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.
Creating a burner for this post is really helping strengthen your case…
your league is called the National Basketball Association, not the World basketball association.
in football the champions league is the most important club level tournament in the world, whoever wins it is the best team in the world, but that does not make them “world champions”, since it is not a world tournament.
when they win the club world cup is when they are declared world champions, they usually win it, but what matters is that they win a world tournament before declaring themselves world champions.
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?
track and field (world champion or olympics) is not inherently exclusionary though, which the NBA is. Like if one country just happens to have all 8 best sprinters in the world that’s fine as long as the competition is open for sprinters not of that country.
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.
Key word is assume here. We can assume that would a club world championship would be won by the NBA champ, so we can assume the boston celtics would be called that. But it stays just that, assumption. a thing that is accepted as true or as certain to happen, without proof. Europeans/rest of the world are annoyed by the nomer world champion, because in their heads in requires the proof of winning a ‘world championship’ because that is how the world champion gets chosen in most other sports they watch.
Ultimately it’s a discussion of semantics, because i can see that on an emotional level for a lot of people there is no difference between being called ‘world champion’ or ‘best team in the world’, the latter on which no-one would really argue the NBA champ isn’t.
Would there be a club world cup for basketball (which in my opinion there should be), most europeans and others would not argue against Celtics being the best team if they won that, even if it would be a foregone conclusion that they would win it.
Have you by any chance heard of the fighting video game tournament EVO?
It’s just a name. French fries. French toast. They don’t have anything to do with French.
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.
Your boxing example is a poor one. Go for golf next time.
Boxing has 18 divisions and four world bodies. So that’s 72 World Champions, which one is truly the best?
The one my favourite boxer holds the belt in is clearly the best
That doesn’t include regular champs and super champs either
well i guess its time to mute this subreddit until november
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
People have called out the World Series for years.
Anyway, it’s all just marketing. The NBA called itself that and everyone went along.
Noah Lyles will never have to worry about rent again
NATIONAL Basketball Association
Do you wear a generic NBA hat when you go to games?
This is one of the dumbest debates I’ve ever seen.
What you have is people who argue what the term “World champion” literally means, and people who argue over a more philosophical meaning of the word.
The NBA is the undisputed best basketball league in the world, no sane person is disputing this. It’s champion is not the “World champion” in a literal meaning of the term, even if theres a perfectly reasonable claim to say they are the best team in the world.
Call them whatever the fuck you want
The less people talk about Noah Lyles and his arrogant demeanor despite not even breaking any world records, the better life would be