On a recent episode of The Bill Simmons Podcast, Bill and his guest Joe House discussed some early-season hypothetical NBA trades. Before doing so, however, they lamented the current rules governing NBA trade transactions. They were pointing out how difficult it is for so many of the high-salaried teams to improve the margins of their roster via trade, under the current rule structure. They seemed to agree that an overriding purpose for the “hardening” of the NBA’s salary cap via the new aprons and attendant trade restrictions was competitive balance, commonly known as “parity.”
House: What goal are you seeking to achieve with the parity that is the world that we live in, right now?
Simmons: You mean if you’re Adam Silver, what’s your goal? What do you think their goal was? You think it was just ‘parity across the board,’ and no high payrolls, and that’s it?
House: Yes. Yes. Parity above all else.
[Discussion begins around 3:30 if you’re interested.]
I suppose that parity is a reason for these types of rules, because a weak salary cap makes it easy for the literally-rich to get richer by greater spending on talent, and vice versa. But the NBA also has other rules specifically intended to prevent owners from harming themselves when they’re trying to improve their roster, such as the “Stepien Rule,” preventing teams from trading away consecutive future first round picks to acquire win-now talent. The CBA has gotten so complicated I’m sure it’s rife with unintended consequences. But as I’m about to get to, right now I don’t think there is any special degree of parity around the league at all.
Here is the current lay of the leaguewide standings land:
While it’s still very early and some of that will get reshuffled, the basic idea of the Nuggets and especially the Thunder being dominant, and the Nets and Wizards being terrible, seems like a trend that will hold for the duration. The gap between them is “conventionally enormous,” in my opinion, and I don’t think the league today has any particular “parity” quality to it that wasn’t there in the past. If it does, it might just be within the Eastern Conference, where late last year three of the best teams lost a star player to Achilles tendon rupture. The sudden absence of Dame Lillard, Jayson Tatum, and Tyrese Haliburton would lower the Eastern ceiling a bit, but that’s a pretty fluky set of bad-luck circumstances concentrated at the top of one conference.
Wolves fans right now are acutely aware of the gulf separating the league’s haves and have-nots. Consider just their last two games.
Facing the New York Knicks (the rare strong East roster that isn’t ravaged by injury) at Madison Square Garden on Wednesday night, the Wolves were blown off the floor in the 2nd Half. They surrendered 137 points (83 in the 2nd Half alone) and embarrassed themselves in front of a national ESPN audience.
Fast forward two nights, and the Wolves were back at home* playing in the “NBA Cup” against the Utah Jazz, one of the league’s bottom feeders. (*”Home in the Wolves’ case for NBA Cup games means playing on a hyper neon radioactive green floor that’s pretty bizarre.) Now facing one of the league’s bad teams, the exactly 4-4 Timberwolves pounced early, leading by more than 20 points barely six minutes into the game, and cruising from there to an even 40-point dub.
These last two games are extreme examples of the team’s seasonwide trend through 9 games. The Wolves have beaten the bad teams and they’ve been beaten by the good ones. If there’s a leaguewide parity phenomenon at work, somebody needs to tell the Timberwolves about it. Right now, they look up to a very high ceiling in Oklahoma, and look down to a very deep cellar in Brooklyn.
Competitive Psychology
“I have a competition in me. I want no one else to succeed. I hate most people.”
—Daniel Plainview, ‘There Will Be Blood‘
The NBA is a zero-sum game. In real life, that term has a negative connotation for obvious reasons. For a situation to be described as “zero sum,” it doesn’t just imply, but definitionally states that one person’s gain is another’s loss, and vice versa. It makes compromise difficult if not impossible, whether you’re talking about land wars in Eastern Europe or children sharing toys at home.
There are only two possible outcomes in a basketball game, however, and if you’re not on the good side, then you’re on the bad. Over an 82-game season for 30 teams, there will be exactly 2,460 wins and 2,460 losses shared between the teams across the league. The fact of this is best highlighted by preseason “over/under’s” podcasts (I’m thinking of the one Bill Simmons always does) when pundits analyze the projected win totals of each team. A string of “over” predictions requires a tapping of the brakes, to say “well, they can’t ALL be over.” Somebody’s gain is somebody else’s loss. You need to start picking some unders, too.
The public interest and enormous financial implications baked into the NBA’s competitive framework make it something of a pressure cooker for all involved. There aren’t too many jobs where getting fired is discussed as loosely as it is for an NBA coach. For players, the stakes are often times higher, many of their earning streams effectively shut off when they’re in their 20s, unless they keep on performing at a high level.
One of the fundamental qualities of ‘Inside the NBA’ is the perspectives dynamic between Kenny Smith, a highly successful role player on championship teams, and Charles Barkley, a perennial superstar who is on anyone’s short list for “greatest to never win a ring.” Each gets a specific preface to his takes on the issue of the NBA day. For Chuck it’s always, “When you a star, Ernie…” For Kenny: “When you’re on a championship team…” I think every locker room is different, but there are probably some qualitative differences to how a heavy-lifting superstar thinks the game versus somebody trying to chip in and, in some cases, keep his career alive.
