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.
The reality is that’s its all subjective and none of this matters. You can make a reasonable argument that NBA champions are world champions, you could make a reasonable argument they are not, and you could make a reasonable there is no possible way to concretely determine a “world champion”.
Moreover, outside of apparently running sports and Europe, no one cared about this until Lyles made these comments. Everyone is getting riled up because some guy with sour grapes was being pedantic. At the end of the day it really is just a marketing term that means nothing.