Russell Westbrook’s career makes no damn sense. It is a paradox within a paradox. It’s Inception, but in the form of a human, professional basketball player. And it’s why he’s been one of the most fascinating-yet-befuddling stars the league has ever seen. While the league features a number of stars whose greatness is manifest and relatively simple to digest — LeBron, KD, Steph, and Kawhi come to mind right off the bat — there is something so contradictory about Russ, equal parts exhilarating and confounding. What makes Russell Westbrook so hard to process?
First, there’s what makes him great: Russ is consistently, spectacularly productive. He’s played 943 regular season games in his 13-year career, averaging 23.2 points, 7.4 rebounds, 8.5 assists, and 1.7 steals in 34.7 minutes per game. In 106 playoff games, he sports similar averages of 24.8/ 7.0/ 7.7/ 1.8 in 37.6 minutes a game. He is a 9x All-Star, 9x All-NBA selection, the 2016-17 MVP, and has led the league in scoring twice and assists three times (including this season). He’s played in four Conference Finals, and helped lead the 2011-12 Thunder to the Finals, the sort of young team that virtually never makes a run so deep. He has now amassed 184 regular season triple-doubles which, as you may have heard, is the new all-time NBA record after surpassing Oscar Robertson last week. His end-to-end athleticism has always been breathtaking. By any measure, he is a no-doubt, first ballot Hall of Famer, and will be remembered as one of the greatest point guards of all time.
Someone who knew nothing of Westbrook’s career and had never seen him play would look at that resume and then immediately question my sanity for ever typing any of these words. It’s a fair criticism. Beyond that, it’s not as though the intangible aspects of his personality render him some sort of locker room cancer. Nearly to a man — hold that thought — his current and former teammates love him and espouse the virtues of playing alongside him. His ruthless competitiveness and desire to win rub off on everyone around him. Early in Westbrook’s career, these traits drew the attention of none other than Kobe Bryant, with the late, now-Hall of Famer pegging Russ as the young player in whom Kobe saw the most of himself.
It’s not even possible to paint Russ as some kind of “empty calories” player. Again, he’s played in 106 playoff games and counting, and in the 184 games where he’s notched a triple-double, his teams have won roughly 3/4 of them. Setting aside his rookie season (when the rebuilding Thunder went 23-59), Russ has won 63% of the regular season games in which he has played, roughly a 52-win pace over an 82-game year. He wants to win at all costs, his production contributes to winning, and yet many fans and media members do not think of him as a “winning” player. This is the central paradox of the Russell Westbrook Experience.
When performing cost/benefit analyses, economists often employ the idea of opportunity cost. Simply put, it is the cost of what someone COULD be doing with the time/energy/resources the person has instead allocated to the choice in question. If you’re spending your time, money, or basketball possessions doing one thing, you are actively not doing a whole bunch of other things. It’s often difficult to quantify the counterfactual, but we know it’s there. This relates to Russ because while the on-court benefit he provides is so obvious, so visceral, he also comes with perhaps the largest opportunity cost of any modern superstar. With analytics taking on a major role in how front offices make personnel and salary cap decisions, teams have become more aware of both what Westbrook’s presence on a roster adds to the equation as well as what it potentially takes away or prevents. This is how a 32-year-old future Hall of Famer, still in the midst of slapping up a historic number of triple-doubles, becomes essentially an NBA journeyman.
Efficiency is not the be-all, end-all of modern offensive basketball, but most fans understand at this point how it has attained a level of primacy in the way we analyze value on that end. I’m not here to pass judgment on analytics as a whole, or the way they have shaped our perception of Westbrook’s career in a manner which would not have existed had he been drafted in 1988 instead of 2008. But the numbers do exist, and the way they commingle with his visible style of play on the court form the basis of this perplexing hesitancy to elevate Russ to the level of other all-timers. For his career, Russ averages 18.8 FGA per game, and he shoots 43.7% from the field. Nearly thirty percent of those attempts have been threes, but he shoots only 30.5% from deep, making him one of the worst volume three-point shooters in history. There has not been a single season of his career where his Effective FG% — which accounts for the added value of a made three — has eclipsed league-average, or really been anywhere close to it. His True Shooting Percentage (which also accounts for FT%) likewise lags well behind the median. On any given possession, there is virtually nothing a defense can do to stop Westbrook from getting the shot he wants, but in many cases, it’s also the exact shot the defense wants to allow. Once again, the paradox of Westbrook.
Russ has been one of the highest-usage players in the league for most of his career, culminating in his 2016-17 MVP season, when he set the all-time NBA record with a Usage Rate of 41.7 percent. The heliocentricity of that team was borderline comical, and while it resulted in historic numbers and a big ol’ piece of hardware for Westbrook, it simultaneously highlighted the limits of such an approach with a player who does not produce particularly efficient offense. That team was short-handed personnel-wise (having lost Kevin Durant to the Warriors in the offseason, which you may have heard about), so it required a big lift out of Westbrook. It was also, however, the logical endpoint of his seemingly insatiable need to be the center of gravity on whatever court he was on, even when he had more efficient offensive options available to him, like KD, James Harden, and now Bradley Beal.
His unquenchable desire to win fills him with both the primal need to be the one making the play, as well as the boundless confidence to try, for better and worse. The opportunity cost of Russ shows itself on defense as well. He frequently is among the league leaders in steals and deflections, but this is in part because he often over-helps and gambles for steals, leaving his teammates in a compromised position when he doesn’t make the highlight play. We can’t quantify what might have happened on all those possessions had he just stayed home and played solid team defense, or not taken an ill-advised elbow jumper in transition, or not whipped a pass three rows into the seats with 90 seconds left in a playoff game, but we can see the deleterious effects of them just as clearly as we can see how much value he adds with his production.
It’s not as though he’s a low-IQ player, either. He has a tremendous feel for the game, he maps the court well (hence all the assists), and he understands how to leverage angles to get to his spots. He has simply never figured out how to take his foot off the gas when the situation requires it because it is not in his makeup to do so. His confidence in his own ability to go win the game for his team is so unshakeable that he appears to be blind to any other way to play. When that mindset meets a skill level which can consistently execute on it, you get the Michael Jordans and Kobe Bryants of the world. When the player’s abilities even slightly misalign with his estimation of them (or begin to deteriorate over time), you end up with great players like Westbrook and Allen Iverson, who have difficulty accepting a lesser role, often to the detriment of the team. The only way to escape the gravity of these guys is to forcefully eject, which explains both Durant’s decamping for Golden State as well as Westbrook being on his third team in three years.
And this isn’t entirely fair to Russ, which is yet another one of his contradictions. This year’s Wizards have been miles better since he got healthy and back on track. Washington started out 6-17 as Russ struggled with a lingering quad injury and the team was ravaged by COVID, but have gone 28-21 since to move all the way up to the 8-seed in the East, pending this week’s play-in tournament. [Their turnaround has been truly remarkable. At one point as late as April, the Wiz had only a 4% chance of cracking the play-in tournament at all, much less getting up to eighth.] He’s averaging yet another triple-double for the season, including a mammoth 24/13/13 since the All-Star Break. [He leads the league in rebounding since the break, which is just an insane stat for a 6’3″ guard. On a related note, it’s highly unlikely he’ll make any of the three All-NBA teams. You may be noticing a theme here.] This undermanned Wizards’ team is without question better for having him (and appears to have gotten the best of the Westbrook/John Wall challenge trade prior to the season), but could also benefit from tilting the offense even further in the direction of the more efficient Beal, particularly down the stretch of close games. [Of which the Wizards have played MANY. Seriously, all their games seem to come down to some crazy nonsense at the end, and Russ tends to be in the middle of it all. Keep this in mind when the Celtics/Wiz play-in game tonight invariably winds up as a two-point margin with ten seconds to go.]
Even after thirteen years, when it’s all over, I still have no idea how the epitaph of Russell Westbrook’s bonkers career will read. No one does, and that’s the fun part. He defies being put into any kind of statistical, narrative, or historical box. I do know the game will feel a bit less weird and a bit more homogeneous when he’s gone, like getting off a roller coaster and onto that attraction where the swings just go around in circles. So strap in and enjoy the crazy ride while it’s here.
We are now within shouting distance of the play-in tournament and the start of the NBA Playoffs, so it’s a good time to hand out some hardware for the most outstanding performers of the regular season. Unless otherwise noted, the order I list the players is the one in which I would have them on my theoretical ballot. A lot to get to here, so let’s skip the flowery intro and dive right in, starting with…
MOST VALUABLE PLAYER
Winner: Nikola Jokic, C, Denver Nuggets
Apologies to: Joel Embiid, C, Philadelphia 76ers; Giannis Antetokounmpo, F/C, Milwaukee Bucks; Stephen Curry, G, Golden State Warriors; Chris Paul, G, Phoenix Suns
I made the case for His Groundness (it’s gonna be a thing, damn it!) a few weeks back, and nothing that’s gone down in the interim has weakened his position. If anything, Jokic has solidified his hold on the award, continuing his metronomic dominance while leading a short-handed Nuggets team missing its top four guards to a 10-4 record since the season-ending ACL tear to Jamal Murray. This season has featured a ton of MVP-worthy candidates — my list doesn’t even get to guys like Luka Doncic, Kawhi Leonard, Damian Lillard, and Rudy Gobert, all of whom have been sensational — but nearly any way you want to slice it, Jokic stands out above the pack. He should be an easy choice.
ROOKIE OF THE YEAR
Winner: LaMelo Ball, G, Charlotte Hornets
Apologies to: Anthony Edwards, G, Minnesota Timberwolves; Tyrese Haliburton, G, Sacramento Kings
As predicted by the draftniks, the ’20-’21 rookie class is shaping up to be deep with NBA contributors, albeit a bit light on potential stars. And with all due respect to a number of guys who have had strong seasons and shown great potential for the future (Saddiq Bey, Desmond Bane, Patrick Williams, Immanuel Quickley, Jae’Sean Tate, and others), this award is realistically a three-horse race. After his semi-baffling draft night slide, Haliburton has looked the part of a seasoned NBA vet from Day One, averaging a 13.0/ 3.0/ 5.3 line and 1.3 steals per game with tidy 47/41/86 shooting splits in 30.1 minutes a night. Questions about his middling athleticism and unorthodox shooting mechanics have all been answered, and his ceiling appears to be an awful lot higher than many originally thought.
Concerns over the shot selection and basketball IQ of no. 1 overall pick Anthony Edwards turned out to be well-founded when the season tipped off. Ant-Man has the greenest of lights for the generally woeful Wolves, but prior to the All-Star break, Edwards seemed intent on tearing down the house KG built, brick by ill-advised brick. He averaged a respectable 14.9/ 4.0/ 2.5 in the season’s first half, but did so on cover-your-eyes 37/30/81 shooting, “good” for a True Shooting Percentage of only 46.6 percent. That kind of number gets you run out of the league on a rail unless you also display pretty special potential, which, ummm…
Beyond the poster dunks, Edwards has shaken off the slow start in a big way during the second half. He has settled into a larger role since the break, starting all 32 games, averaging 35.0 minutes a night, and quickly becoming one of the most fun quotes in the league. The game has already slowed down for him, allowing the 19-year-old wunderkind to put up borderline All-Star numbers: 23.5/ 5.6/ 3.3 on legitimately decent 45/35/75 shooting. The Wolves have looked downright feisty since bringing in new head coach Chris Finch, and the rapid development of Edwards has been a major driving force in their anti-tank. It may still have been a mistake not to use the no. 1 pick on the guy we’re about to discuss, but it’s looking like a lot less of a catastrophe than it did two months ago for a franchise desperate for some hope.
LaMelo Ball was all set to win this award going away back in mid-March, until he suffered a fracture in his right wrist against the Clippers. The original diagnosis suggested he might miss the remainder of the season, and playing only 41 out of a possible 72 games would have made it tough to justify giving him the award. [Heavy shades of the Joel Embiid/Malcolm Brogdon debate from 2017.] Instead, Ball missed only 21 games and suited back up on May 1st, which should, fingers crossed, allow him to play the Hornets’ final ten games, plus the play-in and potentially beyond.
Fifty-one is still a lot less than seventy-two. [It appears Edwards will play in every game.] Even with the difference in overall volume, the gaps in efficiency and impact make Ball the choice for me. LaMelo has been a revelation, bringing the combination of size, ball-handling, and court vision scouts anticipated, but also adding unexpected shooting proficiency (36.0% from deep on 5.1 attempts per game). There were questions coming in about his maturity and defensive effort, but both have thus far been stellar. He makes mind-bending passes look routine. This is pure damn sorcery:
Per-36 minutes, he averages 20.1 points, 7.3 rebounds, 7.7 assists, and 2.0 steals, and that seems to be his floor going forward. However you may feel regarding his family or his path to the league, there’s no denying it: this dude is going to be a top-of-the-league mega-star, and soon. No need to overthink it.
