The problem with “unthinkable”
Legends can, and sometimes should, be traded or cut
BY HENRY ABBOTT
We’re deep enough into the NBA season to know that the Lakers won’t win the title. Neither will the 76ers. Probably not the Bucks, Warriors, Clippers, or Suns, either. By my count, eight of the ten highest payrolls are already to the point where they start asking what went wrong.
To cure the disease, it’s critical to get the diagnosis correct. Let’s assume the 76ers will do something. Doing the wrong thing could easily damn them to years of irrelevance.
Are the 76ers terrible because the roster lacks the talent to withstand Joel Embiid’s predictable absences? If that’s the case, they might want to throw everything they have into a trade-deadline deal for a starting power forward.
Is Paul George past his prime? If that’s the case, no need to be sentimental: see what the trade market looks like for PG.
Have the players tuned out Nick Nurse? That would probably be the easiest problem to solve.
Is the cold, hard analysis that the 76ers will never contend when Joel Embiid is out? Maybe it’s worth pausing his season and flying him all over the world, visiting every possible expert to ascertain how to get his body right.
It can be hard to put your finger on the real problem—especially when the people in charge don’t want to find it. A pretty dumb, but sadly common thing, is that a team will ignore the real problem in favor of what makes key people look smarter. The Kings drafted Tyreke Evans ahead of Stephen Curry, then literally threw a parade to assure everyone they had been brilliant.
In that vein, the 76ers just executed a multi-year strategy to pair Embiid with George, the jewel of free agency. Everyone thought it would work. I wonder how many times the 76ers front office researched, prepared, and pitched this plan to billionaire Josh Harris. After all, who builds a house and then a few months later recommends tearing down the house? It’s simply human nature to ignore the flaws of something you labored over for years.
Recently on ESPN, Brian Windhorst explained that the Warriors’ dream is LeBron James playing alongside Stephen Curry and Draymond Green. That might work! But if it doesn’t go smoothly, trading away the talent the Warriors would need to get LeBron would likely kill Steph’s chances at another title. The Clippers once decided they’d win more with Paul George than Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and a load of picks (one of which became Jalen Williams). The Bucks went all-in on the bet that Damian Lillard was just what Giannis needed.
On the Lakers, to me the real problem is that the team not only employs, but orbits, a $49 million megastar who, as we’re learning painfully before our eyes, is simply too old to carry a good NBA team night in and night out. It’s one thing for Henry Abbott and David Thorpe to resolve that LeBron James is the problem with the Lakers. For Lakers head honcho Jeanie Buss, I wonder if it’s even possible to truly weigh that when basketball’s most famous person is buoying the local TV ratings that support her whole family.
On the other hand, the Buss family has been through this before—and it hurt.
Last week, Adrian Wojnarowski resurfaced in NBA media circles. He seems to be doing well—keeping prostate cancer at bay, looking happier and healthier than his days on the NBA grind. And he told a story that shook something loose in me.
As the 2011 NBA lockout negotiations dragged on, it was reported that the new CBA would include an amnesty clause. That’s a way for teams to kiss a bad contract goodbye. They’d still have to pay every penny, but they’d be able to waive the player while (here’s the key part) getting relief from the player’s effect on their salary cap and, if applicable, luxury tax.
It’s a mulligan for a bad contract, commonly used on a star with a big salary and a bad injury. Gilbert Arenas, Baron Davis, and Brandon Roy—beloved players slowed by injury—were predictable picks. According to an article by Chad Ford and Marc Stein in the fall of 2011, it was a “slam dunk” that the Lakers—with massive payroll, questionable contracts, and an urge to improve the roster—would amnesty someone. Leading candidates at the time were Metta World Peace and Luke Walton.
But the Lakers didn’t amnesty anyone in 2011 or in 2012. The way the rules worked, teams had five years to avail themselves of the clause. And, in a quirk, players could be amnestied only during a one-week period in July, and only on contracts signed in or before 2011. The number of eligible Lakers decreased by the year. By the spring of 2013, the Lakers had just four amnesty-eligible contracts.
That spring was an inflection point. For the 2012-2013 season, the Lakers had assembled a super team around Kobe Bryant: Steve Nash, Dwight Howard, Pau Gasol, and Metta World Peace. The team dominated preseason predictions and had the NBA’s highest payroll by a wide margin. Yet, after losing to the Clippers by 24 points in the last game before the All-Star Break, the Lakers had a dismal 25-29 record and faced an uphill battle just to make the playoffs. It was an old and expensive team, and it was hard to see how they’d improve.
At that point, Kobe Bryant was 34 and the highest-paid player in the NBA—he made north of $30 million, while the second-highest salary was about $20 million. Every team with a 34-year-old star should plan for the after times. That’s extra true when the player makes a fortune and fails to win with an All-Star roster.
