If you pay any attention at all to professional basketball, I’m sure you’ve come across at least a few anecdotes concerning one of seven things:
1. The league is ruled by a star system.
2. The NBA is in deep financial trouble, and doesn’t currently have a stable platform for business.
3. Rich, under-educated kids are taking power from the crusty old general managers and controlling their own destiny by choosing where they want to play.
4. The league is WAY to top heavy, with eight or nine legitimate title contenders, several middle of the pack squads, and five or six bottom feeders that generate little revenue and are all around, unwatchable.
5. SUPER TEAMS. Players are choosing where they want to play, and with the power they wield, are teaming up with their buds and forming so-called “Super Teams”. Think Miami Heat or the New York Knicks.
6. TATOOS ARE BAD.
7. The middle aged white people that make up the majority of the NBA’s customer base can’t relate to the coddled, brash, rap-listening, tattoo-bearing, thug-life athletes that play the game.
Like any professional sports league, the NBA has its share of problems—some severe, some not so severe. And in the past couple of weeks, I’ve noticed more NBA doom and gloom columns than ever (well, since the Artest melee at least). So let’s take our fire breathing fists to the heart of the issue…
LeBron James broke Cleveland’s heart when he bolted to the Miami Heat, inciting fans to burn copies of his jersey along the way. Carmelo Anthony tortured Denver for six months with trade talk to the point no one blinked an eye when he was gone. Chris Bosh destroyed professional basketball in Toronto. If you’re a Raptor, Nugget, or Cavs fan, watching your team play is like a Charlie Sheen interview—ugly, heart-breaking and a little bit confusing (though not so much for the Nuggets). Your best player left not only for a better chance at a title, but he basically said, “-insert city here- sucks; I want to play in a big market like New York, Los Angeles, or a wondrous place like South Beach.” It goes beyond business, if you’re a fan, it’s personal.
But look at it from the player’s perspective; pretend you’re in their shoes. I know, I know, it’s hard to give a 25 year-old kid making thirty million dollars sympathy, but bear with me. Let’s do a hypothetical: Pretend there’s a 25 year-old basketball player in the athletic prime of his career, coming off his best year yet. Let’s call him LeWade Dwyames. LeWade has over 500 games on his odometer, halfway to a thousand—when most players begin the steady march to mediocrity. LeWade is feeling his mortality; he realizes his days are numbered. In a game as grueling as professional basketball one has a limited peak, and thus, a very slim title window. LeWade KNOWS all this. He looks at his team, looks at what they’ve accomplished over the past seven years, and comes to a difficult realization—he can’t win with what management has built around him. LeWade eyes the model franchises of the NBA. He looks at the Spurs with longing, admiring the way they drafted Tim Duncan and put the necessary pieces around him to win a title. He looks at what management has done for him, and he sneers. “I’ve worked my ass off for six years, and they still haven’t delivered any support”, he says. What have they done for me?
Can you blame LeWade? Can you blame him for leaving for greener pastures when management was so inept it couldn’t deliver an adequate supporting cast in six years? Can you blame a person in a profession with a limited window of opportunity for getting antsy? If a professional athlete has a chance to be the best ever, and is unfortunate enough to land on a team run by imbeciles, can you blame him for worrying about his legacy? LeWade was so tired of being short changed by management that he left, call him selfish, but he left. He’s human, too.
Unsurprisingly, when a small market team loses its star player the long road to recovery begins…and it’s a rough one. When Shaquille O’Neal left Orlando for Los Angeles, the Magic didn’t recover for another ten years…when they were fortunate enough to land Dwight Howard in the lottery. And that’s precisely what it takes: a lucky draw in the draft, and a player good enough to build around. Barring some serious luck, that takes years. Oklahoma City began its resurgence when they landed Kevin Durant with the first pick of the 2006-2007 draft. The Los Angeles Clippers look to be on the rise after they landed rookie sensation Blake Griffin with the first pick of the 2008-2009 draft (crap, I forgot about Donald Sterling—on second thought, forget I said anything about the Clippers).
