WHAT’S THE PROBLEM WITH THAT?
The modern NBA superstar is now the most powerful genre of athlete in American professional team sports history. Those elite players have it all: the riches, the platform, the influence, the savvy about the league’s business and the audacity to use everything for their own good, no matter the consequences.
The latter two things — the know-how and the nerve — frighten and intrigue at once. It’s an uneasy feeling because it’s unfamiliar. You’re used to athletes competing, getting their money, enjoying their fame, trying to win their championships and leaving everything else to function mostly without their input. Historically, the lanes have been defined, and the roles have been honored. As long as the collective bargaining agreement guaranteed them fair compensation, the players played, the owners owned and the general managers managed.
But now, 29 years since Tom Chambers pioneered NBA unrestricted free agency, the NBA superstar has figured out how to run the show. The league sways on the whims of its greatest players, who currently believe in partnership over parity.
It’s easy to declare the NBA has a parity problem. The symptom causes everyone to point and stare. But it’s important to understand the condition that created it first. Marquee players understand their power now. Since the summer of 2010, when the greatest free-agent class in league history featuring LeBron James, Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh joining forces in Miami, the biggest stars have learned to leverage their talent and popularity to shift control of how organizations are built in their favor. Yes, organizations still win championships, but not without superstars serving as unofficial front-office members.
You want parity? Well, the first question has to be: What do the stars want? Right now, stars want to combine their powers. It has been 25 years since the Dream Team graced the Olympics, and the fact that the NBA’s best regularly play together on Team USA has thawed the competitive ice that once made the league so interesting. It’s a different era. Stars understand each other better because they’re not always adversaries. But the pressure to win multiple championships — if you really want to be considered an all-time great — remains. So they’ve figured out a teambuilding cheat code, and they’re doing business their way.
You want parity? Well, here’s the second question: How do you structure the league so that stars have incentive not to make like Kevin Durant and create a super team? Remember, this is a collectively bargained sport that is in good overall condition and making serious money currently. Dramatic change doesn’t happen when everyone’s pockets are bulging.
But it’s never a bad time to float ideas for long-term consideration. For all the solutions I’ve heard, including instituting a hard salary cap, the most realistic remedy for parity is actually a continuation of what the league is already doing.
Discouraging movement
In the new CBA, under which the league will operate starting this season, the NBA has continued its efforts to help teams retain their stars by allowing them to pay more. The league had already made max contracts worth more for players who decided to stay. Now it is instituting a super-max contract, called the designated player veteran extension, for essentially the game’s top 15 players. If players meet certain elite criteria, they’re eligible to sign extensions that can pay them more than $40 million per season, in many cases, to remain with their teams.
This summer is considered a test of how effective that will be. Russell Westbrook, the new league MVP, can sign a five-year deal worth about $215 million to stay with the Oklahoma City Thunder. Westbrook, whose current contract expires after next season, would forfeit a chance to earn $70 million-$80 million if he left as a free agent.
The money is a strong reason for Westbrook to remain with a small-market team that has been consistently good. But the problem is that, when you’re a marketable and transcendent star, you can sacrifice a super max for a mortal max and at least come close to making it up through endorsements by playing in a bigger market or for a team with a better chance to win a championship.
In the future, the NBA will have to provide a greater incentive. This max-salary system is going to die, eventually, because too many players are getting max contracts. Anyone who is a top 15 free agent in a given year will demand a max contract. And if you’re currently an NBA have-not — or even a prettygood team that aspires to be great — you can’t build one of the league’s most talented teams if the new standard is to give the max to your top three players, regardless of whether they’re truly elite.
By the end of the summer, John Wall might be the Wizards’ third-highest paid player. It makes no sense.
The structure has to change. Pat Riley, the former great coach and Heat president, is among those who have suggested a franchise tag in which teams have a salary cap exception to sign its best player to whatever their owners want to pay. There would have to be some restrictions to keep owners from being foolishly aggressive. But if the NBA could do that and tighten its salary cap rules while being fair to the union, there would be greater incentive for stars to stay.
But does the NBA really want to force parity? Free agency is as exciting as the Finals right now. For the next two weeks, the league will dominate the attention.
Actually, it already has begun to do so, with Chris Paul forcing a trade to the Rockets, Paul George being traded from Indiana to Oklahoma City and Phil Jackson leaving the New York Knicks within the past week. If the Utah Jazz could offer Gordon Hayward $45 million a year to stay — which he turned down — is that really in Utah’s best interest? The league’s? Or is the possible formation of a Celtics super team more compelling?
One thing is certain: Hayward was free to do what he wants, which is kind of the point of free agency. And he made a power move because he’s an NBA star. And the league will sway a little on his decision.
consisted of men blessed with exceptional basketball IQs and the ability to improvise within the team concept. What they largely lacked, across the lineup that included Jackson as a longlimbed defensive nuisance, was the enhanced athleticism of the 21st century player, along with the freedom to operate in the ever-expanding shot-launching areas of the court.
