Game 7 of the 2025 NBA Finals will conclude tomorrow night, and a new champion will be crowned. Next season, the winning team will have a ring ceremony, and 15-20 years later, that will somehow be important. It wasn’t always that way, and it still isn’t that way in any sport outside of basketball. For some reason, hoops fans have started to weigh heavily how much jewelry a man wears when determining his greatness.
Michael Jordan fans are the ones to blame for sure. Early on in Jordan’s career, his supporters didn’t care about rings because he didn’t have any. They didn’t start bringing up rings until 2003 because a high school made them nervous. This singular focus was highlighted by Jason Segel in the movie Bad Teacher. When he mentions Jordan’s six rings, his student (a LeBron James fan) asks if that’s the only argument he has, Segel yells, “It’s the only one I need, Shawn!”
Wayne Gretzky is the greatest player in NHL history. Asking a hockey fan how many titles “The Great One” has it’s less likely to be something they know off the top of their head than how many goals he has or career points. That’s because in hockey, how a player performs on the ice individually is more important to their individual greatness than how their teams have fared in the playoffs.
Gretzky finished his career with four titles, almost a third as many as Henri Richard. The reason Gretzky is the nearly unanimous GOAT of his sport is that until recently, he was the league’s all-time leader in goals scored, and yet, if he had never scored a single goal, he’d still have more career points than any player in NHL history. The same can likely be said if he had never won a title. It would be considered a tragedy that the greatest of all time never won a championship.
Babe Ruth is widely considered the greatest baseball player of all time, and yet many casual baseball fans can’t say off the top of their head how many World Series titles he won. It’s seven, or in other words, less than Yogi Berra and Joe DiMaggio. The reason he’s considered better than them is because of his 714 career homeruns. Neither of them was the King of Crash or the Colossus of Clout.
Even the few fans of America’s pastime who pick Henry Aaron as the greatest do so because of his 3,771 hits, 755 of which were homeruns. It certainly would have little, if anything, to do with his one career World Series ring. Finally, football is so specialized, it’s impossible to name the greatest “player” of all time. It has to be broken into position groups. Lawrence Taylor is considered the greatest linebacker ever, despite having just two Super Bowl rings to someone like Ken Norton Jr’s three.
Despite fans of all the other major sports understanding that team achievements, like championships, are not individual achievements, basketball fans, when comparing James and Jordan, will mention six rings to four. It’s the only argument they need. Except for the fact that six rings is the fourth-most in NBA history, behind nine other players. If rings were all that mattered, Jordan would be the 10th-best player in NBA history.
Bill Russell has 11 titles, and even a role player like Robert Horry has seven. The case against Horry is that he wasn’t the best player on his team. It’s impossible to be in the GOAT argument if a player had a teammate who was better than him. So, what’s the excuse for Russell? He was the best player on his team, and he has double the rings as Jordan. It’s not rocket science, it’s not even simple math. It’s selectivism.
Bringing it back around to tomorrow night’s game seven. Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and Tyrese Haliburton are the best players on their respective teams, and one of them is coming away with a ring. The first in their career will be more than Charles Barkley, Patrick Ewing, Reggie Miller, Elgin Baylor, John Stockton, and Karl Malone. Neither of them will be mentioned in the same sentence as those greats next week, unless rings are being compared.
It’s not that rings don’t matter, despite the title; it’s that they only matter a little. They are one piece of a 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle. Points per game matter, All-NBA teams matter, individual awards matter, and……rings matter. If rings are the only argument someone has, they actually have no argument at all. Don’t frustrate yourself trying to get through to them. Just walk away.
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