The West will never end
Damian Lillard's decision to return to Portland, Marcus Smart's launch toward Los Angeles, Chris Paul and Bradley Beal's collusion to remain out West, these are not major deals, massive shifts. No team in the dilapidated East is particularly envious of the additions.
We hope for the best for Beal and CP3's Clippers, but if these fellas were big movers they'd be packed and unpacked in the first week of July. And most of the NBA's internet spent the third week of July discussing the demerits of Dame and his reembrace of the Blazer organization instead of scaling the Song of the Summer, 2025.
So much for vibes. Earlier this month I kvetched about an imaginary NBA lockout, made fun of people who actually graduated college.
This time out? The Eastern Conference will be terrible in 2025-26 for what feels like the 2025th-straight season. This is not good, when two-thirds of America has a W in its radio station.
Lillard leaving Schlitz Park, the Clippers' millennial-aged additions, they do little for this: Lillard doesn't play in 2025-26, Beal is 33 next summer, Chris Paul is 41 in spring, Clipper reserve center Brook Lopez turns 38 in April. Marcus Smart is 32 in March, he has the hands of demoted deckhand, don't ask about his back, never ever say "old man" to the old man, don't even talk to him. Do not look at him.
Yet beyond these artifacts, the best team in the NBA remains in the West, and so does the second-best NBA team and third-best and fourth-best and fifth-best and sixth-best and seventh-best and eighth and we're just going to keep going until Cleveland or New York admits that all this hurts.
We'd call for a 1-through-16 playoff bracket but for the environmental absurdity of tossing a Sacramento-to-Boston first-round series into the air.
So what do we do? Wait out Achilles tears?
Rely on the steady groundwork from team ownership, utilizing business savvy and sensible dollops of guile to guide these franchises through storm and stress? Better luck waiting out Achilles tears.
The easy move is no move at all. Recognize Minnesota and Memphis and New Orleans as "Eastern," draw the line between NBA Conferences at Highway 61 ahead of adding Las Vegas and Seattle as expansion outfits.
What I fear is the East earning the Timberwolves just as the new Minnesota ownership loses its money, the celebrated depth of its front office flees en masse, not an intern left to find, let alone deputy to lead.
Grizzlies hit the East and whatever it is that Robert Pera creates stops selling, he splits after Memphis doesn't give into his whinin' and moaning about public money for a new arena, the front office goes similarly skinflint. Suddenly I have to hear about "Nashville," I don't need to hear about Nashville, at night I can hear it from here.
The Bensons finally sell the Pelicans to an owner who clears house and turns over. Success doesn't spark quickly enough for the new regime, they were promised an easy trip to the Finals and they don't like the old Pelican arena even if this building were in the Finals, suddenly I have to hear about "Nashville" again.
Out West, the trillionaires behind the new Seattle and Las Vegas teams learn from the successes and failures of previous NBA expansion clubs and build brilliantly and lol OK fine we don't buy that. But maybe the new owners could luck into something while the ex-Western teams flop out East? Vegas and Seattle rolling lottery odds into New Shaq and then New Penny?
The Magic are supposed to be one of the Good Ones, they made it back to an NBA Finals in 2009 well after Shaq and Penny, and the Magic are primed for another Finals run in 2026. Primed because they traded for the third-best player from the eighth-best team in the West.
Where is Orlando once the East returns to full health? With that monstrous payroll full of guys pulling up and missing jumpers at the free throw line?
Where would the Magic be if not for that second or third stroke of lottery luck? The team that lowballed Shaq? The team that biffed with Dwight Howard?
I spent the last half of the 1990s preparing to opine the shit out of 2000s NBA coverage and heck no, no way did I see the East/West gap (emerging before century's end) persisting longer than Rasheed and Shareef and KG and Kobe and Shaq. Anyone could visualize Tim Duncan making a Finals at age 38, sure, but not as a representative of maybe the deepest bracket in postseason history (and for the 15th year in a row).
I read to achieve the belief that no star could turn down the charms of the Garden, the red running through Chicago's uniform, Orlando's golfing prospects, Atlanta's everything. The East – Dikembe Mutombo to Atlanta, Bison Dele to Detroit, Grant Hill and Tracy McGrady to Orlando – once drew free agent stars. Beyond that, good teams would balance bad luck with strong draft picks and pique every free agent's interest in having cake and the Larry Bird Rights to a nice place to eat it, too.
