Bill fixes the Lakers, tests my patience (part 1)

Stand back, folks.  Genius at work.

I know a Celtics fan should never try to help the Lakers. 

/record scratch

Yes, I hope you are already annoyed, as I was when I first clicked here and saw this opening sentence.  What's that, Bill?  You're going to fix the Lakers?  You benevolent soul!  How nice of you to bestow your mountains of wisdom upon your readers, but more importantly, upon the front office of the Lakers, who undoubtedly were waiting with bated breath for this column to appear and save their offseason.  If Bill wasn't full of himself, he'd be full of nothing at all.

I know I should bite my tongue. 

No!  Don't refuse to help, Batman!  Gotham NEEDS you!

I know I should hope Jimmy Buss keeps ruining his family's team, I know I should be hoping that they'll kowtow to Kobe and make the Lakers juuuuuuuust decent enough to be irrelevant, and that a decade of Blowtime 

lol pwn3d

would be my best possible outcome here.

Jesus, he even turns the success or failure of a sports team with tens of millions of both fans and haters into his own little me-fest.  Bill, tell us, what's YOUR best outcome for George Zimmerman trial?  What's YOUR best outcome for the 2014 midterm elections?  Your readers are dying to know.

But here's the problem …

As you already know, the problem is that he's such a fucking genius that he can't possibly hide his talents under a bushel basket.

I love making fake NBA trades, figuring out blueprints for franchises and determining the fastest, most efficient ways to save them. 

I AM THE VP OF CAWMAWN SENSE!  THE MAGIC WILL RUE THE DAY THEY PASSED ON EMEKA OKAFOR TO DRAFT DWIGHT HOWARD!  

That's just who I am. I'm a weirdo. 

#humblebrag

I have a folder of iPad bookmarks called "NBA Nerd" that features links for the ESPN.com Trade Machine, HoopsHype's NBA salary page, ShamSports's NBA salary page, Basketball-Reference.com, Hoopdata.com, PER leaders, and the NBA Transactions Archive. 

Gosh, guys, I'm such a NERD, aren't I?  What with the way I know everything about the NBA, and how it works, and how to make every team better?  What a NERDY thing to do, right?  

/Bill watches Twitter feed, patiently waiting for validating Tweets telling him he is awesome and not a nerd to roll in

I'm like a cross between the Wolf, Olivia Pope and Jerry West. 

OK, I admit I had to look up who Olivia Pope is.  It's great that Bill can reference "Scandal" (undoubtedly one of the top 150 shows on TV right now), but what the fuck do public relations and image management have to do with any of this?

Or I like to think that I am. Again, I'm a weirdo. 

I'm a nerd, but not a NERDY nerd!  Right, guys?

I genuinely enjoy hypothetically fixing broken NBA franchises. Even ones I can't stand. So after Dwight Howard completed The Indecision 

Sweet joke, I like the idea of contrasting the excitement surrounding LeBron's choice with the relative calm surrounding Howard's, except that it took Howard no longer than it took LeBron to decide, so the joke makes zero fucking sense.

and fled Kobe's clutches for the sanctity of barbecue, luxurious strip joints, no state taxes, lower expectations and low-key media pressure Houston, 

LOL!  Another home run of a fake struck text joke!  The 2% of writers who are good at these must be annoyed with fuckups like Bill who butcher them all the time.

I found myself clicking on the Lakers' salary page just out of curiosity … but then my wheels started turning … and one thing led to another … and suddenly I found myself helping the Lakers. 

LISTEN TO ME TALK ABOUT MY CREATIVE PROCESS!  YOU ARE CURIOUS ABOUT IT!

I couldn't resist. Within a few minutes, I was inadvertently hatching a plan that even Rachel Phelps would consider shameless.

My guess is he writes his columns without the specifics of any of the references filled in (just the general ideas), then just has a team of unfunny writers complete them like a mad-lib.  This one: "scheming villain from an 80s comedy."

In the NBA, you want to be either really good or really bad. You never want to land between those two "reallys" for long. You don't want to be squeezed into the no. 8 seed or keep finishing 12th or 13th in every lottery. Basically, you don't want to be the Milwaukee Bucks. (Cut to every Bucks fan nodding vigorously.) If you can't compete for the title, why not bottom out in the most flagrantly offensive way possible?

This "you don't want to be mediocre, you want to be good or shitty" thing is one of his frequently mentioned ideas that I actually agree with.  Thought I'd point that out since most of the ideas about how sports works that he mentions all the time are complete monkey shit.  Of course, all that means is that he probably stole this one from someone else.