Jerry West’s autobiography is one of my favorite sports books I’ve read. “West by West: My Charmed, Tormented Life” puts added emphasis on the “tormented” portion, as the late West rarely came off as someone at peace with things. He very clearly blended a great deal of inner torment into a drive that led to all kinds of professional success, but probably not as much enjoyment one would expect to accompany it.
I could endlessly quote segments of this book (and maybe I will, over time) but this part stuck with me on this subject of competitive psychology:
“We have a limited, brutally narrow time to do what we do at the highest level, and one of the cruelest ironies about what we do–unlike many other professions–is that the smarter we get about what we do is in direct contrast to the erosion of our ability to do it.”
There’s a lot to unpack here. I’d begin with pointing out that West made the All-Star Team in his rookie season, and proceeded to make 1st Team All-NBA in his second, third, fourth, fifth, six, and seventh seasons. Whatever accumulated knowledge and wisdom he held in the twilight of his career might’ve helped him as a young player, but it was hardly as if he was failing to reach his potential in his prime.
Even if West was imagining some alternative version of his prime self that never could have existed, he also probably makes a good point. After “only” making 2nd Team All-NBA in years 8 and 9, the man went on to make four more 1st Teams, in Years 10 through 13. I’m sure he had plenty of tricks up his sleeve as a player in his 30s that he wished he’d had in his 20s. Contradictions permeate any good “what could have been” discussion, and West himself acknowledges this when he writes first that he peaked as a player halfway through his 14-year career while at the same time believing his 1970 season to be his finest as a pro. (Halfway through for West would’ve been 1967.) He wrote the book in 2011, at age 73. He’d been working in professional basketball in different capacities for over 50 years. I strongly suspect that in looking back at his playing career he wasn’t only thinking about knowledge he acquired in his late 20s and early 30s, but probably stuff he learned as an executive and simply as a fan of the game, watching its development over several decades.
Last thing for now on West, and this subject of competitor’s regret. It isn’t two pages past the excerpt above when he’s describing his post-basketball-career golf obsession, and noting “I have always wished I had begun playing golf earlier in my life.” Haha, I think playing more golf might’ve taken more shine off West’s prime hoops career than any unacquired knowledge did. Time is limited, some things are zero sum.
Malik Sealy holds a special place in the heart of Timberwolves Nation. Most fans are aware that his life was cut way too short in a tragic highway accident. His #2 remains the only retired Timberwolves player jersey. In an early-season article for the Star Tribune in November 1999 (what would be Sealy’s final season), Steve Aschburner reported on Sealy’s new mental approach. A former decorated collegiate star at St. John’s, Sealy’s NBA career had not panned out as well as he’d hoped, playing for bad teams mostly in a bench role. Entering the ’99-00 campaign, he looked to return to being “The Man,” if not in statistics then at least in psychology. He explained:
“I’ve been in situations where I was, quote-unquote, ‘The Man.’ That’s the mentality I have to go back to now. Not in an egotistical way, but I’ve got to do what I’m capable of doing. I can stop somebody. I can hit open shots. Those are things that can win games, and I’ve got to do them.”
He was contrasting this mentality with what he felt was his previous one, where “‘it’s okay to let the chips fall where they may.’ Instead of making them fall where I want them.”
That push and pull tension between digging deep and letting go is pretty translatable to life. Sealy went on to have a bounce-back season in ’99-00 and would’ve likely been a valuable contributor to the Wolves for years to come.
Finally, Julius Randle. He’s playing the best basketball of his career right now, through 9 games. While on the subject of early-season articles about psychology, Jon Krawczynski’s preseason Randle feature for The Athletic is shaping up to be one of the most important pieces of NBA writing in a while. For the piece Randle and his wife Kendra were very candid about the depth of darkness and depression he had been experiencing in New York, and the ways he’s come out of it in Minnesota. There’s a ton in the piece describing the pressures of New York, the relative peace of Minnesota, specific ways in which he’s improved his mental health off the floor, and the the positive influences he cites within the Timberwolves organization that have helped him bounce back. I think this quote probably captures the basketball aspect of it:
“When I’m here, I feel like I don’t have to be perfect every single day…And that just allows me to have that easiness and be comfortable to be like, all right, I’m not perfect every single day, but I’m trying my best. And people aren’t judging me just because you have one bad moment or two bad moments.”
Where Sealy needed to put more pressure on himself, Randle needed the exact opposite. The Wolves team certainly has more work to do, and Randle’s “easy” approach needs to better blend in more defensive focus, but if his offensive-side dominance continues, the the future brightens up a great deal.
The season continues Sunday night at Sacramento where the Wolves will face a Kings team that isn’t quite sure of its own direction. Until then.
Go Wolves.
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