Dysfunction Junction

Cartoon by Nashnal Baskitbel Asosiashin

FOR a purveyor of all things failure, it doesn’t get much better than the tire fire that is the Cleveland Cavaliers organization. The Cadavers rose from the dead to defeat the Atlanta Hawks on Tuesday night for their first win of the season, which came under the watch of interim head coach Larry Drew … except that he’s not the interim head coach, he’s the … uh …

Uh, okay, so, that’s a little weird. But these are the Cavs, where everything has been a little weird even in the best of times. Having LeBron James on your roster will do that. In the end, he wins titles and conference finals and what have you, but he also tends to bring drama, melodrama, and soap opera to the proceedings as well. But now that LeBron has taken his talents and accompanying theatrics to the South Bay, Cleveland has descended into farce.

And it wasn’t hard to see this coming – or, at least, it shouldn’t have been, but everyone involved with the Cavs has been delusional. You can see how something like this occurs, of course – it’s very easy, when you reach the pinnacle, to forget how and why it was that you got there in the first place. It’s easy to overinflate your own accomplishments and contributions, and think you’re better than you are. To that end, the Cavs doubled down this offseason, believing that even with LeBron’s departure, they could compete for the playoffs this season.

They cannot.

Let’s be honest here. The Cavaliers won a championship and reached four straight finals because they had LeBron. At no point, during any of those four years, were they ever any good as a team without LeBron on the floor – not even when they still had Kyrie Irving on their team. Since taking over the helm in Jan. 2016, Ty Lue’s record in games where LeBron didn’t play was 1-12. LeBron is the system – or, at least, he was.

Oh, I should update that stat. Including the first six games of this season, none of which the Cavaliers won, Ty Lue’s record without #23 in the lineup was 1-18. Lue’s firing after six games seemed, at first glance, to be something of a mercy kill. The guy was so miserable on the sidelines last season that he needed to take several weeks off to get his health back. Since it’s impossible to judge anything that took place in Cleveland outside of a LeBron-related context, I honestly have no idea whether or not he’s a good coach. He did, however, succeed at keeping the peace during that time, and man management skills are often far more important than acumen with X’s and O’s when it comes to coaching professional athletes. But it’s hard to know how well Lue would have handled going through a long rebuilding process in Cleveland.

But it would have helped, of course, if Lue’d known he was in for a rebuild from the start, which would have required everyone involved acknowledging, on the 1st of July, that the roster was garbage. Instead, everyone from the top down, starting with owner Comic Sans Dan Gilbert and GM Koby Altman, were insisting that the Cavs were going to try and compete for a playoff spot in the East. Sure, LeBron is gone, but we’ve got winners here! We’re smart! We don’t need LeBron! All for one and one for all …

… which lasted all of two games, as the Cavs got roasted in both, at which point a schism developed between Lue and Altman, with Lue wanting to play the vets who’d won him a title in 2016, while Altman wanted Lue to play the younger guys – “younger” meaning all of the guys who came to the Cavs after Altman took over as GM, a bunch of whom showed up at the trade deadline and none of whom contributed much of anything to the Cavs’ playoff run last spring because, well, because they aren’t very good. No one on this team is any good, save for Kevin Love, on whom Altman tacked a 4/$120m extension ostensibly in the hopes of making him potentially more tradable down the line, which seems risky since Love is constantly hurt. Maybe there’s a market for 30-somethings being paid 30-something million dollars, but I don’t know where that market is. And besides, if you are trying to be good, why is it a good idea to make your best player more marketable to other teams? And if you suck, you probably have to eat that deal. This makes no sense. Then again, nothing Cleveland does makes any sense.

Anyway, after two depressing losses to start the season, when the reality settled in that the Cavs are gonna be awful, all of a sudden Altman wanted to pivot, play the “younger” players and bench all the old vets – which Lue did, with predictable results, because the “younger” players aren’t any good, and while the vets aren’t any good, either, they’re prideful people who have accomplished some stuff alongside LeBron in recent years and getting benched didn’t go over so well. So this experiment went predictably badly, at which point Lue just decided to give his bosses the finger, reversing course yet again and sticking his vets out there on the floor and basically daring Altman to fire him for his insubordination – which Altman promptly did.

This was well played by Lue. He’s got a championship ring and three straight trips to the Finals on his résumé – a résumé which will now also be absent the 55-60 losses his now former team is going to amass this season. While I still don’t know just how good of a coach Lue actually is, those credentials are shiny enough that he’ll probably get another gig. And after stepping in back in Jan. 2016 as the interim head coach and guiding Cleveland to a championship, Lue parlayed this success into a 5/$35m contract, which means that Comic Sans Dan is still on the hook for $15-$20m to Lue, who can take some time and get his health back and be choosy about his next job, resting easy while sleeping on a pile of Dan Gilbert’s dollars. This also adds to a rather astonishingly large graveyard of dead money on the Cavaliers books:

from Joe Vardon, The Athletic Cleveland

Now, to give Comic Sans Dan some credit here for a moment, he has been willing to spend to win, unlike some other stints around the league. The Cavs have carried some of the highest payrolls in NBA history in recent years, contracts which were doled out to the likes of JR Smith and Tristan Thompson and so forth who filled legit, specific needs on a LeBron-led team – which is what you should do, because the chance to win is so fleeting. But one way or another, the bill winds up coming due. Part of the problem now for the Cavs is that all of those one-time useful role players are now, post-23, little more than big-numbered bad contracts.

But Comic Sans Dan has now also churned through 7 coaches and 5 GMs during the time he’s owned this team, and that sort of constant tumult and turmoil makes for some damn near impossible working conditions. Even when things have gone well, behind the scenes, everyone is mad at each other all the time. Bad ownership is an incredible competitive disadvantage. The only way to overcome that is if a miracle occurs – which is precisely what once happened in Cleveland. The Cavaliers ultimately won a championship because it just so happened they won the draft lottery and the greatest player of his generation happened to be born in neighboring Akron and feel an affinity for the place. (Actually, two of the greatest players were born in Akron, but I digress.) It has nothing to do with Comic Sans Dan’s acumen as an entrepreneur. They won championships and won all of those games in spite of him.

Everyone involved in this mess is fooling themselves. Top 5 Reasons why the Cavs won an NBA title: 1. LeBron, 2. LeBron, 3. LeBron, 4. Kyrie made a great shot in Game 7 of the finals, 5. LeBron. Every single thing about this organization sans LeBron is sub-replacement level, at best.

And now they’ve turned it over to interim coach … uh, “voice” Larry Drew, who doesn’t want to be leading this death march through the rest of the season unless he’s paid more, and is letting everyone know it. That said, he says he won’t step down from his assistant coach job, which means he’s basically doing the job anyway, so I’m not exactly sure how much leverage he has – if someone’s doing the job by proxy and not getting paid for it, why pay them? So you now have a coach who isn’t the coach, coaching a team that isn’t much of a team given the rancor and the discord. JR wants to be traded – hell, everyone wants to be traded – but there are no realistic trades that do not involve the Cavs taking on bad money in return, Kevin Love is out for at least a month, the Cavs got destroyed by Denver last night and are 1-7 despite a friendly, home-heavy schedule, and about the best they can hope for is being so bad that their Top-10 protected first round pick doesn’t wind up conveying to the Atlanta Hawks next summer. And sure, there is always some bad luck in this kind of thing, but at the same time, once LeBron left this team, the pivot to a rebuild should have been immediate, but that would have required everyone to actually have some self-awareness.

(Oh, look, now we have an age discrimination lawsuit. The hits just keep on coming.)

And this is hard to watch, because when they weren’t all bickering behind the scenes and actually took to the floor, the LeBron-led Cavs played some incredible basketball. When they were dialed in, they could be truly great. But now the Cleveland Cavaliers are such a mess that they’ve somehow rendered the hapless Browns – who have finally decided that Hue Jackson, he of the 3-36-1 record as head coach, didn’t know what he was doing – not even the most incompetent franchise in the city. This might be, at the moment, the single-most dysfunctional franchise in all of professional sports – although the Minnesota Timberwolves still might have something to say about that, and LeBron is well on his way to getting another coach fired in one of the least-surprising developments of this still-young NBA season, but I’m waiting for the next plot twists in those soap operas. Tune in next week for another episode of As The Stomach Turns …

Losability: Your Short-Attention Span NBA Preview

Who hasn’t wanted to do this at the office?

WE love all sorts of failure here at In Play Lose. We love epic chokes, we love season-long death marches through the abyss. Losing takes many forms, many shapes and varying degrees of significance, and I’m interested in all of it. Obviously, we love the epic fails, those comedic bursts of idiocy, those gifable moments where a player does something jaw-droppingly incompetent. This is because losing is, ultimately, funny. This series of articles from The Athletic, about the worst teams that many excellent reporters had to endure, is far more funny – and ultimately far more revealing – than any series about the supposed ‘best’ teams they ever covered could be. Winning is boring. It’s what you’re supposed to do. It’s when it all goes wrong, and you are scrambling to come up with answers as to why that failure happened, that truly reveals your nature.

I mention this on the eve of another NBA season because the fact of the matter is that for 29 teams in the NBA – most likely everyone who isn’t the Golden State Warriors, although that is by no means a certainty – the season is going to prove to be unsuccessful. And that’s okay, really. It’s okay and it’s essential. You need winners and losers. Losing is essential. But even more importantly, you need a variety of losers. Because the fact of the matter is that while all 30 teams in the NBA would love to win the title, it isn’t realistic to expact that to be happening. Every team in a professional league has a ceiling, they have a level that they could realistically hope to attain and, in the big picture, reaching that level actually constitutes success.

I mentioned this idea this past summer while talking about the World Cup: if, in 2016, I’d said that  two years hence, the Croatians would finish 2nd in the World Cup, the Belgians would finish 3rd and the English 4th, both players and fans from those nations would say that, in the bigger picture, that’s a pretty good outcome. But in the moment, of course, in the here and the now of 2018, finishing third for the Belgians means, “god damn it, why are Fellaini and Chaddli still in this game and why can’t we break down the fucking French defense?” For the Croatians, it’s “jesus christ, we’re dominating this final and we should be beating this goddamn team.” The loss, in the immediate, feels painful and agonizing and frustrating. The immediate result runs contrary to the process. Finishing second or third is terrific, but finishing second or third also means that, at a critical moment, you failed.

I mention soccer even though this is an NBA blog, since there are an incredible number of similarities between the two – not the least of which being that players in each have come to have something of a mutual admiration society for each other. Both sports are star-driven, games in which the players have incredible agency over their careers. In both sports, players have taken agency over their careers to a much greater extent and come to realize their full stardom and earning potentials. With stardom potential, of course, comes petty drama and paparazzi – both sports are full of gossip, full of glamour, full of hangers-on and shady characters on the fringe.

