September Round Up!
Everything from Undrafted this month....
This week, over at his own Substack, Freddie deBoer has a piece on the NBA’s “player employment era.” That’s a big subject, and his overall conclusion — that trade demands should be a formalized part of NBA contracts, with rules about them negotiated in the CBA — is an interesting one, but I wanted to focus on a specific claim he made in his piece, that trade requests inherently favor certain cities. As he writes, “The NBA already has a profound haves and have-nots problem. Some franchises are considered intrinsically more attractive because of weather, taxes, and fun.”
I see claims like this all the time. Bomani Jones has referred to the NBA having “a real estate problem,” because some franchises are in cities where no star wants to play.
But is there any real evidence of this? The occasion for this piece was this week’s Damian Lillard trade, but he was traded to…. Milwaukee. It’s true that he WANTED to go to Miami, but he didn’t end up getting that, and it seems he will play for the Bucks, and likely make them the favorite to win the East. It seems strange to write about the plight of NBA small markets when the best team in the East is Milwaukee and the reigning NBA champions hail from Denver.
More to the point, I’m just not sure the recent history of trade demands is a history of dominance for “desirable” cities like New York, LA, and Miami. Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving each just forced their way OUT of Brooklyn (to, of all places, Phoenix and Dallas respectively). James Harden demanded trades from both Brooklyn AND Houston (and is doing so now with Philadelphia).
It seems like the main reason players demand to be traded is because of how they fit in with the team, not the city itself. Indeed, Lillard’s trade demands were not because he didn’t like Portland — he was upset about the direction of the franchise, which traded away C.J. McCollum and drafted another point guard, Scoot Henderson, in this year’s draft. Even when Anthony Davis forced his way to the Lakers a few years ago, it was largely because the Pelicans stunk and were once again “rebuilding.”
I have ambivalent feelings about the “player empowerment” era, and will eventually write something in-depth about it, but for now I just don’t see any evidence for this idea that some cities just can’t field competitive NBA teams. Seems like a way to let bad owners off the hook…
Anyway, here’s everything from Undrafted this month (starting, of course, with A-Rod):
Three more A-Rod episodes, which were all, in one way or another, about steroids, the Steroid Era, and baseball’s reaction to steroids.
Speaking of steroids…
…these two pieces were a more in-depth defense of my skepticism that steroids caused the home run surge of the 1990s.
In non-steroid news:
Football is back! How should socialists react?
A fun piece about a fun player…