One of the easiest ways to con someone is to appeal to their vanity. A good confidence man seems like they’re more intelligent, that they understand more about the system than anyone else, and makes the mark believe in what they’re selling. They can separate the mark from everyone else on account of their specialized insight, then separate them from their money.
The three-way trade that sent Rudy Gay to Toronto at first
seemed relatively bad for Memphis, in that it seemed to be going the opposite
direction of their trade just the previous week with the Cleveland Cavaliers.
In that deal, they traded future first round pick for salary cap space to keep
their franchise players, but in the next they traded a large component of their
current team for more salary cap space and a second round pick. It isn’t hard
to see through the press coverage of the trade to see just what kind of con the
new Memphis ownership is pulling on their fans. It isn’t a new trick – Phoenix’s
ownership and management pulled it for years, sinking their once-exciting team.
Sacramento has done it too. They’re using our own vanity to sell us the future as a real thing.
"We are excited to add three players who bring with
them a tremendous amount of value to our team and have achieved incredible
success on the pro, college and Olympic levels," general manager Chris
Wallace remarked in a Grizzlies press conference, under the glowing lights of earnest
speech, codifying his communication to hide the team’s real long-term goals.
Translating that, the figurehead told the press, “Since
modern technology has forced us to acknowledge that you know as much as we do
in terms of salary justifications and statistical analytics, anybody can see
how valuable flexibility is, and how transparent this trade is. We all know Gay
is really paid a lot of money, has limited future potential, whereas a cheaper Ed
Davis has some potential, and now we have all this elasticity with the salary
cap. You know, and are silent.”
Thanks to the new sports media, fans are now also buying this narrative, and accepting the meta-game of “inside basketball” as part of the story.
Consider how long the Phoenix Suns did it, trading down picks
and good players to stay “flexible,” to put the pieces around Steve Nash to
win, sending star players all over the league. Eventually, they dumped Nash
himself for the “flexibility” to rebuild. No one in the Phoenix management
actually thought Michael Beasley is going to turn it around, but they just know
how much his salary is worth, and can smile.
In this case, people ignorant of the increasingly stingy
purses of NBA owners may be right in rejecting what’s presented in front of
them. The con of “quality/value” can only work for so long. Has anybody ever
seen a highlight reel demonstrating salary cap space? A retired jersey hanging
in the rafters for a season having avoided luxury tax? Does anybody other than
Daryl Morey and his acolytes want to see underpaid players more than people
worthy of being stars?
Morey’s game, and this con, is part of the problem in that his
ilk has convinced many, many intelligent people that financial value actually
matters much in something where it’s less than primary: watchable competition.
Smart people don’t look at All Star votes or commercial endorsements, they find
it value in offensive win shares, points per 100 possessions, and true
rebounding possession. Management and ownership then uses that information to
exploit whoever fits best financially.
While the best teams can find contributions from well-paid
role players like Jason Terry or Mario Chalmers, or even good minutes off late draft
round picks like Norris Cole, it is the expected well-paid stars, LeBron or
Dirk Nowitzki or Derrick Rose, that matter the most.
Value is great in all kinds of things, but in pure
competition, it does not matter much at all. We award the presidency to whoever
gets the most Electoral College votes, not who got the most voters per dollar. Analytics
work for forecasting an election, but aren’t quite there for monetizing the
voters themselves. If you’re going to drive it every day, a Corvette is a
better value sports car than a Bugatti Veyron, but that same Bugatti is still
faster on the track. In basketball, an overpaid Josh Smith is going to put more
basketballs through a hoop than an underpaid Jeff Green [editor’s note: Jeff
Green will never be underpaid].
Basketball isn’t about saving their ownership money, it remains
a sport about winning. This trade does not help the Grizzlies win, short-term
or long-term. They simply dumped salary and said they gained “value” or “flexibility.”
Over the course of two trades, they went from having a first round pick to a
second round pick and from having a legitimate starter and a bench to an aging
Piston and a “value” backup for the only positions they have filled with
franchise players.
What other business could tell their customers that they’re
making their current product worse for the purpose of keeping flexibility to
maybe make a better product in the future? Which other sports’ owners could get
away with telling the fans that even if the team is worse, to root for them
because the ownership is making more money? This is a disappointing way of doing business, for the casual fans, and a con to anybody paying attention.
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