Homecomeable players

Fans have got it in their heads that Kevin Durant may be going back to Washington D.C. LeBron-style in 2016.  Well, so does the sports media, which can’t stop speculating about it.  There was so much talk that Durant deleted his Twitter account, which was hounded by fans pleading him to go.  He doesn’t want his next two seasons to be overshadowed by the same “will he or won’t he?” drama that plagued James so much, even when it seemed unlikely he would ever come back. 

Unfortunately for him, the speculation continues, thanks in part to the moves by the Wizards themselves.  They stoked the fire not long ago by hiring Durant’s high school coach as an assistant.  Why else would they do this, if not to lure Durant?  And Durant’s recent withdrawal from the USA national team from the FIBA World Cup has also been surrounded in strange off the wall ideas from Wizards fans that he wants to keep himself healthy with 2016 in mind.

There is real excitement about this issue.  Historically fans are generally supportive of athletes’ decisions to live wherever they want.  But it is nice to think that it is possible for other players to return like LeBron did.  The only real problem concerns who besides KD we might pin our hopes on.

Elite Daily recently put together a great list that showed what each team would look like if its players were only the local talent.  It piqued interest for a while and made us wonder about the options available to other players.  But as soon as you begin seriously looking it over, you find yourself doing a lot of headscratching.  It isn’t that the moves wouldn’t exactly make sense.  It is just that not all players indeed pass muster as homecomeable players.  They don’t make you as happy as seeing them on their current team, or on another team where they have better potential to succeed.

Yes, it’d be great if the Clippers had Klay Thomspon, since he grew up in Los Angeles.  But would you really want to see that instead of seeing him on Golden State, where he makes up the Splash Brothers duo with Steph Curry?  No way.  Would it be nice if Robin Lopez was on the same team, since he also grew up there?  Not at all.  The man so obviously belongs in Portland it is hard to imagine he was ever on another team in the first place.

So this naturally leads us to ask the question: What exactly makes for a homecomeable player?  A player who we would like to see come home to his home town or region, rather than go do something more and possibly even better with another team?  And who really, currently, are they?

The way I look at it, there are several determining factors which qualify you as a homecomeable player, or bar you from being one.  In some cases, one factor is enough; with other players, you need some combination of the factors.  Everyone, certainly needs the first:

If you grow up in the US or Canada and within a few hundred miles of a team:

First, on a basic level, our homecomeable player definitely has to live in the US or Canada, or somewhat near where a team is.  Sorry, foreign players.  Though it may be nice for some of them—say, Manu Ginobili, who loves his Argentina dearly—to be able to play for their own teams, I doubt few would ever give up the chance to play in the NBA for the chance to play in one’s own city or country.  That is what FIBA and the Olympics are for.  As for players born in areas where no real NBA team is, such as Kansas—well, every place has a team, pretty much, so that’s less of a consideration.  Except Alaska.  But then if you’re from Alaska you’d never even consider going home in the first place, because you don’t want to freeze to death.

If you value loyalty

Next, it probably has to be a player who values his roots and for which loyalty is a big part of how they play team basketball.  In this sense, it would make complete sense for LeBron to come back to Cleveland: he values loyalty perhaps above all things, and the way he does his duty on the court for whatever team he is on, rather than taking over, shows it.

The more self-centered players in the NBA then aren’t quite as homecomeable.  Can we really picture Kevin Love coming back to Portland?  Hardly.  He’s from Oswego anyway, which isn’t really part of Portland.  Hell, I’m doubtful whether it is even part of Oregon.  But besides that, he loves to go wherever the biggest action is, and he plays like it.  Chasing stats is exactly the opposite of what a homecomeable player would do.  Loyalty has little to do with his game.  Same with Rondo, strangely: he isn’t considering Sacramento, we know that (as much as he would absolutely destroy people on that team), but he also isn’t looking to go anywhere near Kentucky.  He doesn’t quite play selfish, but he definitely plays in a self-involved way.  And no one like that is really home-comeworthy.

If your game expresses a regional style or culture of basketball

You don’t always have to value loyalty to be able to “come home” as a basketball player.  It is enough, perhaps, if style of your play has some significant relation to your roots.

I could indeed see someone who played basketball in New York as a kid having something to his game which is tied to the location itself.  Take Lance Stephenson, for example.  There is, I think, something of a homecomeable to him.  If he came to play for Brooklyn, it would somehow make sense, in a way that someone who wasn’t from there would.  Similarly, it makes wonderful sense that Chicago has Derrick Rose, and that Rose probably would not ever leave the team.