DEFENSIVE PLAYER OF THE YEAR
Winner: Rudy Gobert, C, Utah Jazz
Apologies to: Ben Simmons, G/F, Philadelphia 76ers; Joel Embiid, C, Philadelphia 76ers; Bam Adebayo, C/F, Miami Heat; Giannis Antetokounmpo, F/C, Milwaukee Bucks; Draymond Green, F/C, Golden State Warriors; Clint Capela, C, Atlanta Hawks
Another category with a lot of great candidates but that should ultimately be an easy choice. Gobert is the alpha and omega for the 4th-ranked Jazz defense, blocking, altering, and deterring shots, swallowing up pick-and-rolls, directing traffic, and generally making the paint a no-fly zone at all times. His presence looms literally large over nearly every possession. The eye test and the advance metrics all paint the exact same picture: Rudy is the best defensive player in the league by a healthy margin. Boredom and goofy circumstances (ahem) are the only reasons not to vote for him in any given year, akin to the voters who force fed MVPs to guys other than Jordan in the 90’s. Let’s move on to awards with a bit more intrigue.
SIXTH MAN OF THE YEAR
Winner: Joe Ingles, F/G, Utah Jazz
Apologies to: Jordan Clarkson, G, Utah Jazz; Jalen Brunson, G, Dallas Mavericks; Derrick Rose, G, New York Knicks; Thaddeus Young, F, Chicago Bulls
Sticking with the theme of Jazz men, Jingles gets the nod here over his fellow bench-mate, Clarkson (Seventh Man of the Year?). Ingles has been plugged into the starting lineup quite a bit due to absences by Mike Conley and Donovan Mitchell, but he will still meet the criteria for 6MOY at season’s end. And despite modest scoring numbers, he is more than worthy of the honor. The 33-year-old Aussie has always been a legit glue guy for Utah, providing playmaking, shooting, and rugged defense in equal measure, but he’s kicked his performance up a notch this season for the presumptive no. 1 seed Jazz.
Again, the counting stats don’t leap off the page: 12.2 points, 3.7 rebounds, and 4.7 assists in 27.8 minutes per game. His efficiency and advanced numbers, however, help to bring his impact into focus. Ingles boasts absurd 50/46/85 shooting splits, good for an Effective FG% of 66.4% and a True Shooting% of 68.3%, which is straight bonkers. [Remember how I said earlier that Anthony Edwards was at one point sporting a TS% of 46.6? Ingles is essentially the polar opposite, and has been doing it all season.]
The Jazz are +11.7 points per 100 possessions with Ingles on the floor (partially a reflection of what a good team he plays for), as well as 4.8 points per 100 better with him on the floor as opposed to on the bench. He just fills in every gap for Utah, including often taking defensive assignments on the litany of big, rugged forwards in the Western Conference. [To his credit, Royce O’Neale shares this duty with Ingles, and is also a terrific defender in his own right.] Clarkson has had a great season, and his scoring with improved efficiency has been impressive. For my money, however, Ingles has simply been the more impactful player, so he gets the nod.
MOST IMPROVED PLAYER
Winner: Julius Randle, F, New York Knicks
Apologies to: Jaylen Brown, F/G, Boston Celtics; Michael Porter, Jr., F, Denver Nuggets; Zach LaVine, G, Chicago Bulls; Jerami Grant, F, Detroit Pistons; De’Aaron Fox, G, Sacramento Kings; Mikal Bridges, F/G, Phoenix Suns; Clint Capela, C, Atlanta Hawks
Thinking too deeply about this award can cause one to fall into a bottomless pit of insanity and despair. In lieu of that, let’s just go with the prima facie obvious candidate, Julius Randle. The former 7th overall pick bounced around the league early in his career, looking the part of an inefficient, turnover-prone ball-stopper whose empty calorie stats would never lead to winning. All of that has changed now, having found a home in New York (crazy, I know) as the no. 1 option for the rejuvenated Knicks. The 26-year-old Randle is averaging 23.9 points, 10.3 rebounds, and 5.9 assists in a league-leading 37.2 minutes per game (Thibs alert!) on 46/41/81 shooting en route to his first All-Star appearance, and has the forever-moribund Knicks sitting at 4th place in the East as of this writing.
His numbers are basically career-highs across the board, and none of it looks like a fluke. Randle has become a legitimate playmaker, sensing when additional pressure is coming from help defenders and keeping the ball moving, a huge departure from the head down, bull-in-a-china-shop assaults on swarms of interior defenders which characterized previous stops on his NBA journey. His high, fading jumper from the right baseline has become a signature shot, and his defensive intensity has clearly ramped up for a suddenly-elite Knicks outfit (3rd in Defensive Rating at 108.5 points per 100 possessions). Kudos to Randle for sticking with it despite his earlier struggles, maturing on and off the court, and making good on the promise he showed coming out of Kentucky. Spoiler alert: he’ll be making another appearance a bit later on in the column.
Again, tons of worthy candidates in this category. Without going into the case for each one, it’s safe to look at the list of runners-up above and conclude the NBA is in a fantastic place, both in terms of the talents coming into the league and how they are being developed. Regardless how you want to define the purposely nebulous criteria of this award, there is never a shortage of potential winners.
COACH OF THE YEAR
Winner: Tom Thibodeau, New York Knicks
Apologies to: Monty Williams, Phoenix Suns; Michael Malone, Denver Nuggets; Quin Snyder, Utah Jazz; Steve Nash, Brooklyn Nets
In my mind, this is a two-man race between Thibodeau and Williams, with all due respect to the other coaches listed. There’s no wrong choice between the two, as both have led teams who have been in the shitter for the last decade-plus back to relevance. Phoenix has been the better team this year, and Monty deserves a ton of credit for that. The only difference is the Suns showed signs of turning the corner last season, going 8-0 in the bubble seeding games before narrowly missing the playoffs, foreshadowing a team ready to make a leap this year. In addition, they added one of the all-time great floor generals during the offseason in Chris Paul, making it more of a challenge to determine how to apportion the credit pie for the Suns’ breakout year.
In contrast, at this point in the season last year, the Knicks were in their typical “dumpster fire swirling around inside a shitstorm” mode. The core of the roster is not wildly different this year, so along with the aforementioned improvements by Randle, the lion’s share of the credit for the swift turnaround has to go to the newly installed front office and its first hire, Thibodeau. Defensive intensity is a hallmark of Thibs-coached teams, and the Knicks have made a remarkable jump in that area, climbing from 23rd in Defensive Rating last year all the way to 3rd this season. When you bring in a coach known for doing one specific thing, and then that thing immediately happens? It doesn’t take some MIT-educated analytics quant to figure out the math on that one. Thibs is never going to have to pay for another drink in his life in Manhattan, with or without ICE! [OK, I’ll show myself out.]
ALL-NBA
First Team
C: Nikola Jokic, Denver Nuggets
F: Giannis Antetokounmpo, Milwaukee Bucks
F: Luka Doncic, Dallas Mavericks
G: Stephen Curry, Golden State Warriors
G: Chris Paul, Phoenix Suns
First off, a disclaimer of sorts. Most of us are aware of the “position-less” nature of the NBA game (I use the quotes because that’s a long, nuanced conversation best saved for another time), and there has been a push by many to go away from the traditional, rigid positional system of All-NBA voting and towards a “just choose your best 15” type of system. Instead, the NBA chose a worst-of-all-worlds solution, keeping the positions on each team in place but granting a certain subset of players positional flexibility in terms of the voting.
The obvious inflection points in this year’s approach are the cases of Nikola Jokic and Joel Embiid, both of whom are manifestly centers in the traditional sense, yet have also been granted forward eligibility to create the possibility of both cracking the First Team. In a truly position-less system, this would be an easier sell, since both guys would clearly make First Team and then we’d move on to our other thirteen selections without a second thought. However, in this particular season, bending reality to squeeze one or the other into a forward spot creates an inequity down the line which cannot be overlooked. There are three centers who clearly stand out above the rest and deserve to be recognized: Jokic, Embiid, and Gobert. In my estimation, those are the only three players the league defines as centers who belong in the top-15 this season, and there’s a meaningful gap between no. 15 and the next center who would make the list (either Bam Adebayo or Clint Capela).
Because of the need to have three centers, cramming Embiid onto the First Team means Gobert leaps to Second Team, and then either Bam or Capela necessarily has to be the Third Team center, which ultimately forces a deserving forward (or guard, depending how we finagle the rest of the spots) off the ballot entirely. To be clear: I don’t have a real problem with fudging Embiid’s position to get him onto the First Team, where he clearly belongs. I just have a problem with the collateral damage it causes to someone else who has nothing to do with it, and because of the way All-NBA selections can have contractual and salary cap implications (which is also dumb), this type of chicanery could potentially cost someone tens of millions of dollars in future earnings (not an exaggeration).
Again, the league could simply choose to scrap positions entirely and eliminate the shenanigans, but they’ve chosen to try to split the baby instead. For that reason, in this specific year, it’s my opinion that sliding Embiid to Second Team is the prudent decision. Don’t @ me.
Second Team
C: Joel Embiid, Philadelphia 76ers
F: Kawhi Leonard, Los Angeles Clippers
F: Julius Randle, New York Knicks
G: Damian Lillard, Portland Trail Blazers
G: Jimmy Butler, Miami Heat
I know, I just spent several hundred words complaining about positional skullduggery, then immediately shoe-horned Doncic onto First Team as a forward and Butler onto Second Team as a guard. I’m a shameless hypocrite, but those feel like the equitable spots for both guys, and ultimately no one really loses out because of it. Some might take issue with Randle getting Second Team over LeBron, but the difference in volume of games and production has become so massive that I can’t dismiss it. LeBron is clearly the superior player in a vacuum; no one with any credibility disputes this fact. But Randle’s production, durability, and impact in lifting the Knicks out of the NBA sub-basement needs to be recognized.
Butler might seem an odd choice by these criteria, since he’s missed a substantial chunk of games too (50 games played vs. 43 for LeBron). When healthy, though, Jimmy has been an absolute killer on both ends of the floor, and Miami has been an utter trainwreck without him. [The Heat are (is?) +4.9 points per 100 possessions when Jimmy is on the floor, and -5.7 when he is off. They are 31-19 when he plays and 6-12 when he does not.] Miami is up to sixth in the East (and appears to be safely out of the play-in mix), could climb as high as fourth, and is once again looking like a squad no one will want to see in the playoffs.
Third Team
C: Rudy Gobert, Utah Jazz
F: Paul George, Los Angeles Clippers
F: LeBron James, Los Angeles Lakers
G: Bradley Beal, Washington Wizards
G: Kyrie Irving, Brooklyn Nets
Third Team is, of course, where the rubber meets the road and the choices get painful. My very last cut was Jayson Tatum, and it’s hard to fathom someone who has been as elite as he has on both ends can’t crack the top fifteen. I wouldn’t quibble if someone wanted him on there instead of Kyrie (Tatum also has guard eligibility, which is suspect, but whatever). Even with his frequent in-season sabbaticals, I can’t find a way to leave Irving off the list because he’s been spectacular: 27.4/ 4.8/ 6.2 on 50/39/92 shooting splits for a team whose rotation has been in constant flux all season and is still sitting at 44-24, second in the East. As with the LeBron thing, it’s important to note that I am well aware James Harden and Kevin Durant are better players than Kyrie, but their extended absences have left Irving to cobble together some level of stability in Brooklyn, and he has mostly done so, to his credit.
I feel a little bad leaving Zion Williamson off my list because he has been a complete force of nature amid a nonsensical, ill-fitting roster in New Orleans. I have a sneaking suspicion he’ll end up on at least a few of these in the future, however terrible a rationalization that may be. Picking the Third Team guard spots is a nightmare. I went with Beal and Irving, which means leaving off Harden, Donovan Mitchell, Devin Booker, Trae Young, Russell Westbrook, Zach LaVine, Ben Simmons, Jrue Holiday, and De’Aaron Fox, all of whom have a legitimate case for inclusion. The guard position (such as it exists) is wildly stacked right now. This is the reality. Difficult choices are better than the alternative.
ALL-DEFENSE
First Team
C: Rudy Gobert, Utah Jazz
F: Giannis Antetokounmpo, Milwaukee Bucks
F: Draymond Green, Golden State Warriors
G: Ben Simmons, Philadelphia 76ers
G: Jimmy Butler, Miami Heat
Second Team
C: Joel Embiid, Philadelphia 76ers
F: Bam Adebayo, Miami Heat
F: OG Anunoby, Toronto Raptors
G: Jrue Holiday, Milwaukee Bucks
G: Mikal Bridges, Phoenix Suns
Apologies to (in no particular order): Kawhi Leonard, Los Angeles Clippers; Clint Capela, Atlanta Hawks; Nerlens Noel, New York Knicks; Marcus Smart, Boston Celtics; Jae Crowder, Phoenix Suns; Dorian Finney-Smith, Dallas Mavericks; Robert Covington, Portland Trail Blazers; Dejounte Murray, San Antonio Spurs; Lu Dort, Oklahoma City Thunder; Myles Turner, Indiana Pacers; Dillon Brooks, Memphis Grizzlies; Matisse Thybulle, Philadelphia 76ers, Royce O’Neale, Utah Jazz
So many worthy choices here, but I feel OK with where I ended up. Are my lists too heavy on Sixers, Bucks, and Heat? Perhaps. I tried to reward elite players on top-tier defensive squads, with the exception of Anunoby, who has excelled as a shutdown wing defender while toiling on a Toronto team suffering the season from hell. Clint Capela is maybe the biggest snub, as his rim protection and rebounding have been life-saving for an Atlanta defense which would be in utter shambles without him. I’m not consciously being a hater in neglecting to put any Knicks or Lakers on my list. They have both been tremendous on that end; it’s just really difficult to make a compelling case for any individual guy on either team.