And both games are great, even if the end product can come to feel like a foregone conclusion. It doesn’t matter, ultimately, that one team is a prohibitive favorite in the NBA, just as it doesn’t matter that Bayern or Barca or Juve or Man City is a prohibitive favorite in some European soccer league. As a whole, the NBA is better than it’s ever been. The players are more skilled, better drilled, and in better condition than they have ever been. They are also more “woke,” more aware, and more connected to fans than they have ever been. These are exquisite athletes, and the level of play in the NBA is the highest the sport of basketball has ever known. It’s worth following if, for no other reason, you’ll see something terrific and artistic and almost balletic on a nightly basis.

And, of course, you’ll also see the Sacramento Kings.

And like I say, within a given league, every team has a ceiling. If you break through that ceiling, your season is a success. The Sacramento Kings are going to play hard, they’re going to play with incredible enthusiasm and energy in lieu of having any talent, and if they, say, finish with a 33-49 record then, damn, that’s a decent season right there. It means the kids played their asses off and they beat a few teams along the way who took the night off or didn’t care or whatnot, it means their young players finally stopped making the sorts of game-ending, soul-killing sorts of mistakes that bad young teams make, and maybe they learned a few things along the way. (And this is about as nice as I’m ever going to talk about the Sacramento Kings, so you should roll with it.) As much as we all want to win, we do have to grade on something of a curve when the season is over.

And here at In Play Lose, where we are connoisseurs of failure, I love all of it. I love the 60-loss season just as much as the Game 7 choke job. There are plenty of layers and levels to losing. Love it. Bring it on. Let’s revel in the failure and have a good laugh, since laughter is always the best medicine. And just as there are different strata and levels of expectation that wind up being contained in any particular league, The Lose has different strata and levels of failure as well, some of which are more interesting to me than others. I have determined there to be nine different levels of Lose within the NBA, all of which provide different challenges to explicate for a purveyor of failure such as myself. Perhaps the best way to preview what is one of my favorite sports leagues in the world, on the eve of its new season, is to express it using those different levels of Lose:

1. Falling Short
These are teams who are striving to win the NBA title and have realistic expectations of doing so. Only one of them can do so, of course, so for the others, this constitutes the highest level of losing. But being in this category also speaks to general excellence of your franchise. These are the élite, after all – so it doesn’t make for great Lose blogging, at least not until the month of May.
I begrudgingly admired the Houston Rockets last season. At one point last spring, I think I said that the Rockets were the NBA’s equivalent of Three True Outcomes baseball, and that it wasn’t a compliment. Just because they attempt to play in the most efficient way possible – shooting only 3s and layups and free throws after Harden holds the ball for most of the shot clock – it doesn’t mean that I want to watch it. That said, they’re commitment to that style was admirable, and their ruthless efficiency was commendable. They were so committed to it that they willingly missed 27 threes in a row against the Warriors in Game 7 of the Western Conference finals, chucking up one brick after another from deep as their double-digit lead evaporated and the series slipped away. I say that it’s begrudging admiration because I hate Harden’s flailing on his way to the hoop and his vague, near-travelling on stepback treys, and any team with Chris Paul is inherently going to be the most annoying team in the NBA, but goddamn it, this team is good, and I appreciate that in this era of whining about “the Warriors ruined the sport,” the Rockets said, “fuck it, let’s beat those guys,” and damn near did. That said, I hate their offseason. They lost role players and replaced them with Michael Carter-Williams, who can’t shoot, Carmelo Anthony, who can’t defend, and Marquese Chriss, who can’t do anything. Their window may close pretty quickly, but at the same time, it wouldn’t surprise me if Daryl Morey goes out and makes a deal for the malcontented Jimmy Butler. (More on him later.)
I love me some Boston Celtics and I’ll be curious to see how they fit all of these great pieces together. It may be a little murky at first, since Gordon Hayward is almost a newish quantity after missing the whole previous season, since Kyrie’s troublesome knee is probably always going to be a concern, the shooting tended to come and go last year and the offense occasionally verged on being impotent, and I wonder if there will be some strange sort of internal tension stemming from the fact that this may become less of Kyrie Irving’s team and more of Jayson Tatum’s team – as it probably should be. But they’re deep and incredibly well-coached, defend like hell, can play all sorts of different styles, and I think anything short of an NBA Finals appearance will feel like a failure.
Of course, the Toronto Raptors might get in the Celtics’ way, because they now have Kawhi Leonard on their team, who is the ultimate series wrecker, a guy who can just wipe most of the opposition’s best scoring threats off the map while also getting you 25 points a game. Toronto had a weird offseason after their obligatory playoff meltdown, entrusting their fate to an unproven head coach in Nick Nurse, then trading franchise icon DeRozan for Kawhi and creating a team that you’d probably not normally entrust a rookie head coach with. And the Raptors will be bothered all year, of course, with distractions created by media and fans pertaining to what Kawhi does next summer when he’s a free agent, but this season, they’ve got about 10,000 guys who can play the wing – when most teams have one or two – they’ve got one of the five best badass motherfucking players on the planet when healthy (which he appears to be), and the defense is going to be filthy. Obviously, trading a franchise icon and stalwart like DeRozan is a shock to the system, but Kawhi is such a ridiculous upgrade that this team has a potential to be terrifying.
But let’s be honest here, barring a catastrophic injury (which I don’t wish upon anyone, friend or foe), the Golden State Warriors are prohibitive favorites here. Anything other than winning a 4th title in five years will be construed as a failure. And I’m sure that I’ll write too much about the Warriors over the course of the season, as I’ll put my objectivity slant aside and devolve into being a fanboy. Much like with Kawhi in Toronto, I genuinely don’t care about all of the non-stories about how KD and/or Klay might be somewhere else next season that the media will create in order to have something to talk about. If that happens, sobeit. I don’t care. They’ve earned the right to make those decisions. The Warriors were only 58-24 last season, and lots of the narrative about them being lazy and unfocused conveniently omits that their four all-stars only played 41 games together over what was, in fact, an injury-plagued season. But the Dubs were admittedly dragging last year, and I actually think they’ll will be more engaged this year, finding the idea of incorporating the recovering Boogie Cousins into their lineups to be a fun sort of challenge. (Oh yeah, they added a 5th All-Star. Have fun with guarding them.) The focus here in the Bay Area seems to be on joy, celebrating the successes of late and honoring the last year in Oakland before moving into the new arena in downtown San Francisco next season, and when the Dubs are playing with energy, with joy and with love, you have no chance.

2. Knocking on the Door
This group of teams doesn’t make for great Lose blogging, either. They’re really good teams who are on the rise. They’ll most likely get some mention here on this blog if they somehow gag away a playoff series, but otherwise, keep doing what you’re doing.
Were I in Vegas (which I won’t be until early November), I would put money on Giannis being the MVP, because the Milwaukee Bucks have a coach in Mike Budenholzer who actually knows what he is doing, and with the spacing and movement on offense they’ve shown here in the preseason, Giannis could be absolutely unstoppable and we’ll finally have to bow down to our Bucks overlord.
The Indiana Pacers simply have a lot of guys who know what they are doing – a novel concept in the raw-talent obsessed NBA – they can play lots of different ways and their best players have taken the cue from their leader, Victor Oladipo, in that their secondary threats – Sabonis and Turner – also appear to be in great shape after significant off-season regimens. The Pacers are going to be good. I like this team a lot.
I also like the Utah Jazz a lot in the West, as their first five play so well together and they defend the hell out of the ball. They’ll go as far as Donovan Mitchell ultimately takes them, but fortunately, his potential verges on limitless. It’s a weird team to watch, in that we’ve been used to Ricky Rubio disappointing us and Joe Ingles looks like a high school gym teacher, but they’re impeccably coached by Quin Snyder and they always seem to know the right play to make. If I were the Houston Rockets, I might be looking over my shoulder, since I think the Jazz are in the rearview mirror and gaining rapidly.

3. Precarious Positions
Okay, now this is more interesting to me from a Losability standpoint. Here we go. These are teams which could, or even should, be pretty good, maybe even good enough to belong in the previous category, and yet there are questions and concerns. All of these teams may bottom out and be a lot worse than we first thought, and we’ll look back and see that the preseason concerns were warranted.
I want to trust the process, but I’m wary of the process. This whole idea that the Philadelphia 76ers are going to start Fultz instead of J.J, Redick – thus breaking up what was the best lineup in the NBA last year – seems weird to me. It seems like the sort of move that a thin-skinned organization would make that didn’t want to admit they made a mistake – which is what history may judge it as, given that they traded the pick which landed Tatum, as well as what may be a plum Kings draft pick, to the Celtics in order to land Fultz. And this team really took off late last season after the buyout pickups of Belinelli and Ilyasova gave them lethal shooters off the bench – neither of whom are with this team any more. The Sixers rid themselves of their GM, Bryan Colangelo, after the embarrassing burner account scandal, which hindered their ability to make deals in the offseason, and I can’t look at this team and say that they improved the roster. They’re counting a lot on their internal development, but the externals aren’t positive.
The New Orleans Pelicans, of course, are the ultimate one-note franchise. I consider it to be simple math, Y = X + 2, where Y equals when Seattle gets an NBA franchise and X equals when Anthony Davis leaves New Orleans. That is how dependent upon AD this franchise is.  If Anthony Davis leaves, this franchise is dead. Of course, a good way to keep him, though not a guarantee, would be to keep winning, which New Orleans did a lot of last year. The Pelicans were great at the end of last season, as AD played at an MVP level and Jrue Holliday was beast and their frenzied approach simply ran opponents into the ground, and they need to play at that level again this season. If healthy, the Pelicans are a 4-seed in the West. Given that health is always an issue in New Orleans, who knows? I find the hand-ringing over losing Rondo curious – he was last season, and is now, a terrible defender who gets by on reputation – but he’s been replaced by Elfred Payton, who has never done anything in his NBA career. The Pelicans need him to do something, anything at all. The margin for error is small in New Orleans, the roster is thin and has a history of being brittle.
It’s easy to put your faith in Pop and say that it’s no big deal that they lost Kawhi, since the San Antonio Spurs were sans Kawhi and still won 47 games a season ago, but the Spurs are now sans Kawhi and sans Danny Greene, Slo-Mo Anderson, Tony Parker and Ginobili. That’s an enormous brain drain as well as a talent drain. Oh yeah, and they have now lost a starting point guard to an ACL and a backup for two months with a foot injury. It just gets worse and worse. They do have DeRozan now to go with LMA, and they’ll likely play a style of basketball straight out of the 90s absent the 3-point shot, but as much as I believe in Pop, this team has feasted on bad teams for years in order to prop up their regular season record, and I just don’t think there are enough downtrodden teams in the West any more which will enable them to do that. I know they’ve got a playoff streak dating to the 1990s, but this roster just isn’t very good, and repeating last season’s result of being an 8-seed in the West would probably constitute an achievement.
I’ll put the Denver Nuggets in this category, because the Nuggets simply have to be in the playoffs this year or everyone’s getting fired. They get something of a mulligan after losing out to Minnesota in Game 82 a season ago, given that first Paul Milsap, and then Gary Harris, suffered serious injuries which ultimately cost them last year. This team should be dynamite on offense with Jokic, Harris, Milsap, and Jamal Murray, but goddamn it, play some goddamn defense. They’re a 5-seed in the West, or better, if they play some defense. Given that Jokic can’t guard his own shoes, and they look like a bunch of toreadors on a regular basis, this is no sure thing.

