Cowardly super teams turning NBA into laugher
INDIANAPOLIS - DeMarcus Cousins to the Golden State Warriors is some of the greatest NBA news ever, eclipsed only by LeBron James going to the Los Angeles Lakers, which would be eclipsed only by Kawhi Leonard getting his wish and ending up with the Lakers as well. All of it tops the doozy of two years ago when Kevin Durant left Oklahoma City to join a Golden State team that didn’t really need him, and did it because it’s just so hard to win the right way.
What is the right way? Not what’s happening in the NBA’s Western Conference, where players are migrating like ducks or winter geese. Wondering now if lemmings migrate, because it’s a bunch of lemmings out West, these guys who can’t bear the thought of competing for an NBA championship without the odds being stacked just so.
But it’s great news for the rest of us. The basketball that matters most in this neck of the woods is happening in the Eastern Conference, where your hometown Indiana Pacers are still building toward something. Toward what? Don’t know. Can’t see it yet. Other than in Boston, where general manager Danny Ainge took apart his aging team so brilliantly in 2013 that he made the rebuild look stupidly simple, pieces come together slowly in the East.
Other teams – OK, two teams: the Lakers and Warriors – are looking for cherries to put on top of a sundae. Golden State adds a 25-and-10 guy in Cousins to a roster with two MVPs (Durant, Stephen Curry) and two players with multiple spots on the top three All-NBA teams (Klay Thompson, Draymond
Green). The Lakers have LeBron James, who all by himself is three scoops of vanilla ice cream, two ladles of chocolate syrup and the sprinkles, and could get Kawhi Leonard.
The Pacers aren’t a sundae, aren’t a finished product after signing Doug McDermott,not if they’re going to keep rising toward the top of the conference, but they’re working on the fundamentals. That’s how it goes in the East, and one of the fundamentals is getting the culture just right. In other words: An unselfish locker room that comes together to form something greater than its individual parts would suggest. You know how you do that?
By adding the right players, yes, and then by winning. And winning some more. Which attracts more right players and becomes a vortex and before you know it, boom, you’re ready to win the conference.
Winning in the East keeps getting easier. That’s why, if you’re into the NBA in this part of the country, these carnival moves out west are tremendous. Hilarious, even. Which is another reason why I’m tracking these moves with popcorn like I’m watching a movie, a comedy, one where the audience isn’t laughing with the big-name stars, but at them.
Intellectually, yes, we all understand it: Every free agent in the NBA, even the elite, has the right to play wherever he wants. Nobody is cheating, unless there was tampering going on, and given the Lakers’ history … But whatever. The most important word in the phrase free agent is the first one. They’re free to do what they want. They negotiated that right – well, Oscar Robertson negotiated it for them, and paid dearly – and isn’t America great?
We’re free to do what we want, too, and that’s laugh at the absurdity of the greatest basketball talent in the world repeatedly trying to game the system to win an NBA championship ring they think will validate their career.
And in a way, such a ring does give a stamp of permanence, even if the stamp bears a strong resemblance to Bozo the Clown.
After nine ring-less NBA seasons in Seattle-turned-Oklahoma City, Kevin Durant has two rings. Do you view him differently, now that he has those rings? Lots of us do. Lord knows, I do: I respect him less. I like him less.
Durant isn’t a bad guy off the floor, not even close to that, but at the end of the day we’re tuning into these guys because of the game they play. That’s the prism through which they will be remembered. I’ll remember Durant as the guy who couldn’t beat the Warriors, so he joined them.
Yes, I’ll remember LeBron for many, many reasons but I’ll never forget the way he went to Miami in 2014, teaming with Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh to start this rush of lemmings toward the NBA’s cowardly cliff.
Now Cousins signs a one-year deal with Golden State for the mid-level exception of $5.2 million, and in another world maybe you’d applaud and say: Good for you, it’s not all about the money. But his world is not that world. Cousins already has made $61 million in his NBA career, and figures to make another $100 million or (much) more before all is said and done. Don’t tell me about sacrifice.
These guys at the top of the NBA food chain, they’re playing with Monopoly money. It’s Fantasy Island. Admiring someone whose career earnings will be well into nine figures for playing one season for just, ahem, $5.2 million, but doing it for the franchise that has won three of the last four NBA titles? Can’t admire that. Can you?
All of which makes me like Paul George a little bit more than I ever have, which isn’t saying much, but he could have aligned himself with the Lakers. Well, we think he could have. Maybe not. Maybe the Lakers had made it clear to Paul and to his tampering little agent that their priorities were LeBron James and Kawhi Leonard, in that order, and if PG13 wanted to wait to see how it shakes out .
Maybe Paul said: Nah. I’ll take all this money and stay in Oklahoma City with Russell Westbrook. Maybe he really had no other choice, given that his choice was LA or OKC.
You and I don’t know what happened there, but we know this: He showed loyalty to Oklahoma City, and that’s infinitely more likable than the mercenary moves happening elsewhere in the West.
Meanwhile, on this side of the tracks, the Pacers are building slowly around Victor Oladipo, Myles Turner and Domantas Sabonis. It’s charming, what they’re doing in a league where the rain and the wind is in their face. It’s colder in the East. The Pacers will put on another layer and trudge forward.
Gregg Doyel is a columnist for The Indianapolis Star, part of the USA TODAY Network.