Professional track and field sprinter Noah Lyles has triggered a storm in the NBA community after he questioned the validity of the “World Champion” title commonly attributed to the NBA Champion team. The ruckus on social media created by Lyles’ comments has prompted many NBA superstars to respond to the contentious argument. Amidst all this commotion, Shaquille O’Neal, who won four NBA titles in his career, recently shared a speech from San Antonio Spurs head coach Gregg Popovich from 13 years ago to add to the debate.
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Shaq won four NBA championships, one with the Miami Heat and three with the Los Angeles Lakers. The Big Aristotle has three ‘World Championship’ banners hanging from the rafters of the Crypto.com Arena in LA from the Lakers’ three-peat in the early 2000s. However, he seemed to resonate with the comments made by Spurs head coach Pop from over a decade ago.
In 2010, Gregg Popovich had said that the NBA Championship doesn’t not qualify a team or a player for the ‘World Champion’ title. According to him, it was flat-out wrong to hand out such titles to NBA Champions.
“It doesn’t make sense for an NBA team to call themselves world champions. I don’t remember anybody playing anybody outside our borders to get that tag.”
Shaq backs Gregg Popovich’s 13-year-old statement about NBA Teams being ‘World Champions’ pic.twitter.com/5tm1p4bUkp
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The Spurs coach had differentiated between different Championship titles during the speech and had declared that the Spanish team were the World Champions at the time (Spain had won the 2006 FIBA World Cup).
The USA were the Olympic Champions and the Lakers were the NBA champions back then. But still the spurs HC thought both those teams were undeserving of the ‘World Championship’ title.
Pop’s thinking surprisingly echoes Lyles’ comments and Shaq seems to resonate with the argument.
Among the NBA players who took to X to react to the debate, Phoenix Suns stars Devin Booker and Kevin Durant both had a view quite different from that of Popovich and Lyles. They expressed their disappointment with the young star’s comments.
Durant wrote, “Somebody help this brother”, before D-Book chimed in with a facepalm emoji.
Meanwhile, the Miami Heat star Bam Adebayo wrote, “Lol is somebody going to tell him??” In addition, Dubs star Draymond Green commented, “When being smart goes wrong.”
Quite understandably, the NBA stars were not happy with Lyles’ remarks.
The debate is really an interesting one. On one hand, it’s true that the NBA houses the best talents in the world and so the NBA Champion team should technically be hailed as the best team in the world.
However, Lyles and Pop share the belief that you can’t simply call a team ‘World Champions’ just because they are the best on paper. You have to actually beat out the best teams in the world as well from different nations outside of North America.
