The Portland Trail Blazers lost a narrow game to the Denver Nuggets last night. That event prompted one of our readers to submit a question to the Blazer’s Edge Mailbag that turned out to have more facets than appear on the surface. Check out today’s edition:
Dave,
Want to catch you while this is hot. After last night’s game do you still think Denver is a contender in the West? Is Jokic your MVP this year assuming he makes the 65 game cut off?
I’ll take my answers off air!
—Kevin
I laughed at your sign-off.
It reminds me of the early days of sports radio in Portland. Tom Parker. Mychal Thompson. Greg Robinson. I loved listening to the medium when it was new.
I’ll admit I hadn’t watched Denver much during the mid-to-late parts of the season just because I considered them more of a known quantity. Any team with Nikola Jokic has a chance, but man, their defense was not playoffs-ready. They better turn it up a notch, two, really! If they don’t, good teams are going to beat them. Since there are a couple good teams in the West, I’d say that for now, based on what I saw last night, Denver is out of my championship equation. They’re good! They’re just not whole.
Moving to MVP talk, Jokic is a sick, sick man. I think I know him, but then I watch him and find myself saying, “Oh yeah, THAT.” He reads things in a way that makes you go, “Duh. Why didn’t I see that too? And why doesn’t everybody?”
You can say Jokic’s play is derivative, even predictable, the same way music from The Beatles was derivative and predictable. They were just taking basic chord progressions, adding lyrical bass, and borrowing from all kind of genres and artists that preceded them: R&B, Blues, Country, Shuffle/Swing, music and instruments from India, and so on. You can dissect almost every one of their songs down to its constituent parts and go, “Oh. These building blocks are basic,” the same way you can watch Jokic playing and say, “It’s just basketball, man.” But somehow The Beatles and Nikola Jokic put things together in a way that others can’t foresee, let alone create. An internal chemistry turns basic, predictable parts into shining paragons. Ain’t nobody else does it the same way.
So yeah, I’d say Jokic is my MVP. I always list him second until I actually watch him, then it seems obvious again that he’s the clear frontrunner.
With all of that said, the part that gets me most about your question is the end, the 65-game requirement for postseason awards. It’s ridiculous that Jokic stands at 63 games now and we still don’t know that he’ll qualify. Cade Cunningham sits at 61, Luka Doncic at 64, but some of their outings might not count because of limited minutes. At least Shai Gilgeous-Alexander is past the mark now so the MVP discussion won’t be a total farce. All-NBA awards may be borked this year, though.
This league needs help solving their problems. That’s clear from almost everything they do nowadays. They have a terrible habit of being basic, ineffective, and overbearing all at once. Honestly, it reminds me of the kind of American stupidity (sorry, we sometimes are) that says things like, “The way to solve crime is just to increase sentences for criminals!” It doesn’t work. It leaves hundreds of factors unaddressed. It has the sole benefit of allowing you to say you did something about an issue without actually doing anything meaningful. In fact, you may have just made it worse.
This 65-game rule to qualify for postseason awards is a prime example. “We want to curb load management! We want our stars to play! So let’s come up with an arbitrary line that will take away all postseason award consideration for anybody who doesn’t meet it! That’ll fix it!” No it won’t. Zero players were saying, “I’m going to sit out this game because I know I can win a postseason award anyway.” It was a marginal factor, one that awards voters could consider, but not a central determiner. Now you’ve set a hard and fast rule and put the might of the league behind it. Games played isn’t a consideration, it’s an absolute bar, not a thing, but THE thing.
The league hasn’t really fixed load management or stars being out. Injuries are still sky-high. Only four of the Top 20 scorers in the league this year have reached 70 games played. All they’ve done is mess up the All-NBA selections, and maybe the MVP race, to the point of making them silly.
Ugh.
If I was the NBA, you know what I’d do? I’d hire a consulting team of people who think about balancing systems and crafting cohesive rules day and night. I’d go to Spiel des Jahres, BoardGameGeek, or wherever the epicenter lies for the board game renaissance that’s taken over the world for the last 20 years. I’d ask, “Who are the best, most creative, most solid and smartest game designers in this industry?” The goal would be retaining a small group of them, forming a committee. Their job isn’t to solve my problems in the global sense. They don’t have to know or fix the NBA Lottery as such. Instead I’m going to put a narrow, game-design issue in front of them and ask for ways they’d handle it.
For example:
We have a draft system that’s meant to favor teams who need help, defined by losing the most games. But some teams are losing intentionally to take advantage of the system. Let’s pretend you were designing a board game with a catch-up mechanism for players who are trailing and the rewards for being behind are significant. What are some options for retaining that benefit while decoupling the direct, easy link between losing and reward? We need to value clarity and simplicity in the solution. No weird and artificial rules.
That group will probably come up with a suite of options. Some will be predictable (nerf the rewards, change the odds of receiving them, etc.). But somewhere in there, as they drill down, they’re probably going to come up with a better solution than the NBA has, in part because they’re not bound by the presumptions that league insiders already carry. All they want to do is make the game work. That’s exactly what they do for a living.
(My suspicion is that they’d figure out mitigating factors making losses weigh differently, or add in other factors in addition to losses that reduce the impact of a single game on the reward system.)
After that we get to load management: encouraging teams to field complete rosters as often as possible without mandating artificial standards that ignore health and/or take the individual decision away from coaches, players, and front offices. Maybe they create a higher cap ceiling or reduce luxury tax penalties for teams with better participation. I don’t know…I’m not a game designer. But I bet they can come up with something better than a hard-and-fast 65-game rule that the NBA has to walk back a couple years after it was instituted.
Hey…how about examining how to keep the excitement of the three-point shot without having it dominate the game?
How about a clear, streamlined process for instant replay reviews that people can actually stick to?
Look, I don’t envy the NBA. They’re in late-stage professional sports the same way the United States is in late-stage capitalism. People have learned to game the system to their own advantage. They not only see that as desirable, but their purpose. Whatever rules you come up with, somebody is going to try to find the loophole. But increasingly, the league’s solutions are solving a smaller and smaller slice of the issues while leaving a larger trail of complications and new fractures in their wake. It’s time to tackle these problems from a systemic view—even if that means tough overhauls—rather than putting fingers in the dike each time, praying the dam doesn’t break.
You know we need this because we’re nearly 80 games into the current season and what are we talking about? Comparatively little NBA discussion nowadays actually focuses on the sport. It’s about things like the lottery, league rules, voting, salary-cap management, and the like. We don’t talk about the game as much as we talk about how to game the game. That’s a pretty good sign that something is wrong. And every adjustment the league makes compounds that issue instead of resolving it.
So yeah, Denver is not a true contender, Jokic is the real MVP, and please can we get some clarity back in this league and try to refocus on what everyone is here to do, which is play basketball? That probably means more than tanking for lottery odds, manipulating the salary system, timing replays correctly, and, if all else fails, shoot from 30 feet. You just wouldn’t know it by the way we talk about things.
Thanks for the question! You can always send yours to blazersub@gmail.com and we’ll try to get to as many as possible!
