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| There is no reason for this gif to be here. I just thought we needed a moose chasing a golfer in Sweden, because moose. |
TODAY we’re going to talk about player movement. This is a good time of the year to do that, since we’re approaching the baseball trade deadline. It’s that time of year where bad teams trade good players, and good teams trade bad players in return for those good players.
Okay, well, maybe that’s not entirely true. The players being dealt back aren’t necessarily bad before they get dealt, but most of them will amount to nothing in the end. This is because the bad teams doing the trading of good players usually are bad teams because a) they have no real good eye for talent, and/or b) they have a coaching, development, and/or organizational system which sucks, meaning whatever talent they acquire will likely go to waste.
This is why, when you see some list of all of the great young talent the Chicago White Sox have acquired in the great purge that is their summer of 2017, you should take it with a grain of salt. The White Sox have done almost nothing right as an organization since they won the World Series in 2005, and have returned to the protoypical bad and boring state of irrelevancy which has generally plagued them for a century. The White Sox excel in producing players who are either mediocre or malcontents. How that is somehow going to magically change remains a mystery. As I’ve said before, if a management team runs your franchise into a ditch, it’s foolish to think they’ll be smart enough to get you out of it.
And teams have wised up and come to understand that you shouldn’t go overpaying at the trade deadline. There hasn’t been a truly wretched deadline deal in baseball for quite a while now. The days of the Heathcliff Slocumb deal have long since passed. And yes, realizing that yesterday was the 20th anniversary of that horrible trade by the Mariners “inspired” me to write this blog, so to speak. In terms of long-term damage to a franchise, I’d probably argue that the Mariners’ trade of Adam Jones for Erik Bédard was actually a worse trade, and that Shelby Miller stinker by the Snakes looks to have lasting power in the annals of deals gone awry, but both of those were offseason deals. In the context of the midseason trade deadline, the Slocumb deal is the (Fool’s) Gold Standard of awful. And the Red Sox made out like bandits in that Slocumb deal, but not even they have been immune to the horrible midsummer trade, which I’m reminded of watching TV here and seeing Jeff Bagwell inducted into the Hall of Fame.
The most common currency these days is pitching prospects, which are basically lottery tickets. Want a guy from a bad team? Give them 2-3 pitching prospects from the lower leagues, and if they balk at that price, then give them 2-3 more. Among the prospects the Giants just received for trading 3B Eduardo Nuñez to the Rex Sox was a 17-year-old presently pitching in the Dominican Summer League. As longshots go, they don’t get much longer than that. Failed African kleptocracies possess currency of greater value than young pitching prospects. There’s a reason for this, of course: pitchers are fragile and prone to breaking down. The likelihood that any of those lottery tickets will cash is slim to none.
And this has proven true with pitching prospects at all levels, regardless of prowess or pedigree. Even picking up seemingly can’t miss prospects can blow up spectacularly. In 2011, the Giants traded for Carlos Beltran from the Mets in an effort to boost their chances at defending their World Series title from the year before. (They failed.) Giants fans were decidedly unhappy about the price for a 3-month rental of Beltran: Zac Wheeler, the 6th overall pick in the draft and considered to be the #1 prospect in the Giants farm system at the time. In five seasons with the Mets, Wheeler has produced a total of 21 wins and has spent 2½ years on the DL with arm problems. Giants fans used to complain about that trade, since Beltran didn’t really do much in two months bayside while Wheeler had so much upside, but no one complains much now given the unfortunate trajectory of Wheeler’s career.
Then again, given the constant and perpetual spate of injuries which seems to ravage the Mets on a yearly basis, it’s quite right to question their training and medical staffs. Injuries can be one-off and bad luck, but runs of injuries throughout a club on a regular basis point to a certain level of organizational incompetence. (We can make light of this in the context of chronicling failure, but something as damaging as this story about the New Orleans Pelicans, from a human standpoint, is pretty alarming.) This goes to what I was saying before about bad organizations, insofar as that, one way or another, they go about making good players into bad ones over time. And make no mistake about it, the New York Mets have been a bad organization for years, one which has won in spite of itself of late. For perpetually bad teams, the buying and selling of talent usually proves to be the perpetuation of the same old mistakes.
The whole point of bad teams trading at the deadline, of course, is to dump salary and try to recoup anything for expiring contracts of players you have no intention of keeping. If you’re bad with those guys on your team, you can quite easily go on being bad without them. But as deadline buyers have smartened up over time, dealing guys away at the deadline has become less and less desirable. Not only are you still bad now, but you’re unlikely to get anything in return which will prevent you from being bad in the future. Your best chance to retool through the trade market actually comes in the offseason.
