Beware the quick fix

No bad team is a deal away

BY HENRY ABBOTT

I’m a gardener. If the soil is bad, or there’s not enough sunlight, or there’s chlorine runoff from your neighbor’s swimming pool, you can spend as much time and money as you want running back and forth to the nursery—and you’ll end up blaming the plants. 

On the other hand, if you’re composting up a storm, building delightful loamy soil structure, and putting roots into impeccable soil with adequate sun overhead … you can barely fail. Good circumstances mean incredible results—they’re just much slower to create. It can take years to diagnose and address what’s holding your garden back. But if you don’t put that work in, nothing else much matters. 

The NBA’s worst teams have some thinking to do: Do they just need a new plant, or is the soil bad?

If you’re a fan of one of those teams, welcome back. It’s your week! Things have been rough, I hear you thinking, but they’re about to change. At least, that’s the message pulsing just beneath the surface with every obsessive re-sc…