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| In Play Lose World HQ |
THE LOSE apologizes for the absence during the month of June, but real life interfered, as it is wont to do. It pleases me to say that In Play Lose has a new world headquarters, but it also pains me to say that, because moving to our new digs has left my back a shambles. But I am now on the road to the recovery with the aid of the Official Chiropractor of In Play Lose. It pains me that everything hurts. It pleases me that some things about me hurt which I’d forgotten exist, so their rediscovery counts as success.
We’ve talked a great deal about the NBA here so far at In Play Lose in 2017, and I wanted to wrap that up now that the Finals are over and the folly that is the NBA draft has taken place. We’ll get into some other subjects here in the coming days. It was a fascinating season to me in that what we all pretty much expected would happen wound up happening – the Golden State Warriors won the NBA championship – and yet I found the road traveled in order to get this point to be endlessly fascinating. There is never any certainty to the outcome, no matter how inevitable the end results may seem.
And you can certainly make a case for the inevitability of the outcome in these NBA Finals because Golden State possesses the most ridiculous assemblage of talent in the history of the NBA. No team that I can ever recall had a roster with four All-Stars under the age of 30. The most comparable collection of talent in any North American sport in my lifetime is the Edmonton Oilers of the 1980s, who won five Stanley Cups and were so deep that they could trade the greatest player in the history of the sport and still win that 5th Cup after he’d left. The Oilers talent level went even beyond the Warriors – they had eight all-stars one season – but even so, Stanley Cup success for The Oil was never assured. They choked away playoff series in 1982 and 1986, and were taken to seven games by the Philadelphia Flyers in the 1987 finals. Wayne Gretzky has spoken in the past of how guys were playing in the playoffs with broken hands, broken wrists, severe shoulder and knee injuries and the like. Just because they were the greatest team ever assembled in the history of the sport, it didn’t mean the others were going to just roll over and give them the titles. They still had to play the games, they still had to go out there and earn it.
And Golden State earned it this season as well, because in the last three games of the NBA Finals, Cleveland was great. They were absolutely great. Their shotmaking was spectacular, and Cleveland got better and better as the series progressed. But the Cavs messed up the series when they messed up the end of Game 3, coughing up a 6-point lead in the final 90 seconds and losing 118:113, which put the Dubs up 3-0 and pretty much ended any realistic chance Cleveland had of winning. But it was precisely the sort of game that you’d expect to happen if you were picking this to be a 5-game series – that close game which could go either way and winds up going to the road team. Again, a sort of understandable script wound up being followed in the NBA Finals: the Warriors win Games 1 and 2 big at home, the Cavs win a game big at home, but Warriors win a close one at The Q to come home with a 3-1 lead and then close it out at home. But the series was nonetheless wildly entertaining, just as the season was wildly entertaining, featuring some of the greatest basketball we have ever seen.
Predictions of Cleveland winning this series always seemed preposterous to me, as they were predicated upon this fantasyland notion that somehow Cleveland’s bad defense would be able to stop what is arguably the greatest offense in NBA history. For all of their truly exquisite shotmaking in the last three games of the series, the Cavs were only able to muster one win. Cleveland’s 2016 title was well-deserved, but then the Warriors responded by making a slight upgrade to their roster. The onus is now on Cleveland to respond. The Warriors got better last summer, and Cleveland has to get better now.
But how?
I would submit that not re-upping GM David Griffin, who only managed to construct a roster around LeBron that won Cleveland an NBA championship, doesn’t count as an auspicious beginning to the summer. Whomever replaces Griffin will be the 5th Cavs GM in the past 12 years, which is a ridiculous amount of turnover for what is one the league’s marquee franchises. Cavs owner Dan Gilbert has never really valued front office positions, but good ol’ Comic Sans Dan just may have laid the groundwork for killing his golden goose. LeBron can be a free agent in 2018, after all, and after the native son came back to Cleveland and brought a title to his hometown club, he has nothing left to prove there. Unlike when he first left in 2010, and they burned his jerseys in the streets, LeBron can walk away from Cleveland having done what he set out to do and brought them the ultimate prize of a championship. If, come next summer, LeBron doesn’t think the Cavs can win anymore, he won’t hesitate to head elsewhere. He’s done it before – twice – and he’ll do it again.
