(This is a very long post. Apologies in advance, but I wanted to make my case as comprehensively as possible.)
So here we are. The Miami Heat have just won the second of two straight championships, and the hype and hagiography machine is rolling on, as expected. Here's a sample of the headlines in reaction to Thursday night's game:
Litke: Victory Validates LeBron's Decision (AP, via the Comcast home page)
LeBron James, Dwyane Wade deliver another NBA title in a Game 7 to remember (Wetzel, Yahoo! Sports)
Back-to-back champ LeBron James helps elevate beauty of game with help from tenacious Spurs (Wojnarowski, Yahoo! Sports)
The articles are pretty much what you'd expect: plenty of laudatory prose showered upon LeBron James, some for Dwyane Wade, not so much for Chris Bosh. A bevy of "One Shining Moment" style salutes to the King James and his Heatles. A touch of "ends justifies the means" rationalization in favor of James and "The Decision"--but with very little cogent analysis of what was so wrong with the Heat from the very beginning.
And no one bothers to say the magic word: collusion.
Dan Litke, at the very least, comes closest. In his column Litke addresses the fact that Miami's assemblage of superstars came together under a very dark cloud of criticism. He writes:
James was already the best player in the game when he made "The Decision'' nearly three years ago, a move that the rest of the basketball world pounced on as a sign of weakness, a tacit admission that he couldn't win a championship all by himself.
James was right on that score...
The Heat were convenient villains, fair or not, for skipping most of the preliminaries and assembling the core of the team with little more than a checkbook. James' move to Miami touched off free-agent envy among his superstar brethren - everybody wanted to be a part of a Big Three somewhere - and the rest of the league is still scrambling to put one together as formidable as Riley's troika in Miami.
Indeed. No team has yet put together a viable counterpunch to Miami's Big Three--and that inability to match up has been the crux of the problem right from the start. That line about "free-agent envy" makes it seem like the issue rests only within the psyches of other NBA superstars; but, as I've argued all along, what happened in the summer of 2010 struck right to the core of the Association and its ability to showcase a truly competitive professional sport. And, of course, it also highlights the other end of this grim reality: the brutal failure of the so-called sports "journalists" to get this story in any way correct in fact or analysis.
As I first argued in this post, non-Miami based NBA players, executives, and (especially) fans had cause for howling in protest against James's move, not out of simple envy, nor because LeBron made a social faux pas (actually staged one, that is, on ESPN no less), nor because the three amigos then backed up the original faux pas with that ridiculous pep-rally/smoke machine show days later. No, the problem lies in the fact that three of the game's best players colluded to try to rig the sport by placing themselves all on one team.
In some ways, it's a simple numbers game. In the Summer of 2010, James, Wade and Bosh were clearly among the top fifteen players in the game--possibly even top twelve or ten. (James was and is the consensus best player in the game, while Wade certainly ranked in the top six or seven. For all the criticism he gets today, Bosh back then was clearly an All-Star and a sought-after free agent--at least the 15th best player in the game). All three had been members of the 2008 gold medal winning USA basketball team at the Beijing Olympics--a sign that they were certainly among the twelve best American hoopsters, at least. James, Wade and Bosh were the pick of the 2010 free agent litter; any players who could match them in stature were either already on the decline, or securely under contract, or both.
So then, you scoop up the three best available players in free agency, all of whom are at least top fifteen quality players, and you put them on one team. What does that mean? Well, it leaves only twelve of the top fifteen players remaining--for the other twenty-nine teams. Even if each of the four remaining best players had their own two running mates on one roster, that would still limit the fifteen best players in the game to only five teams (out of thirty). More likely, due to reasons of contract status, age, and a host of other variables, those other twelve players will remain scattered, singly or in duos, throughout the rest of the league. If all the remaining top players are evenly distributed on other teams, that still leaves seventeen teams in the league without one of those top players at all.
Does that affect the league's competitive balance? Of course it does. Remember, in the best of scenarios, the NBA is the least competitively balanced of the four major North American professional sports leagues. (I discussed this fact in the research article "The Champs-Chumps Ratio," still available online at Scribd.) Start clumping the superstars together on just a few teams, and that propensity towards competitive imbalance will become overwhelmingly decisive. Already, few teams go into an NBA season with a viable chance to win the championship; let the best players pick and choose their own teams and teammates, and the trophy being passed among two or three teams (at most) will become a foregone conclusion. All the rest of the teams in the league become nothing more than well-paid versions of the Washington Generals.
And the fans of those out-of-the-superstar-loop teams? What do they do? Apparently, they can go pound sand, for all James, Wade and Bosh care.
Remember, Miami's Big Three were not assembled through good scouting, drafting and coaching (a la the Spurs of Duncan, Parker and Ginobili); nor were they constructed by way of shrewd trades at just the right time (like the Celtics did with Garnett, Pierce and Allen). No, the Heat's superstars came together because they colluded to put themselves together on one roster. In doing so, they raised a gigantic middle finger in the faces of the fans of every team that could have been helped by any one of those guys, had there been a true market for their services.
And to what end was that middle finger raised? "Not five, not six, not seven..." Those words are treated as a joke these days--an arrogant joke, to be sure, but somehow not reflective of James's true intentions. But taken at face value (as they should be), that's a pretty lofty mission statement, one that defines the players' intrigues as an action taken with the goal of creating a competitive imbalance designed to secure multiple championships.
In other words, the Heat's Big Three colluded to rig the sport in favor of their success. And in doing so, they unleashed a torrent of consequences, both intended and unintended, that will shape the NBA for years to come.
