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This post was originally posted at The New Democrat on Blogger

Anytime there’s a choice between having the player who scored the most points in a game and the team that scored the most points in a game, especially a playoff game I would always take the team. When one player scores fifty points and his team loses, it generally means he was doing most of the scoring for his team in that game. And that his teammates weren’t doing much damage to the other team. Classic example of Michael Jordan vs. the Boston Celtics in the 1986 Eastern Conference Quarterfinals, where he scored sixty points in back-to-back games, but the Celtics beat the Chicago Bulls in both games and beat them badly.

That is how you defended Bob McAdoo when he was with the Buffalo Braves. You guarded him tough and you tried to stop him. But not to the point where it would free up other Braves to beat you with open shots and layups. Now it so happens that the Braves won this game and Big Bob was able to put the Braves on his back. But the Bullets won this series, because they had a better team, even if the Braves had the better player in the series. Good teams, or in the Bullets case very good teams, if not great teams generally beat teams that have a great player, if that player doesn’t have a very good supporting cast around him.