Wrong, said NBA stars. Warm weather. And some of us like Portland, for whatever reason.
I thought the last part was a little rude and clearly unnecessary but when stars speak, I listen.
Turns out NBA players aren't as turned on by the gleaming spots their prospective bosses (Doc Rivers, Larry Bird) love to golf, the links that are never too hot but not too cool.
Motivation to win now begats intrigue which develops into reputation, to where even the Denver pictured above can still win 'em over: Antonio McDyess, Aaron Gordon, Allen Iverson demanded a trade there over several other suitors.
Chris Webber signed a seven-year extension with Sacramento, Carlos Boozer left LeBron James to sign in Salt Lake City, and those are the West's Bad Ones.
So, change rules?
Or, or, or! Or? Or! Or, listen, or, or the teams at the East could improve?
The NBA had a titan, a ratings giant, in Chicago. Something to sustain through Jordan and into the New Century, the ratings would merely approximate Mike's but it wouldn't matter, look at those numbers, look at that uniform. Cowboys regained their championship colors after Landry, why not the red and the black?
The NBA blew this, a quarter-century of outsized revenue, to favor Jerry (Reinsdorf).
The Bulls make the most money in the NBA but they should make katrillions more. Yet 29 other business geniuses can't combine the juice to squeeze this item into a meeting, the thing about the internationally-beloved Bulls printing tens of billions for the NBA if they'd simply show up to a Finals every ten years, hang out in the occasional third round for a few seasons in between. If Jerry Reinsdorf were any other owner, the NBA would have hired Stu Jackson or Rod Thorn or Bryan and Jerry Colangelo or Joe Dumars to come in and save the place.
The Bulls don't pay money. Boston won because it paid money. Miami won because it paid money. Milwaukee won because it paid money. New York lost because it spent money.
See the difference, Jimmy Dolan? That's why it's been 26 years with as many Knicks Finals games as Hornets Finals games and fewer playoff series wins than the Hawks and barely more than the Kings and JD you're looking grumpier every time I see you, in scientific defiance of the surgically-inserted balloons lifting your cheekbones.
Now that's what I call, a straight shot. Charlotte? Major league-fanbase showing out more recently than Jordan's Bulls ...
... done in for two decades by the Hometown Savior. A solid, pre-Jordan, Bernie Bickerstaff-led expansion foundation enfeebled by cheapness and crap scouting. Characterized recently as the NBA club nobody wants to watch.
The Wizards? What can you say about a franchise so consistently dulled by a single looming presence? Maybe it's that guy, Ted.
The NBA waited out the Davidson years in Detroit until the Pistons, around since train rides, were rendered irrelevant, until the Pistons became the NBA's infamous one of 30 that ya just couldn't find the time to watch. All the early aught momentum, championship torque, skunked, spun into smoke.
The NBA brought a Russian oligarch in to grease the Nets' move from the swamps to Newark to Brooklyn, tasteful.
David Stern let a 1970s-like clash between minor Atlanta Hawk ownership partners with major basketball opinions turn into an actual court battle, in 2005, where photographers could take amazing images of the team's GM hesitating while wondering if he should shake the extended hand of the owner that took him to court for trading for Joe Johnson.
These should be 1970s ABA tales, not 21st Century NBA takes from Kelly Dwyer's decades of dumb blogdom.
NBA wins are finite, not every team can land 60 victories, ask every dynamite 54-win Western Conference club from the last 25 years. But if the NBA turns 85 in 2031-32, we're lookin' at half that time with the West in a firm grasp if Cooper effin' Flagg sticks to Dallas, Wemby the same in San Antonio.
We applauded these lottery wins. At least they weren't wasted on the Hornets, Pistons, Wizards.
It would be nice to give Wizards and Hornets fans the chance to prove they are as loyal as those basketball freaks in Texas, to give Hornets fans a reason to sell out for a decade and for Wizards fans the chance to rant and yell when the GM makes a bad move with a franchise player – at least they'd have a franchise player, not the No. 6 pick.
Sorry, Tre Johnson. They tell me you're amazing.
There are ways around warm weather, there are enough great NBA players to staff cold NBA courts on the East coast. If Boston can pull it off for gotdamned 75-years, Washington should be able to, too. So you didn't hire Red Auerbach, so what, move on.
