24 (Slightly Absurd) NBA Certainties for the 2014-15 Season

The following twenty-four NBA-related events will most certainly occur over the course of the next eight months. 

1. On October 30, Blake Griffin “retaliates” against Serge Ibaka‘s third take-down of the game by blowing him kisses. Later in the game, Glen Davis crushes Ibaka and then pins him to the court in a wrestling maneuver. Davis is suspended for five games, but coach Doc Rivers buys Davis a new Tesla for his troubles.

2. The Minnesota Timberwolves will not be all that exciting in general, but Ricky Rubio to Andrew Wiggins and Rubio to Zach LaVine lob passes will be a nice distraction from the standings. Coach Flip Saunders gives Rubio an ultimatum in mid-November: “Get to the free-throw more or we’ll all start calling you, “Marco.”

3. Milwaukee Bucks coach Jason Kidd comes out of retirement in late-November because he wants to, “Teach Jabari the pick-and-roll.” Jabari Parker continues to pick-and-pop but refuses to “roll.”

4. Golden State Warriors owner Joe Lacob introduces pre-game three-point contests involving Steph Curry, Klay Thompson and new coach Steve Kerr. The Warriors start selling tickets for the pre-game event only.

December

5. Philadelphia 76ers second round pick K.J. McDaniels becomes first NBA player to have a 10 block, 10 turnover game against the downtrodden Orlando Magic.

6. Chicago Bulls coach Tom Thibodeau embraces the fact he finally has a deep bench and plays everyone 25 minutes per game, saving them for the playoffs. Derrick Rose will play the entire season.

7. ESPN.com crashes for several days in mid-December due to advanced metrics malfunctioning and causing panic.

8. In a New Year’s Eve special, longtime TNT commentator Marv Albert has a breakdown. After months of rotating broadcast partners, Albert retires mid-season, forcing Ernie Johnson into an awkward play-by-play role. Back in the studio, Charles Barkley and Shaquille O’Neal won’t listen to Kenny Smith. Shaq keeps shouting, “Barbecued Chicken!” The ratings have never been better.

January

9.  The Boston Celtics take a league-record 53 three-pointers in a game against the Toronto Raptors, including 19 by Jared Sullinger. They make only 7. Sullinger finishes the game with 18 offensive rebounds.

10. LeBron James tells Dion Waiters that Waiters won’t be joining the Cleveland Cavs on their ten-day road trip in January, because he will be enrolled in anger management classes. Coach David Blatt simply nods in the background.

11. ESPN declares they will air every Cavs game from February 1 until the end of the season.

February

12. At the All-Star Break, the NBA announces the details of its new television deal on the salary cap, but the cap number keeps increasing every week, like it does with the Mega Millions. By June, the number is $140 million. Every team will have an inordinate amount of cap space and twelve assistant GMs will quit right before free agency begins in July, 2016.

13. The Houston Rockets beat the Los Angeles Lakers, 104-92. Only two Rockets score points in the game. James Harden gets 58. Dwight Howard scores 46. Kobe Bryant scores 31 points, taking 57 shots, in the least-efficient performance in league history. Lakers guard Jeremy Lin finally complains to the media about Kobe’s selfish ways. Rookie Julius Randle gets a DNP-CD from coach Byron Scott because he accidentally took a corner three-pointer the previous game. Phil Jackson‘s laughter can be heard from coast-to-coast.

14. The Indiana Pacers, who are averaging 64 points per game, trade away Roy Hibbert and David West to the Sacramento Kings for Ben McLemore and a future second-round pick. Larry Bird goes AWOL as soon as the season ends.

15. The Boston Celtics do not trade Rajon Rondo. Bill Simmons yells at Celtics GM Danny Ainge on The Grantland Basketball Hour. At 25-29, the Celtics make a run at the 8th seed in the weak Eastern Conference. In an ironic twist, the Celtics and Nets will fight it out for the final spot.

April

16. The Philadelphia 76ers play a regular season game in which the arena is completely empty. The television commentators leave the booth in protest early in the second quarter. The Sixers forfeit their final five home games, but refuse to refund those tickets to the 43 remaining season ticket holders. Instead, they barter with those fans, hoping to secure second round picks. Sixers GM Sam Hinkie sits down with SI’s Lee Jenkins in April, at the end of the Sixers 6-76 (fitting, isn’t it?) season. The tell-all essay is titled, “Vision 2020.” Sixers fans organize an event where they set fire to a pile of this issue of Sports Illustrated. Joel Embiid is asked to stop using Twitter by commissioner Adam Silver.

17. The Sacramento Kings win 44 games but finish 10th in the Western Conference. Owner Vivek Ranadive petitions for Sacramento to move to the Eastern Conference, but commissioner Silver stops answering Vivek’s texts. A blog is created: http://www.vivekstexts.com

18. The Memphis Grizzlies finish 6th in the West and end up taking the 3rd-seed San Antonio Spurs to Game 7, before losing the final game on two Zach Randolph missed free-throws.

