I WAS going to update by NBA Losability ratings, seeing as how we are at the ‘halfway’ point of the season with the NBA All-Star game happening this past weekend in New Orleans. Sure enough, as we were nearing the break, there were a few teams establishing themselves as prime candidates for some Lose pontification. For starters, you had Miami go on a 12-game winning streak and pretty much wreck every plan the front office had to tank, which I think is awesome. As a professional athlete, I can’t think of a worse situation to be in than that in which you are expected, by your bosses, to fail. No one gets to be that good at a sport without anything other than supreme confidence in your ability to be successful. The Heat were 11-30 and had ‘tank job’ written all over them, but then the players sucked it up and pulled it together and went on a 12-game streak, and good for them for doing that, because I would be pissed off if I was one of those guys. I’ve mentioned previous in this blog how the Warriors went so far in their desperately attempts to tank and protect a draft pick they might lose that they started five rookies – and the rookies then went out and won a game and almost messed up the plan. Being deliberately bad has no place in sports, so I commend the Heat for this incomprehensible run, and I must admit that the Dion Waiters Experience is a long, strange trip.
And then there are the Heat’s in-state brethren, the Orlando Magic, who haven’t done anything right and have managed to construct the league's least appealing roster outside of Brooklyn despite having five straight picks in the Top 10 of the NBA draft. The Magic just atoned for a bad trade this past summer – giving up Victor Oladipo and their 1st round pick to OKC for Serge Ibaka – by making an even worse trade – flipping Ibaka to Toronto for Terrence Ross and a 1st round pick likely to fall at the end of the draft – thus managing to trade something good for something bad. I have no idea what the hell Orlando is doing, and haven’t had any idea for years.
Oklahoma City, of course, always finds a way to clamor for The Lose’s attention, and that game last Saturday against the Warriors pretty much summed up every single thing wrong about this entire organization – starting with the hillbilly fans who were so fired up to boo and heckle Kevin Durant the whole game, the novelty of which wore off by the time the Warriors were up 26 in the 2nd Quarter, and continuing on with Russell Westbrook, the “hero” of OKC who chose to “stay at home,” in part because OKC gave him about $8,000,000 more, and in part because being in this situation allows Russ to continue to do what he does best, which is play Don Quixote and take on all-comers and be the most selfish player in the league. Want to know a big reason why Kevin Durant left OKC? Because who wants to play with a guy like that, particularly in what would’ve been his contract year? Go back and watch that game over again and see how the Warriors basically sucker Westbrook by switching KD on him, at which point Russ goes full-on windmill tilt and abandons the OKC game plan completely, which is precisely what the Dubs wanted him to do. Most of his 47 points were essentially in garbage time – complete with him woofing “I’m coming” at KD, to which KD replied, “so what?” – and the Warriors scored nearly as many points off Westbrook’s turnovers as his teammates scored off his assists.
But then the Knicks simply can’t accept not being in the limelight for 10 minutes, even if they have to do something completely utterly stupid like have Charles Oakley – a former Knick, a loyal Knick, and a longtime fan favorite at the Garden – be ejected from the Garden for talking shit to owner Jim Dolan, who is one of those idiot owners with more dollars than sense. And the NBA has some of the worst sorts of these types in comparison to other sports, because unlike in other sports, where owners sit in boxes, the owners like to sit court side in the NBA – a good number of them foolishly believing that the fans in attendance are actually there to see them instead of what’s on the floor. The Knicks are a total disaster this season, of course, having doled out the single worst contract of the offseason when they signed Joachim Noah at 4/72, and having traded for Derrick Rose, who is a shell of himself and a walking distraction on a team full of distractions, most notably the distraction of Phil Jackson constantly going about bad-mouthing Carmelo Anthony and seemingly just trying to annoy Melo to the point where he’ll agree to wave his no-trade clause – which is something Phil gave to him in the first place, and did so for no apparent reason other than Melo asked for it. There were rumors of a trade with the Clippers – Melo for a bunch of stuff – and then came the rumors of Melo for Kevin Love, which is a deal the Cavs wouldn’t make anyway, but now they really won’t make with Love out injured for two months. The rumors in New York are always much more interesting than the truth – the truth being that the team on the floor is trash.
