No theme this week, just a selection of wonderful articles about sports that I flagged throughout the week. One of my favorite parts of writing Dear Sports Fan is reading other great writers cover sports in a way that’s accessible and compelling for the whole spectrum from super-fans to lay people. Here are selections from the best articles of the last week on the subject of attitude:
Football is everywhere, right? And the Super Bowl is the biggest sporting event of the year. It’s virtually a holiday! Here’s the story of a small but growing group of people who engage in their own Super Bowl competition: who can make it longest without finding out who won. They’re called “runners” and losing, or finding out who won, is jokingly referred to as “dying” or a “death.” This is a great article.
Most of the runners, however, found themselves waking up each day in a cold sweat. “I feel like I’m being sequestered for the stupidest jury trial in modern history,” one competitor said. “It’s gotten to the point where three things may end me: recklessness, homesickness, or sheer boredom.”
“I’m starting to think that #DeathByGirlfriend is becoming a reality as she gets more fed up with me being anti-social,” one runner wrote on Twitter. A doctor feared going to the hospital, where he would have to make small talk with patients. A stripper in Los Angeles slept through the Super Bowl—most of the clientele was watching the game—but found the rest of her work week difficult: “Starting every conversation with ‘Don’t tell me who won the SB!’ is hilarious but not the best way to make money in a strip club.”
Now that the Super Bowl is won and gone, the biggest story in the sports world is… still NFL football. It’s now time for free agents to be wooed and signed by new teams. The biggest and best free agent this year is a ferocious defensive tackle named Ndamukong Suh. Suh is known equally for being an impactful player and a dirty one. In this article, Brian Phillips pierces through the first level of analysis and tries to get at what makes Suh the type of player he is.
We want football players to be blood-scenting berserkers half the time and upstanding sportsmen the other half; even if you don’t agree that the line is in kind of an arbitrary place, can you imagine how hard that would be to navigate, from Pop Warner on? You’re a big, fast kid who can hit people hard. You’re taken into a room and told, first of all, that this makes you special, and second of all, that your special self is subordinate to a team. You’re told that all your future specialness will depend on how completely you subordinate yourself. You’re told to give everything. Give your all. Leave it on the field. Never stop trying to win. Never stop trying to get better. You’re told that there’s no room for weakness. You’re told that there are no excuses. You’re told to make yourself a weapon. You’re told that the only thing that matters is beating your rivals. You’re told to call me sir. You’re told that what you’re doing when you’re playing defense is hunting. You’re told to seek out any edge, any advantage, any crack you can use for a toehold. If you win, the crowd roars your name. But the crowd will like you only if you’re humble. The crowd is screaming for you to kill your opponent. But do it at the wrong time, in the wrong way, and they’ll turn on you. Be a warrior. Be a killer. But be respectful. Give 110 percent, but hold yourself in check.
As a set of inputs, this is madness. What person’s brain could line that up into anything like coherence?
Soon, college basketball will take over the sporting landscape as early March transitions into March madness, the NCAA men’s college basketball championships. As such, it’s time for the personal interest stories to start flowing. This story is a particularly excellent example of the genre. It follows Isaiah Williams, a junior guard for Iona, a small school New Rochelle that hopes to qualify for the tournament this year. Williams grew up in Newark, New Jersey, and has struggled during his college career with finding a balance between trying to help his family out of their socio-economic and violent plight, and personally protecting his little brother, Kevin.
Teammates wondered how Isaiah held it together.
“It’s not just like, ‘My best friend got killed,’ which is hard enough to take,” says Iona senior forward David Laury, Isaiah’s closest friend on the team. “It’s like, ‘One of my best friends got killed.’ Two months later, ‘Another one of my best friends got killed.’ Another month later, ‘Another one of my best friends got killed.’ These are kids that he grew up with from around, like, sandbox time. It was just ridiculous.”
The off-campus house Isaiah shares this year with seven students is quintessential college — dirty floors, a Fry Baby in the kitchen and a sign hanging in the foyer that reads “5 O’Clock Somewhere Ave.” He says he’s doing well balancing books and basketball as he works toward a degree in criminal justice and currently sports a 3.0 grade-point average thanks, in part, to Wednesday evening date nights with Menendez at the library.
The biggest difference between New Rochelle and Newark is obvious, Isaiah says.
“Here, you can walk outside around 11 o’clock and you don’t have to worry,” he says. “Back home, once the sun goes down, you need to be in the house. Not even — when the sun’s up, you still not safe.”
Even with Isaiah at school, his presence is felt in the family’s Newark home. His associate’s degree hangs next to the front door. The living room alcove is filled with 26 trophies and dozens of medals. Framed pictures of Isaiah dot the walls.
I’m not sure Errol Morris is a sports fan. As I watched the second and third installment of his six part series of short films on Grantland, it became increasingly clear to me that Morris is in this primarily for humor. The Heistand The Streaker, like the first film in the series, The Subterranean Stadiumfocused exclusively on the strange behavior of non-athletes.
The Heist tells the story of four Duke men’s college basketball fans who sneak into the stadium of their arch-rivals, the North Carolina Tarheels, and steal a ceremonial jersey which was hanging on the rafters. There’s a tradition in American sports of honoring a great player by “retiring” his or her jersey. Once a jersey is retired, no one on that team can use that jersey number again. To symbolize this, a giant jersey is ceremonially hung from the rafters of the stadium. In this case, the number was 23 and the player was Michael Jordan. The four Duke fans, who remain nameless throughout the film and whose faces and voices are are obscured, concocted a plot to sneak into the stadium, steal the jersey, and then reveal it during a game between the two team, temporarily modified to support Duke instead of North Carolina. This simple, sophomoric prank goes smoothly, although the hoped for reveal never happens. It’s not, by itself, an extremely interesting subject for a short film but Morris clearly enjoys himself applying all of the tropes of a true-crime film to this nominally illegal act.
