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In sports, coaches always like to say “there is no I in team”. If you have no heard this phrase before there is a really good chance you have never played, watched, or even have heard of sports or teamwork. That is fine though, everyone has their own lives and now is a good time to start learning about sports if this is the case. The reason for this saying is to promote teamwork and to prove that not one player can single handedly win a championship or even a game in a team sport. If you do not believe this you can ask LeBron James about it. He may have gotten some superstars together to win him some championships. That will be the only shot at LeBron in this article though.
Some of you may be asking where this is going? Well there was a wonderful feat accomplished recently when Devin Booker of the Phoenix Suns scored 70 points against the Boston Celtics. Now if you did not know about his game already, who would you have thought would have won this game? Well you are incorrect, the Phoenix Suns actually managed to lose. This just shows that no matter how great of a game one player has, Basketball is a team sport. Just to clarify, the statement “there is no I in team” has to do with getting people to work together. This has nothing to do with what Booker did. He is one of the real up in coming stars in the NBA. That game the Suns were just feeding the hot hand. Just to clarify this is not an article about how Devin Booker is a ball hog. It’s more of an article about how much basketball is a team sport.
There have been 67 instances in NBA history where a player has scored more than 60 points in a single NBA game. In those 67 games, 15 times the team with the player that scored over 60 points lost. To break that down even further, that is 22% of the time. That is almost 1 out of every 4 times a player scored 60 points or higher, his team lost. That is actually the reason why coaches say “there is no I in Team.” It really does not help that much if a player has to take on that much scoring. Just look at the Golden State Warriors right now. They play team basketball with a balanced scoring attack. Of course there will be games where the team feeds the guy that you feel like cannot miss, but that is not going to happen regularly.
The Devin Booker game showed this more than ever. The Boston Celtics are one of the rising teams in the NBA. Meaning they are easily one of the best teams in basketball and are only getting better. Brad Stevens preaches team basketball and has a team filled with unselfish players. Devin Booker unfortunately is on a team that needs some selfish play to even get close to beating the Celtics. Losing by 10 points also is not really that close either. The biggest takeaway from this game though is that if anyone had any doubt about how good of a player Devin Booker is they were silenced. He also just put himself on a list filled with names like Wilt Chamberlain, Kobe Bryant, David Thompson, Elgin Baylor, David Robinson, Michael Jordan, Pete Maravich, and many more basketball greats. It is too bad the Suns are kind of a joke, but at least they have a superstar in Booker.
Stats and Info Courtesy of Land of Basketball or NBA.com