Brooklyn should be able to, too. Charlotte, ahem, should be an awfully fun place for a rich, young man to live in February and March and April and every month until November. When he's on the road, anyway.
There is only so much room on Los Angeles' beachfront, they're not all going to the Lakers, they only have 15 spots. The Clippers spotted the East all those Sterling years, the Suns spotted the East with Sarver's cheapness and whatever hole Mat Ishbia just dug himself. There is no NBA team in Anaheim or Albuquerque or San Diego, there aren't that many other warm Western rosters to trade demand oneself toward.
There is no way to fix it because nothing is wrong with it.
Teams in the Eastern Conference, the businesses, must perform better. The NBA does well, but it could do much better and do much better without internal austerity measures. And without nickel and diming every last fan with ten-different passwords to five different streaming subscriptions.
America really, really likes a Laker-fied NBA, but it doesn't love it. This league could be colossal, drawing eyes from the NFL, turning MLB and NHL and all those piddly solo sports into afterthoughts.
It was there before in the 1990s and it sniffed the status in this century with LeBron, but it doesn't get there without New York. It doesn't get there without the south, and it doesn't get there without Chicago.
Until then, kids from Georgia will grow up hanging on every Laker move to make it down the ShamsWire, every child in the Carolinas focuses on football, every NBA fan in Chicago has to sit through What Could Have Been, as if the Bulls couldn't have gone out and tried to find another star after Derrick Rose's knees registered failing grades in each of the tests listed below:
The Bulls are the league's best-looking franchise and yet they feature the front office everyone laughs at. The Clippers haven't been the Clippers since Jay Leno was on at 11:35.
In 27 years, the Bulls developed down into the cultural combination of the late Davidson-era Pistons and Davidson University, nobody can name any of their players and shouldn't have to unless plied with visible cash currency. Imagine if the Pirates were also the White Sox but also Craig Kilborn's career, that's the Bulls.
I want them to succeed because I remember being in a tire swing in River Forest, whipping back and forth with a Bulls media guide I checked out from the library, it wasn't even a new one, just the one they had: Reggie Theus and David Greenwood. This is what I did, in the weeks before school started, I didn't think about school, I thought about the Bulls. I won't stop thinking about them even though they won't let me back in that building unless I have a Queen & Adam Lambert ticket.
The NBA should want Chicago to succeed because we tried the East coast, and it didn't work. Knicks and Celtics and all that, Philly and back. Yawn.
No, what's hot is the what's left of that: Minnesota and Memphis and Milwaukee and Chicago, Cleveland cranked because its owner wants to win a title without LeBron. Pacers shamed into spending, Pistons back.
The heat isn't merely in the Midwest, we'll rattle up the Wizards and Hornets and Magic and Hawks and get the South risi– listen, by then, I'll find a different way to put it. Southeast Division, standing tall!
The NBA sits on an entire generation who could not give two sits about MJ and Kobe or even, shock horror, sports. The NBA isn't the NFL, it isn't as compelling to be a Lakers fan from afar as it is to be a Cowboys fan from afar. This is where 82 games works in the NBA's favor, a repeated and somewhat surprising local touch ("I forgot it's already been two days, the [Home Team] are on again tonight!") could be a feature with this league, which works through winter and past it.
This league can't rely on repeated breakfast viewings of SportsCenter and Sports Illustrated on Thursday as much as it cannot rely on Twitter and YouTube and whatever other staples those who were born in the 21st Century find archaic. The answer is not a bid for exponential growth, as the phrase "artificial intelligence" kinda speaks for itself.
No, what it needs is winning teams in the East. Seedlings growing in different rates in big cities, smaller towns. Can't win 'em all, but by 2030 we're looking at two out of three decades of mostly trash in Chicago, Washington, and Charlotte.
With three injuries in the 2025 postseason, three different Eastern teams saw ten percent of their certain wins suddenly turn to future coin-flips. In response, Atlanta did well to improve. Washington and Charlotte did well to develop sleepers. Orlando put itself on pace with Atlanta in a bid to knock out the favorites in Cleveland, New York. Milwaukee doesn't want to go anywhere, Pacers and Heat never rebuild, Boston will be fine, Philly and Toronto are one move away.
Chicago, who should overwhelm the decimated Conference with competency, are in a position to turn the corner. They do not want to.
