European soccer/football fans are a different breed though. Fans consider thenselves an integral part of the clubs they support, in a way that doesn't really exist in America. Often, fans are given a say in how their clubs are run. It's just a far closer relationship than you see in the NBA, NFL, etc.
"Damian Lillard, massively-talented but aging and extremely expensive guard for the Portland Trailblazers, demanded a trade."
This is where I feel your argument collapses on itself. These "player empowerment trades" are almost always good for the team trading the player in question. Portland has been trying to get off Lillard for multiple seasons, waiting for him to wave his hand and say "TRADE ME", so they could get some assets back and move off his insane, getting-paid-$60-million-at-age-37 contract. He did it, made some requests that they ignored, and now they're better for it.
Is there any world where it's better for Portland, with Scoot Henderson and Shaedon Sharpe in the fold, to hold onto Damian Lillard getting paid that much money well past his prime? I don't think so. They had to trade him, but they couldn't do it without his permission else they'd piss off their fanbase.
Why would a kid become a Pacers fan? Because the Nuggets just won a title and they have the best player in the league. Milwaukee won a title and they are the team with Giannis and Lillard now. Cleveland won a title and had Lebron on their team for 12 total years. The Spurs were the best team in the sport for 20 years. The league is basically this - if you have an organization that wins, you typically hold onto players. If you don't, you get stuck in a cycle of trading decent stars to other teams. That's true whether you're in OKC or New York or LA.
There are way bigger problems structurally for the NBA than this, and it sounds like a management red herring to distract from the fact that bad ownership results in losing more than any other factor.
Lots could be said here - Gianni's literally just said that he would force his way out if he didn't get what he wanted - but the big problem is circularity. "Good teams keep players," but teams are good because they can keep players, and it's just objectively true that it's far easier for the Heat or Lakers to keep star players.
If "player empowerment" is about stars dictating the direction of their franchises rather than simply demanding trades to particular teams, this isn't even the first time Giannis has effectively used his leverage to league-changing results. In 2020 Milwaukee got embarrassed in the second round, with Giannis up in a year and waffling on signing his extension before hitting free agency: they get him Jrue Holiday, he extends a month later, they win a title that season. This year they got embarrassed in the first round, and Giannis can opt-out after next season and has not yet signed the max extension on the table - so they trade Jrue for Lillard.
Meanwhile, my Sixers have spent so much time dicking around with Embiid's prime that half our fanbase is resigned to acting as if he's ALREADY requested a trade to the Knicks or Heat.
"Teams are good because they can keep players, and it's just objectively true that it's far easier for the Heat or Lakers to keep star players."
IDK - Lebron left the Heat because they couldn't put a team as good as the Cavs together. Once they saw he couldn't win, he was out. KD left NYC to go to... Phoenix?
The argument isn't really circular at all. Denver, despite their market, has done a good job filling out a roster around Jokic and made it possible for him to win a title there. Washington has done no such thing and has been famously mismanaged for, what, 30 years? So then the obvious happens - Jokic stays in a place that offers him a really good chance to compete while Beal asks for a trade because they have no interest in competing. Charlotte has not sucked for 20 years strictly because they haven't randomly chanced upon good players - they've sucked because their ownership sucks. And when ownership sucks, you get players wanting to jump ship. In small markets where ownership/management is good, you don't have this problem.
But please address how these two things are simultaneously true:
- It's terrible for Portland's fans that Dame asked for a trade
- Dame is old and overpaid
IMO, everyone makes out in this exchange. This is a great outcome for all parties.
- Dame gets to go to a winning situation
- Small market Milwaukee gets another realistic shot at a title
- Portland doesn't have to deal with his contract anymore
- Portland's fans, after a decade of Lillard magic, can now look forward to a decade of Scoot (health permitting) and have the upside of Milwaukee's unprotected draft picks (which will likely be very good because Dame will be retired by then, Giannis will be older, and they have limited ways to improve)
It just seems to bad because... everyone in the media is saying it's bad? I don't see the downside.
Not trying to be antagonistic - I love your writing - but just disagree with you on this one.
If Miami's offer was a second round pick swap for Lillard, should Portland have been forced to agree? Because according to your logic, they should have been.
Where do you see that being my logic? I say nothing about Portland being forced to agree to Miami's terms. They clearly weren't forced to do anything - they accepted a deal from Milwaukee.
Could you please address the main gap I see in your argument? How is Dame Lillard old and paid too much, but it's also bad that he's no longer with Portland?
Who said he's old and paid too much? I said he's aging and expensive. You're acting as though the details of this deal are relevant when they aren't. What's relevant is that players in the NBA can force teams that don't want to trade them to trade them, often at discounted prices, in a way that deepens the already-large inequality in the league.
"Aging" implies that he's old. "Expensive" implies that he costs a lot. When you put those two terms in the same sentence, you're indicating that his contract =/= his value. I apologize if I'm misreading, but calling him "aging and expensive" is not a positive thing. Frankly, he IS old and getting older and he IS paid too much.
You're also ignoring the most relevant part of this deal.
"players in the NBA can force teams that don't want to trade them to trade them"
Portland wanted to trade Damian Lillard. Full stop. There is no reason to keep him. They've been looking for an excuse to send him elsewhere for two seasons now. They did not want him anymore, especially if he's going to soak up 35% of their cap. And then they traded him not for a discounted price - they got a lot of stuff back! Stuff that will help them more over the next decade than Damian Lillard will over the next two years.
The reason teams generally agree to do these trades is because more often than not, it benefits them more than it benefits the team receiving the player.
By the time a star player has demanded a trade, he has is often at the end of his prime or post-prime, expensive and his team is usually at the end of their competitive window and likely needing to rebuild anyway.
You have seen teams put their foot down when that equation doesn't make sense for them, like Morey with Harden or the Blazers with Lillard. Trading Lillard always made sense for the Blazers this off-season (Their window is closed), it just didn't make sense to trade him to one team low-balling them and so they didn't.
100%. Portland didn’t want to trade it’s most loyal player - bad optics - but ideally they would have traded him 2 years ago for something like the Rudy gobert package. Dames trade request was exactly what they wanted
First off let me say I love the sports posts because mainstream sports news basically ignores the structural meta that drives so much of how fans ultimately experience the leagues. Looking forward to your future post on the NFL's running back contract crisis.
But imo the culprit in this specific case is the max contract provision. The NFL would probably have a similar super team issue if it weren't for the fact that quarterbacks are actually able to seek market-clearing salaries. If KC were limited in how much they could pay Mahomes, he would have much more incentive to go to a more desirable city. I don't buy that the NBA isn't able to market players from small markets since LeBron was their biggest star for years playing in Cleveland, though I suppose that's ancient history now so maybe not relevant.
Getting rid of max contract would help a ton for parity. If Lebron wants 100 million a year, he’ll get it, but then can’t complain when he’s got no help.
Not sure how eliminating one salary cap hit helps. Doesn’t that just give an unfair advantage to teams with older superstars in their primes, since the super max is a much bigger cap hit than the max?
