In Defense of the Showboatin' NBA All-Stars
If the Important People Really Want a Serious Game, They Should Shift the Incentive Structures
Let’s start with a couple anecdotes from youth baseball. During my final year of little league, I had physically developed sooner than most of my peers, and was thus the best player in the league. I don’t know who the second best player was, but the gap between him and me was significant, and with my outsized success, I’m sure I developed a bigger head than I had earned. As such, in one game I popped a ball high in the air to the vicinity of third base. In my frustration, I took a couple steps out of the batter’s box and proceeded to watched the third basemen catch the ball for an out.
Aside from my missed opportunity at the plate, the problem was that my travel-ball coach was in the stands watching. And it was he who chided me for half-assing the play, for not getting to first base instead of watching my opponent catch the ball.
Two years later, I was playing for a different guy who had a practice rule that if you caught a fly ball with just one hand (your glove) rather than putting the other hand underneath the mitt as a kind of safety in case the ball pops out that the rest of your teammates would run laps until you then caught a fly ball with your bare hands.
Well, one day I caught a ball at my shins with one hand. I didn’t exactly like it, then, when my coach decided to make an example out of me. In fact, I had a feeling his punishment actually had something to do with the fact that the previous season I had played in a different league and therefore not on his team (this had been my parents’ decision). So I let my teammates run for a while. Just kept letting the coach’s dumb fly balls in my direction hit the ground. Until finally he lofted one that was so soft and easy, then I caught it, and my teammates were allowed to stop running.
Most baseball folk know that while there’s wisdom in the “two hands” thing, it doesn’t really apply when you’re running forward and have to reach down close to the ground to get it. Trying to use two hands would be such an awkward bodily movement in that case that it might actually prevent a player from making a catch. And so, as I look back at the two memories, it strikes me that the first one is reasonable and correct, and the second one is (still) ridiculous.
The reason for the distinction really isn’t about “effort” or “pride” or any of that moralizing nonsense. In the first one, it really is in a baseball player’s interest to run out what should be an easy play for the defense for the obvious reason that defensive players, even good ones, make mistakes, sometimes even on routine plays. A pop-up to the third baseman can become a de facto double, even as it goes down as an error in the score book. My problem in this first instance, in other words, wasn't my laziness, though I was being lazy. But the bigger problem was that I was being stupid (in a baseball game, anyway).
We live in a world with a good bit of what I’ll call randomness, though by saying that I don’t mean that it isn’t orchestrated by some sort of Higher Being or Energy (I have no idea!). Without knowing completely why, we do know that pandemics drop from the sky and wreck much of the lives we have built. Someone dies unexpectedly. Countries break out in war, weather cuts against our expectations, natural disasters devastate cities. And former Notre Dame linebacker, and eventual Dallas Cowboys’ draft pick, Jaylon Smith, honorably chooses to play in a high-level but still relatively-meaningless bowl game, and the result is a torn ACL and LCL in the first quarter, a plummeted draft stock, a bright “future” that never quite got off the ground. This is just one of the reasons why “effort” isn’t always the answer. Discernment is a perpetual game of calculating odds, of weighing costs and benefits. We still can’t control outcomes the way we want to, but some things just aren’t worth the risk at all.
I set up these examples, and the reflection that comes out of them, as a way to start talking about the effort that was exhibited at the NBA All-Star Game (ASG) over the weekend, hosted well as it was by the city I live in, Indianapolis. We all got blasted with snow on Friday, and I was preparing over the weekend for a Monday interview—as well as not really in the mood to deal with downtown traffic—so I passed on my sister’s invitation (she loves these kinds of things) to: 1) attend a Machine Gun Kelly concert on Thursday night, 2) attend the celebrity game and a T-Pain concert on Friday night, and 3) attend a Lil Wayne concert on Sunday before the big game. On Saturday night, I happened to check tickets with someone for the three-point and dunk contests, and we passed due to the hundreds of dollars we would have needed to give up in order to attend. If someone had literally handed me tickets for the ASG for nothing or very cheap, I suppose I would have gone for the life experience, but at no point did I expect the game to be anything all that competitive, in spite of NBA Commissioner Adam Silver’s public promises that this was going to be the year that NBA players take it all so seriously.
And yet, here we are a couple days into the week with ESPN’s Stephen A. Smith and others who I might otherwise and typically listen to or even agree with, scolding players for not trying hard enough in a game that saw one side score more than 200 points (100 points is a lot in a real game, meaning mostly that not much defense was played in this particular affair).
I find the post-game posturing so bizarre. Why are we so surprised that in setting up an unserious weekend party that at the end of it all, the players do not buckle down and sweat their asses off for the extra $75,000 the winning players get? For all our desire for these wealthy basketball players to ‘have some pride!,’ as Adam Smith understood about human nature, the incentives matter. And there are lots of incentives built in for the players to not care very much, and few, if any, incentives built in for the players to really go after it.
Let’s start with that $75K. For most of us, we would play hard in a basketball game for the possibility of that kind of money. But these guys make millions already. More importantly, they’re in the middle of an 82-game season—which is too long for the games to count as much as would require to get better and broader fan buy-in—of a game that absolutely breaks human bodies down. I do not say that to solicit pity—Michael Jordan, for example, was notorious for playing as much of the grind as his body would allow, rarely taking time off for injuries— for twenties and thirties men who get to play a game for extravagant amounts of money, but rather to show that in this kind of marathon, a weekend off is needed and a luxury. Then you throw contests and concerts and alcohol promotions on top of that, and, well, we’re getting what we’re paying for.
Speaking of paying, I’m not convinced that either the players or the fans would miss the ASG if it went away, but the people who stand to make money off this kind of thing might. And so what we have now is that the people making the decisions and the money are scolding the folks who are supposed to put on the great show for us, but who are instead deciding to put on a different kind of show for us. Because whether or not the right kind of show gets put on, or the wrong kind of show, there will not be much difference for them. So you might as well take it easy out there and try not to twist your ankle.
As ESPN has reported, here is what Los Angeles Lakers’ forward Anthony Davis had to say about the game: "I think the best [moment], we were talking about it, was the Bulls and the Pacers dunkers. With the trampoline? They were very, very impressive."
The players are doing what most of us would be doing if we were in their situation. It might be the case that if we really want a serious game that we could get it by tweaking some of the incentive structures. Something Major League Baseball (MLB) has tried, for example, is trying to tie the outcome of the game to home-field advantage in the World Series. The problem with this is that it probably won’t affect enough of the players hopes, again given that they’re in the middle of a long season that is going to tax their bodies. Shortening that season (the MLB’s as well) might help the situation, but the timing of the game should also be addressed. The National Football League plays their “Pro Bowl” on the week in-between the conference championships and the Super Bowl. This still doesn’t mean they will (or should) “try” very hard, but at least if something like a serious injury happened, everyone who isn’t playing in the Super Bowl would be staring at an offseason, rather than a minimum of forty-one more games.