Tainted Love

I love the NBA. Unabashedly, wholeheartedly, and unconditionally. But you may have noticed that not a peep has been uttered here at Arena Apothecary about its upcoming resumption. When news came down the pipeline that we were going to have an NBA season after all, two words stopped me from an exuberant hallelujah rant in this space: "in principle." As in, "the NBA Players Association and the owners have agreed to the new CBA in principle."

I wasn't going to put anything up until every last detail had been hashed out and ratified, and the ink from the signatures of all parties concerned was nice and dry. I was paranoid that some seemingly mundane or insignificant bargaining point was going to derail the whole thing, and I didn't want to spike the ball on the 2-yard line instead of in the endzone, so to speak.

Yesterday, with the finalized agreement due to be signed, I started planning out a massive "woohoo lookit the basketball!" column. I was all cued up and ready to roll out a joyful posting celebrating the madcap time-compressed free agency period, the positively delightful slate of opening games on Christmas day, some predictions about the upcoming season, some grousing about my beloved Hawks signing Tracy friggin' McGrady ... and a few paragraphs about that eminent blockbuster three-team trade that was sending Chris Paul to the Lakers. Now, my first NBA post of the new season is one fueled by outrage and disgust. Because, of course, that trade did not happen. It was agreed upon in principle, but it got shot to hell because some of the owners who collectively control the New Orleans Hornets as well as their own franchises pitched a fit over the deal.

To a degree, I understand those owners' sentiments. They just spent the past five months slugging things out with the players partly because the recent rash of player-engineered "superteam" amalgamations has dealt a fairly severe blow to the NBA's already tenuous grasp on parity. The new CBA was supposed to alleviate at least some of the problems for the small market teams, and here, mere minutes after its ratification, was yet another star player abandoning a smaller, weaker franchise to go play with Kobe Bryant on one of the richest teams in the league.

It makes perfect sense that this would generate some frustration. Frustration that was expressed with scathing vehemence by (surprise!) Dan Gilbert. Captain Comic Sans dumped a boatload of vitriol into the email in boxes of the other owners, who then opened fire on David Stern. Since the league owns the Hornets, it is technically within the rules for them to veto the trade, but the implications are disturbing at best and nefarious at worst.

The list of who got hosed here:

A. Dell Demps. The Hornets' GM spent a great deal of time and effort getting the machinations of this trade sussed out, the goal being to maximize the returns of dealing CP3 instead of losing him for nothing in free agency next year. Now, he has to wonder if he has any authority to actually run his team at all.

B. The Hornets and Rockets. As I just noted, NOLA is going to lose Chris Paul one way or another, and no later than free agency this summer. At least this way they were getting some very quality pieces in return. Now? They have to hope they can manufacture another trade that's somewhere close to beneficial. Houston painstakingly set themselves up for this situation, and would have gotten a premier asset in Pau Gasol while also clearing a good chunk of cap space to play with. Now all that careful planning is meaningless and they have to mollify the guys they were discarding.

C. The Lakers (ish). Lamar Odom is distraught and Pau Gasol probably will have to be appeased in some way, so they likely lost some locker room cohesiveness, but I'm not sure they were going to be improved by this deal. They would have lost their frontcourt depth and placed the immediate future of the franchise on Kobe, Paul, and Andrew Bynum. That's three stars with four or five bad wheels between them. Asking those limbs to all remain healthy during the brutally compressed 2012 season would be a gamble, and if it had gone south it would have been a disaster. Then again, if it had worked, that would have been a phenomenal team to watch.

D. Chris Paul, whom the league has chosen to make an example of, apparently. "You can't force your way to a big market and create another superteam! How dare you! Don't you understand why you were locked out? We will not stand for this!"

E. The owners. At least, the owners who complained about the trade. They hosed themselves with this, and they're too myopic to even realize it. They think they "won" in this scenario because they bitched enough that Stern stepped in. They think they made some sort of grand point. The backlash is coming. It's coming from the players. It's coming from the owners who would like to conduct their business without interference, thank you. And above everything else, it's coming from the fans.

If the danger of the lockout was losing the goodwill and buzz the league built with casual/new fans last season, the danger here is how the diehards are going to react. You think the Donaghy scandal was bad? That was one isolated guy (so far as we know). This was the league itself manipulating things in a misguided attempt to "protect" something it never really had. Speaking for myself and most NBA junkies I know, my forbearance with the owners was worn paper thin during the lockout. This despicable stunt eroded what was left. It's time for the pitchforks and torches.

What the small market owners don't seem to grasp is that they can only exist in the light of their big brothers. The NBA runs on the historical gravitas of the Lakers, Celtics, and Knicks, and on the condensed star power of Miami. Without the juggernauts, things become far less compelling, less people are in the stands, less people are watching on TV, and everyone is worse off. Parity, in a pure form, would be horrible for professional basketball.

And speaking of people who hosed themselves ...

F. The Commish. For years, David Stern could do no wrong. Under his watch, the league has generally flourished. He was ahead of the curve on the internet/social media revolution, innovative in growing basketball's global brand, and by all accounts ran a tight and well-steered ship. Even when the Donaghy scandal exploded in his lap, Stern handled the situation with swift and unerring authority. No one dared to cross or defy him. Even if seventy percent of the stories about his legendarily fearsome tirades were apocryphal, and there's no reason to think that they are, the remaining thirty percent would be sufficient evidence of how forcefully he ruled the league. Until recently.

One of the underlying themes that the lockout brought into stark relief was the revelation that Stern's iron fist is rusted through. The owners want more, more, more, and if Stern can't give it to them, they're not going to listen to him anymore. Three years ago, if owners had carped about a trade like they did Thursday night, Stern would have told them to cowboy up and deal with it. Now he's bending pathetically to their will and mumbling hollow platitudes about "basketball reasons" to the media.

Which exactly zero sane people believe to be even partly truthful. The Hornets were going to make out like bandits in this deal, to the extent that you can while losing a superstar player. For the league to claim that they squelched the trade to protect New Orleans' best interests is an outright travesty.

We know what happened, David. After you preached the gospel of fairness and parity throughout the lockout, a situation materialized that, at least in the eyes of certain owners, invalidated everything you said. The bill of goods you sold them was bunk, they broke out the extra-strength venom, and you caved. Pretending otherwise is insulting to our intelligence, offensive to our sensibilities, and toxic to your legacy.

This whole thing is an unmitigated disaster. We just got the game we love back, and its ostensible caretaker has defiled it in one of the most fundamental ways imaginable. Shame on David Stern. Shame on the owners who railroaded him. Shame on anybody who isn't outraged by the situation. When Bryant Gumble made his now semi-infamous plantation analogy, I thought he was crazy. You can't possibly compare that horrible time in American history with a lucrative professional sport, right? It's in poor taste at best and truly awful at worst. And yet, the man had a point.

If the league doesn't rescind the veto and allow that trade to go through, we may as well re-lock the NBA out. The last five months were about ensuring that the new CBA was a tenable paradigm for everyone involved. If the new "business as usual" means owners can arbitrarily stand in the way of, well, usual business, what the hell was the point?