This comment expressed 90% of what I wanted to say, but I will add 3 additional items: 1) the max contract effectively acts as a redistribution from the absolute top talent to the fringe and deep bench players. As absurd as the supermax salaries are on paper, 35% of the salary cap and already reaching into $50+ million a year, they do likely undervalue the true superstars on court and off court value. Now not all max players are undervalued. As a wizards fan, I clearly think Beal is overpaid on his deal. 2) player empowerment only works for the NBA upper class. Austin Rivers made this point recently on Bill Simmons podcast, but role players (much less guys barely hanging onto the roster) do not get to demand trades or come up with spurious injuries to avoid fulfilling their contractual obligations. Finally 3) the NBA, and sports leagues generally, increasingly rely on national broadcast rights as the primary driver of revenue. In this paradigm small market fans don’t really matter, especially with regional sports networks either going bankrupt or barely hanging on. Gate revenue is roughly 20% of total revenue, though this surely varies widely, with teams like the warriors actually reaping large gate receipts during long playoff runs with exceptionally high ticket prices. Nevertheless, in a model driven by TV packages, themselves driven by advertising dollars, the main thing that keeps the NBA perpetual motion machine running is how much advertisers value NBA fans. On this point the NFL seems to be in a robust place to continue demanding high TV deals, I think roughly 80% of the highest rated network TV events are football games, but the NBA, I think, has a less robust hand to play in future negotiations.
`As a wizards fan, I clearly think Beal is overpaid on his deal.'
Not our problem, anymore! Horrible timing and lackluster return(?), though, which is in keeping with the tradition of general incompetency at the wizard's front office.
Hopefully this new front office regime will be able to keep Leonsis committed to a full rebuild. Leonsis' record as an NBA owner is pretty putrid, but the Caps have been a near-model franchise during his ownership, though perhaps that is just downstream of having a generational talent as a franchise anchor.
i think ultimately sports are only fun if you can watch a game and care who wins and loses that game. sports news should focus even more on game highlights and strategy, not managerial decisions. normal sports fans should not understand or have opinions on how to financially structure player contracts. people need to be fans of the game of "basketball" not "managing a basketball team over multiple seasons".
increased gambling and real-money-fantasy is bad overall but at least may help with this. I think it would improve the "tank/rebuild" cycle, where at root everyone who doesn't win the championship is treated as an equal loser, so you may as well go all-out to try to build a superteam, or else give up.
I’d argue that the player empowerment/mobility thing is exactly the type of thing that engages casual fans. You may not understand a Spain pick and roll or the CBA, but you know that it’ll be exciting the first time the Bucks and the Heat play this year.
Narratives and drama engage casual fans. Player mobility continually creates fresh narratives and drama.
ideally most games between two NBA teams would be exciting, and the narratives and drama would be related to on-court action.
that's a tough ask for baseball, but for basketball it just seems very doable. if you watch an NBA game, amazing athletic feats happen constantly that don't require subtle knowledge of the sport to understand.
Depends on the team and the players, right? Denver - super fun to watch. Charlotte? Not so much. And sometimes, good basketball is boring. For whatever reason, I’d rather watch the Thunder than the Celtics, even though the Celtics are consistently excellent. But that’s always been true. Outside of the 2014 team, which was amazing, the Spurs were consistently great and consistently boring. Just depends on the personnel.
I understand very little about the mechanics of basketball beyond the most basic rules, but I absolutely love the drama. The first time my Raptors play against the Sixers this year, I am turning the game on early and watching all those damn interviews because of the Nick Nurse drama.
I don’t think the next generation of sports fans consumes sports in the same way as older sports fans. My son is twelve, and plays hockey, basketball and baseball, but I have a hard time getting him to watch a full game of anything with me. He knows a lot of his favourite players through the PS5 and through Fortnite, and he loves watching highlights, but unless we are at a live event, sitting down and watching a full game is just not something he wants to do. Unless sports leagues can find a better way to monetize the more casual fans of his generation, the problems with the player empowerment era might solve themselves, as nobody will be giving out monster contracts for televised games that nobody is watching.
Give it time. I gained more of an appreciation for live sports thanks to video games. Madden gave me more of an appreciation for football strategy. Ditto with MLB The Show and baseball.
It's not social. All the boys gathering at someone's house for the Big Game/party just doesn't happen the same way. (The downside of sports being available everywhere?) Also, it used to be if you wanted to know what happened, it was either catch the game on the one station carrying it, or read about it in the paper next day; now, all the "good parts" are available immediately on multiple websites/channels. I don't know about attention span; people happily watch soccer, which is 89 min of kicking a ball around, with 1 min of scoring drives.
And actually going to the game will run you hundreds of dollars. The most fun I've had watching sports the last few years has been minor league games; $8 seats, $2 hotdogs, and the players are happy to chat with fans.
I think this is an important point and it's something I think Freddie got wrong in his post. I can't speak for all kids, but from what I've seen from my son (7) and his friends, kids love sports as much as they always have. They just consume professional sports differently.
They don't really follow teams, they follow players. In a sense player empowerment doesn't change things too much for them - a Dame fan will like Dame as much in Milwaukee as they liked him in Portland.
This is sacrilege to someone like me, who grew up believing you could only support your home team. I don't think it's going to undermine the long-term popularity of the league, though. The small market teams will continue to flourish with their share of TV revenue earned by a league that sells big stars in glamorous places.
I definitely think following a player instead of a team is more prevalent in NBA fandom than in other sports. The NHL, MLB, and NFL fandoms still seem to be more city-orientated. Though, because we don't live in a major centre, you can kind of pick and choose your team, and so you tend to gravitate towards the team your favourite player plays for, hence why my son is a KC Chiefs fan, even though we live thousands of miles from Missouri.
Old man here, I can’t watch whatever game they’re playing now in the NBA. I swear their biggest problem is more about the game itself, not the labor rules. Instead of new labor rules how about call a travel now and then!? Compare pro football to college football, the games are identical except the quality is higher in the pros as you’d expect. Do the same between college and pro hoops, they are not anywhere near the same thing. Except maybe the 4th quarter in game 7 of the finals magically looks like basketball again. Rant over :)
Im the opposite. Lots of people prefer college basketball. I started watching the NBA as a kid and then tried to get into March Madness - it’s harder to do that way, because the difference in skill level becomes glaringly obvious. So many whiffed layups and open threes, bad turnovers, junked offensive possessions...tough to watch.
Did you watch Denver last year? That was beautiful basketball by any standard and any era. Jokic is pure joy to watch.
I used to be really into college basketball, but the level of play has really declined. Also, following an individual team kind of sucks now because transferring between teams is so easy. I still try to follow Maryland, but every season there are so many changes in players I barely even known who's on the team at any given time. I support college players getting paid. Just pay them salaries with real contracts rather than this transfer carousel.
Yeah, one and done played a big part in that. Hard to play high level basketball with a bunch of 18 year olds who just met. And you’re 100% right, the transfer portal is creating the exact same thing in college sports. I think it’s just less noticeable because
a)college sports has always had more frequent turnover because you don’t have college stars for 10 plus years
b) colleges have a built in fan base from alumni, which is an inherent loyalty advantage that pro teams lack
Yeah, this. I grew up in Kentucky, obviously a fan of college ball, really cultivated a love of basketball generally. College ball has become unwatchable. 5 guys on the court who look like they met this morning and have never practiced together.
The NBA is far superior. Yes you have to have a superstar, but the title goes to teams who play team-oriented basketball while integrating that star. All of the super-teams that tried his turn-my turn, and never developed a team game, crashed and burned.
I’d ascribe most of the differences you point out to the pro basketball “no defense” rule. And maybe they make more layups because THEY CAN TAKE EXTRA STEPS WITHOUT DRIBBLING! BTW, I’m mostly kidding, I can see how pro basketball can be entertaining, I’m just used to a different way of playing.
