Don't Read This if You Own an NBA Team
Some teams get all the luck... does it matter?
I have a question for you:
What causes sustained ineptitude in the NBA?
There are no wrong answers.
Wow, you picked the one wrong answer... jk, thanks for voting. :)
Here’s what I think: negligent and disinterested ownership / upper management keeps teams bad. More than bad luck, more than a small market, more than lack of opportunities (i.e. free agency and trades), and more than the players themselves. A front office that simply waits for success will be waiting forever, and an owner convinced they have all the answers is almost surely going to end in… something like this.
Granted, I think all of these options play a part in most inept franchises. But at a foundational level, an ownership group that is afraid to (this is a phrase I’ll use throughout the piece) do shit, is almost always the culprit for a team’s on-court product failing time and time and time and time again.
This isn’t a novel take— as we speak, in the distance, I can hear fans of about 15 NBA teams calling for their owner to sell, sell, sell. But I want to examine how a few different teams have lifted themselves out of the NBA’s gutters, how a few more have stayed down there for so long, and why I think taking action (“doing shit”) is almost always a better path to high-level success than “over-patience” even if over-action causes things to go sideways. (Bulls fans, I pray for you.)
To do all that, we must first travel back in time.
ALL ABOARD THE BROKEN PRESS TIME MACHINE
There’s room for all, come along now. Get comfortable. Seatbelts on.
Off we go!
We’re stopping somewhere very exciting… yes, coming up on it now. Here we are…
Houston, Texas! On March 1st, 2023!
We’ll go see dinosaurs or pharaohs after this, please just be patient for two seconds. Christ.
Okay, we’re in Houston. Toyota Center, to be exact, where the Rockets just lost. Again. That’s 11 in a row. They’re 13-49. Last season, they went 20-62. The year prior? 17-55.
This team is young, but the roster still doesn’t rouse much excitement in fans— Jalen Green is inefficient, Jabari Smith Jr’s best skill was supposed to be his shooting but he can’t really shoot, Alperen Sengun is a talented center but has serious defensive limitations, Tari Eason is a versatile defender but is clearly better suited as a role player on a good team.
Also, less than two months ago, John Wall went on Theo Pinson's podcast and lambasted the Rockets organization (and Justin Patton specifically, for some reason) for overtly tanking.
He also, apparently, told Rockets guards Jalen Green and Kevin Porter Jr that:
“The shit y’all getting away with over here… if you to any other teams, you’d be out the fucking league”
I don’t exactly know what that means, but it’s strangely prescient in retrospect.
Overall, this is pretty bleak! Houston’s record is bad, vibes are bad, culture (whatever that means anymore) is bad and its ownership is donating millions of dollars to Greg Abbott.
This is the gutter. This is the very bottom for an NBA team.
Okay, everyone hop back in the time machine. We’re traveling back to present day.
Fine, dinosaurs first.
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Now we’re back!
Today is December 6th, 2023. Let’s peruse the NBA standings. Based off what we saw about 9 months ago, things in Houston are probably still pretty ba—
Wait, that’s not awful, actually. The Rockets are 0-8 on the road somehow, but own a positive point differential and appear to be right in the mix for a playoff spot.
What happened? Let’s look at the team stats:
Oh shit, Alperen Sengun got really really good.
Jabari Smith Jr remembered how to shoot!
Jalen Green is still kinda inefficient but he’s still contributing!
Tari Eason might be on track to becoming an elite defender.
Ownership is still giving money to Greg Abbott… can’t win them all.
How did Houston get here, though? How has Houston become, at the very least, a respectable franchise once again? Perhaps most importantly, how did they reach respectability with a lot of the same players who were part of the basement-dwelling team?
By being proactive. By doing shit.
Houston hired a winning coach in Ime Udoka, then signed Fred VanVleet and Dillon Brooks to bring stability on both sides of the court. Did it overpay for both players? Yes. Does that matter? Not even a little bit. Because both guys bring traits that make the lives of Sengun, Green, Eason and Smith considerably easier— specifically FVV, who can actually run a damn offense, a trait foreign to Houston Rockets players for the past five years.
These improvements weren’t gifted to Houston; there was no luck involved. The franchise made a conscious effort to clear its financial books to afford FVV and Dillon Brooks. It was aggressive in its pursuit of a coach who has won before (and who maybe shouldn’t be in the NBA at all? but that’s a stack for another day) and now the entire future outlook of this team has shifted.
The Rockets took action and showed that opportunities are always available, but those opportunities are created by the franchise itself. Waiting around for an opportunity will not actually yield any opportunities.
