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| Get this man some help! |
WE ARE approaching the halfway point of the NBA season, and we’re starting to see, at least in the West, everyone starting to slot themselves. The gap between the good and the bad in the West is HUGE, with a 5½ game spread between the 7th and 8th place spots in the conference, which is only ½ game smaller than the gap from the LOL Kings, in 8th place, down to the Phoenix Suns, who are dead last. The East, meanwhile, is kind of muddled – only 6 games separate 3rd place from 12th, and the table shakes up completely seemingly every couple of days or so. So basically, pretty much everyone save for the 76ers and the Nets, and maybe the Miami Heat, is only a good 2-week stretch of basketball away from being in the playoff race.
Now, that’s not the same thing at all as being realistically in the playoff race, of course. The Phoenix Suns can scarcely string together two possessions of good basketball in a row, much less two weeks. But playing a sport successfully – which every NBA player does simply to reach that level – is based on a certain level of optimism and belief. Part of why I always resented Sam Hinkie so much when he was running the 76ers is that, with his actions and his attitudes, he very clearly viewed the guys that he was employing on his roster as crap. He thought they were crap and wanted them to be crap. He set them up to fail. Players always play to win. There are guys on 30 teams in the NBA who firmly believe that they can make the playoffs this year. If you don’t have that killer instinct, you’re not going to be any good at the game. It’s the management that sometimes play to lose, and sometimes this is couched in the nonsense about “taking the long view.” It seems somewhat two-faced and cynical, if you ask me, but I can understand why it is that they do this, even if I don’t like it.
But at the moment, there are a whole bunch of teams on both sides of the continent clamoring to get into the playoffs, which means that all of the machinations going on behind the scenes are even more complicated than is the norm. As we move through the next couple of months here, it’s going to be interesting to see how the trade market shakes out, since there will be an abundance of posturing and positioning going on, but it’s hard to say who is actually going to make any moves. The trade deadline (and for The Lose’s international audience, you can think of this as the transfer window) is one of the more fascinating elements of sports, in that it brings a whole lot of issues to the forefront that can, in one fell swoop, immediately be addressed. Maybe this team needs a point guard, maybe this team over here wants to move a soon-to-be free agent. Questions about economics, public relations, and organizational philosophy come to the forefront. For anyone who studies the management of the game, this is one of the more fascinating elements.
For example, let’s take the Toronto Raptors in the NBA. The Raptors have lost a little ground here in recent weeks, as they’ve been forced on a seemingly endless road trip over the holidays thanks to the inanity that is the World Junior Hockey Championships taking place in their home building. (And yes, my Canadian friends, caring so much about high school kids is stupid. And yes, we care far too much about high school football in this country.) The Raptors have slipped back a little bit on this road trip from hell, but at 23-11, they are in second place in the East, only three games behind the Cavaliers in the standings.
And the Raptors have been terrific this season. They have a historically good offense, posting an offensive rating better than any team in recent memory save for this year’s Warriors. They are a bit of an oddball team in that their two best players – Kyle Lowry and DeMar DeRozan – are ball-dominant guards who play together and go about succeeding in old-school ways. Lowry is slow, can’t jump, and yet he is one of the smartest players in the game, one of the game’s best technicians, and has become an élite level shooter. DeRozan, meanwhile, is all mid-range and driving to the basket, bucking all NBA trends of shooting from deep. The rest of the team is complimentary players, role players who are comfortable without the ball and able to play off of DeRozan and Lowry. The talent on the rest of the roster is both deceptively good and deceptively lacking: they have a lot of glue guys and versatile guys able to fill roles, but not a lot of other shotmakers or playmakers. But as a unit, the Raps function remarkably well.
But not quite well enough. This is a team which had only won one playoff series in 20 years before reaching the Eastern Conference finals last spring, where they were beaten by the Cavs in six games and the series never really felt that close. But Toronto is even better this year, as both Lowry and DeRozan are shooting exceptionally well, but are they good enough to beat the Cavs in the playoffs?