ALL-ROOKIE
First Team
LaMelo Ball, G, Charlotte Hornets
Anthony Edwards, G, Minnesota Timberwolves
Tyrese Haliburton, G, Sacramento Kings
Saddiq Bey, F/G, Detroit Pistons
Jae’Sean Tate, F/G, Houston Rockets
Second Team
Patrick Williams, F, Chicago Bulls
Desmond Bane, G/F, Memphis Grizzlies
Immanuel Quickley, G, New York Knicks
Isaiah Stewart, C, Detroit Pistons
Isaac Okoro, F/G, Cleveland Cavaliers
Apologies to: Jaden McDaniels, F, Minnesota Timberwolves; Facundo Campazzo, G, Denver Nuggets; Cole Anthony, G, Orlando Magic; Theo Maledon, G, Oklahoma City Thunder, Deni Avdija, F, Washington Wizards
Thankfully, positional designations do not apply to the All-Rookie team — it’s almost as if the league is onto something here — so we can simply choose our top ten guys as we see fit. We already discussed the first three rookies, who make up this year’s top tier and are no-brainers for the First Team. It’s dealer’s choice after that for the final two First Team spots between Bey, Tate, Williams, and Bane, all of whom have shown real defensive prowess (not just for rookies) and look like rotation stalwarts for many years to come. Okoro nabs the final spot over the likes of McDaniels and Anthony on the strength of his defensive versatility and overall body of work, though his offensive game still has a looooong way to go. I like the flashes of star potential I’ve seen from both McDaniels and Anthony, and there is certainly a world where one or both end up as superior players to Okoro in the long run.
The NBA’s inaugural Play-In Tournament begins in fifteen days, and the current media furor over it is emblematic of all the worst parts of the wider discourse. As is customary, LeBron James sits at the center of the firestorm. LeBron ripped the concept of the play-in , clearly coincidental with his disinterested-looking Lakers squad dropping its sixth game out of the last seven and falling into a three-way tie for fifth in the West at 36-28 with Portland and Dallas. The Lakers’ swoon positions all three teams for an eight-game sprint to the finish line, with the “loser” of the group left to occupy the 7th seed and play a “win and you’re in” game against the 8-seed. [The loser of that game then plays a single elimination game against the winner of the 9/10 game for the final playoff spot.] Regardless of who the teams are, that sounds kind of exciting, right?
Somehow, the argument which keeps getting passed around by critics of the new format is that it “devalues” the regular season, despite the fact it has demonstrably created a massive sense of urgency for a whole slew of teams who, under the old rules, would essentially have nothing to play for at this juncture of the season. This line of reasoning is so specious, especially because it emanates from a lot of the same people who have for years been lamenting how the final month of the season is pointless and no one tries hard. Which is it? Do you want the regular season to matter, or not?
Humans respond to incentives, and NBA players and coaches even more so than most. The simple reality is that by adding an extra set of inflection points in each conference — at both the 6/7 and 10/11 seed lines — the league has incentivized more teams to compete all-out until the final games. As it stands, only five teams — Orlando, Detroit, OKC, Minnesota, and Houston — out of the 30 have been mathematically eliminated from the play-in, with Cleveland soon to join them. [To their credit, Orlando and Minnesota have continued to play competitive basketball, while the others, along with Sacramento, have mostly let go of the rope.]
So most of the league is continuing to play meaningful basketball, whether it’s to secure a higher seed, avoid the play-in tournament (at the 6/7 line), or to crack into it (at the 10/11 line). Under the old rules, a number of teams who are mathematically still in the mix — Washington, Toronto, Chicago, and New Orleans — would likely have pulled the ripcord by now. Beyond that, teams securely in the playoffs in previous years but not out of range of the play-in tourney now (Knicks, Hawks, Heat, Celtics, Mavericks, Blazers, and Lakers) have no choice but to keep their foot on the gas. As one final added bonus, with a potential first-round threat like the Lakers possibly getting one of the bottom seeds — but without having any idea which one it might end up being — the teams at the top of the West can’t sandbag their last few contests in an effort to game the matchups, like the Nuggets did a couple years ago in a shameless display of last-minute tankery.
It’s no surprise the teams sitting in 7th under the new format aren’t big fans of it. Many people support positive change in the abstract right up until the point it bites them in their specific ass. But all thirty teams voted for this change, and here’s a foolproof idea for those who want to avoid being stuck in the play-in: win your goddamn regular season games!
This isn’t to disparage LeBron. Frequent visitors to this space know I am the furthest thing from a knee-jerk LeBron hater. But he knows better, and with he and Anthony Davis back in the lineup now, it’s not as though the Lakers have any excuse for their lackadaisical play. Chances are, we’re just seeing the public manifestation of the private frustrations many players and teams are enduring as part of this weird, stressful, condensed season. It’s easy to say that the Raptors, for example, don’t deserve a shot at the postseason, what with their rotten 27-38 record. This discounts the degree to which they have experienced an absolute season from hell. They’ve been forced to effectively play an entire season on the road because they cannot travel back and forth to Toronto, with their nominal home games taking place in a mostly empty arena in that most desirable of travel destinations, Tampa, Florida. [No disrespect to Tampa. OK, maybe a little.] The fact they’ve been competitive at all, despite six months on the road, brutal injury- and COVID-related luck, and calls to blow the team up mid-season, is a testament to the durability of their organization and culture, the kind the “purists” out their usually like to tout, at least when it suits their needs. The Raptors have won six of their last ten, including Sunday’s game against the aforementioned, scuffling Lakers, to stay within range of the tenth-place Wizards.
Speaking of: break up the Wizards! A 29-35 record doesn’t look like much, but after a 17-32 start featuring a 13-day COVID pause in January, they’ve since won twelve of fifteen to take sole possession of the final play-in spot. Russell Westbrook is back to his scalp-taking ways of old (23/12/12 in thirty games since the All-Star break), Bradley Beal is still among the leading scorers in the league even after the recent detonation by Steph Curry, and the reshuffled deck of young guys and cast-aside veterans has resulted in a supporting cast which can occasionally muster something like professional defense. The Wiz may not be a threat for a deep playoff run, but there’s no way any of the teams currently above them in the play-in standings (Boston, Charlotte, and Indiana) will be enthused about facing them in a do-or-die scenario.
Point is, we’re left with an endgame to the season where these hard-luck late bloomers like the Raptors and Wizards have the opportunity to shake off their bad starts, while disappointing marquee teams like the Celtics and Lakers are forced to fight for their playoff lives. None of those scenarios would exist under the old format, so HOW CAN ANYONE ARGUE THIS IS A BAD THING? And oh yeah, there’s also this: single elimination games are super-exciting! It’s the whole reason we all like the NCAA Tournament. Upsets are fun, and the likelihood of them increases in a single-game situation where the variance is jacked up. A 2-seed in the NCAA’s spent thirty-something games establishing itself as better than the 15-seed it faces in the Round of 64, but this fact doesn’t cause anyone to decry the college basketball season as meaningless. And when the 15-seed miraculously wins, it’s the most exciting shit in sports. NBA fans don’t want to mimic some of that madness? Why the hell not?
The argument against the play-in boils down to the most dangerous eight words in the English language: “because that’s the way we’ve always done it.” This is rarely ever a compelling argument, and it certainly isn’t in this case, no matter how much you do or do not enjoy the combination of purple and gold hues. The NBA has never been shy about tweaking things in search of the next evolution of the game, and it has been equally willing to admit and rectify its mistakes. [The dress code, that dumb composite leather ball, and shortening the three-point line in ’94 are all good examples of well-intentioned changes which were abandoned in short order.] Perhaps we can all afford the league a bit of grace here, especially since this particular change has already had a discernible effect on the competitiveness of an otherwise mediocre and dispiriting regular season.
In the end, this is all a bunch of sound and fury, signifying nothing. No team lower than the 6-seed has ever won the title, and that’s only happened once (the ’95 Rockets, who retooled their roster mid-season in a weird year which featured the original hand-checking ban). By the time the first round of the playoffs ends, it’s unlikely anything which took place in the play-in tournament will be of any consequence. So let’s all just relax, enjoy some single-elimination NBA basketball, and see how it shakes out. Including you, LeBron.
Death, taxes, and LaMarcus Aldridge’s baseline turnaround from the left block. These are the immutable constants of life over the last fifteen years. In a world now filled with ever-shifting realities, NBA fans will have to adjust to life without the seven-time All-Star. Aldridge abruptly retired Thursday after playing Sunday’s game with an irregular heartbeat, consulting with team physicians, and deciding it was no longer in his best interests to continue his career. The Dallas native was diagnosed with a cardiac condition called Wolff-Parkinson-White Syndrome early in his NBA career and has had several procedures in the intervening years. It’s commendable that LaMarcus put his health and his family at the forefront of his decision-making, even as it is sad to see him leave the game in this fashion.
Aldridge leaves behind a tremendous legacy as a player. He scored 19,951 regular season points in his career, and was voted All-NBA five times. He never won a title, but played on several tremendously entertaining sub-championship-level teams in Portland and San Antonio. [Though they are not in the same tier historically, finally landing on a championship-caliber team in Brooklyn, only to retire mid-season, is evocative of the recently passed Elgin Baylor. Elgin retired nine games into the 1971-72 season for the Lakers when his body could no longer hold up, with L.A. going on to win the title that season. It would have been Baylor’s one and only championship of his legendary career.]
Aldridge’s Hall of Fame case will be a fascinating one, and will likely cause untold meltdowns among sports talk media clowns. Basketball-Reference estimates his chances of enshrinement at 51%, which despite the circumstances surrounding his buyout and subsequent signing in Brooklyn, almost certainly would have been bolstered by ending this season with a title. [It would have been whiplash-inducing to listen to talking heads argue this point while simultaneously claiming his legacy was cheapened by choosing Brooklyn, so at least we’ll be spared that dumbassery.]
Perhaps more interesting is how his departure from the game acts as a signpost for the stylistic shifts in NBA basketball as a whole. For one, there is Aldridge’s understated personality. He was always a quiet star, never a big self-promoter or endorsement guy. For the most part, he simply went about the business of being an excellent, highly-compensated NBA player without much drama or fanfare. Aldridge was the literal and figurative heir apparent to Tim Duncan, even if he never achieved the same heights as the Big Fundamental.
While LaMarcus will thankfully survive this health scare, from an on-court perspective, he was the last of a dying breed: big men whose offensive game was centered around post-ups and midrange jumpers, the two most maligned play types in modern pace-and-space basketball. While the demise of these types of shots has been exaggerated by the hot-takesmiths out there, it is also true that there are no more high-volume NBA bigs with a shot distribution which looks anything like that of Aldridge. Per Basketball-Reference, for his career, LMA shot over 50% of his field goal attempts from outside of ten feet but inside the three point arc. Only 4% of his career attempts were from three, with the majority of those coming in the last four seasons as 3PA across the league exploded. [Even Joel Embiid, who is dominating in both the post and midrange this season on his way to an inevitable top-5 MVP finish, doesn’t do this much of his work in those areas, relatively speaking. Just over 30% of his attempts this season are coming from the midrange, and over 20% of his shots are threes.]
Aldridge was able to maintain his effectiveness deep into his career despite this analytics-averse shot profile because, unlike your average NBA player, he was an absolute marksman from those spots. His game was extremely asymmetrical — he much preferred setting up on the left side of the court as opposed to the right — and it came as a minor shock anytime he missed one of those aforementioned fadeaways from the left block.
Unless major rule changes are instituted, it is unlikely we’ll ever see a star big man again who plays quite like LaMarcus Aldridge, for better or worse. A front court player with a career 25.8% Usage Rate who doesn’t shoot threes, get to the line much, or generate many assists is going to have a tough time garnering big money in the brave, new NBA world of threes, free throws, and layups. So pour one out for LaMarcus Aldridge. He probably came along a bit too late in NBA history for his own good, but in doing so, reminded us all of what we’ve lost, and in the end, filled us with gratitude for all we have.
The picture above was taken at the last NBA game I attended in person, back in the halcyon days of 2019. It was against the Washington Wizards in DC, a game the Nuggets would win 113-108. It was the first and only time I have seen Nikola Jokic play in-person. He didn’t exactly light the world on fire statistically that night: 15 points on 6-of-12 shooting, 6 rebounds, and 11 assists. He was a -10 in 36 minutes. [The Nuggets’ bench absolutely torched the lowly Wiz that particular night, but I digress.] From the vantage point of the third row — he is legit no more than 20 feet away from me in the photo — he is the same doughy, plodding, unimpressive-looking physical “specimen” he appears to be on TV. What did stand out in the flesh, however, and what continues to escape the understanding of many basketball casuals when it comes to the NBA’s leader in the clubhouse for the 2020-21 MVP award is this: Nikola Jokic is a goddamn sorcerer.
