Eddy Curry is the root of all evil. The NBA’s guaranteed deals have no way of holding Eddy Curry accountable, and this will always be a sore spot with fans—one owners have always done a good job of exploiting. Owners and fans, they’re in the same boat, gettng jobbed by unionized slobs like Eddy Curry. It’s pretty much the American right in miniature.
The obvious retort is well, tough. The Knicks signed him, they have to deal with it. Because of the way NBA contracts work, there’s a certain amount of risk built into deals. But Curry was an honest mistake on their part; he wasn’t another Jerome James. Curry is robbing the Knicks blind. However, if we’re going to apply this standard to players, what about the people making the decisions? Curry is one player. His superiors: then-GM Isiah Thomas, or arch-fiend owner James Dolan, are both splendidly incompetent at their jobs. And yet throughout this lockout, we’ve been told that NBA teams are losing money, and players must acknowledge this tough fact and make sacrifices.
Dolan is only one such case; there’s no shortage of owners whose competence, even their sanity, can be questioned on a regular basis. On the most basic level, though, dealing with the ups and downs of the economy, and generally running a business well, are the ownership version of accountability. What’s more, their actions effect dozens, hundreds, even thousands of people. Eddy Curry really only impacts his roster’s cap figure. Dolan, and his cronies, could sign an entire roster’s worth of Curry’s. And there are far more financial decisions that go into running a sports team than picking players.
Yet the entire discussion has addressed owners’ supposed financial woes as if they were owed special treatment. This isn’t the American economy at stake; there’s no such thing as an NBA team too big to fail. The league will continue to exist.
Player accountability of some form is probably a good thing. The NFL’s model, whereby big name players who have aged too fast or paid too much are cut to cover up the front office’s mistakes, is probably not the best one. This does nothing, though, to address the owners, who—like the financial sector during the bailout—have set their own incompetence as part of the ground rules in this labor dispute. As long as that’s the case, there’s no reason to expect the players to suddenly stand up and be the adults in the room. Eddy Curry-like cases make easy scapegoats, but they represent a very small percentage of the league’s players. It just doesn’t make sense to compare his impact to that of Dolan’s. And where there’s Dolan, there’s also Sterling, Sarver, and other nitwits tasked with making sure teams as wholes, in all senses, amount to something.
Maybe the rift shouldn’t be between large and small markets, but owners who deserve to keep their jobs, and maybe get a little bit of a bump with revenue streams suffering, and those who are, in essence, expecting the players to bail their dumb asses out.
Once upon a time, ESPN mag asked me to debunk the rigged 1985 lottery myth. Here’s what I gave them; it didn’t make the cut, but maybe because I got it right … and the exercise was never supposed to succeed in the first place?
Heading into the 1985-86 season, the NBA instituted a very primitive form of draft lottery. Patrick Ewing went to the Knicks, the league’s biggest market and hometown of Commissioner David Stern. You may also be familar with a conspiracy theory arguing that Stern to fixed the results. It’s based on a Zapruder-esque close reading of that night’s lottery, which took place in plain sight, on live television. The crucial steps:
1. One Jack Wagner, a phantom who cannot be officially linked to the firm of Ernst and Whitney, dropped the envelopes into a clear plastic drum.
2. One envelope bounces off the side as it is dropped in, which would have dented the corner.
3. Stern reaches in, fumbles around with the pile, and then draws out one from the middle—which must be the Knicks envelope, identified by its dented corner.
It’s pretty heady stuff, and will keep you up for hours, giggling maniacally over a grainy YouTube video that should be most notable for the wide ties and huge-shouldered suits on display. But what if you go further, breaking through paranoia and the thrill of discovery and reaching … true enlightenment.
1. Corporations shred records all the time. Maybe Ernset and Whitney is covering up something that really matters, like proof of the cocaine they bought for a company party.
2. The “dented” envelope in fact slide smoothly down on its bottom edge, before flopping down lightly on top of the pile. The three before it are actually tossed in, roughly, and end up with their corners absorbing the impact (since it’s a spherical surface on the bottom). If anything, the “dented” envelope might be the only one without some superficial damage.
3. Ever cut cards? The instinctive first move is to go to the middle of the deck, since that presumably does the most to randomize the order. It is the great unknown. Stern’s not cutting cards, but this process is new to everyone. He’s figuring out as he goes along. And part of that is—clumsily, reflexively—treating the envelopes like he’s in the middle of a poker game.
It not be as juicy as a rigged lottery. But at the end of the day, would you rather believe that the first lottery was an excuse to make the league even more unfair? And, incidentally, have you taken a look at other outcomes from the envelope days? Something tells me Stern would rather the Clippers not get Danny Manning and Danny Ferry.