So should we have sympathy for these mid-level teams that lost their franchise cornerstones? For the fans: absolutely, for the suits that run the team: NO. Could LeBron James have possibly won a title with what he had—a bunch of glorified role players, a couple veteran past-their-prime-guys, and several buy-outs? I don’t think so. Folks will make the argument that James could have, but we were all a little spoiled after LeBron led his rag-tag band to sixty+ regular season wins two years in a row. LeBron James is so good, we STILL haven’t grasped how bad his supporting class was in Cleveland. The same goes for Chris Bosh, Carmelo Anthony and Deron Williams. I will take this with me to my grave: Superstars don’t leave simply because they’re restless, or they want to live somewhere glamorous, or they’re nescient…they want to win, and great players care about their legacy. Put the right pieces around a superstar and he won’t budge. Look at the San Antonio Spurs, a small market team that hit the jackpot with Tim Duncan, surrounded him with a plethora of talent, and became a dynasty. Chicago drafted Scottie Pippen to pair with Michael Jordan, and the Celtics traded for Kevin Garnett and Ray Allen to surround Paul Pierce. The Oklahoma City Thunder are doing the same with Durant, pairing him with emerging stars Russell Westbrook and Serge Ibaka. Think he’s gonna’ leave because Oklahoma City doesn’t have the bright lights of New York or the beaches of Florida? HELL NO. And it’s not like these teams don’t have time. Cleveland and Denver had their respective superstars for seven years, yet they still couldn’t deliver proper supporting casts.
As a fan myself, I know what heartbreak feels like. Maybe not quite like Cleveland fans when they watched LeBron James take his talents to South Beach on live television, but believe me, I fee; ya’. I, along with every Boston sports fan in the world, watched our collective hopes and dreams flash before our eyes when Bernard Pollard destroyed Tom Brady’s knee, and with it, New England’s season (You’re right, that wasn’t the best example. Sorry Cleveland fans). Blame LeBron James all you want for orchestrating possibly the most callous and asinine television spectacle in years, but don’t hold it against him for leaving in the first place. That, my friends, lies solely on the shoulders of Dan Gilbert, who in his seven year marriage with the best basketball player on Earth, managed to acquire a 37-year old Shaquille O’Neal, a past-his-prime Antawn Jamison, and a good-but-not-great Mo Williams.
Admittedly, there has been much hand-wringing in respect to the financial impact of small markets losing their stars. For those small market teams, the effect is no less than devastating. But for the NBA consumer it’s pretty exciting. Has there ever been a postseason in NBA history as hotly anticipated as this one coming up? Is anyone gonna’ complain after a round one series featuring the Heat vs. Knicks (very much in play)? Right now, the NBA’s got seven-eight awesome teams, six or seven god-awful ones, and everybody else. Here’s the debate: Do we want seven or eight super teams, or thirty good ones? There is no easy answer—unless, of course, you’re a Cavs fan.
But parity is sweet (just look at the NFL), and smaller markets need a better opportunity to compete with huge markets like New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. The root of the problem is the NBA’s lack of revenue sharing. Huge markets rack in huge amounts of dough every year, even if they’re not fielding competitive teams (looking at you Sterling) while small markets are struggling even if they’re product is watchable. It’s a problem, and one the NFL has figured out. According to the Washington Post, “…the NFL shares 90 percent of its revenue; the NBA, less than 50 percent.” New York, with its massive population has never struggled getting people to watch, but Sacramento? That’s a whole different story. As greedy as the owners are, you would think they would realize that an eight team league ain’t gonna’ cut it. The wealth needs to be spread out to a greater degree, allowing smaller markets to compete for the marquee free-agents out there. Crap, doesn’t it sound like the makings of ANOTHER summer of labor talks and lockout terror? Excuse me as I bludgeon myself to death with my David Stern bobble-head.