Most people know about his passing at this point. The 26-year-old Jokic averages 7.1 assists per 36 minutes for his career, and is already on the Mount Rushmore of “best passing centers of all time,” which may be selling him short. The guy can deliver passes which beggar belief, and make them look easy:
The wizardry I noticed up-close was a bit more subtle, more granular. It was his hands. It’s not just that his hands are strong; they are certainly that. What struck me is how often the ball appears to be almost magnetically attracted to them, as if he summons the ball directly into his grip. Some players use their quick-twitch athleticism to go get the ball. Jokic uses basketball clairvoyance — calling it basketball IQ does it a disservice — to know where the basketball is about to be and simply have his hands there, ready to receive the ball when it completes its predestined journey.
I recently saw a stat saying Jokic is currently 11th in the NBA in deflections, per NBA.com. This fits perfectly with my observation of his mythical anticipatory skills, but not so neatly with the mainstream perception of His Groundness as a negative defender. It’s true Jokic is not an elite rim protector and his Nuggets teams have not historically been top-tier defensive outfits. He is far from a liability, however. His current “individual” Defensive Rating — that is to say, the Nuggets’ D-Rating when he is on the floor — is 109 points per 100 possessions this season, which is over 3 points stingier than their overall mark. His MVP candidacy is not built on his defensive acumen, but the national media narrative really needs to stop painting it as some sort of glaring flaw in his game.
The Joker’s candidacy is built on the foundation of an utterly unimpeachable statistical resume. He is rocking scintillating per-game averages of 26.3 points, 10.9 rebounds, 8.7 assists, and 1.5 steals on equally absurd 57/42/86 shooting splits. He leads the NBA in virtually any all-in-one value metric you can think of, and has played in every game this season. His statistical case is as airtight as it gets.
The argument against him for most of the season has been Denver’s lack of team success. The Nugs started out 6-7 through thirteen games, but have gone 27-11 since to bring their current record to 33-18, leaving them only a half-game behind the Clippers for third in the LOADED Western Conference. Even more recently, Denver is 6-0 since its deadline trade for Aaron Gordon, with the starting lineup of Jokic/Gordon/Michael Porter, Jr./Will Barton/Jamal Murray completely cooking everyone they’ve faced (+32.1 points per 100 possessions prior to Wednesday night’s win over San Antonio), and it is not a byproduct of a soft schedule. The new-look rotation has the feel of a genuine championship contender, and if the current torrid stretch of play continues, they’ll no doubt put to bed the idea that the team is not elite enough to house an MVP winner.
The NBA media is going to do its damnedest to stir up a debate pitting Jokic against guys like James Harden, Joel Embiid, Giannis Antetokounmpo, and Damian Lillard. There’s a case for each of those guys, but when viewed holistically, there is no way any of them checks all the MVP “boxes” (statistical resume, availability, team success, individual importance, and narrative/approval rating) in the way Jokic does. He’s not guaranteed to stay healthy or to keep the team playing the way it is right now, of course. But speaking in terms of probabilities, it’s a good bet. His slow, ground-bound style allows him to be put in fewer positions to get injured — he’s missed only 20 games thus far in his career — and on a pure “eye test” level, the trade for Gordon really does seem to have unlocked the best version of the Nuggets on both ends of the floor.
Nikola Jokic may not be the image you see when you picture an NBA MVP in your mind’s eye, but you better start getting used to it, because he’s not going anywhere.
As per usual, LeBron James is acting as the moral center of the NBA universe, this time concerning the debate over whether or not to hold an actual All-Star Game in Atlanta in March. “I have zero energy and zero excitement about an All-Star Game this year,” LeBron said, in no uncertain terms. Players were told before the season there would be no ASG this year, and he believes having it sprung on them now amounts to “a slap in the face.”
Feelings aside, he is, of course, 100% correct. Players are enduring a difficult season as it is, being shuttled from city to city amidst a pandemic, while essentially being confined to nothing but arenas and hotel rooms. A five-day break in March would be a welcome respite for many of them. Even more so, as the league appears to finally be turning the corner on getting control of its COVID-related issues, it’s genuinely irresponsible to bring its entire class of superstars to a city with very few social restrictions in place, just to play an exhibition game no one seems to have much interest in playing. Seriously, who actually wants this?
OK, rant over. The point is that it would make a lot more sense to just name the teams to honor the individuals for their performance, so let’s do that. With about a month to go before the ill-fated game itself, here would be my current picks for the teams, along with some honorable mentions. Let’s get started.
FC = Frontcourt
BC= Backcourt
WC= Wild Card
EAST ALL-STARS
Starters:
FC: Joel Embiid
FC: Giannis Antetokounmpo
FC: Kevin Durant
BC: James Harden
BC: Bradley Beal
Reserves:
FC: Domantas Sabonis
FC: Bam Adebayo
FC: Khris Middleton
BC: Trae Young
BC: Jaylen Brown
WC: Jayson Tatum
WC: Ben Simmons
Honorable Mentions: Tobias Harris, Kyrie Irving, Malcolm Brogdon, Collin Sexton, Julius Randle, Jerami Grant, Zach LaVine, Nikola Vucevic, Gordon Hayward
For the first time in as long as I can remember, picking the East team is actually a more difficult proposition than the West. The list of Honorable Mentions is nine-deep with legitimate candidates having phenomenal years. In my estimation, there are eight absolute lead-pipe locks: the starters, plus Sabonis, Brown, and Tatum. Middleton is a borderline lock, as he’s only putting up one of the most efficient shooting seasons in the history of the damn league. Miami has scuffled thus far, but Bam Adebayo has been a monster at both ends in the absence of Jimmy Butler and others, and he deserves recognition. Trae Young’s efficiency remains questionable, but he is the undisputed lead dog for a Hawks team which has risen from the basement of the East to playoff contention.
I gave the last spot to Simmons on the strength of defensive versatility, but his teammate Harris has been every bit his equal for the East-leading Sixers. Kyrie has been electrifying offensively, and it wouldn’t be surprising to see the coaches name him as a reserve because of his pedigree. That said, he’s also played only sixteen games thus far, and with so many quality candidates, availability is as good a tiebreaker as any. I honestly feel bad that so many deserving guys are going to get “snubbed,” but on the plus side, at least they won’t have to travel to Atlanta to play in a meaningless game and possibly get COVID for no apparent reason. So there’s that.
WEST ALL-STARS
Starters:
FC: LeBron James
FC: Kawhi Leonard
FC: Nikola Jokic
BC: Damian Lillard
BC: Luka Doncic
Reserves:
FC: Anthony Davis
FC: Rudy Gobert
FC: Paul George
BC: Steph Curry
BC: Donovan Mitchell
WC: Chris Paul
WC: DeMar DeRozan
Honorable Mentions: Mike Conley, Devin Booker, De’Aaron Fox, Zion Williamson, Brandon Ingram, Christian Wood, Ja Morant, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, CJ McCollum
I feel icky about a few of these. The top nine are locks — if you wanted to swap Curry for Luka in the starting lineup, I wouldn’t fault you — but those last three spots could go a lot of different ways. There is a case to be made for Conley over Mitchell and Booker over Paul, but in the end, brand recognition probably wins out. All four are playing great for overachieving teams, but there just aren’t enough spots. The Spurs deserve some shine for patching together a really dynamic mix of players and sitting squarely in the West playoff picture. For all the shade he receives for his retrograde game, DeRozan has been excellent all season, averaging 20.5/ 5.2/ 6.8 on 49/35/89 shooting. Starting next year, he may be entering a new phase of his career (to steal Bill Simmons’ favorite phrase), so it’s probably a good time to honor a guy who has somehow become underrated.
Zion and Ingram are putting up big numbers for a team that makes no damn sense from night to night. They’re both likely to be part of many All-Star Games in the future, but this doesn’t feel like the year to shoehorn them onto the roster. Wood, Morant, and McCollum have all been sensational, but have missed a bit too much time to warrant a spot. [I feel especially bad for CJ, who was balling the fuck out before going down with a foot injury: career-bests of 26.7 ppg and 5.0 apg on 47/44/84 shooting for a Portland team battling through terrible injury luck for yet another season.] Ascendant guards Fox and SGA are perhaps the most egregious “snubs” here, as both are leading young, undermanned squads to surprising levels of competence. Even as players like Paul, Curry, and Lillard eventually begin to age out, the competition for guard spots in the West is going to be intense for the foreseeable future.
So there you have it. Now let’s hope the league comes to its senses and gives these stars the recognition they deserve AND the break they’ve earned before the sprint to the finish line in the second half of the season.
As if recent history hasn’t provided enough examples of slovenly terrorists strong-arming their way to their desired location, on Wednesday James Harden was finally granted his trade request, heading to the Brooklyn Nets in a mammoth four-team deal. The time to reckon with his ugly departure from Houston — and the inevitable comparisons to Vince Carter’s messy divorce from Toronto back in 2004 — will come, and it may have long-lasting ripple effects on how NBA teams conduct business with their superstars. For now, let’s look at the deal, and what it does (or doesn’t do) for the four teams involved.
THE DEAL:
Brooklyn gets: James Harden, Cleveland’s 2022 2nd-round pick
Houston gets: Victor Oladipo, Dante Exum, Rodions Kurucs, Brooklyn’s unprotected 1st-round picks in 2022, 2024, and 2026, unprotected rights to swap picks with Brooklyn in 2021, 2023, 2025, and 2027, Milwaukee’s unprotected 2022 1st-round pick (via Cleveland), and a future 2nd-round pick from Indiana
There is obviously no way to forecast where the picks and swaps will fall and what they will turn into, but let’s take a shot at a first accounting of what this trade means for each team. Nowhere to start but with…
BROOKLYN NETS
The rumors have been flying around for weeks now, but it still feels shocking to see a team consummate a win-now move of this proportion. The Nets have now assembled one of the most talented-if-mercurial Big Threes of all time, at the cost of two excellent young players and (potentially) all of their draft equity for the bulk of the decade. The upside here is clearly higher than it was for the disastrous Paul Pierce/Kevin Garnett trade back in 2013 — it was obvious even at the time that team was never sniffing a title — but Nets’ fans (whoever they are) must still be feeling at least a twinge of terror at the prospect of looking at the stump where their collective arm used to be, nodding grimly, and diving back into the exact same shark-infested waters.
Harden, Kevin Durant, and the currently-MIA Kyrie Irving are under contract for this season plus two more (with 2022-23 being player options for all three stars), and nothing short of a title will be considered an acceptable result in any of those three seasons. They become the instant favorite to come out of the East this year, but how good can they be? Will this work? Can the whole even equal the sum of these parts, much less be greater? The old “there’s only one ball” saw is dumb and reductive, but at the same time, Usage Rate is a real thing which exists, and boy do these three guys use a ton of possessions. Their combined Usage Rate this season (one in which Harden’s is down significantly) adds up to 91.2 percent, which means there is no feasible way for these three guys to share the floor without someone taking a step back offensively. The obvious candidate is Harden, who has been an offense — and a damn good one — unto himself for 8+ years, but will now have to re-learn how to play nice in an ecosystem where he is no longer the keystone species. Can James Harden play “normal” basketball? Does he want to? Will the offense resemble the “my turn, your turn” vibe of the Russ/KD Thunder teams and early Heatles squads, or will it come closer to the ball-moving nirvana achieved by the 2016-17 Warriors?
Assuming Kyrie ever returns from his ongoing spirit quest or whatever, the ability to stagger the stars’ minutes should make this offense lethal for nearly every minute of every game. The math is such that head coach Steve Nash (yup, still feels weird) could play each guy 38 minutes a game in the playoffs, have two of the stars sharing the court at all times, and leave 18 devastating/awkward minutes a game where they all play together. Filling out the remaining 126 minutes of court time is another matter, as the remaining depth on the roster isn’t terrible, but is visibly short on large men. The starting center spot currently falls to either KD Super-friend DeAndre Jordan or frequent 24SS punching bag Jeff Green, but it feels nearly certain another move is coming to import a big man to fill out the rotation. [My pet conspiracy theory: Brooklyn GM Sean Marks targeted Cleveland to send Jarrett Allen to so that the Cavs would buy out the last year of Andre Drummond’s contract in the name of clearing the way for the future starter, thus allowing Brooklyn to sign Drummond off waivers. If this is true, it would be an all-time Jedi mind trick.]
Just as enormous as the upside of the move is the risk. Forget the draft picks; cross that bridge when we come to it. The offense should clearly be on another planet, but is there an upper bound to how explosive a basketball offense can be? And are there diminishing returns on having so much shot creation in a lineup? Perhaps more importantly, even if this is now far and away the league’s best offense, can they stop anybody? In this century, having a top-10 (or close to it) defense is essentially a prerequisite for winning a championship, and that feels like quite the stretch for this roster and coaching staff as it exists today. Trading out Allen (an elite rim protector) and LeVert (a high-end source of deflections and turnovers) for Harden and Available Big Man X is a likely downgrade to a unit which has been merely decent thus far (12th in Defensive Rating). Had they found a way to include PJ Tucker in the deal, this concern would be lessened, but alas. [Tucker is also almost certainly on the move in the coming days, and he is going to be a HUGE get for some contender.]
