I fell asleep on the job today watching Summer League—I’ll
have notes on Portland’s strange and intriguing game for you tomorrow—and there is so much
free agency news that it’s a bit hard to sum it all up. So I’ve opted simply to look at some good
quotes from journalists this week, to get a sense of what all the news that has
happened has meant for the league.
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Regarding LeBron’s announcement that he is returning to
Cleveland, it was harder to find a more incisive and interesting take than that
of Bill Simmons.
This wasn’t entirely to be expected. Simmons’ talents are usually displayed in coming
up with amazing stories about what happens in the NBA, not so much coming down with
fresh opinions on issues. We shouldn’t
let this fool us, of course—he has extremely insightful, almost philosophical
views about what it means to watch sports.
But he is more of a storyteller and a critic, and so it was delightful
that he brought us this time a really smart way to understand what was going on. “If you think of him like a genius,” Simmons
says, “it makes more sense.”
He’s smarter about
basketball than you and me, and, really, anyone else. He sees things that we
can’t see. During that last Miami season, I don’t think he liked what he saw
from his teammates. LeBron James wanted to come back to Cleveland, but he also
wanted to flee Miami. His heart told him to leave, but so did his brain. And
his brain works like very few brains — not just now, but ever.
It is a wonderful way to see what happened. While the conversation shuttles between
people talking purely about what makes LeBron’s move justified for technical,
basketball reasons, and people who talk about what the decision means morally,
in personal and human terms, Simmons finds a way that combines both of these
areas of debate, and makes the case that the move is the exercise of a mind
that understands what sports mean as an artform, as a creative endeavor.
So much of the rhetoric surrounding James focuses on him as
a moral being with an amazing gift. It
is harder to see him as a mind that utilizes specific skills in crafting a life
for himself. But Simmons makes a good
argument for doing so.
The closest that people have come to this point of view is
in talking about LeBron’s “maturity,” a highly loaded and overmoralized concept
that attributes little to his understanding of basketball, and everything to
the play of common knowledge—slowly acquired—in his head. We always want to talk down to LeBron, to be a
step ahead of him in terms of our development as persons. We often talk about
LeBron James as he pursues his career like he is a member of our family who
sometimes does boneheaded things, but other times pulls off wonderful feats of
which we are proud. That doesn’t do
enough credit to how simply artistic and creative the development of his career
is. Look at another take
on his decision that was printed in Time magazine:
When LeBron left
Cleveland he celebrated it as the Exodus from Egypt and enslavement, and that
arrogance left a bitter taste in his fans’ mouths. It was like showing up at a
party with his new girlfriend when he knew his ex would be there. Tacky. Even
his return to Cleveland might have been seen as more from the heart, as he
states in his essay, if it had just been announced as a fait accompli instead
of the press and fans waiting in anticipation for the word to come down from
the mountain inscribed on tablets.
That’s Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and his piece is worth
reading. And while he has often had the
accusation of aloofness leveled at him, what is remarkable is the way that his
pedantry here is no different than so many other articles on LeBron. “Tacky.”
No statement on LeBron could be more
typical of the discourse that surrounds him. It is what everything in these “takes” amount
to saying.
It isn’t that this is a negative criticism—approving is also
something this essay does a lot—it is that is he sort of superficial judgment about
what have been done, what should have been done, of what shouldn’t have been
done, of which they mostly consist. Their
point is always about “the way he does things,” except it never accounts for
any of the style with which he does it, the way “the way” is more than a proper
or improper behavior and more like a show, an act (in the best sense of this
term), an art, a venture into invention and creativity. But Simmons’ effort places us in a different
relationship to him, one that is more distant but also more interested in him.
Whenever Simmons speaks of basketball, he talks as if he is
watching a show on TV or a movie: what matters to him are not the intentions of
athletes but the way they appear, the way they represent themselves, the way
they play out narratives in front of us. This is a revolutionary and extremely sophisticated
view of what happens in sports, because it removes the question of effort and
focuses on the product, the artwork itself.
But it is also a more respectful one, in many cases.
In the course of the piece Simmons asserts something many
people would find quite blasphemous, really, and it is a bold claim that takes
courage to make: that the type of mind that James has—which Jordan had too—is more
like that of Michelangelo’s, or Einstein’s, than we usually think. Whatever its ultimate truth, at a moment like
this, when many are evaluating James in the same old tired ways—trying to say
that this merely undoes a mistake, or returns him to where he was—it is an
important one, which stresses the man’s remarkable inventiveness.
