| Guest Post - Randolph Reaction: Con |
 |
| Written by Chip Crain |
| Thursday, 02 July 2009 03:35 |
|
CALL ME IN 2011
by hooba
I can’t emotionally invest in the Grizzlies anymore. I just can’t. I didn’t want to believe the national NBA press when they continually rip the Grizz front office. I didn’t want to believe that Michael Heisley was indifferent to winning. I was deeply sympathetic to financial plight of operating a team in a small market. I bought into the 3 Year Plan.
And then they go and trade for Zack Randolph. I’ve been sucker punched before. I was in the wrong place at the wrong time once in college and found myself surrounded by 4 guys with bad intentions. I was trying to talk my way out of the situation when the guy behind me popped me in the nose. I didn’t see it until it landed and knew immediately it was good and broken. So I know the feeling, and I got good and sucker punched again last night. This time by Michael Heisley, but it was my fault for being an openhearted fan that I didn’t have my guard up to deflect the blow. No more.
“When 20 + 10 Does Not Equal 30”
“20 and 10.” “20 and 10.” That is how Randolph is going to be sold to the Grizz fans. Randolph has been roughly a 20 and 10 player for 6 years – over those 6 years his teams have averaged 27.6 wins per year. Zack Randolph is when 20 +10 does not equal 30, wins that is.
As of last night, 3 times in the last 3 years Randolph was traded by his team for not only less talented players, but nominal talent players with bad contracts (heck, Portland even paid tens of millions to get out from under him in addition to getting nothing back). No one else in the entire NBA wanted Zack Randolph and his 20 and 10 on their team. His teams were desperate to get rid of him and his 20 and 10.
Googling “Zack Randolph Cancer” leads to 62,600 links (plus another 21,700 for “Zach – with an “h” -- Randolph Cancer”).
I have nothing against Randolph. He is who he is. And much more likely than not he will continue to be what he has been, i.e., overweight, out of shape, injury prone, selfish on offense, nonexistent on defense, and poison in the locker room. That is the book on Randolph written season after season and with three different clubs.
And that is why no one else in the NBA wanted him – except Michael Heisley and the Grizzlies (to whom my anger and frustration is directed, not Randolph).
There are absolutely no indicators from Randolph’s basketball career to date that this will be a good basketball move. No team that prioritizes winning in any fashion or has a rational plan for building a winning team would make this trade. It is a short term economic play disguised as a basketball move because Zack Randolph averages 20 and 10 and the Grizzlies needed a Power Forward.
“National Laughingstock”
Michael Heisley has pulled off a remarkable feat. The Pau Gasol deal made him a national laughingstock around the NBA when he traded 20 & 10 for nothing, yet now he has managed to again become a national laughingstock by trading nothing for 20 & 10. Â
And to add insult to injury, Heisley got absolutely punked by Donald Sterling and Mike Dunleavy. On draft night, Sterling turned down Z-Bo for Marko Jaric’s contract. Sterling wouldn’t take the much cheaper second most untradeable contract in the NBA for the more expensive most untradeable one. So Heisley gave Sterling a better deal – Richardson’s expiring instead of Jaric’s 2-year deal. He didn’t even foist Greg Buckner’s Voidable Contract on the Clippers. So not only did Heisley take on something that no one else in the NBA wanted – he overpaid for it.
So the small market Grizzlies now have the 2 most most unmoveable contracts in the NBA (Randolph & Jaric) that will cost almost $50 million over the next 2 years representing about 50% of the team’s entire payroll over that time. Call me in 2011 when Z-Bo’s gone – because the Grizz aren’t going to win before then, and they aren’t going to spend any more money now either to try and win.
Almost as inexplicable as the trade is the timing of the trade. This deal would have been available every single day from now until the February trade deadline – because no one else in the entire NBA wants Randolph. So why do this on the first day of Free Agency? Maybe David Lee’s demands come down in a couple weeks in a buyer’s market. Maybe the Jazz decide to dump Carlos Boozer’s salary in order to re-sign Paul Millsap. Maybe any of dozens of other scenarios play out over the next 3 months. Now there are no more possibilities until 2011.
