This NBA trading season made me excited, yet fearful. Every year, I cringe at the “Great trade! Who'd we get!” mentality of sports talk radio and webboards. This seems especially true in the NBA, where boom-bust cycles for teams are shorter than in the NFL and MLB, making for impatient fan bases. However, in light the realities of the NBA salary and talent development structures, I put forward an example of wheeling-and-dealing that required several years to marinate and come up to temperature.
The NBA’s closed system
As I mentioned, team building and management is a challenge in the NBA. Team brass are presented with a complicated payroll structure, involving salary floors, a “soft” salary cap, and a harder, but still malleable luxury tax. If this wasn’t enough, all of these flourishes of accounting finesse were designed in a much more prosperous era, when Stern & Co. only knew one direction for team revenues and player salary inflation. Add in grandfathered salaries from superstars of previous collective bargaining agreements, like those of Kevin Garnett and Shaquille O’Neal, and you have a superstar elite eligible for wages equal to 30-40% of a team’s total cap space, and not a penny less.
What you end up with is an largely incoherent system unable to properly value players that hit the open market, making trades less about achieving present equity than future flexibility. Clever GMs have taken huge PR hits for trading massive talents (with equally massive contracts) for players stashed abroad, rookies and draft picks. The de-facto swap of Pau Gasol for Marc Gasol and Zach Randolph has garnered significant attention as an example is this “BOOOOOOOOOOO…HURRAH!!!” paradigm, I think a more distant example shows the nuance involved in evaluating an NBA trade.
How “Seven Seconds” became several more years.
In the summer of 2005, Joe Johnson was not a happy camper. He felt low-balled by a Suns team he had helped put back on the map, and chafed in a role outside the limelight. Whether or not his anger would have been soothed by superstar money is debatable, but both sides eventually declared the marriage untenable. What ensued is often considered the beginning of
“cheapskate” ownership tactics by Suns’ boss Robert Sarver: Johnson was traded for unproven vet Boris Diaw and two future first round picks.
In retrospect, this move helped the Suns prolong the Seven Seconds or Less era for several years to follow. Had the Suns retained Johnson at Atlanta’s offer (5 years, 70 million, with a “poison pill” in the form of a $20 million signing bonus up front), they would have likely filled out the roster around Johnson, Steve Nash, Shawn Marion and Amare Stoudemire with minimum salaried players, since Stoudemire had just inked a max deal, and Marion and Nash had been taken off the market by near-max deals in previous summers.
Instead, acquiring Diaw under a rookie contract gave the Suns some wiggle room. They signed Raja Bell to the full mid-level exception that summer, something they would not have done with a re-upped Johnson. Both he and Diaw were fine fits in the Suns up-tempo system. Bell provided defensive toughness and shooting without wasting many possessions, and Diaw gave the Suns a versatile forward option, especially when Stoudemire was sidelined with knee injuries. In 2009, as the Suns’ run in the Western Conference was clearly over, Diaw and Bell were flipped for Jason Richardson and Jared Dudley, younger alternatives at starting 2-guard and rotation forward who have flourished in the desert. When added to the bounty of the two draft picks – cap relief from Brian Grant’s guaranteed contract and cash considerations in 2006, and emerging center prospect Robin Lopez in 2008) – it looks as though critics of the current Suns administration need to look elsewhere for
examples of
managerial futility.
Final Thoughts
Of course, the extended transaction method of evaluation is rarely this clean. The main point here is that the NBA team building and management system has been forced by current conditions to be much more fluid and open than its professional sports brethren. Trades in basketball are rarely even swaps, or even today’s stars for tomorrow’s prospects. Instead, trades are made for flexibility, or by teams that have acquired flexibility. It is a system altered by upcoming negotiations between owners and players, but for now, makes for an interesting study in managerial behavior under artificial constraints.
*Don’t even get me started on largely failed developmental system – teams clearly don’t trust the D-League with their young players – that isn’t even as good as the model it replaced (the other CBA). Finally, at the beginning of this dysfunctional system is a draft which locks first-round picks into guaranteed contracts that teams on the edge of cap-imposed restrictions are loathe to accept.