Im sure it must piss Allen Iverson off to no end that he caught so much flak when he was in the league for a slight carry and now every guard in the league has a four count ‘gather’ step-back three 😂😂
I like it though, in general. Cool dribble moves are fun to watch. And defense still matters, especially in the playoffs. It gets really hard to score, you have to execute a sophisticated offense. See: Miami in the finals
I do think it's fair to say that LeBron's infamous "I'm taking my talents to South Beach" reality TV special wrecked the league for the entire 2010s. It begat Kevin Durant's even worse signing with an already stacked Warriors team.
Fortunately, better days lie ahead. The last three champions were the Bucks, a Durant-less Warriors, and the Nuggets. All three were tremendously fun to watch and didn't rely on being wrestling-style villains.
In both of those cases, ownership was at fault. Dan Gilbert did a terrible job in their first run with Lebron, making it so that Donyell F'ing Marshall was like the second best player on those Cavs teams. The OKC owners cheaped out and traded Harden before his rookie contract was up so they wouldn't have to pay the tax. Do you blame either of those guys for saying "If this is your commitment to winning, I don't have a commitment to you."
They traded Harden because it was widely believed at the time that they could keep either Ibaka or Harden, but not both, and they justifiably kept the rebounding and defender over a third scorer. It just looks bad in hindsight.
They could have absolutely kept both. Ownership would simply need to be willing to pay the luxury tax. They cheaped out and probably cost themselves 1-2 titles, and ultimately KD.
And if the OKC owners can't afford/don't want to afford to pay the tax for a team THAT good and THAT young, then the issue seems to be that they shouldn't be owners, the NBA should have never left Seattle, and the NBA does a bad job of vetting the financial condition of the people buying their teams. The issue is not Kevin Durant wanting to play for a team that has ownership's full financial commitment.
How do you figure? Milwaukee is paying the luxury tax. Cleveland is paying the luxury tax. Denver is paying the luxury tax. Phoenix is paying the luxury tax. They are not in Los Angeles.
The Lakers are actually one of the teams that doesn't spend a lot of money because their ownership group has no other business. All they do is the Lakers.
It's odd to me that you're defending the owners of Chesapeake energy as being too limited by their means. Steve Ballmer spends a lot of money on the Clippers because of Microsoft, not the location of the Clippers. Being in LA is a DISADVANTAGE for him because no one gives a shit about his team. Geography has nothing to do with paying the tax - it's whether the owners are willing to take slightly less profit from all of their revenue sharing to put a title team together.
"And if the OKC owners can't afford/don't want to afford to pay the tax for a team THAT good and THAT young, then the issue seems to be that they shouldn't be owners, the NBA should have never left Seattle, and the NBA does a bad job of vetting the financial condition of the people buying their teams."
Aren't you basically admitting here that some larger markets--like Seattle--have a built in advantage when it comes to paying the luxury tax because they can offset the extra cost through ticket/tv/merch sales? If that extra revenue isn't there you're asking organizations/owners to lose money to put together a contender. How realistic is that when these sports teams are, at heart, businesses?
My Seattle comment was more that they had a good fan base there and then they uprooted the team and gave it to two unproven owners in a city with not basketball pedigree.
I'm not denying that larger cities have an advantage. I'm disagreeing on the degree of that advantage and how it manifests itself in these player transactions. Remember, we're talking about a star player getting traded from Portland to Milwaukee and that somehow leads to an argument that there's insurmountable, structural disadvantages to being a small market team? What?
Yeah, they're businesses, which is why owners should want to build up fanbases. Milwaukee is doing that right now. So is Denver. Cleveland. They have an opportunity with one of the best players in the league, and they're spending a lot of money to win. Many other owners, regardless of the size of their market, do that every few years to build fans in those markets. It comes with being an owner of a professional sports team.
So it should be very realistic for owners to temporarily sacrifice some profit to build fans. If they don't want to build fans and they just want to collect revenue share checks, that's fine, but I'm not going to shed a tear for them when their players want to go somewhere else. OKC made a decision to not pay a little more for a brief period of time - they could've extended Harden and then traded him a couple years later, or Ibaka (which they did anyway) - but they cheaped out. They did the opposite of what Milwaukee and Denver are doing.
Basically, I don't understand why we're all becoming management shills on this issue. These guys are making 10X times their investment if not more selling these teams. Expecting them to pay $20 million more than they usually would to field the most competitive team possible while they have the brief window of a young, healthy superstar is not much to ask. It's penny wise, pound foolish.
Yes, this also applies to the Warriors---sure, the Bay Area has more money than God, but also, Joe Lacub actually spends it! They weren’t a good or successful team until he bought them in 2010. Many have interpreted the new CBA as directly targeting him. There’s no way that at least 2/3 of the other owners would have spent so much money to surround Steph with stars for so long, but it’s also made Lacub even richer. The luxury tax is a good investment if you have a star, and that’s what Milwaukee and Denver understand. Now, Ballmer’s kinda fucked, because he has a very broken star and has spent tons of money trying to uselessly fix him. His ROI is quite bad...
Those teams and championships do slightly diminish Freddie's argument, but the Bucks and the Nuggets were *extremely* lucky to each draft generational/transcendent players outside of the lottery.
Are there recent examples of stars deciding to play in smaller markets (getting drafted into one doesn't count)?
I will note that there is a very specific context for all of those situations that is probably not generally replicable.
Also this implies that small-ish markets are worthwhile only to visit to try to get a title and then flitter to the next opportunity. Why would that be interesting for a fan? Who in Oakland really cares for Durant?
Also, Brooklyn fan? None of those markets are *that* small, especially Philly.
Well, you asked for smaller, and all those markets are smaller than the one they were traded from.
You can say they’re not small enough, but try to remember when Robert Sarver was selling draft picks at the same time the 7 seconds or less suns were a championship team (one of those was Rajon Rondo). He was so fucking cheap he quit on Jalen Smith, an 8th overall pick, two years ago earlier in his contract than pretty much any lottery pick in recent memory just to save cash on an extension.
The relative size of the Phoenix metropolitan area was irrelevant when it came to the salary structure of the team. He was a cheap bastard, and the team lucked out that he was a dirtbag who had to sell to another owner actually interested in owning a basketball team. Now they have Durant and we’re retrofitting them as a “big glamour market.”
And you’re also moving the goalposts. Of course players want to move to winning organizations. Why would they want to move to losing organizations? Btw, My friends in Cleveland love Lebron for 2016 and they pretty much don’t care that he left for La because he gave them a title.
Also meant to add that the big market teams have sucked so much that they haven’t had good players to trade. Before RJ Barrett, the Knicks hadn’t extended a rookie in like a decade. You can’t trade good players when they’re not on your team in the first place.
I don't think it's actually an existential problem for the league. They just need to find the right balance that keeps the small market teams sufficiently competitive against the stacked teams (like a more credible set of Washington Generals).
I think they've got that, for the most part. Sometimes player empowerment falls apart (Brooklyn) or supports parity (Dame to the Bucks). You also have unicorns like Jokic and Doncic propping up some forgettable cities. The super teams are still likely to win, but it's by no means a certainty and I think that's enough.
The issue is that's "what's good for the game" in terms of what makes a competitive interesting sport, and "what's good for the game" in terms of what put butts in seats/luxury boxes are misaligned, with billions of dollars at stake.
Honestly, I don't like professional big-money sports any more; knowing the degree of corruption, and the way they alternatively privilege or chew up and spit out their athletes, plus the way politics gets involved.
