Because of the Olympics, Noah Lyles is relevant again for a few weeks and I’ve seen a lot of comments on social media that agree with him for calling out the NBA for calling the NBA Champions as World Champions. First of all, isn’t the NBA Championship called the NBA FINALS? Why not call out MLB World Series?
Why are people comparing the Boston Celtics to Team USA? A National Team is different from a Professional Team/Club. To be labeled as World Champion isn’t exclusive to a competition between countries. What matters more is the level of competition and the qualification of the participants. The best basketball players in the world are playing in the NBA. The gap in talent between the NBA and other Basketball Leagues is so huge that it would be a waste of time for them to play other League Champions in a 7 game series.
In Boxing, The Champion fights his countryman for the World title as long as the challenger is a top contender in that division. Is that title fight a World Championship or a National Championship?
Even in track and field most of the top countries can have more than one participant as long as they qualify. Going by the logic of Lyle’s defenders, each country should only send their number 1 sprinter to the Olympics even if that country’s number 2 sprinter is a lot faster than the sprinters from other countries. What if all the athletes who qualified were from one country would it still be considered a world championship?
The NBA is the best basketball league in the world. If FIBA doesn’t have any competitive Club World Championship every year then it’s safe to assume that the best Professional Basketball Team in the best professional basketball league in the world are World Champions or World Champion Professional Club/Team. if you want to be more specific.
How can so many people post and believe stuff like this when the league is called the National Basketball Association?
National as in a Nation not the world. Just cause you have one team based in Canada doesn’t make it a world championship.
Where the teams are based is irrelevant to this. If you win the highest level tournament in the world that year for the sport you play, you are the world champion in that sport.
Where the teams are based is the only thing relevant to this. Basketball is a TEAM sport, so the WORLD championship requires TEAMS from all over the world to compete. The NBA is nowhere near being a world championship.
But that is just you way of defining it, which is not inherently wrong but still subjective. Why are the people who claim you need a global competition to be called world champion wrong then?
No where they’re based is literally the qualifying criteria for being world champions.
We play GAA here in Ireland, football and hurling. There are teams from New York and London as well but it’s called the All Ireland championship. The winners are the All Ireland Champions, If anyone called themselves would champions for winning it they’d be laughed out of town.
This is just Americans doing American things and bugging up their achievements.
That sounds like Ireland doing funny Irish things. If a team wins the most prestigious tournament of the year in your sport, they are the world champions for that year. Were they, or were they not, the best Gaelic football team to play that year?
Best in the world and world champion are different. jfc