There is one wrinkle to this idea, however.  Larry Bird no doubt was formed by the type of basketball culture in Indiana.  But could we ever really see Bird playing for the Pacers and not for Boston?  There seems to be a certain level of refinement, personalization, which takes you beyond the home-coming decision.  The talent of someone like KD and LeBron must, as thoroughly as it is individualized, still express something more about the locale.

If you have a personality that expresses where you come from

Could we see Kawhi Leonard as a Laker?  Hardly.  All that glitz doesn’t fit him.  Could we see Lillard as a Warrior?  Yes.  That’s a team that’s hard as nails and fun as hell, and in many ways very like Oakland.  Same thing with Jeremy Lin: he could play for the Warriors and represent too something of the sunny and freewheeling elements of the city right across the Bay, San Francisco.

If it doesn’t fit, though, better to let it go.  Joakim Noah?  He has personality, but it doesn’t say New York to me.  And letting it thrive outside of New York, has allowed it actually, to say Chicago.

If you don’t have a personality that makes the city feel awkward about the fact that you were born there

Dwight Howard is never going to play for the Hawks, in short.

And Dwayne Wade, you could say, has become someone so bizarrely un-Chicagoan you could only really see it making people feel weird when he drives around in his Ferrari with his sunglasses on in 22 below with the wind whipping off the lake.

If you are Canadian

Being homecomeable also has to do with the nature of the place you are from, too.  I think it is fair to say that if you are from Canada, then it makes you a homecomeable candidate for coming back to Toronto.  And this goes for anywhere in Canada, including Quebec.  Toronto isn’t just Toronto’s team, it’s Canada’s team.  At least until there’s more expansion.  And so long as that holds up, well, I could see Wiggins, Corey Joseph, Nic Stauskas, and Anthony Bennett having some sort of reason to end up there.  That’s not too far-fetched.

If you are from a run-down and depressed Midwestern city

Similarly, there are certain places where it just makes sense that you’d come back there.  Anyone from any post-industrial, decrepit Midwestern mid-market city qualifies as home-comeworthy.

Why?  Mostly because these places somehow embody the values of homeyness more than other places.  Plus, they are in immediate need of economic benefit, and the player can help return something to where he grew up.  I could see Corey Brewer, Lou Williams, or JJ Redick going back to Memphis.  We already nearly see Mike Conley on Indiana—and I certainly could see Gordon Hayward and Jeff Teague there, along with Mason Plumlee and, perhaps, Zach Randolph.  I could also see Wes Matthews going back to Wisconsin.  Caron Butler belongs back there this instant—though maybe Detroit is as close as the members of the Bucks really want him anymore.

And as for Detroit, I could see Jordan Crawford, Draymond Green, Kenyon Marton and Chris Kaman all contributing to something of the renewal of the city.  And not just by adding to civic pride.  They may add something to the mere willingness to survive and muddle through in dark times.  They could give some hope to the locals.  Kaman could also help shoot some of the wild animals reportedly running through the streets.

If you are from the South

The South doesn’t have as many NBA teams, and so there’s something right in wanting to go back and contribute to one if you’re near it.  Corey Brewer belongs on Memphis.  For some reason, KCP on Atlanta just sounds right.

And so does DeMarcus Cousins on New Orleans, doesn’t it?  It’s hard to call it home exactly, but it’s the closest thing to Mobile.  There’s something too about this idea that fits the player’s needs too: there is something in Cousins that seems rootless and restless, and in this case, he might find some support for his outbursts in the wild, excited culture of the region.

The real story here however is the Hornets, nee Bobcats.  The Hornets would become the South’s team.  Chris Paul, John Wall, Steph Curry, and Ray Allen (who was born in California but went to high school in South Carolina).  Go, now. You can’t have that many point guards, but every single one of those people needs to be on the Hornets.

If you are from the Bay Area/Central California

The Bay area and Central California is cosmopolitan, but also set in its identity.  It looks after its own, and its own are all sorts of types.  This is why it needs more people to come back home.  The Bay Area and Central California are some of the most accepting places in the US, and they need someone to accept.  We saw a little bit of it with Lin when he first played there.  But oh my, if Lillard ever came back home to the Warriors…

As for the Kings, Drew Gooden and Ryan Andersen both immediately need to get back home.