The Knicks, who should be ready to feast on a starless night after starless night, embarrassed themselves before hiring a coach who was their sixth choice.
Doesn't matter who New York hired, we'll only forget this misspent summer once the Knicks do something they haven't done since, say it with me, Nixon was in office.
One week before this:
NEW WESTERN ADDITIONS
The baseline hope for Marcus Smart is not dreaming he'll be as good as he was in Boston.
Rather, hoping Marcus Smart will be as good as he was in Memphis and Washington even though Marcus is a year older, and that your team (the Lakers!) can do more with Smart's declining output and stilted movement than the Grizzlies or Wizards could.
If Marcus Smart plays as well as he did in Boston, ask Marcus who his doctor is, make sure all that stuff is legal. We don't need a 60-game suspension for LeBron's backup insurance.
The value of Smart's ideal contribution is so profound that he's spun into a satisfying pickup. He wants to be there, the Lakers badly need someone to guard the positions LeBron and Luka probably will not, play the minutes Luka and LeBron probably should not.
Their time is April and May, maybe June. Marcus Smart's gig is to help them get there, until rotations tighten. Marcus Smart is not supposed to play all 82 games, that's not the requirement. The job is to do help the superstars' lode, and be around when superstars are sidelined with unexpected strains and tweaks.
Maybe it is "load," I don't know. Luka and LeBron deliver a lode, though, right? All sterling silver and shiny gold. Other NBA players carry a load, lumpy potatoes and ashy oranges. Domantas Sabonis carries a load, but Nikola Jokic brings his lode.
Celtic fans? I can't tell them how to feel, Boston won a title a year ago and Smart was on the C's two years ago, some Bulls fan is going to tell Celtics fans how to hurt?
SUNS
Beal wasn't a malcontent, he didn't have to be off the team, he was only redundant. The most wasteful owner in NBA history, by the owner's own own-up, was only felled by basketball tautology, a '2', another '2,' a '4' that plays like a '2,' all three shoot twos. Worse for Beal was the Top 2, Mr. Sun himself, Devin Booker. Rendering relative dwarf suns out of the other two uncelebrated '2s.'
The failure of Beal and Booker and Durant was a sports thing. Not a measure of the worth of a superteam, some giant column. It was just three dudes who kinda played the same way.
Want to place three super-old 25-point scorers for the same team? Please do that! But ensure that they are three different archetypes of scorer, and save for a bench. I thought the team with three '2s' would do well in the 2024-25 regular season, working under a one-game-at-a-time-guy in Mike Budenholzer. But Bud couldn't narrow his focus after the jump, understandably so.
Beal played exactly as we all expected at age 31. Few teams wanted his contract as anything more than an excuse to grab whatever picks and assets the Suns could collect to pay to move off Bradley's deal, and Beal was well within his rights to turn his nose at those temporary homes. And he was the only player who could do something about each individual aversion, with that well-earned trade clause.
The problem was not Durant, tweeting all night. The problem is ownership, the guy who said this, but only a few months ago:
"If I didn't feel we had a chance to win an NBA championship, I promise you we wouldn't have the highest salary and highest luxury tax in NBA history."
A chance? To the extent that severe superstar injuries could happen in four consecutive playoff rounds, each time to the Suns' immediate opponent? Sure. But if Mat Ishbia still thinks adding three of the same player is the way to build a championship-chance, then hit the bricks.
And if Mat Ishbia still thinks 29-year old Devin Booker is amazing, we have trouble. Devin was underrated when he was shat upon for his pouty performances for bad teams, historically-inferior squads, and Devin Booker is in no-way overrated for his marvelous contributions since. But he's forever Third Team, often not even this.
A Rookie of the Year season from a Duke center doesn't change the Suns, they're in the West. Phoenix did well to find capable players and appealing talent and a promising draft pick for Durant, Khaman Maluach might be a terrific pivotman straightaway. New Suns coach Jordan Ott may lend Phoenix the edge it expected from Coach Bud. Jordan Goodwin is a fun pickup, always love watching him play.
But, West. And Phoenix just fed the Clippers.
CLIPS
Strong work by the front office, doing much with little (plus the charms of L.A.) Not sure why they took in Josh Primo tryouts when everyone wants to be in Los Angeles anyway.
Beal was not a malcontent but his opinion of the entire Suns enterprise was all over his smirk. He will be a fine third or fourth or fifth-option in Clipperland because Bradley Beal actually thinks the Clippers have a chance.