May

19. After much debate, Seattle doesn’t get a franchise but they do get a new Chipotle restaurant.

20. In the middle of the Western Conference Semis between San Antonio and Oklahoma City, Kevin Durant announces he’s moving 5,000 of his closest friends and family to a newly built community outside of Oklahoma City. The rumors that he’s headed to Washington, D.C. persist anyway, because the NBA gossip bubble in the age of Twitter expands like a piece of Bubblicious.

21. The Washington Wizards and Charlotte Hornets finish 4th and 5th in the East. Paul Pierce and Lance Stephenson become involved in a staring match that lasts for 45 minutes at center court after the final buzzer of Game 1. Whichever team wins the evenly-matched series loses in 5 games to the Bulls in the East Semis.

22. The Golden State Warriors and Los Angeles Clippers meet in the Western Conference Semis. Steve Kerr and Doc Rivers both agree to do color commentary and let their assistants coach during the second quarter of each game.

23. In the Eastern Conference Finals, the Chicago Bulls beat the Cleveland Cavs in 6 games. Jimmy Butler does such a ridiculous job defending Kyrie Irving (holding him to 13% shooting for the series) that he is named series MVP.

June

24. The Chicago Bulls beat the Los Angeles Clippers in the NBA Finals in 7 games. Five of the games come down to the wire. Chris Paul retires (temporarily) out of frustration. Tom Thibodeau is named MVP, due to the fact that every member of the Bulls contributes roughly the same amount to the wins, and the voting ends in a seven-way tie.

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Tips on Fandom: How to Be a Semi-Enlightened NBA Fan (Or How to Navigate the NBA Media Swamp)

1. Stop watching ESPN’s daily programming. When you watch actual NBA games on ESPN or TNT, feel free to use the mute button when commentators start to discuss “juicy” gossip or spread controversy.

2. Read Jonathan Abrams, Tom Ziller, Paul Flannery, Bethlehem Shoals, Zach Lowe, Steve McPherson, Ian Levy, and Lee Jenkins as well as several independent NBA blog-writers.

3. Whenever you read a headline that says, “Player [x] says [x] about Player [x]” or “Player [x] says he’s the best [x],” remind yourself that it’s not news and that it’s designed to make you click. This is called “click-bait.” Avoid clicking.

4. Realize that the majority of the opinions you read about NBA players or NBA teams is a product of group-think. Forming your own opinions about players takes more time, more reading, and actual observation of the players in the actual games.

5. Limit the amount of time you spend considering the salary-cap, free-agency and trades. Everything you read about the salary-cap over the last few years loses all meaning as soon as the NBA’s league office determines how high the cap will jump over the next few years, due to the enormous television deal the NBA signed with Disney (ESPN/ABC) and Turner (TNT). Every long-term contract a player signs will make them overpaid, and the vast majority of the NBA owners will continue to swim about in their wealth, so stop worrying about contract negotiations.

6. Possible trades are not actual trades. Endless, usually uninformed, speculation is cheap writing and cheap reading. Guesses about where players may go, who might be unhappy, and who is going to demand a max contract are all wastes of your time. They are not the game you love and they should not dictate how you follow a sport.

7. Speculation shapes a player’s reputation and group-think allows casual fans to believe they know what kind of person each player is. Don’t bother pretending you know if a player is a good guy or a bad guy. We all have positive and negative characteristics and most of us change.

8. Allow yourself to consider that each professional athlete is capable of changing, both in how they behave off the court, and how they perform over the course of his or her career. Neuroscience shows us that the male brain develops full executive functioning at age 25. Instead of agreeing with the commentary, “Player [x] is a knucklehead,” consider how old Player [x] is. When you read that “Player [x] can’t shoot, but is working on improving his shot,” consider the career arc of Bruce Bowen, whose defense kept him in the league, but whose corner-three-point abilities, combined with his elite perimeter defense, made him a key role player on three NBA championship-winning Spurs teams.

9. Think about what kind of fan you currently are and what kind of fan you want to be. Don’t let the bullshit get in the way.

10. Often when you read about an NBA player, you will see them referred to as an “alpha dog,” a “beast,” a “complementary piece,” or an “expiring contract.” These are simple categories with which to refer to the role or the impact of each player. They are not necessarily meant as negative terms. But consider what it means to refer to athletes this way. Either they are animals or commodities. Are you watching games as if you are following the stock market? Is this how you want to watch the game, watching different size dollar signs $$$ matching up vs. $$? Are you simply a commodity at your job? Is that how you’d prefer to be analyzed? How do you measure your own worth? If it’s by any number, you might need to re-examine what’s important in your life.

11. When you see another headline that ranks players in some list, remember that constantly worrying about a top-10 or top-20 category is somewhat arbitrary and mostly meaningless. These lists are exist because they make for simple debates and are easy to argue over. Remember this around mid-season when the All-Star game nears.

12. Enjoy the games for the teamwork that they display, the sacrifice involved, the actual drama of the moment, and the improvised artistry and athleticism of the game of basketball.

13. Enjoy the analysis of the game that examines the numbers, the efficiency, the coaching, and the strategies employed.

14. Appreciate the stories of each player who has the opportunity to play in the best basketball league in the world. Writers like Abrams and Jenkins are writing in-depth about how some of these players made it and why we should cheer for them.

