"But [the Maloofs] don't deserve [Anthony] Davis. They don't deserve a team."
-Steve Kelley, Seattle Times, May 2
Let's get one thing straight - deserve's got nothing to do with.
You want to talk about deserve? Does Jerry Buss - a Class A philanderer - deserve Kobe Bryant?
Does Donald Sterling - a racist skinflint - deserve Blake Griffin or Chris Paul?
Does Aubrey McClendon - a top-class con artist who has swindled his own company out of hundreds of millions of dollars - deserve Kevin Durant?
Does James Dolan - a top-notch jerk who seems to flounder from one disaster to the next - deserve Jeremy Lin?
For crying out loud, who does deserve Anthony Davis? As it stands now, Michael Jordan and the Bobcats will get Davis, even though they forced their customers to pay first-class prices for third-class service the entire 2011-12 season. Do they deserve Davis?
The answer, of course, is no. As much as Steve Kelley would like to get free tickets to NBA games again, and as scandalous as the NBA's departure from Seattle was, we don't deserve an NBA team any more than anyone else. And the notion that David Stern will now - after 30 years of being a condescending and selfish twit- suddenly morph into a benevolent dictator and hand us the keys to the Sacramento Kings, well, I'm sorry, but I'm not holding my breath about that happening anytime soon.
David Stern is going to do what David Stern always does: Get the best deal he can for his owners and let the chips fall where they may. If he can keep the Maloofs in Sacramento and get a new arena he will, but if not, it will be up to the Maloofs - not David Stern, not Steve Kelley, not anyone else - where the team will go next.
Because deserve's got nothing to do with it.
4 comments:
Funny, I had the same thought/quote in my head when I read that Kelley line too.
If I've learned one thing from the relocation, it's that the concept of "deserving" doesn't work the same way in the moral universe of the NBA. In that world, OKC deserves a team, Seattle doesn't. New Orleans, Memphis, Sacramento deserve years to sort out their ownership/leases/arenas, Seattle doesn't. The city 28th in attendance (for that one year) doesn't deserve its team, but cities #29 & #30 do.
Okay, NBA, I get it. "Deserve" is an arbitrary or non-existent ideal, so I should stop bitching, accept that is how it works and move on. Right?
Soooo... if that's how the logic works--if that is the reasoning that keeps teams in those cities I mentioned? And if accepting this logic is required to reenter the NBA family? Then that same, bizarre, effed-up logic means that when we get some heisted team to move here, Sonics fans should not feel any guilt or shame whatsoever.
Unless there's some double-standard that requires that we have to forever feel shitty for losing the team, that we can never covet other cities' teams, and that we must feel shitty the moment we hypothetically steal another team. In which case, I quit.
I think you're looking at two different sets of moralities here; the NBA's and the fans'. The NBA is completely and utterly a business, and, as a business, doesn't have to worry about morality. Fans, though, are human beings, and, as human beings, can fall sway to feeling guilty/shitty/etc.
It's ironic, though, that Kelley feels that the best solution is to take the team away from the Maloofs and give it to Chris Hansen. I'm curious, exactly how does that rectify the bullshit that Sacramento fans had to endure? Unlike Seattle, they managed to conjure up an arena plan that seems to be appealing to the league, the city, and the team. It was only when the weasels that ran the team changed their minds that the whole thing fell apart ... and Kelley's logic is to solve the situation by punishing the Sacramento fans? I just don't understand it at all.
You guys are both forgetting a key component - Steve Kelley puts as much thought into his columns as my three year old does into his bowel movements.
And - whaddya know - they both produce the same thing!
Good point, Jason!
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