Parity Is Great and J.A. Adande Is an Asshat

There are two kinds of articles I bitch about on this blog. First, you've got articles that are just plain wrong. These are the Eckstein-is-greats, the ARod-is-bads, and the Bonds-is-innocents. They should make you cry. Second, you've got articles that don't contain any objectively incorrect information, but are still very wrong. They should merely make you whimper. This, by J.A. Adande, is one such article.

Superstar trades put emphasis back on the games

Let's hear it for big, fat contracts. Money-money-money-monnn-ey -- MON-ayy. Dollar-dollar bills, y'all. Those salary-cap-killing, luxury-tax-inducing contracts -- envied by fans, cursed by owners with buyer's remorse -- are saving the NBA.

You can't wait for the playoffs to start. You have no idea who's going to win it all. And it's all thanks to economics.

In the past eight months, four All-Stars have switched teams and reconfigured three of the marquee brands in the NBA. In order, Ray Allen and Kevin Garnett, Pau Gasol and Shaquille O'Neal were traded to the Celtics, Lakers and Suns because their old teams were tired of paying star salaries for scrub results.

Let us count the ways in which this article is wrong, so far.

1. Expensive contracts are not "saving the league," neither in the way Adande implies here nor in any other way. Sure, their existence has recently facilitated a flow of high-paid stars to popular/good teams. (As you'll see, his premise is basically that the league is better off when said teams have all the talent and "under the radar" teams, like their former teams, disappear into the background.) On the other hand, popular/good teams are just as susceptible to horrible contracts as anyone else. Why do the Knicks blow right now? Because (among at least fifty other horrible gaffes) a few years back they gave the untradeable and unplayable Jerome James an 11 year deal worth $290 million. What's wrong with the Bulls? Well, for one thing, they signed Ben Wallace to a disastrous contract two summers ago. For every Memphis who gives a Pau Gasol a monster deal and then has to send him away so they can look towards the future, there's a marquee/popular team that makes a devastatingly bad decision.

2. "You can't wait for the playoffs to start." If you didn't feel that way before these trades, you weren't an NBA fan in the first place. Douche. "You have no idea who's going to win it all!" This has been the case each and every year since Jordan retired the second time. So, for a decade or so.

3. These stars' old teams were "tired of paying star salaries for scrub results?" Maybe in Shaq's case. As for the other three- well, if you call their most recent seasons/half seasons with their old teams "scrubby," I'd like to hear what adjectives you'd assign to the 97% of the players in the league that aren't as good as these guys.

OK. *Deep breath* Good. This is going okay so far.

Their former squads aren't better off today. In fact, Seattle, Minnesota, Memphis and Miami have the four worst records in the league.

Let me introduce you, J.A., to some of the finer points of the "trade." You see, very few "trades" are made between teams that expect the same results from the deal in the same time frame. You alomst never see two teams trade players that are current stars. Same goes for swapping young players that have the potential to be stars somewhere down the road. Although they do happen in rare circumstances, trades like these don't make a ton of sense on the surface. Right? You see why, don't you? Unless it's a positional or change-of-scenery issue, why would a team trade a guy who's really good right now... for another guy who's really good right now? And why would they trade young guys with potential... for young guys with potential? That would be like trading eggs for eggs, or shoes for shoes. You make "trades" in order to acquire something you don't already have.

I'm wasting everyone's time. I know. Let's just leave it at this: despite being a professional journalist who primarily covers the NBA, J.A. Adande apparently has yet to grasp the idea that teams often deal current stars for young players. This is the basic format of the vast majority of significant trades to take place during the salary cap era.

I am slightly frustrated.

This wasn't about them trying to stay in the hunt for a championship. It's about them trying to stay out of the red in the Excel files.

It's about them acknowledging they were not going to win a championship in the next couple of years, and building for the future beyond that timeframe. Welcome to the wonderful world of professional sports franchises.

Top-to-bottom competitive balance is right where it belongs: in the trash can, next to the short shorts.

