Busting a Move

There is no reason for this gif to be here. I just thought we needed a moose chasing a golfer in Sweden, because moose.

TODAY we’re going to talk about player movement. This is a good time of the year to do that, since we’re approaching the baseball trade deadline. It’s that time of year where bad teams trade good players, and good teams trade bad players in return for those good players.

Okay, well, maybe that’s not entirely true. The players being dealt back aren’t necessarily bad before they get dealt, but most of them will amount to nothing in the end. This is because the bad teams doing the trading of good players usually are bad teams because a) they have no real good eye for talent, and/or b) they have a coaching, development, and/or organizational system which sucks, meaning whatever talent they acquire will likely go to waste.

This is why, when you see some list of all of the great young talent the Chicago White Sox have acquired in the great purge that is their summer of 2017, you should take it with a grain of salt. The White Sox have done almost nothing right as an organization since they won the World Series in 2005, and have returned to the protoypical bad and boring state of irrelevancy which has generally plagued them for a century. The White Sox excel in producing players who are either mediocre or malcontents. How that is somehow going to magically change remains a mystery. As I’ve said before, if a management team runs your franchise into a ditch, it’s foolish to think they’ll be smart enough to get you out of it.

And teams have wised up and come to understand that you shouldn’t go overpaying at the trade deadline. There hasn’t been a truly wretched deadline deal in baseball for quite a while now. The days of the Heathcliff Slocumb deal have long since passed. And yes, realizing that yesterday was the 20th anniversary of that horrible trade by the Mariners “inspired” me to write this blog, so to speak. In terms of long-term damage to a franchise, I’d probably argue that the Mariners’ trade of Adam Jones for Erik Bédard was actually a worse trade, and that Shelby Miller stinker by the Snakes looks to have lasting power in the annals of deals gone awry, but both of those were offseason deals. In the context of the midseason trade deadline, the Slocumb deal is the (Fool’s) Gold Standard of awful. And the Red Sox made out like bandits in that Slocumb deal, but not even they have been immune to the horrible midsummer trade, which I’m reminded of watching TV here and seeing Jeff Bagwell inducted into the Hall of Fame.

The most common currency these days is pitching prospects, which are basically lottery tickets. Want a guy from a bad team? Give them 2-3 pitching prospects from the lower leagues, and if they balk at that price, then give them 2-3 more. Among the prospects the Giants just received for trading 3B Eduardo Nuñez to the Rex Sox was a 17-year-old presently pitching in the Dominican Summer League. As longshots go, they don’t get much longer than that. Failed African kleptocracies possess currency of greater value than young pitching prospects. There’s a reason for this, of course: pitchers are fragile and prone to breaking down. The likelihood that any of those lottery tickets will cash is slim to none.

And this has proven true with pitching prospects at all levels, regardless of prowess or pedigree. Even picking up seemingly can’t miss prospects can blow up spectacularly. In 2011, the Giants traded for Carlos Beltran from the Mets in an effort to boost their chances at defending their World Series title from the year before. (They failed.) Giants fans were decidedly unhappy about the price for a 3-month rental of Beltran: Zac Wheeler, the 6th overall pick in the draft and considered to be the #1 prospect in the Giants farm system at the time. In five seasons with the Mets, Wheeler has produced a total of 21 wins and has spent 2½ years on the DL with arm problems. Giants fans used to complain about that trade, since Beltran didn’t really do much in two months bayside while Wheeler had so much upside, but no one complains much now given the unfortunate trajectory of Wheeler’s career.

Then again, given the constant and perpetual spate of injuries which seems to ravage the Mets on a yearly basis, it’s quite right to question their training and medical staffs. Injuries can be one-off and bad luck, but runs of injuries throughout a club on a regular basis point to a certain level of organizational incompetence. (We can make light of this in the context of chronicling failure, but something as damaging as this story about the New Orleans Pelicans, from a human standpoint, is pretty alarming.) This goes to what I was saying before about bad organizations, insofar as that, one way or another, they go about making good players into bad ones over time. And make no mistake about it, the New York Mets have been a bad organization for years, one which has won in spite of itself of late. For perpetually bad teams, the buying and selling of talent usually proves to be the perpetuation of the same old mistakes.

The whole point of bad teams trading at the deadline, of course, is to dump salary and try to recoup anything for expiring contracts of players you have no intention of keeping. If you’re bad with those guys on your team, you can quite easily go on being bad without them. But as deadline buyers have smartened up over time, dealing guys away at the deadline has become less and less desirable. Not only are you still bad now, but you’re unlikely to get anything in return which will prevent you from being bad in the future. Your best chance to retool through the trade market actually comes in the offseason.

Then again, if you suck, you’ll probably screw up the offseason as well.

The baseball deadline nears just as the flurry of activity surrounding the free agency period in the NBA finally peters out. (Or so we thought, but more on that in a minute.) I continue to maintain that the Golden State Warriors have, in fact, broken the NBA, is as much as that the response from the other 29 teams to this dominant juggernaut seemingly having risen from straight out of the Pacific Ocean is to completely melt down and lose their collective minds. We’ve already killed the Kings and the Bulls for selling off their stars – Boogie Cousins and Jimmy Butler – for pennies on the dollar, but then the Indiana Pacers said “hold my beer” and one-upped them with one of the more mind-bogglingly bad trades I’ve seen of late, swapping their disgruntled star Paul George to OKC for a couple pairs of shoes. OKC can now pair PG13 with Russell Westbrook for a season in yet another attempt to remain relevant before George inevitably jets off to Los Angeles in free agency. The primary piece going back to Indiana is Victor Oladipo, who has now been traded twice in a year, and who the Zombies are happy to get off their books after inexplicably giving him an $84 million extension. Sam Presti didn’t get nearly enough shit for offering that awful contract up last season, nor does he get enough slag for some of his awful drafts in OKC in recent years, because Presti’s greatest strength over the years has been to figure out who the dumbest teams in the league are and trade with them.

Which is a description that fits Indiana well, at the moment. Presti must have known he should make a deal with Indiana GM Kevin Pritchard because it was Pritchard, as GM of the Portland Trail Blazers, who picked Greg Oden instead of Kevin Durant with the 1st pick in the 2007 draft, and that pick of Durant at #2 served Presti quite well over the years. Indiana apparently had a three-team deal worked out whereby they’d move George to Cleveland, the Cavs would trade Kevin Love to Denver, and the Pacers would get a bunch of promising stuff back from the Nuggets, but the proposed 3-team trade has a funny way of winding up being a no-team trade. For some reason, Indy pulled out of that deal – apparently neither the Cavs nor Nuggets quite know why – and then they scrambled around and cobbled together this dog of a deal with OKC. Oladipo is a decent player, but not great by any means, and now they are on the hook for $84 million of decent-but-not-great. The best, and also most cynical, reason that I figure this deal took place is that the Pacers thought they were going to stink regardless after trading PG13, so the best way to keep asses in seats at The Fieldhouse was to bring back a guy who played down the road at the University of Indiana. And I don’t think that aspect of this trade has been played up enough. Seriously, if this decent-but-not-great player owed $84 million hadn’t played at I.U., I think there is ZERO chance Pritchard trades for him. NBA fans, even in Indianapolis, are far savvier than that. It’s small-time thinking on the part of what’s become a small-time franchise.

But that brings up something which a lot of people forget, which is that these sorts of decisions by franchises aren’t always made for reasons pertaining to on-field performance. Quite often, other forces and factors come into play. Sales reasons, marketing reasons, or hell, maybe the guy is a pain in the ass and you just want him to go away. Those reasons aren’t necessarily any better or worse, in terms of making a deal, than reasons relating to on-field performance. I think playing on the Hoosiers sentiment with Oladipo in Indianapolis is stupid – I’d argue the best way to keep asses in seats is through winning basketball games – but you can understand that line of reasoning when it doesn’t appear that you’re going to be any good, anyway. One of the more amazing non-trades I can recall from my Seattle days came in the panic that followed the Sonics choking in the 1994 playoffs. Head Coach and Acting GM George Karl cobbled together a deal to trade Shawn Kemp and the #7 pick in that draft to the Bulls for Scottie Pippen, a deal which didn’t come to pass, in part, because Kemp was the Sonics most marketable star at the time, and it was reported that many season ticket holders and corporate sponsors made it be known to the business office that their support was being pulled if Kemp was dealt. In retrospect, of course, that deal would probably have been good for Seattle, but in retrospect, most everything about the RIP Sonics could have been done better.

And one of the reasons the Indiana Pacers dealt Paul George was because he’d told them, in no uncertain terms, that once his contract was up, he was leaving. The trade in professional sports is something of a strange relic from earlier times when the franchises had complete control over the players and could dictate the entire course of their careers. While clubs in baseball and the NBA and such will insist the trade is vital to their interests and the ability to do it is essential, the players haven’t nearly figured out the ways in which they can leverage the situation in their best interests. Because ultimately, trades don’t make much sense in the abstract – why should I be told that I have to now pick up and relocate to someplace else where I don’t necessarily want to be? It’s been reported that numerous possible trades of George were, in fact, scuttled by his agent catching wind of the possible deal, calling up the potential suitor, and saying “we’re not signing with you, so don’t bother.” And it surprises me that more guys don’t do this sort of thing. Obviously, role players and 25th men on the end of an MLB bench don’t have nearly the sort of leverage, but stars have the power to shape and control and chart their careers, often failing to realize just how much power they actually have.

And we should applaud players for taking control of careers, instead of taking the sides of ownership and management. Don’t buy into any argument a sports league puts forth about trying to promote competitive balance through salary caps, revenue sharing, luxury taxes and the like. That’s not about competitive balance. That’s about cost certainty, which is entirely different. Major League Baseball finally clamped down on one of baseball’s biggest freeloaders, the Oakland A’s, and told them to stop skimping on payroll and claiming to be broke while raking in the easy money provided by revenue sharing. MLB had to force the Florida Marlins to promise they’d spend revenue sharing money on players after they’d been found to be turning rather nice profits while fielding horrible teams with horribly low payrolls. In North American sports, there are few incentives to be good and plenty of incentives to be terrible. Hell, the Seattle Mariners are worth over $1 billion, even though they’ve never won anything, they’ve lived off of the aegis of the state of Washington, who built them Safeco Field, and they made it a point to actively fight and thwart Chris Hansen, the guy who wanted to buy the Sacramento Kings, when he wanted to build a new arena down the street from their ballpark. They’ve not been good neighbors, and they’ve not been any good. How much are they worth again? A billion dollars? As in billion with a B?

