Lakers’ LeBron James on NBA Superteams: Role Players ‘Ultimately’ Help You Win Titles

NBA roster building has long been built around a central edict—acquire the superstars and figure out the rest later. It’s extremely hard to win titles without at least one top-10 player and a star or two behind them.

But more than a few superteams have come and gone without achieving glory, and as LeBron James and J.J. Redick spoke about on their Mind the Game podcast, filling out the roster with the right role players is a huge key to winning championships.

“The complementary guys are ultimately the ones who will help you win the championship, for sure,” James said (conversation begins at 6:45 mark). “And classified as a real super team.”

He went on to discuss one of the issues during his first season with the Miami Heat, when he paired with Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh but fell short to Dirk Nowitzki and the Dallas Mavericks in the NBA Finals.

“My first year in Miami, yeah, we had a big three. Everybody said it was a superteam,” he noted. “But we had to build our team around [minimum contract] guys. Which was still OK, but we didn’t fill out the complementary guys enough. …We didn’t have enough complementary guys to make it all work.”

Granted, the Heat still made it to the NBA Finals, a testament to the overall value of superstars when it comes to building out a championship roster.

But role players are ultimately the glue, and without the right ones to complement the skill sets of the stars and do the less glamorous jobs required on a nightly basis, a team will lack the balance it needs to succeed at the highest levels.