To be the best, you have to play with the best. Winning a National Basketball Association (“NBA”) championship is considered the pinnacle of a basketball player’s career. The place where players become legends on the floor, where Hollywood could take hundreds of stories for screenplays, where there is an atmosphere of professionalism and madness at the same time. The NBA phenomenon is amazingly colorful and leaves no one indifferent. Basketball is an iconic game that people all over the world love. This sport is an important element of the corporate culture of different companies. Writers providing cheap essay writing service gather several times a week to play basketball and watch the best NBA games. In this article, we describe the best players in NBA history.
The essence of the NBA can be summed up in the quote from the greatest basketball player of our time, LeBron James: “My goal is to be the best all the time. That means I have to play my best.
How it all began
When the Basketball Association of America was formed in 1946, no one could have anticipated its success. After merging with the National Basketball League, the NBA was born. The league of professional men’s teams in North America, specifically the United States and Canada. At the beginning of the league’s formative era, dynasty teams emerged (they dominated for several seasons) because of not much competition. The first was the Lakers of Minnesota and the Celtics of Boston. There is a tradition here of naming teams with characteristics specific to the city or state (the Lakers are “lake people” because of the many lakes in the state, the Celtics are “Celts” because Boston traditionally had a lot of Irish people living in it).
Gradually the game evolved, the rules became more complicated, and new clubs from other cities were added. While initially there were 17, the league now consists of 30 teams.
The NBA’s ethnic makeup is vast, and nowadays, you can find players from all over the world. African-American players make up the most significant percentage, about 75-80 percent. Russian players also play in the league from time to time, as in 2016, Timofey Mozgov, who plays the center position, became the NBA champion with the Cleveland Cavaliers.
In the 1970s, there was an attempt to create a competitive league, the Basketball Association of America (ABA). Organizing a new association arose because of the high monetary threshold for entry into the NBA league. However, the NBA reacted quickly and began to actively promote its model, trying to attract new teams and cities. In 1976, a partial league merger took place, which affected many aspects of club-player relations. In particular, it affected the salary cap, a mechanism that leveled the playing field for teams by limiting their financial injections.
Soon there was a gradual decline in spectator interest in the game. Scandals surrounding players with drugs, racism, and bad relationships between club owners and players did not add to the league’s good image. The situation was saved by a multi-year rivalry between the Los Angeles Lakers and Boston Celtics teams. Their stars, Magic Johnson and Larry Bird made the confrontation exciting and suspenseful until the very end. Johnson would then play a significant role outside of basketball as well – he would openly admit to having HIV, thereby causing a widespread public outcry and leading to eventual attention to the problem and study of the disease.
The peak of the NBA’s popularity came in the 1990s. It was associated with the NBA’s new commissioner, David Stern, who took the league to a new level of play and finance. The league’s subsequent emergence of the planet’s most famous basketball player, Michael Jordan.
The NBA is now a corporation with a sound strategy and growing commercial potential. The main thing it has learned to do is to put on a show and sell people the emotions they want to feel all the time.
Who Made the NBA Great
The first truly great player is Bill Russell. The Boston Celtics center is an 11-time NBA champion in his 13-year career. By becoming the NBA’s first superstar, Russell changed how the game was viewed, African-American players, and their position in clubs. He won an NBA championship as a coach and Olympic gold in 1956. He owns a witty quote about happiness: “As we know, people jump for joy at the moment of supreme happiness in every culture. Jumping is an internationally recognized expression of joy, and basketball is a sport that is built on jumping. Perhaps a player jumps because he is happy, but, more likely, he is happy because he jumps. I’ve heard players complain about almost any detail of the game – the rules, the size or color of the ball, the shape, or the temperature in the locker room. I’ve never heard anyone complain about having to jump.”
Russell was a one-time teammate of another iconic player, Wilt Chamberlain, who could win a game single-handedly and still holds the phenomenal record of 100 points per game (the average team in his time was about 90-100 points per game). Chamberlain was a brilliant individualist and made no secret of it. His life was full of adventures.