But how in the hell is Cleveland going to get better? They have one of the oldest teams in the NBA, and they have the most expensive team in the NBA. Win-now mode netted them the ultimate prize in 2016, of course, which means that ultimately it was worth the cost, but that moment has passed and now the Cavs are stuck. They have no promising young players, they have no draft assets to work with – that trade of a 1st round pick to Atlanta for Kyle Korver looks really awful in hindsight – and the NBA repeater tax is going to kill them this coming season.
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| Cleveland Cavaliers payroll obligations for the next three seasons |
Cleveland’s problem is a problem endemic to the NBA salary cap, in that you wind up paying players on your roster relative to their value to your own team – which has nothing at all to do with their value to anyone else in the league. This is why making trades can be really difficult. A guy worth $15 million on your end probably isn’t valued at that level by anyone else, and in a league that’s constrained by salary caps and floors and luxury taxes and the like, the salary math is almost as important as if they can hit a jump shot, if not more so.Your $15 million player is not necessary my $15 million player. The highest paid player in the league this year was Mike Conley of Memphis – a very good player, mind you, but one who owes that salary not to being the best point guard in the league, but to the fact that he is the best player on his team and, since they had a max contract slot to dole out, they may as well give it to him. It will be interesting this offseason to see what happens in Washington and Detroit, where Otto Porter and Kentavious Caldwell-Pope, respectively, will likely demand max contracts in order to re-sign. Nice players, both of them, but neither of them would even start on the Warriors, much less be paid the max. If I am going to watch a Buzzards game, I am going to see John Wall and Bradley Beal, not Otto Porter. I pretty much never want to see a Detroit game ever, since that team verges on unwatchable.
For the Cavs here, Tristan Thompson is owed $16.4 million this coming season, and $52.4 million over the next three years. Tristan Thompson fills an important role for the Cavs – holding down the center of the floor while the others are bombing away from three. His value to the Cavs, however, is much higher than with anyone else in the league. No one wants $52.4 million worth of a limited offensive center who got played off the floor in the first two games of the NBA finals. The contracts for J.R. Smith and Iman Shumpert are similar – whatever their role on the Cavs, no one else wants to take on those contracts in trade. Those guys fill a need around LeBron in Cleveland, but take LeBron out of it, and they are not nearly as useful as players.
In truth, Cleveland’s only really good trade chip is Kyrie Irving. But you’d be an idiot to trade Kyrie Irving. Kyrie Irving is one of the most creative shotmakers the game of basketball has ever seen. That’s a stupid idea. So then what do you do? The Cavs were already shopping Kevin Love, who is an élite offensive talent, but he’s also 28, is owed $46.7 million over the next two seasons, just had knee surgery this past season, can’t guard anyone in the open floor, and much like Thompson, Love also got played off the floor at times by the Warriors. I’ve been hearing about these trade rumors ever since the finals ended in which the Cavs would make a 3-team deal whereby they would ship Love to Team X, Team X would give a bunch of stuff to either Chicago or Indiana, and the Cavs would land either Paul George or Jimmy Butler. (More on him in a minute.) Those rumors made no sense to me, simply because if I’m Team X, I’d rather have Butler or George than Love, and if it’s going to cost me a bunch of stuff in order to move those guys, I’d rather just deal with Chicago and Indy directly and ignore Cleveland’s phone calls.