North American sports fans are strangely conditioned to take the sige of management when it comes to all labor-related issues. One of the reasons for this is that fans root for teams for decades, whereas players inevitably come and go. Fans have a sense of loyalty to their favorite teams, and they assume that players should as well. This is naive, it always has been, and always will be. We also buy into dumb narratives about players being selfish, not caring about the team, and not caring about winning. Bullshit. These are the most competitive people on the planet. They want to win no matter what jersey they put on – it’s just that quite a few of them would rather be wearing a different jersey, which I’m perfectly okay with. I personally don’t understand why more players don’t force trades out of bad situations, nor have their agents work behind the scenes to prevent them. Your career is not best served by being traded to the Phoenix Suns or the San Diego Padres. Well, obviously, in the short-term, the reason guys don’t force their way out of places is because they get killed in the press for it, but ultimately, players should have the power and the control over their careers. We’re fans, we’ll get over it and root for whomever dons the jersey next. (Well, maybe those hillbillies in OKC won’t get over Durant. Tough shit. I would love it if Russell Westbrook, when given the opportunity to sign the new übermax $200 million extension, decides not to sign it – and he has all the leverage, so he has no reason to do it right away – and sends that entire garbage franchise into such a panic that they’ll corkscrew themselves straight into the ground, which would be glorious. But I digress.)

And this brings us to Kyrie Irving, who ruined the summer vacation plans of a great many NBA beat writers when it became public knowledge that he’d asked for a trade from the Cleveland Cavaliers. The Cavs have been in full-on meltdown mode ever since the NBA Finals ended. Cavs owner and junk mortgage king Comic Sans Dan Gilbert wouldn’t bring back GM David Griffin, one of whose main jobs in Cleveland involved keeping the peace. He then lowballed his first choice candidate for the job, Chauncey Billups, who turned it down. In the meantime, the Cavs whiffed on trading for either Paul George or Jimmy Butler, the sort of player they needed to add to compete with the Warriors, and no one who covers the NBA is able to deny the bevy of rumors of LeBron James leaving next summer to go to L.A. All of that probably has something to do with Kyrie’s thinking, not to mention the fact that he’s very likely sick of playing with LeBron and wants to be the #1 option on a team – which seems odd to me, in that he’s already somewhat of a #1 option in Cleveland, where he shoots more than anyone, and also seems somewhat delusional to me, seeing how whenever he truly has been the #1 option (i.e., without LeBron), the Cavs have been terrible. Be that as it may, I have no issues with Kyrie wanting to take control of his career and dictate its terms. In that sense, he’s learned from LeBron, who has spent his entire career maximizing his leverage and looking out for his own best interests.

Kyrie wants out of Cleveland and good on him for doing it. He’s something of a complex character, the value of whom is truly hard to discern. On the one hand, he’s an incredible scorer and one of the great shotmakers I’ve ever seen, a trick shot artist with the ball in his hand. On the other, he’s never shown himself to be very good running an offense, he’s not a great playmaker, he is truly one of the worst defenders I’ve ever seen, and I’m not sure he’s ever made a teammate better. Further still, it could be argued that with constant turbulence and instability in the franchise – so many coaches, so many GMs – and having had to play second fiddle to LeBron, he hasn’t truly developed all of his game. Further still, and this one is important, regardless of what the numbers tell you – and the numbers suggest to me that he might be overrated as a player – Kyrie Irving is a superstar. He hit the biggest shot in the history of the franchise, the championship-winning shot in Game 7 of the NBA Finals. He sells shoes, he’ll sell jerseys, and he’ll put asses in seats. And all of that stuff matters. In many ways, it matters even more than what he produces from a pure numbers standpoint. (Which could lead me into a long rant about how I hate all discussions about Halls of Fame in which statheads through numbers at me and disregard the narrative aspects of a player’s career, because Halls of Fame aren’t Halls of Stats, but I’ll get to that line of argument at another time.)

So congratulations, new Cavaliers GM Koby Altman, you now get to figure out how to trade Kyrie Irving and not get screwed over in the process. Have fun with that. Kyrie is only 25 years old, and has two years left on a contract that is, by NBA standards, incredibly team-friendly, as it was signed under the previous CBA. I mentioned previously that he was the Cavs’ best trade chip, precisely for those reasons. I also said they’d be insane to trade him, but everyone involved with the Cavs seems to be insane, so this is not as far off-script as you’d think.

And yeah, if you’re the Cavs, you really should try to trade him. You could be a dick about it and say, “you have two years left on your contract, so tough shit,” but that’s just asking for two years of distractions on a team that’s already rife with them. And you’re also better off if you make a good-faith effort to work out a deal with one of his preferred destinations – San Antonio, Minnesota, New York, Miami – because otherwise, Kyrie’s agent can say, “we ain’t resigning in two years” and likely scare off some suiters, or at least cause them to lower the asking prices. The players really do have more leverage than they realize in these situations. OKC didn’t care about trading for a year of Paul George’s services, because for them it’s a no-lose situation. If he walks, it’s a whole lot of open space on their books. If he stays, it’s a bonus. But most teams will not be willing to do something so ballsy, and be more inclined to play it safe.

Given the circumstances, this is a bad spot for Cleveland to be in. They need to stay relevant, in case LeBron wants to stay, because the only way LeBron will stay is if he thinks they can win. They also need to somehow get younger, because if LeBron leaves in 2018, he leaves behind a whole roster of guys well-suited to play with LeBron but not so good otherwise, all of them with contracts that make them extremely undesirable to anyone else. The chance for a bad outcome here is high, and so I thought I would cook up a few bad outcomes of my own for the fun of it …

Over on ESPN, they have a fun NBA Trade Machine which will allow to propose all sorts of trades and see if they meet the criteria established in the CBA. In the wrong hands, of course, such technology can be a dangerous thing. I decided to set out on a misguided quest to see if I could cook up the worst trades possible for Kyrie Irving, based upon the number of expected wins the trade will cost the Cavs. Behold some of my masterpieces, starting with the Knicks, who are one of the four teams Kyrie had on his wish list:

How’s that for a return? Only -11 wins for Cleveland though. Surely we can do better – or do worse, as it were, especially if we try to move some salary and trade some of the contracts the Cavs would be happy to get rid of.

Orlando has plenty of pieces with which to make an awful deal.

I don’t know if Sacramento would be willing to make this deal, since it would mark a radical departure from Vlade Divac’s usual philosophy, which is to amass as many basketball players from the Balkans as possible and grossly overpay all of them.

Here’s a 3-team deal with the Blazers and Bobcats Hornets. I didn’t have the heart to dump Evan Turner on the Cavs.

Here’s a bad trade with Detroit. You’ll notice some themes developing here, one of which is that a lot of the guys going back to Cleveland in these deals are guys who signed last summer, when NBA ownership got drunk on salary cap space and inked a bunch of not very good players to expensive contracts they now regret. The other theme you will notice is a lot of centers, which is a position no one cares about in the NBA anymore, anyway, and is a position laden these days with a general dearth of talent.

Atlanta has nothing good to offer, which is perfect for this exercise.

Okay, now this is more like it. Team up Kyrie with AD and Boogie in New Orleans in exchange for someone who is always hurt, two not very good centers, and some guy that I’ve never heard of. This is getting better and better.

In terms of number of Hollinger losses, this trade here of Kyrie to the Griz for the rotting corpse that is Chandler Parsons’ contract is the overall champ at -14. But this isn’t my favorite deal.

This is my favorite deal. I think this one is my Sistine Chapel.

And as dumb as those deals are, there have been deals in all sports in North America which were worse than those.

In the NBA, a superstar player rattling the sabres about wanting to be moved is a source of leaguewide upheaval. In soccer, it’s a day ending in Y. The biggest saga of the summer when it comes to superstars possibly changing teams is not Kyrie Irving leaving the Cleveland Cavaliers – but we’ll get to him in a minute – but the possibility of Neymar moving from F.C. Barcelona to Paris St. Germain at a price which is gobsmacking. The reports have suggested a transfer fee for the Brazilian in the realm of €250,000,000, which seems just preposterous, but everything about international transfers in soccer seems preposterous, and there is a good reason for that – most of the reporting turns out to be smoke, with very little fire behind it.

Transfers are a shady and shadowy business, and the international market is deliberately rife with gossip and innuendo. This is because clubs cannot directly speak to players who are under contract with other clubs. That’s against the rules. Transfers are the ultimate act of “have your people call my people.” Recruitment operations at club will employ fleets of middlemen whose job it is to go out and contact player’s agents and attempt to gauge interest in a player being willing to be moved – and the agents, of course, are perfectly happy to let it slip out that such-and-such a club would be interested in a player’s services if it results in said player getting a better contract out of the deal.

A result of the landmark Bosman ruling in 1995 has been that players have tremendous power when it comes to dictating where they play. When a player is out of contract, the club gets nothing if a player changes teams. As such, players hold the ultimate leverage: all it takes to squash a potential move is for an agent to tell a club there is zero chance in hell his client will sign a new contract, meaning the club has shelled out X amount of euros to acquire him and will wind up getting nothing in return. If you run a club, and you have a guy you want to keep, and he wants a new deal, his agent will go contacting middlemen working for other clubs, and then some strange transfer offer will materialize seemingly out of thin air from some other club saying “hey, we’ll give you X for such-and-such player,” at which point you have to go back to the agent, who will say “gosh, I have no idea why that club is so interested since my client loves playing for your club, and he would love to play for your club going forward for another €100,000 a week.” The only real leverage a club has is through playing time. If you want to get rid of someone, bench him and tell him he’s not in the future plans. Guys want to get paid, but guys also want to play football. If you tell him he’s not in the plans, he’ll want to go someplace else.

And when you’re a fan of a soccer club, you get used to it. My beloved Canaries of Norwich City make for a good reference point here. Norwich City are, for all intents and purposes, a Division 1.5 club. Every nation has in Europe has these sorts of clubs to one degree or another. The Canaries are one of the yo-yos, bouncing up and down between the EPL and the Championship on a regular basis. They’re a midsized club and, as such, they’re likely to look for younger talent at more reasonable prices and, at the first sign of trouble, they’re also likely to sell. When they were relegated from the EPL in 2016, I took stock of the roster and noted which guys were most likely to be sold to bigger clubs. Now, little more than a year later, the first five guys on that list of mine are all gone.

But this is how it goes. You accept it as part of the game and you move on. You’d love to keep your players for as long as possible, but if a bigger club comes calling and willing to buy, you’d be stupid to sell. Nobody in Leicester bitched too much when, the summer after winning the EPL title, the Foxes sold their best player, N’Golo Kanté, to Chelsea for £32 million. Kanté being sold to the Blues, a year after he arrived in Leicester, meant first and foremost that Kanté wanted to go to Chelsea. And why wouldn’t he want to go to Chelsea? He can make more money, first and foremost, and given Chelsea’s resources, he’s likely to win a lot more football games over the course of his career. Can you blame him?

