It’s been a quiet week, and I’m not convinced that’s because newsworthy things aren’t happening. Yes, it’s a slow part of the sports calendar, but an important variable in the news equation is how much time the media has on its hands. It’s not the only variable—if I were to propose an equation for news volume, its most basic form would be a logarithmic function including two variables (media time–on–hands being one, newsworthy happenings being the other)—but it’s a key variable, and with sports media largely off this week for a summer holiday, things which might otherwise gain traction are poking along silently instead. I’m curious about how this has changed over the last twenty years, from the heyday of SportsCenter until today. The internet has allowed us media grand flexibility in terms of the quantity of coverage we produce, whereas in the newspaper age there were physical constraints and in the SportsCenter age there were time constraints. The internet is, for many intents, limitless, which is why these notes are so damn wordy, especially today. My incentives to aggressively edit are weak.
Anyway, quiet week. Partially because the media’s on vacation, partially because it’s a quiet week, partially because Twitter made itself such a crutch for journalism that it became a prosthetic limb and we’re all catching our balance as it finally really does start to bend and sway.
The biggest ongoing stories at the moment are conference realignment, Damian Lillard, and the Cincinnati Reds.
We love talking about the first of those, but there have been absolutely no surprises on this favored front since we last spoke. The latest news is the least surprising of all: The Pac-12’s leaders reset expectations yet again for when a media rights deal might hit the table, pushing the expected date back until August. We’re still in any–minute mode there, as we’ve been for the last twelve months and six days, but either this is not the minute or no one receiving leaks from Arizona cares enough to go to the trouble to report on them before Monday.
We hate talking about the third of those, because the ascent of the Reds makes us rather angry as Cubs fans, both complicating our own cautious hopes for contention in this shitpuddle of an NL Central and demonstrating that getting really good really fast might not be as hard as our guy Jed Hoyer makes it out to be. This last bit isn’t to take anything away from the Reds—what they’re doing is impressive and were our rooting interests not directly affected we would be fawning all over them—but they, the Orioles, and last year’s Mariners have all pulled rabbits out of the hat while we’ve dutifully told fellow Cubs fans that rabbits aren’t that plentiful. It must be Easter, because there are bunnies hopping around everywhere and we have egg all over our face.
We’ve been meaning to talk about the second of those, and the second we shall talk about today.
There are two categories to the Damian Lillard intrigue right now. The first category has more to do with the Blazers. The second category has more to do with the Heat.
The Blazers made two very good draft picks a long time ago. They drafted Damian Lillard in 2012. They drafted CJ McCollum in 2013. Each was a lottery pick, but each came rather unheralded, starring for Weber State and Lehigh, respectively, two schools which can more reasonably be called low-majors than mid-majors in the college basketball landscape. Unfortunately for Portland, those two good picks were never, in the absence of more good roster-building, enough, and the other necessary good roster-building never came. Though they made the playoffs in every season before the one in which McCollum was traded, the Blazers never finished better than third place in the West, and they never won a game in the conference finals, only winning four playoff series in their eight straight appearances. They were better than the caricature of the current day Bulls, a team oscillating around 8th place, but in the present NBA, oscillating around 5th place isn’t much more useful, especially if the oscillations are as tight as they were for Lillard & McCollum, LLP. The Blazers never found the complimentary pieces Lillard and McCollum needed, and when the game had run its course, McCollum was shipped off to New Orleans in early 2022.
Now, the Blazers are tasked with shipping off the first name in that partnership, their franchise icon, and the obvious objective within that task is to maximize their return. Prior to Lillard’s trade request, the Blazers’ situation was one in which they had one of the league’s ten or twenty best players and therefore needed to find one or two more, depending on the quality of the surrounding cast. Now, the Blazers need to build the whole house from scratch. Jerami Grant and Anfernee Simons can be part of the final vision, and Shaedon Sharpe and Scoot Henderson each has the upside to be a Lillard-quality figure in the franchise’s center if all works out perfectly, but Sharpe has equivalent downside and for as good as Henderson might be, the “might” word carries a lot of weight with a man born in 2004. In the best-case scenario, the Blazers only need one more top-50 guy in a few years, but with Lillard off the table to be that guy, this trade is an exercise in finding him, and in finding his possible cohort if Sharpe and/or Henderson doesn’t work out. He doesn’t have to be a top-50 player right now, but the Blazers need someone who can be that player in some year like 2026. They could go after one guy, they could go after a whole bunch of guys and picks, but however they shape their search, this is a crucial trade for the future of the Portland Trail Blazers. The Blazers are making a very important trip to the trade market.