Next, there is the Houston situation, which no one could
have predicted. Not only did Chris Bosh
turn down their offer of a maximum contract to stay in Miami, completely
rendering useless their trade of Jeremy Lin to the Lakers (which will be
absolutely wonderful for Lin, he needed to be free of that strange market and
go to a place where he would be more welcome), but the Mavs gave Houston a
taste of their own medicine and offered a contract to Chandler Parsons that
ruins their future if they match it. Zach
Lowe had a few good words on this, in his piece that was coming to grips
with everything that was happening to Miami:
Bosh’s choice is a
disaster for Houston, which gave away Jeremy Lin and a first-round pick to the
Lakers to lustily open up the final chunk of cap space for Bosh. He would have
fit perfectly alongside Dwight Howard and James Harden, but Bosh likes life in
Miami, and he has surely seen the YouTube videos of Harden’s defense. At least
Houston nabbed an extra pick, one that could fall in the lottery, in their
other cap-clearing move — the trade of Omer Asik to New Orleans.
I’ve written here about how the Rockets have an image
problem. But they may also have a basketball problem, and Lowe gets to the
heart of it.
Everyone is saying that Bosh has not come to Houston because
of personal reasons. He likes it in
Miami, he is settling down. People are
speculating that his wife had something to do with it, that she calls the shots
in the relationship and that if Bosh had his say he may have decided
differently.
It is part of a long process whereby Bosh’s basketball
decisions come to be coded in strangely personal terms. And that forms part of a bizarre questioning
of Bosh’s agency as a human that has plagued him all his life, a perverse
result of his being, quite simply, one of more level-headed and intelligent
players to ever pick up a basketball.
People question his virility, insinuating he can’t make his own
decisions, or makes easy ones, rather than being a man, playing tough, making
the hard choices.
But it is not entirely clear that this isn’t a basketball
decision, pure and simple. This flies in
the face of most logic, of course. On
paper, a Rockets team with Bosh on it works amazingly well. In principle, it is a formula that could take
a big bite out of much of the Western Conference. With that personnel and that skillset, the
team should be brilliant. But in
practice, there might have been problems, problems which Bosh might have
foresaw—the major one being how they would use him to shore up their defense,
as Lowe intimates.
The main reason Bosh was an attractive candidate—this has
been reiterated in countless talks about the deal that have gone on this week—was
not because it would capitalize on anything that they were good at currently,
but instead would be an instant solution to a chronic defensive problem,
combined with a nice ability to spread the floor in the same manner their
offense does already. With Bosh on the
floor, they could alternately give Dwight Howard help in the paint on defense
(freeing him up to gobble up rebounds), and then come down on offense and space
the floor with his three point shooting. The defense would get better, the scorers then
could get even more room to score. There
would be—and this is the crucial emphasis—no loss at all in efficiency, only
gains.
But it isn’t quite clear that this would really be a step
forward for Bosh. Bosh wants to
capitalize on his gifts, and perhaps become a strange new form of NBA player:
something like a lankier and quicker version of LaMarcus Aldridge. It isn’t clear that bringing his defensive
skillset to back up Dwight Howard (whose defensive skills aren’t quite as formidable
as they were back when Stan Van Gundy was scheming to take advantage of his
physical prowess) to merely allow a whole bunch of other people on the roster with
a history of hogging the ball to get easier touches—it isn’t clear that this
would really allow him to do that. It
wouldn’t be too hard, probably, to fix and make things work more smoothly and
more in his favor. But Bosh seems to
have a crystal clear idea of what he wants to become and wants to put this into
practice now, rather than put in all sorts of effort to coerce a young team to
use his gifts rather than let him enable their own.
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There is Melo, there is Pau Gasol, there is there is the
Summer League, there is more to be said about
Chandler Parsons, there is a lot to be said—I wanted to include it here,
but I also want to give it some real attention—about Isaiah
Thomas and the moves of the Kings organization. And if I stop here this little review will be
much too Grantlandy. But more reviews
and summaries in the next few days—rather than news updates—will provide some
more commentary along these lines and hopefully account for the majority of
everything going on, or at least its impact on the state of basketball. For now, though, that will have to be all!
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