NBA news: A busy week for the USAB, Sterling, the Bucks, the Kings, and the league as a whole

We’re in for some downtime, I thought.  I even said so last week.  With the end of the major trades of the summer, the NBA offseason would finally slow down, I reasoned.  I thought I was so smart.

I was wrong.  Yes, we’re not worked up into a frothing frenzy like we were with LeBron’s big move.  And the trade news is pretty much done.  But not all news comes out of that one place: the NBA is a vast and complex organism, and has many levels at which happenings, well, happen.

First, there is Paul George’s injury.  Since I’ve already addressed this in another piece, I won’t get into it deeply here.  There are, however, some practical details to note.  First, what the USAB team decides to do now is going to be crucial.  How are they going to deal with this blow to their roster?  How will they, at the same time, honor George?

It is not like there is a lack of talent at the spot.  But there is a big loss defensively.  KD could make up for it but that’s not what we want him ideally focused on: he needs to score.  That said, the team will be so good at scoring, that might not be an issue and KD can cover.  But playing George was definitely better for the team than not. Earlier in the game last night he made some great passes, great decisions.  And it is fitting in a way he went down on an excellent defensive play—if it had to happen, at least it did while he was doing what made him one of the very best in the league.

Obviously, the right way to honor him is win it all.  Doing something like keeping a roster spot open for him, would be a disservice to the talent out there.  At the same time, this will not be enough.  And even if there is a win, there is something dissatisfying about the whole thing.  The proper way to honor George is to value this tournament more than ever—almost more than the Olympics, in fact.

Next, this injury poses a huge problem for the Pacers.  Larry Bird said the doctor’s examinations left him “optimistic.”  But losing George for a year—which is what this looks like it will be—will be a a huge blow to the team.  The bookies moved their odds of a championship way back, from 8-1 to 15-1 to win the East.  This may be a bit drastic.  The East will be better, but it remains to be seen how better it will be.  Chicago was looking to be in a better position than Indiana, and so too the Cavs.  But not by much—assuming they got their act together and played up to their potential, unlike they did in their funk last year.  Now, however, can we really say they stack up against, say, Charlotte or the Raps?  It’s more of a question.

He was not only the Pacers’ best player—on offense and defense—he was also their most offensively powerful.  The Pacers had a horrible time scoring last year, and their offense in general was displeasing to watch.  George at times seemed to be their only contributor on offense.  It also means their defense will suffer horribly.  Defense is the most fragile instrument at a team’s disposal.  Getting it to work well takes a lot of time and precise coordination.  This might not be a blow it can survive.  Frank Vogel, in short, has his work cut out for him.  But hopefully he can use this as an opportunity to overhaul the team’s strategies, which after last year looked like they may be in need of a reboot and serious rethinking anyway.

Besides George and the Pacers, the biggest news—perhaps even bigger, really—is that of the Donald Sterling case.  This took up most of last week, but nothing quite happened.  Mostly, it was just a bunch of courtroom farce, with Sterling calling bogus witnesses and raging at people.  Monday, however, changed this.  Shelly Sterling won the case against him.  She can sell the team.  In fact, she can sell it now.

This was the main nub of the case: they wanted to make sure the team could be sold even throughout the appeals process which Donald would bring if the Judge found it fine to go ahead with the sale.  Normally, an appeal would put a stay on such sales, but in cases where the value of the asset would be lost, there can be made an exception.  The reasoning, which the Judge agreed with, was that the $2 billion offer of Steve Ballmer may not be matched, and that trying to sell it on the open market (rather than by bidding for it blindly, as happened) would surely make the team not fetch such a hefty price.

It is a huge blow for Donald, though rightly no one gives a damn.  Judge Levanas not only rules in favor of everything that Shelly wanted, he also reprimanded Donald for the type of testimony he used, and in general the shoddy nature and backwards reasoning of his various arguments.  He tried to say that Shelly was up to something sinister in trying to remove the team from him, and the Judge simply dismissed the notion, mockingly saying that he found it hard to believe Shelly was up to some “secret plan.”  He also tore into their attempt to use Dean Bonham and his absolutely uneducated guess about how much the team would sell for as expert opinion.  It only discredited his fight the more.

Then, there is other administrative news.  The Bucks are slowly flushing out all the bad from their system.  They recently fired their Chief Financial Officer, and this week replaced him with Patrick McDonough, longtime CFO to the Knicks.  They also added Bob Cook, executive at HNTB, the Midwest based engineering company, who will bring his expertise to the issue most pressing to the Bucks now: the construction of a new stadium.  It is yet another promising move signaling the GM work of John Hammond is going well, and the ownership of Wesley Edens and Marc Lasry is a good thing.

Next, the Kings put on their purple hardhats.  They started work on their downtown site for their new arena yesterday.  Cones, fences, signage aplenty.  This is absolutely great news.   The real sledgehammer thwacking should start next week.  The arena itself is planned to be open in 2017.  And not a day too soon—this should have happened about five years ago.