Then again, if you suck, you’ll probably screw up the offseason as well.
The baseball deadline nears just as the flurry of activity surrounding the free agency period in the NBA finally peters out. (Or so we thought, but more on that in a minute.) I continue to maintain that the Golden State Warriors have, in fact, broken the NBA, is as much as that the response from the other 29 teams to this dominant juggernaut seemingly having risen from straight out of the Pacific Ocean is to completely melt down and lose their collective minds. We’ve already killed the Kings and the Bulls for selling off their stars – Boogie Cousins and Jimmy Butler – for pennies on the dollar, but then the Indiana Pacers said “hold my beer” and one-upped them with one of the more mind-bogglingly bad trades I’ve seen of late, swapping their disgruntled star Paul George to OKC for a couple pairs of shoes. OKC can now pair PG13 with Russell Westbrook for a season in yet another attempt to remain relevant before George inevitably jets off to Los Angeles in free agency. The primary piece going back to Indiana is Victor Oladipo, who has now been traded twice in a year, and who the Zombies are happy to get off their books after inexplicably giving him an $84 million extension. Sam Presti didn’t get nearly enough shit for offering that awful contract up last season, nor does he get enough slag for some of his awful drafts in OKC in recent years, because Presti’s greatest strength over the years has been to figure out who the dumbest teams in the league are and trade with them.
Which is a description that fits Indiana well, at the moment. Presti must have known he should make a deal with Indiana GM Kevin Pritchard because it was Pritchard, as GM of the Portland Trail Blazers, who picked Greg Oden instead of Kevin Durant with the 1st pick in the 2007 draft, and that pick of Durant at #2 served Presti quite well over the years. Indiana apparently had a three-team deal worked out whereby they’d move George to Cleveland, the Cavs would trade Kevin Love to Denver, and the Pacers would get a bunch of promising stuff back from the Nuggets, but the proposed 3-team trade has a funny way of winding up being a no-team trade. For some reason, Indy pulled out of that deal – apparently neither the Cavs nor Nuggets quite know why – and then they scrambled around and cobbled together this dog of a deal with OKC. Oladipo is a decent player, but not great by any means, and now they are on the hook for $84 million of decent-but-not-great. The best, and also most cynical, reason that I figure this deal took place is that the Pacers thought they were going to stink regardless after trading PG13, so the best way to keep asses in seats at The Fieldhouse was to bring back a guy who played down the road at the University of Indiana. And I don’t think that aspect of this trade has been played up enough. Seriously, if this decent-but-not-great player owed $84 million hadn’t played at I.U., I think there is ZERO chance Pritchard trades for him. NBA fans, even in Indianapolis, are far savvier than that. It’s small-time thinking on the part of what’s become a small-time franchise.
But that brings up something which a lot of people forget, which is that these sorts of decisions by franchises aren’t always made for reasons pertaining to on-field performance. Quite often, other forces and factors come into play. Sales reasons, marketing reasons, or hell, maybe the guy is a pain in the ass and you just want him to go away. Those reasons aren’t necessarily any better or worse, in terms of making a deal, than reasons relating to on-field performance. I think playing on the Hoosiers sentiment with Oladipo in Indianapolis is stupid – I’d argue the best way to keep asses in seats is through winning basketball games – but you can understand that line of reasoning when it doesn’t appear that you’re going to be any good, anyway. One of the more amazing non-trades I can recall from my Seattle days came in the panic that followed the Sonics choking in the 1994 playoffs. Head Coach and Acting GM George Karl cobbled together a deal to trade Shawn Kemp and the #7 pick in that draft to the Bulls for Scottie Pippen, a deal which didn’t come to pass, in part, because Kemp was the Sonics most marketable star at the time, and it was reported that many season ticket holders and corporate sponsors made it be known to the business office that their support was being pulled if Kemp was dealt. In retrospect, of course, that deal would probably have been good for Seattle, but in retrospect, most everything about the RIP Sonics could have been done better.
And one of the reasons the Indiana Pacers dealt Paul George was because he’d told them, in no uncertain terms, that once his contract was up, he was leaving. The trade in professional sports is something of a strange relic from earlier times when the franchises had complete control over the players and could dictate the entire course of their careers. While clubs in baseball and the NBA and such will insist the trade is vital to their interests and the ability to do it is essential, the players haven’t nearly figured out the ways in which they can leverage the situation in their best interests. Because ultimately, trades don’t make much sense in the abstract – why should I be told that I have to now pick up and relocate to someplace else where I don’t necessarily want to be? It’s been reported that numerous possible trades of George were, in fact, scuttled by his agent catching wind of the possible deal, calling up the potential suitor, and saying “we’re not signing with you, so don’t bother.” And it surprises me that more guys don’t do this sort of thing. Obviously, role players and 25th men on the end of an MLB bench don’t have nearly the sort of leverage, but stars have the power to shape and control and chart their careers, often failing to realize just how much power they actually have.
