Get Better

James Harden gets beat for a dunk while coming to realize that he’s lost his keys

HOUSTON winning Game 2 of the Western Conference Finals was a relief. Now, as a Warriors fan, it annoyed me, in the moment, but in the bigger picture, the Rockets winning Game 2 127:105 did us all a service, in that it quelled, for the moment at least, the enormous existential angst about the league that’s been running rampant. It’s pretty much been around since July 4, 2016, of course, which was the day that the Warriors signed Kevin Durant, but after Game 1 of this year’s Western Conference Finals, in which the Rockets – the team whose GM admits to being obsessed about beating the Warriors, the team that’s been heralded as being “built” to beat them – got whooped 119-106 at home and made to look bad in doing so, then all of a sudden, there are not only the usual assortment of tweets, but also regular columnists talking along the lines of how the Golden State Warriors have somehow “ruined” the NBA. (He’s not alone in this, by the way. From Sunday night, I give you a ridiculous tweet by a Jazz beat writer I admire. They’re everywhere, these sorts of takes.)

The Rockets winning Game 2 of the series put a stop to this hand-wringing, at least for the moment, but it’s all flowing back in after the Warriors destroyed Houston 126:85 in Game 3. And if I didn’t find these knee-jerk reactions annoying, I’d probably find them amusing. Aah, yes, let’s long for the glory days of yesteryear when no one was dominating the NBA, when no one was winning six titles in eight years or going to the NBA finals eight times in a decade.

Oh, wait, both of those happened.

Trust me, NBA twittersphere, the league survived the Bulls winning six titles in eight years, and survived the Lakers going to the finals eight times in the 1980s, and you’ll survive the Warriors winning a few titles in a cluster in the 2010s and 2020s. Seriously, you’ll live.

Look, folks, this stuff is cyclical. Nothing is permanent, and nothing lasts forever. But here’s a suggestion, to all of you out there lamenting the fact that your team is fodder against the mighty Warriors, here’s a suggestion that I offer up, both as a fan of said Warriors and also as someone who got so annoyed watching the Sonics get their brains beat in the Lakers for years on end: get better.

Seriously, it’s that simple. Get better. Draft better, scout better, develop players better. Coach better. Be shrewder and more savvy in the front office. Sick of the Warriors winning everything? Fair enough. Get better.

And since I referenced, in the link above, a column by Toronto columnist Bruce Arthur (whose work I generally admire), let’s use the basketball team in his backyard as a reference point here. The Toronto Raptors got blasted 4-0 by the Cavs last year in the 2nd round of the Eastern Conference playoffs. They weren’t good enough. Quite simply, they lacked the sort of personnel on their roster capable of defeating LeBron & Co. in the playoffs. So what did they do in the offseason? Did they get better?

The Raptors lost 4-0 to the Cavs this year in the 2nd round of the playoffs, so apparently not. Oh, I know, there was a lot of talk about how the Raptors “changed the culture” this year, on their way to winning 59 games and taking the top seed in the Eastern playoffs. These are the new Raptors! They shoot more threes! They pass the ball! They run actual coherent plays! And sure, they did do all of that in the regular season, but the fact of the matter is that, when it came to face up against the baddest dude on the block in LeBron, the Raptors had the same problems that they had a season ago – mostly because, for all of their commendable efforts to develop young players to counteract picking low in the draft, when it came down to crunch time, the Raptors were doing the same old things they’ve done every year, and relying upon the same old players, whom they’ve now invested a fucktonne of money in.

If you’re the Raptors, and you get trucked by the Cavs a season ago, you might want to actually take a look at why it is that you have no chance to beat Cleveland: you have one-dimensional bigs who struggle to defend in open space, and you have no scoring on the wing, which means LeBron doesn’t have to guard anyone. The Raptors solution to this was to re-up thirty-something point guard Kyle Lowry to a thirty-something-million a year contract, and also re-up Serge Ibaka, whom LeBron is perfectly content to lay off of and not guard because nine times out of eight, he won’t make the right play with the ball in his hand. That’s not getting better!