I don’t see how Cleveland gets any better. I suppose you could hope that Dwyane Wade and Carmelo Anthony get bought out from the Bulls and the Knicks eventually, but an old team with a bad defense and two ball-dominant players probably doesn’t need two more old, ball-dominant players who play bad defense. That formula didn’t work against the Warriors in 2017, and it isn’t likely to work in 2018, either. Teams that are old and slow don’t magically get younger and faster, and once they go bad, they tend to go really bad, really fast. Cleveland cruised through the Eastern playoffs this season, but I would argue their competition in the East is closer to them than they are to the Warriors, assuming that competition bothers to actually make some moves …
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The aforementioned Jimmy Butler was ultimately dealt during the comedy of errors that was the Chicago Bulls draft night. It’s rare that true stars get traded in the NBA, but now we’ve seen it twice in 2017 and, just as was the case with Boogie Cousins going to New Orleans, the return on the star sale seemed somewhat laughable. Butler is reunited with Thibs now in Minnesota, while the tag team comedy duo running the Bulls referred to as GarPax uttered the obligatory, “this was the best deal we could get” line, which seems dubious seeing as how it’s the exact same trade they apparently nixed a year ago – Butler for Kris Dunn and Zac LeVine – before both Wolves’ dudes were damaged goods. This deal got grades ranging from F to F+ from the assortment of NBA pundits, and the Bulls then compounded the disaster by swapping pick positions with Minnesota – if you’re the one trading the star, you shouldn’t be giving away stuff – using the 7th pick in the draft on Lauri Markkanen, who can shoot but can’t defend and who rebounds about as badly as any 7’0” guy I’ve ever seen, and then selling the 38th pick to the Warriors for $3.5 million, allowing the NBA champs to get the guy they wanted, Jordan Bell, on a cheap deal. This is precisely the same strategy Golden State used a year ago, paying $2.4 million to the Bucks for Patrick McCaw, and all McCaw wound up doing this year was playing 4th Quarter minutes in Game 5 of the NBA Finals and looking far better prepared to play NBA basketball than any of the 37 guys picked ahead of him in the draft. If the Warriors come knocking on your door and throwing money at you to buy their way into the draft, you might want to shut the door in their faces.
And I asked the same question, when I saw this Butler trade, that I did when Cousins got traded back in February: where are the Celtics? Why is Danny Ainge sitting on his ass … ets? Stars are hard to come by in the NBA, but you need them to win. You need them more than ever, now that Golden State has four of them. But instead, the Celtics played it safe once more, although they did make one deal: swapping the 1st overall pick to the 76ers, trading down to the third spot, and taking one of Philly’s picks over the next two years.
I hated this deal. And I hated this deal for two reasons.
Golden State has changed the calculus in the NBA. They have four All-stars under 30, all of them signed or soon to be signed up through at least 2019. They’re not going anywhere, so what are you going to do about it? Clearly, the second-best team in the league is Cleveland, and to get your shot at the Warriors in the East, you have to go through Cleveland first. Boston isn’t good enough to beat either of those teams in a playoff series, as the East final clearly showed. So if you’re Boston, what are you going to do about the Cavs? Are you just going to sit around and wait for LeBron to get old, or are you going to try to push the envelope?
So, okay, let’s take the tact that the Celtics are playing “the long game.” (I’ll get to why I think that is dumb here in a minute.) Okay, so in the post-LeBron world, who looks to be your chief adversaries in the East? I was talking previously about the absence of upside in the first round of this year’s NBA playoffs, talking about how so few of the losing teams showed any real long-term potential. But who does have the long term potential in the East? Milwaukee, to be sure, because one day Giannis will develop a jump shot, basketball will be over as we know it, life will be over as we know it and we’ll all bow down to our Bucks overlord. So who else? Philadelphia, of course. Philadelphia cannot get everyone on the court just yet, and health is a huge concern for them, but if they do ever get all of their guys on the court healthy and knowing where they are supposed to be at any point in time, they have two guys – Simmons and Embiid – with star potential. How many guys among the many redundant, nice-but-not-outstanding members of the Celtics can you say that about? IT? He’s certainly a star at the moment, but he’s still 5’7” and now he has a hip injury. Who else? Some people like Jaylen Brown. Then again, some people also like mayonnaise. I like neither of those things. Who else? Anyone? Didn’t think so.
