HoopsHype.com NBA Blogs - Sam Smith

Three guys show up for their job orientation and who knows what they did, though it seemed to involve drugs and sex. Another guy makes a video apparently demeaning his country and finding enough vile words for an HBO special.

I know I’m excited.

It means our favorite guys are back.

Yes, it’s just about time for the NBA season.

Of course this is an overstatement. But that’s the inescapable burden of the NBA. I’ve been around this league for almost 30 years and believe its people are better than in any sport. No, golf isn’t a sport.

But part of the fun of loving the NBA is our guys do some goofy stuff.

I’m hereafter nominating those goofs for my Reggie Harding memorial award.

My preseason nominations are the Kansas Three, rookies Mario Chalmers and Darrell Arthur from Kansas and Michael Beasley from Kansas State. No, kids, you aren’t in Kansas anymore. And you shouldn’t have brought Dorothy to rookie orientation. Or her sister.

Then there’s Josh Howard, who slammed the national anthem this summer on a video (don’t these guys ever learn, Melo?) as the topping for his drug use admissions last season and excess partying in playoff defeat.

I’m told all Dallas Mavericks players this season when standing next to Howard will have to wear those “I’m with stupid” t-shirts that Kenny’s mom wears in South Park episodes.

And then there’s Ben Gordon, who really is a very good and decent guy, who seems to have turned down enough money to bail out Wall Street while working through an aimless free agency.

Oh yeah, Reggie.

Reg was a troubled young man who was one of the first to be drafted by the NBA without attending college. He was a seven footer from Detroit. He played four decent NBA seasons (twice even averaging a double/double through trouble shortened seasons) and one double/double season in the ABA, and was shot dead on a Detroit street corner in 1972 at age 30.

Reg wasn’t the brightest guy and so the story goes once, wearing a mask, he decided to rob a store in his neighborhood. The owner recognized Reg as there weren’t a lot of seven foot holdup men around.

“Reg,” the man said, “don’t do it.”

Replied Harding: “It ain’t me, man.”

You’d think Ron Artest retired this trophy, but Josh is working hard to wrestle it away.

As for my man, Ben, I weep for him.

Eventually, Gordon will be a rich young man. You’d say he probably is now since he’ll likely sign a one-year qualifying offer for about $6.4 million this season and thereafter become an unrestricted free agent.

And then what?

That’s the rub, and I understand Gordon’s position, much stated to the Bulls.

Ben: “I’m the leading scorer on the team for the last three years. I should be highest paid.”

Bulls: “We like you and believe you are valuable and would like you to remain with the Bulls. But you turned down $10 million a year for five years last year and you and the team had a bad season. So we’ll offer you maybe $9 million or so for six years, again more than $50 million. But you really are a classic sixth man, a great scorer with limited ballhanding and passing skills and you’re, what, six foot tall? We haven’t gotten any trade offers for you (OK, Miami said they were thinking briefly about Shawn Marion and Marcus Banks, but who wants Banks’ contract and Marion’s pout?). Go get an offer somewhere and we’ll make a deal. And, who, after all, is going to give you $10 million or more of saved cap room next summer when everyone is waiting for 2010 and LeBron, Wade and Bosh?”

And so Gordon sits with the rest of us suckers watching our money disappear.

Hey, I should have sold my house last year. But I didn’t. Now I can’t.

It’s timing. It’s life.

Sorry, Ben, the market for six foot shooting guards, no matter how good a guy you are and hard you work, isn’t there.

Take the $9 million or $9.5 million (estimate) and be a very, very, very, very rich man.

OK, not as rich as some of your friends.

But, hey, the guys at Lehman Brothers thought they were rich last week.

I understand well how this works.

It’s about respect, right?

No, it’s about competition.

You don’t become a pro athlete unless you compete at everything. They compete in conversation. So when all us old timers who are trying to find the airline without baggage fees say you are rich whether you make $8 million or $12 million and never can spend it all, anyway, we don’t get it.

It’s the same in your office. A salary of $75,000 might sound great until you find out the sinkhole at the next desk makes $85,000. Then it’s misery.

Especially with athletes.

It really isn’t about the money. Sort of. No one really realizes how good they are until you try to play against them. What gets you to that level is the desire (and we’d love to see it more often when they are there) to compete all the time.