Karim Abdul-Jabbar took over the baton from the great players, who held records for minutes on the floor at the time of his retirement, points scored, field goals, blocked shots, etc. The 6-time NBA champion played until he was 42, two years old, leaving behind a great legacy. After his career as a player, he pursued literature and acted in movies (famous role in “Game of Death” with Bruce Lee).
After Jabbar, more stars began to appear. Johnson and Byrd mentioned Carl Mallone, John Stockton, Charles Barkley, and others.
But the biggest star of the era and the NBA was Michael Jeffrey Jordan. His NBA career began in 1984 with the Chicago Bulls. He progressed quickly and won three consecutive titles from 1991 to 1993. Jordan shocks the world when he decides to quit basketball and try his hand at baseball. He would return a year and a half later to win three consecutive titles from ’96 to ’98 and forever inscribe his name in the Basketball Hall of Fame. Jordan’s charisma, leadership qualities, and most importantly, his superior level of play helped elevate interest in basketball to an unprecedented level. Michael became the first athlete to be honored with a personal brand of athletic shoes before he played a game in the NBA. The comedy film “Space Jam” starring Jordan further increased Michael’s recognition. Numerous polls consider him to be the most recognizable athlete on the planet and the athlete who has made the most money during his career.
He expressed his attitude towards his success in the phrase, “I’ve missed more than nine thousand shots in my career, lost in three hundred games. Twenty-six times I was trusted with the decisive shot, and I missed. I failed over and over again. That’s why I was successful.”
Next, NBA stars such as Shaquille O’Neal, Kobe Bryant, LeBron James, Kawai Leonard, Kevin Durant, Steff Curry, and others elevated the league even higher. Their modern recovery and training techniques and fanatical attitude make their game impressive and unique.
A league of ups, downs, and many stories
NBA stars have always had a knack for making news columns spicier and giving reporters a reason to talk about their lives. After many biographies were released, we learned about the behind-the-scenes lives of players and coaches.
After Jordan signed with a sneaker company, the league banned him from playing in them. They were black, and you had to go to the floor in white shoes. Michael didn’t care – he continued to go out in his name shoes and pay a $5,000 fine for each game. The company and Jordan benefited tremendously; the acceptable situation only increased the player’s and brand’s visibility.
Kobe Bryant, who tragically died in a helicopter crash, was one of the game’s most passionate fans. His teammate recounted how he arrived early one day at the practice facility by 6 a.m. and was surprised to see Bryant throwing balls at the basket, even though the lights were out due to the early hour in the gym. Bryant didn’t like to lose and compete with others in everything. He raced reporters to the base, beat a pro at hotel ping-pong when placing a team, came to practice first, and left last. Kobe owns the record price of tickets to his farewell game. The minimum ticket price was $750. That night, his previous phrase was “Mamba Out” (mamba is Bryant’s nickname).
Attendance records and team completion
The NBA seeks to increase competition between clubs and fuel interest in watching games. By the way, the average attendance at NBA games is about 18,000 people. A record-breaking 62,046 people attended the game.
The league introduced a salary cap and a player draft mechanism. A draft is an offseason event where teams can sign young and promising players, usually from college leagues. The weakest teams in the season are given the first draft pick. It is a way for couples to acquire strong players and build a new roster around them.
Basketball Development and the Dream Team
The league pays a lot of attention to charity and basketball development on the planet. Its social mission is to promote healthy lifestyles, protect the environment, erase boundaries for fans of the game, reduce illiteracy, and offer master classes from League coaches.
One of the most effective ways to promote basketball globally has been through the creation of the Dream Team. They called the 1992 U.S. Olympic basketball team, which included every star player in the NBA, including Jordan, Byrd, Johnson, Pippen, and others. Professional players had previously been barred from the Olympics, but the NBA and the U.S. government got them to participate and sent the best players to the tournament in Barcelona. That’s when most people got to see the actual level of basketball. The Dream team won every game with an average goal difference of 43.8 points. Not only did fans sign autographs for the team, but so did opponents from other teams.
Since then, Team USA has won many major tournaments, proving that if you want to be the best, there’s only one way to be the best in the National Basketball League.
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Jeanna Bray is someone with significant expertise in writing on various topics such as education, sports, technology, and more. She assists with research work for PaperHelp.
