Clutch Opportunities—the Week In Green

The Celtics went 4-0 since my last column, notching a solid win over the Warriors, and some uneven performances against the Wizards, Suns, and Grizzlies.

The negative way of looking at this is that the C’s really shouldn’t have struggled against the Grizzlies (24-45), and probably shouldn’t have had such a hard time with the Suns (39-31) considering they were hosting Phoenix.

However, there are positive aspects of these games to consider as well. The Celtics have struggled in clutch situations all season, as exemplified by their game against the Thunder the week prior. With Jayson Tatum back, they should be better, but they still need, for lack of a better term, clutch game reps. They need to figure out how they’re going to play out these situations now that they have Tatum back, and that’s the opportunity that games against Phoenix and Memphis presented.

Against Phoenix, Boston wilted in the first half of the fourth quarter, as the Suns went from being down by five at the start of the quarter to being up four with just over four minutes to play. From this point on, however, the Celtics locked down and the Suns did not score another field goal.

In Memphis, the Celtics struggled to put away a team that really had no business competing with them, but again, this enabled the Celtics to get some clutch game reps. The C’s entered the fourth quarter trailing by four, and Memphis managed to push that advantage as high as seven points, when the score hit 98-91 at the 9:08 mark.

The C’s caught up over the next two minutes, with Derrick White tying the game at the 7:21 mark. After two more lead changes, Jaylen Brown gave the Celtics the lead for good with 5:06 to go. That was the beginning of a 10-0 run that put the game out of reach.

Again, you can argue—not unreasonably, in my opinion—that it never should have come to this, but the bright side is that the C’s, on two occasions this week, got to learn how to close out tough games in convincing fashion. Against Phoenix, they relied on their defense, and against Memphis, it was their offense that carried the day.

Expansion on the table, finally

The NBA will be holding meetings starting on Monday to discuss expansion.

Previously, Adam Silver had indicated that the league was considering expansion in 2019, 2023, and 2025, but this is apparently the first time that the league has made expansion a subject of a Board of Governors meeting.

However, this upcoming meeting is not a meeting to award franchises, or even to approve expansion.

The only thing that’s officially being done at this meeting is obtaining a vote on whether the league should investigate expansion specifically to Las Vegas and Seattle.

Mind you, if there’s consensus on whether the league should investigate expansion to these cities, there’s basically consensus on whether the league will expand to these cities.

If you’d like to get a peek into how league meetings work, I invite you to read select chapters of Veeck as in Wreck, as well as The Hustler’s Handbook, in which Bill Veeck discusses his tussles with other Major League Baseball owners on matters such as relocation, sales of teams, and expansion.

The main takeaway you’ll get from Bill Veeck is that owners’ meetings work best when they are purely perfunctory affairs. Nobody wants surprises at these things, so there’s a great deal of time spent before meetings building consensus, lobbying, trading favors, and doing the sort of cajoling and wheeler-dealering that is what really keeps things moving forward.

Naturally, the stakes are a lot higher these days than in Veeck’s day. There’s a lot more money floating around and a lot more teams involved, but people are people, and people haven’t changed much over the past 70 years.

Adam Silver has said that relocation is not going to be on the agenda at this meeting, which is an interesting statement which implies that perhaps it should be.

So which franchises are on shaky ground? One is New Orleans. New Orleans is a small market, with a metro population of just over one million, and that’s riding on the thin edge of what you need to support a professional sports franchise, let alone two of them. There’s currently a conspiracy theory afoot suggesting that the owners are doing little to nothing to retain fans in order to build a case for the inevitability of relocation.

Memphis is another team in a tiny market that has some open questions about its home arena coming up. Their lease ends in 2028, and with a metro population on par with New Orleans, they’re in a similar situation with respect to their ability to support a pro team.

I suspect that the chief objection to expansion was a strong desire to relocate weaker teams to Seattle and Las Vegas in lieu of expansion which will not do much to shore up weaker teams and will ultimately dilute TV and sponsorship revenue for all existing teams.

If I’m going far out on a limb, I would suspect that some of the deal-brokering that has been going on to approve expansion has been support for relocation.

In any case, because expansion is on the agenda, it’s basically a fait accompli at this point. The owners pushing for expansion already have the votes they need in their pocket. What they had to do to get those votes remains to be seen.

Just keep your eyes open for the sudden appearance of news articles talking about how such-and-such a team is losing money or needs a new arena, or something similar.

Cade Cunningham and schedule length

The Piston’s loss of Cunningham to a collapsed lung has prompted a new surge of commentary on the length of the season, and its role in player health.

The league loves the money that this dense schedule brings in. With the league’s streaming deals in place, there are multiple NBA games every night of the week on nationally televised platforms. This is great for both owners and players—or at least it’s great for their wallets.

But nobody loves the seemingly increased toll that it’s taking on player health.

Players are doing far more than they did when the schedule was expanded to 82 games in the 1960s, and games are much more demanding. We are pushing the limits of what the human body is capable of, and we’re seeing the results of pushing those limits too far.

Unfortunately, there’s no good solution here. Or perhaps, I should say there is a good solution here, but nobody wants it. Nobody wants the season to be shortened, and everybody knows that the season is too long.

The irony here is that everyone in the league could easily afford to give up a bit of money in exchange for a shorter season. Basketball salaries are, on average, the highest among the four major sports, and for owners, fixed costs are a fractional aspect of the operating expenses they incur. Or, I should say, fixed costs outside of player salaries, which would be reduced under a shortened season.

Essentially, players and owners, who have more money than they need, are unwilling to give up some of it in order to assure that the game is healthier. Make of that what you will.