If you aren’t from Texas or Chicago

Sorry LaMarcus.  There’s just too much damned talent in that state, and too many NBA teams already that enjoy success.  If all Texas players returned home, the League would break.

It’s similar—even perhaps more the case—with Chicago, and the dominance of the team throughout the 90s doesn’t help.  Talent is better spread out than hoarded.

If you aren’t from LA or a location with a confused identity

Brooklyn has an identity that is not connected with its team.  In LA, there is also absolutely no sense of a unified place in the city to begin with, so no team can express it.  Having grown up there myself I can tell you: it’s like someone took a big handful of a bunch of buildings and palm trees and some scrubby mountains and sand and just chucked it over a 50 square mile stretch of earth next to the ocean.  Its internal logic is decipherable only to a grizzled madman I once saw gnawing on a manhole cover behind a bar in downtown Albuquerque, wearing a dog carcass for a hat and a necklace of human teeth, probably his own.  L.A. has very little identity, and both the Lakers and the Clippers are franchises that trade on glitz, glamor.  It is entirely proper that the players who most expresses them comes from Italy and grew up in Philly—two of the most un-LA type places you can get.

The same reason, to the farthest extent, goes to Phoenix.  This is the same reason, but taken to the farthest extent.  Phoenix not only has no identity as a place, the only thing it does express well is the heat itself.  No player actually comes from Phoenix.  Neither of these places is getting a player coming back to it as a “home,” quite simply because they aren’t homes to begin with.

If you would reboot a franchise

This is precisely why Indiana wanted so badly to acquire George Hill.  Reeling from the Malace at the Palace, the Pacers were looking to replace the team with “character guys” so that nothing like that would happen again.  Attendance also dropped massively, and so another idea to try and get people interested in the team was to find a home-town hero in Hill, then on the Spurs.  This is what lead to the Kawhi Leonard trade, which looks so significant for both franchises in retrospect.  It may have given the Spurs one of the best young small forwards in the game, but Indiana needed to bring someone home for them and create a different culture and team image.

The question is whether something like this would work with Minnesota, which needs a reboot more than any other team in the NBA.  It is possible to see Mike Miller, Kris Humphries, and Mike Muscala coming back to the team and generating some energy.  But the fanbase is so thoroughly maudlin and morose they seem like they’d need something younger to wake them up—though getting Wiggins, Bennett and the first-rounder for Love has sparked a bit more interest.  A big, big draft pick would be a wonderful thing.  And in this sense, “coming home” can’t really occur: you have to be somewhere else first in order to come home.

If coming to your team would connect the city to its history

Lance Stephenson needs to go to the Nets.  Now.  It would be perfect.  It would be a tribute to Brooklyn basketball.  And Melo, too, as bizarre as it would be to see him across the river. The team needs greater Brooklyn roots, to connect back to its basketball history, and these two players would do it. 

Hiring Kidd was a nice move, but it tied the team to its franchise history, and the results has left it suspended not unlike its mascot was over the court.  The team lacks any organicism—it seems to have little to no relation to the amazing culture of basketball outside it and much more to the best latte place in Prospect Heights.

A similar solution for Oklahoma City would be found in Blake Griffin.  And then there is Chris Paul coming back to the Hornets.  Paul has become such a big part of the Clippers that it would be hard to see him go, but it isn’t entirely implausible.  And it would bring the Hornets some success—success which it has contended for over a couple decades—especially in the 90s—but to no avail.  There is something calculating and fierce about Paul however that wouldn’t quite give the story the same warmth as a KD or a LeBron, perhaps.  But then again, Cliff is appealing, and maybe being back home and getting the franchise to make the city even more mindful of its successful past in basketball would bring more of that character back out.

If your city hasn’t won anything in a million years and you want to bring them a championship

It certainly does make you a homecomeable player if you have this particular motive.  No one is going to argue with that.  It is LeBron’s, of course.  But could others have the same motive?  How many people besides him could actually pull this off?

First, let’s look at the teams that would work.  They are ones that haven’t won anything at all, haven’t won much, or won their only trophies way back in the dark ages. 

We’d have the Nets, the Pacers the Cavs, the Jazz, The Suns, The Magic, all with zero championships.  Then, among teams with championships, there’s the The Wiz, The Hawks, The Blazers and the Sixers. Then there’s the Bucks and the Kings, and the Warriors who each have a clutch of trophies but not since the middle of the 20th century.  And then there’s the Knicks and Oklahoma City.

