It’s OFFICIAL! NBA training camp has started and I am taking this as the official start of the NBA season. There are a few things everyone looks forward to every year. Highlight dunks on ESPN or other sports stations. NBA All Star weekend. The NBA finals. These are a few things that the casual fan looks forward to every year. A guy like me who looks forward to the NBA the moment after a new champ is crowned looks for some completely different things. I’m going to give you my top five things I think can turn a casual fan into a regular or hardcore fan.
1. The Breakout star:
Even people who don’t know about basketball know who LeBron James is. Even if you don’t know his game, you know him from commercials or jokes from tv shows or movies. He was a household name before he signed his first NBA contract. So what he does isn’t a big surprise. Every year in the NBA there is at least one player that exceeds all expectations. Now, I don’t mean the “Most Improved Player” award, I mean the guy who goes from being just a star too a superstar. A guy who is not just getting sneaker endorsements, but things like a deal with Sprite or Honda for big time money. A few years ago, that star was Blake Griffin. Him jumping over a car at the Sprite Slam Dunk Contest was his big moment. Since then, he has endorsements from KIA Optima, Game Fly, and (no endorsement deal is complete without a sneaker deal) Jordan brand footwear.
Not only does a player have to be a superstar, they have to have a likeable or loveable personality. Shaquille O’Neal has been retired for a few years now and he still manages to keep the endorsements coming in from Buick to Gold Bond Ultimate Men’s Lotion. Who will be the breakout star his year? James Harden made a little noise last year. I say by the end of this season, he’ll be among the names mentioned for more than just his on the court game. His trademark beard doesn’t hurt his cause either.
2. Will this be the year?
A few years ago the question on every sports analyst or NBA fan was “Will this be the year LeBron James wins the big one?”. Two years later and now Lebron has two rings. After 2004 it was “Can Kobe win a ring without Shaq?”. Fast forward to 2009 and Kobe has added another two championship rings to his collection. Now the questions are “Will this be the year Kevin Durant wins his title?” “Can Carmelo Anthony bring the Knicks back to glory?” and the one I am personally wondering “Has Dwight Howard finally found a home in Houston”. Questions like these make every game a little more interesting. They make you follow a certain player or team a little closer, you start to watch the stats and from there you start to look at the moves the teams make to their rosters whether it’s a small tweak in the rotation to trades to the firing and hiring of coaches and front office. Especially if it’s a move on your favorite team or your teams rival.
3. Achievers and Underachievers:
Every team has a question mark on what their expectations are and can they achieve goals they set. Some teams like the Charlotte Bobcats and Orlando Magic have simple goals. Their goals start at just being competitive and not being the joke of the league. Once upon a time, the Bobcats had the worst winning percentage in NBA history (.106 and losing the last twenty-three games of the season). Try not to be the team every other team marks off as win. Teams like the Miami Heat, San Antonio Spurs, and Los Angeles Lakers see anything except an NBA Championship as a failure. These are the teams that have either had success in the recent past, have all star kinds of lineups, or a franchise based on winning titles.
The average teams (The teams who are expected to make the playoffs but lose in the first or possibly the second round) want everything from overachieving to winning a title. All three of these kind of teams have realistic goals. When you see a bad team keep up with and beat one of the better teams it is a complete shock and can boost the teams morale for the rest of the season when they have a big win to go on. The average teams always have that glimmer of hope of winning a title. It’s not uncommon to see a four or five seed in the conference finals. And everyone expects the contenders to be right there in the finals when the smoke clears. Although, it’s amazing when David comes against Goliath and takes him out.
4. The Trade Deadline and trade rumors:
Trades can happen during the beginning of the season and before the season, but that doesn’t compare to the trade deadline anticipation. The trade deadline is usually a couple of weeks after NBA All Star weekend and always filled with all sorts of drama. Bad teams are looking to make trades for draft picks, good teams are looking to get better, and championship caliber teams are looking to solidify their chance at a title. The reason this gets so exciting are the endless possibilities. As a fan, you like to think of possibilities that sometimes have little to no chance of happening (Who wouldn’t want Kevin Durant on their roster?). You start wondering can your team pick up a star from another team for a few of your role players. If your team is bad, you start hoping that your team sheds the dead weight so you can get a first round draft pick. Or at the very least pick someone up who can sell tickets and make them exciting again.
The Memphis Grizzlies made a big trade sending one of their premier scorers in Rudy Gay to the Toronto Raptors. Both teams hoped this would make them better and for a while it did. Unfortunately, the Grizzlies sorely needed him in the Western conference playoffs against the San Antonio Spurs and it showed. On the flip side, while the Raptors weren’t a playoff team, bringing in Rudy Gay made them competitive and exciting again. Thus making the Raptors that much better towards the end of the year and hopefully this year.
5. The comeback player:
This is always a great thing for any sport. In the NFL, you have a guy like Adrian Peterson who came back from an injury like a torn ACL (The anterior cruciate ligament is a cruciate ligament which is one of the four major ligaments of the human knee), an injury that some players don’t even come back from and if they do, they’re a shell of their former selves.
Peterson came back dominated at his position. I’m not a big NFL fan, but his story was amazing and inspirational. Who doesn’t love a comeback story and the NBA is no different. This upcoming season we have two of the league’s top ten (twelve depending on who you ask) players in the league coming back from injuries, Kobe Bryant and Russell Westbrook. What makes Westbrook’s injury standout is because he hasn’t missed a game since high school. He prides himself on being there for his team and this injury is going to make him dangerous. He is the type of guy that is going to feel like he has something to prove and this is going to make him work harder – then there’s Kobe Bryant – the man is a freak of nature. The only reason he injured his Achilles to begin with is because he strained it carrying his team on his back all season long. At times he seemed like he was leading the team in every category. Kobe’s drive to come back from injury is almost superhuman. He claims he will come back from his injury better than ever and in record time. The problem is, he’s no spring chicken. Russell Westbrook is twenty-four. Kobe is thirty-five and has been in the league seventeen years and has been a force of nature the last fifteen of those years. My biggest concern is whether or not he’s pushing himself to hard on his aging body. Accelerating the timetable so he can prove how good he is.
The only person who gets to talk to me like that is myself, in the mirror.
By Mark Lynch
Twitter: @VeryRandom13
Main image provided by Jason Namdos via Flickr