for the sake of creating the Kevin Durant – Kyrie Irving – James Harden super team.
And it was supposed to be a learning experience, a cautionary tale for other teams after Brooklyn got nothing out of the very expensive experiment, and yet Phoenix followed the same path and traded its young role players in exchange for Kevin Durant.
The same free agency shortsightedness from the front office, which fans blindly laud.