Shit, I sound like a real capitalist right now. That’s never good. But you know what I mean.
Back in the time machine, folks.
Don’t worry, we’re going somewhere dope this time. Seatbelts on, please. Off we go!
I can see our destination now. Arriving in 3…2…1…
Welcome to Oklahoma City!
Why do you look like that?
It’s April 2022. The OKC Thunder just finished the season with a record of 24-58— that’s a winning percentage of .293, a decrease from the 20-21 season. Shai Gilgeous-Alexander just posted a career-high 24.5 points per game and might have the makings of a superstar, but rumblings about his future in OKC have already begun. Whether that’s fair or not after just two rebuilding seasons is a fair question to ask. Still, this team needs to show improvement quickly.
Ok, ok, everybody squeeze back in. To current day we go!
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We’re back. I’ll be honest with you: all this time travel might be excessive. I really could have just told you all this without actually taking you to Texas or Oklahoma.
Anyway… a few years ago, around the time we just traveled back to, I thought Sam Presti was a fraud. I thought he was scared of making any real decisions as a General Manager so he just traded everyone for future draft picks that he’d keep packaging for more future draft picks that would never actually turn into players. I thought OKC was in a spiral because its owner was giving the keys to a man obsessed with the hypothetical nature of draft picks.
I’ve done a full 180. Because shortly after that day we traveled back to, Presti picked Chet Holmgren and Jalen Williams in the 2022 Draft— two guys who might be the franchise’s second-and-third most important players for the next decade.
Did OKC get lucky by earning the second pick? Yep— they also traded an All-NBA talent in Paul George to the Clippers for SGA to even get the pick that turned into Jalen Williams. That’s doing shit.
That’s also, simply put, drafting well. Negligent ownership includes drafting poorly. A good scouting department is usually a pretty good sign of… well, whatever the opposite of negligence is.
For the record, Presti is still obsessed with draft picks. Look at this! This is just the next three seasons! The list keeps going!
The Detroit Pistons lose a lot of basketball games.
Actually, they almost exclusively lose basketball games. Occasionally they mix in a win for funzies, but mostly… they lose.
Here are Detroit’s win totals each season since 2019: 20, 20, 23, 17. Pretty bad. This year, they’re worse. They might not reach 15 wins, currently own a record of 2-18, and rank 29th in net rating—buoyed from dead last only by San Antonio.
If Detroit keeps losing like this, they might approach “worst season of all time” territory (I don’t think they’re quite that bad) a dubious record currently held by the 2011-12 Charlotte Bobcats who went 7-59 in a lottery-shortened season. I watched every game. It changed me. For the worse.
Anyway, this year’s Pistons might give Charlotte a run for its money... and at least that Bobcats team had a franchise cornerstone in Byron Mullens they could cling to for hope. Why are you laughing?
Detroit’s luck has been fine: it received the first overall pick in 2021.
The opportunities have been there, too— Detroit could have picked Tyrese Haliburton or Tyrese Maxey in 2020, and it could have picked Shaedon Sharpe or Jalen Williams just last season, instead picking Killian Hayes and Jaden Ivey.
And is the market all that undesirable? People have lots to say about Detroit (a lot of it rooted in racism just like every… other… city… they talk about) but it’s a team and a town with real basketball history that I still think players would be proud to represent.
So… what’s the problem?
Well, I’ll say this much: Detroit was really damn good from 2001 to 2009, and have been perhaps the worst franchise in the NBA since then.
Oh, Tom Gores bought the Pistons in 2011? Huh.
What has this franchise been doing since 2011? Well… they’re not “doing shit,” that’s for sure.
Winning in the NBA is hard, in part because building a good product requires the people at the top to care. When it goes right, that caring usually involves getting the fuck out of the way and letting people who know about basketball… run the basketball team.
This is why I believe owners of successful teams deserve minimal credit and owners of bad teams deserve a lot of blame.
That’s not just because I refuse to give billionaires credit for anything. Although I do.
Seriously though, you want praise for writing a big check, hiring some smart people, then getting out of the way? Okay, dude.
There’s not a singular, tried and true way to build a competent NBA franchise, but there might be one way to build a loser. It starts when the folks at the very top can’t be bothered to care—if they are finally moved enough by the peasant’s pleas to improve the franchise, think the only way out of this mess is by activating their genius billionaire brain and solving it themselves. I’m ready for publicly owned NBA teams.
Thanks for reading! Go do some volunteering this week.
As always: Free Palestine, fuck 12, and power to the workers.
Talk soon.