Why It Is Possible to Win an NBA Title Without a Superstar

It doesn't take a rocket scientist (or, say, Sebastian Pruiti) to figure out that superstars dramatically improve the likelihood of team success in the NBA. A singular talent like LeBron James, Kobe Bryant, Dwight Howard or Kevin Durant can carry a mediocre squad into the playoffs and, with the proper supporting cast, lift it into title contention.

But by no means is a superstar sufficient or (dare I say it?) necessary for a franchise to lift the Larry O'Brien Trophy at season's end.

Doing so without a franchise cornerstone is no walk in the park. If there's anything to be gleaned from NBA history, it's that the absence of a transcendent star only makes a team's journey to the top that much more unlikely.

Since the institution of the modern salary cap in 1984-85, only five squads—three Detroit Pistons teams (1988-89, 1989-90, 2003-04); the 1994-95 Houston Rockets; and the 2010-11 Dallas Mavericks—have been crowned champions without placing one of their own on the All-NBA First Team. The Rockets, though, featured Hakeem Olajuwon, who'd earned a spot on the First Team the year prior and still ranked as one of the league's superstars at the time. The Mavs, for their part, were led by Dirk Nowitzki, a former MVP who cracked the Second Team that season and was still the face of basketball in Big D.

That leaves us with only the three Pistons teams of record. The '89 edition still ranks as the only champion that failed to place a single player on an All-NBA team since the voting expanded to three five-man groupings, and the last since the 1978-79 Seattle SuperSonics exacted revenge on the Washington Bullets in the NBA Finals.

Granted, the "Bad Boys" were hardly devoid of talent. They featured three current Hall-of-Famers (Isiah Thomas, Joe Dumars and Dennis Rodman) and sent a fourth (Adrian Dantley) packing before they won the title in 1989.

But none of those three (or four, if you're including Dantley) ranked in the same stratosphere that the likes of Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson and Charles Barkley occupied in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

The same goes for the 2003-04 Pistons, who were represented by Ben Wallace (9.5 points, 12.4 rebounds, 3.0 blocks) on the All-NBA Second Team...alongside the likes of Sam Cassell and Peja Stojakovic. Mind you, this was the one year, during a stretch of five, in which Big Ben wasn't honored as the league's Defensive Player of the Year.

And as popular as Wallace was for his 'fro, by no means was he a superstar on par with Kobe, Shaquille O'Neal, Tim Duncan, Jason Kidd, and Kevin Garnett, all of whom made the First Team.

What's most important about these Motor City champs, though, isn't how they differed from the prototypical, superstar-centric squads with whom they share historical significance, but rather what they have in common with the best of the best.

Namely, a team-wide commitment to defense.

As in most major sports, defense wins championships in the NBA. The 2003-04 Los Angeles Lakers were the last team to reach the NBA Finals without ranking in the top 10 in opponent's field goal percentage—they were summarily stomped by the Pistons in five games.

The last team to win the title without placing in the top 10 in field goal defense? The 2000-01 Lakers, who were buoyed by Kobe's rise into the league's upper crust, along with another brilliant performance by Shaq that season.

Moreover, no Conference Champion since the turn of the millennium has placed outside the top 10 in point differential.

All of which is to say, teams that keep their opponents from scoring are far more likely to win the title than those that don't. Again, this isn't exactly rocket science, but it holds true nonetheless.

Furthermore, defense is played best by those teams that play it together.

It certainly helps to have a star like Dwight Howard or LeBron James who can singlehandedly dominate a game on that end of the floor, but by and large, championship-caliber defense requires all five players on the floor to be on the same page, and for every man on the roster to buy into a significant measure of self-sacrifice on defense.

With the way the NBA rulebook discourages contact and favors offense nowadays, great defense is more important than it has been in some time. Teams that play top-notch team D own an even more noteworthy advantage, simply because it's so difficult to shut down opposing offenses, especially those orchestrated by superstars.

Not that superstars don't deserve credit for what they bring to the table on offense. The Miami Heat wouldn't have emerged from the Eastern Conference scrum last season without the otherworldly efforts of LeBron and Dwyane Wade, nor would the Oklahoma City Thunder have survived to advance out of the Western Conference without Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook coming through in crunch time.

As bright as those superstars shone on the way to and during the Finals, it was each team's defense that made the ultimate difference. OKC and Miami ranked fourth and fifth in field goal defense, and third and fourth in point differential, respectively.     

All of which is to say, there's still hope for the likes of the Denver Nuggets and the Indiana Pacers, both of which lack superstars around whom they might otherwise organize their winning cultures. The Larry O'Brien Trophy is well within reach, even in a league dominated by "super teams," so long as they do what the Pistons did in 2004, or better yet, what the "Bad Boys" did during an offensively-ebullient era in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

That is, play defense. Play it hard and play it well.

You don't need a full-scale, John Hollinger-style breakdown to figure that out.

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