Of course you can. Here in the states, we still have hillbillies decrying Kevin Durant’s lack of loyalty to an organization he had no choice in joining, and hooters who will burn LeBron’s jersey when he decides to take his talents to South Beach. That’s just dumb. If you’re going to root for the name on the front of the jersey, then root for the guys presently wearing those jerseys, instead of the guys who have moved on. Stop buying that stupid narrative about loyalty. There isn’t any loyalty the other way. Teams will dump players in a heartbeat if it serves their needs. Why do we, as fans, continue to grant license for ownership to do that, yet balk at the idea of players looking out for their own best interests?

Being a sports fan, ultimately, means allowing yourself to be conned into thinking that the ownership of your favorite club actually gives a shit about what you think. They want you to buy season tickets, of course, since that lump sum payment in the offseason is a nice influx of cash with which they frontload their budget. But there is plenty of evidence to suggest that many of those either don’t care about winning, or are far too incompetent to go about doing it. I have never begrudged any player who wanted to leave a favorite team of mine. They move on, the club resets and you go from there. It’s fun to think about the mechanics of making trades, like I did with the trade machine earlier, but if your team sucks, a trade isn’t likely to make them all that much better by themselves. If your team sucks, the rot likely begins at the top with ownership and then filters down into management. About the only thing they aren’t willing to trade, unfortunately, is themselves.

Loose Balls

In Play Lose World HQ

THE LOSE apologizes for the absence during the month of June, but real life interfered, as it is wont to do. It pleases me to say that In Play Lose has a new world headquarters, but it also pains me to say that, because moving to our new digs has left my back a shambles. But I am now on the road to the recovery with the aid of the Official Chiropractor of In Play Lose. It pains me that everything hurts. It pleases me that some things about me hurt which I’d forgotten exist, so their rediscovery counts as success.

We’ve talked a great deal about the NBA here so far at In Play Lose in 2017, and I wanted to wrap that up now that the Finals are over and the folly that is the NBA draft has taken place. We’ll get into some other subjects here in the coming days. It was a fascinating season to me in that what we all pretty much expected would happen wound up happening – the Golden State Warriors won the NBA championship – and yet I found the road traveled in order to get this point to be endlessly fascinating. There is never any certainty to the outcome, no matter how inevitable the end results may seem.

And you can certainly make a case for the inevitability of the outcome in these NBA Finals because Golden State possesses the most ridiculous assemblage of talent in the history of the NBA. No team that I can ever recall had a roster with four All-Stars under the age of 30. The most comparable collection of talent in any North American sport in my lifetime is the Edmonton Oilers of the 1980s, who won five Stanley Cups and were so deep that they could trade the greatest player in the history of the sport and still win that 5th Cup after he’d left. The Oilers talent level went even beyond the Warriors – they had eight all-stars one season – but even so, Stanley Cup success for The Oil was never assured. They choked away playoff series in 1982 and 1986, and were taken to seven games by the Philadelphia Flyers in the 1987 finals. Wayne Gretzky has spoken in the past of how guys were playing in the playoffs with broken hands, broken wrists, severe shoulder and knee injuries and the like. Just because they were the greatest team ever assembled in the history of the sport, it didn’t mean the others were going to just roll over and give them the titles. They still had to play the games, they still had to go out there and earn it.

And Golden State earned it this season as well, because in the last three games of the NBA Finals, Cleveland was great. They were absolutely great. Their shotmaking was spectacular, and Cleveland got better and better as the series progressed. But the Cavs messed up the series when they messed up the end of Game 3, coughing up a 6-point lead in the final 90 seconds and losing 118:113, which put the Dubs up 3-0 and pretty much ended any realistic chance Cleveland had of winning. But it was precisely the sort of game that you’d expect to happen if you were picking this to be a 5-game series – that close game which could go either way and winds up going to the road team. Again, a sort of understandable script wound up being followed in the NBA Finals: the Warriors win Games 1 and 2 big at home, the Cavs win a game big at home, but Warriors win a close one at The Q to come home with a 3-1 lead and then close it out at home. But the series was nonetheless wildly entertaining, just as the season was wildly entertaining, featuring some of the greatest basketball we have ever seen.

Predictions of Cleveland winning this series always seemed preposterous to me, as they were predicated upon this fantasyland notion that somehow Cleveland’s bad defense would be able to stop what is arguably the greatest offense in NBA history. For all of their truly exquisite shotmaking in the last three games of the series, the Cavs were only able to muster one win. Cleveland’s 2016 title was well-deserved, but then the Warriors responded by making a slight upgrade to their roster. The onus is now on Cleveland to respond. The Warriors got better last summer, and Cleveland has to get better now.

But how?

I would submit that not re-upping GM David Griffin, who only managed to construct a roster around LeBron that won Cleveland an NBA championship, doesn’t count as an auspicious beginning to the summer. Whomever replaces Griffin will be the 5th Cavs GM in the past 12 years, which is a ridiculous amount of turnover for what is one the league’s marquee franchises. Cavs owner Dan Gilbert has never really valued front office positions, but good ol’ Comic Sans Dan just may have laid the groundwork for killing his golden goose. LeBron can be a free agent in 2018, after all, and after the native son came back to Cleveland and brought a title to his hometown club, he has nothing left to prove there. Unlike when he first left in 2010, and they burned his jerseys in the streets, LeBron can walk away from Cleveland having done what he set out to do and brought them the ultimate prize of a championship. If, come next summer, LeBron doesn’t think the Cavs can win anymore, he won’t hesitate to head elsewhere. He’s done it before – twice – and he’ll do it again.

But how in the hell is Cleveland going to get better? They have one of the oldest teams in the NBA, and they have the most expensive team in the NBA. Win-now mode netted them the ultimate prize in 2016, of course, which means that ultimately it was worth the cost, but that moment has passed and now the Cavs are stuck. They have no promising young players, they have no draft assets to work with – that trade of a 1st round pick to Atlanta for Kyle Korver looks really awful in hindsight – and the NBA repeater tax is going to kill them this coming season.

Cleveland Cavaliers payroll obligations for the next three seasons

Cleveland’s problem is a problem endemic to the NBA salary cap, in that you wind up paying players on your roster relative to their value to your own team – which has nothing at all to do with their value to anyone else in the league. This is why making trades can be really difficult. A guy worth $15 million on your end probably isn’t valued at that level by anyone else, and in a league that’s constrained by salary caps and floors and luxury taxes and the like, the salary math is almost as important as if they can hit a jump shot, if not more so.Your $15 million player is not necessary my $15 million player. The highest paid player in the league this year was Mike Conley of Memphis – a very good player, mind you, but one who owes that salary not to being the best point guard in the league, but to the fact that he is the best player on his team and, since they had a max contract slot to dole out, they may as well give it to him. It will be interesting this offseason to see what happens in Washington and Detroit, where Otto Porter and Kentavious Caldwell-Pope, respectively, will likely demand max contracts in order to re-sign. Nice players, both of them, but neither of them would even start on the Warriors, much less be paid the max. If I am going to watch a Buzzards game, I am going to see John Wall and Bradley Beal, not Otto Porter. I pretty much never want to see a Detroit game ever, since that team verges on unwatchable.

For the Cavs here, Tristan Thompson is owed $16.4 million this coming season, and $52.4 million over the next three years. Tristan Thompson fills an important role for the Cavs – holding down the center of the floor while the others are bombing away from three. His value to the Cavs, however, is much higher than with anyone else in the league. No one wants $52.4 million worth of a limited offensive center who got played off the floor in the first two games of the NBA finals. The contracts for J.R. Smith and Iman Shumpert are similar – whatever their role on the Cavs, no one else wants to take on those contracts in trade. Those guys fill a need around LeBron in Cleveland, but take LeBron out of it, and they are not nearly as useful as players.

In truth, Cleveland’s only really good trade chip is Kyrie Irving. But you’d be an idiot to trade Kyrie Irving. Kyrie Irving is one of the most creative shotmakers the game of basketball has ever seen. That’s a stupid idea. So then what do you do? The Cavs were already shopping Kevin Love, who is an élite offensive talent, but he’s also 28, is owed $46.7 million over the next two seasons, just had knee surgery this past season, can’t guard anyone in the open floor, and much like Thompson, Love also got played off the floor at times by the Warriors. I’ve been hearing about these trade rumors ever since the finals ended in which the Cavs would make a 3-team deal whereby they would ship Love to Team X, Team X would give a bunch of stuff to either Chicago or Indiana, and the Cavs would land either Paul George or Jimmy Butler. (More on him in a minute.) Those rumors made no sense to me, simply because if I’m Team X, I’d rather have Butler or George than Love, and if it’s going to cost me a bunch of stuff in order to move those guys, I’d rather just deal with Chicago and Indy directly and ignore Cleveland’s phone calls.

I don’t see how Cleveland gets any better. I suppose you could hope that Dwyane Wade and Carmelo Anthony get bought out from the Bulls and the Knicks eventually, but an old team with a bad defense and two ball-dominant players probably doesn’t need two more old, ball-dominant players who play bad defense. That formula didn’t work against the Warriors in 2017, and it isn’t likely to work in 2018, either. Teams that are old and slow don’t magically get younger and faster, and once they go bad, they tend to go really bad, really fast. Cleveland cruised through the Eastern playoffs this season, but I would argue their competition in the East is closer to them than they are to the Warriors, assuming that competition bothers to actually make some moves …

* * *

The aforementioned Jimmy Butler was ultimately dealt during the comedy of errors that was the Chicago Bulls draft night. It’s rare that true stars get traded in the NBA, but now we’ve seen it twice in 2017 and, just as was the case with Boogie Cousins going to New Orleans, the return on the star sale seemed somewhat laughable. Butler is reunited with Thibs now in Minnesota, while the tag team comedy duo running the Bulls referred to as GarPax uttered the obligatory, “this was the best deal we could get” line, which seems dubious seeing as how it’s the exact same trade they apparently nixed a year ago – Butler for Kris Dunn and Zac LeVine – before both Wolves’ dudes were damaged goods. This deal got grades ranging from F to F+ from the assortment of NBA pundits, and the Bulls then compounded the disaster by swapping pick positions with Minnesota – if you’re the one trading the star, you shouldn’t be giving away stuff – using the 7th pick in the draft on Lauri Markkanen, who can shoot but can’t defend and who rebounds about as badly as any 7’0” guy I’ve ever seen, and then selling the 38th pick to the Warriors for $3.5 million, allowing the NBA champs to get the guy they wanted, Jordan Bell, on a cheap deal. This is precisely the same strategy Golden State used a year ago, paying $2.4 million to the Bucks for Patrick McCaw, and all McCaw wound up doing this year was playing 4th Quarter minutes in Game 5 of the NBA Finals and looking far better prepared to play NBA basketball than any of the 37 guys picked ahead of him in the draft. If the Warriors come knocking on your door and throwing money at you to buy their way into the draft, you might want to shut the door in their faces.