Stop me before I destroy the Jewish race! Or so sayeth the comments on my Tablet piece on Jeff Van Gundy and Jewish identity. Calm down. All I wanted to say was that:
Almost all Jewish basketball fans (and plenty of non-Jewish ones) have, at one time or another, sought to confirm their intuitions about Van Gundy, who is diminutive and bald; talks too much and always sounds slightly annoyed at himself for doing so; and, of course, has that vague yet unmistakably European surname. The strong prima facie case for Van Gundy’s Jewishness is only enhanced by his connection to the Knicks, a franchise with strong Jewish overtones. Both Jews and Knicks fans tend to be eager for anything resembling a Jewish presence in Madison Square Garden
For that, I am accused of 19th-century anti-Semitism, and told to “visit a college campus, to see how Jews are represented?” Someone sent his kids to the wrong school! I kind of like what Eric Freeman and I concluded last night. He said it would be “too much, too obvious” for JVG to be Jewish. I responded: “You’re right. He almost doesn’t need to be.”
Rest easy, everyone, I will not stay deconstructing, or subversively reinforcing, stereotypes forever. Nor am I about to turn this into an argument about 21st-century assimilation; I’m glad you grew up strong and able to play sports, if you were. And, sadly, my Paul Newman costume is at the cleaners. Maybe that explains it all.
Pure poetry from the Brandon Roy-less Blazers. Do you have a strong reaction to that sentence? Read the zillion words I wrote on last night’s games at GQ.com. I promise, one of these days I will have something nice to say about the victors.
In person, Carmelo is disarmingly casual about pretty much everything. He speaks in a slow, laconic drawl, and seems bemused by all the fuss he causes. Every big-name athlete who comes to New York has to devise a strategy to deal with The Media. Some attempt to ingratiate themselves (Nick Swisher), some are combative (Randy Johnson), some are both (Alex Rodriguez), and some magically dance between the raindrops (Derek Jeter). Carmelo sees the media circus the way a native New Yorker might: With wry humor and the perspective that, hey, this is just what happens here—it’s kinda fun.
The Nuggets have no superstar; the Nuggets are currently one of the NBA’s most dangerous, and highly-regarded, teams. It’s not quite Bill Simmons’s Ewing Theory—more like a double-Ewing, since it’s the Melo-less Nuggets mixed with the Amar’e-less Knicks. Maybe, this isn’t a league of stars after all. You could make a similar claim off of what the Sixers have been doing in the other conference; I can’t think of two squads whose playoff adventures are as eagerly anticipated, especially the putative Thunder/Nuggets match-up in the first round. But I think we’re missing something here. Neither the Nuggets nor the Sixers are an anti-superstar assemblage per se. These aren’t the 2004 Pistons, who especially with their later All-Star Game takeover, actively rejected the notion of stardom. On both Philly and Denver, there are plenty of players cable of great individual performances—sometimes only for a play, sometimes an entire evening.
Team play can, in effect, be the star, if it’s about parceling out opportunities and interactions to make the most of a roster full of nascent playmakers. I made a silly remark the other day about the Nuggets insisting they’re the real Knicks, only to realize just how deep it cut. What the Nuggets are doing now, and the success they’re having, is not so distant from the seventies Knicks teams. Granted, there aren’t any Hall of Famers here, and probably won’t ever be. But this is proof that there’s a lot of middle ground between selfish and selfless, and that a deep, smart team with just might be the league’s newest hot commodity. The stars aren’t dead, we just shattered him into a million pieces and made sure everyone got a piece like rhinestones. But only if they earned it.
From a piece on the Knicks and Jewish identity that I did today for Tablet:
“What made the Ward Affair especially jarring and sad was the team it involved. For reasons historical, allegorical, and even theological, the Knicks are without question the most Jewish franchise in American professional sports. It’s not just the New York City thing. It’s that the team, more than any other, represents basketball’s increasingly distant Jewish past, projected onto the present.”
The Charlie Ward Affair, one of my favorite episodes in recent NBA history, figures prominently. Sadly, a gut-busting line about Larry Johnson’s membership in the Nation of Islam (“at least if it had come from Johnson, it would have made sense”) didn’t make the final cut. Grammar was the culprit, but it does raise the larger issue of whether it’s unfair to make Nation of Islam jokes at Johnson’s expense. The Nation has, at times, espoused some rather outlandish beliefs about Jews, and has never really succeeded in a convincing about-face; granted, Johnson himself has never been a part of this, so you can’t really accuse him of anything directly. But right to kid is different from proof or guilt, and this opens up an entirely different can of worms: The familiar “identity-through-persecution” could be reborn as a bloggy, stylized “who has the coolest repression references”. Knowing someone might be out to get you is, I suppose, a great way to show you’re down. It certainly worked for Isaac Babel, didn’t it?
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