A better question would be to ask if beating the Cavs in the playoffs is even a goal, because the Raptors are selling out their home games in National Airline Center No Spell It the British Way Centre, and Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment Ltd., who owns the Raps, are pretty happy at the moment with their profit margins, and #fearthenorth became a thing last spring as the Toronto sports fans, desperate for anything good after several decades of abject misery, turned out en masse to fill up the fan zones outside the arena during the playoff push last season. The Raptors are good, really good even, but how good is good enough? Does the club want to be champions, or are they happy winning 55 games a season and making reasonable playoff pushes? This is the balancing act we spoke about a little bit in this Lose post from last spring, where we asked the question of would you be happy with your team always being good, or would you prefer they had it all come together in some sort of one-off event to win a title. Further complicating matters is that the 31-year-old Lowry is due to be a free agent this coming summer, and will likely command a 5-year, max contract upwards of $175 million or more. His age is a bit of a red flag, but he’s blossomed into an all-NBA player and an Olympic dream teamer in Toronto and led the Raps to lofty heights they’ve never known, so they probably have to bite the bullet and re-sign him, just as they had to do with DeRozan last year. But as we saw with Kevin Durant this past summer, there are no guarantees you are going to do that. Assuming that they do re-sign Lowry, however, he is still in his prime but his game, while being relatively age-proof since he does not base it on athleticism, is still likely going to start to decline in his 30s. Both he and DeRozan are at their peak of performance right now.
So if you’re Toronto, and you’re three games behind the Cavs in the East, and you have two of the best guys in the NBA in DeRozan and Lowry in their absolute primes of their career. Do you make a move? Do you decide to go for it, try to challenge for the title? And if so, is there a move you can make which can do that? And Toronto has pieces to trade if they want. They have some good players on good contracts, they have young prospects with upside, they have a decent collection of draft picks after some shrewd moves in the past. Do you go for it?
And if you decide to go for it, who do you try to get? The most obvious candidate is Paul Millsap in Atlanta, who will be a free agent this summer and has shown little interest in re-signing with the Hawks, who are one of those teams that bounce between 5th and 9th in the East standings depending upon their mood and the day of the week. Millsap is a stretch four, which fills a need for the Raps, who lack rebounding and could use more shooting and tend not to play much defense, but if you add Millsap, is it going to be enough to challenge the Cavs and LeBron, who has been systematically stealing Millsap’s lunch money in the playoffs the past couple of seasons.
OK, so if you’re the Raps, maybe Millsap won’t get you past the Cavs and the cost in a trade will be steep, so why don’t you think bigger? Hell, you’ve got Drake bumbling about on the sidelines pretending like he’s a part of the organization, so why not put him to use and get his people to call some people and work the back channels, and maybe call up Boogie’s people in Sacramento … not that Sacramento is going to trade him right now, seeing as how they’re the 8th seed in the West at the moment and no franchise would more happily be the 8th seed and get stomped all over by the Warriors than the Kings, but let’s say the Kings do what they usually do this time of year and completely crater and succumb to utter dysfunction over the next couple of weeks. Boogie hates it there, he’s been a malcontent and he’s given no indication he’ll re-sign in Sac in 2018 no matter how many banks they break to sign him. He’s also the best damn center in the NBA. Would he fit in Toronto? Hell, you’d make him fit. When you’re talking about an élite talent like DeMarcus Cousins, you go about finding ways to make him fit. And the Kings are dumb, of course, they’re one of the dumbest franchises in the league, so you might be able to “win” the trade by giving up 2-3 players and a #1 pick, since otherwise Boogie walks in 2018 and the Kings get nothing for him.
If you’re Toronto, do you make that call to the Big Tomato and talk trade? It can’t hurt, can it? When he was the GM of the Sonics in the early 1990s, Bob Whitsitt used to joke about how every time he had some reason to call Chicago, he made it a point to ask if Michael Jordan was available. The responses ran the gamut from, “Bob, you’re crazy,” to “Bob, you’re drunk,” but the point is that he was always willing to ask.
There are lots of trade rumors that float about, along with lots of really bad proposed trades but forth by rosterbators, a lot of whom don’t seem to understand just how complex this stuff really is. You have to have something to trade and, perhaps more importantly, the other side has to have a reason to want to trade with you. The Celtics have seemingly a million assets at their disposal for making a deal, the two juiciest of which are the rights to swap draft positions with the Nets this summer, and the Nets #1 pick in 2018 – by-products of one of the more confounding trades in NBA history. But just because you have those assets, it doesn’t mean you necessary have to, or want to, make a deal. Boston could theoretically dangle those two goodies out there and forge a trade for just about anyone in the league – or they could sit back and see a horrible Nets team flounder the next two years and possibly get a pair of top-3, or even #1 overall, draft picks out of the deal.