But the Zen Master himself, who has proven now to be so bad as an administrator in New York that you start wondering if his incredible résumé-filler of nine championships as a coach had anything whatsoever to do with anything other than having great players, is now free and clear to opt out of his deal and go back to L.A. and start fucking up the Lakers, with news today that Jeannie Buss has fired her brother Jim and also GM Mitch Kupchak – of course “Special Advisor” Magic Johnson might have something to say about that as well, even though Magic should probably be doing something like trying to find a way to get the blackout lifted on the games for that baseball team for which he’s a minority owner/face of the franchise. The Lakers’ season has gone from being fun to fun bad to just bad, and they’re presently on a crash course with the bottom, trying to lose as many games as possible to avoid giving away their draft pick to Philly this summer. Oh, wait, Magic is now the President of Operations for the Lakers. Come Thursday, he might be the starting point guard. Apparently the front runner for the GM job is Rob Pelinka, who was Kobe Bryant’s agent. Pelinka did a nice job scoring Kobe the biggest contract in NBA history at the time, of course – and the Lakers went 84-220 during the length of that contract. And I’ve seen this agent-to-GM route in the NHL before – in Vancouver, where Mike Gillis turned one of the most powerful franchises in the sport into a joke during his tenure. This sort of thinking doesn’t bode well for the Lakers. I find it amazing that I’m now reading reports where the Lakers wanted Bob Myers, the GM of the Warriors, to do the same gig in L.A., which speaks to just how delusional the Lakers are at the moment. Why would Bob Myers take that job? That’s a BAD job! Magic’s biggest task is going to be trying to convince people the franchise is still relevant. Good luck with that.
So there is a whole lot of lose fodder going right now, but the Kings had to go and flex their muscles over the All-Star weekend and reassert that they are, without a question, the masters of Losability, and remind all of us yet again that they are the worst-run, most disorganized, and single most incompetent franchise in all of North American professional sports, as they went out and traded Boogie Cousins, their one decent player, to the New Orleans Pelicans for what amounts to about 30¢ on the dollar.
Now, The Lose was speculating back in January about the availability of Boogie, suggesting Toronto might be an interesting destination if the Raptors wanted to make that kind of a bold move. But I said that based upon the idea that the Raptors were one of the few teams which could make a deal like that, given that they sort of assets to do it – which was obviously wrong on my part, when you see the return the Kings got from the Pelicans: Buddy Hield, a mediocre rookie shooting guard who has actually made fewer 3-pointers this season than Boogie; Langston Galloway and Tyreke Evans, who are both salary filler and the latter of which will probably ask to be bought out so he can go sign with someone like the Cavs; a first round pick in this year’s draft, which likely won’t be worth much since the Pelicans will possibly make the playoffs now and thus be out of the lottery; and a second round pick. That’s it? That’s the best you could do?
And some of that is on Boogie, of course, who has a pretty solid reputation, at this point, of being a clubhouse cancer. There has always been a question in Sacramento of whether the problem there is the organization or the problem there is Boogie, seeing as how it’s almost incomprehensible that an NBA team with such a good player can be so bad for so long. I’m inclined to think the former, but pretty much no one who has been around this team on a regular basis seems to have a whole lot of good to say about him. (For the play-to-play man, Grant Napear, to fire off a tweet storm like this in the aftermath of the trade speaks to the sort of day-to-day misery he, and everyone else in this organization, have had to put up with.) Boogie has clearly been a problem here, and the Kings were in a bad spot owing, in part, to the unintended consequences of the new CBA. Thanks to all of the knee-jerk reactions to Kevin Durant signing with the Warriors, the new CBA has provisions to allow clubs to offer massive sums in order to keep their All-NBA players, and the Kings were going to have to decide this coming summer if they really wanted to invest $210 million in a guy who was clearly a pain in the ass. Given that there are so many stories circulating about what a bad locker room guy Cousins was, you can understand them being hesitant to do so, since you’d be stuck with him for years. And given how bad Boogie’s rep has become, and how poor his behaviour has been on the court as well – he’s accrued so many technicals this season that every time he gets another, he’ll be suspended for a game – his rep is so low that the offers started getting lower, and lower, and lower. The offer New Orleans made was something of a fly-by. That offer wasn’t good enough to get them Jalil Okafor from the Sixers a couple of weeks ago.