SacTown Royalty is going to keep us updated with whatever stories develop.  But the amazing thing now is simply that it is getting done, finally, finally.  The collective relief in the city is nearly audible.  Now all that needs to happen is the team has to get its act together.  All in all, though, a great and exciting day for Sacramento.

Finally, there is news floating around about expansion teams.  Seattle is long due to get their team back, and people who are into the investment have dug up a lot of indications that the NBA is leaning towards doing so.  There are also rumors that the NBA may consider putting a team in Louisville, and reviving the old bizarre legendary Kentucky Colonels of the ABA.

Though there isn’t any official talk of this sort of move net by anyone in the NBA, the general sense among supporters is that the NBA will be dealing with the Donald Sterling affair and the TV deal for the foreseeable future, and once that is dealt with, they will immediately go after expansion teams.  That’s discouraging in one sense, very encouraging in others.

It would be somewhat of a blow for Kansas if Louisville ends up getting a team first—they have that new Sprint Center downtown, which has been ready and waiting for a few years now, and which would be a wonderful place to play a basketball game.  But they may soon also get the NHL to pull off a deal there, so at least they may be entertained in the meantime.

All in all a pretty busy week.  The next one will be busy too, with the Hall of Fame ceremonies kicked into high gear this year because of David Stern.  He will be entering the rather confused and strange pantheon of players in the HoF, and it will be yet another time to look at his legacy.  With so much going on in the league right now on the business side, it is an opportunity to appreciate just how successful he made the league.  It is also clear he may have stayed on a little too long, and created a few problems and a few ways of doing things from which the league still has to wrest itself away.  It should be great entertainment, certainly.

Morning Review, May 23 2014: V. Stiviano, Sterling, Tobias Fünke, and Cuban

Here is your morning review of NBA writing.  I changed it from "roundup" to "review" because, well, "review" is the title of the blog, and that seemed more fitting.  So that's done, you needed to know that, you really did.

Today is the morning where basically we all find out what actually happened in the Donald Sterling situation, and understand more about the fate of the team.

First, a little before 7 am TMZ reported what has since been verified by ESPN writers, namely that Sterling handed over control of the Clippers to Shelley Sterling, who will sell the team.  How this will go about isn't quite clear.  Let's hope Bill Gates or something gets in a fight with Paul Allen over who should get the check, then vows to eviscerate him in every NBA season to follow, buys the team, and brings the team to Seattle.  I love Paul Allen, and (like a good Portland citizen) am competitive with everything Seattle (boo Sounders), but I don't hate them.  And the Blazers can beat the Clippers, as we saw this season.  Bring it on.  The team will reportedly sell for something near $2 billion, or thereabouts.

Not even a half hour after that--in breakfast time, that's a cup of coffee, some eggs, toast and OJ--the LA Times published a piece by James Rainey that digests in detail the court documents in the case between Sterling and the NBA.  The documents basically relate all the details of what actually happened: how the tapes were produced, what motivated their distribution, what happened when Clippers staff were informed of their existence, etc.  People are still sifting through it, trying to figure out their reaction to it all.  Satchel Price over at SBNation has a digest of the digest with a few takeaways, in case you don't want to look through the long email.  But here's a quick five sentence summary of the beginnings of it all, as concisely as I can put it:

Basically, Shelley Sterling decided finally to clarify her relationship with Donald, to reckon up her assets, and so began forcing Stiviano to account for her mooching: that is, she took her to court and kicked her out of the house Donald got her.  When Donald began to try and shut her out too, she grew angry, said in a text message "LET THE GAMES BEGAN" (which is genuinely hilarious), and shared among her girlfriends the recordings, which--according to her--she continually made in a sort of Tobias Fünke inspired attempt to show Sterling "how poorly he came across at times."  One of the girlfriends (Stiviano says) leaked them to TMZ, and Stiviano contacted the Clippers with the recording to tell them what would happen.  The Clippers employee who received the message contacted the team president Andy Roeser, and Roeser told the employee to delete the recording.

What followed is important, because it details how the NBA responded.  But it isn't quite as clear as the first part. TMZ contacted the Clippers on April 23.  Roeser was pressed by an employee to contact the NBA about the tapes, but told him not to do so.  Later that night, he called Adam Silver. It seems that Sterling began to lie to the league about what happened, as they began to investigate.  It seems that Silver was informed of the recordings, talked to Sterling, and the proper course of action came to him particularly after he found Sterling unrepentant about what he expressed.  After the ban, Sterling approached Stiviano and told her to lie to the league about what happened.

It's Silver's reaction that is really important: it again stresses how the course of action he decided upon issues not so much from the utterance of the views so much as how Sterling holds the views himself.  This is an important distinction, though one especially difficult to make in this situation.  It's clear the recordings were obtained illegally, and with an intent to blackmail, and if Stiviano does not face some kind of consequence for doing what she did, that would be an injustice.  At the same time, Rainey recalling the original title of the TMZ posting reminded us what was really important about them: "L.A. Clippers Owner to GF: Don't Bring Black People to My Games ...Including Magic Johnson."