So if you’re Boston and you’re playing the long game here, and thinking of the post-LeBron world, you have to think that the Sixers will be your prime rivals. This 2017 draft is a draft filled with good players, but it’s hard to guess who has the potential to be great. My hunch is that there are three potential superstars in this draft, all of whom are point guards with one of whom – Markelle Fultz – being the clear #1. The Celtics had the #1 pick, and their future rivals, the 76ers, wanted Fultz – so why are they giving him to the Sixers? It’s Fultz reaches his potential along with the others, the Sixers now have three stars in their lineup. They have exactly the core that they need to become a championship team. This is reason #1 that I hated this trade: Don’t give something to your closest rivals.
Oh, but they didn’t give Fultz to the 76ers, because they got another draft pick! Here’s the second reason I hated this trade: the Celtics don’t need more picks. They have too many draft assets already. They had eight draft picks in the 2016 draft – yes, that’s right eight – and wound up essentially throwing a lot of them away, which makes them useless. Danny Ainge commented, in the aftermath of the Butler trade to Minnesota, that teams ask for too much stuff from the Celtics because they know how much stuff that the Celtics have. He seems to think that the others in the league are undervaluing his many assets, but if anything, Ainge appears to be overvaluing them.
And here is why I think playing the long game is dumb, and why I thought it was dumb this past season as well. Boston isn’t as good as Cleveland, but Cleveland is old and plays bad defense and there were, and still are, guys out there – not just guys, but actual stars – whom the Celtics have the assets to acquire which could make an East final against the Cavs at least competitive, if not tipped in Boston’s favor outright. Jimmy Butler and Boogie Cousins were each traded basically for a pair of shoes. Boston could easily have beaten those offers and barely made a dent in their asset stashes. Paul George is now on the market as well, as he’s told the Pacers he’s leaving in free agency next summer. Why not rent the guy for a year? Throw two first round picks at the Pacers for him – and Boston can afford to do that, since they have seven first round in the next four years, which is far more than they can ever truly use effectively. Hell, if Kristaps Porziņģis actually is available from the Knicks (good lord), I’m calling up Phil Jackson and saying, “Here Phil, I’ve got seven first round picks in the next four years. Pick any two! Hell, pick any three! You’re giving me a unicorn, a 7-footer who shoots threes and protects the rim and is still on his rookie wage scale! Take any of that stuff that you want!” But instead, you’ve got Danny Ainge hoarding picks and kicking the can down the road, and now would be a good time for me to point out that his judgment in the draft has been, well, meh, and that most of his acumen amid all of his wheelings and dealings has come in finding undervalued players in the league like IT and Crowder and maximizing their value.
But the main reason I want to see the Celtics playing short, bulking up and beating on the Cavs has to do with what I said earlier in the show here, which is that LeBron can be a free agent in 2018. LeBron has some designs on being in L.A., of course, but his decisions are going to come down to whether or not he can win in Cleveland – so go and beat his ass! If the Celtics stock themselves up this offseason and then kick Cleveland’s ass in the playoffs, they also quite possibly kick LeBron all the way to the Western Conference, which means they have the run of the East until Philly gets its shit together, or until Giannis develops a jump shot and life on earth as we know it is over. (But at least our Bucks overlord will be a benevolent sort of overlord, since Giannis seems like a genuinely nice guy.)
All that I can think is happening at the moment, given the favorable hand they hold and given the market conditions, is that Ainge has been standing pat because he is as close to certain as he can possibly be that a big free agent – possibly Gordon Hayward, possibly Blake Griffin – is going to be signing this summer. Otherwise, none of this makes any sense. I don’t believe for a second that they drafted Jason Tatum, a nice shooter from Duke, with the idea in mind that he was the best guy in the draft and worth trading down for. Tatum adds to the Celtics’ glut on the wings – another position of strength of theirs in the trade market, as 3-and-D guys are in demand, but it isn’t a position of strength if your action is to just stock up on even more of them. Remember, Sam Hinkie’s death blow in Philly was drafting a third center, creating needless redundancy and overstocking at a position that is becoming less and less important in the modern NBA. The Celtics have too many wings, too many nice players who aren’t great players and all of whom are going to start getting expensive, and their other roster quandary going forward is what to do with IT, who is great but who is also 5’7” and going to be 29 when his contract ends and now has a dicey sort of hip injury. Boston could have gone a long way towards solving those problems in the future by drafting either Fultz or Ball and then trading some combo of Crowder/Bradley/Smart for either Butler or George, but they didn’t do any of that, and as a long time Celtics admirer, I’m sort of getting tired of continuing to build for some future that never, ever seems to exist. The future could be now, if they want it to be now.