Gordon’s like that. And he’s a worker.

I hate this being him because he is a dedicated guy. I’ve traveled with the Chicago Bulls on and off the last few years and just about every city the Bulls land in Gordon gets off the plane and heads directly to a gym to shoot. There are few guys in the NBA who practice as much, certainly not on their shooting. Every summer, Bulls coaches rave about all the work Gordon has put in.

And then it turns out he’s still six feet tall.

No one on that Bulls team gets as much defensive attention, so it didn’t go so well with Ben Wallace averaging $15 million. Geez, and the guy can’t make a layup.

Gordon asked for $15 million last season and didn’t budge. The Bulls offered $10 million and didn’t budge.

Next!

So this summer Luol Deng signed after he rejected a deal last year close to $60 million for five years. It was announced this time at more than $70 million. But with, according to league sources, perhaps $20 million deferred in the first five seasons, the present value of the contract is believed to be slightly less than Deng was offered last season. The Bulls are believed to have made a similar proportional offer to Gordon, like Deng, slightly less than Gordon could have made last year. But seemingly a lot of money.

Gordon averaged more points than Deng as well and now Larry Hughes is there making about $13 million a season and he’s no Ben Gordon. Where’s the loyalty?

So Gordon remains unsigned.

It seems clear the Bulls will not trade him, and though Gordon this summer talked of having played his last game for the Bulls and never playing for the qualifying offer, he has nowhere else to go.

Were he even to get an overseas offer, he’d still be a Bulls free agent when he returned as you cannot by rule play out your free agency somewhere else. Plus, the European offers have been even less than the qualifying offer and much less than Gordon keeps rejecting here.

So he’ll come in and disrupt the team by, what, shooting all the time?

Duh.

It’s what he does.

Gordon’s not going to hurt the team, and the Bulls know it.

First, he’s not a bad guy, and he would become unrestricted if he signs the one year offer. Not a great time to lay down.

Plus, he always comes in shooting anyway. What’s he going to do to undermine the team? Pass?

So the Bulls will panic because they can’t afford to lose him in free agency and get nothing in return? Right? Hardly.

Admittedly, it’s not a great free agent class next summer, though Carlos Boozer and Hedo Turkoglu could be there. The teams most likely to be $10 million or more under the cap to sign someone unrestricted likely figure to be from among Memphis (not spending money), Oklahoma City (probably not with the big relocation fee due), Portland (got guards), Miami (going for Boozer, we hear), Indiana and maybe Minnesota. So if you are spending, you lock in Ben Gordon and pass on a chance for Wade or Bosh? LeBron is going to New York or New Jersey, as we know.

No. If Gordon wants to go anywhere and get paid he probably would have to come back to the Bulls anyway for a sign-and-trade. Which is why the Bulls don’t seem in any hurry to make a deal.

And with a signed Deng and No. 1 pick Derrick Rose, they need Gordon. Who else is going to score? Gordon has a chance to have a terrific season, and perhaps the team improves as a result.

The Bulls have made it clear they aren’t going to make a bad deal to accommodate Gordon, and they aren’t about to panic. Most Americans’ portfolios don’t look like they did two weeks ago, and so the timing isn’t great for Gordon, either.

But Gordon still has a chance to be guaranteed some $50 million or more. Hey, it would be more than Josh Howard got.

I know, I know. Bad example.

My guess: Gordon ends up re-signing with the Bulls at some point.

It is what it is, as we like to say in the NBA. And you are who you are, which extends even beyond our world, though few around the NBA know that world exists.

And so it is with Michael Jordan as well, lately the part owner and basketball operations director of the Charlotte Bobcats.

Why Jordan is having such a difficult time having success in Charlotte is because Michael is just being Michael. He’s doing it as he sees it, and for Michael – for many stars, really – this job is so difficult because the construction of anything great requires subtlety as much as skill. And seeing both.

Because it’s about team building and not talent.

And they can be mutually exclusive.

Sure, you need talent, but the evasive part is the talent that meshes, that fits.

We see every day some team struggling with the combination. Now it’s the Phoenix Suns, who seemed like a championship contender days ago, and they began their new journey Wednesday with Shaquille O’Neal. And we hear now about chemistry and mix and the right group.

