After being traded to the Utah Jazz this week, 17-year veteran Kevin Love spoke for many of his sport’s tossed-around players. “Never thought I’d be a math problem,” he said. “Welcome to the NBA.” Love is a five-time All Star, a former MVP finalist, and was once an important part of a championship. Those days are well over, and Love and his teams—the Cleveland Cavaliers and Miami Heat—have known it, and paid him cheaply as a result. So it makes plenty of sense that Love, drifting gracefully into retirement, thought he was in a place inconsequential and tenured enough to make himself safe, and that he couldn’t see this one coming. But it happened anyway; the spreadsheets of front offices are just that hard to balance, these days.
Jonas Valanciunas doesn’t want to be a math problem either. He was traded to the Denver Nuggets last week. That might seem like a premium, cushy new gig for the 33-year-old center. Backing up the best player in the world, Nikola Jokic, and competing for a title; this is an exertion-to-glory ratio that most players his age would kill for. But consider that the Lithuanian big man is now employed by his fourth franchise in three years. He may feel that his once-proud career has been whittled down to the shape of a bartering chip, and that he no longer cares to be part of some other mens’ endless game of poker.
And so it was that, shortly after the announcement of his move to Denver, Valanciunas was in reports that said he was planning to leave the NBA. Panathinaikos B.C., a Euroleague basketball team based out of Athens, Greece had offered him a three-year, $13 million contract. At first glance, this seems like a pay cut relative to his NBA contract, which is worth $10.4 million for just next season. But consider the quirks in American and European media, respectively. American media tends to report the largest possible number whenever a deal is signed, even if taxes and unmet contract incentives are likely to bring it way down. This is perhaps because, culturally, America enjoys numbers that are really big. European media does the opposite: tells you what an athlete will actually be taking home, once the realities of bureaucratic society have dented the number.
Speaking of unmet incentives: maybe Valanciunas is nervous about the financial future of the NBA. Many players might be, after learning that the league’s most recent season fell short on revenue projections, leading to many star players giving significant cuts of their salaries back to help cover the shortfall. In addition to loving big numbers, the grand architects of American economy are fond of hubristic assumptions about those numbers growing even larger, and designing whole societies around said guesses.
Why did the NBA fall short? A lot of reasons, probably, but chief among them is the sloppy and ongoing revolution in media, which has left many a market and fanbase either scrambling or indifferent as they’re unsure of how to even watch their local team. In Chicago, where I live, the Bulls have just entered their third broadcast format in less than one year, and none of them have been especially accessible or affordable. The fans who still care enough to scrounge have had to go buy anachronistic TV antennas, hang them in odd places, change their viewing device’s complicated settings, or just say hell to the law and tune into fuzzy illegal streams to watch their middling team.
Doesn’t exactly sound like a joyous bonanza, does it? Remember that Valanciunas just spent a season with two of the only teams with more dismal situations than those Bulls, in the Washington Wizards and Sacramento Kings. Before that, he was with the New Orleans Pelicans, who Dejounte Murray recently blasted, saying that the team he’s supposed to start for never made basic things like physical therapy and training easy for him—”I hope the organization gets it together,” Murray said. Since Valanciunas arrived in the bayou in 2021, he’s been on a half-decade tour of the league’s more neglected and dysfunctional corners.
About a week after the acquisition of Valanciunas potentially blew up on them, though, the Nuggets appear to have put out the fire. They’ve stood firm on their unwillingness to buy Valanciunas out of his contract, and since FIBA cooperates with the league, that would make it impossible for the big man to play in Athens instead of Denver. The NBA might not be doing perfectly with its money, but it’s still the biggest basketball league in the world, and enjoys the power over the sport that comes with that.
But maybe more important to that was the rumored phone call that took place between Jokic and Valanciunas. Two huge men, both of whom aren’t exactly crazy about America. One imagines they were able to strike an accord, talking about how quickly they leave their professional country for the more familiar land of eastern Europe, every chance they get. It’s a life that can work. After all, they are both—for right now, anyway—playing for a team named after the waves of men who came to the neighboring mountains only to extract their gold. Jokic has had his before, while Valanciunas has been living the marginal NBA life, far from the stuff. A year from now, maybe that will have changed.