I agree with basically everything in this piece, and as my group chat's resident NBA obsessive have been complaining about much of the same thing to my friends for a few years now. My only quibble would be to point out that while LeBatard will always land dead-center at whatever the "woke" position is in sports culture, Amin seems more amused by player empowerment than a supporter of it for the game's benefit. ALSO it's worth mentioning that they're Miami guys working for the same media company, with both a vested and a performative interest in Lillard specifically joining the Heat.
As a diehard Nuggets fan, I feel the need to point out that this is what makes our defending championship squad so special. We were an NBA backwater for almost our enitre existence and over the past few years, we built a champion through the draft, thrifty free agent signings, and smart trades. I don't see Jokic or Murray sabotaging the team when they don't get their way any time soon. Guys like Aaron and MPJ, who have had reputations for being selfish at different points in their careers, have fully bought into supporting roles.
It's an easy choice support them when they meet the Bucks in the finals this year.
He’s an asshole, but he spends money on players and doesn’t Dolan his way into conversations about coaches and players. Yes, fuck the Waltons, and fuck him for acting like he doesn’t have nearly all of his money from marrying one, but he also has done pretty well not fucking up Arsenal, improving the Avalanche and doing something decent with the Rams.
My hatred for him comes from what the NFL allowed him to do in St. Louis. The Rams had a local buyer lined up who wanted to keep the team in St. Louis long-term (he ended up buying the Jags when the NFL jilted him). But the NFL allowed Kroenke to break their own rules to be the Rams owner and move the team again. We all know what happened next. Ultimately he had to pay the city of St. Louis something like $800 million in damages.
It’s amazing how much the NFL bungled getting back into LA. There was one franchise (the Raiders) that had a bad stadium situation and an existing rabid fan base in the city, yet somehow they’re the one that ends up in Vegas because their owner has no liquidity outside the franchise and needed someone to pay for the stadium.
I have very purist sensibilities when it comes to sports, but are the salary cap and the luxury tax not the problem? When the amount of money on the table is limited, it's rational for players to look at the amenities that their new workplaces will offer. In soccer, Manchester, not a very glamorous city, is home to two world-class teams because they're owned by big spenders who compensate players for agreeing to live in a town with bad weather and inferior nightlife. I understand why some might find the idea of an oil sheikh buying the Milwaukee Bucks and outspending every other franchise to sign all the best players unappealing, but that still seems more fair than the dynamic you point out where some teams will always naturally accumulate the best players because they're located in attractive cities. In theory, any team could suddenly become flush with cash and field a strong roster of players willing to move to a boring town for the right price: Manchester City was playing in the third division of the English system ten years before it got bought by Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan. My other idea for fixing this issue is to decouple teams from cities and take the NBA on tour, much like WWE or NASCAR. Each current NBA city could be the host for part of the NBA season, with every team playing a few games at each stop on the tour. Maybe you'd shorten the season so players aren't "on the road" so much; the regular season is too long as it is. That way players could live where they wanted.
I agree with much of what you wrote, but I think you are overstating the small market team issue here: "To repeat the question in the subhead, why would a 12-year-old in Indiana become a diehard Pacers fan, after watching the team for their brief lifetime? What possible hope would they have that the team would be able to consistently attract star talent the way the Brooklyn Nets, LA Clippers, New York Knicks, LA Lakers, or Miami Heat can?"
You pick the Pacers, which have been a static and boring team run in an overly conservative fashion for many years. But that is not a small-market issue, that's a front office issue. Are the Bucks a big market team? Is Denver a big market team? They have two of the best players in the league, have recently won championships, and are favorites for the title. The draft can make "small market" teams into something different. No one thought the Warriors were a "big market" team, they were a laughingstock trash team. I grew up going to games for $10, scalped at the BART bridge, and watched them through blunt smoke in the top deck. Now? Ha. And anyone saying that it was the obvious result - it's the Bay Area! - is playing goofy hindsight games. How about Cleveland? Handwave away "sure get the greatest player of a generation born in your town" all you want, it's still there.
Yes, there are only a few areas that can consistently attract "star talent" in the free-agent / force-my-way manner. How has that worked out for them? The Nets and Clippers have been a hilarious disaster. The Heat have not become what they are in the post-Lebron era because of their ability to steal players from other teams (they got Butler because the 76ers are fools). The Lakers are, really, the only example that you bring up that resulted in success, in a weird 2020 season, after being abject trash for so many years they had a massive pile of assets to use (they hardly underpaid for Anthony Davis).
The freakout about big/small market team divide was really picking up steam when the Clippers looked dominant, the Bucks flamed out, and Denver was broken. The pendulum swings, now it's in the middle in the media landscape, where I think it belongs. Asking why would anyone be a fan of a small market team is doing a real disservice to these teams and I think ignores a great deal of success those teams have had in the last ten years.
As for making the trade demand process formalized in the CBA, there's no incentive from either side to do that. The majority of players got crushed in this last CBA iteration, and "let's create a formalized process for us bailing on our contracts" will require quite a cut. Further, it's only relevant to a small proportion of players. The top-tier stars will always have the leverage to act outside the CBA's confines, whereas the mid to lower tier players just want as much money as they can get before their time is up. My guess is that it'll keep going this way with little changes at the margins, like we saw with this CBA iteration.
Lol well said, pretty much point for point what I just wrote out. I emphasized the exact same thing about the pacers, they literally run their franchise as if the goal is to lose in the second round every year 😂
I think the issue here is that people are lamenting the old model of sports fandom, which involved lifelong attachment to whatever teams you are born close to. Modern nba fandom is more about players than teams. It’s different, but I don’t think it is inherently worse. But if you think it’s the job of the league to win lifelong fans, then yeah, of course player empowerment is bad, particularly for small market teams.
Well, I'm a biased Warriors fan so I will ignore the Grizzlies, since we're apparently rivals or something. But yes, Grizzlies are a good example and, while we're talking about teams with acrimonious relationships with the Warriors, so are the Thunder.
Yes, this also applies to the Warriors---sure, the Bay Area has more money than God, but also, Joe Lacub actually spends it! They weren’t a good or successful team until he bought them in 2010. Many have interpreted the new CBA as directly targeting him. There’s no way that at least 2/3 of the other owners would have spent so much money to surround Steph with stars for so long, but it’s also made Lacub even richer. The luxury tax is a good investment if you have a star, and that’s what Milwaukee and Denver understand. Now, Ballmer’s kinda fucked, because he has a very broken star and has spent tons of money trying to uselessly fix him.
The Anthony Edwards example FDB gave is also interesting---the Timberwolves ALSO are in the luxury tax, MNPS is cold but it’s one of the wealthiest, biggest, and sports-mad (see: Vikings fandom) cities in the middle of the country besides Chicago. The reason why they aren’t Denver or Milwaukee is because they happened to draft a very, very bad teammate (KAT) and then bought Tim Connelly off Denver post-prime so he could make one of the worst trades ever.
European soccer/football fans are a different breed though. Fans consider thenselves an integral part of the clubs they support, in a way that doesn't really exist in America. Often, fans are given a say in how their clubs are run. It's just a far closer relationship than you see in the NBA, NFL, etc.
Freddie says what needs to be said, whether it's Taylor Swift or NBA stars.
"Damian Lillard, massively-talented but aging and extremely expensive guard for the Portland Trailblazers, demanded a trade."
This is where I feel your argument collapses on itself. These "player empowerment trades" are almost always good for the team trading the player in question. Portland has been trying to get off Lillard for multiple seasons, waiting for him to wave his hand and say "TRADE ME", so they could get some assets back and move off his insane, getting-paid-$60-million-at-age-37 contract. He did it, made some requests that they ignored, and now they're better for it.