It was entertaining to listen to Kobe Bryant last weekend explaining the elements of building a team.

Bryant, of course, has had a bad year doing that, basically trashing his team last spring, trying to get himself traded to what we can clearly see now is a flawed Chicago Bulls team and finally accepting he had to stay with the Lakers, where his team is, sigh, now one of the favorites to win the NBA championship.

“I was frustrated,” Bryant shrugged about having lashed out last spring and demanded to be traded, to the point Bryant apparently was telling some in the media he’d never again wear a Lakers uniform. “We haven’t won in three years. You have an opportunity to get a player like Jason Kidd. Everybody thought I was knocking Andrew (Bynum). But the truth of the matter is Jason Kidd is one of the greatest point guards of all time. Why would you not want to do that deal?”

That was the trade the Nets tried during last year’s All-Star break – which the Lakers rejected and sent Bryant spiraling into becoming his own talk radio call out show by the spring.

“I’m glad I wasn’t the GM,” Bryant says now with a laugh.

I recall a similar scene with the Chicago Bulls of the late 1980s.

Jordan wasn’t getting anywhere despite what was clearly the best individual talent in the NBA. His was winning the oohs and aahs of the fans while his team was 1-10 in its first 10 playoff games. It’s a feeling you figure LeBron James, coming off his second All-Star MVP in the last three years, is getting now with his team hardly regarded by anyone as a contender even if it went to the Finals last season.

Phil Jackson, then as an assistant with the Bulls, had been pushing for the team to trade for Knicks center Bill Cartwright, a big man to at least hold off the big men in the East, which then was a physical big man’s conference. Eventually, the Bulls made the trade for Charles Oakley, a talented young forward and close friend with Jordan. Jordan was furious and for several years derided Cartwright, the trade and management for making it.

Just before the fourth game of the Eastern Conference finals in 1991 as the Bulls were on the way to sweeping the Detroit Pistons and winning their first of six NBA championships, Jordan came out and admitted he was wrong and how much the Bulls needed Cartwright to get by the Pistons‘ James Edwards, the Knicks’ Patrick Ewing, the Celtics‘ Robert Parish and the Cavs‘ Brad Daugherty.

It’s why owners and general managers have to be smart and not let their stars make trades. They see talent and how to combine it.

The Bobcats have been a major disappointment, if only in regard to their own public expectations.

Rookie coach Sam Vincent, who is in hot water with his players and could be out after one season (like Jordan’s first coach in Washington, Leonard Hamilton), talked about a top four finish for the Bobcats this season. I suspect it was less a prediction than an attempt at motivation. He virtually guaranteed a playoff spot, and while it never looks good when you are wrong, what was he supposed to do? Say they weren’t a playoff team. He’s a former Jordan backcourt running mate with the Bulls. It’s his first head coaching job, so maybe he gets another chance next season. Jordan also doesn’t want to appear to be running through coaches too quickly.

The problem is the makeup of the team.

Jordan sees stars and gets them, but they don’t necessarily fit.

The Bobcats have done a good job of developing Gerald Wallace, an athletic wing player. So what do they do? They add athletic wing player Jason Richardson. Certainly a talent, but the team gets into the my turn/your turn thing Allen Iverson and Carmelo Anthony share in Denver.

Players have to play off one another, a team being a fit like jigsaw puzzles, pieces with different skills in different sizes and shapes coming together to fit at a time.

Perhaps the best at it these days is the Pistons’ Joe Dumars, with whom the Bobcats made their other deal of late.

Give Jordan this: Though he gets criticized by other GMs, privately at least, for not working hard enough because he doesn’t scout or come around much due to to his worldwide celebrity and the potential distraction when he is on the scene, he has tried to address needs.

The Bobcats were faltering in the middle, so he traded Primoz Brezec and Walter Hermann, both with expiring contracts, for Nazr Mohammed. The Pistons were anxious to get Mohammed’s three years off their books, but Mohammed does little to complement Emeka Okafor as both will generally step out about 10 feet to make a shot. Neither is a true post-up player.

The guards, Raymond Felton and Jeff McInnis, the latter a cheap pickup, are both shooting guards trying to be point guards.

Jordan knows talent, and he has talented players. But he has difficulty distinguishing how you make it a team. Though he’s hardly alone. It’s much more difficult than it seems.