Far more Mr. Nice Guys

— -- Rick Mahorn, erstwhile Bad Boy, looks around the NBA landscape and notices something missing.

"I don't see any villains," Mahorn says.

They've all been purged from the NBA, be it the peaceful transition of power from David Stern to Adam Silver, the forced expulsion of Donald Sterling, the decline of the league's most fabled franchises or the rehabilitation of LeBron James' image, 2014 was a year for erasing enemies. The anger is over.

The progress toward peace culminated on Christmas Day, fittingly enough. It was the rousing moment during the first timeout of the Cleveland Cavaliers-Miami Heat game, when a video distilled LeBron's triumphant four-year stay in Miami down to a minute's worth of highlights and the fans responded with a standing ovation. If the town he left could set aside its hurt to show him that much love, there's not much room left to loathe the former Public Enemy No. 1.

It marked the completion of LeBron's comeback from the low points of The Decision and The Celebration in 2010. Two championships and an Olympic gold medal along the way didn't hurt. A Harris Poll this summer announced that LeBron was the most popular athlete in the United States -- and the survey was taken before James went back to Cleveland, the move that warmed hearts across the country and restored him to the good graces of his hometown team's fans.

If LeBron is the league's bell cow, things fell in place for the rest of the herd.

Right now, the good teams aren't hateable and the hateable teams aren't good. The San Antonio Spurs typically produced more apathy than anger. In 2014 they went from being ignored to being appreciated. (Of course, it helped that they dismantled the hated Heat). Take the current crop of top teams and try to find any widespread animosity for the Warriors, Trail Blazers, Raptors, Hawks or Wizards.

Meanwhile, it's hard to muster the usual resentment for the Celtics and Lakers that built up as they won those 33 championship banners between them. This year they could make history of a different kind: Both franchises are on track to simultaneously miss the playoffs in back-to-back seasons for the first time.

Individually, NBA players have never been more likable. How are you supposed to hate on Kevin Durant and Stephen Curry? A Sports Illustrated list of the 35 most disliked people in sports didn't include any pro basketball players. The only NBA-related people on there were a pair of owners, Sterling and James Dolan, and Sterling isn't even in the league anymore.

For Silver, banning Sterling for life in Silver's first real at-bat as commissioner brought him more instant affection than his predecessor Stern ever enjoyed in his three decades in office. Silver hasn't been in office long enough to build up a list of fan bases that resented him, the way the Suns fans did Stern for those 2007 playoff suspensions or Lakers fans did for voiding the Chris Paul trade in 2011.

But admit it, you liked it when Stern played the role of WWE heel at the NBA draft and invited the fans to bring on all the boos they could muster. And there's something about going to the game to see a visiting team you don't just enjoy beating but want to humiliate. The sport is richer when it has those types of common enemies, those unifying forces.

As Ralph Wiley once wrote in a piece on John Thompson, the Darth Vader of college basketball, "The good villain makes you reach higher, deeper within ... the villain is the one who makes the drama work in the first place. There's no hero without him."

On Christmas morning, the same day of the LeBron lovefest in Miami, the "Bad Boys" 30 for 30 documentary on Mahorn's Detroit Pistons ran on ESPN2. It's funny how nostalgic people get for that team now, when it was despised everywhere outside of Michigan back then. The thing is, the Pistons reveled in that role. On the road, random people would call Mahorn's hotel room to cuss him out, and he'd just laugh at them.

"We would go different places; they hated us because they wanted to beat us," Mahorn said. "It's a compliment to me when they hate you so much."

No one sees it that way anymore. No basketball team is going to willingly rebrand itself as the NBA version of the Oakland Raiders.

Perhaps it's the NBA's countercultural tendency, zigging when the rest of society zags, bringing good guys to TV sets that came to be inhabited by a litany of antiheroes such as Tony Soprano, Walter White, Francis Underwood and the first-name-basis quartet from "The Wire": Omar, Avon, Stringer and Marlo. Whatever the cause, it's where we're at.

The NBA is at a peaceful place.

As we say goodbye to 2014, don't forget to say goodnight to the bad guy.