4. Fun Bad
These teams aren’t great from a blogging standpoint, because they aren’t very good and everyone knows it. All of these teams are focused more on talent development, to some extent, and young players generally do a lot of stupid things along the way. They’ll all play like hell and will be extremely watchable, while periodically doing some jaw-droppingly dimwitted things which cost them wins. Now, it should be noted that all of these fun bad teams could, in fact, turn out to be better than we all thought, and if they figure out how to avoid the ‘bad’ part of fun bad, those timetables may be accelerated.
There may be a light at the end of the tunnel for the Dallas Mavericks, who wound up landing Luca Doncic in last year’s draft after all of the machinations were finished. Doncic is a young player years ahead of other rookies, in that he’s been playing in the Euroleague – the 2nd-highest level of the game – for years now instead of laboring in college and posterizing the Vanderbilts and the the Wisconsins and Washington States of the world. His game is way more savvy and nuanced than your typical teenager. Pair him and Dennis Smith Jr. and there is so much to like about the Mavericks, but young players still screw up a lot and this roster isn’t good enough to overcome it.
I was impressed with Doc Rivers’ coaching job for the L.A. Clippers a season ago. The Clippers competed and played like hell. They’re the epitome of fun bad, in that they’ve got enough talent in Lou Williams and Tobias Harris and their spate of wings to be competitive on a nightly basis, but lack that killer superstar who put them over the top and will probably lose a lot of the close games they could hope to win.
It’s probably a stretch to put the Swamp Dragons, aka the Brooklyn Nets, in this category, but the Nets will be fun as hell as well and play crazy games, shoot a tonne of threes and be willing to lose 120-118 in this, their first season where they have control of their first round pick since god-knows-when. The Nets are also in a nice position to land some free agents in the summer of 2019, when a lot of awful contracts come off the books and everyone in the league will have some money to spend. Being loose and fun and well-coached and playing like hell in New York City makes for a decent sort of selling point to prospective free agents. The results aren’t there yet, but all the signs indicate that the Nets are moving in the right direction.

5. Need To Be Better Than They Are
All of these teams need something good to happen to them. There is a sense of urgency among this group. The problem is that, well, they aren’t that good.
Both the Detroit Pistons and the Charlotte Hornets are desperate to make the playoffs, which is doable in the East, whereas there are probably 12-13 teams in the West who are better than they are. I can’t find a single reason to care about either of these teams. Detroit has, at least, been freed from the Reign of Error that was the tenure of coach/exec Stan Van Gundy, who walked away from this mess after assembling an unwinnable roster locked in salary cap hell. Having the freshly fired Dwane Casey on the bench should help, and they’ve got more tangible talent than the Hornets in the quest for the #8 seed in the East. But in the meantime, the Pistons will continue covering up those red seats in Bad Pizza Arena with black tarps to mask their lackluster attendance, while the Hornets try to figure out whether or not to hit the reset button by unloading Kemba Walker – their best player, who is something like the 5th-best paid player on their mismatched roster – or fully engage in a shamfest of a battle for the #8 seed in the East.
I bet you didn’t know that the Miami Heat have the highest payroll in the NBA. I bet you cannot believe what you just read. For all of his championship rings and his successes, the fact of the matter is that the roster Pat Riley has assembled in Miami is, well, underwhelming and he’s not gotten near enough stick for that. Their hopes to land Jimmy Butler from the Wolves is an effort to turn a 7-seed in the East into a 6-seed in the East. What’s the point? Spo will coach them up, of course, because he’s a voodoo witch doctor, but a team saddled with the dead weight that is Hassan Whiteside and Tyler Johnson’s ballooning bombast of a contract and the contract of the seriously injured Dion Waiters is a waste of time.
And then there are the Portland Trail Blazers, whose 2nd-best player, C.J. McCollum, got into a long series of arguments this offseason online in which he said he’d rather get swept in the playoffs than go to a “super team,” and who seems to be getting quite good at that, given that the Blazers got absolutely embarrassed last spring in getting whomped 4-0 by the Pelicans in the first round of the playoffs, and haven’t won a playoff game since 2016. The Blazers punch above their weight during the regular season, are exquisitely coached by Terry Stotts and climbed to the 3-seed in the West last year, but this is always a turkey waiting to be carved. People keep saying the Dame/C.J. backcourt isn’t a winning formula, which is dumb, since the problem is the mediocre frontcourt that never gets addressed, but this team is still suffering from the hangover after the gin bender that was GM Neil Olshey investing $347 million in the summer of 2016 in contracts to the likes of Evan Turner and Myles Leonard, who is 7’1” and managed not to block a single shot last season. Stotts routinely saves his GM’s head with his coaching jobs, but the Blazers, despite being a 3-seed last season, were three games out of missing the playoffs entirely. The frontcourt still sucks, and the margin is so thin with this team that you could see them being a tangibly better team in 2018-19 and still missing the playoffs. My money is still on Stotts, however, to get this team into the playoffs, as he is quite accustomed to doing more with less. Which is an excellent segue into my next category …

Kings fans are delighted with their offseason.

6. Doing Less With Less
All of these teams are terrible, and scarcely worth my time.
The Clueless: Last season basically ended after 13 games for the Memphis Grizzlies when Mike Conley got hurt. That they were so dependent on one guy speaks to how pathetic this roster is. Conley is the last Grizzlies draft pick to get a second contract, and he was drafted more than a decade ago. The roster is so thin that if the oft-injured Conley, the grumpy Marc Gasol, and the waste-of-money that is $92m free agent Chandler Parsons get injured – which they seem likely to do – this team is DOA. I have zero faith in this team to stay healthy, and they are also saddled with J.B. Bickerstaff, a not particularly good coach who got the job primarily because he was cheap and available. They’re far more likely to lose 50 games than win 40. I’m amazed that GM Chris Wallace still has a job, given how terribly he’s gone about assembling a roster, and given that they’ve been losing about $40m a season, I worry for the future of the Grizzlies, who may very well wind up being Sonics 2.0 in Seattle if the Pelicans and, yes, the Clippers don’t see Seattle as a possible cash cow when the new arena opens two years from now.
The Hapless: The Atlanta Hawks are trying to be bad, and will succeed at that, likely to be the worst team in the league. But this past summer’s draft, in which they traded prodigy Luca Doncic to the Mavericks for Trae Young, is the sort of trade that ultimately gets GMs fired. Young is going to be bad for the Hawks, and that sucks. I read a ludicrous story this summer from Vegas Summer League from a Hawks fanboy talking about his “breakout game.” There are no breakout games in Summer League. Don’t kid yourselves. Young has condierable upside, of course, but is also going to be a target, having been foolishly laden with expectations after what was, ultimately, a marginal trade by his team at best. The Hawks will be awful.
The Hopeless: The Sacramento Kings are the dumbest franchise in the NBA, if not all of Nortb American professional sports. They can’t really tank this season, since they gave away their #1 draft pick in the dreaded Sauce Castillo trade with the 76ers. But even if they try, what difference does it make? They pulled a Sam Bowie sort of move in drafting Marvin Bagley with the #2 pick instead of Doncic, tabbing a guy who has no real discernible NBA skill to fit in with their endless run of non-impactful bigs. The Kings will play their asses off and probably play well enough late in the season against downtrodden teams to win some games and cost the Boston Celtics, who own their pick in next year’s draft, but at what point does anyone – and I mean anyone – in this organization realize that Vlade Divac is truly terrible at his GM job and that the small-change, mollify-the-quaint-fan-base-with-Kings-legends approach to running this team just isn’t conducive to being successful? If the Sacramento Kings didn’t exist, In Play Lose would have to invent them:

Sacramento Kings twitter is a wonderful and strange place

The Useless: The Phoenix Suns fired their GM, Ryan McDonough, a week before the season. This after firing coach Earl Watson three games into last season. Good God. Now, this is not to say that McDonough was good at his job. He wasn’t. He ran the franchise into the ground, he went from having too many point guards to having none, he turned three top-10 picks in the draft into Alex Len, Marquese Chriss, and Dragan Bender, who were three of the worst players in the NBA last season. He needlessly signed Devin Booker to a $133 million extension a year before he needed to, and when Booker turned up injured and needed surgery on his hand this summer, the Suns essentially had to write off this coming season before it started, even though they made a bunch of moves to indicate they were actually going to try to win. [Update: Booker is apparently going to be ready for the season opener, which is good news.] He’s been a terrible GM at the helm of a terrible franchise. But that last bit is the biggest point here. This is a terrible franchise, one which guys flee from at the first chance. Owner Robert Sarver is apparently more hands-on than ever, which is the kiss of death, as literally no one who leaves this franchise has anything good to say about how Sarver operates it. I hate this team. I hate everything about this team. They are everything wrong about North American sports, a team cynically exploited by a megalomaniac who suffers no real repercussions for putting out a terrible product year after year. Send this garbage franchise to the G-League. Or better yet, shoot it into the sun.

