The Thursday Thorns column series exists to keep us all in check, exploring the uncomfortable facts and realities in the sports world today amid all the hyperbole and yelling out there. This time, we’re taking on—with the help of LeBron James—the “ring culture” that has dominated sports-mediot mentality for too long … and not just in the NBA. When media personalities push this false narrative, fans start believing it.

They don’t need to win a championship to validate careers, folks, and winning one doesn’t make them special, either.

This is reality in a sports world where a team wins the league title one day, and less than 24 hours later, the news cycle has moved on. Perhaps winning a gold medal once meant something to amateur athletes who worked real jobs while also training for the Olympics, but those days have been gone for almost 35 years now. Don’t get us wrong: winning championships and titles is cool, but it’s not everything and never was.

James noted this earlier in the week during an interview: “You sit here and tell me Allen Iverson and Charles Barkley and Steve Nash f—ing weren’t unbelievable?” Those three Hall of Fame players never won an NBA title, and James believes—accurately—it should never diminish what they did achieve in the regular seasons of their careers … all of them MVPs, actually. As we have said, the playoffs are crapshoots.

And just because a player was on a title team doesn’t mean they deserved the ring themselves, via individual performance: to wit, San Francisco Giants catcher Buster Posey hit .230 in three World Series with a .616 OPS. Certainly, he is not why those teams won titles, of course, but he gets to bask in the glory of being brought along to titles by his teammates who greatly outperformed him on baseball’s biggest stage.

But mediots and sheeple point to his “leadership” skills, and he’s overhyped for “winning” those rings. We have discussed this nonsense with Kobe Bryant, too, in terms of him not being the best player on any of his teams that won championships. It’s a shame sports fans don’t have a better grasp of these realities, but when they cannot think for themselves and swallow whatever lines the sports mediots feed them? Well …

James taps into this by accurately recognizing many factors that go into winning a title: the team effort, foremost among them. It’s also the Caitlin Clark issue: she was the third-best player on her team last year, but she seemed to get all the credit for the Indiana Fever success. Why? Because she’s popular? She didn’t win a ring in college, while many better college players actually did win rings there. A lot of it is luck, really.

We may not have played professional sports, but we certainly have had our own athletic careers: having played and then coached multiple college sports, we know what LeBron is talking about here, and we’ve been arguing the same thing for years. We were lucky to win the team championships we did, and we were not the stars of the team. Does that make us more special than better players who never won a title? No.

Look at the current Edmonton Oilers, who just lost a second Cup Finals in a row, sadly. They have generational gods on their roster, who have come up short of winning it all so far in their careers. In reality, so few players actually get to win rings, and it does come down to being in the right place at the right time. We can’t judge without context of luck. Ask Ernie Banks. Ask Dan Marino. Heck, even ask Barry Bonds.

[Scratch that: don’t ask Bonds anything. He’s an asshole.]