And here we have the main premise of the article, the main reason I am forced to conclude that J.A. Andande should be attached to a weather balloon and released into the atmosphere. I've read some bullshit in my life, but this sentence might take the cake. Let's see- which major pro sports league has the most year-to-year parity? That's right, those jolly fat fucks in the NFL, who have more money than they know what to do with right now. And how do people tend to respond to underdog success stories? My inside sources say they like them, and that there's a direct relationship between the amount of competitive balance in a league and the likelihood of such a story playing out. Why do salary caps exist in three out of the four major sports? Because otherwise we'd have four times as many Yankees and Red Sox running around, which would not be "good for the league(s)" no matter what anybody says. And finally, why does the NCAA limit the number of athletic scholarships schools can give out? Because having the Boise States of the world occasionally dance with the big boys is more exciting than having USC, Notre Dame, Oklahoma, and Alabama grab 150 out of the top 200 recruits every year like they did in the 40s/50s/60s/70s.

The league is better off with several superpowers battling it out among themselves, not with some unknown upstarts crashing the party.

Let's focus. I'll limit discussion to the NBA alone. Boy, I sure don't remember anyone being excited about Golden State's first round win over Dallas last year. Boring. Who likes an upstart, anyways? I find life more fulfilling when everything is extremely even-keeled and goes exactly according to plan all the time. Keeps my blood pressure down. Here is my ideal 2008 NBA playoffs: Don't even play the first round in the West or the first two rounds in the East. Celtics sweep Pistons in the Eastern finals. Lakers sweep Spurs and Mavs sweep Suns in the Western semis. Lakers sweep Mavs in the Western finals. Celtics and Lakers agree to split the championship and instead play 7 exhibition games against each other. Immediately following the playoffs, every team in the league has to send its top scorer and rebounder to one of the six teams I named here to make 2008-2009 even more exciting! I mean, exciting in an even-keeled kind of way.

Supreme teams are compelling and draw big ratings, as the New England Patriots just showed.

This is partially true, but I would argue that the pursuit of perfection angle was much more important than just the simple fact that the Patriots were a dominant team. If they had somehow dropped their week 1 game (farfetched, I know, considering they were cheating during it), and gone through the whole season without that magical zero in the "L" column, I'm willing to bet ratings would have been much lower. Still outrageously high compared to anything the NBA puts up, but relatively lower.

If the success of the rich must come at the expense of the struggling poor, so be it. Call it de facto contraction.

Apparently J.A. has a little Rush Limbaugh in him.

"There are too many teams," one All-Star said. "There needs to be, like, 20 teams."

That guy probably just said that because he hates road trips.

But because the owners won't give up that additional revenue and the players won't give up the extra jobs, we're stuck at 30. The best we can do is have the best players concentrated among a few elite teams.

Nevermind, you know, the fans of those teams. Are there millions of rabid Bobcats fans out there? No. Are you going to get stabbed if you tell someone in a bar in Memphis that you don't really give a shit about the Grizzlies? Probably not. But that doesn't mean those teams are irrelevant or not useful assets for the league and their home cities. I really don't give a deuce if Adande thinks the Sonics or T-Wolves or Hawks shouldn't be competing with the traditional powerhouses. I steadfastly refuse to believe it's harmful to the sport in any fashion when parity exists and when non-traditional teams see a little success from time to time. I know ratings suffer and the blogosphere erupts with contempt when something like the 2007 NLCS happens. You know what? If people are too fucking stupid to be interested in a given sport's playoffs unless a team with a lot of history is winning them, that's not my problem. Those kind of people can go play in traffic.

"The trades seem to have piqued interest," commissioner David Stern said.

This doesn't support your point, tinydick. These trades would have piqued interest no matter where the marquee players landed.

There's anticipation and unpredictability, the two things that make sports such compelling TV content.

If Ray Allen goes to New Orleans and KG somehow ends up on the Clippers? No anticipation or unpredictability whatsoever, I guess.

Anticipation and unpredictability sound a lot better than cynicism and skepticism, which was the general attitude toward the NBA last summer.