And I asked the same question, when I saw this Butler trade, that I did when Cousins got traded back in February: where are the Celtics? Why is Danny Ainge sitting on his ass … ets? Stars are hard to come by in the NBA, but you need them to win. You need them more than ever, now that Golden State has four of them. But instead, the Celtics played it safe once more, although they did make one deal: swapping the 1st overall pick to the 76ers, trading down to the third spot, and taking one of Philly’s picks over the next two years.

I hated this deal. And I hated this deal for two reasons.

Golden State has changed the calculus in the NBA. They have four All-stars under 30, all of them signed or soon to be signed up through at least 2019. They’re not going anywhere, so what are you going to do about it? Clearly, the second-best team in the league is Cleveland, and to get your shot at the Warriors in the East, you have to go through Cleveland first. Boston isn’t good enough to beat either of those teams in a playoff series, as the East final clearly showed. So if you’re Boston, what are you going to do about the Cavs? Are you just going to sit around and wait for LeBron to get old, or are you going to try to push the envelope?

So, okay, let’s take the tact that the Celtics are playing “the long game.” (I’ll get to why I think that is dumb here in a minute.) Okay, so in the post-LeBron world, who looks to be your chief adversaries in the East? I was talking previously about the absence of upside in the first round of this year’s NBA playoffs, talking about how so few of the losing teams showed any real long-term potential. But who does have the long term potential in the East? Milwaukee, to be sure, because one day Giannis will develop a jump shot, basketball will be over as we know it, life will be over as we know it and we’ll all bow down to our Bucks overlord. So who else? Philadelphia, of course. Philadelphia cannot get everyone on the court just yet, and health is a huge concern for them, but if they do ever get all of their guys on the court healthy and knowing where they are supposed to be at any point in time, they have two guys – Simmons and Embiid – with star potential. How many guys among the many redundant, nice-but-not-outstanding members of the Celtics can you say that about? IT? He’s certainly a star at the moment, but he’s still 5’7” and now he has a hip injury. Who else? Some people like Jaylen Brown. Then again, some people also like mayonnaise. I like neither of those things. Who else? Anyone? Didn’t think so.

So if you’re Boston and you’re playing the long game here, and thinking of the post-LeBron world, you have to think that the Sixers will be your prime rivals. This 2017 draft is a draft filled with good players, but it’s hard to guess who has the potential to be great. My hunch is that there are three potential superstars in this draft, all of whom are point guards with one of whom – Markelle Fultz – being the clear #1. The Celtics had the #1 pick, and their future rivals, the 76ers, wanted Fultz – so why are they giving him to the Sixers? It’s Fultz reaches his potential along with the others, the Sixers now have three stars in their lineup. They have exactly the core that they need to become a championship team. This is reason #1 that I hated this trade: Don’t give something to your closest rivals.

Oh, but they didn’t give Fultz to the 76ers, because they got another draft pick! Here’s the second reason I hated this trade: the Celtics don’t need more picks. They have too many draft assets already. They had eight draft picks in the 2016 draft – yes, that’s right eight – and wound up essentially throwing a lot of them away, which makes them useless. Danny Ainge commented, in the aftermath of the Butler trade to Minnesota, that teams ask for too much stuff from the Celtics because they know how much stuff that the Celtics have. He seems to think that the others in the league are undervaluing his many assets, but if anything, Ainge appears to be overvaluing them.

And here is why I think playing the long game is dumb, and why I thought it was dumb this past season as well. Boston isn’t as good as Cleveland, but Cleveland is old and plays bad defense and there were, and still are, guys out there – not just guys, but actual stars – whom the Celtics have the assets to acquire which could make an East final against the Cavs at least competitive, if not tipped in Boston’s favor outright. Jimmy Butler and Boogie Cousins were each traded basically for a pair of shoes. Boston could easily have beaten those offers and barely made a dent in their asset stashes. Paul George is now on the market as well, as he’s told the Pacers he’s leaving in free agency next summer. Why not rent the guy for a year? Throw two first round picks at the Pacers for him – and Boston can afford to do that, since they have seven first round in the next four years, which is far more than they can ever truly use effectively. Hell, if Kristaps Porziņģis actually is available from the Knicks (good lord), I’m calling up Phil Jackson and saying, “Here Phil, I’ve got seven first round picks in the next four years. Pick any two! Hell, pick any three! You’re giving me a unicorn, a 7-footer who shoots threes and protects the rim and is still on his rookie wage scale! Take any of that stuff that you want!” But instead, you’ve got Danny Ainge hoarding picks and kicking the can down the road, and now would be a good time for me to point out that his judgment in the draft has been, well, meh, and that most of his acumen amid all of his wheelings and dealings has come in finding undervalued players in the league like IT and Crowder and maximizing their value.

But the main reason I want to see the Celtics playing short, bulking up and beating on the Cavs has to do with what I said earlier in the show here, which is that LeBron can be a free agent in 2018. LeBron has some designs on being in L.A., of course, but his decisions are going to come down to whether or not he can win in Cleveland – so go and beat his ass! If the Celtics stock themselves up this offseason and then kick Cleveland’s ass in the playoffs, they also quite possibly kick LeBron all the way to the Western Conference, which means they have the run of the East until Philly gets its shit together, or until Giannis develops a jump shot and life on earth as we know it is over. (But at least our Bucks overlord will be a benevolent sort of overlord, since Giannis seems like a genuinely nice guy.)

All that I can think is happening at the moment, given the favorable hand they hold and given the market conditions, is that Ainge has been standing pat because he is as close to certain as he can possibly be that a big free agent – possibly Gordon Hayward, possibly Blake Griffin – is going to be signing this summer. Otherwise, none of this makes any sense. I don’t believe for a second that they drafted Jason Tatum, a nice shooter from Duke, with the idea in mind that he was the best guy in the draft and worth trading down for. Tatum adds to the Celtics’ glut on the wings – another position of strength of theirs in the trade market, as 3-and-D guys are in demand, but it isn’t a position of strength if your action is to just stock up on even more of them. Remember, Sam Hinkie’s death blow in Philly was drafting a third center, creating needless redundancy and overstocking at a position that is becoming less and less important in the modern NBA. The Celtics have too many wings, too many nice players who aren’t great players and all of whom are going to start getting expensive, and their other roster quandary going forward is what to do with IT, who is great but who is also 5’7” and going to be 29 when his contract ends and now has a dicey sort of hip injury. Boston could have gone a long way towards solving those problems in the future by drafting either Fultz or Ball and then trading some combo of Crowder/Bradley/Smart for either Butler or George, but they didn’t do any of that, and as a long time Celtics admirer, I’m sort of getting tired of continuing to build for some future that never, ever seems to exist. The future could be now, if they want it to be now.

I’d still try to rent Paul George, just so Cleveland doesn’t get him. Maybe he decides in the summer of 2018 that he wants to go to L.A., but maybe with him in tow, Boston could knock Cleveland off and make a good showing against the Warriors in the finals, and maybe PG13 sticks around at that point, because he comes to discover that he actually likes winning, which is ultimately the point of all of this.

In order to win in the NBA, you need stars. The best way to get stars is to draft them, but an even better way to get them is to trade for them when you have the means to do so, which is clearly where the Celtics are at this point in time. Failing to do so constitutes missed opportunities, and when you have a behemoth on the other side of the continent that you’re up against, you just can’t let those opportunities slip past.

* * *

* * *

And as I’m writing this blog, I’m now reading about how there is a possible 3-team trade in the works involving Cleveland, Indiana, and Denver. Denver? Sure, because Kevin Love is precisely what a team who couldn’t guard their own shadows last season needs to add to the roster. I get that Denver is desperate to be relevant, but they finished 9th in the West last season and everyone who finished 4-8 has huge question marks this offseason: the Clippers have a new front office head honcho in Jerry West, Paul and Griffin need to be re-signed, etc.; the Jazz don’t know if they’ll have Hayward and George Hill around; the Grizzlies are old and slow, capped out and have no draft assets; OKC has to upgrade their horrible roster and aren’t likely to be so lucky in close games; Portland is in salary cap hell. Hell, if Denver does nothing except stay the course, they could be relevant again simply through attrition. Trading for Kevin Love seems completely unnecessary to me. But as we’ve seen with the trades of Boogie and then Jimmy Butler, you cannot expect actors to act rationally in these situations.

The NBA is drunk this offseason. The Warriors broke the league. They went out and signed KD, stomped on everyone, and now every other team seems to be losing its mind in one way or another. What’s strange to me about the PG13-to-Cleveland rumor is that I still don’t think it makes the Cavs good enough to beat the Warriors, but I guess you can’t blame them for trying. I’ve heard more bizarre rumors in the past two weeks than I can wrap my head around. It’s hard for me to keep up:

* * *

Apart from the weird 1-for-3 Boston-Philly exchange, and Chicago going insane, the NBA draft was basically chalk. Lest you get too excited about the players in the 2017 NBA draft – a draft which is supposedly one of the deepest in ages – I invite to look back at the 2015 NBA draft, which people thought was going to be pretty good, and see what’s come of it in two short years: #1 was Karl Anthony Towns to Minnesota, which was a no-brainer and is still a no-brainer; #2 was DeAngelo Russell, who was so bad in two years in L.A. that the Lakers threw him into a Mozgov salary dump trade with Brooklyn (and while I’m at it, I should give the Swamp Dragons some props here for making that deal, because Russell still has considerable upside and Brooklyn has nothing to lose giving him the keys and trying to develop him); #3 in that draft was Okafor to the 76ers, who will probably get traded at some point this season for about 25¢ on the dollar; #4 was Porziņģis, who shouldn’t be traded but just might be because Phil Jackson is the worst GM in the NBA; and #5 was Mario Hezonja to Orlando, who has basically been a bust. Outside of Towns and Porziņģis, you’d probably have to say the best player to come out of that draft was Devin Booker, who was picked 13th by Phoenix. But otherwise, there are a lot of iffy guys in that draft who, just two years ago, looked as if they might possibly be useful NBA players.

