Race to the Bottom: Five Most Incompetent Franchises in the NBA Following this Summer
Hint, the league worst starts with a K.
Making fun of Billy King and how he mortgaged the future of his franchise, his kids and about 1500 Brooklyn residence on the aging Boston Celtics core is both the stuff of NBA legends and the stuff of NBA past. The Brooklyn Nets have gone through hell and came out on the other side with the other side of the tunnel looking at least slightly more illuminated. Sean Marks has done everything in his power to parlay the barren wasteland he inherited into something that at least resembles a habitable environment. Other teams should follow his example, except they probably will not.
The NBA is a weird world where the rich get richer, the best players take pay cuts to help them make it so and the Warriors have basically put the league to the sword trying to keep up. While some teams like the Spurs have years of unparalleled excellence in consistently building contenders and unearthing gems overseas, other teams have been in a downward plummet for longer than some of us have been alive.
It’s nice to root for a competent franchise, because the absence of volatility is good for your nerves. On the flip-side, rooting for someone like the Kings is like strapping fireworks to your back, lighting them and then running into an open dessert with the knowledge that the nearest body of water may or may not be near by. It’s a gamble.
But, bad franchises are fun, at least for those who aren’t directly tied to them or do not have a one to one relationship with them. I’m a Lakers fan, so watching the Kings fumble through reverse positionless basketball by drafting roughly 67 big men in the last three years while already having Cousins has been thoroughly entertaining for me. For Kings fans? I imagine not so much.
So, what are the five least competent franchises in the NBA?
Five: Cleveland Cavaliers
It should be borderline criminal to put any team that features LeBron James, the human equivalent of an asteroid that killed the dinosaurs, on any kind of bottom list, yet here we are. For a change, this has nothing to do with LeBron and everything to do with Dan Gilbert — team owner, venture capitalist and Comic Sans enthusiast. Over the years Gilbert has taken on an increased role in “putting his nose into team business” despite the fact that I wouldn’t trust anyone who uses Comic Sans to as much as park my car or babysit my cousins (except for the youngest one, he’s kind of annoying).
While there is a certain level of pride in owning a basketball team, a competent operator knows how to delegate tasks he knows nothing about to others. I DJ as a part time gig and the most annoying thing is when someone walks up and doesn’t just request a song, but begins to tell me “you know what would be the best song to play next?” Yes, yes I do Samantha, that’s why I’m playing it, I don’t come into Lululemon and presume to tell you how to pedal overpriced athletics wear to millennials. Same as I wouldn’t walk into Gilbert’s office and tell him how to do what it is he does, which I presume is screwing over middle-class Americans.
Anyway, the Cavs owner has been blessed by the sheer coincidence that Zeus will for his son to be born in Akron, Ohio, not far from where the Cavaliers play and the saddest sports city on Earth. LeBron left, then came back, then took the Cavs to three (!!!) straight Finals and won one. The objective here seems easy: keep LeBron James happy.
Unfortunately, firing the GM that James had some sort of rapport with and bringing in Jose Calderon: the old wise man of the NBA with few tangible remaining basketball skills, and Jeff Green — the NBA’s version of the messenger of your team’s apocalypse, aren’t that. You have to give it to Gilbert, it takes a lot of talent and skill to make your franchise look this incompetent while coming off a third straight Finals appearance and having the best player on the planet.
Four: Indiana Pacers
I can’t quite put my finger on when Indiana’s decline started, but it has to have something to do with losing Lance Stephenson. It’s weird that that’s the catalyst, but after Lance left the Pacers hit a tail slide and ended up trading a franchise player for practically nothing. It’s like that scene in The Wire when Bubbles prints fake bills and hides them in between real bills to scam the drug-dealers. The real bills are Victor Oladipo and Domantas Sabonis, the fake ones are their level of talent compared to the player they netted for Oklahoma City.
Granted, Indiana started to make at least what resembles savvy moves by trading for Cory Joseph and shedding some of the bigger contracts. The East is like the deserted wasteland from the Book of Eli where even a blind man can find great success. The Pacers might even make the playoffs. It’s comical, but they might. I for one still can’t believe they didn’t even get a pick for Paul George.