Hmmmm... let's jog our memories... why was there a lot of cynicism and skepticism aimed at the NBA by fans and analysts last summer? I was going to link the funniest looking Tim Donaghy and Isiah Thomas pictures I could find, but J.A. actually goes through the trouble of answering his own question in the next paragraph. How thoughtful. OK, fine, fuck it. I'll link the pictures anyways.

Those dark days seem so long ago they might as well be in black-and-white. A referee was found to have bet on NBA games and shared inside info with gamblers. A troubled young player had a fatal car crash. The No. 1 overall pick had season-ending surgery before he even played a game. The SuperSonics gassed up the moving vans. The Knicks went through a sordid sexual harassment lawsuit. It was all gloom and doom.

Not on this list:
Too much parity in league
Too many upstart teams having success
Elite players too spread out
Fans bored by lack of traditional dynasty
Too long since Lakers or Celtics have won title
Shawn Bradley no longer available to be hilariously dunked on

Although that last one damn well should be included.

Last year was one of the hardest years from a public relations standpoint," said former All-Star David Robinson. "To see how well the NBA has bounced back from some of that stuff last year … I don't know any league that could deal with that kind of stuff. Wow.

"The energy level is still great. Everybody is looking forward to the playoffs. It's still so much excitement."

So what happened? Sports happened.

What does that mean? How does it justify your point?

We should know by now that all it takes to restore faith and interest in a league is to play games. Make that, play games on relevant networks (two points lost on the NHL).

Apparently the NHL is no longer playing games. No wonder I haven't heard much about them recently. And apparently they willingly chose to take their games off NBC and ESPN. "Hey," Gary Bettman said to a board of league executives, "I heard this 'Versus' is the next big thing. Call up our current networks and tell them to stick their thumbs up their own asses. We're riding the wave of the future, baby."

Bring out the balls, blow the whistle and the problems go away.

And- make sure all the best players in the league end up on just a handful of teams. You forgot that part.

All they had to do was keep playing and wait for the emergence of a dominant team or two. There's nothing wrong with a little healthy hegemony. In the league's glory days in the 1980s, there was a nine-year stretch when the Lakers and Celtics won eight of the titles. So much for sharing the wealth.

Those were the "glory days" because of the kind of people I earlier said should go play in traffic. Ratings were up. Everyone talked about the Celtics and Lakers. Great. But was the level of play in the league and higher? Was there something more inherently interesting about the games? The NBA has and always will market its superstars ahead of its teams. And it just so happened that two of the biggest superstars of the 80s happened to play for two otherwise excellent teams in opposite conferences. But just because everyone back then said "Oh man, Lakers/Celtics ftw, kewlest yizz evr" doesn't mean things were any better. Having both the Yankees and Red Sox playing very well at the same time these days sure generates ratings and hype for MLB. But can you really say the sport is better because of it? Really? Look, I already said it, but if you need shit like this to get interested in a sport then you weren't really a fan in the first place.

There are more good teams now. At the current pace, a Western Conference team could win 50 games and still miss the playoffs.

This will not happen. I promise. And it doesn't prove at all that there are more good teams now. The Lakers and Suns were already going to win 50 games before their moves. Denver, Utah, Portland, and Houston have basically the same rosters they did in November. As long as "now" is referring to "since these big trades," which I'm pretty certain it is.

Before the All-Star Sunday the arena was buzzing with the renewed possibility of a Dallas-New Jersey deal. It turned this weekend's All-Star Game into exactly what it should be: an afterthought. An interlude. People are obsessed with trade talk, and with the state of Kobe's injured pinkie. (One way or another, it always comes back to Kobe). But that's where the focus should be. There's no sense wasting time wondering whether the East All-Stars can beat the West. Who cares? You don't want the exhibtions overshadowing the main event.

Most confusing paragraph in the whole article. The All-Star Game should be an afterthought to what? Trade talk? Injury speculation? Are those "the main event?" I sure hope not. But I thought the only thing the league had to do in order to make everyone happy was just get out there on the damn court and play with their balls while whistling. Now you're telling me we should be more focused on gossip and rumors. And does anyone else see the irony in Adande knocking the All-Star Game after forming a whole article around the idea that concentrating the elite players onto as few teams as possible is a good thing?

