Friday, March 4, 2011

The Pot Calling the Kettle Black: The LeBron and Carmelo Edition

In the past six months, two of the biggest stars in the NBA have made decisions regarding their employment which have been scrutinized and criticized from pundits and fans alike. In both cases, their actions have been blasted as selfish, dishonorable, disloyal and narcissistic. But now that there’s been some time to digest their respective decisions and for the jilted cities to lick their wounds, maybe we can review more objectively whether NBA fandom has been fair in their criticisms, or more pointedly, would we hold ourselves to the same standard as these two basketball players?

In LeBron’s case, he made a decision to leave one employer to join a company where two of his friends were also planning to play. By the way, we all seem to forget that he actually took less guaranteed money in his contract to do so. Is that really worthy of our condemnation? Now most of the biggest LeBron haters will point to the most damning allegation, that at some point in the career-in-Cleveland-ending playoff series against Boston, he simply gave up and lost the will to win, influenced by the knowledge deep in his soul that he was leaving anyway. Okay, the whole “The Decision” thing on ESPN was bad and I’m not going to defend that.

To draw a parallel, let’s play this out from the perspective Bob, the middle manager of a telecommunications company. Bob’s doing pretty well, but he’s frustrated that his company doesn’t seem to be able to get over the hump and be the best, and bring his stock options above water. He has two college buddies who are also golfing buddies, Dan and Greg, who happen to work for a rival telecommunications company, a company which is on the rise. Bob deliberates joining Dan and Greg at their company, and during that deliberation, he gets hit with wave after wave of demoralizing financial news at his soon-to-be-former company, greatly diminishing his morale and colleague engagement. Ultimately, he decides to join Dan and Greg, and does so at a lower salary.

Now let’s take Carmelo Anthony. He wants to go to play for the Knicks in New York, which is the city of his and his wife’s birth. But the thing that apparently really makes him a bastard is (1) his insistence that he gets paid at the maximum allowable extension rate, instead of losing millions of dollar under the new collective bargaining rate and (2) his lack of concern that the Knicks have gutted the team to get him, by trading away a number of key players and draft picks as part of the deal. The hard-core Knicks fan (I have to admit that these thoughts passed my head) seem to think it’s unconscionable that Carmelo didn’t happily give up tens of millions of dollars so the Knicks could keep a bunch of other players for the good of the team.

So again, let’s play this out from the perspective of Doug, a senior executive of a mid-level pharmaceutical company. Doug is being recruited by the largest pharmaceutical company in the world which happens to be where he was born and raised, The recruiters tell him, “Doug, we’d really like you to take less significantly money than other similarly-talented and high-performing executives have taken. Why? We think it would be great if we can use the money we would save to put into research and development and maybe do some small acquisitions. Do it for the good of the company.” Doug politely declines, pointing out that his contributions will also greatly improve the company in the short and long term, and that he’s well worth his salary.

If you don’t condemn Bob and Doug, you also need to give LeBron and Carmelo and break. That being said, if the Knicks are saddled with two superstars and a bunch of D-League players for the supporting cast due to zero salary cap flexibility, I’m not going to be a happy Knicks fan.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Hey Mike,
Interesting perspective. You make a valid point in that Melo could have potentially influenced the situation by saying that he doesn't plan on resigning with the Nuggets at all. That would have most certainly driven the price on him down. And maybe we'd still be able to keep at least either Chandler, Felton or Galinari. Don't understand why he didn't do that unless it was out of fear for backlash from the Denver fans?