Before this trade, national perception of the worst Owner-GM combinations of the decade were Dolan-Thomas and Sterling-Dunleavy. Well, the Clips can relax because the duo of Heisley-Wallace has indisputably sidled up right behind Dolan-Thomas. It is unclear what, if any, authority Chris Wallace has, but his name was on the door for the Gasol trade and the Randolph trade, so any sympathy I had harbored for him being raked over the coals nationally for Heisley’s decisions has evaporated.
And the raking over the coals will be thorough. It has already begun over at ESPN.com and elsewhere. That is part of why I have to disengage as a fan. How can you emotionally and economically invest in a franchise that is consistently ridiculed in the sports press that I read and watch regularly? In the past, the ridicule sometimes seemed over-the-top given the national media’s lack of in-depth familiarity with the truly Unseldian tenure of Jerry West as GM and the resultant necessary restructuring, so it was easier to discount it. But at a certain point even as a fan who can step back a little bit and understand the meta experience of fandom – you simply start to feel like a jackass for caring about a team that is the deserved object of ridicule.
“The Red Herring”
I always gave Michael Heisley credit for being the first guy to figure out that the prevailing NBA economic model of the last quarter century died around 2005-2006, even though he figured it out in haphazard fashion. The old model was to buy a franchise in an underperforming city with an old arena, sustain annual operating losses, move to a new city and get a new arena built, sell lots of tickets to the new arena in the new city having spent money on some decent players – and then leverage the new arena into a sale of the team for more than it was actually worth on operational basis cranking out a nice profit over and above the acquistion cost and the intervening operating losses.
Heisley followed that traditional playbook only to find out that no one with actual financial wherewithal would pay him more than the team’s actual worth – which meant that Heisley would not make a substantial (if any) profit by selling the team given the acquisition cost and significant operating losses incurred through 2005-2006. So Heisley got out in front of the rest of the League (which realized this in the past 12 months) and started slashing payroll, so the Grizzlies would operate like a normal business whereby revenues needed to exceed expenses each year.
In the course of operating in that manner, Heisley became a master of profiting off of the Salary Cap and Luxury Tax woes of other teams by capitalizing on the Grizzlies’ available capspace.
I am deeply sympathetic to the notion of running the team at a profit and believe that maneuvering around the Cap & Tax rules to do so was deft business – particularly when accumulating young talent in accordance with Heisley’s self-proclaimed 3-Year Plan. But as a fan you get savvy to the maneuvering too.
The pressure was starting to build on Heisley to spend the necessary dollars to sign a desperately needed Power Forward to help accelerate the Grizz on court success (off the court they were profitable this past year). And the Randolph trade is going to portrayed as Heisley’s commitment to spending money in order to win (or in this case lose).
It’s a ruse. Don’t believe it. When the Grizzlies flipped Darko’s $7.5 million contract for QRichardson’s $9.35 million contract, the Knicks gave them “Cash Considerations” – presumably the roughly $1.85 million difference between their contracts (but possibly up to $3 million). By trading Richardson without ever paying him, that cash is on hand and offsets Randolph’s salary. Presumably now the Grizzlies will rescind Hakim Warrick’s $3.02 million qualifying offer now that Randolph is added to Darrell Arthur and DeMarre Carroll. So Darko’s contract plus the Richardson cash plus the rescinded Warrick contract equals $12.37 million – only $3.63 million less than Randolph’s $16 million contract.
The same holds true for 2010-2011 where Heisley is actually absorbing all $17.3 million of Randolph’s salary. The current cumulative salaries of the Grizz players (all but Jaric and Randolph are on rookie or small contracts) require that somebody get paid big dollars in 2010-2011 in order to be in compliance with the Collective Bargaining Agreement.
