BY TIM COWLISHAW
The Dallas Morning News
DALLAS - (KRT) - It is a painful admission for someone who adored the Boston Celtics as a burr-headed youth, but it’s a fact. The Los Angeles Lakers are the biggest show in sports.
Bigger than “America’s Team” right over there in Irving because the NFL doesn’t need a successful team in Dallas or New York or Chicago or any other market to survive. The highest-rated Super Bowl ever was San Francisco-Cincinnati.
Bigger than the Celtics even with fewer titles, because Boston achieved 11 of its 16 during the remarkable Bill Russell era. For many of those seasons, there were eight teams in the league. Now there are 16 in the playoffs, which has made sustaining championship runs that much more difficult.
Yet the Lakers have managed to stay at or near the top for around 30 years, winning nine championships since 1972.
And, yes, even bigger than the big bad Yankees. That’s the only team that really even competes with the Lakers in terms of sustained greatness, dominance, personality, image and tradition.
And in the end, as all of us NBA conspiracy theorists understand, the Lakers always win.
Derek Fisher wins a key game, getting a shot off in .4 seconds. Karl Malone doesn’t get a suspension for ramming an elbow into Darrick Martin. There’s never a shortage of evidence, for the conspiracy-minded, that something is watching over LA.
Now just how can anyone in their right mind think any team could be bigger than the 26-time world champion A-Rod-loaded Yankees? Well, the “right mind” part has been questioned before, but let’s examine the facts.
In terms of performance over a century, yes, the Yankees win. But the NBA didn’t even exist until after World War II, so there’s no way the Lakers could match that.
The Lakers were the original dynasty in the NBA, winning five titles in Minneapolis before shifting to Los Angeles. Since World War II, it’s Yankees 16, Lakers 14.
To a more current generation, since the `70s, it’s Lakers 9, Yankees 6.
A case can be made that when their careers are over, Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe Bryant will join Wilt Chamberlain, Magic Johnson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar on the list of the 10 best players in NBA history. I recognize that Wilt was near the end of his career as Laker, but he did help Jerry West and Elgin Baylor capture a championship there.
And toss in West and Baylor, and LA may claim seven of the top 20 players in league history.
In terms of great Hall of Fame players, the Yankees can go head-to-head with this list, starting with Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig and continuing through generations with Joe DiMaggio, Mickey Mantle, Yogi Berra, Reggie Jackson and, when he is finished, Alex Rodriguez.
There is a noteworthy lack of truly “great” pitchers in the Yankees’ history book. It would be hard to press a case for any of their best pitchers having a place in the all-time top 10, except for Roger Clemens. He, like Chamberlain, spent the best parts of his career elsewhere.
The real question is: Do the Yankees mean to baseball what the Lakers mean to the NBA?
“The Lakers’ success, visibility and infamy are all great for the NBA,” Mavs owner Mark Cuban said via e-mail. “If the Mavs don’t win, I put my NBA hat on and there is no question that the Lakers (possibly) making it to the NBA Finals is better for business.”
The Lakers exert a much stronger pull on the TV ratings than the Yankees. When Los Angeles beat Philadelphia in 2001, they had a 12.1 average rating. They had a 10.2 a year later when the Lakers beat New Jersey.
When the Spurs beat New Jersey in 2003, the rating was a 6.5.
The Yankees and Arizona staged a classic seven-game series in 2001 to draw a 15.7 World Series rating. That tumbled 24 percent to an 11.9 when Anaheim played San Francisco, but the return of the Yankees to the Series last year to face Florida drew only a 12.8 - about eight percent better than the lowest-rated Series ever.
The difference may just be that the Lakers pack more star power. Shaq is a star of greater magnitude than A-Rod. Kobe, before his sexual assault charge, was becoming as marketable as Michael Jordan.
Even with the cloud of suspicion over him, Kobe maintains (rightly or wrongly) a bigger-than-life quality that is greater than whatever Derek Jeter brings to the New York tabloids.
The Yankees’ century in New York beats what any American pro sports team has to offer. It’s a modern world. People have slightly shorter memories than that.
The Lakers are No. 1. And if anyone says they aren’t, surely the NBA can fix it to prove otherwise
Yankees jumped out early, but Lakers have passed them