The hijinks continue in Morris’ third film in the It’s Not Crazy, It’s Sports series with The Streaker. Mark Roberts, the eponymous streaker who gives the film its name, is the world’s most famous streaker. He has streaked at every major sporting event and despite the fact that police forces and security companies all over the world know who he is, he manages to keep doing it. Now in his fifties, he’s still blithely unapologetic about what has become his life’s work. To my disappointment, Morris does not press him on the real potential danger of allowing or encouraging other people to run onto the field. I would have been fascinated to hear what Roberts said if confronted with questions about the times when a fan has run onto the court with violent intent, like the fan who stabbed tennis star Monica Seles in 1993. Instead, we get more high-spirited frivolity, including Roberts’ answer to the question, “would you want to die while streaking?”
I can’t say that I haven’t enjoyed these short films but I am mildly disappointed so far. Morris is such a wonderful film maker and interviewer but I feel his choice of topics is limiting the quality and meaning of these films. In my review of the first film, The Subterranean Stadium, I enjoyed how Morris used a light-hearted subject to examine deeper and more emotive aspects of real life. That second level was missing in these two films for me. What did you think?
No theme this week, just a selection of wonderful articles about sports that I flagged throughout the week. One of my favorite parts of writing Dear Sports Fan is reading other great writers cover sports in a way that’s accessible and compelling for the whole spectrum from super-fans to lay people. Here are selections from the best articles of the last week on the subject of attitude:
Oh no! Not video games AND sports. It’s true, the subject of this article is the attempt to accurately recreate the strengths and weaknesses of real-world football players in the most popular football video game, Madden. One of the most fascinating aspects of this piece is the graphic showing how different strengths are weighted in importance for different positions. You can learn a lot about real football from how the game programmers decided to do this. For instance, look at how the importance of the pass blocking skill varies across the offensive line positions. It’s most important for the left tackle, who protects the blind side of all right-handed quarterbacks. Note that the tight end is the only offensive position where all the skills have some importance to the overall rating — the tight end is a hybrid position that does a little of everything.
There’s no good way to overcome the problem of simulating a quarterback like Manning, whose most important skills — reading defenses, calling audibles, seeing things on the field that no one else can, and making sound decisions — are instantly negated when a gamer picks up the controller.
“Quarterback decision-making is the most difficult thing to simulate,” Moore said. “We’re trying to simulate strengths and weaknesses as best we can within the game, but how you play the game is still you.”
Everything you need to know is contained in the headline of this article… but that doesn’t stop it from being a ludicrously fun short read.
“This species is named after the acrobatic goaltender for the Finnish National ice hockey team and the Boston Bruins, whose glove hand is as tenacious as the raptorial fore tarsus of this dryinid species,” the authors wrote in the paper, which has been accepted and will be published in April.
The name also fit for other reasons. The project that led to the discovery of the species was underwritten by the government of Finland, Rask’s home country. The wasp is yellowish and black, similar to the Bruins’ colors. The grasping front legs of the female have claspers that look vaguely like goalie gloves.
Two months ago, Larry Sanders was the promising young starting center for an NBA basketball team. Now he’s unemployed after negotiating a buy-out of his contract. What happened and what does it mean for mental health advocacy in sports?
This presents a stubborn paradox for NBA teams: Mental health treatment for players can’t realize maximum effectiveness until there are first-class services in place. But it’s hard to sell owners, management and players on shelling out for first-class services until they’re proved effective.
All the while, NBA players struggle in the shadows. Virtually everyone in the league can rattle off names of current or former players who needed serious help but never found it. A player who is getting razzed on social media for pouting his way through a season is actually dealing with the sexual assault of a loved one who lives across the country. Another player who seems uncomposed on the floor and confrontational with teammates and coaches suffers from acute anxiety and the prescribed medications are having an adverse effect. Read deeper into any story about fragile team chemistry or “off-court behavior” and there’s likely a component of mental health embedded inside.
Sports are constructed universes that each have their own set of rules. One of the most attractive aspects about being a frequent visitor to a sports world is that it’s rules are so much clearer and more well defined than the rules of the real world. Each sport has a clear objective and every game that’s played has a winner and a loser. It’s no coincidence that virtually every sports arena has a large screen in it which shows the current score at all times. Unlike the other facets of most people’s lives — workplace dramas, romantic relationships, friendships, etc. — a sports fan always knows how their team is doing. Every game ends with a win or a loss. Every season ends with a championship or no championship. In a blurry, grey world, sports offers black and white contrasts. Fans, athletes, coaches, and general managers are free to pursue a single goal with an unwavering commitment rarely available or wise outside the realm of sports.
“You play to win the game.” If you were to watch ESPN 24 hours a day (not a real recommendation) you would probably hear this phrase at least four or five times a day. The phrase first assaulted the sports Zeitgeist in 2002 when New York Jets head coach Herm Edwards said it in a post-game press conference.
The appeal of Edward’s rant is, at first glance, obvious. It’s a strident statement of the foundational truth about sports that we described above. Sports is objective. There is a winner and a loser and the goal is to be the winner. The second level of enjoyment for many people is in how dismissive and obnoxious Edwards is being towards the media member who somehow suggested that winning was not the ultimate purpose of sports. Bullying media members is, at this point in the United States, basically its own sport, and Edwards (who now works for ESPN himself,) is a champion at disdain. Forget those first two levels though, it’s the third level that we’re interested in today. The third level of interpretation reveals that this quote is complex. The thing about “playing to win the game,” is that it isn’t really true. Or at least, it’s a more paradoxical truth than it seems at first glance.
Today we’ll look at some of the ways in which teams don’t always choose to win games at all costs in two sports: NBA basketball and European club soccer.
