July | 2010 | Bryan Joiner

July 9, 2010

If everyone always did the safest or most popular thing, the world would be a shitty place*

LeBron James is 25 years old. Twenty five-year-olds can make stupid decisions, and even they can be aware that these decisions may, in fact, be stupid. LeBron seemed to know something was up with his pawing desire to go to Miami. For all the talk of his being a “committee of one,” it seems like there was really a committee of five or six, and at the top was not LeBron, but Gloria James. It was both heartbreaking and totally reassuring that LeBron said his decision finally came down to his mom’s approval. It was heartbreaking because you know there was a last line of defense to talk him out of it, but it was reassuring because it reinforced true loyalty in a scenario where loyalty was being imposed upon LeBron—not at all unconvincingly—left and right. Even Gloria James had to know that her son’s best chance to win a title was with Chicago, and that his chance to write the best story was in Cleveland. But her son effectively asked her if she would be okay with him forgoing both those scenarios to play with his friends in Miami, because it would make him the happiest, and she said yes. Maybe playing in Cleveland so long expanded his vision of what needed to do that he thought playing in Miami would strap blinders on him in a way playing in Chicago wouldn’t have done; maybe he does crave the spotlight, but needs some time off. I don’t know. All I know is that Gloria James trusted in her son’s ability to work these things out for himself. What can I say to that?

Did LeBron “betray” Cleveland? Well, if he “quit” on the team in four of games of the NBA playoffs, as Dan Gilbert suggested in his acidic open letter on Cavs.com, then yes. But let’s not forget than his ending up in Cleveland was the result of a roll of the ping-pong balls anyway. It made a great story because it seemed like it was preordained, but nothing is preordained—that’s hacky sportswriter bullshit that’s no different, spiritually, from the filler for hundreds of stories on James that were written last week. At the same time, he did come to Cleveland, and he is from Akron, and it was a great story while it lasted. And now this.

I think it’s worth remembering that an unhappy Allen Iverson was nearly traded to the Los Angeles Clippers the year before the 76ers made the finals; an unhappy Kobe was nearly traded to the Bulls the year before the Lakers made the Finals; and an unhappy Paul Pierce was almost shipped out of Boston the year before the Celtics won their 17th title. The reports on Kobe, specifically, came so fast and furious it seemed like the next time you refereshed he’d be out of L.A. None of these things happened, but the groundwork was there. If they had been free agents, there’s no question they would have bolted. Cavs fans could say that they didn’t exactly provide the pressure-cooker environment of Philadelphia or Boston, or the dysfunctional one of L.A.; I’m not sure I would believe them. Check out the Cleveland Plain Dealer’s cover this morning. You might not be able to read it, but the arrow pointing to his hand says “7 years in Cleveland. No rings”:

I thought it wasn’t about rings in Cleveland? I thought it was about his hometown. I thought it wasn’t 7 years, but 25. And I thought it was about the promise of bringing a title that lingered despite the Cavs’ “failures” to win it all in the last few seasons. I mean, if you’re going to be so blatant about admitting you were using James as a tool toward your own deliverance, you’re pretty far into the muck.

I can’t really blame the Plain Dealer for playing populist, however; it’s just a shame that there were never really any real adults in this situation. LeBron didn’t act like one; Dan Gilbert didn’t act like one; ESPN’s commentators were almost, to a person, eating shit in the sandbox. LeBron is the most hated man in basketball today, but if you’ve got the energy to get mad at LeBron you should already be 10 times angrier at the NBA for its very often brutally inconsistent, self-aggrandizing, borderline unwatchable product. LeBron James isn’t the system, he’s a product of it, and now he’s going to play with Dwyane Wade in Miami. That’s totally ridiculous and throws everything David Stern has done for the one superstar, one team ethos right back in his face. If it doesn’t get thrown back in LeBron’s face when D-Leaguers are missing wide-open layups on the break, why will we criticize him? He obviously doesn’t care. We do. What I’d most like to see is compelling, fair basketball. If I can’t have that, this will have to do.

•••

* Yes, this is a tweet from last night.

July 8, 2010

Remember Billy Donovan?

Remember when he accepted the head coaching job for the Orlando Magic and came back to Florida within days?

Remember when Billy Beane agreed to become general manager of the Boston Red Sox and came back to Oakland within days?

I’m starting to get the sense that LeBron might, in fact, announce that he’s joining a team other than the Cavaliers tonight. My sense based on nothing but rumor and innuendo and “implications” that Chris Broussard apparently reported out and turned into a story sometime between when I went to sleep at 1:30 and woke up at 7:30, but I get the feeling nonetheless.

