Franchise of the Decade

We took a little detour from Decade Week to pay our respects to Chris Henry, but back we are with another Best of the Decade piece. This time, we'll take a look at the best team of this decade. Now, two provisions before going forth. One, while usually when people talking about the best "teams", they're usually year-specific, this award is for the team that was most dominant through the entire decade. Secondly, I'm not counting seasons currently in progress because, obviously, we don't know the ending yet. I'm sure this means will put the two or three Colts fans reading this into an uproar if their boys can go 19-0 this year but, in the immortal words of the Pope, tough shit.


Now, before we get into the winner, here's a run down of the runner-ups.....in no particular order.


1. New York Yankees: What I was looking for mainly in the franchise of the decade was simple: number of championships and/or championship appearances the team made, number of potentially great players the team had on its roster over the course of the decade, and the distance between said team and what would have been the second best team in its sport. The latter point is what hurt the Yankees the most. Sure, the Yanks went to four World Series, winning two of them, this decade and there's no question that they finished this decade with potentially more all-time greats than any team in any sport(Jeter, A-Rod, Clemens, Rivera, Sheffield....the list goes on forever). The problem with those two parameters in terms of the Yankees(and I realize this isn't the Yankees' fault) is that there's no set cap in Major League Baseball. The Yankees can afford to have the greatest players because they can afford to buy an All-Star team. Even with that said, how much of a distance do you put between the Yankees and Red Sox over this past decade. Both won the same amount of titles(though the Sawx, in more impressive fashion, swept both of their World Series opponents). Both were perennial playoff teams(though the Yankees made it there far more often than Boston did) and, while the Yankees owned the Red Sox for the first half of the decade, all of that seemed to become moot once the Red Sox came back from a 3-0 deficit to eliminate the Yankees in the 2004 ALCS and go on to win their first of two titles this decade. So while the Yankees were certainly the most impressive team in their sport over the past ten years, the Red Sox were equally noteworthy.


2. San Antonio Spurs - It's hard to argue with their consistency over the last ten years. They've won at least 54 games every year this decade. They won three titles in three tries. They have one of the five greatest basketball players to ever step foot on the hardwood in Tim Duncan. They have one of the greatest coaches of all time in Greg Poppavich. In the end, they came up just a hair short of the team that inevitably took home the Team of the Decade crown(Spoiler Alert: It's the Lakers).


3. New England Patriots - Since the emergence of future Hall of Fame quarterback Tom Brady in 2001, the Patriots have towered over the NFL like a colossus. They've won three Super Bowls in four tries and, like the Spurs, have possess one of the game's greatest players(Brady) and one of the game's greatest coaches(Bill Belichick). So what keeps them from being the best of the decade? Well, if you want to be nitpicky, they DID go 5-11 to start off the year(although that did lead to them snagging DE Richard Seymour in the following year's Draft). Obviously, if they beat the Giants in the Super Bowl in 2007 and finish 19-0, they win this award going away.......but they didn't. Also, outside of Brady, all of the other great Patriots of the last ten years(Randy Moss, Junior Seau, Rodney Harrison, Corey Dillon) enjoyed the primes of their career elsewhere(unless you believe Ty Law and Richard Seymour are sure-fire Hall of Fame types....which I don't). Sure, you could make the case for Wes Welker as a potential Hall of Famer, but I think we are a few years from that and also(again, being nitpicky), it's hard to give top honors to a team that had their own cheating scandal(Spygate). Plus, the case can be made that, even before this season, Peyton Manning's Colts closed some of the gap from the distance between themselves and the Pats much like the Red Sox did to the Yankees over the second half of the decade.


Before we announce the winner, I'm sure some people will wonder why the case wasn't made for the Colorado Avalanche or the New Jersey Devils or the Detroit Red Wings or any other potentially dominant hockey team. The answer is pretty simple: While we here are proud of our following in Europe and appreciate their interests, we(like the rest of America) don't give a crap about hockey. Sorry.

Anyway, here's our winner:

Look, it pains me to put the Lakers here, too, but the fact remains that 6 NBA Finals appearance and 4 NBA titles in ten years is pretty damn impressive. Sure, their regular season winning percentage is lower than San Antonio's and they've had as many MVP winners(Shaq in '99-'00, Kobe in 2007-08) as the Spurs have this decade(Duncan in '01-02 and '02-'03). Still, it's hard to argue with a team that had, for most the decade at least, this generation's most dominant big man(Shaq), this generation's most unstoppable scorer(Kobe) and this generation's best coach(Phil Jackson).

Shaq and Kobe will go down in history, not only as possibly the best players ever at their respective positions, but as one of sports' greatest dynamic duos. To put it in another perspective, they are the Jay-Z and Damon Dash of basketball -- a tandem who will forever be synonymous both for their greatness together as well as their much-publicized split. The hypothetical question of "How many rings would Shaq and Kobe have won together had they managed to stay together?" will go down as one of the sport's greatest "What ifs". The fact that, at one point, this team reached the NBA Finals with a starting five that included Shaq, Kobe, Karl Malone and Gary Payton just makes it more awe-inspiring, and that team didn't even win the title.

The most impressive of the four championships might have been last year's title, with Kobe managing to finally win his first championship without The Diesel and, instead, proving that he could lead the team on his own with a group of good, but not great, role players in guys like Trevor Ariza, Andrew Bynum, Lamar Odom and Pau Gasol. The Lakers also led all contenders in the memorable moment department. In this decade alone, there was Shaq's 61-point performance against the Clippers on his birthday, the two amazing playoff buzzer beaters from Robert Horry(against the Kings) and Derek Fisher(against the Spurs), and Kobe's 81-point night against Toronto.

On top of that, the 2009-10 Lakers seem primed to outperform the achievements of last year's title team. While the team's 20-4 start obviously has no barring in the vote for this honor, it certainly will get the franchise off to a great start if they can cap off this season with yet another championship.