I’d still try to rent Paul George, just so Cleveland doesn’t get him. Maybe he decides in the summer of 2018 that he wants to go to L.A., but maybe with him in tow, Boston could knock Cleveland off and make a good showing against the Warriors in the finals, and maybe PG13 sticks around at that point, because he comes to discover that he actually likes winning, which is ultimately the point of all of this.
In order to win in the NBA, you need stars. The best way to get stars is to draft them, but an even better way to get them is to trade for them when you have the means to do so, which is clearly where the Celtics are at this point in time. Failing to do so constitutes missed opportunities, and when you have a behemoth on the other side of the continent that you’re up against, you just can’t let those opportunities slip past.
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And as I’m writing this blog, I’m now reading about how there is a possible 3-team trade in the works involving Cleveland, Indiana, and Denver. Denver? Sure, because Kevin Love is precisely what a team who couldn’t guard their own shadows last season needs to add to the roster. I get that Denver is desperate to be relevant, but they finished 9th in the West last season and everyone who finished 4-8 has huge question marks this offseason: the Clippers have a new front office head honcho in Jerry West, Paul and Griffin need to be re-signed, etc.; the Jazz don’t know if they’ll have Hayward and George Hill around; the Grizzlies are old and slow, capped out and have no draft assets; OKC has to upgrade their horrible roster and aren’t likely to be so lucky in close games; Portland is in salary cap hell. Hell, if Denver does nothing except stay the course, they could be relevant again simply through attrition. Trading for Kevin Love seems completely unnecessary to me. But as we’ve seen with the trades of Boogie and then Jimmy Butler, you cannot expect actors to act rationally in these situations.
The NBA is drunk this offseason. The Warriors broke the league. They went out and signed KD, stomped on everyone, and now every other team seems to be losing its mind in one way or another. What’s strange to me about the PG13-to-Cleveland rumor is that I still don’t think it makes the Cavs good enough to beat the Warriors, but I guess you can’t blame them for trying. I’ve heard more bizarre rumors in the past two weeks than I can wrap my head around. It’s hard for me to keep up:
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Apart from the weird 1-for-3 Boston-Philly exchange, and Chicago going insane, the NBA draft was basically chalk. Lest you get too excited about the players in the 2017 NBA draft – a draft which is supposedly one of the deepest in ages – I invite to look back at the 2015 NBA draft, which people thought was going to be pretty good, and see what’s come of it in two short years: #1 was Karl Anthony Towns to Minnesota, which was a no-brainer and is still a no-brainer; #2 was DeAngelo Russell, who was so bad in two years in L.A. that the Lakers threw him into a Mozgov salary dump trade with Brooklyn (and while I’m at it, I should give the Swamp Dragons some props here for making that deal, because Russell still has considerable upside and Brooklyn has nothing to lose giving him the keys and trying to develop him); #3 in that draft was Okafor to the 76ers, who will probably get traded at some point this season for about 25¢ on the dollar; #4 was Porziņģis, who shouldn’t be traded but just might be because Phil Jackson is the worst GM in the NBA; and #5 was Mario Hezonja to Orlando, who has basically been a bust. Outside of Towns and Porziņģis, you’d probably have to say the best player to come out of that draft was Devin Booker, who was picked 13th by Phoenix. But otherwise, there are a lot of iffy guys in that draft who, just two years ago, looked as if they might possibly be useful NBA players.