This game won't be more entertaining than that Suns-Warriors game Wednesday. There's no way it will be more tension-filled than Shaq's anticipated Suns debut this Wednesday.

Thank you for helping us make the connection that Shaq's debut this Wednesday is for the Suns during a Wednesday game this Wednesday which will be his first game with his new team.

It was telling that, for the first time in memory, Stern opened a news conference talking about basketball. Not collective bargaining negotiations, not television ratings, not legal proceedings. "We're awful pleased about the state of our game," Stern said Saturday night.

"The game looks terrific. It's open, it's fluid, there's more movement. And there are more shots. The fact that the shots go in is also good.

"People feel good about the state of the game and the way it is being played and coached and reffed."

The league rediscovered what matters most, the one thing the fans really care about.

"It's the game, it's the game, it's the game," Stern said.

I thought it was trade rumors, injuries, and Kobe.

Not all the league's problems have magically disappeared. What should be a full-fledged celebration of the hosting Hornets, the team atop the Western Conference, is tempered by the possibility they could leave town without increased fan support. And the Sonics are locked in litigation with the city of Seattle, doing their best to bolt for Oklahoma City.

The last time an NBA team left the Pacific Northwest for the South, it was Vancouver to Memphis … and look how that turned out. The Grizzlies are playing in a half-filled arena, having just dumped their best player in exchange for No. 1 pick bust and a rookie.

But why weep for the Grizzlies when you can wonder how far the Lakers will go with Gasol?

But why wonder about the Lakers when you can be interested in whichever team is your favorite? I realize my well documented anti-Yankees/Red Sox bias is dripping into the article, but it's doing so for good reason. It's comments like this that make me hate every single nationally popular team out there and sometimes make it difficult to cheer for my hyperexposed alma mater.

As J.A. suggests, I'm not weeping for the Grizzlies. It's their own fault they put together a shitty team and had to basically give away Gasol. But at the same time... I know this is hard to hear if you're an elitist fan of a big-market team that thinks because they're on TV more often than everyone else that they're special... I also couldn't give two craps about the Lakers. To wit, with my baseball comparison- do you think Joba Chamberlain should start 2008 in the bullpen or the rotation? If you're not a fan of an AL East team or a keeper league fantasy owner, the answer is "Who fucking cares?" Honestly. Your team has a rich history and a larger than average fan base. I get it. Now stop bothering me so I can learn about other stuff.

Sorry, Memphis. Sorry, Minnesota. Your losses are better for the league as a whole.

I think you mean, your losses are good for the Lakers and Celtics.

The on-court action is as good as you could ask for.

If you're a Laker or Celtic fan.

It's All-Star Weekend in New Orleans. Might as well grab a go cup and celebrate the good times.

You sound like you're drunk already.

J.A. Adande is the author of "The Best Los Angeles Sports Arguments."

1. What's the best way to enjoy a Dodger game- by showing up in the 3rd, leaving in the 6th, or both?
2. Which riot was more violent and unnecessary- the one after UCLA basketball's championship in 1995, or the one after the Lakers won the NBA finals in 2000?
3. Why the fuck don't we have an NFL team?
4. Who's going to end up as a bigger bust- Matt Leinart or Reggie Bush?
5. How fucking lame are the Angels and their fans for that "Rally Monkey" shit?
6. Why doesn't anyone think USC football qualifies as a "dynasty" this decade, even though they've grabbed a whole one national championships?
7. How do we get the Clippers to go back to San Diego?
8. What's the best object to throw on the field for no reason when you're drunk at a Dodger game?
9. No, seriously, why does the country's second largest city not have an NFL team?
10. Tommy LaSorda- fat or pregnant?

Much love to any LA-based fans or readers if they made it this far. You know I'm just messing with you. I pretty much hate everyone equally. Except Boston.