What is important--and I don't think the league really has made this clear, or would have any incentive to make this clear--is that the opinions expressed were the opinions of an owner of a basketball team about who should and should not be allowed to attend his games. They are vile beliefs to come from the mouth of an owner, indeed, but what is particularly bad, and what gives the NBA all the right in the world to act upon them--where it may be more of a question where they just opinions in general--is that the link to how they can translate into the owner's policy and exercise of power as an owner is entirely evident.  These are not just opinions that happen to be held by an owner of a sports team in a league that is predominantly, crucially black--as if what were bad about them were merely the fact that these two things coincide.  This is not what people try to express in saying that they are inherently vile beliefs.  What they mean is that they are remarks that indicate a willingness to use power in a way that it should not be used: they are, in effect, policy, though they have not perhaps had the clearest consequences.  We may not be able to point to instances of discriminatory use, but we can point to a thousand things all expressed in that statement that would make us reconsider whether our threshold for what constitutes use is inordinately high.  The statement makes apparent the existence of a coercive power an owner has put to work to keep a person and a certain people from his games--and that power simply has no place in the league.

In other words, no owner of an NBA team should be unaware of racial exploitation, and the hurt and the harm that voicing certain words, and sustaining within oneself certain beliefs and prejudices, can have. But what this means is that racism is not an abstract thing: it is an absolutely concrete network of relations of power.  The league clearly hasn't done anything about Sterling before because while he did racist things, he didn't say them.  It should have been exactly the opposite way around: whether or not he says things, if what he does displays an actual tendency to use power to exploit others--even in other areas of business (such as housing)--it should absolutely constitute grounds for an ouster.  Racist beliefs and ideologies are able to be condemned; racist practices are able to be changed or done away with.

This is something that Zach Lowe and Kevin Arnovitz essentialy talk about in Lowe's podcast from yesterday, which is, as usual, great listening.  Arnovitz goes through current changes in the organization and the power that now Doc Rivers is wielding, with the owner gone.  Everything tends to make more and more clear--clearer than we already know--just the toll a particular owner's practices can make on an organization, and how clearly the strange conception of power that Sterling had translated exactly into practices that held the Clippers back for so long.  Lowe also goes off on Aaron Sorkin, which I like, because I also absolutely can't stand Aaron Sorkin and his complacent preachy distractions from actual life, actual politics, actual problems.  That too even seems to bear on the discussion of Sterling, and the history of the league's tolerance of his mismanagement and bigotry: for too long people in the business seemed to believe politics is a matter of statements, when it is a matter of actions and consequences and effects.

This also all has a bearing on Mark Cuban's strange statement on bigotry, which sort of flails around at several of these things and doesn't quite make much sense in the end--a typically Cuban gesture.  Cuban's main message seems so insufficient because it is not about prejudice and bigotry at all but about complicity.  That is, it is so concerned with some inner journey involving reconciling oneself with one's prejudices, rather than dealing with what those prejudices do in the world.  It does not talk at all about effects, about results--only about some quest to further and further refine one's beliefs to some form of perfection, as if being ethical and moral for that matter were some kind of state of being one could eventually inhabit, rather than a form of responsiveness and awareness that is only relevant in the context it is used for. As if dealing with one's prejudices were like working out and trying eventually to make weight.  To many people this seems to minimize what prejudices are: they are not beliefs, or opinions, and referring to them as such (as we are wont to do in our effort just to talk about them and to give some indication of how they involve us) underscores how everyone would probably benefit from a little consequentialism about the issue: we may all have opinions, but prejudices are not things we all have, unlike what Cuban would say, because quite simply they issue not from our "subscribing" or "unsubscribing" to certain ideologies, but from the way we exercise our will and our power to produce different outcomes in the world.  That said, Cuban also does something interesting and perhaps somewhat important in acknowledging the post-Politically-Correct-culture of thought control: but fundamentally these are not the problems that lead to the Donald Sterling situation.  It isn't our sensitivity, merely, that demands his ouster.  It is the fact that, materially, the man exercises power the wrong way. And in the end, Cuban's penultimate statements about what he does when he does encounter bigotry in organizations he controls, acknowledges the complexities of power relations involved in owning corporate entities while at the same time suggesting ways to deal with something deeper, much more materially malicious, which he himself isn't complicit in--because despite what he might say, while he has opinions, he isn't a bigot or a racist, doesn't have those types of prejudices, since he doesn't exercise his power in that way.  Tim Cato at SBNation links to the video and has a good guide to the coverage of it all, and rightly suggests that the responses which generally call him racist, that say call him out and say acknowledging complicity isn't escaping it, are perhaps going down the wrong path.  The right way to respond to this is to simply reply that Mark Cuban isn't as prejudiced as he'd like to think he is, and that therefore racism and bigotry is a much bigger and more concrete problem than he might find it easy to merely make statements about.

Well, that's the morning review for you.  A bit too much philosophizing and commentating, perhaps--I'll be sure to keep it less intense in the future.  But these things touch on deep issues, and it's good to work through them.  More news coming up later today!