There are no great NBA teams this season.
There are some pretty good teams - Chicago, Orlando, Houston spring to mind - but no great ones.The reason? Expansion.
This is not an isolated viewpoint. All around the league, people are saying that the NBA, in its rush to take advantage of an expanding fan base, has diluted its product.
The prime evidence is in Chicago. The Bulls are on their way to a 70-plus win season, causing some people to call them a great team.
Bulls forward Dennis Rodman, for one, won't be impressed if Chicago smashes the NBA record of 69 wins in a season, set by a great Laker team of the early '70s.
"This league is so filtered and watered down, we can beat anybody with our eyes closed, pretty much," Rodman said.
Charles Barkley and Larry Bird have expressed comparable sentiments about the way the league has thinned out; Bird even used the Jazz as an example, and people in the Jazz camp have a hard time disagreeing.
"You look at the overall picture, it is diluted to some extent," said Jazz coach Jerry Sloan, whose team is in Los Angeles preparing to meet the Lakers on Friday night. "You can get by with three great players on a team, and have a chance to win it all. Before, you had to have four or five great players, and some good players around them."
"The talent level now nowhere compares to what it was eight years ago, and obviously it's because of expansion," said Jazz broadcaster Ron Boone.
What Boone worries about is talk of even more expansion. He says the NBA is already a league of guys who can run and jump but don't know how to play the game. "What I'm concerned about is the lack of good shooters," he said. "Guys are more athletic now, but they're not fundamentally sound. How much more expansion can they do?
www.deseret.com
