And, yeah, you know and I know that the writing I do now is pretty much all about food, all over at Lancelot Sturgeon, but I’ve dipped my toe in the LeBron Saga coverage and feel the need to add a little something.
ESPN’s TrueHoop offered a definitive take on the situation, both the Jordan-centric (and, in this particular case, Jordan-voiced) argument that LeBron is admitting weakness by going to Miami, and the counterpoint that a team-centric mentality — one that would value joining with D. Wade and Mario Chalmers — has equal historical validity as a model for “best player ever”. But the Comic Sans letter-writing, jersey-burning, sports pundit-ranting vitriol that last week’s Decision inspired doesn’t really make any sense through the lens of individual/team. Something else is going on here.
And it’s not just Cleveland being upset that they got jilted. While I feel empathy for Cleveland for one more one-name blow to the fanbase’s morale, and I feel pretty neutral overall about the pecking order in the Eastern Conference, I still found his decision aggravating, even beyond being stunned by his tone-deaf tv special.
It’s losing the notion that a championship team can be built “playing by the rules”, as laid out in the current player contract structure. The idea that, whichever it is, no matter how star-crossed, your team could succeed through a string of shrewd moves and just a little bit of luck. A level playing field, basically. Under the current CBA, that basically means a bad team wins the lottery (or has a high pick), drafts a franchise-quality player, and puts the pieces together to become a contender. As we saw in seven years in Cleveland, though, even a clear franchise player and some not-awful front office moves left them a couple steps short of a title. Other teams attempting to rise with their lottery-pick all-NBA guys like the Magic and Hornets also can’t seem to hold their own in the top tier.
And if that’s not the way to a championship, what is? It comes down to variables outside a team’s control, like the Appeal of Historical Pedigree, State Income Tax Laws, One-Sided Trades, and Extraordinary Coincidences. Nothing you can bank on happening to your team. Nothing I can bank on happening to my Nuggets (and this is even after I’ve convinced myself Melo will sign that extension that’s on the table). Let’s look at how this plays out in practice:
The Lakers held onto Kobe in the summer of 2004, when he was an unrestricted free agent, a summer which happened to coincide with those allegations of sexual assault that had turned basically all non-Lakers fans against him. They then managed to Pau Gasol, the only above-average player on a 50-win team (remember that year the Grizzlies won 50? ha!) without giving up any of their top eight players, allegedly because of cost pressures in Memphis. Then we have the Celtics, who came together in their current incarnation after acquiring Ray Allen from a team that wanted to sever Seattle’s emotional connection to their team in anticipation of a move to Oklahoma (and so gave him up for Jeff Green, who I understand if you’ve never heard of, because he’s pretty average by most metrics). And once Ray was on board, former Celtics great Kevin McHale traded them Kevin Garnett, for years the best player in the NBA, for five players of whom they have retained exactly zero as of this summer. Even those Spurs teams that stand as a model of good management got their start by winning the draft lottery and getting David Robinson, but then winning it again after he missed an entire season due to injury. And the Pistons benefited in 2004 from acquiring Rasheed Wallace for a package of bench players headlined by either Lindsey Hunter or Bob Sura (from a Hawks team that had traded a 20ppg scorer for him just days earlier).
While I know that storylines are most easily written after the fact, Cleveland suffered from a lack of them (beyond the pan-sporting event curse, which, really, you can only show that same montage so many times before people starting throwing stuff at their tvs). They made a long string of weird and ultimately unsuccessful trades — second-best players getting paid too much ricocheting around the league, four-team deals to acquire players with narrow skill-sets — they were always pedestrian to recap, and the team never really got that much more than it gave.
In my team’s case, Denver has at least had the Allen Iverson Experiment season and the Chauncey Billups’ Homecoming season, both of which were outside-the-expected enough to give us a little bit of hope that they would be the Wildly Unfair Deals that seem to be the prerequisite for a championship. What hope do the rest of us have of our team trading Kwame Brown for an All-Star? Of convincing an all-NBA player to sign on as a free agent?
Sports leagues tend to either encourage parity (the NFL, to a fault) or stratification (pro soccer in every country except the US, MLB baseball). The NBA seems to be stuck somewhere in the middle right now, and as a fan of a team whose intangibles right now include “our coach is recovering from cancer” and “our sixth man is in his seventh season but was on our Vegas Summer League roster for some reason”, it may be a timely reminder to keep expectations realistic.
credible / incredulous 