Tell Me Your Job and I'll Tell You Your Politics

This week, NBA legend and Indiana Pacers General Manager Larry Bird came out against Ray Allen's decision to sign with the Miami Heat, saying:

“The one thing that bothers me the most is guys taking big pay cuts for a year to go down there and try to win a championship. There’s a lot of guys who like to ride the coattails of the best, and they’ll take a pay cut just to have an opportunity to win that ring.’’

First of all, I can't believe Allen is getting shit for taking less money to play for a proven champion after so many years of sports writers bloviating about spoiled players and a concerted effort from the NBA owners to drive down salaries. Some fuckers just can't win, I guess.

But the more interesting thing, to me, is that Larry Bird had no problem with Bill Walton narrowing his potential teams down to the Lakers and Celtics- and ultimately landing with the Celts- in the mid '80s. Hell, Bird was on the phone with Walton, encouraging him to ship up to Boston.

And this, of course, reminds me of Michael Jordan. During the 1999 lock out, Jordan famously told the owner of the Washington Wizards that if he couldn't make money on the Raptors, he should just sell the team, rather than try to cut players' salaries. But in last year's lockout, Jordan, as GM of the Charlotte Bobcats, drew one of the hardest lines against the players as the owners essentially made the same argument about profit.

So, what we've got here is two NBA legends who said one thing while playing, and another as executives. I can't wait for Magic to step in and be a twat to some Los Angeles Dodger!

Of course, I'm not sure Jordan and Bird are the absolute best examples of selling out; Jordan has famously cared about little besides winning and making money ("Republicans buy sneakers, too" and all that), and Bird wasn't really a progressive activist. But still, it's striking in that they've both done dramatic 180s on these issues.

The benefit of hiring former players as executives is, supposedly, that as former players, they have unique perspectives on the game. Hopefully, they have a greater understanding of how it works, but even at very least, they're coming from a different place, so they ought to avoid the groupthink of other NBA executives. For our purposes, we would hope that former players would understand that greater player freedom is good for basketball, and that the players are what the fans are coming to see- and thus, restricting player movement and suppressing player salaries are counter-productive and anti-capitalist, and that the owners' empty moralizing about players' salaries and loyalty is, well, empty moralizing.

But none of that works when the players, upon becoming executives, immediately adopt their old owners' positions, forget the things they learned during their careers, and directly contradict themselves. None of that works when they become the moralizers. When that happens, the same tired arguments get repeated and the same useless policies get perpetuated and it's 20 more years before we can have the kind of NBA we actually deserve.

Listen, we've all got bosses. We all have to smooth out some of our sharp edges for our jobs, we all have to pipe down on our most extreme views. And Bird and Jordan now both have the job of maximizing wins while minimizing costs, which is a different set of priorities than they had as players. But still, their analysis is flawed, their stated preferences will not actually improve the game, and when they were players, they knew that. Moreover, if anyone is in a position to buck their bosses and the expectations of their positions, it's Michael fucking Jordan and Goddamn Larry Bird. That they're not doing that- that they're perpetuating the same bullshit conflicts that have dominated the NBA since they themselves were wearing shorts- is pretty depressing.

NBA Finals Post Mortem: Pricks Can Win Championships, Too.

Dear me, do we really need all of these peons to LeBron James' personal growth as a man? His victory is interesting and well-deserved, and I don't mind analyzing the psyche of successful athletes, but I'm calling bullshit. The Miami Heat won the NBA Finals because they're an excellent basketball team and LeBron James is an incredibly talented player; they most certainly did not win because James "matured" or "hit rock bottom and returned" or "learned how to be a champion".

I mean, I'm sure James is slightly more mature this year than he was last year- but then, so is everyone, including Durant, Rondo, Duncan, Rose, and the rest of this year's non-champions. They've all faced adversity, too, not the least of which being James and the other excellent basketball players on the Heat. As for "learned how to be a champion", that's a bullshit fucking phrase that I'm not even going to attempt to fucking decipher without a shit ton of useless fucking profanity.

Unfortunately, my protests amount to very little, and the "LeBron James finally won because loss and unpopularity last season made him focus on what's important" narrative is already taking hold. The sports punditry is just incapable of handling it when someone they don't like wins- so they immediately recast that person as someone who only won because they finally came around to the things the sports pundits like. I guess that's the annoying cousin to Orwell's "We've always been at war with Eastasia" thing.

The worst part is, that kind of narrative setting cheapens the sport- it cheapens all sports. The best thing about sports is that it's a Grand Meritocracy. Eventually, talent wins out over rank, money, popularity, records- and yes, personality. That's amazing; it's what gives us upsets and underdogs and no-names making history. But more importantly, it's incredibly progressive; it's why Jackie Robinson and Roberto Clemente were ultimately inevitable, why Ted Williams gets a place in history even though he quarreled with the intolerant, close-minded Boston media, why Brett Favre gets no passes just because he fooled so many football writers into thinking he was jes' a good ol' boy havin' fun out there.

