The crazy NBA off-season and what it could mean for the NBA

I‘ve never been more confused about the NBA than I am right now. Watching LeBron James opt out and then somehow get Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh to follow suit is creating the strangest NBA off-season in the history of the league. I don’t know if I can come up with a cohesive all-encompassing narrative about it all, so let’s look at some of it a bit at a time.

How in the world does Dwyane Wade opt out of that deal? More importantly, how does it make sense for anyone (even his sole employer as an NBA player, the Miami Heat) to continue to pay Dwyane Wade like an on-court equal of LeBron James? Yet here’s the Miami Heat and Pat Riley seemingly sticking by Wade even has he continues to decline.

“Dwyane has been the cornerstone of our organization for over a decade, and we hope he remains a part of the Heat family for life,” Miami president Pat Riley said in a statement.

At what cost though? I know I’m not breaking new ground here, but we’re talking about a guy who only played 54 regular season games and slogged through 20 playoff games as Miami fell to the Spurs.

When LeBron James left Cleveland it was about winning. Many who have justified the LeBron James means by pointing to the championship victory ends are staring down the flailing of their argument. If it was all about winning, there’s no way that LeBron James would continue to try and build a winner in Miami with a trio of he, Chris Bosh and Dwyane Wade splitting the majority of the money. At least not in the same roster location where they’ve decimated the pipeline of players by building a super-team via free agency. We’re talking about an NBA team that hasn’t picked a player and actually added him to their roster since Norris Cole in the 2011 NBA draft. If it’s all about winning and even if LeBron wants to continue to do it with Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh, Miami is no longer the best roster to start with. Even forgetting the easy punchlines about MIA fans, it’s just not the best place anymore from a pure X’s and O’s standpoint.

And this isn’t to say that Cleveland is the best roster to start with. The Cavaliers are a mess and have been ever since LeBron left. It’s not just the losing either. They’ve had no real sense of direction or consistent, quality leadership. Still, a roster makeup like Cleveland has is a far far better fit to build a sustainable winner than what’s going on in Miami, you know, if you’re going to start with veteran stars and just plop them in on top of an existing roster.

If economic incentives no longer matter to players, then what’s the point of a league structure with caps? This is especially troubling for someone like me who has worshiped at the altar of salary caps in pro sports. That’s always been my presumed fix for baseball and maybe it would work there, but what does it say about the NBA and their financial incentives and structures when players don’t act in a rational and predictable fashion based on economic incentives? I mean, I know there’s more to life than money, but in a closed economic environment players are supposed to act mostly predictably and in their own self-interest, when they don’t it really makes you question the point. And despite some serious wrangling by the league during CBA negotiations that seemed to be at least a partial reaction to LeBron’s first “Decision,” here we are with three of the highest profile players making a decision (presumably/purportedly) to leave money on the table.

I apologize if this all comes off like sour grapes, but what has Micky Arison done so very well to be deserving of this special treatment by three of this generation’s best players? He hired Pat Riley who helped architect the whole deal, but when you really boil it down, it’s pretty random and chaotic for a league to have a team-up like this. I know these are older thoughts, but just because we’re used to the idea after four seasons doesn’t make them any less wacky for a league that so desperately wants to exert control over player movements, parity and rosters. It feels like a weird disincentive that I’ve felt in baseball for the Indians at times over the years. Yes, Dan Gilbert has money, but it feels like even if he’d hired Pat Riley that what the Heat pulled off would never be possible in Cleveland. It’s this absence of possibility which is so painful as an Indians fan and now as a Cavs fan. Even as the Browns have stunk, I’ve never felt like they couldn’t achieve it. I just felt like they didn’t and needed to be held accountable. In so many ways Mark Shapiro and Chris Grant (even with their faults over the years) have felt like partial victims of circumstance.

The sports bubble keeps indicating that it wants to pop. And don’t take this as an argument that owners deserve more money or anything like that. That’s a whole different discussion. I think the proof is apparent that this is the definition of players being overpaid. If they no longer respond to the financial incentives and choose to turn them down, technically I think that’s the definition of being overpaid from an economic standpoint. And if prices continue to go up for fans and players care less about extracting every dollar from their contracts then isn’t it all starting to feel like a bubble that wants to pop? It’s the definition of a bloated system and we’ll see how it all shakes out, but I’m more confident than ever that this is unsustainable.

And I do know it’s not all about the money. I know there are a ton of different variables including endorsements and other outside investments and of course personal happiness, but it’s still disheartening to know that even with a system of largely guaranteed economic balance between NBA teams, that you still can’t predict the ability to bring those resources to, say, Cleveland.

For me that’s still all this is ever going to be about. I’ll occasionally watch a TNT game or maybe some playoffs not involving the Cavaliers, but I’m 95% a Cavs fan and only about 5% an NBA fan. The Cavs have gotten tremendously lucky in the NBA draft lottery and I’m hoping that it finally pays off with Wiggins and all the other players that have come to Cleveland since 2010, but it’s really hard to not feel discouraged about the future – near and far – with the way things seem to be playing out all over the league. I know it’s exciting and interesting for national commentators, but at some point the chaos will start to feel so contrived and inauthentic that it will be hard for anyone to even care about the stakes.

You can’t raise the stakes of chaos by introducing more and more and more chaos forever. At some point it’s an action movie with a high body count, but there’s really no difference between Rambo killing 750 people and 7500, right?