With so much top NBA talent on the move, chemistry might be overrated

Does team chemistry matter anymore in the NBA? Or should we define chemistry differently these days, making way for the idea that it can be microwaved and served immediately?

I ask because the league has been turned upside down recently by a series of pairings involving many of the game’s superstars. Remember when franchises wanted a Big Three, a la LeBron James, Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh with the Heat? Or Stephen Curry, Klay Thompson and Kevin Durant? It was so important, the experts told us.

Suddenly, the NBA is all about Dynamic Duos. Namely:

James and Anthony Davis with the Lakers.

Kawhi Leonard and Paul George with the Clippers.

James Harden and Russell Westbrook with the Rockets.

Durant and Kyrie Irving with the Nets.

There’s a decent chance that the NBA title will go to one of those four, freshly infused teams over the next few seasons (Durant is expected to miss the 2019-20 season with a torn Achilles). It’s not a given, by any means, but when you concentrate so much talent in such a small cluster of franchises, it not only helps those teams immensely, it dilutes the talent pool for everyone else. It means one of several things for the league. Take your pick:

• That chemistry is overrated.

• That chemistry is a much more fast-bonding substance than it used to be.

• That talent beats everybody and everything, including good chemistry, every time.

With so many of the NBA’s top teams going the two-superstar route, we’re going to find out, again, that talent — as long as effort and some concern for fellow teammates are mixed in — always wins. Perhaps there’s a lesser-talented team out there whose players have toiled and bled together long enough to be able to challenge opponents blessed with more God-given ability. That would be a nice story to tell your grandchildren someday. But more and more in the NBA, it feels like a fairy tale.

The only thing the have-not teams have going for them is the possibility of ego wars among the haves. Harden and Westbrook look like a mushroom cloud waiting to happen. Both want the ball in their hands, so someone is going to have to give. Does either strike you as a giver?

Where all of this leaves the Bulls, who are rebuilding and talking a lot about the importance of team culture, is in the eye of the beholder. They have no superstars, but they do have some young players who might turn into something. That’s the nice view.

Or you can take the darker view: that the Bulls chose the rebuilding path at a time when rebuilds are being rendered irrelevant by superstars constructing their own super teams. Wouldn’t that figure?

Free agents are going where they want to go — nothing new there. But now players are engineering their own trades — George did it to join Leonard in Los Angeles, and Westbrook did it to join Harden in Houston.

The teams that lost superstars have amassed first-round picks. In addition to getting three players for Davis, the Pelicans also received three first-round picks from the Lakers. Sounds good, right? But given the NBA trend, it seems more likely that Zion Williamson will win a title with a team other than New Orleans, which took him with the first overall pick in this year’s draft. He might end up having a wonderful rapport with his Pelicans teammates, but will there be enough talent around him to make him stay? Remember: talent first.

When Leonard joined the Raptors via a trade last season, then led them to the NBA title, it seemed to challenge the idea that team chemistry mattered. But he was going to a team that already played well together, and, perhaps more important, he seemed to lack the selfish gene that plagues so many superstars.

But it did raise a question: What is locker-room chemistry, anyway? If it matters, it can’t matter in the same way it used to, when there weren’t these wild changes at the top of teams’ rosters. Chemistry might now be defined as: They can play together without wanting to kill each other. Or maybe it means this: I barely know your first name, but I like that you pass the ball to me. I might even pass it back.

You can make the argument that today’s players don’t need a lot of time in the same uniform to develop chemistry. Everybody already knows everybody else. Two players might share an agent or a shoe company and have a close relationship because of it. Or they might train together in the offseason. A getting-to-know-you period might not be necessary. NBA offenses are very similar to one another. It’s not the NFL, where each team’s playbook is a different complicated math problem. So assimilation is easier in the NBA.

Play, get along as best you can and let talent prevail. For better or worse, that’s how it is in the NBA, more than ever. Chemistry? What a quaint notion.