Imagine that the company that you work for is coming up to the end of its’ fiscal year. Everyone in the organization, as well as others in your industry, know that this year has not gone as well as anyone had hoped and that the company was in position to fall $500,000 short of their projected revenues. Now imagine that as the pressure mounted – as stockholders got ready to sell and you began to fear for your job – your boss came to you and declared that he or she had developed a plan that would save the company! Now imagine that your boss’s plan was to take what little money the company had left and board a plane to Las Vegas, where they would proceed to wager the cash reserves at the roulette table. Now even if they won, and your boss came back, slapped you on the back, showed you a million dollars and said, “ See, I told you everything would be alright,” would you feel particularly secure with your organization?
What makes this whole hypothetical situation so great is that this has literally been the business plan of at least 5 or 6 NBA teams this past season. Take a look at Boston and Memphis, two teams who went on what can only be described as a “tank job for the ages” in the hopes of acquiring either Greg Oden or Kevin Durant in the coming NBA draft. Let’s look at this from a logical standpoint. Let’s imagine these teams do “win the lottery” and both end up with the services of either young man next season. Would you feel secure as a fan that it got that close? Would you feel right knowing stupidity was rewarded? I mean for the sake of argument (as well as for the sake of the general rules of probability and statistics) lets imagine one of these two teams fail in their endeavor and end up with say the 4th pick where Durant and Oden are no longer available. This would mean that for the draft rights to Joakim Noah (a 6’10” version of Justin Guarini) the team would have: a) alienated ticket holders b) injected a “culture of losing” into the locker room c) disgraced the notion of competition d) and made poor Joakim Noah the symbol of the failure of the organization (think Sam Bowie to the Portland Trailblazers).
It gets worse for organizations like the Kings - who got stuck in “Lottery Limbo” - and attempted to tank some nights and compete others. Now you have a situation where you share all four results mentioned above – and you have almost no chance at any form of payout. This has certainly been the most pertinent problem the NBA has faced (ironically because of Stern’s age requirement rule – none of this would have happened last year had Oden been coming out of high school…) and the truth is that there is little than can be done. The NBA is a business they say, and as in any industry there will always be business leaders who would rather rest on dumb luck than hard work or smarts. I suppose it is always easier to justify your inadequacies on the premise of bad luck as opposed to your limited natural aptitude. Nonetheless this has proven to be an unfortunate theme of the 2006/2007 NBA season. Unfortunately, as life often teaches us, dumb luck does seem to happen to those who don’t always deserve it; which would imply that tanking is a phenomena that we are going to have to get used to. Unless Mr. Stern can deliver a solution that would limit its’ effectiveness. I can think of at least one way to accomplish that, and I promise I will write about it next time…
QoD: “We must believe in luck. For how else can we explain the success of those we don’t like?” –Jean Cocteau

