There are those of you who might say that the Dallas Mavericks are just plain bad, and that’s why they’re losing. And good for them, because working hard every night to try your best to win has a multitude of underrated payoffs, which will benefit both the players and the team down the line.
The Dallas Mavericks have put up a real fight in almost every game. Sure, it gets hard when you’re losing or keep losing, but head coach Jason Kidd keeps getting the team to go out there and work hard every night.
That’s how he operates, and that’s a really good thing for the team.
What it does, is basically eliminating the issue of potentially creating bad habits during a tanking season, and that’s important because it is in the struggle that we find our identity and strength for adversity in the future.
Not in manipulation, pretense and stat-padding. No one ever reached greatness – or an NBA championship – by cutting corners. And that is what tanking is.
We cannot talk about this without acknowledging that tanking is offensive to sports as a whole. From the point of view of a European, it’s hard not to feel that the theatrics and manipulation around this whole thing is a sham. Losing in order to win is an inherent antithesis to the competitive nature of sports.
Not only are we teaching kids and fans that manipulating is a criteria for success, we’re also teaching them – along with players – that not putting your best effort forward could prove beneficial.
It’s all an artificial game of make believe. We pretend it’s normal and convince each other that rooting for a team to lose is a good thing.
But trying to lose in a competitive environment is not normal, especially for the people involved. Players, who have been brought up to focus on one thing and one thing only – winning – now have to pretend to be satisfied with being part of an organization that encourages not putting your best foot forward.
Players who have been encouraged to have tunnel vision focus can lose their perspective. It takes a special athlete mentality to make it to the NBA, and for that to become misaligned can prove detrimental, set careers back and in the worst case ruin them.
We call it bad habits, but it’s more than that. Players are not robots who you can just tell how to think, act and play. Do you think the best players ever become the greatest of all time by tanking? Do you think football players like Lionel Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo or Zlatan Ibrahimovic would ever be part of an organization who “had” to lose?
No. And that’s why they’re among the best that ever played. They would not allow themselves to be distracted by the politics of tanking. By manipulating a system to get the biggest reward. They would want to play through adversity to prove that they are the best and deserve to be called the greatest.
But since the rules still are in place, teams have to play along – but there are ways to do it more gracefully and with less of the negative effect to the players especially. And luckily, that’s exactly what we’re seeing from the Dallas Mavericks right now.
Good habits can be formed while losing, character is shaped during adversity and all that. But it’s not until we take ourselves seriously, as fans, players, leaders and people in the world, that we can improve. Let’s not get blindsided and pretend tanking is a natural part of sports. It should be reformed, rethought and updated, because it provides nothing positive to sports, the NBA or basketball.
But at least we have finally found something the Mavs are winning at: being the most ethical tankers around.