That’s why Lakers GM Mitch Kupchak held regular meetings about the post-Kobe Lakers. Especially: Kupchak met secretly and regularly at the Polo Lounge in Beverly Hills with Dwight Howard’s agent Dan Fegan, who died in 2018. Fegan told me several times about those meetings. One topic: which coach might make Kobe more of a team player. Fegan advocated Phil Jackson. Failing that, he recommended ways the Lakers use the amnesty clause to jettison the biggest contract in the NBA. If the Lakers amnestied Kobe, Fegan believed, there were many paths to pairing Howard with another star and returning quickly to contention. For a time, it seemed to Fegan that Kupchak and Jim Buss, who made the big Laker decisions at the time, were leaning that way.
I have no idea how much Kobe knew about those meetings, but very likely something like that was on his mind as he reportedly told Wojnarowski he thought he’d be amnestied.
What emerged next was a smear campaign that would make it hard for the Lakers to sell their fans on the concept Howard had what it took to lead the post-Kobe Lakers. Wojnarowski published several stories, many overtly attributed to Bryant and some less so. In January 2013, in a Wojnarowski article discussing the team’s ideal strategies, Bryant mentioned every key teammate except Howard: "We need to go back to basics. We need to put guys in positions to do what they do best. We need to strip it down. Steve is best in pick-and-roll. Pau is best in the post. I’m best from the free-throw line extended down. Let’s go back to basics.”
“Part of the problem of Howard’s clowning act is that people don’t take him seriously,” Wojnarowski wrote the following month. “It’s easier to doubt his toughness, tenacity, when they’re watching him grab the microphone to do impressions on team charters or booming farts in the locker room. Bryant never wanted Howard’s disposition to rule the day in the Lakers’ locker room.”
A few days later, Wojnarowski wrote about the possibility the Lakers would trade Howard, and quoted an icy Kobe: “I don’t know what they’re going to do. At this point, it doesn’t matter.”
Woj smiles as he recounts how Kobe believed the Lakers would use the amnesty clause to, essentially, fire Kobe. He laughs it off as if it would never have happened.
The Kobe story packs a lesson for the current Lakers: NBA rules make clinging to the past incredibly costly. Player careers end all the time—sometimes instantly, more commonly in ways that are grueling, painful, and Shakespearean.
While dragging the Lakers into the playoffs in the spring of 2013, Bryant alarmed his teammates, trainer, and coach with excessive work on and off the court. It culminated in a torn Achilles, which changed the debate in various ways. Yes, the Lakers made the playoffs thanks to his heroism, but they were swept in the first week in forgettable fashion. The entire episode seemed to carry a lesson: It was unlikely Kobe would ever lead the Lakers to another title. The work was simply too taxing.
The following summer, as I wrote at the time, Howard chose to leave the Lakers in no small part because he felt his teammates were fueling media attacks on him. There was a chilly meeting at Fegan’s office where Nash reportedly said he didn’t realize that Howard felt that way, but Kobe essentially told Dwight to toughen up. Howard didn’t. Instead, he left for the Rockets for $30 million less than the Lakers had offered. (Kobe later said he regretted nothing.)
The Lakers then finally did use their amnesty clause—on Metta World Peace. The Lakers held a press conference to say, essentially, that losing Kobe Bryant would be unthinkable, and eventually extended Kobe’s contract.
It didn’t work. After opening the 2012-2013 season with what was widely seen as the NBA’s best team, the Lakers almost instantly turned into one of the worst, winning just 64 of their next 246 games. Bryant played in just 107 of that 246. It’s doubtful he could have helped much.
By the end, Kobe had one of the worst plus/minuses on the team—like LeBron now. (That suggests the team could expect better results from an average player taking their minutes.) What followed was the losingest period since the Lakers opened for business in 1948. The team spun through general managers, coaches, and stopgap players. Nothing worked until the miracle of LeBron’s arrival.
We’ll never know what would have happened had the Lakers amnestied Kobe. But they didn’t—because the idea was unthinkable. Given how things worked out, the lesson surely would be to make everything thinkable.
Most of the NBA’s highest salaried teams have hard decisions to make right now. The cost of expecting the future to resemble the past can be painful years of mediocrity. David Thorpe recently argued that the Lakers should trade Anthony Davis. I often wonder if the 76ers might be better off moving on from the painful Embiid experience. The Suns won’t trade Kevin Durant, but if they did they’d get a rebuild out of the deal.
The Athletic just launched a big project ranking, based on an anonymous survey of GMs, the league’s best front offices. The answer is the Thunder, the Celtics, and then everybody else. The Thunder once had a massive star, at his peak, in Paul George—and traded him away at age 29. The Celtics traded away Kevin Garnett at 37 and Paul Pierce at 35. Both front offices hired no-name head coaches. In other words, they had the courage to make unpopular-in-real-time decisions that favored the long term over the short term.
There are front office executives who earn, in some cases, more than $10 million a year to nail those decisions. Sometimes they do. More often, though, instead of the hard call, they make the comfortable one.
Thank you for reading TrueHoop!
Henry, please write more of this type of article.
Another great article. I've been reading your stuff for a long time and enjoy your knowledge and perspective immensely.
Keep this stuff coming!