NBA Basketball
Not trying to win or even trying not to win is one of the biggest topics in basketball right now. It’s seen as a crisis by many. There are two main ways in which teams subvert the single-minded goal of winning each game. The first is a strategy commonly known as tanking, where teams try to increase their chances of getting a high draft pick in an upcoming draft by losing as many games as possible in the current season. In an article on mathematical elimination, I described tanking as “a scourge to the sports world roughly equal to the flu in the normal world or sarcoidosis on House.” Tanking is trying not to win. The other focus of attention in the NBA is teams not trying to win an individual game by choosing not to play a player who is theoretically healthy enough to play that game. Unlike tanking, this tactic is used more by teams that believe themselves to be in championship contention.
Tanking
More than any other team sport, basketball teams are only as good as their best player. If you start in 1980, and list out the NBA Championship winners by their best player, the names are almost all recognizable, even to non-sports fans: Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, Magic, Julius Irving (Dr. J), Bird, Magic, Bird, Magic, Magic, Isaiah Thomas 2X, Michael Jordan 3x, Hakeem Olajuwan 2x, Jordan 3x, Tim Duncan, Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe Bryant 3x, Duncan, the exception to the rule that is the 2004 Detroit Pistons, Duncan, Dwayne Wade, Duncan, Paul Pierce, Kobe 2x, Dirk Nowitzky, LeBron James 2x, Duncan. Only once in the past 35 years has a team without a super-star won the championship!
The clear lesson for teams is that if they don’t have a super-star, their chances of winning a championship are drastically reduced. By far the easiest way of getting a super-star on a team is to draft him, usually with one of the first picks of the NBAdraft. There’s some chance involved, but at the end of every season, the team with the worst record has the best chance of getting the first pick, the second worst team, the second best chance and so on. If a team is going to be in the bottom third of the league, there’s a clear incentive to be as bad as possible.
Teams pursue this strategy in a number of ways, most of which don’t involve actually instructing their players not to score. By far the most common form of tanking is for general managers to manipulate the chances of their team winning by trading its best players. The goal is to have a set of players and coaches that all try their hardest to win but simply don’t have enough experience or talent to do it. The current Picasso of tanking is General Manager Sam Hinkie of the Philadelphia 76ers. Hinkie, who was recently profiled brilliantly by ESPN writer Pablo S. Torre, is taking this strategy farther than anyone has ever taken it before. He’s drafted injured players so that they cannot possibly cause the team to win the year after they are drafted. He’s drafted players from Europe and the rest of the world who will not actually come to the United States to play for the 76ers for several years. One of his first moves when he got the job was to trade away the 76ers best player, Jrue Holiday, and just a week ago, he traded two of their best players away again, mostly for future picks.
It remains to be seen whether this strategy will work or whether it will be a complete disaster. It’s also unclear how much longer it will be possible. Tanking is odious enough to people in the sports world that the NBA is likely to make structural changes to how it decided its draft pick order to take away the incentive to tank.
Resting Players
Unlike tanking, where a team is eager to forgo winning games in one season for the potential of winning games in a future season, this tactic involves reducing a team’s chances of winning a game in order to increase the team’s chances of winning the championship that year. Increasingly, basketball coaches and executives are realizing that most players cannot play at peak effectiveness for an 82-game regular season and then a playoff run that could involve as many as 28 additional games. Smart teams that hope to make it deep into the playoffs have adjusted to this knowledge by managing the number of minutes their players play during the regular season in the hopes of keeping them fresh for the playoffs. Often that means reducing a player’s normal time on the court per game from 35 minutes (out of 48) to 30 minutes over the course of the season. Other times, that might mean sitting a player for the entire second half of a game that is evidently going to be a blow-out win or loss by half-time. Even more blatant is the tactic of choosing not to have a player on the bench and available to play for a particular game.
Teams that choose to rest a player who isn’t seriously injured often choose one of the many small hurts that player is suffering from and use it as an excuse. A team might say, “Oh, So-and-So is out tonight because of a knee injury. They should be fine for the next game.” Usually the media knows this is nothing more than an excuse, but the gesture is enough to maintain the appearance that the team is optimizing to win every game. Some coaches, led by the example of San Antonio Spurs coach Gregg Popovich, don’t even bother with the excuse. They simply list players as “DND – CD” which stands for “Did Not Dress – Coach’s Decision.” Popovich famously thumbed his nose at the practice of using half-true injury designations to excuse coaches’ decisions to rest players in 2012 when he listed Tim Duncan as “DND – Old” for a game.
Resting players is not as noxious of a strategy as tanking, probably because the teams that do it are more well-respected (because they win) and because the future gain is so much closer and more concrete than the gains that teams tank for. The largest criticism of resting players is itself problematic. People often criticize resting players because the one game Tim Duncan sits out may be the only time a fan sees his team play in person all season or ever. By choosing to sit a player, a team is intentionally lowering the entertainment value of the game for its fans without a commensurate lowering of the cost. That argument make sense but only if sports is primarily entertainment rather than competition — and if it’s entertainment, then that in and of itself threatens the principle of trying to win every game. Uh oh, logical black hole alert! Let’s move on to soccer.
European Club Soccer
The structure of European club soccer creates a few scenarios where not winning is enough of a draw that even the most obsessed coaches are tempted to instruct their teams NOT to play to win the game. This subversion of what seems to be an obvious truth about sports is one of the curious and interesting things about learning how another continent organizes its sports leagues. Here are three common times when soccer clubs in Europe may be intent on something else more than on winning.
