This is a blog about basketball. Specifically the Dallas Mavericks, Memphis Grizzlies and Denver Nuggets. It’s also a blog about America, but it’s mainly a blog about the NBA.
A couple months ago on a seemingly innocent Saturday night, the NBA’s earth shifted below our feet. The Dallas Mavericks, recently sold by billionaire Mark Cuban to the Las Vegas-based Adelson and Durmont billionaires, traded away their generational superstar Luka Doncic at just 25 years old. If you had staged a thought exercise prior to that Saturday night for which player you could put on the NBA trade market and command the largest return, Luka would probably be second or third on that list after the space alien in San Antonio.
Instead of a historic return that could create the deepest team in the league, Dallas basically swapped Luka for Anthony Davis, a fantastic player who can anchor your defense against any team that doesn’t have Nikola Jokic on it. People plugged this trade into video games and it got laughed out of their living rooms. Shocking doesn’t even begin to explain Dallas sending one of the NBA’s lone supercomputers to the Los Angeles Lakers who already had an ageless supercomputer looking for one more championship run. It was such a preposterous deal, the exact kind of fake trade you see on the braindead basketblogger aggregator accounts that define NBA Twitter, that Shams Charania, basically the voice of God when it comes to confirming NBA trades, had to post again that the trade Dallas agreed to was real and he was not hacked.
Furthering this late-season insanity were the Memphis Grizzlies firing one of the best and most established young coaches in the league in Taylor Jenkins just a couple weeks before the playoffs. Jenkins is the winningest coach in franchise history and had built the Grizzlies into perhaps the West’s second-most consistent contender behind the next team who has lost their damn minds, and for whatever reason, the folks in charge in Memphis decided that just as their potential championship run was about to begin, they should cut its legs out from underneath it.
The reporting is that Memphis’s chief decision-makers did not believe Jenkins was the coach who could get them to the mountaintop, but that is an excuse to fire him after the season, not fire him now. If there is anything to be learned from the recent teams who reached the mountaintop, continuity is very important in the modern NBA. You cannot microwave a championship anymore, the death of the big three era has proven that (and LeBron might be the only guy who could do it anyway). There is no evidence to suggest that replacing your coach has any immediate benefits in a world where contenders are constructed five years at a time, yet that is ownership’s explanation behind the inspiration for this blog.
Fuck You Stan Kroenke
I am aghast. Agog. Flabbergasted. Chagrined. Shaken to my basketball core. The Denver Nuggets, owned by Stan Kroenke (seen in the titular photo scowling through the greatest moment in franchise history), fired head coach Michael Malone today, the man who spent the last decade helping to create the greatest player alive and doing what no one else could in 47 years of mile high city misery. Malone was given one title defense. That’s it. This is the latest in-season firing in NBA history.
Before Malone came to town, the Denver Nuggets existed as a punchline who rose up from the dead once every ten or twenty years to lose to the Los Angeles Lakers’ newest generational superstar on national TV. The journey that he dragged Nikola Jokic, Jamal Murray and the city of Denver through this past decade was unlike any sports experience I have had. He did what you’re supposed to do, and built slowly and deliberately until the Nuggets had a planet-destroying juggernaut in the Murray-Jokic two-man game that the NBA still has not figured out. Two players who were a negative infinity on defense in their early years became usable to good defenders, all because Michael Malone repeatedly said that was the only way they would ever win a championship, and they listened to him and proved him right.
Malone arrived in Denver and immediately called us out on being underwhelming basketball fans when his job security was at its lowest, and he turned the Nuggets into the most expensive ticket in town these days. He changed basketball forever in Denver and inspired millions of t-shirts saying, “take that L with you on the way out,” directed to our town’s many transplants who had always been able to get the last word on our floundering franchise. Not anymore. Culture is one of sports’ most over-used words but changing it was Malone’s ultimate impact on Denver.
Now the man who is the answer to the “who’s your daddy” chants my city directs at the Los Angeles Lakers is gone. Right before the playoffs in the NBA’s best player’s greatest season yet. A championship window seemingly slammed shut in a press release. Malone is perhaps the greatest Nugget ever, but Pat Riley being an all-time great coach for two franchises proves that eventually the reaper comes for all NBA coaches.
But why now? Why is this happening to two teams who have been models of stability in the West the past several years? (Ja Morant’s continued adventures with guns excluded) Oklahoma City are clearly the favorites in the West this year, but they are far from a juggernaut, and the average age of their roster is like 17 years old. If Dallas, Denver or Memphis had emerged from the West with the team they had earlier this season, no one would have been that surprised.
But like voters in November, all three teams chose to blow good, but not great, things all to hell right before the playoffs. What possible reason could Dallas have for trading Doncic for that return? If the argument is that they are worried about his calf and don’t want to have a Joel Embiid situation with a giga-max contract sitting in the trainer’s room in the future, fine, make it someone else’s problem. But to trade him for astonishingly below market value that basically amounts to just Anthony Davis, a man who has never proven he can stay healthy, is some nonsensical bullshit.
