Nate Jones (@JonesOnTheNBA) recently made an argument against Tim Duncan’s private, quiet approach to life in the NBA. It’s one he’s been making for a long time. The argument goes like this: basketball – regardless of the product’s essence – is an entertainment business. Tim Duncan is an interesting person and an important basketball player. In the hands of the right writers and interviewers, Tim Duncan could be marketed as a fascinating public figure. Therefore, opening up to the media should increase Tim’s brand recognition and that of his team. In Duncan’s case, it would also be good for basketball in general (and the NBA in particular) if Tim did so, because he embodies rarefied, virtuous qualities on and off the court. There are templates for Duncan to follow such as Steve Nash, but regardless of how he does it, Tim Duncan should become a more public person, at the very least showing his interesting personality to the national media. In fact, one could argue (as Jones does), Tim Duncan’s salary is paid precisely because more athletes don’t follow his quiet path. Duncan may not like it, but morality appears to demand that he seek an active public profile for the benefit of the league.  Continue reading →

I’ve been itching to respond to Steve Kerr’s recent Grantland piece arguing for raising the age limit because I find so much to disagree with. However, trawling the Internet for counterarguments, I found this podcast by Henry Abbott and Michael McCann, laying out almost every imaginable critique of Kerr’s piece two months in advance of it being written. I find it more succinct, organized, and authoritative than anything I could put to text. Still, at the end of the podcast I felt like something crucial went unsaid. Kerr’s piece ultimately had less to do with the age limit itself than with the larger problems Kerr uses the age limit to simultaneously attack: player maturity, development, and marketing. These are clearly critical problems to be solved, and in this two-part response, we’re going to work on them.

But in the framework of these larger problems, Kerr’s proposal to change the age limit by one year seems at best absurdly limited and unsuitable for these problems. Kerr’s argument, to me, reads somewhat like that of a high school student who writes an essay arguing something trivial like that a first-time drug possession fine should change by $50, in order to ameliorate crime, increase revenue for the state, or advance political liberty by a few ticks at the end of the fiscal year, using a bunch of ad hoc, heterodox arguments. “It will ameliorate crime because… it will increase revenue because… it will advance political liberty because…” Perhaps, Steve, perhaps. Crime, fiscal policy, and liberty are enormous problems, though, requiring a broader vision than a rhetorical, cherry-picked take whose prime directive appears to be “stay on message.” Continue reading →

 “Closeout games are actually kind of easy. Teams tend to fold if you come out and play hard in the beginning.”

– Andrew Bynum, prior to Game 5 vs. the 2012 Denver Nuggets

Matchups, matchups, matchups. Like it or not, they’re the name of the game in the NBA. If the best team in the sport has an elite wing, you stock up on elite wing defenders. If the best player is a freight train, you break the bank on a conductor. And if the team that’s got your goat has the most dominant post presence in the league? You pick up Shaq and pretend he can still guard anyone, of course! It’s not a foreign concept to most fans: You make a number of adjustments to your team over the course of the season, and while they’re ostensibly made solely for the good of the team, everyone really knows why the adjustments are made. The dirty little secret is that – for teams blessed to be in the sphere of five or six contending teams per conference – the personnel adjustments tend to be little more than an ill-concealed arms race. A juggling of human capital in a usually futile attempt to adjust your team to fit perceived weaknesses in the better teams. Neutralize the strengths of the best team, and perhaps you’ll luck your way into the finals! Or so they’d say. I’m going to tell you a story about the biggest arms race in the NBA over the last five years. As most things tend to be when you boil them to their essentials, it’s about the Lakers. Continue reading →