AI Summary
5 min readDo You Still NEED a Top-5 Player to Win an NBA Championship?
The old rule in the NBA was simple: you needed a consensus top-five player to win a title. But the last two champions—the Celtics with Jayson Tatum and the Knicks with Jalen Brunson—have started to crack that assumption. Neither guy was ever considered the best player in the league. On Locked On NBA Daily, West Goldberg, Matt Moore, and Hayes wrestled with whether the rule has actually changed, or whether we're just redefining what "top five" means.
The Mixed Evidence
Moore immediately pushed back on the premise. "I don't know the answer to this," he said. "You can look at it and go, well, Jason Tatum wasn't top five. Jalen Brunson wasn't top five. But Steph in 2022 was borderline top five. LeBron in 2020 probably still top five. The counters are Shai, obviously top five MVP, Jokic coming off two MVP seasons, Giannis, Kawhi in 2019." The recent champions don't form a clean pattern.
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What you'll learn
- 1 (00:45) **Do You Still Need a Top-5 Player to Win a Championship?** - The hosts debate whether recent champions have proven you no longer need a consensus top-five superstar to win a title.
- 2 (09:24) **Who's the Next Non-Top-5 Champion?** - The panel identifies which players outside the consensus top five are best positioned to win the next championship.
- 3 (13:26) **Revisiting the Pacers' Zubac Trade** - The hosts analyze the trade that sent Ivica Zubac to Indiana, questioning if the Pacers should regret giving up a pick that became the fifth overall selection.
- 4 (24:38) **Mount Rushmore: NBA Players to Have a Beer With** - The hosts build their personal Mount Rushmores of current and former NBA players they'd most want to share a drink with.
- 5 Standout Quotes
- 6 "If you're not gonna have a top five player, you better be on the side of the bracket that falls apart where everything gets melted because of injuries and bad luck." - Matt Moore
- 7 "If they traded this pick for Zubac... how do you feel about it before he has his breakout season? I would have been like, 'What on earth are they doing?'" - West Goldberg
+ Full timestamped outline available in the app
Guests on this episode
Show Notes
Do you still need a top-five NBA player to win a championship? Recent champions have challenged one of the league’s oldest team-building rules, and Wes Goldberg, Matt Moore and Haize debate whether having an elite superstar is still the best path to a title — or whether teams are better off building deeper, more balanced rosters around stars such as Jalen Brunson and Jayson Tatum.
Then, should the Indiana Pacers regret trading for Ivica Zubac? The guys revisit the massive deadline deal now that Indiana lost its 2026 first-round pick and debate whether judging the trade by what that pick became is fair.
Finally, we reach peak offseason content: Which NBA players, past or present, belong on the Mount Rushmore of guys you’d most want to have a beer with?
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