We love the draft because we’re intoxicated by the great opiate that is potential, but the truth is that a lot of good talents will have their careers negatively affected by being drafted by organizations which are completely incompetent. It was pointed out during the coverage of the NBA draft that more All-Stars have been drafted 10th than have been drafted 2nd, which says far less about the players being picked and more about who is doing the picking. To that end, if I had a guess who’d ultimately be the best player in this draft, my guess is that it would be Dennis Smith, who was the 9th pick in the draft and went to the Dallas Mavericks, simply because the Mavericks generally know what they are doing and will put the kid in the most positions to succeed. A lot of those guys we just pointed out in that 2015 draft were put into positions where failure was inevitable. In Russell’s case, his rookie season coincided with the bombast and bluster of the Kobe Bryant victory lap around the NBA and he was subjected to the indifference of Byron Scott on the bench. In Okafor’s case, he was on a team that was designed to be terrible and made no secret of its wishes to be terrible. Guys get hurt, guys blossom late and whatnot. This is all an inexact science we’re talking about here.

Which is why, when you have great young talent, you need to do everything possible to keep it, which makes what’s going on with Porziņģis in New York even dumber. In terms of the most valuable young assets in the game, I’d submit that only Towns, Giannis, and maybe Anthony Davis surpass Porziņģis. He’s that unique, and his upside is that great. It’s not a big deal that Jackson’s fielding offers for him, because everyone is always fielding offers for everyone – former Sonic/Blazer GM Bob Whitsitt always liked to point out that he’d ask about Michael Jordan trades every time he spoke with the brass in Chicago on the phone – but what’s a big deal is that Jackson is perpetually talking about it. By doing so, he’s letting it be known that Porziņģis is available when, by all rights, he shouldn’t be. But this is how it goes with Phil, who is completely tone deaf and out-of-step with the modern game, and whose incompetence as an exec has called into question whether his success as a coach really was little more than rolling the ball out for his superstars, since his intelligence and judgment seem to have been greatly overstated. Jackson got himself into a huff when Porziņģis skipped his exit meeting at the end of the vortex that was the Knicks 2016-2017 season – an act which Porziņģis did because he didn’t care for the way that Jackson was running the team, of course, and particularly in response to the ways in which Phil has constantly devalued his team’s best player, Carmelo Anthony, whom he’d like to trade but cannot because of the no-trade clause which Phil foolishly handed him during their last negotiation. It’s all a mess.

The problem with letting it be known that Porziņģis is available is that, because of his rookie scale contract, literally every team in the league can afford him including those over the cap and the tax lines, meaning Phil is going to field 100 offers, probably 98 of which will be bad and, quite possibly, one of which he’ll foolishly accept. In response to the current state of affairs, most of the Knick fans that I know have either developed even more damaging drinking problems than they already possessed, or have simply thrown up their hands and given up on watching basketball entirely. Come back, Knicks fans! Come back! It’s not that bad! There are brighter days ahead in … well, it’ll happen at some point, I’m sure of it …

And to all of my faithful readers out there who may have lost faith in the NBA here of late, as the Warriors have stomped on everyone’s faces and gone 16-1 to win an NBA title with a roster that appears set to dominate the league for the next 3-5 years, I say this: all of this is cyclical and nothing is forever. I’m reminded on the fabulous This Day in Suck twitter account that it was on this day back in 2009 that the Golden State Warriors drafted Steph Curry. Things improved after that, suffice to say. The franchise was SO DIRE back then. Seriously, you have no idea how hopeless this team was. You really have no idea. And here we are, eight years later, with the Warriors being arguably the single-most dominant and most marketable franchise in all of sports, an entity which is going to be worth about $4.5 billion when their new arena opens in downtown San Francisco and whose Q rating is so high that any sort of fanciful notions from the past of taking away the Golden State moniker have been thrown out the window. None of this was ever expected, none of it could have ever been anticipated.

There is zero guarantee that will happen to your team, of course, but the point is that it could, in fact, happen. So stick with it and stay the course. And in the meantime, enjoy the game of basketball being played as skilfully and as beautifully as it’s ever been played. What’s not to like about that?

Greatness

Sorry, Toronto, you are not great. (Comic from https://www.facebook.com/nbapls/)

AS HAS been said many times here before at In Play Lose, you need stuff that sucks to have stuff that’s cool. But the inverse is true as well. You need stuff that’s cool to have stuff that sucks. In order to develop a keen eye for failure, you must also be able to appreciate, and embrace, success. True ability to discern that which is bad comes, first and foremost, from the appreciation of that which is good and even great.

We have a great matchup in the NBA finals this year. We have the ideal matchup. It’s the completion of the trilogy, the third go-round between the Golden State Warriors and the Cleveland Cavaliers, each of whom have won one championship before. It gets no better than this. The Warriors are, quite simply, on one of the greatest runs which has ever been seen in the NBA. Cleveland, meanwhile, possesses LeBron James, who is the greatest player in the history of the sport of basketball.

And I make those two sentences being fully aware of the legacy of Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls from the 1990s. We continue to be inundated with 90s nostalgia about the NBA for a simple reason – most of the former player pundits dominating the airwaves came from the 1990s, which was the point in time when NBA basketball went from being simply a sport in this country to transcendant entertainment. Those guys developed star power and as such, their version of NBA history carries weight in the modern day. But the truth is that the game has been radically altered and shifted in the times between the Michael Jordan Bulls and the Steph Curry Warriors. Players today are so much better. My god, are they ever better. Players are faster, are more athletic, are better shooters and technicians, and the basketball IQ is off the charts.

I’ve pointed this out before but it bears repeating: watch any New York Knicks game where the players are running The Triangle offense. Ignore, for the moment, the fact that the Knicks, as presently constructed, wouldn’t look good running any offense at all, but just think about the philosophy and the ethos and the approach of the Knicks compared to what everyone else is doing in the league. The Knicks look prehistoric. What they’re doing makes no sense at all in the modern game. Okay, well, the Knicks prehistoric offense was cutting edge in the 1990s when the Bulls were running it. It was a schematic advantage on top of a talent advantage which turned the Bulls into 6-time champions. But today? It’s so old school as to be worthy of being condemned to the dustbin of history. Every team in the NBA learned from the Bulls, just as every player learned from Michael Jordan and improved upon it. I find any and all discussions about “MJ vs. LeBron” and “1990s Bulls vs. 2010s Warriors” to be laughable. If they played head to head, the Warriors would sweep the Bulls and wipe the floor with them. And so would the Cavs, for that matter.

It’s too bad that, in order to get to this point, we had to endure almost two months of terrible playoff series. The NBA playoffs have been terrible, mainly because of injuries. The Cavs faced Toronto without Kyle Lowry and Boston without Isaiah Thomas. The Warriors played Portland missing Nurkic, Utah without Hill and without a healthy Gobbert, and San Antonio minus Kawhi and Tony Parker. Attrition was brutal this year. But that happens sometimes. This contributed to the fact that both the Cavs and the Warriors rolled through the playoffs: the Cavs went 12-1 in their three series, while the Warriors went 12-0 and are riding one of the more astonishing streaks imaginable – they last lost a game where their four All-Stars played significant minutes on Feb. 4 against the Sacramento Kings.

So the playoffs were garbage, but the end result is great. It’s absolutely great and I want to see it. On the one side, you have LeBron, who is the best ever, and Kyrie Irving, who is the most creative shot maker in the NBA. On the other, you have four All-Stars and the most fearsome collection of talent in league history. This is what I want to see.

But apparently, this isn’t what a lot of people want to see.

I’ve read countless articles and hot takes claiming that the Cavs and, most especially, the Warriors are “ruining” the NBA. How exactly are they doing that? By being great? In the case of the Cavs, I do think they dogged it a little bit during the regular season. Or, more to the point, the Cavs conserved their energy. The Cavs can only go as far as LeBron can take them, and LeBron plays more minutes per game than just about anyone in the NBA, and has done so for most of the past 14 seasons. LeBron needs to conserve energy, and necessarily does so during the year on the defensive end of the floor – an understandable move on his part. As such, an already not very good defense became a bad one, and the Cavs lost a lot of games during the season. It’s still a bad defense, mind you – one which is going to the Cavs beat in this series – but a locked-in, full throttle LeBron on both ends of the floor can be devastating, and has been in these playoffs. It’s a stars’ league, in the end, and no star is greater than LeBron. His performance in last season’s Finals is enough to make people conveniently forget about the ways in which his opponent this year has upgraded. “Hey! LeBron was down 3-1 last year and won, so obviously he can do it again!”

The Warriors, meanwhile, have ruined basketball by constructing a super team. Okay, so, let’s review how that super team was constructed, shall we? And this is an important point in a modern NBA where far too many people are obsessed with the folly that is potential you can obtain through the NBA draft to the extent that teams are tanking for 3-4 years in order to amass draft picks. The Warriors, indeed, drafted three of their All-Stars: Steph Curry was the 7th pick in the draft, Klay Thompson was the 11th pick in the draft, and Draymond Green was the 35th pick in the draft. That, right there are three of the 20 best players in the NBA, and 50 players went before them in the draft. Seriously, go ahead and look up those three NBA drafts and tell me how many of the 50 players selected before Steph, Klay, and Dray, you would actually want. There are some good ones, of course, but nobody, and I mean nobody, could ever foresee Steph morphing into the transcendant, game-altering, geometry-altering talent that he became.

Now, of course, at the beginning Steph contributed to the endless Warriors malaise by being hurt all the time. He was hurt so often that he signed a contract which was the best he could get at the time, one which makes him, without question, the single-most underpaid player in all of professional sports – which, combined with a spike in the NBA salary cap, freed up the Warriors to sign Kevin Durant. The Warriors signed 2015 Finals MVP Andre Iguodala as a free agent only after dealing away multiple first round picks to the Jazz in exchange for the Jazz being willing to take on the terrifyingly bad contracts they had doled out to Andris Bedrins and Richard Jefferson. The bench is full of reclamation projects: Shawn Livingston suffered the worst injury I’ve ever seen (I refuse to link to the video), Javale McGee was nearly laughed out of the league, Ian Clark was a D-Leaguer. And what does it say about the stupidity of the infatuation with the NBA draft that the Golden State Warriors put the 38th pick in the 2016 draft, Patrick McCaw, in the starting lineup for a couple of playoff games and he looked like he actually knew what he was doing, which could scarcely be said of the bulk of the 37 guys picked before him? Yes, that’s right, the Warriors have constructed a super team, alright, and done so in the worst way imaginable, which is by being smarter than everyone else.

But fans will continue at the Warriors and continue to be sore at KD about exercising his collectively bargained right for determining where he wants to work, because fans always seem to be pro-owners when it comes to the player/owner dynamic of labor negotiations, never stopping to consider what it is that they are actually watching when they go to the arena (hint: it ain’t the owner, no matter how vainglorious he is). Me personally? I love great teams and great games. I didn’t care a whit that it was always Celtics-Lakers in the 1980s. They had the best players and were playing the greatest basketball that had ever been seen on the planet. Give me greatness. Give me the best that the game can offer. That’s not ruining the league. That’s enhancing it. That’s why I want to watch the game.