7. Blowhards
I have to admit, I love to kill these teams. You’ll note how many of these teams are in major media markets. All of them are self-important blowhards burdened with unreasonable expectations from zealous fan bases, and their tires generally get pumped by lapdog media.
Man, I’m going to love watching the L.A. Lakers be not very good this year. Okay, so they signed LeBron James in the offseason, and good for them for doing that. They also signed the biggest collection of misfits and jokers I’ve ever seen. The Lakers are, in keeping with their status of being the most-important story in the NBA, going to get lots of ink in spite of the fact that they have a 45-win roster. Lonzo Ball still can’t shoot, Brandon Ingram is a story only because he plays in L.A. – honestly, if he played for the Charlotte Hornets, would you care how good he is? They’ve signed a collection of clownshoes including Rondo, Lance Stephenson (on this roster only so LeBron doens’t have to be annoyed with him as an opponent), and JaVale McGee, who instantly sets this team as about the 13th-best team in the NBA’s Western Conference in terms of big men, which the Western Conference happens to be laden with – LMA, Jokic, AD, Gasol, Towns, Adams, Nurkic, DJ, Gobert, Ayton, and Draymond if the Warriors bother to play that way are all way better at center, and that’s off the top of my head. This is a very flawed roster. But this is also an era when NBA media is basically Pravda for the Lakers and we’re going to have to put up with every grade-on-the-curve story about how L.A. is somehow relevant, when they’re probably a 6-seed, at best. It’s only preseason and I’m already annoyed.
The New York Knicks are garbage, and this season, we’re going to hear nothing but how they’re going to sign KD and Kawhi and Jimmy Butler and every available free agent in the summer, in lieu of being any good in the present, especially because Porzingis is hurt. But why would anyone play for a team owned by Jim Dolan? Answer me that. Where is the upside in signing for this team? And Knicks fans deserve better than this. They do. But spending a season watching Tim Hardaway Jr. going 1-on-1 while Enis Kanter fails to guard his own shadow is going to kill the will to live of even the most diehard of Knicks fateful. I wouldn’t be shocked if this was the 2nd-worst team in the league.
The Chicago Bulls won’t stop anyone. God, this defense is absolutely horrible. Whatever improvement is seen on the offensive end, a team full of guys like Zac LaVine and Jabari Parker and Lauri Markkanen, none of whom can guard a chair, isn’t going anywhere. The Bulls are almost worthy of belonging in the fun bad category, as the games should be wildly entertaining, but the grand rebuild may not be as far along as everyone had hopes.
And, of course, there is no bigger blowhard in the NBA than OKC, who will, of course, promise big things with Russell Westbrook scowling a lot and going hall-bent-for-leather and putting up fluffy and puffy triple-doubles, but Russ had offseason “minor knee surgery” as did Paul George, and there is no such thing as “minor knee surgery,” and Andre Roberson, who keys their defense, suffered a patella tear last season, an injury the likes of which almost no NBA players ever recover. I’d be nervous about all of those injuries. On their day, the Thunder can compete with any team in the league. Off their day, they can’t beat the Phoenix Suns. The Thunder always make lots of noise and clamor to be relevant when, at best, they’re a 5-seed with a flawed roster that can’t make enough shots to advance past the first round of the playoffs. The delayed return of Roberson is huge, as he keys their defense – but if you’re team is so dependent on a guy who can’t shoot and scores little, you’ve got a problem. OKC are the ultimate much-ado-about-nothing group of blowhards in the NBA. At some point, the media who follows the NBA will hopefully stop pumping Russ’ tires and fawning over empty calorie statistics and acknowledge that a team constructed like this can never be all that good.

8. Putting the Fun in Dysfunctional
I love these teams. This is easy money for The Lose. This is all kinds of bad ideas played out on an NBA court, teams blessed with talent but zero awareness.
Well, the Cleveland Cavaliers used to be blessed with talent, but the circus has left town with LeBron taking his talents to the South Bay. LeBron’s presence always made for high drama, and the Cavs were constantly engaged in soap operas and chaos off the court, and sometimes on it, while he was there. I’ll miss all of the melodrama, because it was amusing. What LeBron’s left behind is, well, not a very good team. They had the point differential last season of a .500 team, only to be saved repeatedly by LeBron’s late game heroics in the clutch. Any time he’s been off the floor in recent years, the Cavs have been terrible. I don’t, for the life of me, understand why it is they felt a need to give Kevin Love an enormous extension, since he’s probably their only good trade piece among the guys on their bloated books. A roster tailor-made to compliment LeBron does not offer much without him. I’ve enjoyed the Cavs and it’s gonna be a bummer to see them floundering and flailing all season.
After being a tire fire last season, with players openly acting like they hate each other, the solution in Washington was, apparently, to throw more gasoline on the fire by adding Austin Rivers and Dwight Howard to the mix. Howard has had such a strange career, he was a sure-fire Hall of Famer who has morphed into this guy that teams just cannot wait to get rid of. Hopefully, some good health will come John Wall’s way this year, which would help matters quite a bit in Washington, but the Buzzards were an unfocused, disorganized mess most of last season, squandering what appeared to be a golden opportunity to gain some traction in the East.
And then there are the Minnesota Timberwolves. Be still my foolish heart. This team is actually going to attempt to play the season while there is a state of open warfare between its best players, Jimmy Butler and Karl-Anthony Towns, who clearly cannot coexist. There were all sorts of rumblings and rumors to that effect a season ago, a season which was a case study in how good you can be in spite of yourselves, as the Wolves possess so many guys who can create their own shot that it makes up for not having a single guy on the roster who can pass. And from what I can discern from the reporting, Butler’s discontent this summer, leading to his demanding a trade, stemmed from wanting a contract extension that the Timberwolves weren’t actually in a position to give him unless they dumped a tonne of money, which is weird. Why would you ask for something when you know you can’t get it, and then make a scene about not getting it? Also, for someone who keeps saying he’s “all about winning,” asking to be traded to the Knicks, Clippers, or Swamp Dragons doesn’t seem to jibe with that idea. Frankly, most everything Butler said in the conveniently-timed tell-all interview on ESPN after his practice escapade sounded like nonsense. It all feels contrived and insincere. And Thibs, of course, doesn’t want to trade him, since Thibs wants to win and, more importantly, has to win to keep his job, but then you have the meddlesome owner going around saying Butler is available in trade and undermining his top exec. What a zoo. Look, the fact is that if I’m an NBA coach or GM not named Thibs, I’m looking at this situation, where player A is 22 and a skilled big capable of going 50/40/90 and putting up 28 and 12, and player B is 29, has an injury history, and has developed a questionable rep as a locker room guy (remember, the Bulls were a disaster in Butler’s last year in Chicago), and I’m tying my fortunes to the former. I don’t care if he’s not assertive enough or what have you. He’s 22! He can get better! But there isn’t a less process-based person in all of the NBA than Thibs, which is why it probably wasn’t the best idea to give him an exec role alongside the head coaching gig. The Wolves have spun themselves into this impossible tangle, and sure there is a lot of natural talent on this roster – enough so that they might win 50 games without ever declaring détente – but you could also see them just completely disintegrating and losing 50 games as well. Seeing the Bucks put up 84 in the first half against them in their last preseason game was pretty disheartening. Everything about this mess is pointing towards it all going over a cliff.

9. Irrelevant
Seriously, what’s the point of the Orlando Magic?

Dealing with the Dubs

(Ezra Shaw/Getty Images)

The Lose appreciates alternative points of view. Today, we are graced with another column from Official Tacoma Resident of In Play Lose, Evans Clinchy, whose work I’m a big fan of, and who has appeared previously on this blog. Evans is an esteemed writer of them basketballs and, today, offers this perspective on the leviathan that the Golden State Warriors have become. Evans warned me, when he submitted this article, “sorry to be hating on your team a bit,” except that it’s completely cool by me. One of the things I’m well aware of is that when you support a club that’s reached the top of the mountain, you’re going to have to take some hits, because some others are going to take their shots – which is what they should do. That’s exactly how it should be. We, as sports fans, should all be so lucky as to have the good fortune of reaching a point where out team carries the bullseye for, above all else, being successful. That’s actually what you want to have happen. It’s the best sort of problem to have.

IN the early-evening hours of Oct. 27, 2016, Kevin Durant stayed a few minutes late after practice. The Warriors had just landed in New Orleans, where Durant was scheduled to play his second-ever game in a Dubs uniform the following day. The team’s mandatory activities had wrapped up at 6:30 p.m., but KD stayed on the practice floor past 7, getting extra shots up while his teammates were gathering their stuff and leaving. KD was also, reportedly, yelling at himself all the while.

“They say you’re not hungry!” the Warriors’ superstar bellowed, according to several media outlets. “I’m out here! Put in work! Stay with it!”

This was a ridiculous media spectacle on multiple levels. First and foremost, talk about a pronoun with no antecedent – there was no “they” and there never had been. Not a soul on planet Earth was accusing Kevin Durant of not being hungry, of not wanting it, of not putting in work. KD was engaged in a shouting match with a straw man. On top of that, even if “they” existed, KD wasn’t proving anything to “them” with this practice gym display. There are few events in the world more commonplace than an NBA player taking the practice floor for a few minutes and putting up jump shots. This shooting session wasn’t newsworthy; it was a lame PR stunt.

Apparently it was an effective one, though. Everyone on the Warriors beat covered it. By shouting just a few words – “They say you’re not hungry!” – Durant had managed to turn a mundane evening at the gym into a headline.

This might seem like just a random vignette from a Warriors practice 20 months ago, but I keep thinking about that day because of the tone it set moving forward. That little shooting session was a perfect encapsulation of the current era we’re living through in NBA history. The takeaway was simple: Until further notice, the drama you witness will not be real drama. It will be manufactured. And honestly, when you get down to it, it’ll be pretty lame.

*****

The Warriors won the NBA Finals with ease in both 2017 and 2018. Their combined record during those two postseasons was a positively ludicrous 32-6. Of their eight postseason opponents, only this year’s Rockets were able to survive longer than five games. The Warriors had been beatable in the pre-Durant era, even losing to LeBron James’ Cavaliers in 2016; matching LeBron with KD instead of Harrison Barnes turned a once-fair fight into a comically lopsided one. KD’s numbers in nine Finals matchups with the Cavaliers are comic-bookish: 32.3 points, 9.3 rebounds and 6.3 assists per game on 54.3% shooting from the field, 45% from 3. This might come as a shock, but when you take an already historically great team and replace its weakest link with an MVP in his prime, it tends to work decently well. (Disclaimer: In NBA history, the sample size for this experiment is one.)

Durant’s arrival in Golden State was an all-time historical fluke. The 2016 Warriors were one of the most desirable free-agent destinations ever, and Durant was one of the most desirable players ever to hit the market. The two just happened to cross paths in the exact summer when a massive new TV contract brought hundreds of millions in new revenue to the NBA, resulting in a salary-cap spike that enabled the Warriors to offer Durant max money. The Warriors had to be willing to make a change, which they were because they’d blown a 3-1 lead against Cleveland in the Finals; Durant also had to want out because he’d just similarly choked from up 3-1 against the Warriors. We have never seen such an absurd confluence of timing and circumstance before in sports history, and I doubt we will again.

A lot of blame has been cast on Durant personally for making his decision. This may or may not be fair, depending on how you frame it. Durant – let’s give him a little credit here – surely knew that going to Golden State would create a juggernaut the likes of which we’ve never seen before. That he did it anyway doesn’t indicate some massive ethical failing on his part. It wasn’t something he “had no right” to do, nor was it something that would “ruin the league.” He simply had the option to choose his employer and he exercised that option. Those who defend Durant are totally justified in doing so. The only really valid counterargument is that KD’s choice was ... well, just kinda lame.