But see, according to our Toronto scribe I linked to above, the Golden State Warriors are, essentially, ruining the NBA and making it less fun, which is complete nonsense. What ruins teams in the NBA is terrible decision making. The Warriors had absolutely, positively nothing to do with Toronto deciding, over the course of the last two summers, to invest well over $200 million in Lowry, Ibaka, and also DeMar DeRozan, who was so bad in Game 3 that he got benched and then got himself thrown out of Game 4. The Raptors brass willingly did this, and willingly tied one of their hands behind their back in the process, because none of those guys are tradable, it’s pretty clear they’ve hit the ceiling, and it’s also pretty clear that playing the way they play is not a winning strategy so long as LeBron lives in a zip code east of the Mississippi River. You, Toronto, you didn’t get better, so as far as I’m concerned, you don’t get to bitch.

And see, the Raptors are in the same spot now that almost every other team in the NBA is in, which is that they got greedy and overspent and have left themselves inflexible. I’m wondering if we’ll see some sort of sideways trades this summer, in which one team trades a guy with a contract they don’t like and have to take another guy with a contract they won’t like, either, with the hopes that the new guy will somehow make them better. Every team has got those guys, most of whom signed new deals in the last couple of years and have since proved to everyone in their organization that it was money poorly spent. And it’s not just the bad teams that have those guys, although the bad teams seem to have more of them. Houston would love to get better this coming off-season, but god knows how they’ll do it, seeing as how they have to re-sign Clint Capela, a young center who is great, and are presently paying $20 million a season to Ryan Anderson, who cannot get off the bench against the Warriors.

Then again, Rockets GM Daryl Morey went about engineering the trade last summer for Chris Paul (whom they have to also re-sign this summer by the way) in an effort to try and build a team that could compete with Golden State. Houston “raised its risk profile,” in Morey’s words. Houston got better, and will probably – hopefully – find a way to get better once again, because that’s what they do instead of whining about how Golden State wins all the things.

At the crux of the angst and anxiety in the NBA is the fact that the Warriors – a 2015 champion, 73-game winner and near champion in 2016 – then went out and signed Kevin Durant after that. It completely astonishes me that this is still such a big deal to so many people, but here I was, the other day, after saying something on twitter along the lines of “quit whining and get better,” arguing about the fact that KD signed with the Warriors with some guy on my twitter DM:

some guy: KD going to the Warriors was the ultimate in bandwagoning.
LOSE: Okay, then, where should he have gone?
some guy: back to OKC
LOSE: If he wanted to go back to OKC, he would have. The fact that he didn’t says that he didn’t want to, which is his right.
some guy: He shouldn’t go to the team that just beat him in the playoffs.
LOSE: Okay, so let me get this straight. Because his team lost to GS, he shouldn’t be able to go there. So does that mean he should only go to situations where the team is worse? If you lose in the first round of the playoffs, you can’t sign with any team that advanced further than that? You have to sign with Phoenix or the Kings? Or would it have been OK for KD to sign with GS if OKC had lost to the Spurs in the playoffs that year, since GS wouldn’t have beaten them? Or could he have signed with Cleveland, since they won the whole thing that year but didn’t beat OKC? Explain these ground rules to me here.
(silence)

I’ve said this before but it bears repeating: every single argument put forth as to why Kevin Durant shouldn’t have signed with the Warriors is dumb as hell, and if you, the person who is reading this blog, espouses that nonsense, than you’re also dumb as hell and you shouldn’t be reading this blog. Seriously, get a clue. Guys reach a point in their careers where they have a choice of where to sign, and if you accept that right of players to have that agency over the careers – one which has been meticulously collectively bargained in all sports over the years – then you don’t get to bitch if/when a guy makes a decision that you don’t like.

I fully embrace that concept, even if it doesn’t happen to benefit the team that I root for. Which it doesn’t, sometimes. That’s how it goes. And I’m not saying this because I’m a Warriors homer. It’s gone the other way for me as well. I’ve watched the Mariners trade lose future Hall of Famers multiple years running. I’ve watched the most exciting hockey player I’ve ever seen in person, Pavel Bure, demand a trade and skate away from Vancouver forever. God knows I know never to ever get invested in any player who plays for my favorite soccer club. Norwich City had two truly gifted young players on their roster this past season – one of whom was among the Championship’s Best XI and the other of whom already has had a call-up to England’s senior national team – and I suspect there’s no way in hell I’ll ever see them wearing Norwich’s yellow and green again. This is how it goes. Guys take agency, and guys move on. Who cares what the reason is? Get over it already.