The NBA is not a league where upsets frequently occur. Quite honestly, I’d say last year’s win by the Cavs was one of the greater upsets in history. If you want upsets, go over and watch the NHL playoffs, which are a crap shoot. The NHL is high variance, the NBA is little to no variance. Which is worse? I don’t know. I found it amusing when, on the eve of the Stanley Cup Final between the Pittsburgh Penguins and the Nashville Predators, I came across an article speaking to the “brilliant roster construction” of the Nashville Predators. (His words, not mine.) Now, let’s take a step back from that for a moment. The Nashville Predators regular season record was 41-29-12: 41 wins, 29 losses, and 12 losses in overtime. So, basically, they were a .500 team. 50% of their games ended in losses during the regular season, and they were a bottom seed in the playoffs who got hot. So, basically, the GM in Nashville constructed a mediocre team which happened to get hot at the right time. And how, exactly, is that brilliant? And that’s not a knock on what Nashville has accomplished in the playoffs, which is cool, but anyone who thinks that’s little more than a so-so club riding a hot streak for a few weeks is kidding themselves.

The NHL playoffs are a high-variance format where, oftentimes, lesser teams beat superior ones simply by gumming up the works and making life miserable. I should know this, because I went to two Stanley Cup Finals games in 1994, a series between the Vancouver Canucks and New York Rangers many around the game consider one of the great Stanley Cup Finals series of all time. The Canucks came a crossbar away from winning a Cup that season – a Canucks team that was a game over .500 and was a #7 seed in the playoffs. And given the two previous years, when the Canucks had 100-point, division winning teams which couldn’t get out of the second round of the playoffs, you can see why a seasoned, vet-laden team like that Vancouver one came to not care a whit about the regular season. So long as they got into the playoffs, they knew they could compete in the postseason tournament – a tournament which, ultimately, is the only thing in the sport that matters.

But we all love these sorts of high-variance playoff runs when it happens to benefit our team, of course, just as my beloved Canucks benefitted in 1994. In a more recent past, the San Francisco Giants last World Series win, in 2014, came when they were an 87-win team that was the lowest seed in the playoffs, and I loved every minute of that postseason. On the flip side, however, I started to sour on the entire concept of the NHL playoffs when the L.A. Kings pretty much dogged it through the entire regular season, finished with a sub-.500 record, won a Stanley Cup, and proceeded to win another Stanley Cup while basically following a similar path. Some of this is my long-standing hatred of the Kings, of course, but when you do something like that, then why do the 82 games beforehand even matter? Why would a fan want to go and watch some meaningless game in February? We have this strange infatuation with the playoffs, when in the case of both football and hockey, it’s really just a small sample size indicative of pretty much nothing they did throughout the year. In that light, what the Pittsburgh Penguins are doing is pretty remarkable. Their 4:1 win on Wednesday gives them a 2-0 series lead over Nashville and they appear headed to their second consecutive Stanley Cup. In the NBA, you can become good enough to overcome the variance. In the NHL, you win in spite of it.

But we’re infatuated with success and championships, of course, so we’re also infatuated with playoff results, even though the entire structure is flawed. It’s nothing like the regular season. There are entirely different dynamics and variables in play. In the NBA, you get to exploit matchups for two weeks in a 7-game series that you would never have much of a chance to do in the regular season. This is why a team like the Toronto Raptors is useless in the playoffs. They are ruthlessly efficient at what they do, which is why they can win a lot of 1-off games during the season, when every team is running their basic sets, but they’re one of the most uncreative offensive teams in the NBA, and in a 7-game series where you have a chance to focus on them and scheme for them, they suddenly become easy to guard. Matchups are everything in the NBA playoffs. The Cavs had more trouble playing against Indiana than they did against Boston and Toronto for a simple reason – Indiana has Paul George, who is 6’9” and a badass and forces LeBron out of his comfortable free safety defensive role, which leaves Kevin Love to look like a defensive doofus and Kyrie Irving to get lit up by Jeff Teague. Neither Boston nor Toronto possessed that sort of player at that position, which meant LeBron could roam around and steal passes and block shots and create mayhem, much as he did against the Warriors in the NBA Finals a year ago – which, above all else, is the reason the Dubs went and got Kevin Durant.

The Cavs would be in the NBA Finals regardless of who they played in the East playoffs, in my opinion, simply because the East was crap – not a single East playoff team had a winning record against the West’s playoff teams during their 16 games in the regular season – but the Bucks and the Buzzards would have been better matchups against the Cavs, possessing the types of players who can give Cleveland problems. As it was, the East was a laughable mess, and Cleveland’s fire power was so superior to who they faced that it could mask the fact they played pretty lazy defense against Boston and could get away with it, as the Celtics couldn’t throw it in the bay and missed an ungodly number of open shots. But there is something to be said of knowing your opposition. As bad as Toronto and Boston played – and both of them played badly, make no mistake – Cleveland has been so spectacular, particularly on the offensive end, that Toronto and Boston playing well might not have made that much of a difference.

And I’m okay with Cleveland being in the Finals, because I appreciated what they did last season in coming back from 3-1 down to win the championship, and because, above all else, I want to see the best. I love great competition. It gets no better than this. There are seven legit NBA All-Stars on the floor in this series. In LeBron, Steph, and KD, you have three guys who will hang up the sneakers and walk straight into the Hall of Fame in Springfield, Mass. You have two of the greatest collections of shooters ever, two teams contributing the most to the very ways in which the game is changing in terms of how its played. What’s not to like about that? You get to see innovation on display in the NBA Finals. You get to see Steph Curry and Klay Thompson stand 30 feet from the basket and actually have to be guarded, which is ridiculous. You get to see the weirdest and wackiest offensive set ever in the league, which is LeBron playing point guard with four snipers stationed 23 feet from the basket, ready to strike a three. This is all great. This is what we should want to see in the finals. Honestly, would the Clippers or the Bucks being at this stage in the playoffs actually be interesting?

The homer in me wants the Warriors to win in four. Hell, I want them to win in three. If they do win in four, however, it’s likely that they do so because they do something great – Steph goes nuts, or Klay drains eight threes, or they decide to play direct and Durant torches everyone. As it is, I think that the Warriors will win the series in five games, simply because Cleveland has at least two terrible defenders on the floor at all times, and I don’t think the Cavs can get enough stops. But I could see the series going longer, simply because LeBron is the greatest player ever and Kyrie makes the most absurdly difficult shots that I’ve ever seen, and because Cleveland is capable of making 20 threes in a game to steal one. I’m not buying any narrative I hear from basketball punditry, all of whom have had far too long to think about this series and have started to try to convince themselves that the Cavs can win, much as football pundits do during the two weeks before the Super Bowl when they conjure up notions like, “oh, yeah, Denver could beat the Seahawks, sure they could.” But I do think the series will be short in terms of games but not in terms of competition. I want it to be great. Even if the Warriors do win in five, it wouldn’t surprise me if many of the wins are close. And in some ways, I want it to go longer. There is so much talent and skill out there on the floor, so much shooting and playmaking. This is, ultimately, what you want to see if you’re a basketball fan. It doesn’t get any better than this.

Let’s ball.

The Rajon Rondo I'll Remember

Today, we are happy to offer a guest column from Evans Clinchy, who is a Friend of The Lose despite the fact that he took a platter of oysters from me in a bet on how many games OKC would win in the first half of the NBA season. I refer to him as “Evans Ainge” because he’s a long time Boston Celtics guy, and I bounce all sorts of weird trade ideas and scenarios for the C’s off of him, to which he usually replies with things like, “Who are you again?” and, “Do I know you?” Evans is a seasoned vet on the NBA beat, both in New England and in the Pacific Northwest, and you can find him online at twitter.com/evansclinchy and also at evansclinchy.tumblr.com.

THEY say a picture is worth a thousand words, which means simple arithmetic dictates I shouldn’t even bother writing this piece. The animated GIF you see above basically constitutes a mammoth essay – tens of thousands of words – about how I want to remember Rajon Rondo.

That play took place seven years ago today. It was May 9, 2010, and the Celtics were down 2-1 in their second-round playoff series against the Cavaliers. Game 4 was a big nationally televised showdown on a Sunday afternoon. It was Mother’s Day. It was a must-win game for the Celtics, and a chance for the Cavs to move one step closer to that elusive first championship.

It was a game Rondo would absolutely own.

For that one afternoon, it felt like the best basketball player in the universe was in the building and LeBron James was too. LeBron in 2010 was just about at his peak. He’d just won the second of his four MVPs. He was everything to those Cavaliers – their emotional leader, their leading scorer, playmaker, defensive Swiss Army knife. He was the clear best all-around player in the game. But for one day, Rondo out-LeBronned LeBron. He stole the show. He finished that afternoon with 29 points, 18 rebounds and 13 assists, carrying the Celtics to a season-saving win. Those numbers – only Oscar Robertson (32-19-13) and Wilt Chamberlain (29-36-13) had ever matched all three in a playoff game. Not even King James was that good.

That win swung the series. The Celtics had been down 2-1; first they evened the score, then they blew the Cavs’ doors off in a shocking Game 5 blowout in Cleveland, then they ended it in Game 6 at home. At series’ end, LeBron famously ripped his Cavaliers jersey off in the hallway heading to the TD Garden visitors’ locker room. That summer, he left for Miami. The NBA’s monarch had been chased out of town by a 24-year-old point guard who couldn’t shoot.

That’s the thing about peak Rajon Rondo. He wasn’t just disgustingly good at basketball (although he certainly was that) – more than that, he was historically significant. That Mother’s Day in 2010 propelled the Celtics to the NBA Finals, where they came within one ridiculous Ron Artest 3-pointer of winning their 18th championship. It also brought the 2000s Cavaliers, once a true NBA powerhouse, to their knees.

A lot can change in seven years. I’ve witnessed this phenomenon up close. In 2010, I was a Celtics beat reporter, following the team around and chronicling their Cinderella playoff run. I was in the front row for Doc Rivers’ postgame news conference on May 9 when he sat and gushed for minutes on end about how he’d never seen a point guard like Rondo before. In 2017, I sat alone in a musty dive bar in Washington, D.C. and sipped a DC Brau Public Pale Ale as the Chicago Bulls, with Rondo watching from the bench, blew a 2-0 series lead and were eliminated in the first round by the Celtics. The series swung when Rondo fractured his right thumb and sat out Games 3 through 6. In 2010, his presence was enough to slay giants; in ‘17, his absence paved the way for the mercy killing of a shitty pseudo-playoff team that all of America was praying would go home anyway.

