For all but fans of two NBA teams, the basketball season has been over for some time. Yes, Oklahoma City and Indiana just finished a seven-game series to give the Thunder their first ever title, but everyone else’s hopes and dreams ended weeks if not months ago. There’s probably no professional sport with a more extended second season than the NBA, where the original regular season is a faded memory by the time the Finals rolls around. Do you remember who finished fourth in the Western Conference regular season? Me neither.
So if you’re part of the camp that started talking about next year more than this year, now is your moment. While Oklahoma City basks in the afterglow and Indiana imagines what could have been, you are thinking about what it takes to be in that very position a year from now. For some folks, that means hyper focus on tonight’s NBA draft, highlighted by Duke’s wonderkid Cooper Flagg, a one-year college phenom that’s bound for Dallas in their post Luka Doncic rebuild. But beyond the first few picks, most draftees are simply prospects, rarely finished products that can change the trajectory of a franchise, at least in a single offseason. To do that, you need veterans, experienced players that join your team through a trade or free agency. Or, as they say, a blockbuster deal, a transaction that changes the constitution of teams and even the entire league. And those often happen right about now.
We saw one this week, when the Houston Rockets traded a few young players, including 23-year-old top team scorer Jalen Green, to Phoenix for 36-year-old superstar Kevin Durant. Durant has become something of a mercenary for hire, a megastar who’s now moved from franchise to franchise as teams search for the missing link to get to the promised land. Sometimes it’s worked out great. Like when Durant became the MVP of the Super team in Golden State that won two NBA titles. It’s also been less successful, like three lackluster years in Brooklyn where he was lucky to play half the season. And now, after three more years and three different head coaches in Phoenix, Durant comes to Houston, a team thinking it’s one cog away from an NBA title, their first since 1995.
This is a pretty common phenomenon in the modern NBA – and other pro leagues as well. The premium economic currency isn’t really winning. It’s winning a championship, even if that means taking considerable risks to do so. And one path to get there is selling your future for the present. That’s what Houston’s done and is pretty much the team history of the Brooklyn Nets. You give away young talent and future draft picks for a player that’s been there and done that, usually a super star with less tread on the tires. And if in two years you don’t have a trophy, well, the gamble failed.
The other way to try and win is doing the opposite – basically, selling your present for the future. Stockpiling future draft picks and building young talent. Maybe the best failed example is Philadelphia, who’s well documented “process” is a case study in almost and could have been. Houston was actually going down that road, playing one of the youngest rosters in the League and finally breaking through the regular season this year, despite losing to a higher seeded Golden State in the first round of the playoffs. Which led to ownership deciding the time is now and to sell off some of that future for a shot today, a chance to relive the Clutch City hysteria of the Hakeem Olajuwon and Clyde Drexler era. All the while, down the I-10 freeway in Phoenix, the rebuild begins, starting with the 10th pick in tonight’s draft.
So, what’s the best plan – go old or young, win today or tomorrow? It’s like asking whether you should get married at 23 or 35. In both cases, it all depends on the personnel. But as reminder, the NBA is a business, not a sport. Which means that whatever tact you take, it’s really a matter of how you sell it. Right now, Houston fans are pretty jazzed up about the moment. Kind of like how Jets fans were excited about Aaron Rodgers. That can change in a heartbeat, or ankle tear to be precise. Which is why H-town really, really needs to needs to win now. And why their season, although over, is actually just beginning.
Keith Strudler is the Dean of the School of Communication and Media at Montclair State University. You can follow him at @KeithStrudler.
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