Ultimately, it means some pricks are going to win sometimes, but, well, suck it up; that's a small price to pay for all the amazing things we get out of the Grand Meritocracy. It's not worth hiding from or pretending it doesn't happen, like we're saying in this narrative on LeBron. When we put personality back at the center of things, we move away from the Grand Meritocracy, and toward some stupid bullshit political version of sports where the pundits tell us to ignore the score, they know who the real winners are.

The thing is, LeBron probably never was as much of an asshole as we thought right after "The Decision"- and nor is he a Saved Man, now; he's always been a little full of himself, but he's always been an incredibly hard worker. I'm confidant that LeBron has been roughly the same man throughout the last two years. And y'know what? That's complexity is more interesting anyway- to say nothing of a better sign for a future great athlete who is even more complicated.

Derrick Rose and the Limits of Player Protection

Big, sad news out of the first round of the NBA Playoffs: The Chicago Bulls' Derrick Rose has torn his ACL and will miss the rest of the playoffs. That happened in the last two minutes of the game, when the Bulls' victory was all but assured. Thus, the Bulls are already facing questions about whether or not Rose really should have been in the game at all at that point. That's good; questions are always good. Welcomed, even. But what's interesting to me is the fact that very few people are asking if Rose himself wanted to be in the game at that point.

In the very important discussion of injury prevention, it's easy to forget that athletes have agency, they're not just at the mercy of uncaring leagues and ignorant coaches. You can probably find examples of forgetting that on this very blog. In fact, you probably already have, because you're just so clever. But, it's nonetheless true; in a sense, athletes are the final veto point over their own health and playing time.

Of course, we probably already know how athletes in general- and Rose in particular- make these decisions. Absent evidence to the contrary, I will always assume that an athlete wants to play. Absent evidence to the contrary, I will always assume that superstar athletes who base their prowess on an aggressive offense will not just always want to play, but always be the deciding factor in the game. So, yeah, Rose wanted in. My guess is, unless Rose knew for a fact that playing in those final minutes would end his career early, he'd want to play. And even if he did know that, he'd need to think about it.

This, of course, makes preventing career-ending injuries a lot harder. But I'm not sure what we can do about it. I'm not sure what we even want to do about it. We all love it when athletes play through pain. We love it when they throw caution to the wind and leave it all on the floor and a couple other cliches, too. It's just in the DNA of sports culture; athletes play through pain, and we the fans feel inspired.

Which is not to say that we should give up on the issue; in fact, if we can't expect athletes to choose not to play through injuries- if, indeed, we want them to play through injuries- that's actually a pretty good reason for beefing up the rest of the system. Leagues need to have better rules for monitoring and disciplining. Coaches need to be more sensitive to injuries. Medical staff needs to be better trained. And yes, players need to be better informed about their injuries, if only so when they inevitably elect to play through them, it's at least an informed decision.

If athletes didn't always want to play, they'd be something else. That's an important limitation to recognize as we talk about preventing injuries. But not because it informs what we can't do about the issue; it's important because it helps define what we can- and should- do.

The Chicago Bulls Have Locked Up Derrick Rose for the Next Five Years: Money Buys My Happiness

Holy balls, a basketball post!

Okay, first, let's just recap that title: The Chicago Bulls have locked up reigning MVP Derrick Rose for the next five years with a contract worth roughly $94 million. I'm happy enough with this; I'm a Bulls fan, and Rose is fun to watch. I wish he had another move besides "drive the line, float the ball over everyone's head", but hey, so far, can't argue with results.

I bring this up solely because it illustrates a interesting, but misunderstood aspect of wealthy, large market teams: that their money even buys stability with their current roster.

You've probably heard some of what I'm talking about before: fans saying their team didn't BUY their success because Player X, Y, or Z is home grown. And it's not even usually some ridiculous third-stringer; Yankees fans, for example, always point to Jeter and Rivera. And that's true! But last time out, the Yankees spent $50 million for the last three years of Jeter's career (oh, crap, spoilers!) and $30 million for two more years of 'Mo.

The thing is, everyone is home grown somewhere. Starting your career with a team doesn't mean much; Shaq started with the Magic. Pujols ack erk sob sob sob. But they moved, because someone else was willing to pay up. It's not just about finding talent, it's about keeping talent, and if you've got money, you've got one more tool to help you do that.

Which brings us back to the Bulls and Rose. The Bulls are a wealthy franchise, and so they can afford to lock up their top player. The NBA complicates this a little, in that it has max contracts, but still, the Bulls can afford to hand out more max contracts than other teams. And anyway, the NBA's olive branch to "home growing" its players is that a player's first team can actually offer him MORE money.

My point is, money doesn't just give a team free agency options. It lets it avoid free agency just as much.

UPDATE: Friend of the blog Chip adds in some details on the NBA's max salary rules under the new collective bargaining agreement: "The new CbA allows teams lucky enough to draft the MVP (or other qualified examples I can't remember just now) to give Them something like 30% of the salary cap as a max, and an extra year. It's rare to have an MVP so young and it is great luck for the bulls. But also very interesting from the contract / CBS standpoint."

I'd heard about this, but didn't think about including it because, y'know, shitty blogger. But it's real, and some people have even taken to calling it the Derrick Rose Rule. My theory above holds true, though- a wealthy team still has more of an ability to exercise this option, even if all teams would be allowed to do so.