What I won’t believe, until the contract is signed, is that LeBron is playing with a team other than the Cavaliers. The self-imposed Thursday deadline isn’t doing him any favors if he hasn’t already made up his mind—why force yourself to make the biggest decision of your life before you’re ready?—and if he has made up his mind, and made it up at the same time he pitched Decision idea to ESPN, it seems to me that it would point him back to Cleveland. I’m not going to read anything into Bronathan’s decision to have this whole thing go down in Greenwich, CT, other than to say that if he wanted to come off as a stuffy asshole, he succeeded.

But all that will be a footnote to history, the same way Ali/Liston II pops up in every discussion of Lewiston, Maine. The real news will be where LeBronny plays basketball. It’s easy to say you’re going to leave home, but it’s harder to do it. I’ll believe LeBron’s gone when I see it.

July 7, 2010

Chris Bosh, -$28 Million Man; David Stern, Superstar

I guess Chris Bosh doesn’t need that $27 million summer house in Southampton. The now-former Raptors’ centerish dude has taken $28 million fewer dollars than he would have made playing (presumably) with LeBron James in Cleveland to play (presumably) with Dwyane Wade in Miami. And thus the free market system has told you something about the relative value of two American cities to one Christopher Wesson Bosh, of Dallas, Texas.

Of course, this wasn’t a perfect example of market forces working their magic. The Raptors could pay Bosh the most, and any other team looking to sign him could pay him $28 million less. The Raptors and Cavs had agreed for Bosh to sign the higher contract and then work out a trade. He didn’t, so they didn’t, and now he’s going to Miami.

All of this makes you wonder how much money would be flying around if there was no salary cap. The NBA system is designed to give superstars incentives to stay on their longtime teams, presumably because David Stern has found that it makes the league more marketable. He’s taken the Michael Jordan effect and spread it leaguewide: Have one recognizable great player on each team, and people will tune in even if they don’t know anyone else on the roster. Best of all, make the league such an enticing draw for advertisers that the best players—the ones whose pay is actually being capped by the limits on maximum contracts—don’t actively bark about their pay being limited, and instead work toward endorsement deals. The league’s increasingly squeaky-clean image—promoted by NBA Cares commercials and enforced by Stern & Co.’s zero-tolerance approach to physical nonsense, on or off the court—helps make these endorsements a reality. It’s the After Artest era, one in which Ron-Ron himself almost single-handedly wins Game 7 of the NBA finals and thanks his therapist on national television.

It’s almost impossible believe that with all the money that’s floating around now that the owners are threatening to lock out the players after next season, and it’s even worse when you know they’d be throwing out even more if they could. You don’t think LeBron would hold out for a contract bigger than Alex Rodriguez’s $300 million deal? LeBron has scheduled a prime-time hour on ESPN to announce his decision. Childhood vanity or innate vanity, it’s still vanity, and by the manner in which teams are falling all over LeBron to procure his services, there’s no reason to think someone wouldn’t nudged an offer at least into spitting distance of A-Rod’s deal. And yet the owners are going to tell you they’re losing money, which they may in fact be doing. There are rumors that they’ve spent so much this offseason because they know they won’t have to pay up, as they are expected to ask for an across-the-board salary cut, owing mostly to dwindling attendance. Knowing David Stern, they’re likely to get it. Mr. Stern doesn’t lose, even if the owners are making an embarrassingly poor case for themselves right now.

Their counterpoint could be that these are simply the costs of doing business, but they’re not. “Doing business” and building a championship team are not, unfortunately for sports fans, the same thing. Profitability has an easily identifiable blueprint: pay as little as possible for players, win as many games as possible and, whatever you do, make the playoffs. Exactly how far you make it in the playoffs doesn’t matter all that much to the bottom line. At some point you are going to run up against someone else’s vanity project, and to plan to beat that team (not the same as actually beating them), takes money out of your pocket at the height of your moneymaking powers. People don’t want to hear it, but if you follow that blueprint, you’ll make money.

Yet rich people continue to buy sports teams and pile money into them, and you don’t become rich enough to become an owner without being a shrewd moneysmith. At some point, owning a sports team could be classified as little more than a vanity project, which would explain owners’ inability to keep their public statements in line with the actions of their teams. They claim to not want to lose money, but most of them are already losing money when compared to how much they could be making if they were, for lack of a better term, “all business.” So what they’re really complaining about is a movement down a sliding scale on which they’ve willingly jumped. I’m not that sympathetic.