The Knicks, in some eyes, aren’t on the same list as the rest of these teams.  They are New York, they’ve had success in other sports and in so many other things, it is hard to think that if any person “came home” to the city, this would matter.  And does the longing, the desperate longing of for a third championship which has consumed fans since 1973, and nearly gave the whole city aneurysms in the early 90s, count the same way a total, utter lack of success does is Cleveland?  I personally think so.

Intensity here matters: the city would go insane if they had a real chance at a title, and if a resident of one of the boroughs came back to lead them to it—it might cause riots.  The promise that Melo could be this person drove the city crazy—that it hasn’t come to fruition is one of the saddest things about being a Knicks fan these days, and that’s saying something.   It is because intensity matters that the Wizards, for instance, is also on that list, really.  If the city didn’t care about it’s team, would it matter that much?

It is also why the Sixers are on the list too, though they won it in 83 and the city has had such success in baseball and other sports.  It is not just that 30 years have passed: despite the years of Iverson, Philly has been in a sorry state when it comes to basketball for quite a while, and the longing to watch good basketball is, among Philly fans, immense.  They are the basketball capital of the world: if one of their own came back to lead the team to a championship, it would seem significant.

This is slightly less so for Oklahoma City, though not much less.  Some people might not include them in this list because they simply have no history of championship contention in the first place: new markets can’t miss out on what they never had.  If Blake Griffin came back to Oklahoma and won the team a championship, they might be able to connect the professional team to the tradition of excellent basketball at the college level.  But that’s not the same thing.  The same applies to the Nets—though I think people would be more genuinely confused than excited for the team at this point: there is less of a longing there than for, say, the Knicks.  And that’s crucial.

We have the teams pretty much covered, then.  But of these teams, there are only so many players who, like LeBron, could actually pull off leading their city to a championship.  Terrence Jones certainly isn’t going to come back and lead the Blazers to a final and then some.

There seem to be only a few contenders.  Could we see Z-Bo coming back to the Pacers and somehow lead them to victory?  That might be a story with some warmth.  But Zach Randolph isn’t really a leader. And in general he has been around the league too much, played for too many different teams.  The thing about LeBron is that he made one move and then went back.  There’s something to be said for economy in the development of this storyline.

Could we see Kobe Bryant at the end of his career leaving.  Los Angeles to join the Sixers and win them another championship.  Hey—it could happen.  But it probably wouldn’t carry the same sort of home-town hero flavor: Kobe has lived most of his adult life in LA, now, and is such a part of that community it doesn’t quite seem like Philly is where he grew up.  Plus, he didn’t really grow up that long there in the first place.

If Lillard came back to Oakland, that would be something--though it would disappoint Blazers fans.  The problem is the Warriors aren’t going to be playing there for much longer, and they already have the success of the Raiders and the A’s in that area—though the former have never won anything in Oakland, and the A’s haven’t won a title since 89, which is seeming more and more like a long time ago.  The brute fact is that Oakland basketball hasn’t had much to distinguish itself, and the city hasn’t had much to distinguish itself, and even across the bay it would probably resonate.  It would be a little awkward.  But it would bring the city back to its history of success, raise it up, and go some ways to bringing it out of a funk.

We might wonder however whether this last motive truly is LeBron’s primary reason for coming back to Cleveland.  Are we sure it isn’t something else, like local ties, or simply the value he places on loyalty itself that makes him a homecoming player?  Certainly he belongs there, but he may belong there for other reasons perhaps, than this one.  The lack of a championship for the city however is so glaring and blatant, and would bring the city back to success, that the motive is just too good to pass up.  It is a brilliant script that LeBron has written himself back into, but there are other possible ones too, and other reasons for him to be in Cleveland, other ones that make for homecoming players.

Besides Lebron, KD too would fit this last criterion best, even over Lillard.  Washington has been in the dumps for so, so long, that coming back to the city would bring it something similar to what LeBron is doing.  We saw just how intense Wizards fans were longing for any chance at success in the playoffs last season: the freak-out that it caused was remarkable, involved the wild mood swings of a genuinely invested, demoralized city getting its first taste of hope in years.

And this, together with his fitting all of the other criteria shows you why he is next in line to go home, according to some people.  He is the most homecomeable player, period.  All of which means KD is in for a long couple years.  The speculation isn’t going to stop.  KD better just get used to it, and maybe some of the other players that are homecomeable as well.