Balancing priorities
In American sports, there’s only one primary goal: win a championship. In European soccer, club teams compete for several different championships during a year, often simultaneously. A team may be playing in one or more domestic tournaments against teams within their country, an international club tournament like the Champions League or Europa League, at the same time as playing their normal league schedule against teams in their own country in their own league. This sometimes leads to conflicts of interest. If a player has a slightly injured ankle, will the coach choose to play him in a league game on Saturday knowing that there’s a Champions League game on Wednesday? What if the coach senses that the whole team is weary? Would it be better to lose in a domestic cup early on to clear the calendar for more rest days and practices? Will the benefit of rest and practice mean the difference between fifth and third place in the domestic league? Is that worth it? Which competition does the team have a better chance of winning? Which competitions are more lucrative and prestigious to do well in?
In American sports, coaches and teams don’t need to balance priorities like this, but in European club soccer, it’s a regular part of life. I wonder what a European soccer fan would think of Herm Edwards’ saying “you play to win the game?” Would they think it was funny because it’s true, funny because it’s not true, or just inaccurate and confusing?
The logic of aggregate goals
Many of the competitions that European soccer clubs take part in are tournaments. These tournaments often have a group round-robin stage and a knock-out stage, just like the World Cup. Unlike the World Cup and most other tournaments we’re used to, instead of one game against each opponent, European soccer clubs play two — one at each team’s home stadium. The team that has scored the most goals at the end of the two games (called aggregate goals) wins the matchup. The rules about breaking ties vary from tournament to tournament but they often have something to do with which team scored more goals when they were playing in their opponent’s stadium. The result of this is that teams pretty frequently go into games with goals other than simply winning. An underdog playing on the road in the first half of the two game series (often confusingly called a “tie”) may think that their best bet is to play defensively and try to leave with a 0-0 tie. A team that goes into the second game down a goal or two knows they need to not only win but to win by two or three or four goals. Likewise, a team going into a second game with the lead in aggregate goals knows they can lose the second game and still win the two-game series. They are not playing to win the game, they’re playing to win or tie or lose by a small enough margin to still win the series. Put that in your remix and smoke it!
When a tie is better than a win
Even in the most twisted of aggregate goal logic, it’s still always better to win than tie or lose but there is one situation when a tie is preferable than a win. Some tournaments, England’s FA cup being the most famous example, are set up as single elimination tournaments but, instead of overtime, if the score is tied after 90 minutes, the teams pack their bags, go home, and schedule a second game to decide who advances and who is eliminated. The second game is played in the stadium of the team that didn’t host the first game. Since the FA Cup is an association cup, open to every team in English soccer, from the rich, famous Premier league teams all the way to tiny seventh tier virtually semi-professional teams that no one has heard of, this leads to an interesting point. When a tiny team plays in a giant’s stadium, they get an enormous financial benefit from exposure, television money, and ticket sales. The bigger and more famous their host opponent, the more money they make. So, it’s often financially better for a tiny host team to tie a giant visiting team so that they get an extra game to play against the giant in the giant’s home stadium. Oh, sure, they’d love to beat the giant and move on to the next round of the tournament, but if they did that without ever playing at the giant’s stadium, especially if their potential opponent next round is not as rich or famous, they’ll really be losing out on an enormous payday. Small teams in this type of tournament have an incentive to tie, not win, games they host against storied opponents.
Understanding how scoring works is one on the fundamental elements of beginning to understand a sport. I’ve written in the past about how scoring works in football and bowling and I will certainly get to other sports in the near future.
For today, I’ve created a simple chart that you can use as a reference as you watch different sports and wonder what types of scores are or aren’t possible.
A few things that may jump out at you as you read the chart.
Football has by far the most varied and complex set of scoring options. It’s also the only sport where a team cannot score a single point. The one point extra point is only possible in conjunction with a six point touchdown.
Hockey and soccer, the two lowest scoring sports, are also the only two where scoring more than a single goal at one time is impossible.
While the mechanism for scoring a point in baseball is solitary (a player runs around the bases and touches home plate without being caught out by the defensive team, it is possible to score one, two, three, or four runs at one time.
Football and basketball both use the term “field goal” but in football it refers to kicking the ball through the uprights while in basketball it’s simply the official phrase for tossing the ball through the basket. It’s possible for both field goals to be worth three points to the team making them but in basketball a two point field goal is also ordinary.
In basketball, a field goal plus a free throw is popularly called an “and one.”
Let me know if this is useful and what other sports you’d like to see added to the chart!
I was watching Moneyball with my husband. We were curious how trading works in various sports. Can you explain the rules and how they are implemented. For example why do trades happen in the middle of the season for some sports, but not others?
Thanks, Sarah
Dear Sarah,
At it’s heart, Moneyballis a story about how careful analytical thought can provide an organization an advantage over its competitors. The team at the center of the story, the Oakland Athletics baseball team, exploited its competition mostly by making unexpectedly smart personnel decisions. In any sports league, teams have three main ways of acquiring players: by drafting players not yet in the league, by signing players who are free agents, and by trading for players. As you pointed out in your question, trades work a little differently in each major sports league in the United States. While an explanation of the exact rules in each league could easily give even the most long-winded Russian novelist a run for her money, I’ll try to lay out a few of the major differences in a few mercifully brief paragraphs below.
Hard Cap, Soft Cap, or No Cap?
One of the biggest factors affecting how players are traded in a sports league is the salary cap structure. A salary cap is a value, set before the season, against which the aggregated salaries of all the players on a team are compared to. In leagues with a hard salary cap, like the National Football League (NFL) and National Hockey League (NHL), teams are (with very, very few exceptions) not allowed to exceed this value. In leagues with a soft salary cap, like the National Basketball League (NBA) there are a host of ways that teams can exceed the value set by the salary cap. Depending on how a team manages to exceed it, they may be assigned a financial penalty but not one that hurts them on the court. Some leagues, primarily Major League Baseball (MLB), have no salary cap. In baseball, teams can pay their players as much or as little as they choose and the market will bear.