It was a slow burn that brought us to this point. Rondo stayed in peak form for another couple of years after that magical 2010 run; he was an All-Star and the best player on a strong East contender in 2011 and 2012, taking the Celtics as far as he could each spring before being eliminated by LeBron’s Heat both years. The downfall began in 2013. On January 25, he drove to the basket late in a Friday night game against the Atlanta Hawks and tweaked his knee; he played 12 more minutes on the bad leg before the night was done. That weekend, he discovered he’d been playing on a torn ACL. He would miss almost a full 12 months before returning the following January. He wasn’t the same after that; he’d lost a step athletically, and he also wasn’t flanked by multiple Hall of Fame teammates. The Celtics had begun a rebuild in his absence.

Eventually, that rebuilding effort grew to include shipping Rondo away. He went to Dallas, where he fit so poorly that coach Rick Carlisle basically told him to stay home from a playoff game in April 2015. From there, he signed a make-good contract for one year in Sacramento. It turned out to be a make-mediocre; he averaged 12 points and 12 assists a game, but also alienated teammates and coaches and got in a heap of trouble for outing a gay referee by directing ugly homophobic slurs his way during a game. Through it all, Rondo remained just barely employable enough to get another gig, signing with the Bulls last summer.

This year was odd. The Bulls got off to a hellacious start, going 8-4 in their first 12 games and boasting the top offense in the NBA. Rondo was a key part of it. Then the losing started, and so did the pouting. Rondo and Fred Hoiberg soured on one another fast; Hoiberg benched his starting point guard by New Year’s. By late January, Rondo was taking to Instagram to publicly vent about the Bulls’ veteran leadership, stating in no uncertain terms that Jimmy Butler and Dwyane Wade couldn’t lead a team like his old pals in Boston, Kevin Garnett and Paul Pierce. The Bulls were in disarray. They were just barely treading water in the East playoff race, and even when they won, it was the ugliest show on hardwood.

Rondo randomly had a late-season renaissance in March; he dropped 24 on the Raptors one night (including four 3-pointers!) and had 15 assists in a surprising win over the Cavaliers. He led the Bulls back from the brink of playoff death, and they snuck into the playoffs as a No. 8. He then averaged a double-double in Chicago’s first two playoff games against Boston, his former team; then, of course, came the thumb injury. The Bulls are now outside the playoffs looking in, and a summer of uncertainty awaits. The team has an option to bring Rondo back. They probably will, but they’re not exactly thrilled about it. Rondo is past his prime, and the Bulls don’t have any viable path to being truly competitive again, with or without him.

It’s weird to think about how we got here. Rondo’s star has fallen so far, so fast. He’s still only 31 years old today. He could still be a great player! Why isn’t he?

This question has been asked and answered to death over the last three years. The debate has raged on since 2014, when Rondo returned post-ACL to a young, rebuilding Celtics team that was in the tank. They had a 15-game stretch late that spring when they went 1-14, and questions about Rondo’s decline began seeping into the national discourse. Some speculated that it was the injury – he just wasn’t the same player without two healthy knees. Others cited his surroundings – without Garnett, Pierce and Ray Allen to pass to, what’s a pass-first point guard to do? Still others theorized that the game had passed Rondo by. He was a non-shooting perimeter player in a fast-modernizing NBA that valued shooting at all five positions. The game was no longer holding a place for him.

Me, I’m tired of the debate. I think it’s clear at this point that the correct answer is some combination of all three, and I don’t have much interest in quibbling over precisely how much of each thing it is. I do think that there’s also a fascinating psychological component there – Rondo was used to being an important NBA player from a young age, and it became difficult to cope when he was forced to transition into being “just another guy.” Rondo was the starting point guard for a championship team at 22. He outplayed LeBron in a playoff series at 24. When you start your career off with such unmitigated success, it’s hard to grapple with the fact that life won’t always be that way.

I can relate. In a lot of ways, my life has mirrored Rondo’s. He was born in 1986, grew up in the South and came to the Celtics when drafted in 2006; I was also born in 1986, grew up in the South and came to Boston for college. In 2006, I got started writing about the Celtics in a column for my college paper. In 2008, Rondo won a title; my first professional journalism gig was covering the team’s victory parade. In 2010, Rondo was briefly on top of the basketball world, at least in terms of individual stardom; I had a job right out of college covering him, which pretty much felt like the pinnacle of life for me, too.

Rondo had his flaws and so did I. He was a basketball player who didn’t particularly like taking jump shots; I was a journalist who didn’t particularly like reporting. We both could be a little prickly when authority figures rubbed us the wrong way. We both also fell victim to timing and circumstance and luck. Long story short, he’s now a fringe starter on a relatively crappy team and I now have a relatively boring desk job.

I try to avoid thinking of either Rondo or myself as someone who peaked at 24, though. Human beings don’t necessarily have “peaks,” anyway. Time isn’t a flat circle, or however the hell that cliché goes. Life brings all sorts of ups and downs and sidewayses.

Rondo, warts and all, will kinda always be my favorite player. He’s talented and misunderstood and enigmatic and flawed and stubborn and maddening and endlessly compelling. There’s so much there to unpack. I’ll probably never be truly done unpacking it.

I continue to hope for the best for Rondo, even though I know nothing he does now can ever live up to the old days. I’m still a sucker for the little mini-redemption stories, like the one he spun for us in March and April this year. And no matter how far he declines, I still try to remember the good times.

Seven years ago today, Rajon Rondo gave the second-best performance I’ve ever seen in person. (The best was Game 6 of the East finals in 2012, when LeBron dropped 45 in an elimination game and singlehandedly saved Miami’s season on the road in Boston.) I’m still thinking about that Mother’s Day today. I think it’s part of the human condition that we go through life doing our best to conjure up the good memories and suppress the bad ones. The ACL tear, the Dallas fiasco, the Bill Kennedy incident, the Instagram post – I do my best to forget those things ever happened. I try to remember Rondo my way – putting up triple-doubles on national television, faking the King out of his shoes and just generally being a badass. That’s the Rondo I’ll remember.

Upside Down

Giannis gives zero fucks about your wimpy shot attempt

WHAT was most striking about the first round of the playoffs to me was the absence of upside, which goes a long way towards explaining why there were virtually no upsets or any real surprises. There were some great games, to be sure, but one of the reasons that surprises come about in the NBA playoffs is that a young team finally puts it all together and raises their game to a new level. You could argue this is the case with the Utah Jazz, the only lower-seeded team to win a series, a former doormat who have slowly, steadily built themselves into a 50-win team. But I wouldn’t really think of this as being that much of an upset. The Jazz were a #5 seed, but they had the exact same 51-31 record as the Clippers during the regular season. I could see the Jazz winning this series beforehand, even before the assortment of in-series injuries, simply because the Clippers are the Clippers and are prone to throwing up on themselves at the most inopportune of moments.

Which they did, of course, because the Clips are gonna Clip.

But otherwise, the seeds held to form. There were some scary moments for a couple members of the NBA élite here and there – most notably in the Boston-Chicago series, which was one of the strangest playoff series I’ve ever seen – but ultimately the bluebloods prevailed. And I was mentioning before about how you want to see teams progress and take strides and raise their game, what was interesting to me, as a disciple of failure, was just how little game any of the eight losing teams had to raise. There was an absence of upside on display. The vanquished all seem to be asking the same questions here in the offseason: where are we going from here? What are we doing from this point onward?

With one big exception, of course: the Milwaukee Bucks. The Lose loves me some Bucks. Milwaukee got a #6 seed this year despite the fact that their 2nd- and 3rd-best players, Jabari Parker and Khris Middleton, each basically missed half the season. Giannis is likely to be in the 5th-7th range of MVP voting, and with good reason: he was the first player in league history to lead his team in scoring, rebounding, assists, blocks, and steals – an accomplishment which got swept under the rug thanks to TRIPLE DOUBLES! BRIGHT SHINY ROUND NUMBER OBJECTS! Anyway, where was I … oh right, Giannis. He’s a beast. He’s going to win an MVP one day. The Bucks need more shooting and their lack of experience showed in their first-round loss to Toronto in six games, squandering a 2-1 lead and then also squandering a last-minute lead in Game 6 after one of the most inspired runs imaginable, a 34-7 run to erase a 25-point Raps lead. Giannis was dead on his feet and the Bucks were exhausted, so they couldn’t close the deal in Game 6, and I’m annoyed because now we get the usual unwatchable Raptors garbage on offense here in the second round instead of the Bucks against Cleveland, who would have been much more fun. Whereas Cleveland is clearly in Toronto’s heads, the Bucks would have given zero fucks about Cleveland mystique. Giannis gives zero fucks about LeBron. He would have just taken it right at him, hell bent on dunking on him and daring LeBron to actually play some position defense for a change. It would’ve been fun to watch, even if the Bucks were certain to go down in flames.

So we love Milwaukee and everyone in the East should fear the deer going forward. But these other seven first-round losers? Yuck. They’re either going in circles or they’re taking on water. I have no idea what any of them do going forward.

At some point during the bloodbath that was Game 4 in Portland, TNT pointed out that the Blazers have every single player on their roster under contract for next season. If you watched the Blazers at all this season, you wouldn’t think that was a good thing. Portland had the second-largest payroll in the NBA this year, believe it or not, having gone mad last summer and doled out enormous contracts to backup guys who contributed little to nothing this season. It’s not all bad, of course – the Nurkic trade was genius, and Denver also gave them a first round pick in that deal, meaning they have three of those in the upcoming draft. Add Nurkic to Lillard and McCollum and you’ve got something good there going forward, but the rest of the front court is a mess and the backup centers are all sub-zero. There has been talk in NBA media circles about how a model based upon two short guards who can’t defend anyone isn’t sustainable, suggesting that Portland make a deal for either C.J. or Dame. This seems nuts to me, since the drop off from the two of them to the rest of the guys on the roster is so vast, but what do you do going forward?

Memphis is in even worse shape. Pluses are you’ve got coach Fiz, who we love, and Mike Conley is great and so is Marc Gasol. But both those guys are now on the bad side of 30, and those two combined with the albatross that is Chandler Parsons’ contract add up to about $85 million on the books for next season. Parsons had micro fracture surgery on his knee, which is a brutal, last-ditch sort of procedure that rarely leads to positive results. The core of this team is ancient – Vince Carter is 40, Zac Randolph 36, Tony Allen 35 – all three of those guys are free agents, but Memphis has no flexibility. Their young players aren’t very good, and they’ve traded away two of their next three draft picks. Grit & Grind might wind up being ground into dust.