We love the draft because we’re intoxicated by the great opiate that is potential, but the truth is that a lot of good talents will have their careers negatively affected by being drafted by organizations which are completely incompetent. It was pointed out during the coverage of the NBA draft that more All-Stars have been drafted 10th than have been drafted 2nd, which says far less about the players being picked and more about who is doing the picking. To that end, if I had a guess who’d ultimately be the best player in this draft, my guess is that it would be Dennis Smith, who was the 9th pick in the draft and went to the Dallas Mavericks, simply because the Mavericks generally know what they are doing and will put the kid in the most positions to succeed. A lot of those guys we just pointed out in that 2015 draft were put into positions where failure was inevitable. In Russell’s case, his rookie season coincided with the bombast and bluster of the Kobe Bryant victory lap around the NBA and he was subjected to the indifference of Byron Scott on the bench. In Okafor’s case, he was on a team that was designed to be terrible and made no secret of its wishes to be terrible. Guys get hurt, guys blossom late and whatnot. This is all an inexact science we’re talking about here.
Which is why, when you have great young talent, you need to do everything possible to keep it, which makes what’s going on with Porziņģis in New York even dumber. In terms of the most valuable young assets in the game, I’d submit that only Towns, Giannis, and maybe Anthony Davis surpass Porziņģis. He’s that unique, and his upside is that great. It’s not a big deal that Jackson’s fielding offers for him, because everyone is always fielding offers for everyone – former Sonic/Blazer GM Bob Whitsitt always liked to point out that he’d ask about Michael Jordan trades every time he spoke with the brass in Chicago on the phone – but what’s a big deal is that Jackson is perpetually talking about it. By doing so, he’s letting it be known that Porziņģis is available when, by all rights, he shouldn’t be. But this is how it goes with Phil, who is completely tone deaf and out-of-step with the modern game, and whose incompetence as an exec has called into question whether his success as a coach really was little more than rolling the ball out for his superstars, since his intelligence and judgment seem to have been greatly overstated. Jackson got himself into a huff when Porziņģis skipped his exit meeting at the end of the vortex that was the Knicks 2016-2017 season – an act which Porziņģis did because he didn’t care for the way that Jackson was running the team, of course, and particularly in response to the ways in which Phil has constantly devalued his team’s best player, Carmelo Anthony, whom he’d like to trade but cannot because of the no-trade clause which Phil foolishly handed him during their last negotiation. It’s all a mess.
The problem with letting it be known that Porziņģis is available is that, because of his rookie scale contract, literally every team in the league can afford him including those over the cap and the tax lines, meaning Phil is going to field 100 offers, probably 98 of which will be bad and, quite possibly, one of which he’ll foolishly accept. In response to the current state of affairs, most of the Knick fans that I know have either developed even more damaging drinking problems than they already possessed, or have simply thrown up their hands and given up on watching basketball entirely. Come back, Knicks fans! Come back! It’s not that bad! There are brighter days ahead in … well, it’ll happen at some point, I’m sure of it …
And to all of my faithful readers out there who may have lost faith in the NBA here of late, as the Warriors have stomped on everyone’s faces and gone 16-1 to win an NBA title with a roster that appears set to dominate the league for the next 3-5 years, I say this: all of this is cyclical and nothing is forever. I’m reminded on the fabulous This Day in Suck twitter account that it was on this day back in 2009 that the Golden State Warriors drafted Steph Curry. Things improved after that, suffice to say. The franchise was SO DIRE back then. Seriously, you have no idea how hopeless this team was. You really have no idea. And here we are, eight years later, with the Warriors being arguably the single-most dominant and most marketable franchise in all of sports, an entity which is going to be worth about $4.5 billion when their new arena opens in downtown San Francisco and whose Q rating is so high that any sort of fanciful notions from the past of taking away the Golden State moniker have been thrown out the window. None of this was ever expected, none of it could have ever been anticipated.
There is zero guarantee that will happen to your team, of course, but the point is that it could, in fact, happen. So stick with it and stay the course. And in the meantime, enjoy the game of basketball being played as skilfully and as beautifully as it’s ever been played. What’s not to like about that?