Three: Sacramento Kings
The Kings were so close. Like, improbably close to actually having a competent off-season. They drafted well and looked to be stocking up on young talent to take on the West in a few years or whenever Golden State starts to deteriorate under salary cap pressure. Unfortunately they also had to go ahead and screw it all up.
Vince: *checks napkin that has “$3 million” written on it* Hi Vivek, nice to meet you, so I was thinking…
Vivek: Hey Vince, so right out of the gate let me tell you, we’re going to give you eight million dollars.
Vince: Now look, I think I’ve shown that I’m worth… wait, what? Yes. Deal *folds napkin back into pocket.*
I don’t think Vivek is purposefully malicious for the Kings. I think he is misguided in the purity of his intentions. He’s like the Kings’ Fredo Corleone. So eager to prove himself yet entirely not competent enough to do so. The Kings are responsible for a myriad of questionable decisions over the years, such as consistently drafting players at the same position (notably the five, which leads me to believe that Vivek doesn’t entirely understand ‘positionless basketball’ as a concept) or trading DeMarcus Cousins for Buddy “Better than Steph” Hield. When they were drafting this year I thought Vlade found a way to lock Vivek away in a closet somewhere they were doing that well.
Unfortunately following what looked like a strong summer, Kings started throwing oversized contracts at aging vets who play the same positions as their most promising young prospects. Unlike the Lakers and Heat in current and previous years, the Kings also offered multi-year contracts, tying up their assets for prolonged periods of time. The Kings had a good hand, but then they decided to double down on stupidity.
Two: Chicago Bulls
Looking over the trade that sent Jimmy Butler away from purgatory and towards a reunion with everyone’s favorite raspy voice despot of the NBA feels like reading a pre-amble to some sort of a long con-novel flashback. The Paul George trade was a bank robbery, the Jimmy Butler trade was Minnesota calmly walking into the bank, putting down some counterfeit cheques and then walking out with all the money, oh and a first round pick for some reason.
Last year, the Bulls doubled down on the philosophy of not having a philosophy. They stared the three-point heavy league right in the face and built their team around long twos, guards who can’t shoot, guards on the wrong side of the aging curve and Jimmy Butler. The results were a predictable disaster, but since the East is basically a straight to DVD recast sequel to the West they still made the playoffs. Now, they’ve sent Jimmy Butler to the Wolves, have to still deliver money to Dwayne Wade’s door by the truckload and are not any closer to being a cohesive unit in the modern NBA. And all of that trouble was presumably done for Lauri Markkanen, who I’m pretty sure I can out rebound.
The Undisputed Number One: The New York Knicks
The litany of Phil Jackson’s decisions as the GM of the New York Knicks reads more like a suicide note or a silent scream for help from a senile old man than an actual recollection of competent basketball decisions. Turns out you can still get some good peyote in New York.
Just because I don’t have all day and it will make me sad, I will not recite the whole list, but here are the spark notes of all things Phil has done because of his love for geometry. Successfully alienated the teams two best players while unsuccessfuly trying to trade either. Signed 2016 Derrick Rose to a 2010 Derrick Rose contract. Signed the ghost of Joakim Noah. Perpetually tried to advocate for an archaic system of basketball that was effective not necessarily because it was the best, but because he had Jordan and then Kobe plugged into it. I’m pretty sure you can put those two into the two sets my YMCA team runs every Friday and we’ll still dust the rest of the opposition.
You know what else he did? He got paid for his trouble. Despite releasing Phil Jackson, the New York Knicks also decided that it was a great idea to renew his contract just two days before, ensuring that whatever lucid dreaming Phil Jackson does will be on James Dolan’s dime. I’m actually convinced Dolan had no idea what was going on when Phil got offered that money and only found out by reading a scathing review of his band’s performance that presented it as a long-winded metaphor for his disastrous tenure as a team owner, you know, the thing writers are good at. Upon that point, because no one speaks ill of JD & The Straight Shot, Phil was released.
The Knicks have a systematic culture of incompetence stretching to signing Allan Houston to such a preposterous contract the NBA literally had to adjust a rule to help New York get out of it. They’ve been washed out by Masai Ujiri so many times, I don’t understand why no one in the organization blocked his number to this day. They couldn’t even intrigue the guy who worked for a comic book villain in Cleveland enough to take the job. The New York Knicks are if a Shakespearean tragedy was a NBA franchise. Sorry Knicks fans.
