You’d be forgiven if, upon learning four-time All-Star DeMarcus Cousins was set to sign with the Golden State Warriors, winners of three of the last four NBA titles, your knee-jerk, unmediated reaction was something akin to: aw, hell nah! You would not be special in this regard, your take joining an ongoing chorus of complaint and protest on social media. (A conversation esteemed Warriors fan Jacob Greenberg refers to as GrumbleWatch.)
For a team like the Warriors, an organization that already appears to have everything — All-Stars, future Hall of Famers, massive media attention, multiple championships — nabbing Cousins, an extremely talented big man (albeit one recovering from a difficult Achilles injury), for merely the mid-level exception (MLE) of $5.3 million feels like highway robbery. It feels like an evil supervillain plan come to fruition. It feels like the bullies have truly won. And to some, it feels like the league will never recover.
But, of course, it will — in fact, it already has. For you and I, the average viewer, the NBA will continue on much as it has for the past few decades. The games, all 2,460 regular season contests, will play on, and many of us will surely watch many of them. For us Raptors fans, we’ll still dream and scheme about our team, and wonder whether, with LeBron James now out of the conference, Toronto can escape the East. Sure, the title odds favour the Warriors, but when has that stopped any of this process from happening? There are so many moving parts here, so many things that can happen, that can go wrong or right, so many surprises to come, and so much that can change. It would be foolish to desire the equivalent of a fast forward button for the 2018-19 season.
That’s before even accounting for the weird side show delight of actually seeing how this — all of this — will play out. Maybe I’m in the minority here, but I think it’ll be fun to watch teams take their run at Golden State (at least in the regular season). And it’ll be fun to watch other teams grow together or crumble apart — what’s going to happen to Philly and Boston now? What about LeBron in LA? Does Houston still have a shot at something? Does Giannis still fit in? There’s such a broad spectrum of entertainment at play here, so many opportunities to be surprised and wowed and disappointed and elated and crushed and literally everything else. I don’t want to offer this up as some sort of consolation prize but also: why else do you watch the games?
As always, it’s also useful to have perspective. There was a time when it seemed like the Los Angeles Lakers, with Kobe, Shaq, and an imperturbable cast of characters, were thought to be unbeatable. Before that it was Jordan’s Bulls. There were once duelling empires of East and West, and before that a time when it looked like the New York Knicks held the keys to the future of basketball. Within even just the past decade, the Warriors were seen as an imploding franchise. They’d blown a once-in-a-lifetime 1-vs-8 victory, in their sole playoff appearance in 18 years, and looked set to spend another run of years as a forgotten joke of a franchise. The team’s last great moment had come all the way back in 1975, when they won a title — and had to cheer on Rick Barry in order to do it.
As others have pointed out, it was astute planning but also supreme luck that got the Warriors where they are today. Signing Steph Curry to a modest deal because of legitimate ankle injury concerns, a huge spike in the salary cap due to a big TV deal, hitting on a draft pick at no. 35 as unique as Draymond Green — it is quite a confluence of events. And it will all one day end in some form or another, and then change into something else. In the future we’ll decry some other team (unless it’s the Raptors, obviously) for being the best team, the one no one else can seem to beat. It all feels inevitable for the Warriors right now, until, eventually, it stops feeling that way.
But there’s something else at play here, something I only understand on a cursory level. It involves the potential long-term fallout of Cousin’s decision to take a massive pay cut to play for the team he wants to play for. Of course, it’s Boogie’s right to go where he wants — the NBA just gave Oscar Robertson an award in part because he fought for players to have such a right. But as Jay Caspian Kang explained on Twitter, if star players (e.g. players who have made tons of money, or have other endorsement revenue, or can always bank on the next big contract) routinely subvert the agreed upon bargaining agreement, the set of rules that outline how much such-and-such player should get paid, it eventually weakens the entire CBA. And if we’ve learned anything about NBA owners over the past few years, it’s that they’ll take any advantage they have to squeeze whatever money they can from the players down the line.
Let me repeat for all the ‘durrr durrr rings’ morons:
— kang (@jaycaspiankang) July 3, 2018
IT IS BAD THAT THE PLAYERS OF ONE TEAM KEEP SUBVERTING A COLLECTIVELY BARGAINED LABOR AGREEMENT. THEY ARE GIVING OWNERS THE POWER TO UNDERPAY EVERYONE.
The fact that a newspaper employee doesn’t know this is sad. https://t.co/VDsEfzkb4B
Even with his injury, it feels fair to suggest DeMarcus Cousins will be fine. In fact, signing this one year deal, as others have pointed out, will ideally allow him to rehabilitate his value, and show the world he can still play at a high level. Boogie could very well sign a huge deal the following year with another team after he’s presumably won a championship with the Warriors and in one sense we’d have no choice but to applaud. That’d be living the NBA dream for sure — win, and then get paid.
But that’s a very specific dream for an extremely narrow class of player. And when the rest of the NBA’s players eventually have to go back to the bargaining table, we might start to hear something different. Come that day, the owners will likely hem and haw to the player’s union about competitive balance (as some have already been doing for years), and about being forced to overpay for mediocre talent, and hey, look at what Boogie did here, he flaunted all the rules in your face, and, y’know, we just can’t compete with the big market Warriors anyway, and what we really oughta figure out is how to implement a hard salary cap to keep contracts under control, and... well, you see where I’m going with this. The player’s union (like all unions) exists to ensure the rank and file are taken care of, not just the top one percent — yes, even if that one percent is the reason why the league exists to begin with.
I’ll be honest, it’s beyond my grasp to paint a complete picture here. I know come next September and October, I’ll get jazzed for the coming Raptors’ season regardless, even if I know deep in my bones that my team can’t win the title. I know I’ll be fascinated just the same to follow along with the league. And I won’t be worried in those moments about the various pay cheques and collective job security of people I’ll never really meet, and truly never really know. That’s the case for most of us — it is just a game after all.
Except, as we’re constantly reminded, the NBA is also a business, one of immense size and scale, one dealing with larger and larger sums of money, and land, and cultural resources. And I’d be lying if I didn’t wonder — and worry about — where it will end up going next.