falcolombardi wrote:sp6r=underrated wrote:MartinToVaught wrote:The point is to compete and entertain the fans, i.e. the people who make it possible for them to get paid millions to play a kids' game for a living. Winning means nothing if it wasn't earned.
The owners pushed hard for maximum individual salaries in the 1999 CBA negotiations to get the union to agree to lower share of basketball revenue. The result of that is Durant can't maximize his basketball salary.
His choice is to 26 million playing with Westbrook in Oklahoma or 26 million playing with Curry and Dray in the Bay Area. The Warriors offer a better work environment, since playing with more talented co-workers is more rewarding than less. The Bay Area. for millionaires, offers a better quality of life than Oklahoma. Both on and off the court signing with the Warriors is the rational choice.
Durant did the rational thing. If you don't like that choice, blame the owners for prioritizing lower labor costs in the 1999 CBA negotiations.
But expecting Durant to act against his own rational interests is an absurd expectation.
I think a lot of issues comes from fans who like using team results and ring counting as a way to rank players with no further context, people tie themselves in a pretzel by trying to uphold this logic
A player had more or less help or played tougher or softer competition? Say somwthingh like "goats dont make excuses" or round up and down the level of their teammates so you can pretend the winner of a series always came down to supertar A outpkaying superstar B
Cause if we accept the fact that sometines the best player loses or a worsr player can win more rings than a better one (talking about superstars here*) then the whole logic system comes down
If we didnt evaluate players so much by team success we wouldnt have to get mad about durant winning fake rings or whatever, we could evaluate dursnt on his level of play in the context he played
You get at a lot of it.
A lot of the anger is the desire for the best player of each generation to end up with the most rings. A disproportionate, not all, but disproportionate of the people I met who hated the Durant signing were Lebron superfans who disliked that it made it much harder for him to end up with rings. Many of them didn't care when Wade, who we all thought would age better than he did, paired with Lebron.
I try not to care which player ends up with the most rings. It is a team sport. There is no reason to think the best players should have the most rings. The ring counter culture is strange. But a lot of basketball fans really do approach it as tennis and love thinking the best player on each team decides each series.
The media sells that narrative which compounds the problem. Many basketball fans are inclined to think the best player decides each series. The major basketball networks frame NBA discussions around that premise since they know it will attract viewers. This will always annoy player fans when their player is still the best but playing on a weaker team, which is what happened with Lebron.
The anger over the Durant signing was also a desire for closer series and more contenders, which concentration of talent reduces. It really did make it much harder for team fans to believe their team could win. The number of credible contenders was reduced. And the confidence level of fans of the other remaining contenders was reduced considerably.
It would be better off if he stayed in Oklahoma so we had another contender. That team could easily have won a title.
But the owners designed a system that encourages players to pair up, The owners designed a system that discourages the top players from considering salary in their signing decisions. It is hard for me to fault players for make incentive aligned decisions.
From my own personal life, I've lived in Minneapolis for half decade and SF for a decade. I had by far a happier existence in Minneapolis. But if you told me I could make 20 million in SF or Minneapolis I'd take SF. If you told me I could make 20 million in SF or Minneapolis and have better co-workers in SF, I would definitely take SF.
That is the choice the owners created when they prioritized lowering labor costs by breaking the players union in 1999. They made it much harder for teams to get superstars to stay on either bad teams or teams in undesirable cities. Who can blame them? If you think about it rationally, they are making the correct decision. Just as they are now making the correct decision to pair off in the big cities, were they can get the best of both worlds.
Get rid of max salaries but keep the soft cap you'll see a lot less of it but that would require the owners agreeing to give the players a greater share of basketball revenue. And the owners would rather whine about players lacking "competitive heart," "loyalty, " and being "fame hungry" and other nonsense rather than acknowledge they designed a system that made it crippling for most teams.
But hey franchise value is up, which is what they care about.
Abolish the draft. Abolish the rookie scale. Make teams try to win.
