LeBron and Superteams

King James has spoken from the top of the mountain, announcing that he is taking his talents to Los Angeles (although he has abandoned the verbiage he used when making prior relocation announcements).  He wants to go to a team with a tradition of winning, so he has joined a team that over the past five years has amassed a winning percentage of .307 and didn’t make the playoffs.  This is like when he announced where he was going when he left Miami and some people (mostly New Yorkers) speculated that he might go to a team where he could win a championship like the NY Knicks (who had last won a title in 1973).  Okay, this is unfair; the Los Angeles Lakers suck now, but they were good way back in the 20^th century.

The most surprising thing is that he made the announcement without waiting to see if the Lakers would snag another big name free agent to co-star in his next title run.  Most of the coverage of LeBron’s future was connected to the possibility of teaming up with other NBA superstars to form a “superteam.”  However bad the Lakers were in 2017-18, the addition of LeBron and one other superstar would immediately assure them a playoffs berth, and even possibly challenge the Warriors for Supremacy in the Western Conference (but this was before the Warriors acquired Boogie Cousins and became even more, um, super-er).

This is where basketball is different than baseball or football; merely signing LeBron would make the worst team in the league a contender for their conference finals.  There is no baseball or football player who alone could have that impact on a team.  Free agency has now wrought this system where players can get together and decide where they want to team up, and with the dominance of the Warriors over the past four years it would take a superteam of at least three superstars to contend.  LeBron, Kevin Love, and three guys chosen at random from the audience (which is the rotation the Cavaliers essentially used during the 2018 playoffs) just won’t cut it.

But what all this manipulation by the players amounts to is that no team will be able to have any chance of winning in the NBA unless they assemble a rival superteam, and the number of cities that can attract a superteam is very small.  From now until doomsday, teams located is such garden spots as Sacramento, Portland, Salt Lake City, Indianapolis, Denver, Memphis, or Orlando (to name only a few) will have absolutely ZERO chance of winning an NBA championship (especially Sacramento, given that it is a well-known fact that the NBA fixed the 2002 Western Conference Finals to make sure that the Lakers, and not the Kings, went to the NBA Finals). 

In other words, three fourths of the NBA will exist only because the other 25% of the teams need someone to lose to them.

The NBA has always been this way; between 1980 and 2010 only 6 teams won 28 of the 30 NBA championships.  But at least in the “old days” a team had the hope that a good draft could bring an emerging star who would immediately elevate his team’s quality.  The problem was that good college players were joining bad NBA teams, but there was a chance.

Unfortunately, now almost all college basketball players are “one and done” and enter the NBA as a callow 19-year-old, with just one season of college ball under their belt.  They tend to be undersized and inexperienced, and not capable of providing a significant impact for at least a few years.  The draft doesn’t level the playing field like it used to.

There are exceptions, like in Philadelphia which implemented “the Process” which called for tanking over several seasons to amass multiple high draft picks and now are favored to vie for the Eastern Conference title in 2018-19.  But this required a half-decade of squalid basketball, fortuitous ping pong ball drops, and a series of quality choices in the draft, all of which cannot be relied upon by another team seeking to emulate their success.

Teams that have a legacy of winning tend to keep it until years after the fact. Maybe successful teams in boring places, like Cleveland, San Antonio and Oklahoma City, will be able to contend for a while by attracting stars to a successful system.  But at some point, the geographic advantage of being in a big city with a pleasant climate, like LA or Miami, will lure the majority of superstars there to form superteams, and from that point on the majority of NBA teams will just be cannon fodder. 

Michele Roberts, the head of the NBA Players’ Association, said that the players should be faulted for competitive imbalance, that it is a factor of some teams being better managed than others.  That assumes that Lebron James seriously sat down and considered signing with the Sacramento Kings, but chose the Lakers not because of money (the salary cap means he’d get the same amount anywhere) but because the prospect of playing with Lonzo Ball appealed to him.  I tend to support player unions, but she’s off her rocker if she doesn’t get that players getting together and “colluding” to go to attractive destinations together is not making rich teams rich and relegating teams in smaller markets to perpetual oblivion.

What’s the solution?  Normally I would oppose anything that restricts player movement, as that helps owners sign players for below-market salaries.  At least it has in baseball, but the economics of the NBA are such that players like Ian Mahinmi can make $16 million in 2017 for playing 15 minutes and scoring under 5 points per game.  Sacramento, Portland and Indianapolis will never be able to compete with LA as an attractive destination for young, wealthy, athletic young men, but there should be some way to stop all of the talent in the league from flowing to a half-dozen teams while preserving salaries and giving the rest of the league a modicum of hope.