It's Worse Than You Think. Much Worse.

Put that Kool-Aid down. The Heat are not heroes

---

(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.

Begging to Differ

Why the Miami Heat's winning streak is not all it's cracked up to be

---

I'm getting tired of this.

Once again, for reasons unknown, it falls to me to point out what should be obvious to everyone.

If you have the slightest interest in sports, and have not been living under a rock these past two months, you know that as of this writing, the Miami Heat have won 25 games in a row. And all the sports media types have been stumbling all over themselves to celebrate the team's apotheosis.

We haven't seen this much Kool-Aid imbibed since Georgetown, Guyana in '78.

Clearly, I'm not as impressed by this achievement as everyone else. The reasons for this should be obvious; unfortunately, we seem to have reached a point in human history where the obvious no longer catches the eye of anyone blessed with a media pulpit, so I will attempt to set the record straight and explain why this performance--while noteworthy and respectable--falls short of the Olympian heights to which the NBA's press flacks wish to raise it.

First, there is the matter of the Heat, who plays for the Heat, and how they got there. I discussed this issue nearly two years ago on this site (see Miami's Vice, from June 2011). All the points made in that essay remain very much in play to this day. It should be no wonder that the collusion worked by James, Wade, and Bosh--which (as I pointed out then) damaged the game's competitive balance--would lead to this kind of result down the road. How do you expect other teams to compete against the squad that has hoarded a plurality of the league's best players? It stands to simple reason that the hoarding team will be able to dominate its competition to an exaggerated degree. The only thing exceptional about winning 25 games in a row is the fact that the streaking team has refused to take a night off and mail one in for such a long stretch of the schedule.

And remember, James and Bosh came to the Heat from other Eastern Conference teams (Cleveland and Toronto, respectively). No surprise then that the moves that weakened those two franchises would pay dividends down the road for the stars' new team. And, indeed, four of the Heat's 25 consecutive wins came against the two teams abandoned by Miami's prized additions.

That, of course, reflects a larger reality within the Heat's winning streak: beating up on Eastern Conference teams. The Heat, in winning their 25 games, have done so against only eight Western Conference teams (one game apiece against each of those teams). And of those Western teams, only five would make the playoffs today (Minnesota, Portland, and Sacramento are on the outside looking in, and will almost certainly remain there). That leaves 17 wins collected against the teams of the notoriously weaker Eastern Conference. Only six of those games against Eastern teams featured squads in playoff position.

So when we break down those 25 wins, we find that only 11 of those victories came against good teams. And, as noted before, there's a dearth of solid competition in the league because...hello!...most of the best players play for the Heat.

One game that many thought might snap the streak, against the Celtics on March 18, proved to be challenging but ultimately victorious for Miami. Perhaps Boston could have put up a better fight if the injured Kevin Garnett had played in the game. Or maybe the Celtics could have prevailed if they had kept one of their recent star players, Ray Allen, on the team. Of course, Allen now plays for...wait for it...the Miami Heat.

Thus, it's no surprise that the Heat, having plucked several of the best players away from their competition, are now dominating that rest of the league.

As they say on late night TV ads, "But wait...there's more!"

One of the favorite lines of hype, employed by the media lickspittles when waxing poetic about Miami's streak, is how the Heat are achieving something "historic" in winning this many games in a row. In more than one sense, this is true--but not necessarily in the way these pundits mean.

That the Heat have achieved the second longest winning streak in NBA history is undeniable. If they match or beat the Lakers' record 33 game streak, that will be a laudable accomplishment. The streak's value will be debatable (see above), especially if the team does not win the championship in June. But the trouble with this winning run is that it serves as yet more evidence that the NBA has a problem with delivering a truly competitive sport.

The game's history shows that dominance by one team (or, at best, two teams) during a given period of NBA history is not an anomaly--it is very much the norm. In the very beginning (during the late 1940s and early 1950s), the Minneapolis Lakers repeatedly prevailed. Eventually, the Celtics took the mantle and ran with it (championships consecutively from 1959 to 1967, with three other wins bookending the run). After the interregnum of the 1970s (when the title changed hands frequently among several teams, probably because of the competing presence of the ABA), we had the NBA's alleged Golden Age in the 1980s, when every championship except two was won by either the Lakers or the Celtics (only Philadelphia in '83 and Detroit in '89 crashed the two-team party). During the '80s, only five teams even played in the Finals. The 1990s saw six championships for the Bulls--a streak broken only because of Michael Jordan's fanciful two-year excursion through baseball's minor leagues. Competition during recent years has been slightly more open, but the turn of the 21st century still saw the Lakers add five titles in eleven years (and they lost two other Finals in the same period).