It’s lame because Kevin Durant used to be a compelling character. His quest for self-improvement used to be a story that anyone could appreciate. Durant was a star player practically out of the womb, but the early years of his career were characterized by a desperate need to transcend good and become great. In 2013, he opened up and told Sports Illustrated’s Lee Jenkins that he wasn’t satisfied with what he’d accomplished. “I’ve been second my whole life,” he said. “The second-best player in high school, the second pick in the draft, second in the MVP voting. I came in second in the Finals. I’m tired of being second.” Durant was itching to reach new heights in his career, and it was easy to derive real joy from cheering him on. Beating LeBron was his holy grail, and his struggles to get there felt human and relatable.

For anyone who’s appreciated Durant for a long time, seeing him sign with the Warriors brought a crappy ending to a great story. It’s a basketball deus ex machina – Stephen Curry is basically the NBA’s version of the naval officer randomly stumbling onto the island at the end of Lord of the Flies. Durant didn’t do any favors for the Warriors’ narrative, either. Despite the 73 wins, Golden State seemed a tiny bit fallible before KD arrived. That legendary 2016 team lost in the Finals because Barnes shot an appalling 3-of-18 from the field in Games 6 and 7 combined; the Warriors solved their Barnes problem in the most unsubtle, brute-force way possible, swapping him out for a Hall of Famer. It’s like fixing a flat tire on your Volvo by junking the whole car and buying a Ferrari instead. Doesn’t exactly make you a great mechanic.

The Warriors pre-Durant were terrifyingly good, no doubt, but there was still a vulnerability there. If you caught them on the right night, when the shots weren’t falling or the chemistry was a little off, you could get the best of them. Now, that vulnerability is a lot tougher to find. Even when the 2018 Warriors were bad, they were still good. They struggled in Game 3 of this year’s Finals because Curry shot 3-of-16, including 1-of-10 from distance; it ended up not mattering because Durant just nuked everyone and the Warriors won anyway. This is what’s infuriating about the Warriors – you are supposed to lose when your star player shoots 3-of-16. The post-KD Warriors often don’t; they have most ludicrously wide margin for error in NBA history. Taking a nucleus of three superstars and adding a fourth one wasn’t a strategy – it was a cheat code.

You try to have empathy for both sides. For the Warriors and their fans, this moment feels earned – they spent decades watching helpless teams built by incompetent front offices, and their turn atop the NBA is more than overdue. But for everyone else ... man. It’s not hard to see how this era can offend their sensibilities. To anyone outside the Bay Area bubble, a team this good feels like an affront to what the game is supposed to be about. Why even watch a sport when it feels like there’s so little at stake? “It’s their refusal to run the risk of losing,” Bethlehem Shoals quipped in GQ, “to truly put themselves to the test, that people find so galling.” It’s true. Historically, we’ve watched sports for the uncertainty, the “anything can happen”-ness they can offer us. What do you do when suddenly, very few outcomes seem possible anymore?

*****

Wait, back up. That wasn’t a rhetorical question. What do you do? If you’re in Cleveland, Houston, Boston or Toronto, how do you handle this period of Warriors dominance? What do you do if you’re a rung below that, desperately hoping for glory days in a place like Milwaukee or New Orleans or Portland?

We already know Klay Thompson’s answer. The Warriors’ All-Star made headlines on the eve of the Finals when he bluntly replied that “It’s not our fault” and that “the rest of the NBA’s got to get better.” He’s right about the first part, as the Warriors have done nothing wrong, but how realistic is he, really, about the second? “Just get better” is a pipe dream when you’re as far away from the Warriors’ level as everyone else. The Rockets became their best selves this year and took a shot at Golden State but missed, and Chris Paul won’t come back next year any younger. The others just aren’t as talented. Kyle Korver can’t transform himself into a 7-foot behemoth wrecking everyone in his path like Kevin Durant. Pascal Siakam can’t become a two-way Swiss Army knife with a Mozart-level basketball IQ like Draymond Green. Even Kyrie Irving, a superstar in his own right, can’t suddenly learn to shoot like Steph. These are fundamental truths. “Just get better” is far easier said than done. All of these teams will try, but it undeniably feels like they’re fighting a losing battle.

Make no mistake – the battle is still compelling. No team, no matter how dominant, should drive you away from the NBA altogether. The league is, and remains, too damn good for that. It is possible, though, that the Warriors will bring about a temporary shift – the league will be compelling, just in a different way. We’ll watch less for the championship destination and more to enjoy the journey. A quick glance at the TV ratings suggests that that’s indeed what’s happening. Finals viewership dipped a little bit in 2018, with the number of Dubs/Cavs viewers moving from just over 20 million in previous years to just over 18 million now, but the regular season is still going strong. Overall NBA viewership was up 8% this year. All of this is fine – there’s no requirement that we care about teams winning titles first and foremost. Sometimes you can lose sight of the forest, get distracted by a few trees and realize, damn, these are some really dope trees.

The NBA can never be ruined. This is the same league that brought us Bryan Colangelo’s wife being caught with five burner Twitter accounts, Eric Bledsoe tweeting “I Dont wanna be here” from Phoenix and lying that he meant “at the hair salon,” and J.R. Smith getting suspended for throwing a bowl of soup at his own assistant coach. (Important detail: The soup was chicken tortilla.) If you’re not finding entertainment value in today’s NBA, that’s on you.

So if anyone tells you Kevin Durant and the Warriors are monsters and league-ruiners, don’t listen. They’re not that. They’re not even bad dudes, really. But it may be time to admit that, compared to the rest of this crazy-as-hell NBA, they’re a little bit dull, and there’s more interesting drama to watch unfold elsewhere. The rest of the league is out here. They’ll put in work. For better or for worse (usually worse), they’ll stick with it.

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?

And Then There Was Lose

That’s more like it.

THE LOSE thought it best to wait to comment on the NBA playoffs until the first round was completed. And one of the things that I want to say here at the start is this: all of these teams who got beat in the playoffs are good teams. They’re good teams with good players, and I’m inclined to want to watch them.

And being good matters. I’m not into the whole notion of “ringz.” It’s nice to win championships but doesn’t happen too often. I’m not a believer in championship or bust. There is nothing inherently wrong, in my mind, with being a good team that wins a lot of games regularly. It’s easy to forget that when we live in an era of Tankamania – an idea which is predicated on the idea that in order to be great, you have to first be terrible, and there isn’t any point to being somewhere in between. But this is an entertainment industry above all else, and in the present tense, putting a good and winning product out on the floor is a good thing.

Where the problem comes with being good in the NBA is that teams wind up being locked into certain cores and groups of players, and once that happens, you have very little flexibility to change. This is a function of the salary cap, which puts benchmarks on the amount that teams have to spend on players. There’s a minimum floor, there are top end caps and tax thresholds, and there are slots where certain players and entitled to certain amounts. Those hold true for everyone. You have to spend that money. There are more than a few players in the NBA who have so-called “max” contracts not necessarily because they are élite players, but simply because the team had the slot available and had to spend the money on someone.

So what frequently occurs, of course, is that a team gets locked into a core group of players and that core maxes out their ability, but very few good teams are good enough to win titles and once you’ve maxed out and reached your ceiling, and you’re locked into enormous financial commitments for players who are no longer improving, the only way to go is down. We are tantalized by young teams with talent and potential, in part, because it’s exciting to see growth and imagine the possibilities, whereas a lot of fundamentally good teams look, in the bigger context, to be stale and staid and stuck.

And one of the things which has been a plague for the NBA the past couple of seasons is the overwhelming sense that a whole bunch of good teams are stuck. Not bad teams, mind you, but actual good teams that win a lot of games. They can’t get better, they can’t realistically compete for a title, and they’re cost-constrained. Now what? Far too many of the eight teams recently vanquished from the NBA playoffs find themselves in this exact predicament. 

This is a case of the road to hell being paved with good intentions. None of these teams are actually trying to get themselves stuck. They’re making what seem, at the time, to be sound personnel decisions that, cumulatively, come to wind up looking not so good.

Being stuck and good sucks, but being stuck and bad is far worse. Detroit is stuck and is bad. Charlotte is probably an even better example. Hornets 2.0 was actually a 3-seed in the playoffs two seasons ago. They’ve built up their entire roster with the idea of being good, and with the idea that it’s going to cost money in order to do it. They’ve done things like sign Nic Batum to a $25m a year contract which, at the time, seemed like a bit of an overpay but it wasn’t that far above the going rate and, more importantly, if Batum didn’t get that money in Charlotte, he’d likely have gotten a similar amount elsewhere. Their entire roster is built this way – guys signed in good faith on the part of the organization for a few dollars more here and there. The problem being, of course, that in 2018, none of these guys are any good any more. They’re old or hurt or whatnot, so now Charlotte has a bad team with a bad roster that’s also an expensive roster. Their best player, Kemba Walker, is only their 5th-highest paid player. They’re up against the tax, which they do not want to pay. (The legendary competitive drive Michael Jordan had as a player does not seem to extend quite as much as an owner when it comes to absorbing extra cost.) The only way to create some financial relief is by attaching something they want to a trade of something they don’t want, since no one else in the league wants $20m+ of Dwight Howard or Nic Batum. The Hornets are not only bad in the present, but they’re completely screwed going forward. Those days in which they were gagging away a first round series against Miami are going to look like the salad days for residents of Buzz City in a couple of years.

So, if you’re a fan of one of these types of teams which dotted the first round of the playoffs – a good team, a playoff team that cannot make it out of the first round and now seems stuck – at least take heart in the fact that your team has been good. There will be plenty of time for theorizing about team building and roster construct this coming summer, but rather than lament about the uncertain future, at least you can bitch here and now in the present about the fact that your team wasn’t very good in a best-of-7 series.

• No team was worse in a best-of-7 series than the Portland Trail Blazers, who were swept by New Orleans and played a supporting role in this year’s edition of Small Sample Size Theatre, in that getting thumped so convincingly by the Pelicans actually convinced more than a few people that New Orleans was good enough to beat Golden State in the second round. The advanced data would suggest that the Blazers actually generated a decent number of good shots and simply missed them, to which I would respond that missing good shots is Exhibit A of not playing well. More than anything, it was just a bad match-up for the Blazers: they have no one to guard Anthony Davis (who does?), and Jrue Holliday decided it was a good time to remind everyone that he’s one of the better 2-way players in the game and spent the whole series thwarting Dame Lillard. New Orleans were bigger and more assertive defensively, and compounding the problem was the fact that Portland runs the least transition in the NBA, whereas the Pelicans run up and down the floor and play faster than any other team in the league. Being both smaller and slower is not a winning combination.