Unfortunately for the Blazers, Lillard only wants them to shop at one store in that market, meaning the Blazers either have to trade with the Heat or find another trade partner who can not only give the Blazers what they want but can also convince Lillard to play for them, rather than holding out. Lillard doesn’t normally have a diva reputation, but he does have the power to hold out, and he’s reportedly making clear that he wants to play for the Miami Heat. This makes a three-team trade rather likely. It also brings us to the Heat side of the intrigue.
In the wake of the McCollum trade last season, as I understand it, Lillard took on an even greater reputation than he already had as a loyal lone wolf, an antiDurant who wanted to win the old school way. Again, he already had this reputation, and though McCollum didn’t have a flaky reputation, McCollum was no Damian Lillard. Lillard was and is better than McCollum, Lillard was in Portland first, Lillard’s a year older than his former wingman and is tasked positionally with doing things which require more from his body, making his relative age even older. They were different entities, with McCollum always best-suited to be the third or fourth or fifth piece on a contender while Lillard could conceivably be the top dog, or at least part of a two-man partnership.
Reputation isn’t everything, and reputation can change quickly. (As if to illustrate this, Lillard’s has taken a hit over the last 24 hours as reports of his holdout threats have emerged, though impressions of how big a hit differ and appear correlated to how much time NBA fans spend scrolling through Twitter.) If, for Lillard, this decision has to do with his legacy, he’s trying to thread the needle to where he can put himself in a position to win a title while not going down as a ring-chaser. By leaving Portland, he avoids consignment to something well shy of Charles Barkley’s fate, but he has to do two things at the same time: First, he has to avoid a situation where he’s a clear third or fourth piece, keeping himself from becoming a Chris Bosh or a Ray Allen in the eyes of history. Second, he has to avoid a situation where he starts bouncing around and still doesn’t get a ring, becoming a Vince Carter or a Tracy McGrady. None of these five guys—Barkley, Bosh, Allen, Carter, and McGrady—are bad figures to be compared to, but only two of the five won any titles, and they were arguably the worst two (the Allen vs. Carter and Allen vs. McGrady debates are fascinating, but they also illustrate some of our point here—Ray Allen was always an accessory). Lillard isn’t as good as Barkley was. He isn’t going to go down as one of the greatest basketball players of all time. What he can do, though, is win a title or two as a main character, something which will keep him strides ahead of Vince Carter on the invisible all-time leaderboard (and the NBA 100 roster in 23 years, but that’s more wishy-washy). Ideally for him, he can do that while preserving his junkyard dog reputation. Is this how Lillard’s approaching the situation? I’m not sure. It’s possible he simply views Miami as the basketball situation which makes the most sense. But if it’s a question of legacy, Miami makes even more sense, because Miami’s ethos matches Lillard’s reputation.
The Heat are unique among NBA franchises. While the Spurs and the Warriors and now the Nuggets have ridden environment and philosophy to titles, the Heat are the only ones who go around proselytizing their own capital-C Culture. Of the four, only the Spurs and the Heat put culture first, and of those two, only the Heat say they do. Of course the Spurs put it first as well, but the Spurs’ culture is more about businesslike things like ball movement. The Heat’s culture, Heat Culture, is about being really fucking intense. Which brings us to this reader email from June 13th, the day after Miami lost the clinching game of the NBA Finals:
Dear Joe –
I know ‘amateur’ basketball is more your forte, but I have a simple professional basketball question for you, with an important follow-up.
Why would an NBA free-agent go play for any team other than the Miami Heat? Are those that don’t just huge pussies?
Granted, I view the Heat through two prisms. The first is as a dad. And this team is basically an organizational manifestation of a basketball dad’s teaching points to his son. To paraphrase Jimmy G. Buckets, the Heat have some dogs, and they love it.
There’s not much to say that hasn’t already been written. They rise to the moment, they out-perform their talent, their sum is greater than their parts. yada yada. Their near-octogenarian president challenges sportswriters to push-up contests. Their best player went from homeless youth to hall-of-famer. They’re a photo-negative of the Celtics. They’re just so cool.
The second prism is as a jaded Bulls fan. The Bulls are the organization who traded Jimmy G. Buckets after he criticized his coach for not being enough of a hard-ass. Think about that!
