Why There Shouldn’t Be An Asterisk On The Bucks Title Run
Asterisk. In basketball, people use them a lot. It can be for an award race, an All-Star selection, or even a championship run. An NBA Championship is an extremely hard task. You need a great team, not just a great player or players to win. There’s a reason some all-time great players leave the game without a ring. It’s not supposed to be easy, but when somebody does win one, people always love to analyze it and degrade it. “This team wasn’t that good, this team was injured, if they had played this team they wouldn’t have won it all.” After every championship, everybody’s mind immediately jumps to that, trying to degrade it. You could certainly point out things about the Bucks title run that favored them. From injuries to Kevin Durant’s feet being too damn big, the Bucks definitely had some luck on their side.
But guess what? There shouldn’t be an asterisk on the Bucks title run, or really any title run for that matter. Here’s why.
What Is The Point of an Asterisk?
What is the point of an asterisk. I get the point and I actually don’t think it’s a bad idea in theory. It’s cool to go look back at past champions and see how hard their journey was to a title. You’ll learn some things with some research, on how good the teams they faced were, who they could have faced, were injuries involved? It’s cool to go down a basketball-reference loophole and just keep learning new things about basketball, I find that very fun.
But there comes a point in time when asterisks become too much. Again, I like the idea of examining past champions and seeing how hard their championship really was. But there is a line and we have most certainly crossed it. I hate when nowadays, you bring up rings, everybody just shoots them down immediately.
Kawhi’s 2019 ring in Toronto? The Warriors were injured, he had a lucky shot in the semi-finals, and the Bucks coaching was awful in the Conference Finals. Debunked, ratioed, go home kid. But that’s just not fun.
I don’t like when people senselessly argue about which NBA player is better, I don’t like rankings of current players, I hate all-time lists, it just creates chaos, arguing, and it solves nothing. Asterisks are the same way.
What’s the point of just debunking every single championship? I mean, I get that you can do it, if you’re weird like that, but what’s the point? To get some retweets on twitter? Some comments on Instagram? I just don’t see the point of constantly trying to degrade every single championship. Because here’s a little truth that some NBA fans have to learn. Every championships should have an asterisk, which in turn means, none of them should have one.
Every Championship Has An Asterisk
Yep, you read that right. Every single championship has an asterisk. Every single one of them. All of them weren’t the hardest path to a championship, all of them had breaks fall their way. All of these teams didn’t have significant enough injuries to slow them down on the path to a title. I could probably do a bunch of research and find you everything wrong with every NBA champion, ever. All 74 champions, I could debunk.
But that’s the thing. All of them can be debunked. All of them can be degraded, so that means that none of them should have an asterisk.
Every champion can be debunked, so that means that every champion isn’t perfect, which means that no champion should have an asterisk. It’s hard. You have to had a good, 10-11 man team with talent throughout to win. You need some veterans, great coaching, some scoring, some defense, versatility, and a little bit of star power.
You need to hope to not get injured. You need to perform in the playoffs. You need to beat good teams. You need to win big games. You have to win close games. You have to not get screwed over by officiating. You have to be resilient.
There are just so many variables to win a championship, what’s the point of going over every single one of those to try and degrade the best accomplishment a player can have in the game of basketball?
Why The Bucks Title Shouldn’t Have An Asterisk
Now, the moment that everybody has been waiting for. Why the Bucks title run shouldn’t have an asterisk. I’m just going to go over, in summary, why this title shouldn’t have an asterisk.
1. They played very good teams
The Bucks played some very good teams to get to the Finals. In the 2nd round, they played the Brooklyn Nets. Guess what? Even when the Nets weren’t healthy? Game 7 of that series still went to overtime with the eventual NBA Champions. So the Nets weren’t exactly slouches when they were injured, they were still a very good team.
Giannis had to put up otherworldly numbers in that series, he needed Middleton and Holiday to step up, that was a tougher series than people remember (although it happened a month ago).
The Hawks in the Eastern Conference Finals were tough. They were a good team and Giannis didn’t play in Games 5 and 6. The Bucks supporting pieces had to step up. Brook Lopez had a 30-point game in Game 5 of that series and Khris Middleton went off in the 2nd half of that series to send the Bucks to the Finals. The Bucks were without their best player on both ends to end that series and yet they still punched their tickets to the NBA Finals.
Then in the NBA Finals, they played a very good Phoenix Suns team who rolled them in the first two games. They collected themselves and Giannis led them to 4 straight wins. Holiday played great defense, Middleton hit big shots. The Bucks won very close games like in Games 4 and 5, and pulled away in Game 6. The Suns were a very good team.
The Bucks title run featured them beating good teams. The Big 3 Nets, the young Hawks, and the very good Phoenix Suns. They didn’t play plumbers and they didn’t exactly get lucky in their matchups. They played good teams and they beat them all en route to a title.
2. They Came Back From Adversity, A LOT
The Bucks didn’t exactly have a cake-walk to the NBA Finals. Like we already talked about, they played good teams. With that came adversity, something we all thought the Bucks would crumble under given how their past two seasons had ended. But they came back from multiple series deficits.
They were down 0-2 to the Nets, which was especially bad because James Harden got injured 43 seconds into Game 1. To make things even worse, both games were blowouts. The Bucks lost Game 1 by 8, but it wasn’t that close. Then they preceded to lose Game 2 by 39 points. Yikes.
They tied the series, but then lost Game 5 simply because Kevin Durant is good at basketball. So they were down 0-2 to the Nets, losing by 39 points in Game 2. Then they lost Game 5, going down 3-2. But they won Game 6 and scratched out the Game 7 win in overtime.
They blew a late in Game 1 of the Eastern Conference Finals to lose Game 1 and then the series was tied 2-2 when they were without Giannis for the final stretch of the series against Atlanta.
Not to mention that they became just the 5th team ever to comeback from a 0-2 deficit in the Finals, winning 4 straight games to take home the title. Only the 1977 Blazers and 2006 Miami Heat had ever lost the first two games and then won the series in 6 games.
But I think that I and most fans are forgetting something, or someone. Donte DiVincenzo. The great two-way guard had a foot injury in Game 3 of the first round against Miami and subsequently missed the rest of the postseason. That was a big loss that got overshadowed. As good as PJ Tucker was, they had to play Bryn Forbes and Pat Connaughton big minutes. Connaughton was actually one of their best players in the finals, but Forbes didn’t play much in the NBA Finals for a reason.
If they had DiVincenzo, the Bucks would be a lot better than they were. But they still won a title without their starting shooting guard.
The Bucks had to overcome a lot to win this title. They lost a starter, had to overcome a lot of series deficits, joining only a few teams in NBA history who had made the same type of comebacks as them. Sure, Kevin’s Durant’s feet are big and sometimes referees cause players to get bone bruises, but hey, all championships have some luck. All championships are going to have some sort of break that favors the team that eventually wins them.
But all championships are like that, which defeats the purpose of an asterisk. Sure, the pandemic affected things. Sure, injuries to other teams helped the Bucks. But those same things help other teams, every single NBA champion. Therefore, defeating the purpose of an asterisk.
With all of this being said, I know 9-year old’s on Twitter will still debate this whole topic of asterisk’s and whether or not the Bucks “deserved” this championship. And you know what? Do your worst Twitter, you’re just wasting your time.
What Are Your Thoughts On Asterisks? Leave A Comment Down Below!
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