Noticing a pattern here? The history of the NBA can be summed up simply: flat out dominance by (usually) one team. Again and again, one team in the league has stood head and shoulders above the rest, often for years at a time. That such supremacy has not resulted in lengthy winning streaks more often should probably be chalked up more to fluke than a level playing field. Past teams, just as dominant as the Heat in today's NBA, may have taken their foot off the gas to rest up for the playoffs, rather than go all out looking to etch their names into the record books. Or perhaps, back in the day when the competition was better, they never got rolling on a long streak to begin with.

However the details may have played out, history shows that the Heat's standing within the league is not something exceptional and rare, but is in fact par for the course.

Indeed, seeing Miami dominate the league to this extent, and recognizing the flaws in the rest of the league that have helped create this streak, actually works to downgrade the accomplishments of past teams. That championship run forged by the Celtics in the '60s has always had a mythic aura to it; we've come to view that achievement as something almost herculean in scope, as heroic as any deeds reported in the Illiad or the Odyssey. But when viewed with a more jaundiced eye, when analyzed via the intelligence that has been honed by studying the causes and effects of the Heat's run, the shining victories of the past start to dim. Such superiority is simply what always happens in the NBA.

All of this truth telling comes from fairly straightforward analysis that can be done even by amateur sportswriters such as myself. No particular secret wisdom is required to see what there is to see in Miami's streak, and thus to keep the hyperventilating to a minimum. Instead, we get hysterical hype, ad nauseum. This failing by the sports media echoes the blindness we saw a few years ago--those same shortcomings I called out in the post referenced above. Those failings may ultimately prove to be one of the truest legacies of LeBron James's career: his actions, his team's exploits, have provided a backdrop against which the shallowness, the amateurism, the outright incompetence of what is currently alleged to be sports journalism have been exposed.

Sports fans deserve true reporting and insightful analysis; instead, all they get are shameless shills and hagiography. The Heat may keep winning; but the sports fans will continue to lose when it comes to what they get from the people reporting on the games.

D'oh! Not Udoh!

I just want to pop in here and make a few (time-stamped) comments on the recent activities by my local NBA outfit, the Golden State Warriors, at the trade deadline.

I don't have a problem with trading away Monta Ellis. A lot of folks have been grinding their teeth over the trade with the Bucks, because the W's sent away Ellis. That's not my beef; Ellis is a good player, and I appreciated watching him these last few years, but scoring guards are not hard to come by.

What really cheesed me about this deal was the departure of Ekpe Udoh. Few observers made any points about Udoh's loss, but I think in time this is going to be the real bungle to come out of this trade. (Especially when Andrew Bogut spends most of his Warriors career on the bench looking like a Mens' Wearhouse advertisment.) The Warriors' eternal quest has been for frontline players: guys who play near the basket, scoring down low, rebounding, and defending the rim. Udoh had the last part down cold; he's good for a couple of blocked shots a game, and altered an odd number of additional shots just through presence in the lane. Lately, in the last several games before the trade, Udoh showed a developing low post scoring game; he has made tremendous progress in that area since the start of last year's rookie season. And while his rebounding has been questioned, the willingness to work on his game--as exhibited by the developing scoring touch--promised better things in that area as well. In short, Udoh had all the promise of growing into exactly the kind of player the Warriors have been trying to get for years.

And they just traded him away. For the NBA equivalent of a handful of magic beans.

It says here that, in three or so years, when Udoh has blossomed to the point where he gets picked as a back up for at least one All-Star game--don't laugh; big men who are solid on both ends of the court are extremely rare, and just a little good game will go a long way--then everyone in the Bay Area will be griping about yet another player who got so much better after leaving the Warriors, and how they let another one get away. The only difference is, this time you heard it here first.