We've already covered one consequence: more competitive imbalance. The Heat were prohibitive favorites to win the championship from the moment James, Wade and Bosh inked their contracts; they were only thwarted from their original stated goal by the Mavericks, coming up a mere two games shy of winning three straight titles.
This imbalance plays out not just in the postseason, but in the regular season, too. Think about the Heat's 27 game winning streak this year. I covered that phenomenon at the time in this post. To briefly recap the point made there: one of the reasons the Heat were able to go on that streak was because, thanks to the collusion that put James and Bosh on the same team with Wade, two other teams in the East were weakened to the same extent that Miami was made stronger. And, of course, its even worse than that, because not only were Cleveland and Toronto stripped of their best players three years ago, but every other team around the league that could have been made better by signing one of those free agents in 2010 didn't get better. Not only were the Heat playing the Cavs and Raptors, who were with out James and Bosh respectively, but every other team they played was without the services of James and Bosh, too. No wonder they had such an easy time winning in such a streak.
But wait--it gets worse. Remember when the Heat signed James and Bosh to go with Wade? Many pundits suggested that paying the salaries of all three players would be so onerous for Miami that it would be the Big Three and a roster full of rookie free agents for the foreseeable future. Yet, who was playing for the Heat during this year's playoffs, besides the Big Three? Names like Miller, Andersen, Battier, and Allen all appeared on Heat jerseys this season--all veterans of more than a decade in the Association, and all made valuable contributions to the Heat's championship run. How is it possible that the Heat could employ such veteran (and theoretically high-priced) talent when they have to pay three superstars--under a salary cap, no less?
Now we see just how insidious is the effect of what James, Wade and Bosh did back in 2010. Veteran NBA players aren't particularly stupid. They're jocks, but they ain't so dumb that they can't see which way the wind is blowing. With James and Bosh moving to Miami and making the Heat overwhelming favorites to win the championship, other players could see that, if they wanted to be playing for anything other than second place and a smaller playoff share, they would do well to sign with the Heat--for less money than they might otherwise make somewhere else--and make up the difference in championship prestige, a higher playoff share, maybe even some endorsements that would not have been on the table if they'd been playing in, say, Portland. So the Heat get the veteran help they need, just the right players to fill the roles and cement their championship pedigree, despite the burden of having to pay the superstars' salaries. Salary cap? What salary cap? In effect, the Big Three's collusion to rig the game in their favor didn't just bring them together, didn't just weaken other teams by drawing their own selves away from those other teams and by denying other squads their services, didn't just weaken other teams by prying away veteran role players--it actually in a de facto sense abrogated the salary cap. You don't have to worry so much about staying under a salary cap if players are begging you to play for your team--for less money than they would make somewhere else.
What that means is, the collusion by James, Wade and Bosh effectively changed the league's rules--but only for their team. Other franchises, without the drawing power of playing beside the Big Three, remained hampered by the NBA's salary cap. For a team that, before the ink was even dry, had an enormous edge over its competitors as soon as the Big Three were signed, the cumulative effect of the advantages gained from those acquisitions was overwhelming. Rigged is almost too weak a word for it.
Oh, yeah, and another thing: what about the precedent these shenanigans have set? Will it be good for the NBA as a whole when, in six years or so, Damian Lillard, Harrison Barnes, and Anthony Davis get together (assuming the continuing upward progress of their careers) and dictate where the three of them will play together--most likely in New York, or Los Angeles, maybe Boston or Chicago? Sure, it will be good for them as individual players, but what about the fans and franchises they leave behind (Portland, Golden State and New Orleans, respectively)? Again, pound sand, fellas. Inevitably, teams that are not constantly, aggressively in the spotlight, that are not traditional glamour teams, will not be able to hold onto their star players, max contracts or not. If you're a fan of one of those lower caste teams, you should be saying, "You want me to pay how much? For tickets to this shit?" Not exactly a sustainable business model. Contrast that with the NFL, where even a team in the hinterlands of Green Bay, Wisconsin can compete on an even level with everyone else, can keep its star players, can always (given competent management) promise its fans a legitimate shot at a title. Does that sound like. let's say, the Utah Jazz to you? Not in LeBron James's NBA.
Remember all this as you read the continuing cascade of fawning words that will come in the following days. We're all supposed to love/adore/suck off LeBron James and his Heatles now, even if we were a little bit angry about that whole sideshow thing at the start. The sages of the sports pages have declared it so. But...how are you really supposed to feel about someone who wins with a stacked deck? I seem to recall a nation, back when I was young, where people actually cared about fairness. Rigging things in your favor was looked down upon, if not actively censured or beaten back. And sports, after all, are supposed to be about competition--fair competition. There's a reason why, when kids get together on a playground, the two captains (usually the best players) are on opposite teams, and they take turns picking players for their respective teams--they do it to make sure the game is fair. That should always be the goal whenever games are played.
Fairness has taken a beating in our society; it has been so for decades now. Working people see the beating fairness has taken in shrinking wages and lost jobs; homeowners see it in unfair mortgages and unjustified foreclosures; poor people see it whenever they butt heads with the criminal justice system. Perhaps this condition reflects the larger society around the game, but what goes on in today's NBA cannot be called fair. The deck is very, very stacked now.
And while others may get lost in the fog of hero worship, I can't bring myself to cheer for someone who wins with a stacked deck. All the talk about LeBron James and his legacy, about how it has just gotten so much better, represents in my view little more than wishful thinking--or perhaps a deliberate attempt to engineer that version of "the truth." Seen in the cold hard light of a clear day, I think that legacy has in fact gotten much, much worse.
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