Greatest Debates in Sports: Basketball Edition
For years every sport has provided us with countless controversial topics. The NBA has brought us great topics from the super-team controversy to Lebron vs. MJ. A pretty heated debate in the MLB right now is whether or not the designated hitter should remain in the game. As for the NFL, who has never argued about the greatest QB of all time? So let’s take a look at the greatest debates in sports, starting with basketball.
1.Should college players get paid? College athletes bring in thousands of dollars in revenue for schools so why shouldn’t they get paid for their performance? Sure, they generate a lot of money for their school but playing for a team at the collegiate level is a privilege, not a job. Playing at the collegiate level is in a sense like an internship with the ultimate goal of landing that job in the professional level. They are playing to improve their game and get noticed by NBA scouts, not for money. That’s why I think that college players should get paid for the money they bring into for their school, but nowhere near the amount that professionals make.
2.Defeat your opponents vs. Joining your opponents. This debate essentially deals with the idea of super-teams, a word that has been thrown around quite a bit in this Cavs and Warriors dominant era. Essentially everybody in the NBA has the same goal which is to win a championship and they have a very limited time to do so. That being said, do you stay loyal to the team you’re on and fight the uphill battle against tougher opponents? Or do you join other stars with the same problem and try to stack your team as much as possible? Even though it was before my time, I personally prefer the way guys like MJ, Magic, and Bird approached the problem by accepting the challenge of trying to beat each other instead of joining together and steamrolling the rest of the league. It kind of ruins the competitive nature of the sport when one team is miles ahead of the others in terms of raw talent. But at the same time, I don’t know what it’s like to be an NBA star with no rings and the end of my career looming over me.
3.Lebron James vs. Michael Jordan. You probably saw this one coming a mile away. This might be the most difficult debate to settle because how do you measure how good a professional basketball player is? Do just focus on their raw numbers or do you look at their rings? But what about how many MVP or Defensive Player of the Year awards they’ve won? Another problem is trying to compare two players from two completely different generations of basketball, with varying levels of competition. Jordan played in a big-man dominant era while Lebron is currently playing in a league focused on small-ball and the three point line. Lebron is also playing in a league where many teams near the top have 3-4 all stars on their team whereas Jordan’s era averaged only 1-2. I personally can’t come to a definitive answer for who is better because there are just way too many aspects of the game that you need to take into account.
What do you think? Post your comments on your opinion on some of these debates and be sure to check back into odcspress.org for the next edition of The Greatest Debates in Sports:Baseball Edition.