The Millsap-to-Toronto idea makes sense – the Raptors could use a guy with Millsap’s skill set, while the Hawks would be better off getting something in return as opposed to letting him walk in the summer – but both teams have a history of being somewhat conservative and risk averse when it comes to trades, particularly during the season. Both want to “win” all the trades, so the deal might not make sense in that regard, and maybe these aren’t an ideal pair of trade partners. It’s hard for Toronto to “win” a Millsap trade, simply because trying to make that trade implies a certain level of necessity. If Atlanta knows Toronto is going all-in and truly trying to compete with the Cavs in the East, the Hawks’ asking price is going to get higher. This is what we mean when we talk about trading from positions of strength and weakness. It’s part of why any sort of honest assessment of Hinkie’s tenure in Philadelphia should never include the line “he won all the trades,” because his fundamental objective for three years was to lose all of the games, and it’s easy to win trades when you’re not actually trying to win any games. Now the 76ers have a mismatched roster and have to make a deal, but everyone knows they have to make a deal, so the asking price for a Nerlens Noel – lost on the bench on Philly, but still young and with some upside – continues to get lower and lower. The 76ers are dealing from a position of weakness, and are unlikely to win that trade.
It’s not just as simple as swap Player A for Player B. Everyone has an agenda and everyone has an objective. Franchises are all at different stages and different places, so what’s best for one team isn’t what’s best for another – and what’s best for a franchise can suddenly shift and swerve. The Kings are a good example of this: Boogie has been uncoachable at times, he’s gotten coaches fired, he’s quarreled with everyone and not exactly been a great teammate, and he’s shown no interest in staying in Sac after his contract expires. They also have Rudy “Welcome to Hell” Gay who is desperate to leave, so much so that he decided to actually start playing well this year in order to turn himself into trade bait and make himself more attractive to other teams. Both these guys should probably be moved in the long-term interests of the franchise, and probably should be moved immediately so as to maximize their value.
But then the Kings start winning a few games here and there, mostly because of Gay being good and Boogie being great, and thanks to the Blazers being awful and unable to guard their own shoes, and thanks to Denver being young and dumb and Minnesota being younger and dumber, the Kings now find themselves in a playoff position, which is a position they haven’t been in forever. So now you cannot possibly justify making those sorts of deals, you can’t justify it to the fans who’ve been filling the arena for the past 10 years and had nothing to show for it. Hell, instead of being sellers at the deadline, the Kings might actually be buyers if they had something to trade which anyone else wanted. Which they don’t, but you get my point. The market has changed simply because the circumstances have changed. Now, if the Kings implode and go something like 9-16 between now and the end of February, it will change again. You’ve got a moving target here, so how the hell are you going to be able to make a deal?
OK, so who else needs to make a deal? OKC, for starters. Russell Westbrook is playing at a level the likes of which we’ve rarely seen, averaging nearly a triple-double a game. And he has to play that well in order for OKC just to be decent, never mind good. Westbrook has 16 triple-doubles and OKC are 13-3 when he registers one. When he doesn’t, they’re 8-12. OKC are 21-15 on the season, with a schedule that’s been home-friendly so far and laden with bad teams, and most of those wins have been close games, games that wind up being close because they manage Westbrook’s minutes in OKC, sacrificing 10-15 of the game in which their back up unit gets killed with the idea in mind that Russ will somehow save them down the stretch. And by “save them,” I mean that he will literally take every single shot in the last 4:00 of the game if he has to. Given that the offense has basically one option, it’s both a testament to Westbrook’s ability and something of a miracle that OKC has that many wins at all.
Russ is winning games on his own, which is unsustainable. OKC needs to get this man some help. They have a roster filled with redundancy, filled with specialists and technicians and one-note players – a roster, in short, built around the idea that they would still have Westbrook and Durant. Above all else, they desperately need some shooting. The defenses are so packed in that there isn’t much room to operate. OKC needs shooting.