But not even the NBA got over it, which is why, in the last CBA negotiations and in the aftermath of Durant going to Golden State, the league concocted what is one of the stupidest ideas ever, the DP extension, which was intended to enable teams to try and keep their superstars but is, in fact, an incredibly daunting proposition for a club. Do you really want to give one guy $200 million over five years and tether such an enormous portion of your payroll to one guy? It’s a no-brainer for Houston to give that to James Harden, and for the Warriors to give it to Steph Curry, but we’ve already seen the Kings trade Boogie Cousins and the Bulls trade Jimmy Butler ahead of possibly being faced with having to offer that contract. And make no mistake: if a guy is eligible for that extension, he’ll want nothing less than that. Offer less, and he’s gone. The flip side to that, of course, is that if you offer it to a player, it’s so much money that they almost have to take it. But what are you really getting? The Buzzards are almost certainly having buyer’s remorse at the moment, having dropped $200 mil on John Wall, who has a history of knee issues and who was at the center of the constant bickering which plagued the Wiz this past season. It’s not looking like a particularly sound investment there on the part of the Wiz. Oh, wait, it’s the Warriors fault that Washington did that, because clearly, they are ruining the NBA, insofar as being as good as they are leads to a whole lot of other people completely losing their minds.

And KD’s been salty all year, which I don’t really blame him for, since he was only doing what anyone in that position should do, which is to go out and take a better job, and he gets vilified for going to Golden State at the expense of poor old OKC, when maybe, just maybe, someone should actually focus on why it is he would want to leave OKC in the first place. But somehow, we’ve spun the narrative of poor little OKC and their small town folk hero Russell Westbrook, enabling him to go off and play Don Quixote on the court as the basketball media ooh and aah over him padding his stats and chasing round numbers with all the aplomb of a selfish blowhard. Gosh, how could KD ever leave OKC? Gosh, why would anyone ever stay?

This actually speaks to one of my broader notions when it comes to labor relations in the NBA and every other sport, which is that we, as fans and also as media, don’t actually like the fact that players have that power. We pay lip service to the idea that they should have the rights to do that, but only when they make decisions that we personally like. You don’t get to make that choice. It’s not your career. It’s not your job. You’re a fan, and your job is to buy tickets and go to the games.

All of this stuff annoys me, if that wasn’t already apparent.

I didn’t care a whit about LeBron going to Miami. He handled it dumbly, but he did what he thought was best for his career. Oh, so he created a ‘superteam’ with Wade and Bosh? Well, so what? Oh golly gee whiz, he actually wanted to play on a good team with good players. What a novel concept that is. Just because you do that, no one hands you a title. You still have to go out and earn it, and the Heat only did that twice in four tries, with their second loss coming to the Spurs who, if you really stop and think about it, had only one guaranteed, sure-fire superstar on their roster: Tim Duncan, a #1 pick in the draft. The Spurs drafted internationals who were something of an unknown quantity. They traded for Kawhi Leonard, who was the 16th pick in the draft. They built that system and that team over years, often making the most of lower picks in the draft. The Spurs didn’t bitch and moan about Miami forming a super team. They went out and figured out how to beat it.

And to that end, I admire the Rockets for freely admitting that they want to beat the Warriors and that everything they’ve done has been for that purpose. I admire the fact that Boston just keeps making moves to improve, often subtle moves that fly under the radar like trading Avery Bradley, a guy they didn’t want to pay, to Detroit for Marcus Morris, a guy who just might help them because he’s a pretty good match-up against LeBron, and whose defense on LeBron has a lot to do with why the Celtics are up 2-1 over the Cavaliers in the Eastern Conference finals even without their two best players. The system is what it is, so use the system to your advantage in order to keep improving and get better.