Is there any world where it's better for Portland, with Scoot Henderson and Shaedon Sharpe in the fold, to hold onto Damian Lillard getting paid that much money well past his prime? I don't think so. They had to trade him, but they couldn't do it without his permission else they'd piss off their fanbase.
Why would a kid become a Pacers fan? Because the Nuggets just won a title and they have the best player in the league. Milwaukee won a title and they are the team with Giannis and Lillard now. Cleveland won a title and had Lebron on their team for 12 total years. The Spurs were the best team in the sport for 20 years. The league is basically this - if you have an organization that wins, you typically hold onto players. If you don't, you get stuck in a cycle of trading decent stars to other teams. That's true whether you're in OKC or New York or LA.
There are way bigger problems structurally for the NBA than this, and it sounds like a management red herring to distract from the fact that bad ownership results in losing more than any other factor.
Lots could be said here - Gianni's literally just said that he would force his way out if he didn't get what he wanted - but the big problem is circularity. "Good teams keep players," but teams are good because they can keep players, and it's just objectively true that it's far easier for the Heat or Lakers to keep star players.
If "player empowerment" is about stars dictating the direction of their franchises rather than simply demanding trades to particular teams, this isn't even the first time Giannis has effectively used his leverage to league-changing results. In 2020 Milwaukee got embarrassed in the second round, with Giannis up in a year and waffling on signing his extension before hitting free agency: they get him Jrue Holiday, he extends a month later, they win a title that season. This year they got embarrassed in the first round, and Giannis can opt-out after next season and has not yet signed the max extension on the table - so they trade Jrue for Lillard.
Meanwhile, my Sixers have spent so much time dicking around with Embiid's prime that half our fanbase is resigned to acting as if he's ALREADY requested a trade to the Knicks or Heat.
"Teams are good because they can keep players, and it's just objectively true that it's far easier for the Heat or Lakers to keep star players."
IDK - Lebron left the Heat because they couldn't put a team as good as the Cavs together. Once they saw he couldn't win, he was out. KD left NYC to go to... Phoenix?
The argument isn't really circular at all. Denver, despite their market, has done a good job filling out a roster around Jokic and made it possible for him to win a title there. Washington has done no such thing and has been famously mismanaged for, what, 30 years? So then the obvious happens - Jokic stays in a place that offers him a really good chance to compete while Beal asks for a trade because they have no interest in competing. Charlotte has not sucked for 20 years strictly because they haven't randomly chanced upon good players - they've sucked because their ownership sucks. And when ownership sucks, you get players wanting to jump ship. In small markets where ownership/management is good, you don't have this problem.
But please address how these two things are simultaneously true:
- It's terrible for Portland's fans that Dame asked for a trade
- Dame is old and overpaid
IMO, everyone makes out in this exchange. This is a great outcome for all parties.
- Dame gets to go to a winning situation
- Small market Milwaukee gets another realistic shot at a title
- Portland doesn't have to deal with his contract anymore
- Portland's fans, after a decade of Lillard magic, can now look forward to a decade of Scoot (health permitting) and have the upside of Milwaukee's unprotected draft picks (which will likely be very good because Dame will be retired by then, Giannis will be older, and they have limited ways to improve)
It just seems to bad because... everyone in the media is saying it's bad? I don't see the downside.
Not trying to be antagonistic - I love your writing - but just disagree with you on this one.
If Miami's offer was a second round pick swap for Lillard, should Portland have been forced to agree? Because according to your logic, they should have been.
Where do you see that being my logic? I say nothing about Portland being forced to agree to Miami's terms. They clearly weren't forced to do anything - they accepted a deal from Milwaukee.
Could you please address the main gap I see in your argument? How is Dame Lillard old and paid too much, but it's also bad that he's no longer with Portland?
Who said he's old and paid too much? I said he's aging and expensive. You're acting as though the details of this deal are relevant when they aren't. What's relevant is that players in the NBA can force teams that don't want to trade them to trade them, often at discounted prices, in a way that deepens the already-large inequality in the league.
"Aging" implies that he's old. "Expensive" implies that he costs a lot. When you put those two terms in the same sentence, you're indicating that his contract =/= his value. I apologize if I'm misreading, but calling him "aging and expensive" is not a positive thing. Frankly, he IS old and getting older and he IS paid too much.
You're also ignoring the most relevant part of this deal.
"players in the NBA can force teams that don't want to trade them to trade them"
Portland wanted to trade Damian Lillard. Full stop. There is no reason to keep him. They've been looking for an excuse to send him elsewhere for two seasons now. They did not want him anymore, especially if he's going to soak up 35% of their cap. And then they traded him not for a discounted price - they got a lot of stuff back! Stuff that will help them more over the next decade than Damian Lillard will over the next two years.
The reason teams generally agree to do these trades is because more often than not, it benefits them more than it benefits the team receiving the player.
By the time a star player has demanded a trade, he has is often at the end of his prime or post-prime, expensive and his team is usually at the end of their competitive window and likely needing to rebuild anyway.
You have seen teams put their foot down when that equation doesn't make sense for them, like Morey with Harden or the Blazers with Lillard. Trading Lillard always made sense for the Blazers this off-season (Their window is closed), it just didn't make sense to trade him to one team low-balling them and so they didn't.
100%. Portland didn’t want to trade it’s most loyal player - bad optics - but ideally they would have traded him 2 years ago for something like the Rudy gobert package. Dames trade request was exactly what they wanted
First off let me say I love the sports posts because mainstream sports news basically ignores the structural meta that drives so much of how fans ultimately experience the leagues. Looking forward to your future post on the NFL's running back contract crisis.
But imo the culprit in this specific case is the max contract provision. The NFL would probably have a similar super team issue if it weren't for the fact that quarterbacks are actually able to seek market-clearing salaries. If KC were limited in how much they could pay Mahomes, he would have much more incentive to go to a more desirable city. I don't buy that the NBA isn't able to market players from small markets since LeBron was their biggest star for years playing in Cleveland, though I suppose that's ancient history now so maybe not relevant.
I’ve been saying for a while the NBA would go a long way to fixing their parity issues by either:
1. Getting rid of the max contract
Or
2. Make one roster spot not count against the salary cap
Getting rid of max contract would help a ton for parity. If Lebron wants 100 million a year, he’ll get it, but then can’t complain when he’s got no help.
Not sure how eliminating one salary cap hit helps. Doesn’t that just give an unfair advantage to teams with older superstars in their primes, since the super max is a much bigger cap hit than the max?
Sure but it opens up possibilities to lure players away as well with an uncapped contract.
This comment expressed 90% of what I wanted to say, but I will add 3 additional items: 1) the max contract effectively acts as a redistribution from the absolute top talent to the fringe and deep bench players. As absurd as the supermax salaries are on paper, 35% of the salary cap and already reaching into $50+ million a year, they do likely undervalue the true superstars on court and off court value. Now not all max players are undervalued. As a wizards fan, I clearly think Beal is overpaid on his deal. 2) player empowerment only works for the NBA upper class. Austin Rivers made this point recently on Bill Simmons podcast, but role players (much less guys barely hanging onto the roster) do not get to demand trades or come up with spurious injuries to avoid fulfilling their contractual obligations. Finally 3) the NBA, and sports leagues generally, increasingly rely on national broadcast rights as the primary driver of revenue. In this paradigm small market fans don’t really matter, especially with regional sports networks either going bankrupt or barely hanging on. Gate revenue is roughly 20% of total revenue, though this surely varies widely, with teams like the warriors actually reaping large gate receipts during long playoff runs with exceptionally high ticket prices. Nevertheless, in a model driven by TV packages, themselves driven by advertising dollars, the main thing that keeps the NBA perpetual motion machine running is how much advertisers value NBA fans. On this point the NFL seems to be in a robust place to continue demanding high TV deals, I think roughly 80% of the highest rated network TV events are football games, but the NBA, I think, has a less robust hand to play in future negotiations.
