The Five: Shaking the Tree (2016)

In an increasingly unstable reality, NBA teams are suddenly blowing everything up.

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Source: https://www.facebook.com/ClutchPoints/posts/the-nuggets-have-fired-head-coach-michael-malone-and-gm-calvin-booth-and-the-nba/1044137004249977/

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I.

In the early stages of the social media-driven tabloid era of professional basketball, the firing of David Blatt as the head coach of the Cleveland Cavaliers came as a shock. The Cavs, at that moment in early 2016, had won 30 games and lost 11; their projected win totals in the preseason were roughly 56.5, and they were on pace to exceed it. They had the best player in the world, LeBron James, on their roster, and while they had recently been blown out by the Golden State Warriors, they won their last two games before Blatt lost his job. Never before had the coach of such a formidable team been summarily fired in the middle of an otherwise successful season, and while it turned out there were complex interpersonal reasons for the dismissal, it was still an utterly bizarre turn of events.

But nine years later, something even stranger is happening in the NBA. The Luka Doncic trade felt like a shocking anomaly when it occurred, but it increasingly feels like it was only the beginning of a chaotic era when nothing is stable and no one is safe.

Move Fast and Break Things (2012)

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II.

Four years ago, a man named Josh Kroenke got swept up in the most ill-informed decision in the modern history of English soccer. The attempt to form a European super league out of the top clubs of the English Premier League was so despised by the fans that they formed an uprising and managed to get the decision reversed. That led Kroenke—whose father owns Arsenal, one of the most popular sides in England—to awkwardly attempt to explain the decision after it imploded, given that his father Stan had owned the team for years and had hardly engaged with the fans at all.

I will admit, I don’t really know anything about Josh Kroenke except that he is the scion of a very wealthy family that owns a variety of sports teams, and also that he says things like this: “I've always preached that we need to figure out a way to get our different groups together because it is apples, oranges and watermelon but it's all fruit to fruit.”

But then the other day, Kroenke—whose family also owns the NBA’s Denver Nuggets—made another curious decision, apparently alongside his father: With the Nuggets just days away from the playoffs, he decided to fire both his coach, Mike Malone, and his general manager, Calvin Booth. This took place two years after the Nuggets won an NBA title. It was the first time a playoff team had chosen to make such a bold move this close to the playoffs, and it came just weeks after the Memphis Grizzlies—also a playoff team—fired their own head coach, Taylor Jenkins. And that came just a few months after the Doncic trade. And it was enough to make you wonder if the people in charge had started to lose their grip on reality.

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III.

The best explanation I’ve read for this weirdness comes from my Substack-mate and former Five Thirty Eighter

Neil Paine

. (And if you’re not reading Neil on a regular basis, you should be.) Neil broke down all this seeming madness through an analytical lens, and surmised that perhaps the league’s sudden transition from parity to top-heaviness has led to a frantic state of neurosis. Neil’s analysis showed that just three teams—the Celtics, the Thunders and the Cavaliers—hold an 82 percent chance of winning the title this year, and in response, it seemed quite possible the rest of the league has gotten kind of crazy in an attempt to upend the status quo:

So teams may now be trying to shake the snow-globe, deciding that the best strategy in such a top-heavy year is to embrace variance: Fire the coach at the literal last minute. Trade the franchise player. Blow everything up. The devil you don’t know is better than the one you do.

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IV.

This would appear to be the rationale Josh Kroenke used to explain the odd timing of his decision to fire both his coach and his general manager. Things were not working well enough, and because Josh Kroenke is who he is—a 44-year-old dude who played basketball at Missouri, worked briefly at Lehman Brothers, and was once described by Sports Business Journal as having a “riches-to-riches story with a twist”—he had some instinctive feel about how to handle it. The key part of the problem appears to be that the Nuggets have one of the league’s best players in Nikola Jokic, but they do not have many other good players around him. And I guess Kroenke’s thought was that maybe the best way to expedite the process of making the Nuggets better was to do something, right now, even if it was, as Yahoo’s Tom Haberstroh wrote, “a panic move without historical precedent.”

“Let’s try to shake this tree and squeeze this much out of this as we can,” Kroenke said by way of explanation, which only reinforced his love of fruit metaphors. And then, after the Nuggets defeated the Sacramento Kings on Wednesday night, this Baghdad Bob update somehow leaked from “sources” to NBA writer Chris Haynes:

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V.

Look, I don’t want to make this another eat-the-rich column, because it’s possible Josh Kroenke is actually right about all of this, even if his attempt to credit his own motivational seminar for a win over the Kings feels like desperate and pathetic spin. In 2016, after the Cavaliers fired Blatt and replaced him with Tyronn Lue, they won an NBA title. Sometimes change really is the right thing to do. But sometimes, you make these radical changes because you don’t really have a plan at all. You’re just grasping for anything. And I wonder if, in a world that feels increasingly unstable, it is that much easier to shake the hell out of the tree right now instead of actually attempting to grow something.

I wonder, too, if part of the reason the Blatt firing felt so unprecedented is because the world had yet to bend into an alternate reality. That would happen later that year, in November of 2016, and it would carry on for nearly a decade, until it landed us here, at a moment when reality is being warped literally every single day. The erratic nature of modern life has to affect the way powerful people view their own enterprises, doesn’t it? The increasingly impersonal and transactional nature of modern business has to impact the way powerful people view the path to success, doesn’t it?

It is quite possible that Josh Kroenke is a brilliant businessman who just spends a lot of time in the produce section at Whole Foods. Or maybe we’ve just reached a moment where every powerful person seems determined to blow everything up, embrace variance, cross their fingers, chop down all the trees, and pray that something new sprouts out of the earth.

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