Which is what the Warriors did after losing the 2016 finals. They got better. They signed Kevin Durant. They got better. This is what you should do, no matter what position you finish in. This came up recently on a favorite podcast of mine about soccer, when one of the panelists asked if Manchester City could repeat as champions next season, given that everyone else in the EPL élite would strive to improve, at which point it was pointed out that Man City had shown ambition enough to spend £500 million on talent, striving to ultimately put together a team capable of amassing 100 points and winning the league at a trot, so why would we automatically assume such an ambitious club would suddenly become satisfied and not want to continue to improve? You don’t just reach the apex and stop. That’s not how it works. Getting better is the aim (at least it should be, NBA Tankamania aside). The Warriors lost in the 2016 NBA Finals, which they didn’t care too much for, and so they went out and got better. It truly amazes me that people have a problem with that.

Oh, and by the way, the beat reporters here in the Bay Area had been saying as far back as 2014 that the Warriors had designs on one day luring Durant to Golden State. They were going to make that pitch in the Hamptons in 2016 regardless of whether they won the title or not. They’d positioned themselves to do so, owing to some good luck – the spike in the cap, the cheap contract Curry’d signed when he was still an oft-injured mystery – and also some sound planning – more money was available thanks to the 5/75 and 5/87 contracts signed by Klay Thompson and Draymond Green, still excellent deals for the players involving massive amounts of money but which, comparative to their on-court value, seem absolutely ludicrously cheap today. And again, those three All-Stars on the 2016 Dubs roster pre-KD were all drafted by the Warriors – and a total of 50 guys went before them in those drafts, meaning that a whole bunch of teams screwed up on the scouting end. Pretty much all of them, in fact. But somehow, by being smarter than everyone else, the Warriors are ruining the NBA.

Seriously, get over it already. The Warriors have come, and eventually they will go. And I’m not kidding when I say that no one in the Bay Area takes this success for granted, because we all know how fickle and fleeting success can be. This team was god awful for years. This city waited 52 years for its baseball team to win a World Series. It’s been two decades since the 49ers won a Super Bowl, with their last loss being a completely disheartening one: they were the better team, but made enough mistakes to give the Ravens a chance to win the game, and the Ravens did. Failure is the default. Ultimate success is never assured.

And in the meantime, enjoy it. Enjoy great basketball. When the Warriors come to town, boo them accordingly, cheer on your team and hope you can win a game here and there. As a Sonics fan in the 1980s, beating the Lakers a game here and there was a source of joy and satisfaction. It was great to kick their ass and lord over them for a day, even though, come playoff time, you just knew that if you played the Lakers, you were going to get worked. So hope that your team improves, enjoy your occasional success when you beat the Warriors and, above all, appreciate greatness. When it’s gone, you’ll miss it. I hated watching the shell of a team that the San Antonio Spurs had become this past season, as a run of 20 consecutive seasons of more than 50 wins came to an end. It was sad to see, because I’ve come to count on the Spurs over the years and taken it as a given that they would be great.

And it’s a shock to us, when the dynasts and no longer dynastic. Lots of people just sort of assumed that the Patriots would win the Super Bowl because it’s the Patriots, by god, and winning Super Bowls is what they do. We’re willing to choose the conventional wisdom – “the Patriots win Super Bowls” – over the empirical evidence – “the Eagles are better at almost every position on the field” – and we wind up surprised when the Eagles actually win. After going to seven straight NBA Finals, no one would dare pick against LeBron in the East, even though he’s dragging along a roster that couldn’t win 30 games in an NBA season without him. Should they fall to the Celtics in the Eastern finals – which I’ve been saying for weeks now could, and maybe even would, happen – it will nonetheless be a surprise. Five years from now, when 35-year-old Steph and 35-year-old KD find themselves locked in some playoff struggle with Sonics 2.0, there will be lots of pundits talking about how these vets from Golden State have savvy and moxie and the heart of the champions and it’ll see them through, but maybe, just maybe, they’ll lose. And it’ll be okay when that happens, just as it’s okay, in the present, if they don’t.

So stop whining. The NBA is fine. It’s better than it’s ever been, it’s great players doing the greatest things ever seen on a basketball court. If you’re a fan, and the Warriors are stomping all over your team, maybe your team should get better. Seriously, get better. It makes the game better as a whole if that occurs. It is not the fault of the Warriors that your team sucks. Get better already, would you?