The other elephant in the room: how will the personalities mesh? Harden should be mollified now that he got his wish — never mind the trail of bodies he left in his wake — but his track record of working with other prickly and/or difficult superstars isn’t exactly pristine. Now he has two of them, one who simply doesn’t tolerate bullshit and another who does nothing but generate it. Everyone who knows Steve Nash says he’s basically Mother Theresa crossed with Gandhi, but managing this locker room is going to put even his supposedly saintly interpersonal abilities to the test. Beyond that, this team is now the NBA’s ultimate black hat, an uber-villain the likes of which we haven’t approached since the 2010 Heat. It will come with media scrutiny as well as an added intensity from opponents, dueling stressors for which we have no data to suggest whether or not Nash is equipped to handle.
Any way you slice it, this is now the most fascinating team in the NBA, and the one which will drive the narrative of the rest of the season, assuming we get through it in one piece.
HOUSTON ROCKETS
The reality is, when your do-everything superstar demands out, you’re fucked no matter what. The task at hand becomes damage control. Through that lens, new Rockets’ GM Rafael Stone did….pretty OK. He squeezed literally as much draft capital as is allowable under the rules out of Brooklyn, plus an extra first from Cleveland. The Oladipo part of the deal is a bit curious, but relatively recent All-NBA guards don’t grow on trees. [In a vacuum, LeVert is probably the more valuable asset, but Oladipo is an expiring contract and Rockets’ owner Tillman Fertitta is said to be hemorrhaging money as a result of the pandemic. As much as we want these things to be about what happens between the lines, sometimes personnel decisions get made for purely financial reasons. The deal also brings Houston below the luxury tax line, FWIW.]
Could the Rockets reasonably have done any better in this trade? Hard to say, mostly because we don’t know if Ben Simmons was ever actually on the table from Philly. If he was, it seems indefensible to not accept a trade package built around him, irrespective of whatever lingering animosity there may be with now-Sixers President Daryl Morey. Houston clearly would not have netted as much draft capital in a deal involving Simmons, but they would have gotten an elite player to build around, plus perhaps promising rookie Tyrese Maxey. One in the hand and all that jazz.
As it stands, where they go from here is anyone’s guess. A core of John Wall/Christian Wood/Victor Oladipo isn’t going anywhere interesting in the West. They aren’t bad enough to tank as currently constructed, and there isn’t much value in doing so anyway. Oklahoma City controls most of Houston’s own draft rights for the next several years as a result of the shortsighted Russell Westbrook trade in 2019, including top-4 protected swap rights on the Rockets’ pick in the 2021 draft. Maybe gobbling up all of Brooklyn’s picks is ultimately the right move — Boston certainly doesn’t regret it — but the Rockets may be destined to wander the NBA wilderness for multiple seasons before they get to find out.
INDIANA PACERS
Swapping Oladipo for LeVert is a tidy bit of business for Indiana. Dipo’s contract is set to expire, and it was an open secret that he was ready to move on to a new team, whether via trade or free agency. LeVert, who was originally drafted by the Pacers in 2016 before being traded to Brooklyn for Thaddeus Young, is younger than Oladipo (26 vs. 28) and is under contract for three seasons including the current one at a palatable-but-also-movable total of $52.5 million. His numbers, mostly compiled as the sixth man and undisputed creator for the Nets’ bench unit, are virtually identical to Oladipo’s so far this season. He will likely slot in as a full-time starter in Indiana, and creative head coach Nate Bjorkgren should be able to find plenty of ways to incorporate LeVert’s herky-jerky pick-and-roll game into what has quickly become one of the league’s most dynamic offenses.
Much like the next team, front offices can create real marginal value by acting as intermediaries in these enormous blockbusters, and Pacers’ GM Kevin Pritchard did some savvy, low-cost maneuvering here. Nice job.
CLEVELAND CAVALIERS
As with Indiana, acting as a transactional remora in these shark-sized deals can have real benefits, and Cavs’ GM Koby Altman got outstanding value for helping facilitate the trade. Giving up Milwaukee’s 2022 first-rounder is unlikely to come back and bite the Cavs, and while he’s still young, Dante Exum has failed to launch as an NBA player to this point. In return, they got a starting-caliber big man in Allen, who is remarkably still only twenty-two years old. Allen badly outplayed DeAndre Jordan in the early going with the Nets, he’ll be a restricted free agent this summer, and he fits nicely with the developmental timeline of Cleveland’s other young, core players (Collin Sexton, Darius Garland, and Isaac Okoro). Taurean Prince has struggled over the last season-plus in Brooklyn, but he could be a nice buy-low candidate as an athletic tweener forward with upside.
The only downside for Cleveland is they are now left with a positional logjam in the frontcourt. Andre Drummond and Kevin Love are still around, along with Larry Nance, Jr., JaVale McGee, and the perpetually disappointing Thon Maker. Altman will undoubtedly shop some of these names around to teams looking to add size, even if none of them has a ton of positive trade value. Drummond is on an expiring deal, and it’s likely he’ll move on in the offseason. The Cavs have gotten out to a surprisingly decent start, but ultimately this season is still about development, so sorting out the big man rotation and ensuring everyone’s happiness shouldn’t be keeping the coaching staff up at night. In the end, the front office acquired a nice building block for the future at a minimal price. Hitting those kinds of singles and doubles are necessary to turning around a moribund, post-LeBron franchise.
Milwaukee Bucks’ head coach Mike Budenholzer has been justifiably criticized in the past for his inability or unwillingness to make adjustments to his system in order to turn the tide in Playoff series. This year has felt like Groundhog Day to many of us already, so why not add another way to the list?
The top-seeded Bucks find themselves down 2-0 to a supremely game Miami Heat team, and the officiating shenanigans from the end of Game 2 notwithstanding, Milwaukee has been thoroughly handled by Miami throughout the bulk of both contests. The Heat deserves a ton of credit for being a more-than-worthy adversary, of course. They are tough, versatile, well-coached, and not remotely afraid of the moment. That being said, the Bucks aren’t finished, but they will be soon if Coach Bud keeps stridently adhering to the principles of his system and counting on the math to work itself out. It works great over the large sample size of the regular season, but this is a different animal. This is one seven-game sample, against a very well prepared team who clearly has their shit figured out. Either Budenholzer adapts, or the Bucks will face a quick-yet-agonizing death, along with all the attendant questions which will follow, given MVP/DPOY Giannis Antetokounmpo’s impending free agency in the summer of 2021.
Even if we start with the assumption (again, a sizable one) that Coach Bud is capable of making real adjustments, what should they be?
Tighten the freaking rotation. Someone should probably inform Bud that all of the depth and load management they deployed during the regular year was meant to allow him to lean more heavily on his primary guys in big playoff moments. Well, guess what? These are those moments! And as you may recall, they also had a four month hiatus in the middle of the season. There is simply no reason to hold anyone or anything back at this juncture, yet he continues to stick to a rotation with too many players and not enough run for the stars. Giannis and Khris Middleton played 36 and 33 minutes in Game 2, respectively. Middleton was a +18 in those minutes. [They both had some fouls throughout the game, but at a certain point, you just have to say fuck it and roll the dice.]
On the other end of the spectrum, Pat Connaughton and Donte DiVincenzo combined for 20 minutes and 2 points on 1-of-5 shooting. I like certain things both of those guys do, but they are not helping in this series. Excise both from the rotation entirely and feed all those minutes to Giannis and Middleton (and maybe a few more to George Hill). Miami never puts a bad minute on the floor; the Bucks need to match that consistency.
Miami wants to form a wall against Giannis. Stop letting them. The purest forms of the modern, five-out offenses found in Milwaukee and Houston have a number of built-in advantages. They create a ton of space for the primary playmakers (Giannis and James Harden, respectively) to attack in isolation and use their physical gifts. The attention they draw also provides space for the shooters dotted around the three-point arc to rain fire from above. It’s like a boxing match: the paint points and free throws are like body blows to soften up the defense, and the outside shots are the right crosses and uppercuts to the head. During the grind of the regular season, the approach creates a ton of low-hanging fruit against inferior/tired/traveling teams without a lot of time to practice or prepare. And no one is better at creating and capitalizing on all that easy, juicy stuff. They generate a ton of paint looks (while taking away the paint from their opponent with their length and scheme) and open catch-and-shoot threes, and combined with a fast pace, it’s enough over a few thousand possessions to tilt the odds in an appreciable way.
Problem is, a playoff series confers none of these advantages, especially in the bubble. The homecourt advantage they worked all season for is virtually meaningless, there is no travel, and opponents have nothing to do but rest and gameplan for them. The total number of possessions is shrunk down, and the opponent can lock in on taking away the easy stuff and the sorts of shots on which the offense thrives. Against the Bucks, there is no mystery about what this means — keep Giannis away from the hoop, no matter what. Toronto provided the “form a wall” blueprint last season, and Miami has changed virtually nothing about the plan. Teams have figured out they can’t survive the string of body blows and the eventual head shots it enables. The Bucks have a reputation as a sweet-shooting team, but again, it’s more a function of volume than anything else. Milwaukee shoots easily the highest percentage in the league from two-point range (56.7% for the season), but is only 18th in 3P% as a team (35.5%), despite attempting the fourth-highest percentage of threes as a proportion of total field goal attempts. George Hill, Kyle Korver, and Khris Middleton are all plus outside shooters. Everyone else…meh. If taking away Giannis layups and dunks means conceding semi-open looks to Eric Bledsoe, Brook Lopez, Wes Matthews, DiVincenzo, Connaughton, and Marvin Williams, well, that’s a trade-off teams are willing to live with.
One of the downsides of Milwaukee’s attack (and in a somewhat similar vein, Houston’s) is that it’s easy for the offense to become stagnant when shooters are at their stations and Giannis is mostly dictating the tempo of everything. So long as Giannis keeps getting to the rim, the math keeps working, and at a superficial level, everything seems fine. If that first domino stops falling, though…yikes.
When teams take away the primary thing an offense is trying to do, it’s obviously not sufficient to just say, “Oh well, we tried. Let’s pack it up.” You have to try something else! Milwaukee has options to counter-punch, both strategically and personnel-wise, if they choose to do so. How can they generate more paint touches and take pressure off of their jump shooters?
First, address the stagnancy problem. Get more player movement from every position, including Giannis, which we’ll address in a moment. Instead of just stationing shooters in the corners and on the wings, move and replace, cut away from the ball, set more pin-down screens — anything to take some of those ten defensive eyeballs off of Giannis, even briefly. [Watching a Bucks’ game followed by a Rockets’ game on Wednesday night amounted to five hours of me yelling “Someone cut!” at my TV. Good times.]
Second, stop conceding the formation of the Giannis wall to the defense. So, so, soooo many of Milwaukee’s sets functionally begin with Giannis holding the ball at a standstill — either on top, on the wing, or at the nail — against a set defense. This despite the Freak continually proving himself to be the planet’s most unstoppable offensive force when attacking a defense which is on its heels in some way. So find new ways to get them on their heels. They have been using Giannis more as the screener in the pick-and-roll, which has been effective at times in springing the ball handler for an open look. [Korver had a ton of these in Game 1, with mixed results.] This alone isn’t producing many paint touches though, because Miami’s rotations are surgical and they always get into the lane early to short circuit Giannis as he rolls to the basket, making any potential catch extremely difficult.
As with Harden to some extent, not supplying a screener to Giannis as the ball handler is logical because bringing another defender into the picture mitigates his one-on-one advantages. So how can they generate those iso touches but not let the defense load up on the impending foray to the lane? Again, player movement seems like the obvious answer. Stop just planting Giannis in one place, forcing him to work to get the ball, and then barreling into a wall of defenders. Initiate the sets with a different action, like a PnR with Bledsoe and Middleton on the opposite side. Run a two-man game with Giannis and Lopez, taking advantage of Brook’s prodigious ability to mash fools on the block as a way to make the defense collapse on someone other than the Freak. Start him on the second side and flow into some dribble handoffs with multiple screening actions. Have a guard cross-screen for Giannis in semi-transition or early offense. Anything to get him the ball moving north-south where the defense can’t load up in advance to stop it. None of this is complicated; it just involves everyone having a willingness to do something different and move their asses around more. Which leads to the obvious but important final adjustment:
Execute. It’s not exactly hard-hitting analysis to say Giannis needs to make his free throws, and the Bucks need to stop turning the ball over and fouling so damn much. The obviousness of it doesn’t make it any less true. Miami has out-executed Milwaukee in nearly every aspect of the game over the first eight quarters of the series, and all the math in the world can’t save the Bucks if they don’t start doing basic, fundamental basketball things correctly far more often. Set better screens, don’t make lazy passes, attack seams in the defense quickly and decisively, and communicate defensive coverages and switches in a way which makes it appear the five players on the court have actually met each other before. If Coach Bud can’t motivate his guys to take some pride in their craft in the most capital-M Must Win game of the season on Friday, then it’s time to rethink what it is his brilliant system is really meant to accomplish.