What are the Atlanta Hawks? Did you know they’ve made the playoffs 11 straight years? There isn’t a more vanilla franchise in the NBA than the Hawks, who probably have to re-sign, and overpay, Paul Millsap since he’s the only guy on the roster who is in the top half of the league at his position. The Hawks win with defense, and maybe Schröder’s first round performance against the Buzzards foretells something good going forward at the point, but running out Crazy Legs Bazemore and the ghost of Dwight Howard isn’t getting you anywhere. The Hawks were schizophrenic this season, going on long losing skids followed by long upswings. That they got a #5 seed owed more to continued Eastern mediocrity than anything they did on the court, since nothing about this team makes sense.

The Pacers make even less sense. What was this team was attempting to do this season? They have a superstar, Paul George, who clearly doesn’t want to be there. George is a free agent in 2018, and if he makes all-NBA this season, the Pacers will have the opportunity to offer him the enormous DP extension newly negotiated into the CBA. This is supposed to be a way for teams to keep the stars they’ve developed, but it creates a couple of enormous unintended consequences. Indiana would have the peace of mind of knowing they can basically drive a few armored cars up to George’s house and dump the contents in the driveway, but do they want to spend over $200m on a guy who doesn’t want to be there? And George would be insane to turn that down, of course, but does he want to spend his entire career in Indianapolis? What seems likely to wind up happening with these new DP contracts is that guys are going to sign them and then start demanding to be traded later if/when it doesn’t go well, which just makes the process uglier in the long run. And it’s not going well in Indiana, where the Pacers did no phase of the game particularly well this season and have an assortment of miscast pieces. They actually shoot the ball pretty well from three, but their offense doesn’t play to that strength. Larry Bird said before the season he wanted his team to be up-tempo, but then he hired a coach, Nate McMillan, whose teams have always walked the ball up. The Pacers wound up pushing the pace somewhat out of necessity, playing catchup because the defense wasn’t very good. Bird’s now fired himself, leaving GM Kevin Pritchard to clean up the mess and figure out what to do. Best guess is he tries to move George this summer and start all over, but no one is going to give up the sort of assets Pritchard will be looking for simply to rent George for a season.

The extension George might be eligible for in Indy is the same one that Russell Westbrook will be eligible to receive in OKC, a one-time exemption the league has granted and probably shouldn’t have granted. Lost amid all of the small-town loyalty narrative was the fact that it made good business sense for Russ to sign his previous extension last summer. Given that the entire narrative in OKC this year was about what a loyal servant Westbrook was, were he to now say he doesn’t want to sign up for 5/220 or thereabouts, he winds up looking like the biggest phony that there is. He sort of has to take it, at this point, and OKC has to offer it.

But what are you signing on for if you do this? Westbrook got to be the big dog and stuff stats to his heart’s content, but that’s not a winning strategy in the long term, and anyone who thinks that’s miraculously going to change is fooling themselves. This roster outside of Russ is, well, not very good. Their offensive players can’t defend, their defensive-minded players can’t shoot. I have no idea if anyone on this team is actually any good – Oladipo, Adams, you name it – since it’s impossible to view anything that they did this season outside of a Westbrook-dominated context. And that was by design, mind you – Steven Adams played more than 90% of his minutes with Russ on the floor. It only took 86 games before Billy Donovan decided that maybe he should try putting Oladipo on the point for the second unit to attempt to shore up a bench that hemorrhaged points at every turn. What was most remarkable about Westbrook’s season was the fact that he was able to pull so many close games out of his ass, usually against not very good teams, after his teammates had contrived to get themselves into a world of trouble. That’s unsustainable going forward. Nothing about this model is sustainable. You just can’t continue to win, in the modern game, with one guy who is so ball dominant.

And while I hate the way that Westbrook plays, rip Westbrook all the time for being selfish and padding his stats, and think that the most underrated aspect of KD leaving OKC was the fact that he was sick of playing with Westbrook, this team is so poorly constructed at the moment that Russ going all gonzo was, in fact, the only real way this team could compete. But what the hell do you do now? It made sense to sign Oladipo and Adams to extensions, even though you’re still not entirely sure what you’re getting going forward, but now you have no space and no real flexibility to tinker with the roster, especially since you’ve got a monstrous amount of money invested in Enis ‘Can’t Play’ Kanter. Kanter’s probably your best trade asset, if you can find someone dumb enough to take on a guy who can’t guard a chair. Then again, they did manage to get two rotation players in a trade for Cam Payne from the Bulls, so there are dumb guys out there capable of making terrible deals.

Oh, and speaking of the Bulls …

No argument here

It’s hard to imagine a more colossal failure of an organization, top-to-bottom, than the Chicago Bulls. Literally everyone involved in this team whose name isn’t Jimmy Butler ought to just go away. Their gutless, soulless performance in Game 6 – a 105:83 loss to Boston – capped off a gutless, soulless, clueless season. It’s not just that this franchise clearly has no plan going forward, as they’ve thrown one idea at the wall after another looking for something that sticks, but all of those ideas are, in and of themselves, bad ideas.

The single-worst thing that could have happened to this team would have been if they’d managed to somehow win that first round series with the Celtics, because it would have given the impression that the tag-team, slapstick duo of Gar Forman and John Paxson actually knew what they were doing this season. Instead, the second-worst thing happened, which is they won two games, and now they’re talking about bringing back Rondo to run the point even though he spent a large chunk of the season being persona non grata. Rondo’s still a better option at the point than the half-dozen assorted stiffs Fred Holberg trotted out in his stead, the most egregious of which being Michael Carter-Williams, who has devolved into one of the worst offensive players in the game, and the aforementioned Cameron Payne, whom wound up in the D-League and was inactive for the playoffs after GarPax traded two rotation players – Taj Gibson and Doug McDermott – as well as a draft pick in order to acquire him. The entire axis of weasel that was the GarPax machinations surrounding Dougie McBuckets – first trading five draft assets to get him, then giving him away for a used pair of shoes – should be a fireable offense in and of itself. GarPax have certainly not done any favors for supposed offensive genius coach Hoiberg, giving him a claustrophobic roster of misfit toys to work with, but there was Hoiberg trotting out units in the last two games against the Celtics which had never even played together before, and doing dumb things like benching Robin Lopez for the entire 4th Quarter when Lopez pounding the glass and stealing Al Horford’s lunch money was the primary reason the Bulls won two games in the first place. Any resemblance to a clue in this organization is purely coincidental.

And then there are the Clippers. Aah, be still my foolish heart.

The Clippers achieved an inglorious milestone with their Game 7 flop against Utah, as they became the first team in NBA history to lose a playoff series where they held the lead in five consecutive seasons. Now, obviously, you can’t help it when, in 2016, Blake Griffin and Chris Paul both get hurt in the same game. That’s just bad luck, and it was bad luck that Griffin injured his foot against the Jazz. But the Clippers flat out choked against OKC in 2014, and then they choked again against Houston in 2015 – the two seasons which really were their best chances to reach the NBA Finals, but seasons in which they didn’t even manage to reach the conference finals. One way or another, they always come up short.

The core of this team has been together for six years now and not even got past the second round. Paul, Griffin, and J.J. Redick are all free agents. It would cost around $190m or so to bring everyone back. They’ve got no young players to speak of, they’ve traded away picks, they’ve never developed a decent backup point guard, the success of the bench unit is still dependent upon the one game in four in which Jamal Crawford makes shots. The team is stale, don’t seem to like each playing with each other much, and going nowhere.

But at this point, can the Clippers really afford to blow it up? Given the nature of the crowded landscape of sports in Los Angeles, you need stars to be relevant. Paul’s not going anywhere – in his role as president of the players union, he as much as drew up his next contract while writing up the CBA – and if you’re the Clippers, you probably have to re-sign Blake if he wants to come back, because what the else are you going to do? And sure, the roster is stale, but as it is, it’s a roster worth 50-55 wins every season. It isn’t, however, a roster which is winning an NBA title.

But therein lies the problem for all of these teams. None of them are winning a title any time soon, because the Golden State Warriors aren’t going anywhere, and neither are the Cleveland Cavaliers. The latter may be a little more vulnerable simply because of age, but LeBron is still there and he’s an indestructible cyborg. What any of these teams do going forward is ultimately going to be determined by how they can manage their expectations. As much as I glossed over the bland Atlanta Hawks before, it is impressive that they’ve reached the playoffs 11 straight times. The question going forward for all involved here is what is it they can realistically accomplish?

And this goes back to what we’ve asked time and again here at In Play Lose: how is it that we determine what is failure and what is success? Obviously, everyone wants to be winning championships, but there aren’t a whole lot of those to go around. What’s particularly perplexing about building championship winning teams at the NBA level is how the process is, ultimately, somewhat accidental. Remember, the Cavs won the draft lottery four times, and were able to parlay two of those picks into the trade for Kevin Love to put alongside former #1 overall picks LeBron and Kyrie Irving. The Warriors were able to sign Durant because Steph Curry has the single-most team-friendly contract in all of professional sports due to his constant injury problems early in his career. At no point in the rebuilding of the Boston Celtics did Danny Ainge think, “you know, what this team really needs at its core is a 5’9” folk hero of a point guard.” It’s a baffling and befuddling sort of process. And the salary structure of the NBA sort of necessitates that the best teams – which these eight are, by nature of being in the playoffs – ultimately wind up being punished for their success. Successful talent costs more than unsuccessful talent, of course, and with every win, the value of your players rises, complicated by the fact that your dumbest competitors will likely overpay and force you to overpay as well. The most successful counter to this has been the Spurs, of course, with their steady, relentless, and systematic approach over the past 20 years, but lauding them for that also conveniently ignores the fact that the Spurs struck it rich twice in the lottery, first with David Robinson and then with Tim Duncan. You need great players above all else, and great players are damn hard to come by.

And now I’m trying to figure out where the next wave is going to come from. Remember, no one foresaw what’s come about in Cleveland or the Bay Area five years ago. What’s the next wave? It’s fun to think about but impossible to gauge, simply because the game is changing so quickly. As much as the Cavs’ indifference to defense has been decried this season, there is something to be said for the idea that the NBA is such an offense-driven entity now that defense no longer matters. The league’s collective offensive rating this past season was the highest in the 44 years where such data is discernible. Maybe you can, in fact, win a championship without being able to guard the floor on which you are standing.

What most of the first round exiters seem to share, however, is a collective inability at the moment to take advantage of whatever trend is out there. Reboot, rebuild, reset: whatever you want to call it. Whatever you do in the modern NBA, you’d better do it quickly, because the league rapidly reinvents itself and turns itself upside down, so you’d better not find yourself left behind in the dust.