Publication Note

malchats media

I have just this week posted a newly updated version of my essay "The Champs/Chumps Ratio," this time on my self-publishing feed malchats media at scribd.com. This new update covers events through this spring, including the Mavericks unlikely NBA championship, as well as provides expanded statistical evidence for the original essay's thesis (that the NBA is far and away the worst of the major professional sports leagues for competitive balance). Give it a look if you have a few.

Miami's Vice

I, like many of you, have lately been subjected to a lot of analysis about why everyone hates the Miami Heat. Most of those critiques have focused on LeBron James and his self-aggrandizing ways last Summer: "The Decision," the months of speculation leading up to that farce, and the dog and pony show that followed his joining the Heat. Many sports pundits have described this "hate the Heat" phenomenon in sports' usual terms: everyone, except for the hometown fans, hates the dominant team. It's a NY Yankees situation, they say; everyone boos when the just-a-bit-too-dominant Bronx Bombers show up in your town.

Unfortunately, I think most of this analysis is wrong. I believe that fans across the country--perhaps even around the world--have developed a strong distaste for the Heat for another, far more perceptive reason. To my eyes, Miami has become a team people love to hate because James, Dwyane Wade, and Chris Bosh--three of the top players in the game--colluded to upset the competitive balance of the league. 

Certainly, they were free agents and had the right to sign with whichever team met their asking prices. But the fact that the three of them--all members of the last USA Olympic team, all ranked among the top 10 to 15 players in the game--got together and decided to play together, with the goal of winning "not two, not three, not four, not five, not six, not seven..." championships (as James himself stated during the aforementioned dog and pony show show), is itself indicative of why they rub fans the wrong way.

For what we must remember is this: the lifeblood of professional sports is competitive balance. As I have argued in my essay "The Champs/Chumps Ratio" (updated version coming soon to Malchats Media on Scribd), competitive balance--the characteristic quality of a league that lets fans of any team believe they have a shot at seeing their team win a championship--is crucial to the welfare of any pro sports enterprise. In sports, hopelessness is death. Folks may scoff at the NFL's "parity," but the fact that any team in the league has a chance to win the Super Bowl--if not now, then within a few years--has been among the strongest forces propelling the NFL to the top of America's pro sports pyramid. Conversely, the NBA is far and away the worst of the pro sports leagues at guaranteeing that all of its teams have a shot at the crown.

So here you have an already imbalanced league, where few teams go into the season with a fighting chance at a title, and along comes a triad of major players who decide to try to sink the league's competitive balance even further by ganging up on the rest of the teams. Is it any wonder that basketball fans would hold a grudge against these guys?

We must note that pro sports owners are incentivized to create competitive balance. Owners reap profits from having a team that wins championships. If one team tries to dominate competition--a la the Yankees--other owners will suffer, and they'll have a strong incentive to step up and spend themselves up to that same level (a la the Red Sox, Philllies, etc.).

Players also profit from winning championships, but their incentive runs in the opposite direction:  they can guarantee themselves championships--and bigger playing and endorsement contracts--if they control team rosters through collusive free agency moves; that is, through destroying competitive balance. James was not off base when he predicted winning multiple championships; the NBA's history is replete with teams that won multiple crowns because they had the lion's share of the best players. When that situation arose through the accidents of player development or shrewd club management, such a run of multiple championships could be palatable to the general mass of fans. But if the best players try to gang up on one team against the rest of the league, competitive balance becomes a joke. And this is especially true in the NBA, with its small active rosters, where one or two great players in a starting five can make a team unbeatable.

That, then, is the crux of the matter. The fans know what is being done to their favorite league, and they're not happy about it.

And what's the saddest part of this spectacle? Perhaps it's the fact that I need to point this out--that so many allegedly seasoned reporters of the game, and sports in general, seem so lost in covering this story. Can they not see what is right in front of them? Are sports journalists so blinded by the glitz and star worship of the modern NBA that they can't decipher the most fundamental facts about the state of the game? Apparently so. Politics, it seems, isn't the only journalistic arena where analytical reporting has gone right into the toilet.

If the Mavericks win tonight, the Heat and their collusive ways will have been thwarted, at least for one season. But if Miami take the next two games and wins the first of its predicted multiple titles, the fans will walk away with a sour taste in their mouths, and the damage to the game will be done. And perhaps worst of all, few will really understand why.