And we should applaud players for taking control of careers, instead of taking the sides of ownership and management. Don’t buy into any argument a sports league puts forth about trying to promote competitive balance through salary caps, revenue sharing, luxury taxes and the like. That’s not about competitive balance. That’s about cost certainty, which is entirely different. Major League Baseball finally clamped down on one of baseball’s biggest freeloaders, the Oakland A’s, and told them to stop skimping on payroll and claiming to be broke while raking in the easy money provided by revenue sharing. MLB had to force the Florida Marlins to promise they’d spend revenue sharing money on players after they’d been found to be turning rather nice profits while fielding horrible teams with horribly low payrolls. In North American sports, there are few incentives to be good and plenty of incentives to be terrible. Hell, the Seattle Mariners are worth over $1 billion, even though they’ve never won anything, they’ve lived off of the aegis of the state of Washington, who built them Safeco Field, and they made it a point to actively fight and thwart Chris Hansen, the guy who wanted to buy the Sacramento Kings, when he wanted to build a new arena down the street from their ballpark. They’ve not been good neighbors, and they’ve not been any good. How much are they worth again? A billion dollars? As in billion with a B?
North American sports fans are strangely conditioned to take the sige of management when it comes to all labor-related issues. One of the reasons for this is that fans root for teams for decades, whereas players inevitably come and go. Fans have a sense of loyalty to their favorite teams, and they assume that players should as well. This is naive, it always has been, and always will be. We also buy into dumb narratives about players being selfish, not caring about the team, and not caring about winning. Bullshit. These are the most competitive people on the planet. They want to win no matter what jersey they put on – it’s just that quite a few of them would rather be wearing a different jersey, which I’m perfectly okay with. I personally don’t understand why more players don’t force trades out of bad situations, nor have their agents work behind the scenes to prevent them. Your career is not best served by being traded to the Phoenix Suns or the San Diego Padres. Well, obviously, in the short-term, the reason guys don’t force their way out of places is because they get killed in the press for it, but ultimately, players should have the power and the control over their careers. We’re fans, we’ll get over it and root for whomever dons the jersey next. (Well, maybe those hillbillies in OKC won’t get over Durant. Tough shit. I would love it if Russell Westbrook, when given the opportunity to sign the new übermax $200 million extension, decides not to sign it – and he has all the leverage, so he has no reason to do it right away – and sends that entire garbage franchise into such a panic that they’ll corkscrew themselves straight into the ground, which would be glorious. But I digress.)
And this brings us to Kyrie Irving, who ruined the summer vacation plans of a great many NBA beat writers when it became public knowledge that he’d asked for a trade from the Cleveland Cavaliers. The Cavs have been in full-on meltdown mode ever since the NBA Finals ended. Cavs owner and junk mortgage king Comic Sans Dan Gilbert wouldn’t bring back GM David Griffin, one of whose main jobs in Cleveland involved keeping the peace. He then lowballed his first choice candidate for the job, Chauncey Billups, who turned it down. In the meantime, the Cavs whiffed on trading for either Paul George or Jimmy Butler, the sort of player they needed to add to compete with the Warriors, and no one who covers the NBA is able to deny the bevy of rumors of LeBron James leaving next summer to go to L.A. All of that probably has something to do with Kyrie’s thinking, not to mention the fact that he’s very likely sick of playing with LeBron and wants to be the #1 option on a team – which seems odd to me, in that he’s already somewhat of a #1 option in Cleveland, where he shoots more than anyone, and also seems somewhat delusional to me, seeing how whenever he truly has been the #1 option (i.e., without LeBron), the Cavs have been terrible. Be that as it may, I have no issues with Kyrie wanting to take control of his career and dictate its terms. In that sense, he’s learned from LeBron, who has spent his entire career maximizing his leverage and looking out for his own best interests.