15. Stop hating just to hate. If you hate one player, maybe its the narrative that you really hate, which means you probably haven’t questioned the narrative. Hating a team is okay, if that team is the rival of the team you genuinely love.

Athletes are Not Superheroes or Evil Villains. Also, Howard Megdal on The NBA and Labor Rights

As sports fans, many of us have been trained to view athletes as superheroes or villains. The scandal-fed modern news cycle and ESPN’s endless mythologizing makes it easy to remove the human element in regard to professional athletes until they do disturbingly human things like Ray Rice or Michael Vick. Then hold them up as human sacrifices to be burned at the stake. Very few people condone punching women in the face or forcing your dogs to kill each other. It’s easy. And it’s even easier when an athlete who has been endlessly praised is then taken down. You can almost hear the “whoosh-ing” sound of their fall. Psychologically, it should remind you of high school. If sports and sports media enables a widespread popularity contest, An athletic scandal is no different from the popular high school athlete getting suspended from school. Those who envied him and hated how loved he was get to celebrate. Isn’t that what we see…over and over and over?

While few are uncertain about their view of Ray Rice, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell gets to plead ignorance, hoping the media moment passes like a thunderstorm. Some are asking for Goodell to get fired, some are hoping he resigns, and many, who still have love for the National Football League, are just waiting until their team plays on Sunday, so they can get back to escaping from the reality of that ugly thing we know as the “human element” and fall back into the superhero/villain routine. Goodell gets the special treatment.

Howard Megdal, writing for Vice Sports, has penned an excellent examination of the NBA and it’s Labor situation and free agency, following the Paul George injury and Marc Cuban’s asinine comments on what should be done about NBA players playing in international competition. Before I excerpt from Megdal’s piece, I’ll mention a news item related to Paul George after the horrific injury he suffered in late July. I had just read Lee Jenkins’ compassionate piece on Paul George and resilience. Then I see that Paul George bought a Ferrari to “lift his spirits.” How is it that an athlete buying a luxury sports car is news? All that I can see it doing is two things: 1) Make people who want to live vicariously through Paul George’s success feel better about themselves. 2) Make people go back to envying and vilifying an athlete/celebrity for buying a ridiculously expensive sports car. This isn’t news. This is the bullshit that we are fed.

Now an excerpt from Megdal’s piece on the NBA and Labor:

Cuban mentioned the NBA’s willingness “to commit what amounts to more than a billion dollars in salaries” to the cause of international basketball. Ah, but which salaries? Player salaries. Mark Cuban’s not committing a damn thing. He doesn’t own his players, as much as his dehumanizing description of human beings as “player salaries” would make you think otherwise.

Those player salaries, by the way, were earned because the league profited from selling the chance to watch those players—in person, on television, intermittently on League Pass when it decides to function—not as some independent entity that, say, Dirk Nowitzki is lucky to have found. Those player salaries, incidentally, that are part of a shrinking percentage of NBA revenue, revenue that keeps on growing and disproportionately flowing back to… Mark Cuban.

Which brings us to the other half of the equation: Whose risk? The player’s risk. Sure, if the best 450 players collectively disappeared from the NBA, the league would have a problem. But any one player? Well, the business model survives. Paul George will miss a season—you can be sure the NBA will make a ton of money this season anyway.

Fun fact, Paul George has a max contract, an Orwellian phrase if one ever existed. Remember, we’re supposed to honor a team’s desires here because they’ve invested so much money in a player. Of course, it is the artificial construct of the salary cap, and the tightly controlled salaries within it, that had an otherworldly player like George limited to five years, $90 million on a “max contract” in the first place. In a true free market, George would make many tens of millions more. Instead, thanks to a swell-for-owners collective bargaining agreement, he’s getting paid like Brian McCann of the New York Yankees. McCann is a fine player, but he’s not even one of the ten best players in Major League Baseball, or close to it.

But of course, the players accepted the current salary cap and a greatly reduced share of total league revenue following the most recent lockout. The common, condescending perspective that players owe their livelihood to the owners helped the owners in the court of public opinion, as it so often does during labor struggles in professional sports. But here we are, with players like LeBron James and Carmelo Anthony forced to choose between getting paid as close to fair value as the system allows or taking a pay cut to play for a winning team, like Tim Duncan does. Naturally, Duncan is held up as a model without anyone asking “Why on Earth is that a choice he’s forced to make?”

The common refrain: because he makes “enough.” Never mind that we’re talking about money that exists because Duncan and Anthony are so compelling to watch that millions of people the world over tune in to do just that. Never mind that this money, if not spent on Anthony and Duncan, isn’t going to hire more teachers or provide health care to needy children. It’s going into the pockets of owners who were so unhappy with their “more than enough” that they locked out the players and reduced their share of the league’s revenue from 57 percent to around 50 percent.

That’s 50-50—you earn 50 percent by doing things no one else on the planet can, and we’ll earn 50 percent by letting you.

Read the rest here: https://sports.vice.com/article/the-next-nba-labor-battle-is-already-here