Here’s another MASSIVE problem plaguing professional basketball: Stupid owners and stupid contracts. How many times over the last decade have we seen teams give players gargantuan contracts they don’t deserve? I can think of a few recent ones: Gilbert Arenas, Elton Brand, Baron Davis, Chris Kaman, Rashard Lewis…
Teams sign players to massive contracts (which happen to be guaranteed in the NBA), then because of financial issues plaguing the league (because of the economic downturn faced world-wide), teams aren’t able to actually satisfy the terms of these contracts and are forced to borrow a lot of money. If this sounds like one big cluster f*** you would be right. So what are some solutions? Option number one is non-guaranteed contracts, similar to the NFL’s current system. We can all agree it’s pretty ludicrous that Gilbert Arenas is making almost $18 million dollars coming off the bench and contributing about as much to the Magic as James Franco did to the Oscars. And what do teams do when they sign a player to an awful contract? They eventually orchestrate a “buy-out” in which they essentially pay the player to not play, freeing up cap space to sign someone else. Pretend you’re renting an apartment in New York City. After a couple of years you decide you want to buy a house in the suburbs and end up settling in rural New York, only you have to continue paying your land lord for the next two years. It’s a broken system that needs to be fixed.
In Jason Whitlock’s recent column titled eight simple rules to save the NBA, he contends that “it is both foolish and bad business for David Stern to allow a system that gives the players as much leverage as ownership and management.” When did that happen? LeBron and Carmelo gave their franchises seven years and Deron gave Utah five and a half. That’s almost twenty collective seasons of basketball, that’s not enough time to build a champion? And since when is this something new? Kareem forced a trade to L.A in the early 1980’s, Shaq forced a trade from Orlando in the mid-90’s, and Barkley did the same. Every single one has the same thing in common: the stars were in bad situations, they were rotting away and wasting their primes only for management to continuously screw up the team around them, and they wanted the chance to play with other great players and win a title. Of course the players have leverage, but you know what I say to that? AMEN.
Whitlock argues LeBron’s James decision to team up with superstar’s Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh in Miami was good for the league short-term, but will have a negative impact in the long run. He contends that LeBron’s decision set in motion a dangerous cycle. It’s a point worth noting, but if we’ve learned anything from the past, it’s that it’s just a part of the game…
Whitlock goes as far to say, “The love-hate tension is at its highest in the NBA. Other than loving hoops, the paying customers believe they have almost nothing in common with the tattooed millionaires who entertain them. Many fans believe they care more about winning and the team than the players do.” That statement is so out of touch I don’t even know where to begin. I don’t have any concrete evidence to support this, but I watch a lot of basketball, and the crowds I see are young and diverse. The NBA’s main paying customers may be older and white (I have no way to prove or falsify, I wish I did), but my generation (early twenties) eventually will be the NBA’s biggest source of revenue, and thankfully, the NBA is as popular as ever with this generation.
Haven’t we moved past the whole “tattoos=bad, I can’t relate to this rich, 25 year-old black kid” mentality? I’m not claiming racism has been eradicated in America, but I think we’ve reached a new level of understanding. LeBron James, with his idiotic summer T.V spot may have set us back in that department, but most pro ballers today are thoughtful, articulate, and “gasp” even humble. I think most of America realizes this Mr. Whitlock. Derrick Rose, Kevin Durant, Ray Allen, Dirk Nowitzki, Dwight Howard, Chris Paul—just a handful of superstars who happen to be ambassadors of the game. This isn’t 1962, where Bill Russell was denied a bus ride to the movie theatre.
The NBA could be America’s game. I’m dead serious. Basketball is insanely popular with high-schooler’s and college kids. Of the four major sports with Facebook pages the NBA is by far the most-liked. More foreign players are entering the game than ever before, and the NBA is experiencing its greatest talent swell in two decades. We’re in a collision course for the greatest postseason in recent memory. How is this not awesome for professional basketball? This June the NBA’s current collective bargaining agreement will expire, and the powers that be have the ultimate chance to fix what ails one of my favorite sports. Increased revenue sharing? Doable. Less buy-outs? Doable. But we can’t have another Band-Aid. If there’s one thing I hope you got from generously giving me your time, it’s that the NBA is set up perfectly to make a run at the NFL, only the owners are slowly committing samurai-style suicide.
Professional basketball is approaching its day of reckoning; let’s hope they realize what’s at stake.
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