Before returning to the Knicks in 2014 as team president and the latest in a long line of well-compensated, would-be saviors, Jackson had record-shattering coaching success — 11 rings’ worth, you may have heard — with the triangle offense in Chicago and Los Angeles. In his hour of reputational disrepair, it would be egregiously revisionist to argue that his fame and fortune were all about Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen in Chicago and Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O’Neal in Los Angeles.
Which NBA coaches with multiple rings — Auerbach, Pat Riley, Gregg Popovich — haven’t had the luxury of all-time greats? The triangle was an effective scheme in all of Jackson’s postseason runs, but never better than during the 1993-94 season, which proceeded without Jordan, who took a sabbatical while the Pippen-led Bulls amassed a stunning 55 wins.
Jackson learned the triangle from Tex Winter, a Bulls assistant coach, not long after he was rescued from the Continental Basketball League, which he liked to call the Cockroach League. Apprenticing for the Albany Patroons, Jackson drove the team van, pleaded with the front office for incremental raises in meal money and lobbied unsuccessfully to have Charley Rosen, his friend and assistant coach, accompany him on the road.
From those days in the 1980s until he returned to New York, Jackson evolved from deserving dues payer to international luminary. From his just concluded time with the Knicks, it is difficult to argue that the trappings of celebrity, along with the stubbornness of age, didn’t compromise his judgment and performance.
His belief in the triangle offense went from what he would call, in more immodest moments, “just a system of basketball” to a full-blown religious experience, the essence of purity in a sport he decided was devolving in the predictability of high-screen-and-roll.
Relying on friendly advice
Four years ago, while promoting his latest best-selling tome (surprise, “Eleven Rings”), he sat in the backroom of a bookstore in Ridgewood, N.J., and explained to me why he would consider returning to the NBA, despite all he had achieved.
“I think some of it is just the influence from my close friends — Jeanie Buss, Kurt Rambis, Jim Cleamons — that you should not stay away from the game because your influence is needed and brings another element to the game of basketball,” he said. “So in watching the game evolve, there’s quite a difference philosophically in the way it’s played now and the way I coached.”
Jackson apparently mistook the advice of a small circle of friends for widespread public demand. He convinced himself that the triangle would save the sport, in general, and Carmelo Anthony, in particular.
Oh, and the $60 million over five years from James L. Dolan, the Knicks owner, would make up for those sparsely compensated years in Albany and even in Chicago.
Jackson is a competitor. It wasn’t just about the money. That argument is as silly as the often-cited one that Dolan, who has spent enough on the Knicks to rescue a good-size country in economic despair, doesn’t want to win. Almost two decades of mostly failure have been about the process, the execution.
To that extent, Jackson, long renowned for thinking out of the box, became trapped in a three-sided prison. He forsook psychology for philosophy. He put Derek Fisher and Jeff Hornacek, his hand-picked coaches, in untenable working positions by insisting they teach as he would, costing them the respect and attention of their players.
In an exchange of testy postings on my Facebook page recently, Rosen — as close to a Jackson spokesman as there is — said Jackson was supremely confident Anthony would thrive, as Jordan and Bryant had, in the preferred isolation areas of the triangle, around the elbow. And that was why Jackson not only re-signed Anthony to a five-year contract, but also added a no-trade clause.
For perspective’s sake, imagine Jackson running the Golden State Warriors. Would he insist on positioning Stephen Curry, Klay Thompson and Kevin Durant within the same limited scoring range?
Hard to believe, but Anthony’s no-trade clause — especially if Rosen’s rationale is true — was a crippling example of ego obscuring executive pragmatism. It ultimately led to Jackson’s lowbrow attempts to persuade Anthony to waive it and alienated Kristaps Porzingis to the point where Jackson considered trading the team’s most precious asset as well. Add that to how the triangle and organizational dysfunction had made the Knicks toxic to stars around the league and you understand why Dolan finally had to move.
Strangled by triangle
A more clearheaded Jackson might have backtracked on Anthony when he realized Anthony, thanks to Jackson’s own malpractice, had all the leverage and that the residual effects of the impasse were putting the franchise on the brink of implosion.
But, yes, it was apparently still about the triangle, the sword he fell on.
On Facebook, Rosen, at least, seemed not to have learned anything from the debacle. He wrote: “If you had a thorough understanding of the triangle, you would understand some of his moves — but obviously you don’t — and don’t give me that M.J., Pip, Kobe, Shaq stuff. Remember how well the Bulls did when M.J. was playing baseball.”
As mentioned earlier, we remember. Who could forget? But these last three years? Simply obtuse.