Them and about 25 other teams, which means that shooting is expensive. OKC’s ethos is that they want younger players with some cost certainty attached since, you know, they’re a small market and can’t sign free agents and blah blah blah. So where are you going to find a guy who fits that profile? And what do you have to offer in return? OKC’s best trade chip is probably Kanter, a guy with great offensive skill but a guy who can’t guard his own shadow whom they’re paying way too much to be a backup center, but whose contract on a team where he’s a starting center would be a bargain. But what does a guy like that bring you in return? Teams that have shooting, in general, don’t need more offense – they need defense, of which Kanter plays none. The most logical trading partner for OKC might theoretically be Phoenix, partly because the Suns are garbage and going nowhere, partly because the Suns are stupid and eminently fleecable, and partly because they do, in fact, have some shooting on that team that might be for sale, but Kanter doesn’t work in Phoenix because the Suns already have a glut of big men – albeit none who are any good – and they don’t need to add yet another one. And what does adding another shooter ultimately get OKC? Are they that much better in the long run? Maybe you wind up a 5-seed in the playoffs in the best-case scenario, but adding one guy isn’t going to make you good enough to compete with the Dubs and the Spurs and the Rockets, so the price you pay might not be worth it.
OKC would be likely be looking to make a deal like that with next year in mind, which pretty much throws away all of the exceptional work that Westbrook is doing in the here and the now – work which, in the here and the now, still isn’t good enough. And herein lies the dilemma. This is the ultimate juggling act going on, as your team tries to figure out your objectives for now, for next year, and the year after that, and do it all in one moment in time, when you can’t possibly know what the future has in store. No one in the NBA, and I mean no one in the NBA, could have ever foreseen the confluence of events which ultimately led to Kevin Durant becoming a Golden State Warrior. All of this is educated guess work.
Teams in baseball, in general, tend to be a bit more aggressive at the trade deadline, with buyers being willing to take on short-term rentals and sellers being willing to dump salary, but this is due entirely to baseball being an open market where guys move much more freely in free agency from team to team in the offseason. If a short-term guy doesn’t work out, he moves on and you spend in the offseason. In the NBA and NHL, you also have endless complications of the salary cap to think through, and in-season trades of players in the NFL is almost unheard of. Soccer is a bit different, in that’s is a straight buy/sell proposition and contract swaps almost never happen, but the same sorts of complications arise primarily due to the players have even more power and ability to dictate movement internationally than they do in any of the North American-based sports. Two of the bottom-feeders in the EPL this year, Swansea and Hull, wound up in the same really awful situation this past summer where they had no available money to buy players, since the clubs were in the process of being sold, but then some of their current players (and in the case of Swans, their best players) wanted to leave and the clubs felt compelled to sell in order to maximize their value – which has, unsurprisingly, left both clubs short on talent and short on options, and ultimately far short on wins and points in the table. And you don’t get a #1 pick if you finish last in the EPL. They throw your ass out of the league and you get to rebuild with £200 million less of a budget as you wander aimlessly through the malaise of the second division.
But I sort of feel like that in a place like Toronto, the future is now. Maybe a Millsap deal doesn’t give you more than a 20% of beating the Cavs come spring time, but the low-percentage play is still better than the no-percentage play. Maybe you make a bold move like that and make up that 3-game deficit and sneak in for the #1 seed, which would give you that extra home game. Maybe you force the Cavs to work harder than they want to for the next few months, since the Cavs seem perfectly content to coast through the season at the moment, exuding lots of energy only when necessary. Standing pat with the team that you have isn’t going to get you anywhere next year, either – neither the Cavs nor the Warriors are going anywhere, so you’ll have the exact same issues. And you’ve spent years trying to rid the franchise of the moniker of an NBA version of Siberia. Toronto is cool now, it’s become a basketball town and you can lure guys there to play – and one of the best ways to lure guys there to play, as well as keep the guys you have, is show yourself to be a franchise that wants to be a big player come springtime, because ultimately players want to win more than they want almost anything in life. I don’t know what you do here. The Raptors are much like the Clippers, in that they’ve moved from the realm of always being terrible to the realm where they can be disappointing on a higher level. Failure on higher levels is still ultimately failure, and the window for success shuts more swiftly than you may realize.