At the same time, the NBA’s system does, at least in theory, strike a nice balance between the rabidly free-market system of Major League Baseball and the proscribed, socialistic payout system of the NFL. Baseball embraced the “watch the money” ethos early on, content to sell as many Yankees hats as it can and crush the dreams of every Kansas City kid; the NFL has far too many players to pay to allow any one team or group to monopolize the talent pool. In the NBA, you can do it if you’re lucky, good and plan well. LeBron, Wade, and Bosh won’t be teaming up in Miami, but they could have. The resulting arrangement should leave title-contending teams in Miami, Cleveland, Chicago, Orlando and Boston… and that’s just in the East. Three of those teams are led by No. 1 overall draft picks, which shows how much you need the ball to bounce your way, but that’s no less capricious than, say, relying on Tom Brady to turn into a Hall of Famer. Sometimes it’s about money, sometimes it’s about skill, and sometimes it’s about luck.

So when looking at Chris Bosh’s decision to leave $28 million on the table and go to Cleveland, I wouldn’t sweat about the money. He’s not a good or bad person for doing what he did, he’s just a guy in search of something at the nexus of comfort, vanity, and fulfillment. Or to put it another way: “There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true method.” That’s Moby-Dick; I’m still on that. LeBron’s the white whale, sure, but the only thing that comes up more in Moby-Dick than Moby Dick himself is God, created the system that led to the noble pursuit in which Ishmael was engaged and over which virtually everyone onboard obsessed.

I think Melville would have liked David Stern.

•••

Apropos of nothing, I was going to post a clip from last night’s Louie, featuring Ricky Gervais, that is in no way, shape or form safe for work. However, the still shot for the YouTube video is of Louis C.K.’s butt, so I’ll just post the link. If you want to watch it, go here. Do this.

4 Comments

July 6, 2010

Looking into the void

I rode to Massachusetts this weekend in a car without a working radio that was three-quarters full of basketball fans, so we passed the time on the way up by thinking out every conceivable scenario for the NBA’s free agent class. We did the same thing on the way back, using the most up-to-date information (Dirk! Pierce! Joe Johnson! Amar’e!). Here’s what we believe:

1) The Knicks actually did something right. After two years of “planning,” the Knicks looked like a rudderless ship as recently as Thursday, but at a poker table where everyone was afraid to make the first move, the Knicks pushed a sizable portion of their chips to the center of the table. Amar’e Stoudemire is a good player on a slow, predictable decline, but Chris the Knicks Fan insists Amar’e is one of the smartest players he’s ever seen. This means the end of David Lee in New York, which messes up your fantasy keeper league team but not much else. (Slight UPDATE: The uninsured part deserves some scrutiny. Okay, a lot. But still.)

2) Going to Chicago is the brave move… for Dwyane Wade. Even my mom knows Wu-Tang is for the children, and it appears Dwyane Wade is too. The convention line of thought at the moment is that D-Wade is likely to go to Chicago because he’s locked in a custody battle with his ex-wife and his children are there. You’d have to be the coldest-hearted Heat fan to hate him for leaving because of his kids, and it’s a good reason to leave, but there’s a potentially better one. LeBron’s decision is magnified because he’s quasi-understood to be “chasing history,” whatever that means: More than Michael, more than Kobe, or bringing a title to Cleveland. Wade, a young champion, seems immune from all this and, family drama aside, perfectly willing to stay in Miami and play on 50-win teams. That’s why I think the bold move for him is to go to Chicago, and wedge himself into the Kobe/LeBron discussion. Could he beat them both if he went to the Bulls? I absolutely think so.

3) LeBron isn’t an afterthought, but no one’s going to wait for him if they find something better. I think the whole “LeBron signs and the dominoes fall” narrative is coming to its end, as a prime result of the two factors discussed above. The Knicks took a “F***-it” approach to wait-and-see, and if Wade thinks he can win a title in Chicago, why would he wait for the word from LeBron?

4) Joe Johnson is or is not overpaid. We hashed out this discussion and ended up agreeing to disagree. Person A said that Johnson is the rare truly effective, occasionally game-changing guard; Person B said that he’d be willing to grant all that, but that the maximum contract rule makes it absurd that he’ll be making as much or more than players who are better than him (like Wade and James). I’m person B.

5. Paul Pierce. In light of Pierce’s greatness/goodness over the last three years, it’s worth revisiting the Celtics team that made it within two victories of the NBA Finals with Pierce and Antoine Walker as 1 and 1A’s. That’s what we told ourselves, at least. Now think about how Antoine Walker played basketball. So yes, he’s getting old and doesn’t bring it every day, but Paul Pierce has been good at basketball for a very long time. For whatever reason, I’m just sayin’.

Tuesday, July 6th. Back in the saddle again.

July 1, 2010

If I was LeBron James

If I was LeBron James. If I was Dwyane Wade. If I was Chris Bosh. If I was Amar’e Stoudemire or Carlos Boozer. If I was Joe Johnson. If I was Rudy Gay. If I was Ray Allen. If I was J.J. Redick.