These rules have a deep impact on the trading culture of the leagues. Having a hard cap restricts the possible trades teams can make. Any potential trade that would put a team over the salary cap is a non-starter. Having no cap, like in the MLB, means that teams are free to trade players pretty much however they want. The in between world of the soft capped NBA is perhaps the most interesting. NBA trades are often more about finances than they are about basketball players. Because teams are constantly in the process of manipulating their payroll in order to position themselves best within the complicated world of soft-cap exceptions, you’ll often see basketball trades that, if you don’t understand the financial and cap implications of them, seem totally crazy. For instance, one team might seem to give a player to another team for virtually (and sometimes literally) nothing. Or a team might send a good player to a team for a player who has had a career ending injury. In those cases, what the team is getting back is not the injured player or nothing, but some element of financial flexibility.
To trade a draft pick or not?
In all four major U.S. sports leagues, there are entry drafts each year where teams get to take turns choosing players who aren’t in the league yet. In all but one, teams can and often do trade their right to choose in a future year’s draft to another team. The one league where that is (again, basically) not allowed is the MLB. Teams in the other three leagues often get themselves in trouble by mortgaging their future for their present by trading a lot of their future draft picks away. One entertaining aspect of trading draft picks is that the order during drafts is set (more or less) by how teams did in the previous season. The worse a team does, the more likely they are to have a high pick in the upcoming draft. If the team you root for has another team’s draft pick, it’s order is still set by how that team performs, so a good fan will root against that team all year to optimize the chance of its draft pick being a good one.
Do the players get a say?
This all seems fine and dandy until you stop and think about players and their families who can get uprooted at any moment and forced to move to another city. This is definitely part of the business of sports and most players don’t have much control over their careers in this way. There are a couple major exceptions. When a player negotiates his or her contract, they can negotiate a full or partial no-trade clause. A no-trade clause, sometimes abbreviated as a NTR means that a player does have some say over whether and where they get traded. A partial no-trade clause means a player has to maintain a list of some number of teams they would be willing to be traded to. A full no-trade clause means they have complete veto power over any trade. Usually only veteran or star players have the clout to negotiate these clauses into their contracts. In the MLB, players who have played for 10 years and have been with their current team for five consecutive years are automatically given no-trade clauses. This is called the 5/10 rule.
How does the sport itself affect trading?
The final major factor that goes into defining the trading culture of a league is how easy it is for players to switch teams mid-season. You mentioned in your question that some leagues don’t seem to have mid-season trades. That’s only partially true. All leagues allow for mid-season trades (at least before a trade deadline) but there is one league where they rarely ever happen. That league is the NFL. This is mostly because football is so complicated and so reliant on the close-to-perfect collaboration of lots of interconnected parts. It’s really difficult for a player from one team to move over to another team in the middle of the season, learn their plays and their terminology, and make a difference to the team’s fortunes that season. Compare that to the NBA where teams often run similar plays and the individual talent of one player (of the five on the court at one time compared to the 11 in football) can make an enormous and immediate impact. NFL trades are rare. NBA trades are quite common.
— — —
Like I said, trading is such a complicated business in sports that a post about how it works from league to league could easily morph into an unreadably long essay. I think this is a good stopping point for today. These four factors probably account for the majority of the trading differences within the four major U.S. sports leagues.
I’ve seen a lot of articles over the last day or two about the NBA trade deadline. What is a trade deadline? Why do sports leagues have them?
Thanks,
Anne
Dear Anne,
It’s hard to define what a trade deadline is without using the words trade or deadline! The trade deadline is a particular date and time after which teams in a professional sports league cannot agree to exchange players or draft picks with other teams. It’s exact date varies by league and by year but each sport has a standard for when it falls in their calendar — half-way through, three-quarters of the way through, etc. It’s an exciting time for sports fans, because, like the day of the draft, it’s a time when fans of every team in the league can be feel hope.
The NBA trade deadline in 2015 is on February 19 at 3 p.m. ET. By this date, most teams will have played between 52 and 55 of their 82 game seasons. They are around two-thirds of the way through the season. The NHL trade deadline this year is on March 2, also at 3 p.m. ET. By then, teams will have played 63 to 67 of their 82 game season. That’s a little farther along — more like 77-82% of the way through the season. On the other end of the spectrum is the NFL, which places its trade deadline right after week eight of 17 or 47% of the way through. What’s the impact of this choice? Well, teams usually decide to be more of a “buyer” meaning they are willing to sacrifice future prospects for players that would be of use this season, or “sellers” meaning they are willing to trade the present for the future, based on how well they’re doing each year. The later a trade deadline falls within a league calendar, the more sure teams will be of their chances to win a championship this season and therefore which role they should play in trades. A later trade deadline creates more and more impactful trades.
Aside from tradition, it’s not entirely clear why teams are not allowed to trade players year-round. I think there is a sense that should be cohesive units before the playoffs begin. During the playoffs, the intensity of emotion and physicality of sports increases. Team allegiance starts to feel more like a matter of identity than choice. Having unfamiliar players on your team at the start of the playoffs or even seeing players move from team to team during the playoffs would break the spell. There’s also the question of competitive balance. Teams might be willing to sacrifice a lot of their future assets on the last day of the season if they were in a position to acquire a player they think could help them make the playoffs or qualify for the next round. Sports leagues understandably may want to protect rash team owners from hurting themselves and their fans for the next five or ten years for a short-term gain.
The day of the trade deadline and the day or two before it are among the most exciting days in sports. If the team a fan roots for is terrible, by halfway to four fifths of the way through the season, its fans are probably a little sick of watching it play. At trade deadline time, the team can interest them again by making moves to get better next season. For fans of teams that seem like they have a chance to win a championship, it’s even more exciting to speculate and then witness what the team does to make itself better for its playoff run. Every fan likes to think of themselves not only as an athlete on their favorite team, the coach of their favorite team, but also the general manager too! Speculating about trades before the trade deadline is an exercise in imagination. What player from an opposing team would fit best with your favorite team? Who could your team part with without losing their essence?