They do: Beal will be nowhere near what Norman Powell was last season, but he'll be that way at a quarter of the price. And Norman Powell may not be what Norman Powell was last season. Beal (who traded his no-trade clause for a trade kicker) stays smiling.
John Collins is desperate to play NBA basketball again, he will save boards and bucks from Kawhi Leonard's nightly duty, make life easier for James Harden, help Ivica Zubac make it to May. When teams string and re-string a bunch of guys at the same star slot (Paul George and Kawhi and Harden and Beal and Chris Paul), every new acquisition at a new, distinctive position (John Collins) seems perfect
Zubac better be in the same great shape, ready to replicate his performance from last season, possibly build upon. Every one of his teammates will be worse, less potent and less pliable from game to game in 2025-26 than they were in 2024-25.
DAME
The Blazers didn't turn anyone down to sign Damian Lillard, didn't give up a pick, didn't reroute valuable salary in an unsavory way. Lillard's addition didn't stop deals (that we know of) to improve the roster. No, Dame (three-years, $42 million, player option for the third season) could not guard anyone long before his 2025 injury, his 2026-27 play might be rather shocking, but it doesn't matter.
And he might be gone that summer anyway. Earning two-years and $28 million from the Blazers for a single season in 2026-27 before clicking that 2027-28 player option and dipping into a championship scenario with another franchise.
Let's say Dame is good, let's say there are suitors in two years, let's say he does bounce: Lillard was paid $3.2 million in 2013-14 to work 82 games of All-Star ball for the Blazers, literally shooting the team into the second round, five outings' worth of home playoff receipts. Lillard dragged Portland to the NBA's 2019 final four with the 14th-highest salary in the NBA, yet again literally swishing his team into the third round.
Portland's front office would be beside themselves with glee and good cheer if Lillard abandoned his $14 million salary for 2027-28 to play for a fraction of much for a Finals hopeful. They're beside themselves if he stays, taking up only eight percent of the cap in 2028. The Blazers own the ability to swing wildly after crushing the ball so soundly in Summer of Lillard, 2023, keeping Miami on the other side of the country while slipping in swaps with several different outlets.
That Jrue Holiday is part of this is funny, not worrying. So Jrue can't hit the front of the rim, so he may earn a few three-second calls this season for not removing himself from the lane quickly enough. Holiday still gets to contribute the mentorship we expected from him during the first five days he was a Blazer, back in early autumn of 2023.
Slow build. The next time the Blazers make the playoffs, they lose a first-round pick to Chicago. If the 35-year old Jrue Holiday is hobbled, I'm unbothered by over $46 million of unplayable point guard between Holiday and Dame, even if Scoot Henderson remains so-so. The Blazers have Deni Avdija dominating the ball for $13 million a year between now and 2028, and we can all dream of a sweet-dishin' 7-footer taking over after that:
Can't be bothered by overpaying a Hall of Famer assured to guide the long-term prospects. This shit ain't always around to buy, but the Blazers came home with two. One to put in the freezer for a year, one that moves like he's still defrosting.
Jrue's a little glassy at the moment, he'll warm. Dame's a statue ceremony in sweats, so you sign that guy to whatever he wants. I can't pretend to be miffed about Dame when Jerami Grant makes two and a half times as much what Lillard might make to play (let's say) 64 games in three years, and for $42 million.
It redounds to the credit of all involved, especially Jerami's agent, especially whomever negotiated the part of the Collective Bargaining Agreement where some of the Blazer money goes back to Milwaukee to offset the price of Dame's release. Like Lillard is some fired head coach hopping on with a new gig even though he's paid to sit a year.
It makes some, but then again, zero sense. Milwaukee benefitted from Dame's release, the Bucks wanted to do it. Does Myles Turner have to give some of his blocked shots to Portland?
CATCH UP ON THINGS AT HOME?
I suppose so, tightened up my tone, took down a few Christmas trees:
These are the good old days, because nobody's moved into that blue house next door. Where do you think I borrowed those bricks from?
WATER
In my head, now it is in yours, drink up while you can!
We bought Outrageous!, Charles Barkley's book, thanks for this! Talk over Charles and TNT next, Larry Bird after that, maybe some baseball, definitely some NBA. Thank you for reading!