So maybe the deal, then, when players want to take their talents elsewhere is that they are just cowards. Maybe the conditioning program is too much of a pain. Maybe the team-first attitude is too much for (humbly) some of the best players in the world.
What do you think? What’s the deal with all these wimps? I anxiously await your response.
Texas Mike
Chicago, IL
It’s not an unfair question. We’re going to answer it in a roundabout way.
The mandate for NBA players from the public, as I understand NBA players to understand it, based on their actions, is to win a title if they want to be considered great, and to do that in the most difficult way possible if they want to maximize the respect they receive. Kevin Durant and LeBron James have marks against them because midway through their careers, having failed to win titles in their original situation, they joined with other stars. Notably for this conversation, James joined the Heat, the paragon of hardassery, and yet he’ll still get shit for it until the day he dies. So, the team for whom a player wins a title doesn’t seem to matter to us as much as the player’s approach to joining that team. LeBron James needed help, and he ditched Cleveland to go find that help. Kevin Durant needed help, and he ditched Oklahoma City to go find that help. Damian Lillard needs help, and he’s ditching Portland to go find that help, and we’re going to be ok with it?
A big part of the distinction here is the difference between a player of Lillard’s quality and a player of LeBron’s or Durant’s. Lillard was never anywhere near as good as those two were at each player’s respective peak. We don’t care as much about what he does because he’s not an all-time great, and going off of that, he wasn’t good enough to singlehandedly elevate his team to championship periphery anyway.
Another big part is how we think about the Heat. At the time James joined them, Heat Culture was a lesser-known concept than it is now. The appearance, at the time, was that James wanted the easiest path to win a title, but there was a lesser public understanding of how grueling the Heat would, as a franchise, make that path. In their earnestness to not miss their moment, the Heat would take no shortcuts. The Heat would put LeBron James through the same wringer as Norris Cole. Ten years later, we have a much better understanding of who the Heat are, and we have a much better understanding of who Erik Spoelstra is, and with no current individual player as good as Dwyane Wade (or LeBron, once he got there) was at that time, the Heat’s identity has further shifted in the direction of their culture and away from the direction of talent.
It’s easy, then, to oversimplify this. Yes, LeBron James was taking on a harder path than he first appeared to be taking, but he was still taking the easiest path to a championship that we could, at the time, conceive. For as much better as Lillard would make Miami—and judging by both betting markets’ reaction to the prospective trade and our own “Core Score,” Lillard would put Miami right alongside the Bucks in pure talent, trailing only the Nuggets, Celtics, and Warriors—there are easier paths to winning a title for Lillard than joining the Miami Heat. Specifically, there is the Boston Celtics path. Lillard doesn’t want to play for the Celtics. He wants to play for the Heat.
This all signifies that ultimately we’re collectively treating unique situations as unique, and at its core, we want players to challenge themselves, and we want players to respect the concept that winning a title should be harder than managing to join the best roster. We didn’t like what LeBron did. We didn’t like what Durant did. We like that Giannis has stuck with Milwaukee. If Damian Lillard is going to leave Portland, we want him to go somewhere which fits his perceived character, and somewhere where it still won’t be easy to win a championship. The intersection of those mandates is Miami. Some might not like how he’s going about it, but had the holdout reports not leaked and had Lillard not tweeted cryptically, few would have noticed. I’m not sure we’ll care at all about those pieces of the story in ten months.
It’s possible, getting back to the emailer’s question, that we wouldn’t feel this way about other players going to Miami. It’s possible that if a player like Durant or a player like James Harden joined the Heat, we would roll our eyes even if it worked, saying they’d gone to an organization capable of making them bear down so that they didn’t have to learn to bear down themselves. It’s a stretch, but it’s the question we have to ask, because if it isn’t true, if we’d respect anyone going to the Heat at this point, it does kind of mean that everyone trying to go somewhere other than Miami is, in a way, making the wimpy move.
Of course, it isn’t quite true. Right now, we’d respect anyone going to the Heat, but part of that is that the Heat aren’t that good, reigning conference champs though they may be. It’s not an easy path to title contention right now. If Lillard were there, alongside Jimmy Butler? That would change. That would be different. The Heat would be closer to a title, and someone like Anthony Davis forcing a trade to Miami would look worse for doing it. Right now, the Heat are untalented enough to be a justifiable path. If they were better? We wouldn’t, as we didn’t with LeBron, care how hard they make their players work.