Trade deadline day is covered obsessively online, primarily on Twitter, and also live on TV. Sports channels are happy to devote time during a week-day to a panel of “experts” who blab and blab all day about the trades as they are reported to the league office and the media. The excitement (I know I sound a little cynical about this, but I do get really excited too) peaks right around the time of the deadline and for a few hours later as information about trades which were executed right before the deadline comes out through the media to fans.
If your colleagues are more distracted on February 19 or March 2 than they normally are, you’ll know why!
Yesterday I was listening to the most recent episode of Bill Simmons’ BS Report podcast. This was a multi-part episode with Simmons interviewing a number of NBA figures, including Miami Heat starter Chris Bosh. Bosh was a member of the so-called Big Three in Miami along with LeBron James and Dwayne Wade, who went to four straight NBA Finals and won two. Bosh and Simmons were discussing a pivotal moment in the Heat’s 2012-13 Championship run – a last second, game tying three point shot by Ray Allen. Simmons and Bosh, sports writer and player alike were marveling at Ray Allen’s obsession with practice. Allen, they said, was perhaps the only person in the NBA who had actually practiced, over and over again, the precise footwork and body positioning required for that exact situation.
Before we get to what they said about it, let’s set the scene quickly for those of you who don’t know the moment they’re talking about. The NBA Finals is a best four out of seven game series. The San Antonio Spurs were up three games to two entering into the sixth game. After three quarters, the Spurs led 75-65. A ten point lead is not insurmountable, but it’s not easily dismissed either. The pressure had to have been enormous on the Heat. They were at home, in Miami, knowing that if they lost this game, they would lose the series and their season would be over. With nineteen seconds left, the Spurs were clinging onto a three point lead but Miami had the ball. Their best player, LeBron James, took a three point shot to tie the game but it hit the rim and did not go in. Chris Bosh, the subject of Simmons’ interview, was in the right spot and grabbed the rebound. As he caught the ball, his teammate Ray Allen who was also trying to get the rebound, was in virtually the same spot on the floor as him, in the paint, right near the basket. As Allen sees Bosh catch the ball, he quickly takes four or five running steps backwards, without turning his body from Bosh. Bosh passes Allen the ball. Allen Catches as he is running backwards, stops right in the three feet or so of room between the three-point line and the out-of-bounds line, and without touching either, he shoots the ball and makes a three point shot to tie the game. It’s an amazing play. Watch it here:
Now back to the BS Report. Here’s how the conversation went:
Chris Bosh: You never know when you’re gonna shoot a back-pedal three in the corner.
Bill Simmons: I really think it was the greatest shot ever because I think he’s the only person who would ever practice the footwork it took to go backwards and not go out of bounds. I don’t even know who else would have thought to practice that.
Bosh: That showed me that you should work on everything because you never know when you’re gonna have to use it or when you’re gonna have to go in your bag and say hey I’ve practiced this a million times and to have the body recognition and the muscle memory to actually do it.
With all respect to Simmons and Bosh, who together know a hundred times more about basketball than I do, I think their conclusion is just slightly off. What they believe they’ve learned from this is that, really, you should practice everything, just in case you need it. That’s simply not practical. You and I don’t have time to practice everything we be called on to do. As a writer, I could practice writing haiku, sonnets, long-form narrative pieces, interviews, criticism, novels, short-stories, plays, and skip codes, but I don’t have time to do that, nor would I get very good at any of it if I practiced all of it.
Ray Allen did something more clever than practice everything. He considered his own strengths as a basketball player and his role within the team and then did a better job than most at figuring out what might be required. Once he figured out what that set of activities was, he practiced them with a discipline and regularity unknown to most. That practice helped him not just in making the shot but also in identifying what he had in his repertoire that would fit the situation. The fact that he identified how he could help his team in this particular situation (run backwards to the corner so that if Bosh passes me the ball, I can shoot a shot I know I can make) is just as necessary and remarkable as the fact that he made it.
The lesson of perhaps the greatest shot in NBA history is this: identify what you might be called upon to do; practice those behaviors obsessively so that you can identify and execute at the perfect moment.
In 2015 Dear Sports Fan will be previewing the biggest sporting event of the year in each of the 50 states in the United States plus the district of Columbia. Follow along with us on our interactive 2015 US Map.
North Carolina — North Carolina vs. Duke
College Basketball — February 18, 2015 — 9 p.m. ET on ESPN. Also, March 7, 2015.
It may seem funny that we chose a regular season college basketball game as the biggest sports event in North Carolina for 2015. The thing is… we’re right. There is no bigger sporting event in North Carolina than when Duke University and the University of North Carolina play in men’s college basketball. Indeed, it would be easy to make the case that there’s no bigger college basketball game all year than when these two teams play.
It’s said that familiarity breeds contempt and Duke and North Carolina are a prime example of this. The two schools are only eight miles apart and have played against each other at least two times a year since 1920. For people who live in North Carolina, it’s hard to remain uncommitted to one side or another. You’re either a Blue Devil (Duke supporter) or you bleed Tar-Heel Blue (North Carolina’s nickname is the Tar Heels and they wear baby blue but don’t call it that… 😉 ) It’s a rivalry that cuts through race, class, and family. The Wikipedia article on the rivalry has two wonderful quotes which together paint a wonderful picture of sports antipathy. The first is from Will Blythe’s book about the rivalry, To Hate Like This Is to Be Happy Forever:
To legions of otherwise reasonable adults, it is a conflict that surpasses sports; it is locals against outsiders, elitists against populists, even good against evil… The rivalry may be a way of aligning oneself with larger philosophic ideals.