Dallas has all the hallmarks of a private equity takeover. Las Vegas is bringing the A’s to the city in 2028 and it’s no secret that they want to join the ranks of four-team towns with a basketball team too. This is the ugly business of sports, and the best reason that you would do something so illogical and alienating to the fanbase is to make it easier to uproot the team from the community later on. Dallas has a cold, cruel logic to it that America learned all too well during the 2012 private equity-laden presidential campaign. I think I get what’s going on down there.
But in Memphis and Denver? What the fuck? The reporting around Memphis seems to boil down to vibes, while Denver at least has some hindsight currently taking root as the shock is wearing off. But the core commonality amongst all three basketball franchises self-immolating this year is that the ultimate decision-makers very clearly reasserted themselves, timing and circumstances for everyone else be damned. Firing a coach is the classic “do something” button that owners press when they don’t know what to do and want to make it seem like they do.
Why Malone Is Gone
It’s very possible the 2023 NBA Champions are a sinking ship. I have wondered this from time to time this year after watching their championship defense run out of gas in my sports weekend from hell last spring. Michael Malone would not be the first championship head coach to get tuned out by his players, and he will not be the last. This quote from his post-game press conference a couple weeks ago after a loss looks a lot more salient than it did at the time when it seemed like he was just venting.
“It was a brutally honest message. The guys that are full of shit won’t hear it. You know they’ll say, ‘coach is tripping’ and guys that uh, maybe do really care, will…they’re not gonna go back and watch their minutes cuz nobody watches their minutes, nobody watches film. We’ll have to show them the film.”
This was probably happening anyway. Nuggets General Manager Calvin Booth was fired too, and frankly that was deserved. Perhaps he was hamstrung by Kroenke refusing to pay the NBA’s new complicated second apron tax, but the choice to spend Nikola Jokic’s prime years experimenting with a bunch of older college players taken in the second round instead of, well, spending money on NBA players will have likely robbed the Nuggets of at least one more NBA Finals appearance in this blogger’s mind. Maybe they were always destined to be a transitional champion to the Boston Celtics’ three-point barrage that has made Jokic’s two-point heavy game something of a relic, but choosing to pull the plug on a decade-long championship-level project on the precipice of the playoffs is so insane it defies words.
If the Nuggets aren’t watching film at this point this close to the playoffs, they’re not going to watch film tomorrow no matter who tells them to do it. If the logic is that this team was destined to blow up in the playoffs, let it blow up in the playoffs and live an honorable death running out of gas like so many championship runs before them. Malone earned it.
This is simply a dishonorable thing to do. In all three cases.
Billionaires Have No Honor
We do not own our beloved sports teams. Billionaires use our love of them to force us to pay for their stadiums, lest they flee to another city, and my basketball and hockey teams’ billionaire benefactor proved he is more than willing to do that by robbing St. Louis of the Rams and taking them to Los Angeles. Now Stan and Jose Kroenke are reasserting control over the Nuggets right before one of the best chances in team history to win a championship, and I cannot help but wonder what fresh hell awaits the Colorado Avalanche on the other side of Kroenke’s portfolio in the NHL.
This is why in my proposed fire your boss agenda I seriously argued that socialists should lead with socializing sports because of the simple math that the number of people who hate their teams’ owners vastly outnumbers people who like the Democratic Party or socialism. Imagine telling Mavericks fans that they could do what their supposed good billionaire Mark Cuban did not, and stop this hostile takeover of their franchise by an ownership group from another city. Sports likes to think it has siloed itself off into a safe space from the rest of the world, but in a world owned by billionaires, nothing is safe from the macro forces they drive.
We are living through the elite backlash to the worker power gained during the pandemic. Everyone realized that computer jobs can be done from anywhere in 2020, and much of the capitalist class decided that meant they had to back the end of democracy. Now capital across the country is worried that their very expensive commercial restate contracts are sinking their balance sheets, which is the primary pressure point in the return-to-work tension. The regional banking system that constructed itself on the back of commercial real estate furthers this freakout, as there are economies of scale dependent on us being in the office. This dynamic taking place across the country of employers reasserting themselves is more than just about capital’s power over labor. Not everything is Marxism.
But when it comes to these select people who can buy anything on planet earth (except something to fill the growing void in their souls), it’s ultimately always about power. We are living through an era right now where a ketamine-soaked billionaire has purchased the United States government and is setting scientific research back at least a generation because he can. A billionaire con man is wrecking the global economy because he doesn’t understand what tariffs are, and billionaires lined up on inauguration day to kiss his ring. Everywhere you look, a select few capitalists are truly the ones in power, and from basketball to politics, they are making an obvious effort to remind everyone who’s really in charge.
GET SPLINTER RIGHT IN YOUR INBOX
The Truth Hurts