`As a wizards fan, I clearly think Beal is overpaid on his deal.'
Not our problem, anymore! Horrible timing and lackluster return(?), though, which is in keeping with the tradition of general incompetency at the wizard's front office.
Hopefully this new front office regime will be able to keep Leonsis committed to a full rebuild. Leonsis' record as an NBA owner is pretty putrid, but the Caps have been a near-model franchise during his ownership, though perhaps that is just downstream of having a generational talent as a franchise anchor.
i think ultimately sports are only fun if you can watch a game and care who wins and loses that game. sports news should focus even more on game highlights and strategy, not managerial decisions. normal sports fans should not understand or have opinions on how to financially structure player contracts. people need to be fans of the game of "basketball" not "managing a basketball team over multiple seasons".
increased gambling and real-money-fantasy is bad overall but at least may help with this. I think it would improve the "tank/rebuild" cycle, where at root everyone who doesn't win the championship is treated as an equal loser, so you may as well go all-out to try to build a superteam, or else give up.
I’d argue that the player empowerment/mobility thing is exactly the type of thing that engages casual fans. You may not understand a Spain pick and roll or the CBA, but you know that it’ll be exciting the first time the Bucks and the Heat play this year.
Narratives and drama engage casual fans. Player mobility continually creates fresh narratives and drama.
ideally most games between two NBA teams would be exciting, and the narratives and drama would be related to on-court action.
that's a tough ask for baseball, but for basketball it just seems very doable. if you watch an NBA game, amazing athletic feats happen constantly that don't require subtle knowledge of the sport to understand.
Depends on the team and the players, right? Denver - super fun to watch. Charlotte? Not so much. And sometimes, good basketball is boring. For whatever reason, I’d rather watch the Thunder than the Celtics, even though the Celtics are consistently excellent. But that’s always been true. Outside of the 2014 team, which was amazing, the Spurs were consistently great and consistently boring. Just depends on the personnel.
I understand very little about the mechanics of basketball beyond the most basic rules, but I absolutely love the drama. The first time my Raptors play against the Sixers this year, I am turning the game on early and watching all those damn interviews because of the Nick Nurse drama.
I don’t think the next generation of sports fans consumes sports in the same way as older sports fans. My son is twelve, and plays hockey, basketball and baseball, but I have a hard time getting him to watch a full game of anything with me. He knows a lot of his favourite players through the PS5 and through Fortnite, and he loves watching highlights, but unless we are at a live event, sitting down and watching a full game is just not something he wants to do. Unless sports leagues can find a better way to monetize the more casual fans of his generation, the problems with the player empowerment era might solve themselves, as nobody will be giving out monster contracts for televised games that nobody is watching.
Give it time. I gained more of an appreciation for live sports thanks to video games. Madden gave me more of an appreciation for football strategy. Ditto with MLB The Show and baseball.
It's not social. All the boys gathering at someone's house for the Big Game/party just doesn't happen the same way. (The downside of sports being available everywhere?) Also, it used to be if you wanted to know what happened, it was either catch the game on the one station carrying it, or read about it in the paper next day; now, all the "good parts" are available immediately on multiple websites/channels. I don't know about attention span; people happily watch soccer, which is 89 min of kicking a ball around, with 1 min of scoring drives.
And actually going to the game will run you hundreds of dollars. The most fun I've had watching sports the last few years has been minor league games; $8 seats, $2 hotdogs, and the players are happy to chat with fans.
I think this is an important point and it's something I think Freddie got wrong in his post. I can't speak for all kids, but from what I've seen from my son (7) and his friends, kids love sports as much as they always have. They just consume professional sports differently.
They don't really follow teams, they follow players. In a sense player empowerment doesn't change things too much for them - a Dame fan will like Dame as much in Milwaukee as they liked him in Portland.
This is sacrilege to someone like me, who grew up believing you could only support your home team. I don't think it's going to undermine the long-term popularity of the league, though. The small market teams will continue to flourish with their share of TV revenue earned by a league that sells big stars in glamorous places.
I definitely think following a player instead of a team is more prevalent in NBA fandom than in other sports. The NHL, MLB, and NFL fandoms still seem to be more city-orientated. Though, because we don't live in a major centre, you can kind of pick and choose your team, and so you tend to gravitate towards the team your favourite player plays for, hence why my son is a KC Chiefs fan, even though we live thousands of miles from Missouri.
Old man here, I can’t watch whatever game they’re playing now in the NBA. I swear their biggest problem is more about the game itself, not the labor rules. Instead of new labor rules how about call a travel now and then!? Compare pro football to college football, the games are identical except the quality is higher in the pros as you’d expect. Do the same between college and pro hoops, they are not anywhere near the same thing. Except maybe the 4th quarter in game 7 of the finals magically looks like basketball again. Rant over :)
Im the opposite. Lots of people prefer college basketball. I started watching the NBA as a kid and then tried to get into March Madness - it’s harder to do that way, because the difference in skill level becomes glaringly obvious. So many whiffed layups and open threes, bad turnovers, junked offensive possessions...tough to watch.
Did you watch Denver last year? That was beautiful basketball by any standard and any era. Jokic is pure joy to watch.
I used to be really into college basketball, but the level of play has really declined. Also, following an individual team kind of sucks now because transferring between teams is so easy. I still try to follow Maryland, but every season there are so many changes in players I barely even known who's on the team at any given time. I support college players getting paid. Just pay them salaries with real contracts rather than this transfer carousel.
Yeah, one and done played a big part in that. Hard to play high level basketball with a bunch of 18 year olds who just met. And you’re 100% right, the transfer portal is creating the exact same thing in college sports. I think it’s just less noticeable because
a)college sports has always had more frequent turnover because you don’t have college stars for 10 plus years
b) colleges have a built in fan base from alumni, which is an inherent loyalty advantage that pro teams lack
Yeah, this. I grew up in Kentucky, obviously a fan of college ball, really cultivated a love of basketball generally. College ball has become unwatchable. 5 guys on the court who look like they met this morning and have never practiced together.
The NBA is far superior. Yes you have to have a superstar, but the title goes to teams who play team-oriented basketball while integrating that star. All of the super-teams that tried his turn-my turn, and never developed a team game, crashed and burned.
I’d ascribe most of the differences you point out to the pro basketball “no defense” rule. And maybe they make more layups because THEY CAN TAKE EXTRA STEPS WITHOUT DRIBBLING! BTW, I’m mostly kidding, I can see how pro basketball can be entertaining, I’m just used to a different way of playing.
Im sure it must piss Allen Iverson off to no end that he caught so much flak when he was in the league for a slight carry and now every guard in the league has a four count ‘gather’ step-back three 😂😂
I like it though, in general. Cool dribble moves are fun to watch. And defense still matters, especially in the playoffs. It gets really hard to score, you have to execute a sophisticated offense. See: Miami in the finals
I do think it's fair to say that LeBron's infamous "I'm taking my talents to South Beach" reality TV special wrecked the league for the entire 2010s. It begat Kevin Durant's even worse signing with an already stacked Warriors team.