On Wednesday night, the NBA took the unprecedented step of putting the regular season temporarily on hold in response to news Utah Jazz center Rudy Gobert had tested positive for the COVID-19 virus. It was a chaotic night, full of confusion, anger, and concern. After the Jazz-Thunder game was postponed just moments before tip-off, the memo from the league came down square in the middle of the nationally televised Nuggets-Mavericks game. It was surreal to see a “Breaking News” chyron at the bottom of the screen announcing the suspension of the season while literally watching NBA basketball take place right above it. There is so much to unpack here, and so many more twists this story is going to take, both as it pertains to basketball and life in general. Here are some initial thoughts.
[Note: I had planned to release a very different column today, one about actual basketball games. It instantly became obsolete around 9:30 PM ET last night, so we’ll suspend that for now as well. Much like the NBA season itself, God willing, you’ll all get to see it sometime down the road.]
First off, let’s be clear about one thing: this is a good decision by the NBA. It may feel inevitable now with hindsight, but that wasn’t the case as recently as yesterday afternoon (when the owners held a conference call to discuss potential steps for holding games in empty arenas — how quaint). The league acted quickly and decisively in the face of the Gobert news, and while there will still be a great deal of cleanup and fact-finding to do going forward, the degree of the crisis has likely been mitigated in a way which should cause other large businesses and institutions to take note. Player and fan safety are of utmost importance in this matter, so the league should be commended for putting those interests above its financial concerns without hesitating when it mattered.
[Will the NCAA do the same? Conference tournaments are ongoing (albeit without fans present in many cases), and the NCAA Tournament is scheduled to begin next week. The organization is notoriously money-hungry, so one suspects they’ll hold out as long as humanly possible. But if an NBA player contracted the virus this quickly, it’s hard to imagine it isn’t already present within the college ranks as well. As soon as someone tests positive, it blows the whole thing up just like it did the NBA. This paragraph may turn out to be old news by the time you read it. That’s how fast this thing is rolling downhill now.]
What’s next? It’s a great question. The teams and officials who came into contact with the Jazz over the last two weeks (during which time Gobert likely had the virus but was asymptomatic) are self-quarantining, and if anyone in said cohort also tests positive, it will probably trigger a response on a much wider scale. Players and media members as vectors for the disease is a terrifying thought when you consider how many people they come in contact with on the daily NBA grind. It appears the testing apparatus is finally becoming more efficient around the country (Colorado now has South Korea-style drive-through testing and many testing kits being manufactured take less time to process than before), so we should begin to get a better sense of the extent of the crisis in the coming days. [People are undoubtedly going to freak the fuck out when the number of confirmed cases starts to explode due to increased testing, but we all need to remain calm and realize that’s actually a good thing. You can’t fight a problem if you don’t know the scale of it.]
All signs point to an extended hiatus for the league, as it’s going to take a while to determine the actual risk level to the fans and players, then there will be the time it takes to mitigate the spread among the general public, and then a likely cooling off period before it becomes remotely feasible to start having people gather in large numbers again. Assuming things die down eventually and games are able to resume, the logistics of completing the regular season and the playoffs are mind-boggling. Most NBA arenas serve as multi-purpose event spaces, and dates are booked many months in advance. The NBA schedule-makers are going to be pushed to their absolute limit in trying to reschedule all the postponed games, which will obviously pile up by the day. The league is fortunate to have a buffer built into its schedule, with the stretch from mid-July through mid-September acting as a dormant period. The league can conceivably push the playoffs, draft, and free agency further into the summer, but the challenge there is the theoretical presence of the Summer Olympics this year in Japan. [What form those will take, if any, of course remains a massive open question as well.] We have no idea how this will play out until we get a better sense of what it is going to take to contain the spread of the virus among the public, but it is difficult to envision the completion of the ’19-’20 season being anything other than a gigantic clusterfuck.
24SS will be back soon, but in the mean time, stay safe, wash your hands, make smart choices, and practice social distancing. We’ll all get through this together, and then we can get back to watching the game we love.
NBA roster construction is an inexact science. Every front office makes mistakes. No one bats a thousand. But when looking at the teams who frequent the top of the standings, a theme emerges: consistently sound decision-making and long-term planning, sprinkled with occasional lightning strikes of good fortune. The Raptors, Heat, Thunder, Celtics, Spurs, and Warriors have all made hay over entire eras of NBA history by simply sticking to a solid team-building philosophy and putting themselves in position to get lucky and/or pounce when an opportunity presents itself.
Then there’s the other end of the spectrum, the teams lacking front office continuity, a consistent strategy, or both. These teams frequently draft poorly, bungle simple transactions, misapprehend value, and generally make decisions in a haphazard fashion which relegates them to the lottery year after year. Well, guess what? We’ve had enough of their bumbling and malfeasance. We’re taking them to court to defend themselves for crimes against their fan bases.
Welcome to team-building court, Judge Culligan presiding.
Here’s how it works. Since it’s my column, I am not only judge, jury, and executioner; I’m also the prosecution and the defense. I will make the case for and against each team’s “strategy,” and then render a verdict based on the facts. First on the docket: an Eastern Conference team which has been trapped in purgatory for over a decade.
DETROIT PISTONS
Backstory: From 2001 to 2008, the Pistons were one of the league’s elite, inner circle contenders. Over those seven seasons, they ground out a 384-190 regular season record (.669 winning percentage), made it to the Eastern Conference Finals in six straight years, and played in two NBA Finals, winning one in 2004 with a team still remembered fondly by many basketball purists. Team President Joe Dumars was considered one of the bright, young stars among front office executives. Everything he touched seemed to turn to gold during those years. [OK, except for Darko.]
After 2008, however, the team’s fortunes shifted, and its troubles began. With the championship core aging, Dumars swung for the fences, trading former Finals MVP Chauncey Billups (primarily) for Allen Iverson. The Answer was mostly washed, and Detroit limped into the Playoffs with a 39-43 record, losing in the first round. That ’08-’09 year was the beginning of a long, slow descent into putrescence for the franchise. They’ve cracked the playoff field only twice since, bowing out in the first round each time. Detroit has drafted in the top-10 five times since then (and nine total times in the top-20), with little to show for it. A series of disastrous trades and free agency signings has piled on additional misery. Dumars “resigned” in 2014 and was replaced by the combination of Stan Van Gundy and Jeff Bowers, who didn’t have a whole lot better luck. They were let go in 2018 and replaced by Ed Stefanski, who still runs the team at present. Regardless of who has been at the helm, it’s been a tough decade. Let’s go through the receipts.
The Case Against: The draft can obviously be a crapshoot, and they’ve had no lottery luck since the original sin of Darko back in 2003. Even so, the record is pretty grim for a team which has had as much draft capital on-hand as Detroit. Here are the notable picks since 2009:
2012: 9th overall – Andre Drummond; 39th overall – Khris Middleton. [OK, not bad that year!]
2013: 8th overall – Kentavious Caldwell-Pope
2014: no first rounder due to trade (hold that thought); 38th overall – Spencer Dinwiddie
2015: 8th overall – Stanley Johnson
2016: 18th overall – Henry Ellenson
2017: 12th overall – Luke Kennard
2018: no first rounder due to trade; 42nd overall – Bruce Brown
2019: 15th overall – Sekou Doumbouya
Drummond is a two-time All-Star, and there will be more to say about him, of course. Monroe had some productive years for Detroit before the league moved on from him. Kennard still hasn’t reached his ceiling, and we have no idea what Doumbouya is yet. Jerebko, Singler, Middleton, and Brown were all nice finds late in the draft. Beyond that, woof.
One of the difficult but important parts of this exercise is to not get too far down the rabbit hole of opportunity cost. There is a Butterfly Effect to nearly every NBA transaction, and it’s easy, with hindsight, to say “Well, they could have just drafted [Available Player X] with that pick.” It’s technically true — Kawhi Leonard was sitting there in 2011 when they instead chose Brandon “My basketball career is a couple years away from getting murdered by DeAndre Jordan” Knight — but the whole thing unravels too quickly if we go down that path. So, to simplify things for the member of the jury (again, me), I’ll try to stick to observable effects of the decisions made.
It’s unclear whether the powers that be in Detroit have been poor at evaluating talent, developing it, or both. Monroe and Drummond were relatively obvious value picks at their respective spots, but beyond those two, they’ve simply been unable to extract commensurate value from the first round, regardless of draft slot. [Again, we don’t know with Kennard and Doumbouya yet, but I don’t think I’d bet on Kennard to ever make an All-Star team. Sekou has all the talent in the world, but there are already rumblings about his inconsistent motor, which is a MASSIVE red flag for any raw prospect.]
They haven’t helped themselves in the trade and free agency markets, either. Once again, it’s instructive to go back to the year 2009. Franchise instability often comes from the top — a lot more on that later — and the Pistons were mired in it at the time. Long-time owner Bill Davidson had recently passed away in March of ’09, leaving the team in the hands of his wife, Karen. Dumars had already been in the habit of making win-now moves due to Davidson’s advancing age and the desire to bring him another championship, and his death set the franchise adrift. [It would be two more years before billionaire financier Tom Gores would buy the team from Karen for a shockingly low $325 million, though it’s not as if his tenure as owner has been particularly stable or fruitful, either.]
That summer, Dumars would wade into an odd portion of the free agency pool, signing Ben Gordon and Charlie Villanueva for five years each and $58 million and $38 million, respectively. Villanueva was fine, playing out the five-year contract entirely for the Pistons as a respectable role player. Gordon, however, wore out his welcome in Detroit, and after the lockout-shortened 2011-12 season, Dumars dumped Gordon’s contract (along with a 2014 first-rounder as sweetener) to Charlotte in exchange for the rotting corpse of Corey Maggette. The pick would end up 9th overall, and Noah Vonleh was selected in what has in retrospect turned out to be an ugly draft. This particular move didn’t come back to bite them hard, but it was a bad piece of business which portended more to come.
The 2013-14 season is when things truly went off the rails, and it spelled the end for Joe Dumars. In the summer of ’13, coming off a 29-win campaign, Detroit used its cap space to sign 27-year-old Josh Smith to a four-year, $54 million free agent contract. It was semi-defensible at the time, even if the fit with young center Drummond was questionable as the league gradually moved into what would become the pace-and-space era. Well, the fit was more than questionable. It was disastrous. J-Smoove would play only 105 total games for Detroit before being waived in December of 2014 using the stretch provision. There was so much money left on his contract that Smith remains on Detroit’s books to this day, counting $5.3 million against the Pistons’ cap in the Year of Our Lord 2020. Only a few weeks later, they would trade the aforementioned Knight to Milwaukee for fellow young-ish, high upside guard Brandon Jennings. As part of the deal, Milwaukee would also receive the rights to something called a Viachesov Kravtsov, as well as Detroit’s little-used second-round pick from the prior year, future two-time All-Star and second-best player on a possible title team Khris Middleton. Ouch.
After a second consecutive 29-win season, Dumars was shown the door, but things didn’t improve much under the new regime. The following season, Van Gundy completed a three-way trade, netting them young, ascendant guard Reggie Jackson from Oklahoma City. The trade itself was fine, except they then re-signed Jackson to a five-year, $80 million extension the following summer. Jackson has battled injuries, ineffectiveness, and a questionable attitude throughout the deal, and was just bought out of the final season last week. In the bat-shit crazy summer of 2016, they handed out a four-year, $41 million contract to noted sharpshooter Jon Leuer. [His shooting is only notable because it’s roughly the only thing he can do on a basketball court. He would clog up Detroit’s cap for three uninspiring seasons before being salary dumped to Milwaukee and waived.] The next move of unfortunate largesse was to throw a five-year max extension at Andre Drummond, including a player option for the final season in ’20-’21. [Hint: this is foreshadowing.]
By the ’17-’18 season, Gores was publicly putting pressure on Van Gundy to move the team towards something resembling contention, causing the Notorious SVG to take his biggest swing. In late January of 2018, Detroit would acquire Blake Griffin from the Clippers in exchange for Avery Bradley, Tobias Harris, Boban Marjanovic, a 2018 first-rounder, and a 2019 second-rounder. [The 2018 first would land 12th overall and become Miles Bridges, who L.A. would flip into Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and eventually, Paul George. One can quibble with the wisdom of the PG trade, but the Clips definitely got their money’s worth out of Detroit’s pick, if nothing else.] The oft-injured Griffin enjoyed a bounce-back season in ’18-’19, being named third-team All-NBA and returning the Pistons to the postseason, though he injured his knee again late in the season and was a shell of himself in Detroit’s first-round whitewashing at the hands of Milwaukee. Whereas last season the gamble may have appeared salvageable, the chickens have come home to roost this year. A clearly compromised Blake played only eighteen games before being shut down in ’19-’20, and his outlook going forward could not be more murky. It’s sad enough to see a player who, at his apex was one of the best and most exciting players in the world, laid low by injuries. Worse for the Pistons is how they never benefited from that version of the player and are now saddled with all the downside. [Namely, an almost-31-year-old, undersized big man who has traditionally relied on his athleticism but will likely never possess it again, and has two years and a shade over $70 million remaining on his contract.]