So Heisley isn’t spending big money. He is spending the minimum money he is required to spend and rather than pursue a Free Agent for a 4 or 5 year deal, he traded for a 2-year red herring under the guise of getting a 20&10 guy – but really just fulfilling his minimum economic requirements with only short term exposure and no regard for the impact on the basketball court (or the impact on the fanbase).
And that is the dirty little secret of the NBA that Heisley figured out this year. If you keep your salaries between the NBA minimum and $50 million (and the Grizz will not go over $50 million this year or next), keep your front office expense low and do a good job of renting out your CapSpace and available roster spots to Capped Out and Taxed Out teams, then you can be profitable on annual basis even in a small market and even without fans and even with only making a pretense of caring about winning. And that is a safer economic approach than investing in long term talent and hoping to increase revenues by generating wins and ticket sales.
But damn it, with a little patience and a little savvy, there were better basketball opportunities that would also have been nearly or as economically feasible as acquiring Zach Randolph – such as, for example, doing nothing. But just like trading Gasol three weeks before the Trade Deadline, trading for Randolph on the first day of Free Agency demonstrates that once the economics are in place for the Grizz, then the deal is in place because the basketball doesn’t really matter.
“The Window of Opportunity” and “What is a Fan To Do?”
The especially sad thing is that the Grizz have (had?) a real core of young developing talent, plenty of future picks and plenty of capspace to really make some noise in the next couple of years as other teams in the West fade. A mere 18 months after the Gasol trade, the window of opportunity was there to climb well up the ladder with just a smart move or two. Instead, Heisley and the Grizz closed the window, pulled the curtains and put a “Do Not Disturb Sign” on the door until 2011. They have committed all the big money they are going to spend over the next two years to two disastrous basketball players (Randolph and Jaric) with immovable contracts. Barring a Zach Randolph Epiphany, instead of fighting with OKC, Minne, and the Clips to leapfrog the aging and deteriorating Suns, Mavs, Spurs and Rockets, the Grizz have consigned themselves to two more years of predetermined has-been never-was status.
So what the heck am I supposed to do? I love the NBA. I love going to games and watching them on the tube. My son and daughter enjoy it with me – it is family bonding time. I don’t particularly care if the team sucks as long as the effort is there – which it mostly has been the past two years – and there is some hope. Because when they suck, I enjoy the other team and the way they play the game and the stars and the athleticism and on and on.
I passed on my usual partial season ticket package last year in a dubious economic environment like so many others, however I was fortunate to weather the storm and planned on re-upping this year -- particularly since real hope and progress at the Fed Ex Forum seemed plausible a mere 24 hours ago.
But now I’ve been sucker punched and I just can’t do it. There is no hope. And instead of excusable undertalented underexperienced effort – it will be Zack Randolph effort. There is no fun in going to a game and watching a dysfunctional team whose potential was indifferently cast aside by an owner and front office that handed over the reigns to the most disliked player in the NBA. I can’t justify spending my money on a team that basically has gone out of its way to alienate fans just when they were bringing them back into the fold. I’ll still go when I get some freebies (which is pretty often in Memphis). I’ll watch a whole lot less Grizz on TV (which should make me a more productive human being at least). But most of all, I’ll emotionally disengage until 2011. There is not going to be any Zach Randolph Epiphany, so I’m not going to expend any energy or time or thought hoping for one. There is no point caring about this team until the team proves it is worth caring about first.
As a Guest Contributor, I want to thank the gang at 3 Shades of Blue for opening their forum to my frustration. My opinions do not reflect those at 3 Shades of Blue and should not be held against them if you disagree with some or all of my above diatribe.
|
Comments
Diatribe, manifesto, whatever. I'm a seaon ticket holder as well, and I'm d**n glad we picked up Randolph. You have your head stuck in the sand if you actually think he wouldn't have been picked up by another team. We finally have a power forward that can knock somebody on their a** and grab an offensive board or two. I'm very interested in seeing how this season plays out. If you're such a great numbers cruncher, you should apply for a Grizzlies front office position!