The other quote is from former U.S. Congressperson Brad Miller, who actually told an AP reporter this in 2012:
If Duke was playing against the Taliban, then I’d have to pull for the Taliban.
What’s the plot?
With Duke and North Carolina, there’s a macro plot about the rivalry as a whole and a micro plot about each edition. We’ll start macro. Like many great college rivalries, the one between Duke and North Carolina can be characterized easily as a rich private school against a public school. Duke is the elite, private school. If you know it mostly for its sports teams or don’t know much about it at all, it’s easy to not realize just how elite it is. Duke accepts only 10% of its undergraduate applicants and 4% of its graduate level applicants. It’s regularly listed as one of the top ten colleges in the country by all sorts of organizations that do that type of ranking. It has an enormous endowment — over $7 billion — and it spends a lot too — over a billion dollars in 2012 on research alone! Duke students and alumni are quite reasonably proud of their school and that pride translates for many of them into obsessive rooting for their school’s sports teams, men’s basketball first and foremost. North Carolina plays the role of the public school. The university is, indeed, a public school, as you can tell from its size — 18,000 undergrads and 12,000 graduate students compared to Duke’s 6,500 and 8,000 — and from its admission stats, which are much more forgiving than Duke’s. Other than that though, the mantle of public schools falls a little uncomfortably on North Carolina’s shoulders. Like Duke, North Carolina is sneaky elite when it comes to academics. North Carolina is consistently sited as one of the top five public universities in the country and claims its place as one of the “public ivies.”
Likewise in basketball, the similarities between the two schools are greater than their differences. They both have incredible histories of winning with no apparent plans to stop any time soon. They are number three and four in all-time wins. Together, they account for nine championships and 33 Final Four appearances. Since the beginning of the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) that they both play in, the two teams have won 79% of the regular season titles and 59% of the conference tournaments. They both win. A lot. They’ve also been lucky enough to have two of the top three most well regarded coaches of all time. Dean Smith, who just died recently, coached at North Carolina for 36 years. My favorite story about him, which illustrates his stature and character the best, is that he was so well loved and respected by his former players, including basketball greats in their own right like Michael Jordan and Larry Brown among others, that they continued to call Smith for advice on any important life decision, well into their forties, fifties, and even sixties. Smith would get calls from former players asking for his advice on engagements, house purchases, etc. Duke’s current coach, Mike Krzyzewski is the current holder of the best coach in basketball mantle. He’s coached for Duke since 1980 and, with 932 victories, is the all-time winningest coach. Although he’s rejected countless offers to coach in the NBA, he has coached the USA Basketball team for the last ten years. In a rare but touching show of inter-rivalry solidarity, many Duke fans will be wearing a shirt honoring their late rival, Dean Smith.
This year, Duke is the more highly regarded and ranked team. Duke is currently 21-3 and ranked fourth in the country. North Carolina is no slouch themselves, but they are significantly behind at 18-7 and ranked 15th. Duke is coming off five straight victories. North Carolina has actually lost three of their last four games although two of those losses came in back to back games against highly ranked Louisville and Virginia.
Who are the characters?
Roy Williams — Roy Williams is the current coach of the North Carolina Tar Heels. Williams was not the direct successor of legendary Coach Dean Smith, but he’s the first one who’s stuck. He was born and grew up in North Carolina and went to the University of North Carolina where he played freshman basketball and volunteered for the Varsity team. After graduation, he took a job as a high school coach nearby and after five years there, returned to become an Assistant Coach under Smith at UNC. He stayed for ten years before striking off on his own to become the head coach of the University of Kansas. At Kansas, Williams succeeded admirably, taking the team to four Final Fours and losing two National Championship games. Still, when the North Carolina job opened up in 2003, Williams jumped at it. In his twelve years coaching for UNC, he’s succeeded even more than at at Kansas — three Final Fours and two National Championship victories. He may still live in the shadow of his one time mentor, but he’s comfortable there.
Jahlil Okafor — For years, Duke seemed to be a hold-out against the trend of recruiting athletes of such promise that they were likely to remain in college for only the one year that is required until they turn professional and enter the NBA draft. Jahlil Okafor is exhibit A that that is no longer a reality. Okafor is likely to be the first overall pick of the NBA draft for this year. He’s listed at 6’11 and 270 pounds. Guys that big don’t grow on trees (they’re so big, perhaps it would be more likely for trees to grow on them?) and to be as polished an offensive player as Okafor is extraordinarily rare. Okafor is deadly when he gets the ball around the basket. Watch for Duke to try to get the ball to him close to the basket so he can overpower or out-skill his defender. Okafor’s only weakness is that he’s not a great defender. North Carolina may try to attack him on that end and hope that the refs call a few fouls on him, forcing Duke to limit his playing time.
Who’s going to win?
Duke. Duke should win. They have the best player on the court and the best coach on the sidelines. It is a rivalry though and rivalries bring out strange performances, especially from college kids, so who really knows?
All-Star games are not always a highlight of a sports season. In fact, they’re often so mundane that people wonder why sports leagues even bother to have All-Star games. The NBA All-Star weekend is sometimes an exception to that rule. It’s a star-studded, moderately action packed weekend of events that has controversially been dubbed “Black Thanksgiving” by David Aldridge in a CNN article which seems to have been removed from their archives. In the article, Aldridge quoted Todd Boyd, a professor of critical studies at USC as saying that “NBA All-Star weekend has turned into a celebration of African American culture.” Whether you’re black, red, yellow, brown, or white, a basketball fan or a non-sports fan, a fashionista or music fan, there’s probably something for you to enjoy this weekend. This guide should help you decide what parts of the weekend will be most or least interesting.
Celebrity Game
Friday, February 13 at 7 p.m. ET on ESPN.
What is this?