Even if Blake comes back next season healthy, he may find himself a fish out of water. Under new head honcho Ed Stefanski, the Pistons seem to have finally signaled they are prepared for a full-scale rebuild, but they aren’t even nailing the tear down. The trade deadline would have been a great time to sell off any veteran piece not nailed to the floor, but that didn’t go quite as planned. Detroit signed both Derrick Rose and Markieff Morris to two-year deals this past summer (Kieff’s second year was a player option), yet couldn’t (or wouldn’t) find a deal for either guy at the deadline. Rose has actually had a surprising statistical season, and probably could have been an effective, low-cost third or fourth guard for a contender. [Lakers, I’m looking in your direction.] Instead, they held on to the former MVP to soak up minutes on a 19-40 team going nowhere because…why, exactly?
Markieff has been less effective than D-Rose this season, but is he truly that much less valuable than his twin brother, who makes five times as much and garnered a first-round pick, an expiring contract, and a young prospect from the Clippers? Apparently he is, because Detroit bought Morris out last week, allowing him to sign with the Lakers for the rest of the season in a move absolutely everyone could have seen coming. The only other scuttlebutt coming out of Detroit at the deadline was that they were engaged in talks to trade Luke Kennard to Phoenix, which is utterly nonsensical. Along with Doumbouya and perhaps Christian Wood (who we’ll get to), Kennard is about the only player on their entire roster they should be looking to build around as a bridge to whatever the next iteration of a competitive Pistons team looks like. A bad plan is better than no plan at all, but it’s not even clear which column to place the Pistons in right now.
Which, at long last, brings us to Andre Drummond. Was there a reasonable alternative to throwing Drummond the full max back in 2016, even knowing his limitations? Maybe not. It doesn’t make what happened at the deadline any less jarring. Two things stick out to me:
Imagine going back in time and telling a basketball fan from the 80’s or 90’s that a 26-year-old, hyper-athletic, 6-foot-11, 265-lb center who has made two All-Star teams, led the league in rebounding three times, and has no appreciable injury history would be traded in 2020 for what amounts to absolutely nothing.
The Pistons happily gave him a player option on the 5th year back in 2016, and by 2020 were so terrified Drummond — who was averaging a 17.8/ 15.8/ 2.8 on 53% shooting, mind you — would actually exercise it that they were willing to trade him…for absolutely nothing.
Building a contender around Drummond — or maximizing his value as an asset — was always going to involve threading a tiny needle in today’s NBA, but Detroit has done whatever the exact opposite is. They paid him a metric shit-ton of money, sacrificed assets to build a winner around him, failed, and then sold him off for pennies on the dollar. Maybe paying him $28 million to be the same player next year is even worse, but that’s a pretty weak silver lining. The mismanagement of Andre Drummond is simply the logical conclusion of an entire decade of organizational malpractice. Their guilt before this court is manifest. The prosecution rests.
The Case For: This is about as close to a nolo contendere as one can get. The defense may not have a ton to work with here, but not everything has been awful. Dwayne Casey is a solid head coach, and they didn’t repeat the mistake of granting him too much power like they did with SVG. The Monroe and Drummond draft picks were the right moves at the time, even if neither guy ever became the centerpiece they were seeking. The Rose signing was a low-risk, high-reward move. In a vacuum, the trade for Reggie Jackson made sense. The Kennard and Doumbouya picks were defensible given the draft positions. [Yes, the next two picks after Kennard were All-Stars Donovan Mitchell and Bam Adebayo, but I said we weren’t going to go there, so we’ll give Detroit a pass.]
Stefanski smartly snagged Christian Wood off waivers from the Pelicans over the summer, and the 24-year-old UNLV product has become an extremely productive big for them this season, particularly in the wake of the departures of Drummond and Morris. In ten February games, Wood is averaging 19.3/ 9.0/ 1.4 on 52/39/79 shooting splits in 30.8 minutes a night. He’s shown the athleticism and versatility to play either big man spot, along with burgeoning floor spacing ability. He’s been a real revelation, and the only downside to the Pistons unleashing him is he’s now going to command quite a bit more cash as a free agent this summer.
If there is any saving grace for this franchise, it has been their ability to find diamonds in the rough like Wood, Singler, Jerebko, Middleton (briefly), Dinwiddie, and Brown. Even so, the knack for finding unheralded talent pales in comparison to the high-profile draft busts, panic trades, and ill-advised free agent signings the Pistons have heaped upon their downtrodden fans.
VERDICT: GUILTY AF
SACRAMENTO KINGS
Backstory: The Kings, as you have probably heard, are in the midst of a 13-year postseason drought, and it does not appear the streak is going to end this season. Look, the West is brutal year in and year out, but even so, eight of the fifteen teams make the playoffs in any given season, and every other West franchise has figured out how to build at least one team which doesn’t totally suck during the span. Everyone except the Kangz. How much is bad luck and how much is organizational incompetence? Let’s break down the facts of the case.
The Case Against: As with Detroit, it’s instructive to start with the team’s draft history. In 2006, 2007, and 2008, the Kings used their first-round picks on Quincy Douby (19th), Spencer Hawes (10th), and Jason Thompson (12th), respectively. These were all understandable misses for a team entering its fallow period — for reasons we’ll discuss shortly — after a run of contention. Over the next decade, the ping pong balls would only bounce their way twice (2017 and 2018, though there will be more to say about the ’17 draft), but Sacramento would be “blessed” with a top-10 pick in every single draft (and two in 2017 following the Boogie Cousins trade). Here’s the crux of what they did:
2011: 7th overall – Bismack Biyombo (sent to Charlotte in three-team, draft night trade; ended up with Jimmer Fredette); 60th overall – Isaiah Thomas
2012: 5th overall – Thomas Robinson
2013: 7th overall – Ben McLemore
2014: 8th overall – Nik Stauskas
2015: 6th overall – Willie Cauley-Stein
2016: 8th overall – Marquese Chriss (traded to Phoenix for picks 13 and 28, which became Georgios Papagiannis and Skal Labissiere)
2017: 5th overall – De’Aaron Fox; 10th overall – Zach Collins (traded for picks 15 and 20, which became Justin Jackson and Harry Giles)
2018: 2nd overall – Marvin Bagley III; 37th overall – Gary Trent, Jr. (traded to Portland for two future second-rounders)
2019: no first rounder due to trade (trust me, we’ll get to this debacle)
It’s only fair to give credit where it’s due. Tyreke Evans became the Rookie of the Year in a draft class also featuring James Harden, Steph Curry, DeMar DeRozan, and Jrue Holiday. [Reke has since become something else entirely, but let’s set that aside for now.] Cousins has as much talent as you’ll ever see in a 5th overall pick, and despite his many foibles, he is a 4x All-Star and 2x All-NBA selection. Those don’t grow on trees. De’Aaron Fox was the correct pick at 5th in 2017, and even with the ongoing trauma he is suffering at the hands of the Kings, still looks the part of a future star. Casspi and Whiteside have outstripped their draft positions, and IT was obviously a home run with the final pick in 2011.
Again, no one slays the draft every year, and Sacramento has had its share of relative successes. But damn, have the failures been colossal. The stretch from 2011 to 2016 is BRUTAL. Six consecutive top-ten picks, not one of whom remains on the roster today. [Yes, Chriss was immediately traded for two guys further down the draft, but neither of them stuck, either.] Three of them are out of the league entirely, and the others are merely fringe rotation players. Giles could still end up being a useful player, but it will probably require a change of scenery. The Kings would be better off if they just kept the 10th pick (which was one of the spoils from the Boogie-to-New Orleans trade). Cousins and Evans both had several productive years for the Kings, but their troubled paths (along with those of Whiteside, McLemore, Stauskas, and Cauley-Stein) beg the question: why can’t Sacramento stop drafting head cases?
The Maloof brothers (Photo by Ethan Miller/Getty Images)
It’s very important to understand when it comes to NBA franchises, ownership sets the tone for everything. Personnel, scouting, spending, fan and media relations — every person in the organization takes his or her marching orders from the top because it’s where the money comes from. [Cue Knicks fans nodding sadly.] Sure, some don’t meddle too much with the decisions of their GMs or Presidents, but you damn well better believe those front office guys know the direction the owner wants to go and what (if any) sort of financial constraints they have on them. We’ll get to how this relates to current owner Vivek Ranadive, but first we have to go back and talk about the Maloofs.
The Maloof family purchased the Kings back in 1998, and operations of the team were handed over to scions Joe and Gavin. At the time, they were running a highly successful casino business in Las Vegas, which would lead to the building of the Palms in 2000. So long as the casinos were thriving, the Maloofs were happy to pour resources into the Kings, which in part led to their successful stretch of play in the early 2000’s under head coach Rick Adelman. Sacramento almost certainly would have won the title in 2002 if not for the, ahem, controversy surrounding the officiating in the Western Finals against the Lakers.
In any case, things began to turn right around 2006. The Maloofs were in a feud with the City of Sacramento over public funding for a new arena, including threats of moving the team to Las Vegas. The front office and Adelman “mutually agreed” he would not return to the team after the ’05-’06 season. And behind the scenes, the Maloofs were slowly going broke. As the Palms began bleeding money, the budget for running the Kings got a corresponding haircut. It is honestly hard to know how much blame to place on former President of Basketball Operations Geoff Petrie (who ran the team all the way from 1994 up through the sale in 2013) because he was — to borrow a poker term — short-stacked for the entirety of those last seven years.
Because I’m a masochist, I went back through all the personnel transactions the Kings made during that period, and it became utterly necessary to look at each move through this cost-cutting lens. Otherwise, one would only be able to conclude the team was being run by Heath Ledger’s Joker because it almost appeared as if creating anarchy was the whole point. They signed zero notable free agents, which makes sense when one views them as a failing business rather than a professional sports team attempting to compete for titles. Petrie systematically sold off all of the highly paid veterans who formed the core of the earlier contending teams in exchange for pupu platters of journeymen and non-premium draft picks. Any young player they acquired who became good enough to warrant real money (Kevin Martin, Carl Landry, John Salmons) was immediately shipped off for something cheaper and, generally speaking, less useful on the court. [A washed-up Salmons would later be re-acquired by Sacramento in 2011 as part of the draft night Biyombo-for-Jimmer trade. Good God, there’s a lot wrong with that sentence.] The players they took back in trades, even ones who could actually play, would often be bought out of their contracts shortly thereafter to further trim costs.
It was an untenable way to run a franchise, and the results bore it out. The Kings went 187-371 from ’05-’06 through ’12-’13, when Ranadive and the “Sacramento group” bought the team following the Maloofs unsuccessful attempt to sell the team to the “Seattle group” led by Steve Ballmer and Chris Hansen. [Think about the Butterfly Effect there for a second.] That 2012-13 season was particularly chaotic, as the team continued to flail on the court (28-54) while Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson (!) worked to come up with local investors for the team and a new arena in order to defeat the relocation bid from the Seattle group. Ultimately, the NBA Board of Governors voted against the relocation, and the Maloofs agreed to sell to the Ranadive group the next day, paving the way for the next generation of Kings’ dysfunction.
Mike Malone, Pete D’Alessandro, and Vivek Ranadive (Photo by Rich Pedroncelli/Associated Press)
Explaining the team’s failures during the Ranadive regime is a bit more complicated. The Maloofs were a decidedly old school ownership situation. Casino magnates who suddenly weren’t so wealthy anymore (and perhaps never were as wealthy as they liked to appear) is a simple enough narrative to understand. An Indian-born tech mogul who was previously a minority owner of the Warriors and came to the league with a much more modern (some would say strange) conception of both basketball and corporate governance is quite the opposite. Ranadive came into the job with the perfectly reasonable notion of hiring and empowering the smartest people, but as with most any profession, there has been a learning curve.
The first thing he did was hire a new head coach in Mike Malone, who Ranadive knew from his time as an assistant with the Warriors. And you know what? That’s a great hire! Malone is an excellent basketball mind, as his current tenure with the Nuggets is proving. But the new owner made a crucial mistake in his order of operations. He hired Malone while Geoff Petrie was still running the team, even though Ranadive had every intention of replacing the old head honcho with his own choice. Sure enough, within two weeks, the team announced it would hire Pete D’Alessandro (formerly a deputy in Denver’s front office; hold that thought) as its new GM. Problem is, there is no evidence D’Alessandro actually wanted Malone to be the coach of the team, and someone as business-savvy as Ranadive should have realized immediately taking decision-making power out of the hands of your new chief executive isn’t the best way to foster organizational harmony.
Regardless, D’Alessandro set to the task of remaking the roster. He quickly pulled off a three-team sign-and-trade to send restricted free agent Tyreke Evans to New Orleans in lieu of matching the 4-year, $44 million offer sheet the Pels were preparing to tender. The return wasn’t massive, but at least it was something for a player who clearly didn’t factor into the team’s long-term plans. [Based on the injuries, ineffectiveness, and off-court troubles that have befallen Evans since, it’s fair to call this one a win for Sacto.]
In December, the Kings took a big swing, trading for highly-paid-but-possibly-overvalued swingman Rudy Gay from Toronto. The move was a signal the Kings were ready to spend again to improve the team, though it didn’t do a whole lot in that regard. [The Kings were 6-13 at the time of the trade; they would go 22-41 thereafter to finish at 28-54 yet again. Conversely, Toronto was 7-12 when the trade was consummated, and would go on to finish the season at 48-34, make the playoffs for the first time in six years, and be a fixture in the postseason each season thereafter. It also should be noted the Raptors’ new GM that season was Masai Ujiri, who happened to be D’Alessandro’s boss in Denver, and has done some notable things since.]
