I love sports. Some people would say I love sports the same way preteen girls love Taylor Swift, or the way an alcoholic loves the bottle. Once I realized, at the age of six, that I wouldn’t become a professional athlete, I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life until I discovered that people could have careers in sports. I am a self-diagnosed sicko, and I do my best to own it.
It’s all sports, too. Basketball, football, running, motorsports, disc golf, regular old-person golf, any of it. I love them all, without discrimination. Sometimes it’s less about the actual sport itself and more about the competition: the thought of two teams going into battle and the tactics and strategy it takes to emerge the victor.
Except for the NBA. I hate the NBA.
I love basketball, but I hate the NBA. I think this is for a number of aesthetic, non-primary reasons such as the late games, the slog of the regular season and the colossal struggle it is to watch anyone but the large market teams. However, I also hate the NBA for one larger reason: it infringes on the competitive ideal.
For any major sport to be competitive, I believe three things have to be true.
First, the games have to mean something.This is something that the NBA struggles with especially. The regular season is about 30 games (36%) too long and exists only for degenerate gamblers and true die-hard fans. It’s really hard to convince an average viewer that a regular season game in mid-March actually counts for anything or has any bearing on who wins the championship.
Second, teams have to be trying to win. This might sound intuitive, “Oh, of course the teams should be trying to win.” But at the risk of losing a more casual fan in the semantics of “tanking”, let me explain.
Every year, at the end of the season, in an attempt to level the playing field, teams are awarded draft picks in the order of the worst teams to the best teams. The worst teams thus get first dibs on the best young new players, in order to try to become more competitive.
Now, let’s say I am the general manager of the Milwaukee Bucks. It’s February, we don’t have a realistic shot at making the playoffs and things are looking bleak. I would, from an organizational standpoint, rather lose every game and secure the number one pick in the draft next year than continue in lukewarm mediocrity until the end of time.
Mediocrity doesn’t win championships, a young new player could.
This is less of a problem in the NBA. They have a system in place called the draft lottery that tries to discourage tanking due to a somewhat luck-based method of deciding the draft order. It does still happen, but I’m shocked tanking isn’t more common in leagues where that system is not in place, like the NFL, unless that’s what the New York Jets have been trying to do for the last twenty years.
Third, and lastly, in order for the competitive integrity of the NBA to be preserved, players have to care. This issue stems from both of the first two I talked about, but is its own unique problem. Players don’t care about the games. And sure, we can bicker all we want about how athletes who get paid millions of dollars should at least try, but honestly, I can’t blame them. If I knew that 36% of the work I did didn’t matter, I wouldn’t try very hard either. Until the league makes some institutional change, the quality of play will not improve.
Enter Victor Wembanyama.
The 7-foot-4 athletic anomaly of a Frenchman has changed the way basketball as we know it is played. His athleticism, coupled with his size and strength, has redefined what a star in the NBA looks like. “Wemby” (as he is affectionately known around the league) is also very aware of those three competitive premises, and he has done a fantastic job of addressing them in real-time, as opposed to only in press conferences like the stars of the past.
In order to make games matter, he has brought in tradition to the San Antonio Spurs organization. EuroLeague basketball is rich with heritage and avenues for fans to rally around teams, which in turn make the games matter. This background has proved helpful to Wembanyama, initiating a tradition where a drum is beaten as the fans clap along after every home win.
The second issue is somewhat out of Wembanyama’s control. He personally can’t make his bosses do their jobs. But he himself has proved a rallying point for both his teammates and the fans that support him, making it impossible for the San Antonio front office to not capitalize on him. His generational talent speaks for itself, and for Spurs executives to waste his prime would not only directly contradict Wembanyama’s competitive spirit but also break their fans’ hearts and ultimately kill their own careers.
The third, final issue is arguably where Wembanyama has found the strongest solution. In his young career, it seems he can’t help but to care about winning games.
Two weeks ago, he broke down in tears after coming back and beating the Clippers in the fourth quarter of a random Friday night regular season game. Mind you, this Clippers team is not the 2016 Warriors. To describe them as anything better than mediocre would be flattery. Instead of the annual handwringing over how to get players to care about the All-Star game, analysts broke down Wembanyama’s tape after. He was clearly the only one who cared about actually winning the exhibition game. His effort and heart speak for themselves, sometimes even louder than the quality of his play.
All in all, Victor Wembanyama could save the NBA. He is exactly the type of star the league needs at this point in its life cycle. Fans can only hope that players use his heart and competitive spirit as a model for years to come.