This is an incredibly bad trade for the Kings. It may be the best they could get, at this point, but that doesn’t make it a good one but the Kings got themselves into this mess and are now, apparently, forced to choose between a bad deal and no deal. They could’ve traded Boogie last summer and scored a big haul. They could’ve waited until June and surveyed the lay of the lottery land. Hell, they could’ve just waited three more days to see if they could somehow get a better offer than what New Orleans gave them. And GM Vlade Divac put forth a brave face in trying to explain himself in the aftermath of this seemingly hasty All-Star weekend trade, but most of what he said made no sense when you consider that he and coach Dave Joerger were singing Boogie’s praises in the media a week ago and saying there were interested in re-signing him. None of the justifications make sense. Vlade mentioned that “character matters,” which seems pretty hollow when you consider that their point guard, Darren Collison, was suspended for domestic violence and their backup point guard, Ty Lawson, has been arrested four times and last year’s point guard, Rajon Rondo, outed a gay official on the court, not to mention the fact that any team willing to employ Matt Barnes doesn’t get to play the character card. There have also been comments about how high they are on Hield, going so far as to say that owner Vivek saw his pre-draft workout and thinks Hield has “Steph Curry potential.” Buddy Hield may not even Seth Curry potential. His only Curry potential is to go pick up some Thai food. And the Kings are spinning this as a chance to rebuild through the draft, which doesn’t make any sense, because you just made a lottery team in New Orleans a possible non-lottery team, so the pick is likely to get worse, and the Kings can’t really rebuild through the draft anyway, since their pick goes to the Bulls if it falls out of the Top 10 – unlikely at this point – and goes to the Sixers if the Kings wind up picking higher in the draft.
And the Kings got themselves into this mess because, for the last few years, they’ve been attempting to mollify Boogie, essentially letting him play coach and GM even though his teams have never even come close to sniffing the playoffs. They let Isaiah Thomas walk because Boogie didn’t like playing with him. They made short-sighted, win-now moves – like the awful trade with Philly which is now going to come back and bite them – thinking they were going to be good, but no one with a basketball IQ higher than that of a garden variety tomato would have looked at those moves, and those constructed rosters, and conclude that. The USA Today correspondent Sam Amick, a Sacramento resident, put forth the idea that the Kings were suddenly willing to part with Boogie because the team beat the Celtics in a game where Boogie was suspended, which typifies the sort of knee-jerk, small-sample thinking that has just killed this team: thinking which starts at the top with Vivek, who clearly knows nothing about operating an NBA basketball team, and doesn’t understand that a good owner doesn’t meddle in the affairs of the club but instead shuts up and signs the cheques and otherwise stays out of the way.
And this is what you get, Sacramento, for making the deal with the devil that is David Stern, who so desperately want to keep the NBA
Oh, and by the way, the fact that Sam Hinkie managed to figure out that the Lakers and the Kings were dumb and make long-term deals which benefit the Sixers does not make him a genius of a GM. I’m reading lots of revivalist shit about his tenure in Philly all of a sudden. Stop it. It’s a whole lot easier to make those sorts of moves when you’re not actually trying to be any good, and it doesn’t change the fact that the roster he left behind in Philly is still a clusterfuck, and that no one in the NBA is all that interested in dealing for the guys – Okafor and Nerlens Noel – that the Sixers have to deal in order to make any significant progress. I read on one of the Kings message boards that they should fire Vlade and hire Hinkie as a GM. Well, you’re going to have a lot of losing anyway, given that Vlade now has the roster of a 20-win team, and will more likely be the roster of a 15-win team by the time the spring fire sale in Sacramento has conclude, and given the fact have been so bungled in the misguided attempts to win in the present. Hinkie could scarcely do worse in Sacramento, were the Kings fans willing to endure three 10-win seasons in a row. Then again, Kings fans are so used to colossal failure by now that they’d probably handle it better than most other fan bases.
Now, for the Pelicans, of course, this move was a no-brainer, as the price was so low, how could they resist? Boogie’s signed through 2018, you now have a second star caliber player in Boogie to pair with Anthony Davis, and you basically had to give up nothing to get him. Grand predictions of Pelican success may be a big hasty of course – neither Boogie nor AD is a classic back-to-the-basket center, as both have pick-and-pop mid-range games, and it’s not really clear how they’ll mesh as Alvin Gentry has to rejig his pace-and-space offense on the fly. The guard position is still a trash pile, there is not enough shooting and not very much depth. Having said all of that, we saw how simply adding Jrue Holliday back to a team consisting of AD and a bunch of muppets suddenly made the Pelicans into almost a competent team. Having three quality players on the court should assure a nice haul of wins here at the end of the season even if they do little more than ignore the offense and just make stuff up on the fly. The Pelicans are 2½ games behind Denver for the 8th Seed, and making a push to get that #8 spot would bring some positivity to a franchise desperately in need of it. There really is no downside for the Pelicans on this deal. If it doesn’t work out, Boogie walks in 2018 and you still have AD to build around. If it does work, you’ve got a fascinating counterweight to all of the trends in the NBA, going big where others are going small, which makes the game a whole lot more interesting as a whole. There is really no downside here for New Orleans.
But there is no underestimating the intelligence of the brain trust behind the Sacramento Kings. Just when you thought they couldn’t do anything stupider, they do something stupider. There really isn’t any point to me doing any more Losability ratings, because there is only one true master of Losability in the NBA and it’s the Sacramento Kings. Check and mate.