Fortunately, better days lie ahead. The last three champions were the Bucks, a Durant-less Warriors, and the Nuggets. All three were tremendously fun to watch and didn't rely on being wrestling-style villains.
In both of those cases, ownership was at fault. Dan Gilbert did a terrible job in their first run with Lebron, making it so that Donyell F'ing Marshall was like the second best player on those Cavs teams. The OKC owners cheaped out and traded Harden before his rookie contract was up so they wouldn't have to pay the tax. Do you blame either of those guys for saying "If this is your commitment to winning, I don't have a commitment to you."
They traded Harden because it was widely believed at the time that they could keep either Ibaka or Harden, but not both, and they justifiably kept the rebounding and defender over a third scorer. It just looks bad in hindsight.
They could have absolutely kept both. Ownership would simply need to be willing to pay the luxury tax. They cheaped out and probably cost themselves 1-2 titles, and ultimately KD.
And if the OKC owners can't afford/don't want to afford to pay the tax for a team THAT good and THAT young, then the issue seems to be that they shouldn't be owners, the NBA should have never left Seattle, and the NBA does a bad job of vetting the financial condition of the people buying their teams. The issue is not Kevin Durant wanting to play for a team that has ownership's full financial commitment.
If they were in Los Angeles they would have the money to pay the luxury tax!
How do you figure? Milwaukee is paying the luxury tax. Cleveland is paying the luxury tax. Denver is paying the luxury tax. Phoenix is paying the luxury tax. They are not in Los Angeles.
The Lakers are actually one of the teams that doesn't spend a lot of money because their ownership group has no other business. All they do is the Lakers.
It's odd to me that you're defending the owners of Chesapeake energy as being too limited by their means. Steve Ballmer spends a lot of money on the Clippers because of Microsoft, not the location of the Clippers. Being in LA is a DISADVANTAGE for him because no one gives a shit about his team. Geography has nothing to do with paying the tax - it's whether the owners are willing to take slightly less profit from all of their revenue sharing to put a title team together.
I'm sorry, but if you think teams in Los Angeles have a structural disadvantage in the modern NBA you're not serious enough to keep reading.
Exactly this.
"And if the OKC owners can't afford/don't want to afford to pay the tax for a team THAT good and THAT young, then the issue seems to be that they shouldn't be owners, the NBA should have never left Seattle, and the NBA does a bad job of vetting the financial condition of the people buying their teams."
Aren't you basically admitting here that some larger markets--like Seattle--have a built in advantage when it comes to paying the luxury tax because they can offset the extra cost through ticket/tv/merch sales? If that extra revenue isn't there you're asking organizations/owners to lose money to put together a contender. How realistic is that when these sports teams are, at heart, businesses?
My Seattle comment was more that they had a good fan base there and then they uprooted the team and gave it to two unproven owners in a city with not basketball pedigree.
I'm not denying that larger cities have an advantage. I'm disagreeing on the degree of that advantage and how it manifests itself in these player transactions. Remember, we're talking about a star player getting traded from Portland to Milwaukee and that somehow leads to an argument that there's insurmountable, structural disadvantages to being a small market team? What?
Yeah, they're businesses, which is why owners should want to build up fanbases. Milwaukee is doing that right now. So is Denver. Cleveland. They have an opportunity with one of the best players in the league, and they're spending a lot of money to win. Many other owners, regardless of the size of their market, do that every few years to build fans in those markets. It comes with being an owner of a professional sports team.
So it should be very realistic for owners to temporarily sacrifice some profit to build fans. If they don't want to build fans and they just want to collect revenue share checks, that's fine, but I'm not going to shed a tear for them when their players want to go somewhere else. OKC made a decision to not pay a little more for a brief period of time - they could've extended Harden and then traded him a couple years later, or Ibaka (which they did anyway) - but they cheaped out. They did the opposite of what Milwaukee and Denver are doing.
Basically, I don't understand why we're all becoming management shills on this issue. These guys are making 10X times their investment if not more selling these teams. Expecting them to pay $20 million more than they usually would to field the most competitive team possible while they have the brief window of a young, healthy superstar is not much to ask. It's penny wise, pound foolish.
Yes, this also applies to the Warriors---sure, the Bay Area has more money than God, but also, Joe Lacub actually spends it! They weren’t a good or successful team until he bought them in 2010. Many have interpreted the new CBA as directly targeting him. There’s no way that at least 2/3 of the other owners would have spent so much money to surround Steph with stars for so long, but it’s also made Lacub even richer. The luxury tax is a good investment if you have a star, and that’s what Milwaukee and Denver understand. Now, Ballmer’s kinda fucked, because he has a very broken star and has spent tons of money trying to uselessly fix him. His ROI is quite bad...
I'm from Cleveland and that permanently killed my interest in the NBA. I couldn't even get into it when he returned.
Those teams and championships do slightly diminish Freddie's argument, but the Bucks and the Nuggets were *extremely* lucky to each draft generational/transcendent players outside of the lottery.
Are there recent examples of stars deciding to play in smaller markets (getting drafted into one doesn't count)?
Within the last two years:
KD leaving NYC to go to Phoenix.
Kyrie leaving NYC to go to Dallas.
James Harden leaving NYC to go to Philly.
Bradley Beal leaving Washington to go to Phoenix.
Can't really argue against those examples!
Let me try:
I will note that there is a very specific context for all of those situations that is probably not generally replicable.
Also this implies that small-ish markets are worthwhile only to visit to try to get a title and then flitter to the next opportunity. Why would that be interesting for a fan? Who in Oakland really cares for Durant?
Also, Brooklyn fan? None of those markets are *that* small, especially Philly.
Well, you asked for smaller, and all those markets are smaller than the one they were traded from.
You can say they’re not small enough, but try to remember when Robert Sarver was selling draft picks at the same time the 7 seconds or less suns were a championship team (one of those was Rajon Rondo). He was so fucking cheap he quit on Jalen Smith, an 8th overall pick, two years ago earlier in his contract than pretty much any lottery pick in recent memory just to save cash on an extension.
The relative size of the Phoenix metropolitan area was irrelevant when it came to the salary structure of the team. He was a cheap bastard, and the team lucked out that he was a dirtbag who had to sell to another owner actually interested in owning a basketball team. Now they have Durant and we’re retrofitting them as a “big glamour market.”
And you’re also moving the goalposts. Of course players want to move to winning organizations. Why would they want to move to losing organizations? Btw, My friends in Cleveland love Lebron for 2016 and they pretty much don’t care that he left for La because he gave them a title.
Also meant to add that the big market teams have sucked so much that they haven’t had good players to trade. Before RJ Barrett, the Knicks hadn’t extended a rookie in like a decade. You can’t trade good players when they’re not on your team in the first place.
Honest question: what is the point of having a contract that is so utterly unenforceable?
I don't think it's actually an existential problem for the league. They just need to find the right balance that keeps the small market teams sufficiently competitive against the stacked teams (like a more credible set of Washington Generals).
I think they've got that, for the most part. Sometimes player empowerment falls apart (Brooklyn) or supports parity (Dame to the Bucks). You also have unicorns like Jokic and Doncic propping up some forgettable cities. The super teams are still likely to win, but it's by no means a certainty and I think that's enough.
As a concrete example, Stockton and Malone in SLC with those two back to back Finals appearances.
The issue is that's "what's good for the game" in terms of what makes a competitive interesting sport, and "what's good for the game" in terms of what put butts in seats/luxury boxes are misaligned, with billions of dollars at stake.