Immediately in the aftermath, there were rumblings about Terry Stotts possibly losing his head coaching job, which would be stupid. Stotts has done a uniquely good sort of coaching job in Portland the past few years, one in which the Blazers’ continually overachieving during the regularly season saves his boss’ job, because GM Neal Olshey hamstrung this team for the next five years by getting drunk on cap space in the summer of 2016 and doling out awful, unmovable contracts to the likes of Myers Leonard (who?) and Evan Turner – the latter of whom has become the source of fan ire this past season, as if it was somehow his fault that Olshey drove a dump truck full of money up to his house and poured it out in his driveway. It would help if he weren’t next to useless on the floor, of course: every one of the many moments he has the ball in his hand is a moment that neither Dame nor C.J. does, and the greatest advocate of that in the league are the 29 opposing defenses.

Portland’s had the same problem for years now: their backcourt is great and their frontcourt is meh, and at this point every year, the question that arises is, “can you win in the NBA with that backcourt?” Well, sure you can, if your frontcourt isn’t meh. People say the Blazers should trade either Dame or C.J., which is a perverse sort of game of whack-a-mole in which you solve one problem by creating another. They managed to get some salary relief this season by moving third guard Allen Crabbe’s $70m contract to Brooklyn, but the problem was that Crabbe was a guy whose shooting ability the Blazers actually needed. The roster is still a mess.

But it’s been a mess for several years now, and every year Stotts goes back into the laboratory and cooks up a scheme enabling his team to then outperform. They won 49 games and got the 3-seed in the West through some slick offensive sets and through some tenacity on the glass and on the defensive end. There is some frustration in stagnation, of course, but in truth, the Blazers are actually continuing to punch above their weight, and that is noteworthy and admirable. The worst thing they did all year was draw the short straw come playoff seeding time.

• One of my favorite moments in the first round of the playoffs came in Game 1 between the Houston Rockets and the Minnesota Timberwolves. Minnesota were down three with 8.8 seconds remaining, having been just thrown a lifeline in the form of Chris Paul throwing a pass into the stands. Minnesota needs a three to tie, and they are inbounding from their own sideline in the backcourt.

As it turns out, the Wolves have, on their roster, one unique player who is useful in this circumstance: Jamal Crawford. Crawford may be a day older than coal, but he can still create a 3-point shot for himself. He’s one of the best ever at doing that. (Now, whether it goes in or not is another story, but you can say that about every guy on the Wolves who puts up a three.) Furthermore, he is indisputably the best ever at creating a 4-point shot for himself. This is important because the Rockets are likely to foul, forcing Minnesota to shoot two down three, but Crawford’s good enough at getting up his own shot that the Rockets would have to be extremely careful not to give three free throws to Jamal, who is also a 90% foul shooter. You couldn’t think of a better player to have in this situation.

And the Houston Rockets respond to this threat by covering Jamal Crawford with … James Harden, whose defensive deficiencies are the stuff of NBA folklore. 
And Houston does this, of course, because they know exactly what Minnesota is going to do, which is have all of the on-court awareness of a traffic cone. Minnesota will throw the ball in to Jimmy Butler, who will go down and try to shoot it himself, because that’s what Minnesota always does in these situations. Houston is so sure this is going to happen that they put a guy who can’t guard his own shoes on the Wolves’ best option for getting up a quick three. 
And sure enough … Butler gets the ball, the Wolves stand around and do nothing, he’s picked up by the Rockets best defender, P.J. Tucker, who doesn’t actually have to foul him because Butler dribbles into a no-man’s land, and he winds up taking a spinning turnaround long two, as his foot is on the line. Bad shot, bad play, game over, Wolves lose a game that could possibly have been stolen.

And that’s not to knock Jimmy Butler. I love me some Jimmy Butler, and he did all he can in the playoffs after returning from knee surgery. But what it speaks to is the complete lack of awareness, and lack of any sort of coherent offensive plan, which runs rampant through the entirety of Timberwolves. And that alone makes any meeting with the Rockets a pending disaster, because one of the things the Rockets do, which I love, is dare their opponents to actually pay attention. 

As an example, the Rockets switch everything on defense. They’re perfectly content to do so, even if, at times, it means their guards are matched-up with bigs underneath. This is because the Rockets do the math: as explained previously here by Mike D’Antoni’s brother, the post-up is one of the most inefficient plays in the game. They know that teams will break down their normal offensive patterns when they see a switch of a guard onto a big down low and try to force the action, and that teams will mess-up the cross-matches going back down the floor. They want to try and bait their opponents and fool them into doing this. Having said that, the Rockets are also stubborn in how they will adhere to what they’re doing, sometimes to a fault. They’re not going to change what they do even if it’s not working – which is how they got thumped by the Spurs in last year’s playoffs, when the Spurs yielded whole areas of the floor where the Rockets could take shots and the Rockets refused to take them. If, for example, you design some primary actions whereby you can get small Houston guards switched down low on a talented and offensively-skilled big, your guy can eat and eat really well, and keep on eating because Houston will keep switching. Gosh, if only Minnesota had one of those types of guys on their team.

Oh, wait, they do. Karl-Anthony Towns. Remember him?

And what is KAT doing when the Rockets switch on the primary action and he’s matched up against someone like Chris Paul, who is something like nine inches shorter than him? He’s routinely, systematically drifting off into the corner to “preserve the spacing” on the play. What the hell is that? Seriously, what the fuck is wrong is you? That should be an instant read – CP3 is switched onto KAT, feed the big guy in the post and let him eat. But instead, you have KAT scoring 5 points in playoff losses and rarely seeing the ball, and you’ve got Thibs saying “Karl has to be more assertive on the offensive end” in the post-game interviews after playoff losses, and I’m wondering if KAT being more assertive involves him saying, “give me the motherfucking ball, motherfucker,” in order to get their attention. That’s generally not a great way to endear yourself to teammates, but given how hard-headed everyone in Minnesota is, it may be the only way. 

Seriously, I’ve hated literally everything I’ve seen from Minnesota for the past two seasons. That they somehow finished with the 4th-rated offense in the NBA this season speaks to how flawed the metric is for rating offenses. The Wolves have gone all-in on loading up on guys who can create their own shot. The downside to that is that no one on this team can actually pass the basketball, and even worse, they don’t appear to be able to think their way through a game – which doesn’t really bode well when you’re playing against teams that actually know what they’re doing. If the primary action of a Minnesota play doesn’t work, everyone on the court collectively shrugs and then whomever has the ball just goes one-on-one.

Oh yeah, and the defense sucks.

That they were even close to winning several of their games with Houston stemmed from the fact that the Rockets didn’t play all that well and couldn’t throw the ball in the Gulf of Mexico. (50 point quarter in Game 4 aside.) And most of the narrative about the Wolves falls along the lines of “a young team that needs to grow,” which belies the fact that they really aren’t all that young, save for KAT and Anthony Wiggins, who is sending Glen Taylor scrounging through the desk drawer and looking for the receipts after giving Wiggins a max contract. 

Tom Thibodeau has parlayed his role as the defensive mastermind of the 2008 NBA champion Boston Celtics first into a head gig in Chicago and then as a head coach and president in Minnesota – a combo of jobs which proves to be a bad one most of the time – and while me, the Celtics admirer, genuinely appreciates what he did in Boston, the fact is that the 2008 Celtics are one of the most unremarkable and self-important NBA champions in history. Yet he’s managed to con people into thinking he’s a good coach, parlaying that Boston success into conning first the Bulls, and then Minnesota, into thinking he’s some sort of coaching guru when his offensive schemes are pre-historic, and for some reason he gets amazing leeway when it comes to signing old Chicago wash-ups like Derek Rose and needlessly playing two bigs and running an offense that wasn’t even cutting edge in 1998. The Wolves win games in spite of him. Their guys just make shit up and occasionally the ball goes in the basket. Not to mention the fact that he is grossly overplaying guys, just like he did in Chicago, which shortened quite a few careers there. And meanwhile, the defense still sucks.

And since Minnesota is so starved for success – they hadn’t made the playoffs in 14 years – and because they had to endure the absence of Butler for two months in the middle of the season due to a knee injury, Thibs will likely get a pass for this team’s truly gross performance. But there is enough individual talent on this team to add up to more than an 8-seed in the playoffs. This team should have been better than it was. It shouldn’t have been playing a play-in game in game 82 of the regular season of the Nuggets just to make the playoffs in the first place. That it did speaks to a level of general incompetence in the organization, but you can’t remove the coach in this sort of situation because, as we’ve seen elsewhere, that would require the exec who is also the coach to admit that he the coach doesn’t know what he’s doing.

• If Joe Prunty weren’t already a lame duck coach in Milwaukee, his in-game decision making in Game 7 would have constituted a fireable offense. Leading 15-12 late in the first quarter, Prunty decided to turn to his bench … 

The Celtics went on a 20-2 run to close out the quarter, and the Bucks were running uphill from there.

Jesus, what an incoherent mess of a team. The Bucks have all of these long, rangy types, and yet their defense couldn’t stop conceding wide open shots to a Celtics team that was desperately in need of wide open shots in order to succeed, given that their two best offensive players are on the shelf. They would foolishly overhelp and leave open shooters, they would reach on defense late in the shot clock and pick up needless fouls and concede free throws. Brad Stevens took what the Bucks defense gave them: his two slashers were filling those gaps, Horford was patient in the post game and worked the Bucks down low, and Scary Terry Rozier used the lack of attention span from the Milwaukee guards against them time and again. 

On the offensive end, meanwhile, you’d wind up with nonsense like three Bucks all standing within two feet of each other on the block, while on more than one occasion a Bucks 2-man game got stymied by running into their own guy, a third guy standing in a spot where he wasn’t supposed to be. Every player on the Bucks has a tell. You know what they’re going to do from the moment they get the ball. Giannis can win games on his own even if you know what he’ll do ahead of time, but he can’t win all the games by himself. Not yet, anyway.

And Giannis is still our future overlord, of course, but Giannis still has lots of bad habits on both ends of the floor – habits due, in part, to the fact that the Bucks don’t do anything to make the game easier for him. The obvious ploy in this series, of course, was to play Giannis at center, put the ball in his hands at the top of key and let him go to work – but that lineup fares badly for Milwaukee because the other four guys on the court can’t figure out where it is they’re supposed to be at any given time, so Giannis has no good passing angles and can thus be at least be slowed down, if not stopped completely. Even worse, whichever empty suit is patrolling the sidelines can’t even figure out which four guys should be out there with Giannis playing center to begin with. 

