Who needs LeBron James? This year’s NBA Finals has more than enough star power

Article content

The NBA Finals arrive Thursday with less star power than usual, but that’s OK.

Article content

Yes, the NBA built itself into a business giant thanks to household name icons like Jordan, Magic, Larry, Shaq, Kobe, Steph and LeBron, but it’s doing just fine thank to an explosion of offence in recent years and its ever-growing worldwide popularity.

Article content

It says something that a two-time NBA MVP and this year’s runner-up, which Denver Nuggets centre Nikola Jokic happens to be, flies so under the radar. It’s not often that an athlete of Jokic’s calibre (he has averaged a ridiculous 29.9 points, 10.3 assists and 13.3 rebounds during Denver’s 12-3 run in these playoffs) has garnered so little fanfare.

Article content

And the Miami Heat’s best player, Jimmy Butler, is almost as unheralded. Butler’s not in Jokic’s class, but he’s pretty damn good (six all-NBA appearances, perennially one of the league’s best defenders and playoff performers, to start) and he just led the Heat to its second Finals appearance in four years.

Article content

Maybe we should have seen that coming, since no team won 60 games this season for the first time in more than two decades.

Finally, it’s not all about LeBron or Curry or even Giannis. Parity, for the first time in ages, has hit the NBA. All but four of the 30 teams had a chance at the play-in or playoffs heading into the final two weeks of the season. Then the league’s quarterfinals featured a No. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8 seed, which had never happened before.

The ratings don’t appear to be suffering as a result. NBA deputy commissioner Mark Tatum told a handful of international media members on a Wednesday video call that the league set an all-time record for attendance, sellouts and percentage of capacity of arenas that were filled this season and added this is the most-watched playoffs in 12 years.

Article content

Article content

It will be interesting to see if that continues with Denver making its first Finals appearance and Miami representing underdogs everywhere.

The Heat is just the second No. 8 seed to ever get this far and actually lost its first play-in game against Atlanta and trailed big against Chicago (a team that itself had to make an improbable comeback to knock off the Raptors in the play-in).

Later, Miami would stunningly blow a 3-0 series lead against Boston before winning Game 7 in Beantown earlier this week. The Heat’s title odds following that loss to the Hawks? 200-1.

The odds are much better for Miami now, but, on paper, this series looks like a mismatch. Denver led the West in regular-season wins and paced all in home victories.

Article content

Jokic has overwhelmed anything Minnesota, Phoenix or the Los Angeles Lakers have thrown at him, with Canadian Jamal Murray looking equally unstoppable as his extremely overqualified sidekick (Murray has averaged 25.4 points and 5.9 assists in 48 career playoff games, including a pair of 37-point efforts in the conference final sweep of the Lakers).

Denver also has a far deeper supporting cast, a significantly more dangerous offence and a lot more size. Plus, the league’s most imposing homecourt advantage, thanks to some mile-high altitude.

Meanwhile, Miami, with a roster littered with undrafted players and former 30th-overall selection Butler, tied for just the NBA’s 11th-best record and was written off several times along the way.

Article content

Until these playoffs, Miami was regarded as one of the league’s least-dangerous shooting squads (27th in three-point accuracy, 26th in total field goal percentage), but somehow, no team has shot better than the Heat’s 39% work this post-season from beyond the arc.

Add the relentless Butler, aging former Raptors icon Kyle Lowry — who has had his moments the past few weeks — and head coach Erik Spoelstra, one of the best in the business, and this feels like an intriguing battle in the making.

A DECADE ALREADY

It was 10 years ago Wednesday that Denver lost its highly regarded, young general manager Masai Ujiri, who returned to the Raptors to replace Bryan Colangelo following Ujiri’s second stint in Denver, where he started as a scout.

Article content

Ujiri had led a remake of the Nuggets, which included the successful trade of disgruntled superstar Carmelo Anthony to New York.

Ujiri’s replacement, Tim Connelly, put together most of the current team before leaving for Minnesota, though it was thanks to Ujiri’s Anthony trade that Murray ended up with the Nuggets, since the draft pick that became Murray was part of that deal.

Ujiri, of course, built the Raptors team that won the NBA title four years ago and has overseen teams that have gone 490-310 since his arrival, with nine the franchise’s 10 playoff series wins.

Article content

RAPTORS TIES

Other Raptors ties to these Finals:

• Heat guard Lowry holds many Toronto franchise records and will likely get his number retired one day.
• Nuggets coach Michael Malone is the son of the first Toronto head coach, Brendan Malone and also was an assistant for Leo Rautins’ Canadian national team.
• Assistant coach Popeye Jones played for the Raptors for parts of two seasons. Two of his sons went on to play in the NHL because the Colorado Avalanche and not the Nuggets, were a power when they were young.
• Murray grew up a big Raptors fan.
• Aaron Gordon was robbed of an NBA slam dunk contest win at all-star weekend in Toronto.
• Assistant coach Anthony Carter finished his NBA career with the Raptors.