The decision-making would only get more bizarre from there. In the ’13-’14 season, diminutive scoring machine Isaiah Thomas — who, you’ll remember, the Kings smartly plucked with the final pick in the 2011 draft — had come into his own, averaging a 20/3/6 on 45/35/85 shooting in 35 minutes a game. So in the summer of ’14, naturally the team decided to bestow a 3-year, $15 million contract on lesser player Darren Collison, then trade Thomas to Phoenix for Alex Oriakhi and a trade exception. [In other words, nothing.] Within three seasons, IT would be a two-time All-Star and the best player on a Celtics team which was a few bounces from knocking off LeBron and going to the NBA Finals. Collison played out his contract with the Kings and was…fine, I guess.
Despite the odd personnel choice, Sacramento began the ’14-’15 season with a glimmer of hope. By December, the Kings were 11-13, a pretty respectable record for a franchise which had by now been a steaming pile of dog crap for a solid eight years. To commemorate the occasion, D’Alessandro decided he should…fire Mike Malone? Yup, the coach the GM never wanted was told to kick rocks, and trust me, it made absolutely no sense at the time, either. After a summarily terrible 7-21 stint by interim coach Ty Corbin, D’Alessandro revealed his “masterstroke,” hiring his former Denver colleague George Karl as the new head coach in February.
Even without the hindsight of Karl’s eventual 44-68 record as Kings’ coach, it was clear by this time D’Alessandro was simply unfit for his position. The former political consultant had made a habit of leaking negative information to the press about players, Malone, and even Ranadive himself. In March, the owner liquidated the front office but spared Karl, possibly as a face-saving PR move. Then, in place of manifestly terrible hire D’Alessandro, the managerial wizard who vowed to hire people smarter than him brought in…Vlade Divac. There can be value in keeping things in-house, but the former Kings’ center is by no means the first name one would bring up in a discussion of which ex-player should be tasked with running a franchise.
Vlade’s inexperience would be exploited in short order. In July 2015, Divac made his first significant move as GM, and it completely beggars belief. Seeking cap relief, for some reason Vlade thought the ideal trade partner was the Patron Saint of Absorbing Bad Contracts in Exchange for Assets himself, former Sixers’ GM/Process enthusiast Sam Hinkie. Look, NBA teams frequently execute trades where they get nothing of real value in order to shed salary. Sometimes it’s even the right thing to do. But what the Sixers and Kings did in July of 2015 might be the single dumbest, most lopsided trade in NBA history. And unlike many idiotic trades which kind of get lost to history because everything basically evens out or the impact is muted, the ramifications of this deal will be felt for at least the next decade, if not longer.
In the deal, Sacramento sent Carl Landry, Nik Stauskas, and Jason Thompson to Philly, along with swap rights on their 2017 first-round pick, and an unprotected 2019 first-round pick. In exchange, Sacramento opened up about $16 million in cap space and received the draft rights to international “prospects” Arturas Gudaitis and Luka Mitrovic, neither of whom ever played a single minute of NBA basketball. [Some intrepid NBA fan should create a game called “Six Degrees of the Idea of Arturas Gudaitis.” Seriously, look at how many NBA players he has been tangentially involved with in trades. Could we work our way back to George Mikan or Bill Russell? My head hurts.]
Why were the Kings so desperate to open up cap space that they would willingly endanger multiple future drafts, you ask? Obviously because they had already come to verbal agreements with free agent needle-movers Rajon Rondo, Marco Belinelli, Kosta Koufos, and Omri Casspi, none of whom they had the cap space to absorb. It’s OK, though, because the signings helped the Kings transform from a 29-win laughingstock in 2014-15 into a 33-win powerhouse in 2015-16.
So what did this quick injection of “talent” cost the Kings? After a decade of dodging having their number called in the draft lottery like they were — oh, nevermind — their luck finally changed in 2017, when Sacramento jumped up to the #3 spot. Unfortunately, the Sixers, who had drawn the 5th spot, owned the swap rights on the pick, which they obviously exercised. Boston drew the top pick, one of the last vestiges of another disastrous trade, the 2013 deal which sent Kevin Garnett and Paul Pierce to Brooklyn. Based on what transpired, we know the Celtics coveted Duke’s Jayson Tatum, and felt he would still be available at no. 3 overall, so they struck a deal with Philly to move back to that spot. The Sixers got the no. 1 pick and would select Markelle Fultz. [For our purposes, it doesn’t really matter how that turned out, but yeah…yikes.] In exchange, Boston got the 3rd pick — which should have belonged to Sacramento — and another future first-round pick. The deal was structured such that the additional pick was a 2018 Lakers’ first-rounder Philly owned, but if the pick didn’t fall between nos. 2 and 5 (which it ultimately did not), it would convert to the 2019 Sacramento first-rounder, which Philly also received in the cosmically stupid 2015 trade.
The Kings would select Fox with the 5th pick in 2017, and his development was a big driver in pushing Sacto towards something resembling competence in ’18-’19, which thankfully allowed the unprotected pick they owed Boston to drop all the way to 14th overall (the Celtics selected Romeo Langford, who is now beginning to get rotation minutes for a contender). Again, the Butterfly Effect complicates any analysis of this, but what on Earth happens if Philly doesn’t have that pick swap in its pocket in 2017? Would Boston have any interest in trading the no. 1 pick, knowing Tatum probably wouldn’t be there at 5? What happens to Fultz and Fox in that scenario? What about Lonzo Ball? Do the Kings still end up with the no. 2 pick in 2018, since their ’17-’18 record would likely have been different? Weirdly, it ended up costing the Sixers the most, as if the basketball gods were not about to let the clever kid prosper from conning the dumb kid out of his lunch money. [The gods were unavailable for comment on why they continue to allow the Celtics to get away with this shit. There is no justice.]
Anyway, the Kings sucked yet again in ’15-’16, which gave Vlade cover to fire George Karl, as one suspects he had wanted to do from the moment he was hired. Somehow, Sacramento stumbled into another good hire, tapping former Memphis head coach Dave Joerger. They pulled another Homer in the 2016 draft, trading the rights to Marquese Chriss (who is bad) to Phoenix for the rights to Georgios Papagiannis (also bad) and Skal Labissiere (ditto), but in the process getting the rights to top Euro prospect Bogdan “Double Bogey” Bogdanovic (who is good!).
In spite of these minor victories, it was lather, rinse, repeat to begin the ’16-’17 season. Divac once again burned their cap space on multi-year deals for roster flotsam (Arron Afflalo, Garrett Temple, Matt Barnes, and Anthony Tolliver), and the team sleepwalked to another disappointing 32-50 finish. In February, facing the reality of having to either offer disgruntled star DeMarcus Cousins a maximum extension the following summer or risk eventually losing him for nothing, the Kings showed a surprising bit of self-awareness and shipped Boogie to New Orleans at the trade deadline. The package they received in return was headlined by young sharpshooter Buddy Hield and a 2017 first-round pick, which would become Zach Collins (who they flipped for Justin Jackson and Harry Giles). Given the questionable leverage they held and what has become of Cousins’s career since, it turned out to be a pretty good piece of business for the Kings, as star trades go.
Would Boogie’s career have played out differently had he been drafted by an organization which could better accentuate his unique strengths and help him mature beyond his mistakes rather than exacerbating them? Hard to say, but why would we give them the benefit of the doubt when the Kings’ franchise is the common thread in the stories of so many highly drafted busts?
With the Boogie drama in the rear view and high-character youngin’ Fox on board, things were surely looking up, right?
In the summer of ’17, Vlade would once again flush cap space down the toilet, this time throwing massive overpays at George Hill and a washed Zach Randolph. Fox struggled to acclimate as a rookie, and the team limped to yet another twenty-something win season, finishing 27-55 in ’17-’18. Lottery luck would strike twice, this time granting the Kings the 2nd overall pick in the 2018 draft. They would get to keep the pick this time, but instead of spending it on Euroleague MVP and manifestly generational talent Luka Doncic, Sacramento chose athletic power forward Marvin Bagley III out of Duke. I know I said we wouldn’t go down the “what if” rabbit holes, but this one doesn’t require much imagination. It was the obviously wrong pick at the time, and the Kings have chosen to double- and triple-down on the decision, even as Luka has rapidly blossomed into one of the league’s brightest stars, while Bagley has alternated between being injured and looking out of place in the modern NBA game.
[A quick aside, only because it helps illustrate how deeply the rot of organizational dysfunction seeps into everything. In November, rumors began circulating Vlade chose not to draft the Slovenian wunderkind because he disliked Luka’s father, Sasa Doncic. It remains unclear if there is any truth to the rumor, but given how little regard fans and people around the league have for Sacramento’s decision-making, it certainly feels like a thing that could be true. Without going too far into 1990’s Balkan geopolitics, my theory is, and has always been, this: people from former Yugoslavian countries simply do not like people from other former Yugoslavian countries. I’m not judging them; civil war and ethnic cleansing will tend to leave some pretty hard feelings. Vlade, a Serbian, and Sasa, a Slovenian, were both young men when the fighting broke out in the early 90’s, and (at least rhetorically) would have been on opposite sides of the conflict. Vlade may not have anything against Luka’s father specifically; he might just generally not care for Slovenians. It doesn’t excuse passing on a can’t-miss future Hall of Famer, but perhaps it helps explain it. Anyway: #KANGZ.]
In the summer of ’18, Vlade signed fellow Serbian Nemanja Bjelica to a rare savvy free agent deal after Bjelica spurned the Sixers in favor of the Kings. [At the time, Philly employed Croatian star Dario Saric. Take that for data.] At the trade deadline, the Kings would further gum up the frontcourt by trading for Harrison Barnes from Dallas. Bringing in two competent vets who fit best at the 4 is fine in a vacuum, but it also served to take developmental opportunities away from Bagley, which flew directly in the face of the rationale for drafting him over Doncic in the first place. [The Kings have repeatedly claimed they didn’t draft Luka because he would have hindered Fox’s development as their primary ball handler.]
Lack of internal logic aside, the Kings finally (FINALLY) showed some real progress in ’18-’19, jumping up to 39 wins and competing for a playoff spot until the latter stages of the year. Fox made a leap in his sophomore season, Barnes proved a solid fit, Hield and Bogdanovic both enjoyed breakout campaigns, and the team as a whole was a fast-paced, entertaining League Pass blur. With things at last trending in the right direction, it was naturally time to…fire the coach? Yup, you read that right. After the team’s most successful season since the George W. Bush administration, Vlade, Vivek, and Co. decided the best course of action was to can Dave Joerger and bring in Luke Walton, who had spent the prior three years stinking it up as coach of the Lakers. Shortly after announcing the Walton hire, news broke of a pending civil suit against him for sexual assault stemming from a 2014 encounter. [The suit would later be dropped.] It’s worth bringing up, not to smear Walton or infer the Kings did something morally wrong by hiring him, but merely to point out how the lack of vetting of an important hire fits the pattern of an organization which seems to go out of its way to avoid doing its due diligence at nearly every turn.
The Kings haven’t given back ALL of the gains from last season in ’19-’20 (they’re on pace for about 36 wins), but from a roster perspective, it’s been the same old story. Once again, they overspent on non-impact free agents, inking Harrison Barnes, Dewayne Dedmon, Cory Joseph, and Trevor Ariza to a combined $188 million worth of contracts. [Dedmon and Ariza would be shipped out at the trade deadline, with Atlanta somehow collecting two extra second-round picks to take back the disgruntled Dedmon. It’s time to wrap this up because my neck is beginning to ache from shaking my head so much.] They played a wildly unnecessary game of contractual chicken with franchise cornerstone Hield before eventually inking him to a four-year, $86 million extension. If that didn’t ruffle Hield’s feathers enough, Walton then proceeded to move him to a bench role halfway through this season, elevating restricted free agent-to-be Bogdanovic (also Serbian!) to the starting five. They made a great move by signing 24SS favorite Richaun Holmes to a team-friendly deal, but not in their wildest imaginations did they think he would have the sort of impact he has.
This is all a long-winded way of saying, the more things change for the Kings, the more they stay the same. Yes, they have real building blocks in Fox, Hield, and Bagley now, but gentleman of the jury, what about the history of this franchise over the last fifteen years suggests they won’t also squander these talents as they have done with so many others?
The prosecution rests, and if it please the court, I would like to go take a long, hot shower.
The Case For: The evidence is incontrovertible, so I’ll just do the lightning round version of a defense and we can all get out of here. Cousins. IT. Fox. Bjelica. Hield. Holmes. Malone. Joerger. Bogdanovic. Reke, the first time around. Didn’t painfully relocate to Seattle or Las Vegas. That about cover it?
VERDICT: HARVEY WEINSTEIN-LEVEL GUILTY
Stay tuned for future editions of Team-Building Court. There is no shortage of criminal franchises out there to prosecute. [Cue Knicks fans, still nodding.]
24 Sloppy Seconds 