There’s something to be said, too, for doing the hard part yourself. If we look up in ten years and Luka Dončić has created a four-title dynasty for himself in Dallas, we’ll respect that more than if Lillard somehow wins four in Miami. At the end of the day, we want players to be doing the noblest thing that can reasonably leave them with a chance at a title. Portland had passed the stage of believability for Lillard. He can go to Miami and we will be ok with it.
This is, we must note, only applicable to stars. For role players, if the goal is to maximize one’s capacity as a player and try to win a title, there’s no better place to go than Miami. There are other considerations—location, family, playing time—but in a lot of senses, Miami’s the place for NBA players to make the most of themselves right now, and some that don’t really are probably dodging the grind. I wouldn’t call them wimps for it, myself, but I would say that there’s a type of player right now who really does not want to work for an employer like the Miami Heat, and that this is the type of player turning a lot of people off of the NBA.
So, in sum:
- Damian Lillard seems likely to get a pass for ring-chasing by going to Miami, partially because he isn’t a top-ten player and partially because the Heat aren’t loaded and partially because the Heat are a bunch of dogs, and Damian Lillard is known for being a bit of a dog himself, so we’re down with dogs getting together with other dogs.
- If Lillard does join Miami, the roster will be too good for other stars to join without looking like they’re taking the easy way out. Joel Embiid, for example, would look soft if he tried to force his way to the Heat, and Lillard and Jimmy Butler might look soft by extension. (It appears via Trade Machine that it could work salary cap-wise, for those wondering, if the Heat gave up all three of Tyler Herro, Bam Adebayo, and Kyle Lowry.)
- Ultimately, we care about these things on an individual basis.
The Cubs’ Week, the Start of All-Star Weekend
As was said at the beginning, the Cubs’ situation has been complicated by the Reds. It was also complicated by that possibly jetlag-induced terrible run against the Phillies and Guardians, but the Reds are an equally large factor. The Cubs should, right now, be six games out of first place in the Central, treading water near bumbling Pittsburgh and Cincinnati. Instead, they’re eight games back of a surging young team.
Still, the series in Milwaukee was electric, featuring two of the franchise’s best wins in recent memory on Tuesday and Wednesday, the first nearly another chapter in a recent run of crushing losses. Now, the team goes to New York, facing an intimidating trio of Carlos Rodón, Gerrit Cole, and Domingo Germán with neither Marcus Stroman nor Justin Steele scheduled to pitch. Had the team won yesterday, the gaps in both the division race and the Wild Card standings would still be daunting, but the loss yesterday gives a last-stand feeling to this short road trip, and Dansby Swanson is not in the lineup again tonight. In some hopeful spinning, Rodón is making his season debut tonight, Cole has outperformed his xERA and FIP this year, and Germán is not the model of consistency, but the Cubs need a lot from some combination of Jameson Taillon, Drew Smyly, Kyle Hendricks, and run support.
If we say the Cubs need to be in contention a week before the deadline in order to avoid selling, they probably need a path forward like the following:
- The Cubs go 9–4 against the Yankees (3, away), Red Sox (3, home), Nationals (3, home), and Cardinals (4, home), climbing to 49–50 overall.
- The Reds go 5–8 against the Brewers (3 away, 3 home), the Giants (4, home), and the Diamondbacks (4, home), dropping to 54–47 overall.
- The Brewers go 5–7 against the Reds (3 home, 3 away), the Phillies (3, away), and the Braves (3, home), dropping to 52–48 overall.
Even this wouldn’t leave the Cubs in a great position—they’d be four out of the Central and heavily reliant on swoons by the Mets, Padres, and Pirates to keep them in the Wild Card race—but this is probably the kind of thing the Cubs need out of the immediate future. It’s a bleak situation, and we might be talking a lot next week about what the Cubs could be able to get for their expiring assets, plus what the organizational fallout should be for what many feel is a disappointing season (we, of course, haven’t been very disappointed, but we’re outliers on this).
In the meantime, All-Star Week starts tonight with the HBCU Swingman Classic, a game named for Ken Griffey Jr. and designed to showcase and celebrate HBCU talent. The game’s at 10:30 PM Eastern Time and it’ll be broadcast on MLB Network. Tomorrow, the Futures Game will be played at 7:00 PM ET and streamed on Peacock. On Sunday, the first day of the draft will take place beginning at 7:00 PM ET. That’ll be broadcast on MLB Network and streamed on ESPN+. More, of course, Monday and Tuesday, but we plan to talk again before then. Have a good weekend, everybody.
