Everyone was a one-name star, if not an actual brand-name superstar, on Thursday around the NBA.

But beyond the obligatory marketing pitch — in this case the donning of jerseys with first names stitched onto their backs — the best Christmas news for the purist fan is that a league long driven by a shoe-company, celebrate-the-individual agenda has continued to lean toward the long-underplayed joy of collective achievement.

For this we can thank the San Antonio Spurs. So said Paul Pierce before his Washington Wizards raced out to an 11-2 lead and coasted to a 102-91 victory over Team Carmelo Anthony, otherwise known as the 5-26 New York Knicks, before a somnambulant crowd at Madison Square Garden in New York.

Having escaped the mediocrity that has settled in at his former home in Brooklyn, Pierce ran with a question of why the league seemed to be experiencing a rise of teams not necessarily endowed with players who have earned the one-name treatment from casual fans.

Besides the Wizards, now 20-8, you know those teams as Toronto, Atlanta, Golden State and Memphis — in addition to the Spurs, the defending champions, whose regular-season goal appears to be simply getting to the playoffs healthy and rested.

“I think San Antonio really created that model,” Pierce said before the Spurs fell to the Oklahoma City Thunder, 114-106. “Usually when a team wins the championship, the next year the teams that are contending try to model themselves after that.”

Pierce mentioned the Big 3 mimicry that proliferated after he, Ray Allen and Kevin Garnett blended seamlessly in Boston to win a championship in 2008.

“Then Miami did it and other teams — they tried to do it here, too,” he said, referring to the Knicks.

Passing on the obvious commentary of how that worked out, Pierce added, “Now that San Antonio won the championship and they’re back on top, more and more you’re seeing teams staying together with a core that try to prepare themselves with deeper benches, and those are the teams that are showing the most success, instead of leaning on one, two or three guys.”

He continued, “You’re seeing deeper teams in this league — you know, more team play. You’re seeing guys who were starters on other teams coming off the bench. You’re not just seeing one guy score all the points.”

Kobe Bryant, whose career sands are emptying to the bottom of the hourglass in Los Angeles. Five championship rings with the now-also-ran Lakers offer little immunity from the kneejerk blame machine. One cable network conducted a debate Wednesday about whether the Lakers, who recently stunned the Warriors without Bryant in the lineup, were better off without him.

Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook can attribute Oklahoma City’s 14-16 record to injuries, but the season has brought little cheer for them. And back in Los Angeles, the Clippers — sold for $2 billion in part on the belief that greatness awaited a franchise led by Chris Paul and Blake Griffin — are looking more like a marginal playoff entry in the loaded Western Conference, upstaged by another rising tandem: the Portland Trail Blazers’ LaMarcus Aldridge and Damian Lillard, who have a better supporting cast.

Naturally, the Trail Blazers didn’t make the Christmas Day schedule. Familiar storylines are hard to let go. So Bryant, though inactive, was with the Lakers in Chicago, and in Miami, the remains of the Heat foiled LeBron James, the homecoming king, and his Cleveland Cavaliers — a team sitting in fifth in the Eastern Conference, behind Toronto, Atlanta, Washington and Chicago.

Now James will have to do without Anderson Varejao, perhaps his favorite teammate and the Cavaliers’ most aggressive interior defender. Instead of using his de facto general manager’s authority to sign his pals Mike Miller and James Jones, James would have been better off making a run over the summer at a rim protector.

At least James, like Dwight Howard (Houston) and Derrick Rose (Chicago), plays for a team with a winning record. The other seven best-paid NBA players had a combined record of 51-91 entering Thursday.