If I was 6’8″. If I grew up in Akron, Ohio. If I had been assigned for greatness by the age of 12. If my high school basketball games had been on ESPN, my tattoos covered by bandages because tattoos were a no-no. If I had watched the results of the lottery, knowing that Cleveland had the best chances at pulling the number one overall pick, and knowing that should they obtain it, even I might begin to believe that the fairy tale. If I had seen, in the aftermath of the lottery, the owner of the Cavaliers hold up a jersey with my name on it.

If I was forever known as the player picked one spot before Darko Milicic (just kidding). If I inspired hundreds of thousands to watch my first pro game, against the Kings, where I gamely tossed a pass to Ricky Davis on a fast break, showing the world that I knew what it meant to be deferential. If I had followed that up with a thunderous dunk of my own, a small peak behind the curtain of the breadth of my abilities.

If I had heard the criticism of my shooting at age 19. If I had been told that I could learn. If I spent much of the next seven years practicing a shooting motion with which I could live, reliant on the slightest flick of the wrist from the top of my elevated Sears Tower-like frame, brambles on brambles of muscle like the skyscraper’s buildings resting upon buildings. If I learned to do it with with my arms bent as awkwardly as frog legs, an imperfection related solely to my massive stature, a nagging imperfection like a fly bounding against an elephant.

If I had watched my team improve to the point it was the best in the league, at least during the regular season, over the last two years. If I had heard the whispers about how it meant nothing about a title. If I had fallen short in the playoffs, only after submitting a handful of the few greatest games in the playoffs. If I had heard the whispers about how I was distracted by the thought of July 1st, 2010. If I had only wanted to get to July 1st, 2010, without hurting anybody, including myself. If I had heard the whispers about how I had failed my hometown, already, by not committing to them already.

If I grew up idolizing Michael Jordan, and had a chance to take his place. If I dreamed of having the chance to live in Chicago since far before the moment I saw him swat Bryon Russell aside. If I wanted to outshine Kanye West. If the President of the United States had, in a moment of honesty, told the world what I already knew: that I would look great in a Bulls uniform.

If I loved Jay-Z and vice versa, and listened to his pitch: Brooklyn, a new team, new name, new tradition… B, why don’t you tell him? If I was suddenly staring down the eyes of Beyoncé. If I was watching them, daring me to be the first person to tell them no.

If I had—at some point in my life—a dream of resurrecting the Knicks, bringing them to the front of the New York sports scene for the first time in almost 40 years. If I had watched the Willis Reed tape dozens of times, imagining that it was me, only I went for 40 points and sent Kobe packing. If I could replace Derek Jeter as the chairman of the Canyon of Heroes. If I wanted to feel tickertape in my skull.

If I had heard the shouting that I wouldn’t be anything unless I won more often than Kobe. If my life was defined, to some degree, by someone else’s, despite everything I had done. If I hadn’t made Kobe realize that the missing element of his game was teamwork, just as he made me realize that real work was the missing element of mine. If I we had corrected our results at the same rate, but he got a better rate of return. If I thought about why that was…

If I had a chance to change everything, to write my own story. If I had a chance to start it all over again someplace else, or bring a title to the only hometown I’ve ever known in a way of my choosing. If I heard the pleas from my friends, neighbors, the mayor, that it was the only right thing to do. If I thought: They don’t need to tell me what’s special about this place; I already know. If I thought: This is what will happen if I leave, and saw the images of crying children, adults, grandparents, a deserted Quicken Loans Arena. If I was prepared to be hated for making a choice that is ostensibly mine. If anyone is prepared for something like that, ever.

If I had to make a choice anyway, and I was LeBron James, what would I choose?

I don’t know. But if I was advising LeBron James, here’s what I’d do: I’d put the contract offers in front of him, in a row, and give him a pen. I’d wait for him to sign one of them, and when he did, I would look him in the eye and tell him that if I was LeBron James, I would never look back.

•••

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention Food Court Lunch’s excellent imagined conversation between LeBron and Chris “Happy to be here” Bosh. An excerpt:

Bosh: (annoyed) How do you figure? Last I checked, you and me had the same number of rings.

LeBron: (incredulous) Same number of…Look, man, let me put this another way. Look over your shoulder. What do you see?

Bosh: (looks) There’s nothing there.

LeBron: Right. Now look over mine.

(Bosh looks. A single-file line of fifteen women, anxiously straightening their dresses and fixing their make-up, has suddenly appeared behind James)

Bosh: What the…

LeBron: You see? I just thought about them, and they appeared.

I also have thought power. I think about work, and it appears. I guess I’m Batman too. So many Batmans.

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Month: July, 2010