There are no real NBA rivalries

Only games that matter a little more because of current stakes.

Good morning. Let's basketball.

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College football just had its unofficial Rivalry Week, with in-state and interstate rivalries taking center stage. Many of these have a deep history, going as far back as the 1890s. Some figure prominently in the highest championship levels of the sport, like Ohio State vs. Michigan and Alabama vs. Auburn. Some, like the Apple Cup between Washington and Washington State or the Egg Bowl between Ole Miss and Mississippi State, don't. You have all those neighborly rivals like those mentioned above, but you also have USC vs. Notre Dame.

You could never really have a rivalry weekend for the NBA. The structure of the league -- the long season, the cycles of success and failure, the enormous playoff field -- dilute the power of any particular two-team tension on an ongoing basis.

We can come up with paper rivalries, like Celtics vs. Sixers. There's a lot of history there, both teams have had success (one more than the other), there's some relative geographic proximity (relative). But the real driving force of any current rivalry between the teams is that both teams are good right now. When the Sixers are down, no one cares about Sixers vs. Celtics. The same applies when the Celtics are down. It's a rivalry built primarily on whether the teams matter.

Knicks vs. Nets has never mattered, and so it doesn't really matter. The Kings moved to Northern California almost 40 years ago and have never NOT ONCE appeared in the playoffs in the same season that the geographically proximate Warriors did. The teams are 90 miles apart and have never both mattered at the same time. So there isn't really a rivalry.

The Lakers and Clippers? Same deal: it's a rivalry without stakes because the Clippers almost never mattered before the last decade and the Lakers haven't mattered but for one season in the last decade. Pacers vs. Pistons mattered only when the Pacers and Pistons were fighting (literally) for a trophy.

Do the Warriors have a rival? Is it ... the Cavaliers? No! It was the Cavaliers while the teams were fighting in the NBA Finals every year, but a regular season game between the teams carries no particular weight, especially with all but one main character gone from Cleveland. The Lakers aren't a rival to the Warriors, either. Nor are the Grizzlies, Mavericks, Suns, Rockets or Nuggets. The Warriors, the most successful team of the past decade, don't have a rival to speak of. Just teams they have dispatched, sometimes in multiple years.

Part of the problem with these potential geographic rivalries is that teams in the same division play each other four times in the regular season, every single year. You might think that familiarity could breed contempt. It breeds lower stakes. And as we've discussed before, stakes are one of the biggest drivers of interest in modern sports. The third game of the season series between the Celtics and the Sixers just doesn't really mean that much to either team, unless they are battling for a playoff seed. Plus some of these teams play in the preseason as well.

This is inherent in the nature of a basketball season vs. a football season, too. UNC vs. Duke is probably college basketball's biggest rivalry, and not every contest between the teams is an enormous deal. But those college basketball rivalries do maintain a certain gravity among the teams' fans that NBA rivalries just don't. Lakers vs. Celtics is really the only true rivalry one can cite, a face-off that can matter to more casual fans. And even that has declined in importance through the Lakers' struggles over the past decade (with the exception of the Bubble Season).

This isn't necessarily an issue the NBA should be focused on. Building up higher stakes in the regular season more generally is an important goal. The play-in tournament has helped do that, and we'll see if the planned midseason cup will boost tension as well. In terms of improving the state of rivalries, shrinking the length of the regular season could help make individual games more meaningful.

Until then, we'll just have to keep inventing our own little ways to make regular season games feel more important than they are.