Honestly, I don't like professional big-money sports any more; knowing the degree of corruption, and the way they alternatively privilege or chew up and spit out their athletes, plus the way politics gets involved.
I agree with basically everything in this piece, and as my group chat's resident NBA obsessive have been complaining about much of the same thing to my friends for a few years now. My only quibble would be to point out that while LeBatard will always land dead-center at whatever the "woke" position is in sports culture, Amin seems more amused by player empowerment than a supporter of it for the game's benefit. ALSO it's worth mentioning that they're Miami guys working for the same media company, with both a vested and a performative interest in Lillard specifically joining the Heat.
As a diehard Nuggets fan, I feel the need to point out that this is what makes our defending championship squad so special. We were an NBA backwater for almost our enitre existence and over the past few years, we built a champion through the draft, thrifty free agent signings, and smart trades. I don't see Jokic or Murray sabotaging the team when they don't get their way any time soon. Guys like Aaron and MPJ, who have had reputations for being selfish at different points in their careers, have fully bought into supporting roles.
It's an easy choice support them when they meet the Bucks in the finals this year.
No beef with the Nuggets players, but their owner Stan Kroenke is one of the biggest assholes in all of sports.
Totally agree. Calvin Booth and coach Malone and his staff deserve all the credit on the non-player side.
He’s an asshole, but he spends money on players and doesn’t Dolan his way into conversations about coaches and players. Yes, fuck the Waltons, and fuck him for acting like he doesn’t have nearly all of his money from marrying one, but he also has done pretty well not fucking up Arsenal, improving the Avalanche and doing something decent with the Rams.
My hatred for him comes from what the NFL allowed him to do in St. Louis. The Rams had a local buyer lined up who wanted to keep the team in St. Louis long-term (he ended up buying the Jags when the NFL jilted him). But the NFL allowed Kroenke to break their own rules to be the Rams owner and move the team again. We all know what happened next. Ultimately he had to pay the city of St. Louis something like $800 million in damages.
It’s amazing how much the NFL bungled getting back into LA. There was one franchise (the Raiders) that had a bad stadium situation and an existing rabid fan base in the city, yet somehow they’re the one that ends up in Vegas because their owner has no liquidity outside the franchise and needed someone to pay for the stadium.
I have very purist sensibilities when it comes to sports, but are the salary cap and the luxury tax not the problem? When the amount of money on the table is limited, it's rational for players to look at the amenities that their new workplaces will offer. In soccer, Manchester, not a very glamorous city, is home to two world-class teams because they're owned by big spenders who compensate players for agreeing to live in a town with bad weather and inferior nightlife. I understand why some might find the idea of an oil sheikh buying the Milwaukee Bucks and outspending every other franchise to sign all the best players unappealing, but that still seems more fair than the dynamic you point out where some teams will always naturally accumulate the best players because they're located in attractive cities. In theory, any team could suddenly become flush with cash and field a strong roster of players willing to move to a boring town for the right price: Manchester City was playing in the third division of the English system ten years before it got bought by Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan. My other idea for fixing this issue is to decouple teams from cities and take the NBA on tour, much like WWE or NASCAR. Each current NBA city could be the host for part of the NBA season, with every team playing a few games at each stop on the tour. Maybe you'd shorten the season so players aren't "on the road" so much; the regular season is too long as it is. That way players could live where they wanted.
I agree with much of what you wrote, but I think you are overstating the small market team issue here: "To repeat the question in the subhead, why would a 12-year-old in Indiana become a diehard Pacers fan, after watching the team for their brief lifetime? What possible hope would they have that the team would be able to consistently attract star talent the way the Brooklyn Nets, LA Clippers, New York Knicks, LA Lakers, or Miami Heat can?"
You pick the Pacers, which have been a static and boring team run in an overly conservative fashion for many years. But that is not a small-market issue, that's a front office issue. Are the Bucks a big market team? Is Denver a big market team? They have two of the best players in the league, have recently won championships, and are favorites for the title. The draft can make "small market" teams into something different. No one thought the Warriors were a "big market" team, they were a laughingstock trash team. I grew up going to games for $10, scalped at the BART bridge, and watched them through blunt smoke in the top deck. Now? Ha. And anyone saying that it was the obvious result - it's the Bay Area! - is playing goofy hindsight games. How about Cleveland? Handwave away "sure get the greatest player of a generation born in your town" all you want, it's still there.
Yes, there are only a few areas that can consistently attract "star talent" in the free-agent / force-my-way manner. How has that worked out for them? The Nets and Clippers have been a hilarious disaster. The Heat have not become what they are in the post-Lebron era because of their ability to steal players from other teams (they got Butler because the 76ers are fools). The Lakers are, really, the only example that you bring up that resulted in success, in a weird 2020 season, after being abject trash for so many years they had a massive pile of assets to use (they hardly underpaid for Anthony Davis).
The freakout about big/small market team divide was really picking up steam when the Clippers looked dominant, the Bucks flamed out, and Denver was broken. The pendulum swings, now it's in the middle in the media landscape, where I think it belongs. Asking why would anyone be a fan of a small market team is doing a real disservice to these teams and I think ignores a great deal of success those teams have had in the last ten years.
As for making the trade demand process formalized in the CBA, there's no incentive from either side to do that. The majority of players got crushed in this last CBA iteration, and "let's create a formalized process for us bailing on our contracts" will require quite a cut. Further, it's only relevant to a small proportion of players. The top-tier stars will always have the leverage to act outside the CBA's confines, whereas the mid to lower tier players just want as much money as they can get before their time is up. My guess is that it'll keep going this way with little changes at the margins, like we saw with this CBA iteration.
Lol well said, pretty much point for point what I just wrote out. I emphasized the exact same thing about the pacers, they literally run their franchise as if the goal is to lose in the second round every year 😂
I think the issue here is that people are lamenting the old model of sports fandom, which involved lifelong attachment to whatever teams you are born close to. Modern nba fandom is more about players than teams. It’s different, but I don’t think it is inherently worse. But if you think it’s the job of the league to win lifelong fans, then yeah, of course player empowerment is bad, particularly for small market teams.
Memphis is a top seed and, if Ja can stop playing with guns then they have a chance to contend. They draft and develop well, every year.
/biased Grizz fan
Well, I'm a biased Warriors fan so I will ignore the Grizzlies, since we're apparently rivals or something. But yes, Grizzlies are a good example and, while we're talking about teams with acrimonious relationships with the Warriors, so are the Thunder.
Yes, this also applies to the Warriors---sure, the Bay Area has more money than God, but also, Joe Lacub actually spends it! They weren’t a good or successful team until he bought them in 2010. Many have interpreted the new CBA as directly targeting him. There’s no way that at least 2/3 of the other owners would have spent so much money to surround Steph with stars for so long, but it’s also made Lacub even richer. The luxury tax is a good investment if you have a star, and that’s what Milwaukee and Denver understand. Now, Ballmer’s kinda fucked, because he has a very broken star and has spent tons of money trying to uselessly fix him.
The Anthony Edwards example FDB gave is also interesting---the Timberwolves ALSO are in the luxury tax, MNPS is cold but it’s one of the wealthiest, biggest, and sports-mad (see: Vikings fandom) cities in the middle of the country besides Chicago. The reason why they aren’t Denver or Milwaukee is because they happened to draft a very, very bad teammate (KAT) and then bought Tim Connelly off Denver post-prime so he could make one of the worst trades ever.