Kyrie wants out of Cleveland and good on him for doing it. He’s something of a complex character, the value of whom is truly hard to discern. On the one hand, he’s an incredible scorer and one of the great shotmakers I’ve ever seen, a trick shot artist with the ball in his hand. On the other, he’s never shown himself to be very good running an offense, he’s not a great playmaker, he is truly one of the worst defenders I’ve ever seen, and I’m not sure he’s ever made a teammate better. Further still, it could be argued that with constant turbulence and instability in the franchise – so many coaches, so many GMs – and having had to play second fiddle to LeBron, he hasn’t truly developed all of his game. Further still, and this one is important, regardless of what the numbers tell you – and the numbers suggest to me that he might be overrated as a player – Kyrie Irving is a superstar. He hit the biggest shot in the history of the franchise, the championship-winning shot in Game 7 of the NBA Finals. He sells shoes, he’ll sell jerseys, and he’ll put asses in seats. And all of that stuff matters. In many ways, it matters even more than what he produces from a pure numbers standpoint. (Which could lead me into a long rant about how I hate all discussions about Halls of Fame in which statheads through numbers at me and disregard the narrative aspects of a player’s career, because Halls of Fame aren’t Halls of Stats, but I’ll get to that line of argument at another time.)
So congratulations, new Cavaliers GM Koby Altman, you now get to figure out how to trade Kyrie Irving and not get screwed over in the process. Have fun with that. Kyrie is only 25 years old, and has two years left on a contract that is, by NBA standards, incredibly team-friendly, as it was signed under the previous CBA. I mentioned previously that he was the Cavs’ best trade chip, precisely for those reasons. I also said they’d be insane to trade him, but everyone involved with the Cavs seems to be insane, so this is not as far off-script as you’d think.
And yeah, if you’re the Cavs, you really should try to trade him. You could be a dick about it and say, “you have two years left on your contract, so tough shit,” but that’s just asking for two years of distractions on a team that’s already rife with them. And you’re also better off if you make a good-faith effort to work out a deal with one of his preferred destinations – San Antonio, Minnesota, New York, Miami – because otherwise, Kyrie’s agent can say, “we ain’t resigning in two years” and likely scare off some suiters, or at least cause them to lower the asking prices. The players really do have more leverage than they realize in these situations. OKC didn’t care about trading for a year of Paul George’s services, because for them it’s a no-lose situation. If he walks, it’s a whole lot of open space on their books. If he stays, it’s a bonus. But most teams will not be willing to do something so ballsy, and be more inclined to play it safe.
Given the circumstances, this is a bad spot for Cleveland to be in. They need to stay relevant, in case LeBron wants to stay, because the only way LeBron will stay is if he thinks they can win. They also need to somehow get younger, because if LeBron leaves in 2018, he leaves behind a whole roster of guys well-suited to play with LeBron but not so good otherwise, all of them with contracts that make them extremely undesirable to anyone else. The chance for a bad outcome here is high, and so I thought I would cook up a few bad outcomes of my own for the fun of it …
Over on ESPN, they have a fun NBA Trade Machine which will allow to propose all sorts of trades and see if they meet the criteria established in the CBA. In the wrong hands, of course, such technology can be a dangerous thing. I decided to set out on a misguided quest to see if I could cook up the worst trades possible for Kyrie Irving, based upon the number of expected wins the trade will cost the Cavs. Behold some of my masterpieces, starting with the Knicks, who are one of the four teams Kyrie had on his wish list:
How’s that for a return? Only -11 wins for Cleveland though. Surely we can do better – or do worse, as it were, especially if we try to move some salary and trade some of the contracts the Cavs would be happy to get rid of.
Orlando has plenty of pieces with which to make an awful deal.
I don’t know if Sacramento would be willing to make this deal, since it would mark a radical departure from Vlade Divac’s usual philosophy, which is to amass as many basketball players from the Balkans as possible and grossly overpay all of them.
Here’s a 3-team deal with the Blazers and
Here’s a bad trade with Detroit. You’ll notice some themes developing here, one of which is that a lot of the guys going back to Cleveland in these deals are guys who signed last summer, when NBA ownership got drunk on salary cap space and inked a bunch of not very good players to expensive contracts they now regret. The other theme you will notice is a lot of centers, which is a position no one cares about in the NBA anymore, anyway, and is a position laden these days with a general dearth of talent.
Atlanta has nothing good to offer, which is perfect for this exercise.
Okay, now this is more like it. Team up Kyrie with AD and Boogie in New Orleans in exchange for someone who is always hurt, two not very good centers, and some guy that I’ve never heard of. This is getting better and better.
In terms of number of Hollinger losses, this trade here of Kyrie to the Griz for the rotting corpse that is Chandler Parsons’ contract is the overall champ at -14. But this isn’t my favorite deal.
This is my favorite deal. I think this one is my Sistine Chapel.
And as dumb as those deals are, there have been deals in all sports in North America which were worse than those.