If I’m the Bucks, knowing now that Mike Budenholzer has worked his way out of a job in Atlanta, I’m calling him immediately. Coach Bud got far more accomplished in Atlanta with far fewer raw materials than Giannis and also Khris Middleton, who was just a stone-cold assassin in this series. There is a lot of chaff on the roster, of course, and there is a big question of what they’ll do with Jabari Parker – he of the -39 rating in 29 minutes in game 7, a skilled offensive player who seemingly can’t guard a chair and who has unfortunately missed two whole seasons with knee injuries. I’d be inclined to let him walk as a free agent this summer, but then again, if you had a coach with a clue, maybe he could carve out a scheme in which Jabari’s considerable offensive upside could be realized.

This was a huge missed opportunity for the Bucks. They played like garbage most of the season, but maneuvered themselves into a favorable match-up in the first round with a beat-up Boston side. Having the best player in the series on your team is usually a huge advantage. We’d have thought going in that was the case for the Bucks with Giannis, but unfortunately for Milwaukee, it turns out the best player in this series was Brad Stevens.

• I was grateful for this ESPN deep-dive, published yesterday, in which they attempt to discern just what in the hell is going on with Kawhi Leonard in San Antonio. This was actually an underreported story during the regular season. If this had been going on in Cleveland, given that franchise’s propensity for self-creating drama, it would have been splashed constantly across every site in the country. I know the Spurs want to be low-key about everything, and I know Kawhi Leonard wants to maintain a low profile in the media, but we just went through a season where one of the five best players in the world missed 73 games and then the entire playoff series with a mysterious injury that’s never been fully explained, and somehow this was of less importance than talking about “WHAT’S WRONG WITH THE WARRIORS?” which is nothing, and “WHAT’S WRONG WITH CLEVELAND?” which is … well, how much time do you have …

And I was really looking forward to seeing what Kawhi was going to do this year. He’s added elements to his game every summer. I sort of anticipated that Kawhi would work to improve his playmaking, given that the Spurs were desperate for point guard play last season. He’d tighten up his handle, he’s got the feel and vision and basketball IQ to become an excellent passer … Kawhi running the point? Jesus, that could’ve been cool.

But instead, we got no Kawhi this year. Instead, we had this injury mystery – and to be clear here from the get-go, I have ZERO doubt that Kawhi was truly injured. Kawhi doesn’t want to waste time on the sidelines. Basketball players want to play basketball. And team doctors can say that guys are ‘cleared to play’ all they want to, but if guys don’t feel like they’re ready to play, they shouldn’t be playing. Guys know their own bodies better than anyone else.

But everything else about this story speaks of mistrust between team and player – or, as framed frequently by the Spurs, between team and player’s entourage – and as that ESPN story explains, there are all these weird ulterior motives seemingly at play, and there is an enormous frustration level now for everyone involved – for Kawhi, for the team, for the players, for Coach Pop. The Spurs brass are understandably a bit miffed at the moment, and now have to decide if they want to invest $219 million in an extension for a guy who they think stiffed them for a whole season.

Kawhi’s absence, of course, exposed just how awful the Spurs offseason was. They’d positioned themselves well to try and land Chris Paul, and were caught off-guard when CP3 decided to go and play off-guard in Houston. They gave away lots of future flexibility to the likes of 30-somethings like Pau Gasol and Rudy Gay and an LaMarcus Aldridge extension. Aldridge was a beast this season, mind you, playing at an all-NBA level and earning every penny of it, but the Spurs are even older and slower than before, and they looked completely hopeless against the Warriors in the playoffs. But, of course, put the world’s best 2-way player out there on the floor, and the Spurs would suddenly have been a legit challenger to the Dubs and the Rockets. That’s how good Leonard is, which is why they’re going to have to bite the bullet and offer him the $219m. If they don’t offer it, he’s gone, and you simply cannot get enough value back in trade.

The Spurs were such a bummer this year. Oh sure, they did what they usually did, which was out-execute all of the bad teams, and enough of the visiting teams, in order to rack up a decent number of wins, but they were horrible on the road and against the good teams, where the scheme couldn’t compensate for the overall lack of talent. If anything, the entire Kawhi saga has served to nuke that narrative of the perpetual motion machine that the Spurs have built up in the past two decades. They’re prone to the same sorts of bickering and in-fighting and sniping as every other franchise in the league. And so too did the gloss and lustre come off of Kawhi the quiet superstar. Even if he’s legitimately injured, which I believe he is, the optics of it all have been bad.

Oh and one more thing about the Spurs: Manu Ginobili is not allowed to retire. Few people bring the joy and the imagination to the game quite like Manu does, so he cannot leave. He must play until he 80. There. We’ve voted on it.

• Speaking of bickering and sniping and in-fighting, here’s a live look-in at the goings-on in Washington:

When Giannis says, in the aftermath of losing to the Celtics in Game 7, that he felt like the Bucks were the better team, you can at least see his point if you squint and look hard enough. If any member of the Washington Wizards does that after their meek exit in six games against Toronto, you’re reminded that this team would be better served if someone went and got a gag order issued by a judge. And then you have John Wall coming out in his postseason presser and throwing all of his teammates under the bus, apparently having also thrown under the bus the mirror that he should be looking into, since he’s part of the problem.

All you need to know about how dysfunctional this team was this past season was that a team with big aspirations, and big opinions of itself, managed to only go 21-15 against sub-.500 teams. Given that so many of the sub-.500 teams were actively trying to lose games this year, to rack up 15 losses against that sorry lot is only possible with a lack of focus and cohesion. In a year where the East was wide open, given that Boston lost Gordon Hayward five minutes into the season and Cleveland was a festering cesspool, a team that was actually as good as the Buzzards think they are would’ve been up at the top of the standings from the get-go and managing their roster down the stretch to prepare for the playoffs. As it were, John Wall then is forced to miss two months with a knee injury, the team is in trouble and has to scramble to get an 8-seed in the playoffs.

Now, to be fair here, it’s unclear just how many of the early season struggles of the Wiz owed to the fact that Wall’s knee was killing him. That doesn’t help matters. He was clearly struggling. But then, lo and behold, he goes out of the lineup and, at first, they win some games! And the ball movement is good, the offense is crisp, and you’ve got a few people starting to whisper that maybe Washington is actually better without John Wall – which they aren’t, of course, as this run of play had more to do with the fact that the other guys on this team came to realize that they’d goofed off for much of the season, their margin of error was now gone, and they needed to actually focus and start playing better. But, of course, this being the Buzzards, where everyone involved appears to hate one-another, guys were suddenly talking about great “team” wins on social media in what were considered by every Buzzards observer to be poorly concealed jabs at Wall and his propensity for hoarding the ball.

And I love me some John Wall. Wall becoming a daredevil going 100 mph on the fast break is one of the most breathtaking things in the sport. But whereas I’d be worried, as an opposing coach, about what do against Wall, that’s still better than being terrified about Bradley Beal, which is what should happen because the guy can be just unguardable at times. Oh wait, I know how to guard him – let the Wizards do it for me! Let Wall pound the rock and go one-on-one and only throw it to Beal in bad areas of the floor. And as much as I love Wall in the open floor, the guy takes a beating. He’s got bad knees already and he’s due another $160m in the next four years – yeech – and he’s going to have to modify his game. He can do that, of course, but pretty much everyone in Washington has to, at this point, which would require them to, oh, you know, maybe actually play as a team and try listening to a coach for a change. They’re going to have to, given how much of their cap is eaten up by the enormous contract of Wall and the maxes doled out to Beal and Otto Porter (whose injury didn’t help matters against Toronto). They managed to make enough small moves to cobble together a bench unit this season that wasn’t an affront to the game of basketball, but no big moves are coming.

I felt a little bad for Scotty Brooks. I’ve never thought he was a particularly good coach, and he certainly should be used to not being listened to after having coached OKC, but he looked exasperated by the end of the season, as the Wiz were coughing up 19-point 4th Quarter leads in Cleveland and blowing games to tank commanders like Orlando – games they needed to win to avoid getting stuck playing Toronto in the first round. Scotty was clearly wondering what he has gotten himself into.
This team was a colossal disappointment, a mix of bombast and bluster, a heap of dung and slag. It was the type of team which teases you with their potential but never leaves you feeling satisfied.

• I generally don’t watch much of the Miami Heat, because I find them to be generally unwatchable. Their defensive strategy seems to be to foul the opposition repeatedly on every single play and dare the officials to call it. The offense doesn’t work all that well, either, and there are stretches of their games where they look like a lottery team. Other than Goran Dragić, I’m not sure there is a single player on their team that I’d actually want. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I missed the Dion Waiters Experience this season, as he was out after an ankle injury, and he took with him the irrational confidence and wild shotmaking ability that made Miami fun a season ago. I wasn’t the only one who missed Waiters. Miami really could have used his offense this postseason.

Waiters revived his career in Miami, and was rewarded with a nice contract. This has been the way that Miami does business over the years. You come to Miami, you buy into what they do, you play well, and they tend to reward you with a contract that’s generally above market rate in terms of both dollars and years. And this is a commendable way of doing business, an admirable way and one of the reasons why Miami is considered a top-notch organization. 

But it’s not useful to have a whole team of guys with extra-long, extra-pricy deals if none of them are actually very good. There is a feel-good and collegial sort of vibe to this team, and a sense of strength in numbers, in that Coach Spo will plug and play any and everyone on the roster to good effect at times, but it was so abundantly clear during their first round defeat to the 76ers just how disparate the levels of talent were between the two teams.

And you can certainly understand why Miami wants to keep doing what they’ve been doing, given that they’ve won three titles, but not even repeated acts of sorcery from Spo can masque the fact that the roster is not very good. Another problem seems to be that they are stuck in their own nostalgia at times. The return of Dwyane Wade from Cleveland at the trade deadline amused me, in that the Heat were winning a lot of close games in crunch time, but given his equity with the franchise, Wade was bound to wind up being inserted in crunch time lineups when, by all rights, he had no business being there. To his credit, Wade got in shape upon returning to Miami and provided a few vintage moments here and there, including a great performance in their lone playoff win, but this was in no way a viable solution. If anything, it was a solution that went searching for a problem. They were fine in close games with their close-to-the-vest approaches. It was when they needed to open up the games that the Heat struggled, as they are lacking playmakers.