Of course, that's something the Lakers have never, ever done. They picked first in the 1979 and 1982 drafts (Magic and Worthy) by fleecing laughingstock franchises of their draft picks — not by being the laughingstock franchise. They miraculously turned Vlade Divac, three cartons of Marlboro Reds and a pound of phlegm into a raw high schooler named Kobe Bryant. 

Given the success rate for guys drafted out of high school, I think it's a better idea to look at that trade as "something that could have gone either way, and happened to work out really well" rather than "DRAFT DAY TRADE OF THE CENTURY."  I mean, 12 teams passed on Kobe.  One of them took Todd Fuller.  It's not like he was an earlier version of LeBron going into the draft.  Now, let's be fair--the intended meaning of the word "miraculously" up there is actually ambiguous.  He could mean what I've suggested here, that he thinks it was miraculous that the Hornets took that deal, or he could mean that it was a miraculous turn of fortune that that high schooler picked 13th overall happened to become one of the 20 best players in NBA history.  Here's the thing: this blog is not in the business of giving Bill the benefit of the doubt.

They landed Shaq, Kareem, Wilt and Dwight for a variety of reasons, the biggest being that (a) they're the f-ing Lakers, 

IT'S NAWT FAY-UH! says the guy whose team once won a title by landing KG and Ray Allen in exchange for Al Jefferson, spare parts and two picks in a mediocre draft.

and (b) celebrities love Los Angeles (we'll get to this). 

Says shameless starfucker Bill Simmons.

Since they moved to Southern California in 1960, they've won 63.3 percent of their games, appeared in 25 Finals, missed the playoffs just four times, and never won fewer than 30 games. They haven't picked higher than 10th with their own pick since 1975, when they selected Dave Meyers second and promptly traded him in a megadeal for Kareem. No professional sports franchise has been this consistently good for this long: not the Yankees, not the Canadiens, not the Steelers, not anybody.

I don't know, I think the Canadiens' stretch from the early 40s through the early 90s where they missed the playoffs two times, won twenty Cups and lost in the finals seven other times comes pretty close.

But desperate times call for desperate measures. Their best player is hitting Year 18 and rehabbing from the worst sports injury an older player can have. 

Nice bit of invented medical knowledge there, impressing many of the mouth breathers who read him regularly I'm sure.  HEY GUYS AN ACHILLES TEAR IS DEFINITELY WORSE FOR OLDER PLAYERS THAN AN ACL TEAR OR A BROKEN SPINE, SPORTS GUY SAID SO

Their second-best player just ditched them. 

Look, Earl Clark didn't "ditch them," OK?  Free agency is a part of the business.

Their third-best player becomes a free agent in 12 months. 

Shocking to see the guy driving the "Gasol for Lakers MVP" bandwagon admit that he wasn't better than Howard last season.  I'm sure that if you taunted him about it a little, you could get him to write 4,000 words on how Gasol and Nash were the only Lakers "who really played like they had a little Daniel-san in them" last season.

Their fourth-best player turns 40 this season. They can't improve one of the league's worst supporting casts because they're patently terrified of being a repeat offender in the luxury tax. 

The NBA's luxury tax is so punitive, even the Lakers won't pay it.  MLB's is so punitive, even the Yankees won't pay it.  Finally, the owners have found a way to stop salary growth and keep more of that yummy delicious revenue in the team bank account.

Their coach is realistically two years away from taking over the Minnesota Lynx or the Pepperdine Waves. And they need to sell the illusion of hope to their fans, which means they need to save as much cap space as possible for LeBron, which means they can't add ANY contracts that expire after next summer.

Look, I hate Lakers fans with all my soul, but I don't really think you need to sell "the illusion of hope" to them.  It's not like they're downtrodden and ready to give up on their team at any minute.  They're spoiled twatballs who have seen their team win five titles in the last fifteen years.  If a good deal came along this offseason that helped them improve their team for the next three or four years, but cost them a shot at signing LeBron next summer, I think they'd get over it in about a day.

Fact: This year's Lakers team will be undeniably worse than last year's Lakers team … a team that didn't make the playoffs until Game 82.

Fact that only a genius could figure out: 154 games combined from Howard and Kobe is way better than ~50 games combined from Howard and Kobe.

Fact: This is bleak. Really, really bleak.

Fact: Using this device to drive home your points makes you a total asshat and a shitty writer.

Fact: I have had enough of this shit for the night.