In the NBA, a superstar player rattling the sabres about wanting to be moved is a source of leaguewide upheaval. In soccer, it’s a day ending in Y. The biggest saga of the summer when it comes to superstars possibly changing teams is not Kyrie Irving leaving the Cleveland Cavaliers – but we’ll get to him in a minute – but the possibility of Neymar moving from F.C. Barcelona to Paris St. Germain at a price which is gobsmacking. The reports have suggested a transfer fee for the Brazilian in the realm of €250,000,000, which seems just preposterous, but everything about international transfers in soccer seems preposterous, and there is a good reason for that – most of the reporting turns out to be smoke, with very little fire behind it.
Transfers are a shady and shadowy business, and the international market is deliberately rife with gossip and innuendo. This is because clubs cannot directly speak to players who are under contract with other clubs. That’s against the rules. Transfers are the ultimate act of “have your people call my people.” Recruitment operations at club will employ fleets of middlemen whose job it is to go out and contact player’s agents and attempt to gauge interest in a player being willing to be moved – and the agents, of course, are perfectly happy to let it slip out that such-and-such a club would be interested in a player’s services if it results in said player getting a better contract out of the deal.
A result of the landmark Bosman ruling in 1995 has been that players have tremendous power when it comes to dictating where they play. When a player is out of contract, the club gets nothing if a player changes teams. As such, players hold the ultimate leverage: all it takes to squash a potential move is for an agent to tell a club there is zero chance in hell his client will sign a new contract, meaning the club has shelled out X amount of euros to acquire him and will wind up getting nothing in return. If you run a club, and you have a guy you want to keep, and he wants a new deal, his agent will go contacting middlemen working for other clubs, and then some strange transfer offer will materialize seemingly out of thin air from some other club saying “hey, we’ll give you X for such-and-such player,” at which point you have to go back to the agent, who will say “gosh, I have no idea why that club is so interested since my client loves playing for your club, and he would love to play for your club going forward for another €100,000 a week.” The only real leverage a club has is through playing time. If you want to get rid of someone, bench him and tell him he’s not in the future plans. Guys want to get paid, but guys also want to play football. If you tell him he’s not in the plans, he’ll want to go someplace else.
And when you’re a fan of a soccer club, you get used to it. My beloved Canaries of Norwich City make for a good reference point here. Norwich City are, for all intents and purposes, a Division 1.5 club. Every nation has in Europe has these sorts of clubs to one degree or another. The Canaries are one of the yo-yos, bouncing up and down between the EPL and the Championship on a regular basis. They’re a midsized club and, as such, they’re likely to look for younger talent at more reasonable prices and, at the first sign of trouble, they’re also likely to sell. When they were relegated from the EPL in 2016, I took stock of the roster and noted which guys were most likely to be sold to bigger clubs. Now, little more than a year later, the first five guys on that list of mine are all gone.
But this is how it goes. You accept it as part of the game and you move on. You’d love to keep your players for as long as possible, but if a bigger club comes calling and willing to buy, you’d be stupid to sell. Nobody in Leicester bitched too much when, the summer after winning the EPL title, the Foxes sold their best player, N’Golo Kanté, to Chelsea for £32 million. Kanté being sold to the Blues, a year after he arrived in Leicester, meant first and foremost that Kanté wanted to go to Chelsea. And why wouldn’t he want to go to Chelsea? He can make more money, first and foremost, and given Chelsea’s resources, he’s likely to win a lot more football games over the course of his career. Can you blame him?
Of course you can. Here in the states, we still have hillbillies decrying Kevin Durant’s lack of loyalty to an organization he had no choice in joining, and hooters who will burn LeBron’s jersey when he decides to take his talents to South Beach. That’s just dumb. If you’re going to root for the name on the front of the jersey, then root for the guys presently wearing those jerseys, instead of the guys who have moved on. Stop buying that stupid narrative about loyalty. There isn’t any loyalty the other way. Teams will dump players in a heartbeat if it serves their needs. Why do we, as fans, continue to grant license for ownership to do that, yet balk at the idea of players looking out for their own best interests?
Being a sports fan, ultimately, means allowing yourself to be conned into thinking that the ownership of your favorite club actually gives a shit about what you think. They want you to buy season tickets, of course, since that lump sum payment in the offseason is a nice influx of cash with which they frontload their budget. But there is plenty of evidence to suggest that many of those either don’t care about winning, or are far too incompetent to go about doing it. I have never begrudged any player who wanted to leave a favorite team of mine. They move on, the club resets and you go from there. It’s fun to think about the mechanics of making trades, like I did with the trade machine earlier, but if your team sucks, a trade isn’t likely to make them all that much better by themselves. If your team sucks, the rot likely begins at the top with ownership and then filters down into management. About the only thing they aren’t willing to trade, unfortunately, is themselves.