And the other big issue, which reared its ugly head in the playoffs, is the fact that Miami has invested an ungodly amount of money in center Hassan Whiteside, who got played off the floor by Joel Embiid and then bitched about his role to the press to such an extent that Pat Riley felt the need to respond. This was one of the sneakily bad contracts given out in the summer of 2016, and one that was made worse by the circumstances. Remember, the Heat were one of the teams Kevin Durant was willing to take a meeting with in the Hamptons that summer, but before that meeting occurred, they dumped $100 million into Whiteside – and while there was no guarantee KD would want to come to Miami, that gargantuan deal made it virtually impossible for the Heat to put that deal together even if KD did. And I have no idea why anyone in Miami thought that it was a good idea to invest so much in a less-than-complete player like Hassan Whiteside in the first place, much less one with a propensity for selfish play, and much less even still who is playing a position which has never been so less in demand. 
Nor do I have any idea why felt a need to match the offer for backup point guard Tyler Johnson given in RFA by Brooklyn. I mean, I like Tyler Johnson, but the Nets poison pilled and backloaded the deal, and the contract explodes starting next year to $19m a year. (The Nets, who had nothing to lose, used this ploy on Washington and Portland as well, offering wacko deals to RFA’s Allen Crabbe and Otto Porter that the others felt they had to match – the moral of the story being that if you have to hold your nose and do it, don’t do it.) Guys like Whiteside and Johnson are not  guys you can really build around and win with, and they are unmovable guys now! You can’t do that!

And what should be one of the league’s glorious franchises is, in fact, rather unsightly. The Heat were completely out of ideas against Philadelphia, and seemed far more determined to want to try and fight the Sixers than try to beat them playing basketball, but the Sixers wouldn’t take the bait. But when it came to actually playing the game, the Sixers simply blew them away.

• One team that didn’t get blown away was Indiana. In fact, the Pacers followed up last season’s playoff performance against Cleveland, where they set a record for the best point differential for a team that got swept (-16), by setting a record this year against Cleveland for the best point differential for a team that lost in seven games (+40). If any of these vanquished sides this year can make a legit claim that they were the better team in their series, it’s Indiana – and that’s with LeBron absolutely playing out of his mind, no less. By the eye test, the Pacers were the better team, and the better team lost.

And it was a frustrating series to watch, because Indiana could have won all seven of the games. The Pacers are sort of a strange team, in that they’re sort of a versatile bunch of generalists who don’t have that much of an identity. They shoot well from three, but don’t shoot many threes, in part because they also shoot well from two. They started out the season playing among the fastest teams in the league, but by the end of the year, they were playing among the slowest. They’ve got a bunch of guys whose greatest strengths seem to be, above all else, that they know what they’re doing, with the idea being that Indy can throw a whole bunch of competent guys out on the floor at any time and carry on, and yet it was in all of these small moments here and there in this series where the Pacers would lose focus and make mental mistakes – turn the ball over or fail to properly execute breaking a trap - that ended up costing them this series. They could never seem to settle on what kind of an approach they wanted to take to attacking the Cavs – a team whose defensive flaws are many, so it’s not like you’re lacking for choice. Indiana could run them up and down, could drive it to the basket, could do whatever they wanted ... but never seemed to make up their minds. And the one thing the Pacers have never done well is rebound, which killed them in Game 7, as the Cavs dominated the offense glass to both create extra possessions and slow the game down – which proved crucial, given how LeBron was gassed by the end of this series and running on fumes.

As annoying as this series was to watch, and as frustrated as the Indianapolis faithful most certainly are after losing yet again to LeBron in the playoffs, this has been a really nice year for the Pacers. They are different from all of these aforementioned first round losers in that they’ve got considerable room to grow. They’ve got money to spend, and they’ve got a core of young players to build around. They far exceeded any and all expectations, having gone off in Vegas with an O/U of around 30 wins at the start of the year, and GM Kevin Pritchard struck it rich by trading Paul George to OKC for Victor Oladipo – who will win the NBA’s Most Improved Player award and who received MVP votes – as well as center Domantas Sabonis – miscast as a stretch four in OKC and showing great potential now in Indy in his more natural position. Everyone, including me, thought this was a terrible trade for the Pacers, one which was somewhat cynically done so that the Hoosiers buying tickets in the Fieldhouse would be mollified by seeing, out on the floor, one of their favorite adopted sons in Oladipo. But Oladipo showed up to camp in great shape, ready to push the pace and run the offense, and he was terrific all year. Funnily enough, when you tell guys in the NBA that their role is to be furniture, they act like a piece of furniture, which is basically what Oladipo was last year in OKC, and now the $80 million extension he signed while in OKC, which felt destined to be an albatross, suddenly looks like a great value contract.

Oh yeah, and speaking of OKC …

• I saved the best for last here, but I’m going to attempt to write about the sound and the fury signifying absolutely nothing that was OKC in the most objective way possible. And this is hard for me to do, of course, because I hate that franchise with a passion, and find an OKC loss to be the most enjoyable thing in all of the sport. But here goes, so bear with me.

Perhaps the best line about OKC which I heard all year came from ESPN’s Royce Young, who said that OKC could take any team to seven games in a series – they could take Houston or Golden State to seven games, or they could take Phoenix or Sacramento to seven games. They were all over the place. Once this supposed ‘superteam’ had been constructed, with Paul George coming from Indiana, and with Carmelo Anthony coming from New York in exchange for Enes “Can’t Play” Kanter, they were going to be a worthy challenger to the Warriors for supremacy in the West. Oh, of course, it would take some time to ‘figure it out,’ but come playoff time, this would be a dangerous team and legitimate threat.

And not once did I ever believe that. 
There would be glimpses, of course – they’d beat the Warriors or put 148 up on Cleveland or win at Toronto – but ultimately, whatever success this team could garner was unsustainable, as it was entirely dependent upon their ‘Big 3’ making tough, contested shots since, yet again, the offense was a complete quagmire and literally nothing ever came easily for anyone.

And it’s always been that way at OKC. The ball doesn’t move. It stops and everyone else stops as well. A first action doesn’t work, and the default setting is for Russell Westbrook to just do something, anything. 

Which, frankly, is the way that Westbrook seems to want it. His competitive drive is unquestioned, and I truly think that Russ does what he does on the floor because he truly believes it gives his team the best chance to win. A lot of nights, he’s proved correctly, in fact. And while I’m not interested in going back and deconstructing the MVP race from a year ago, I firmly believe that the way in which OKC plays – with one guy dominating the ball while everyone else stands around waits for the scraps – is not a winning strategy. The narrative was that Russ had “no help” in a 47-win, 5-game playoff season. So Presti goes out and gets him help in PG13 and Melo, and it results in a 48-win, 6-game playoff season. 

And it’s impossible to say what does and doesn’t constitute “help” because it’s impossible to view anyone on this roster outside of a Russ-related context. People have tried to make the case regarding Oladipo that he wasn’t the same player a year ago, but how would you even know that, since he almost never was on the floor without Westbrook, and had to be subservient to Russ’ whims. Same goes for Steven Adams – a promising young center and a definite badass, but someone who is almost never on the court without Russ. What can he actually do on his own? I have no idea. The bench has been so worthless that it almost seems like it is deliberately constructed in an attempt to make Russ look better, since OKC always looks completely hopeless whenever he is off the floor. Everything about this team, for the past two years, has felt artificial and contrived, with the entire narrative being “look how great our small-town hero Russ is.”
At no point did I ever believe they were ‘figuring it out’ this season, and whatever flashy moments of brilliance occurred obscured the greater reality that this team really wasn’t very good. My most retweeted foray onto twitter of all time came in response to Russ mashing a dunk and stomping around and scowling against Charlotte, which drew oohs and aahs from the Russ stans out there, and completely ignored the fact that Charlotte responded to said dunk by going on a 22-2 run and handing OKC yet another confounding loss in a season of confounding losses. OKC apologists could also point to the devastating injury sustained by defensive specialist Andre Roberson, which was a real downer, as something which undid their season, but if your season is really being undone by a guy who can’t shoot a lick, perhaps you’re not as close to élite as you think. They played down to their competition repeatedly, struggling regularly with the Dallases and the Phoenixes and the Sacramentos of the world, all the while saying they would ‘figure it out,’ but never actually doing so, because there was nothing really to figure out.
This team was a fraud. It was a fraud from the get-go, and I’m amazed that anyone bought into it. Actually no, I’m not, because it’s the same group of people who think Russ ‘plays harder’ than everyone else simply because he stomps around and scowls.

A phenomenal and inspired comeback, led by Russ and PG13, from 25 down against Utah in Game 5 saved the season, but they were down 3-1 in the first place because of their nonsensical defending of Utah’s pick-and-rolls and because of Westbrook deciding he wanted to shut down Ricky Rubio, after Rubio lit him up for a triple-double in Game 3, and then wasting his time picking up four fouls in the first half of Game 4 doing that, while the Jazz just shrugged off this made-up beef and went about running more pick-and-rolls which OKC couldn’t defend. It was such a selfish and small performance by Westbrook, who then atoned for his sins in Game 5, and who then took 43 shots in their Game 6 loss, including 19 threes, which was both preposterous and, quite possibly, necessary since everyone on the offense just stood around and waited for him to do something. As much as I don’t like the way Russell Westbrook plays and think that he pads numbers and chases stats, there has never been any sort of a coherent strategy in place to do anything besides that. You can’t play this way and hope to win, but good luck getting Russ to change. (Now he can do what he wants, remember?) 

And now OKC is in a mess. They swung for the fences and they whiffed, and going out meekly in the first round of the playoffs is an unquestioned disaster. This entire season was intended to be a sales pitch and an audition to the soon-to-be free agent George, but even if he wants to re-sign for OKC – which seems unlikely, given their awful performance this season – their cap situation is dire: including luxury taxes, the cost of reassembling this team next season would run well over $200 million, to which ownership will rightly ask why it is they are paying over $200 million for a 5-seed. It would help matters if Anthony would opt out of the $28m he is owed next season, because he is miscast as a catch-and-shoot guy, can’t guard anyone, and was routinely hunted by the Utah offense to the point where head coach Billy Donovan had to bench him in the playoffs, which is pretty much the only decisive thing Donovan’s done in the last three years. But there is no way in hell that Anthony would do that, since he isn’t likely to garner more than a fifth of that amount on the open market. Volume shooters who hoard the ball and can’t shoot from three and can’t defend aren’t exactly en vogue in the NBA, except in OKC, of course, where they already have one of those guys in Westbrook and definitely don’t need another.
And while I revel in OKC failure, the fact is that if the effort on the court had matched the effort it took to compile this team, OKC would probably still be playing. That Oladipo and Sabonis bloomed in Indianapolis while George is likely to walk, and Kanter had a nice year in New York while Anthony was a bust, doesn’t change the fact that they were trades GM Sam Presti looked, at the time, as if he’d won. They were, at the time, seemingly no-brainer trades. And even if he didn’t win those deals, it was worth it to try. When trading for Chris Paul, Rockets GM Daryl Morey said that thanks to the dominance of the Warriors, it was necessary for Houston to “raise the risk profile.” Doing so is quite likely going to lead to one helluva good series in the Western Conference Finals. And I would much prefer to be profiling teams that take big risks, try to amass talent and wind up missing than those who simply give up and throw away multiple seasons trying to amass ping-pong balls. We can question the methods and mistakes, but ultimately, losing in the playoffs is the right sort of losing.