It’s a basketball game played by a very strange mix of musicians, actors, general celebrities, retired NBA players, and current WNBA players. It’s… sometimes fun to watch. As opposed to the actual All-Star game, the people playing in this game usually do really want to win. They were chosen in part because they are competitive, entertaining, and at least kind of know how to play basketball.
Who plays in it?
The game has been dominated (no joke, dominated) over the past few years by Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan. He’s missing this year, so I’m most excited to see the following three people play in the celebrity game:
Paralympic athlete and former high school basketball player Blake Leeper. Leeper was born with both knees missing below the knee and has been using prosthetics since he was nine years old.
Robert Pera, the owner of the Memphis Grizzlies. At 36, Pera is one of the world’s youngest billionaires. I think this is probably the first time an NBA owner has played during All-Star weekend.
Mo’ne Davis!!! That’s right! The first girl to record a win (and pitch a shut-out) in the Little League World Series is going to be on the court! My guess is that she’ll mop the floor with most of the players she faces. After all, at 13, she’s already on a high school varsity basketball team and has talked publicly of wanting to play in college for the University of Connecticut.
Watch this if…?
You like watching celebrities make fools of themselves trying desperately to win a basketball game while awkwardly trying to play it off as not mattering to them. That makes it sound less fun than it actually is. This game is often really enjoyable to watch. The only thing I don’t like about it is the inclusion of active WNBA players who seem unsure of whether or not to treat it like a real game or not.
Rising Stars Challenge
Friday, February 13 at 9 p.m. ET on TNT.
What is this?
A showcase for players in their first two years in the NBA. In past years, this has been organized as rookies vs. second-year players. This year it’s going to be USA players versus players from the rest of the world.
Who plays in it?
There are so many exciting young players in this game. The U.S. team features Shabazz Muhammed, Trey Burke, and Victor Oladipo. The World team is even more exciting, with players like Giannis Antetokounmpo from Greece, Gorgui Dieng from Senegal, Dante Exum from Australia, Nikola Mirotic from Montenegro, Dennis Schroder from Germany, and Andrew Wiggins from Canada. I expect the World team to kill the U.S. team.
Watch this if…?
Watch this if you like basketball! Seriously, I think this will be the best pure basketball game all weekend. Also, if you like youth and enthusiasm.
NBA Fashion Show
Saturday, February 14 at 6:30 p.m. ET on TNT.
What is this?
LeBron James is producing a fashion show with fellow NBA players as runway models. Each of the eight models will show one boardroom outfit, one game-attire outfit, and one for clubbing. Eight players will start and it seems like after each outfit, half the remaining players will be eliminated until only one wins.
Who plays in it?
I can’t find all eight names but at least James Harden, Klay Thompson, Chandler Parsons, DeMarcus Cousins and Zach LaVine will be taking part in this modeling competition.
Watch this if…?
You like fashion and/or comedy. With TNT producing this, you can bank on there being some comedic commentary from Charles Barkley and co. Jokes aside, this will probably be a legitimate fashion show — some of these players treat post-game interviews as fashion shows, so they will certainly be prepared for this.
All-Star Saturday Night
Saturday, February 14 at 8:30 p.m. ET on TNT.
What is this?
A basketball skills competition. The two main events are the three-point shooting competition and the slam dunk competition. In the three-point competition, players have one minute to make up to 25 shots from five points along the three-point arc. This is the most hotly contested competition every year but especially this year when the field of competitors is deep and unusually good. The slam dunk competition is more prestigious but less competitive, perhaps because it is judged qualitatively. Its other issue is that, unlike in the 1980s and 90s, the biggest NBA stars no longer compete in the dunk contest. The other two events of the night are a shooting competition with teams of three made up of an NBA player, a retired NBA player, and a WNBA player and an obstacle course competition.
Who plays in it?
This year, four players will be in the dunk contest: Giannis Antetokounmpo, Victor Oladipo, Zach LaVine, and Mason Plumlee. LaVine is the favorite to win but it’s hard to bet against a guy (Antetokounmpo) whose nickname is the Greek Freak. In the three-point contest, Kyle Korver and teammates Steph Curry and Klay Thompson are the three favorites but don’t sleep on James Harden, a legitimate MVP candidate this year.
Watch this if…?
You enjoy admiring people show off unrealistic physical skills.
D-League All-Star Game
Sunday, February 15 at 2:30 p.m. ET on NBA TV.
What is this?
The D-League is the NBA’s minor league. Players in this game will absolutely see this as a chance to audition in front of tons of NBA executives and scouts. Did I say earlier that something else would be the most competitive game of the weekend? I was wrong — this will be! There’s also a D-League version of the slam dunk contest at half-time.
Who plays in it?
The D-League is stocked with mostly former college players who haven’t caught on with an NBA team yet. This year’s most recognizable player will be Seth Curry who went to Duke and whose brother is NBA All-Star Steph Curry. Their father will also be a contestant as the retired NBA player in a shooting threesome. It’s a family affair!
Watch this if…?
You’re an NBA junkie who roots for a bad team. Think of it as scouting for your team!
NBA All-Star Game
Sunday, February 15 at 8:30 p.m. ET on TNT.
What is this?
This is the All-Star game itself. It’s usually a wide open offensive exhibition until half-way through the fourth quarter when players tighten the defense up a bit and actually try to win the game for bragging rights and for the extra $25,000 per person purse.
Who plays in it?
You can find the full rosters on Wikipedia. If these players were mixed up and then two teams created to be even, I think perhaps only one player from the Eastern team would crack the top ten. The Western team is so much better and deeper but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll win.
Watch this if…?
Watch this if you enjoy pomp, circumstance, alley-oops, and thunderous dunks. Watch it if you want to see the greatest NBA players of our day break a sweat playing something that vaguely resembles basketball.
with my husband. We were curious how trading works in various sports. Can you explain the rules and how they are implemented. For example why do trades happen in the middle of the season for some sports, but not others?
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