Is a Superstar Needed to Win an NBA Championship?

What does it take to win an NBA title?

The Oklahoma City Thunder and the Los Angeles Clippers would certainly like to know. Their Monday night meeting is one from among the ever-dwindling supply of marquee matchups left on the regular season schedule, which comes to a halt in 10 days.

Both teams sport not one, but two superstars—Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook for OKC, Chris Paul and Blake Griffin for the Clips—which, in theory, would render both legitimate NBA Finals favorites out of the Western Conference.

After all, star power is difficult to come by, and these two teams sport it in abundance.

Necessary or Sufficient?

But is superstar power necessary in the quest to carry home the Larry O'Brien Trophy at the end of the season?

We know that superstars aren't sufficient in and of themselves for championship glory. Just ask last year's Miami Heat, with LeBron James, Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh.

Or the New York Knicks, who never brought home the bacon with Patrick Ewing in the middle.

Or the Utah Jazz, whose Hall-of-Fame duo of John Stockton and Karl Malone came close, but twice had the proverbial cigar snatched away by Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen's Chicago Bulls.

I could go on and on with example after example, including squads (like the Tracy McGrady-Yao Ming Houston Rockets, or the Chris Webber-led Sacramento Kings) that never had the opportunity to play in the finals.

Still, if we're to disprove the somewhat-widely-held notion that superstardom is a (if not THE) key to Titletown, we'd need to find an example of a team without so much as a single elite player.

Ask Chauncey Billups, who was reduced to morale boosting after tearing his achilles earlier this season, and he'll give you an answer.

How to Succeed Without Superstars

The 2003-04 Detroit Pistons.

That team didn't feature a single superstar, per se, yet still managed to dominate in the NBA Finals against a Los Angeles Lakers team that featured four future Hall-of-Famers (Kobe Bryant, Shaquille O'Neal, Malone and Gary Payton).

Granted, The Mailman and The Glove were on their last legs, but Kobe and Shaq were still as incredible as ever, even if they spent far too much time at each other's throats.

That Pistons team featured one player (Ben Wallace) who was picked for the All-Star Game in L.A. that year.

(Side note: Flip Saunders, then the coach of the Minnesota Timberwolves, came this close to trotting out a five-man lineup of seven-footers during that game—Shaq, Yao, Kevin Garnett, Tim Duncan and Dirk Nowitzki—and it definitely would've worked.)

It wasn't until 2006, after Detroit lost to the San Antonio Spurs in the least interesting seven-game series in NBA history, that the Pistons got their due at All-Star weekend, with Chauncey, Rip Hamilton, Rasheed Wallace and Ben Wallace all earning spots as reserves on the Eastern Conference squad.

And, remember, Tayshaun Prince was pretty darn good, too, so it's not as though the 2004 champs didn't have talent. Rather, they didn't have one or two (or even three) guys who were widely considered among a handful of the best players in the association at the time.

Before that, you'd have to go back to the "Bad Boys" Pistons of the late 1980s to (potentially) usurp the "superstars" rule, though to do so wouldn't exactly be fair to the Hall-of-Fame trio of Isiah Thomas, Joe Dumars and Dennis Rodman.

Or to their back-to-back titles, for that matter.

Rewind the tape even further to 1979 and you'll find a Seattle SuperSonics squad whose best player (Dennis Johnson), while enshrined in Springfield, was later dwarfed by the likes of Larry Bird, Kevin McHale and Robert Parish on the Boston Celtics.

And if you're really intent to dig deep for superstar-less champs, you could make a case for the 1951 Rochester Royals and the 1955 Syracuse Nationals.

At most, then, that makes six teams out of 62 (since the BAA became the NBA in 1949), and four since the NBA-ABA merger in 1976, that have succeeding without truly elite talent.

Wide-Open Spaces

Clearly, it can be done, though if anything, the lack of exceptions only proves the rule. In any given year, a team with superstars is far more likely to win the title than one without.

Not that such a stipulation should comfort the Thunder and the Clippers. They may have top-tier ballers of their own, but so does just about every other contender, including the Lakers (Kobe, Pau Gasol and Andrew Bynum), the Heat (Wade, LeBron and Bosh), the Bulls (Derrick Rose), the Celtics (Rajon Rondo and the Geriatric Trio of Ray Allen, Kevin Garnett and Paul Pierce), the Mavericks (Dirk Nowitzki) and the Spurs (with their aging triumvirate of Tim Duncan, Tony Parker and Manu Ginobili).

If there's any team in this year's field that could make a run to the title without a superstar, it's the Memphis Grizzlies. Everyone's sleeper pick to win the West boasts one current All-Star (Marc Gasol), one former All-Star (Zach Randolph), a borderline All-Star talent (Rudy Gay) and a host of high-caliber role players.

Not to mention Gilbert Arenas, who's been an All-Star three times but clearly isn't on that level anymore (and hasn't been for some time).

But if the Grizz are to be the latest complete team to win the title, they'd likely need to beat Blake and CP3's Clips in the first round, Durant and Westy's Thunder in the second and (perhaps) the Three-Headed Monster of Kobe-Pau-Bynum in the Western Conference Finals before facing one of the Beasts of the East in the NBA Finals.

That's a lot of wattage for one team to overcome, especially without much of its own.

For now, let's just enjoy the run-and-gun dunkfest between the Thunder and the Clips, and hope that the Grizz, like the Pistons before them, are at least able to make things interesting in the playoffs.

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