"Solving For Pattern" and the NBA Lockout

Thanks to Larry Coon (via Pounding the Rock) we learn that the lockout is extraordinarily more expensive than the marginal percentages at stake in lockout negotiations. Now, as someone applying for jobs in computer science, and someone that has recently been obsessed with proper solutions to problems on small and large scales, maybe I can weigh in here with my (probably idiotic and reductive) two cents.

Wendell Barry's great essay "Solving For Pattern" (warning: PDF) is a fantastic burst of sense that tells us lucidly about "holistic" and "organic" solutions to problems without falling into ideological or mystical claptrap. Barry tries to differentiate between good solutions and bad solutions and uses as an example some case studies in agriculture. In his view, good solutions don't create problems outside the scope of the solution or the original problem. As Barry attempts to show, good farms mimick nature in her elegance, rather than in her bare-stripping brutality. Good farms don't pollute the surrounding area with manure. Good farms don't demand too much in resources of the world outside the farm, don't deconstruct their own long-term goals with short-term cash grabs (for example, by destroying the farm's topsoil with a monoculture). Good farms turn (as much as is possible by the Great Eroder) cattle waste into fertilizer for plants and plants into feed for cattle. Good farms are really good (if highly artificial) ecosystems with a sustainable yield. Good farms are not so large in scope or size that they cannot economically sustain the humans needed to tend to them. Good farms are good interrelated processes with the overall goal of social health and well-being.

Now, Barry is not just talking about some pie-in-the-sky utopia rooted in Ecclesiastes' meditations or some sort of Platonic or Randian ideal where a farmer is some sort of virtuous, compassionate genius or anything. No, Barry just calls for the existing attention and intelligence and vision of farmers to be directed to appropriate solutions, rather than directing that mental power to ameliorating work and liabilities with directionless amalgams of short-sighted band-aids (that in the end tally, says Barry, are unsustainable on every level). Barry recognizes that any solution not rooted in a whole understanding of problems, any solution that is not recognized as a process with its own qualitative demands and yields (he uses the analogy of an organ in the body) is doomed to fail at resolving the solution's goals in some ultimate sense.* Transparently, Barry's argument applies to just about any organization and its problems.

*Hilariously (especially to a Spurs fan), Timothy Varner of 48 Minutes of Hell uses Barry's essay (Varner's piece actually inspired the piece you are reading right now) to call Richard Jefferson out as a "bad solution" to the Spurs' basketball needs. Varner therefore interprets the George Hill/Kawhi Leonard trade as an Barry-like attempt to ameliorate RJ's toll.

But that's not what I came to talk to you about. I came to talk about the draft...er, the lockout. Heh. From my relatively short experience as a Spurs fan (and as an avid reader of basketball literature), I have a few examples and I'd like to share my interpretation of what is wrong with the NBA's negotiation structure. We have a tendency to overpersonalize systematic problems. Farmers (to go back to Barry) don't decide to ravage their topsoil: They make good-looking crop decisions that are ill-fitted or short-sighted. Similarly, owners and players aren't just being greedy. Their negotiation structure is just a status quo that seems inevitable, and they negotiate (often in good faith mixed equally with self-interest) to the best of their ability.

You see, the collective bargaining agreements that the NBA makes once every 5 or 6 years may be the result of thousands of independent entities (players, ownership groups, teams, TV networks, demographics of consumers, advertisers, the NBA's front office) with loose and often contradictory needs and goals. And as a result, when 12 or 18 years have passed - and there is a tremendous amount of turnover not just in the negotiating entities but in the world at large compelling these entities - the terms of the previous CBA seem not to fit. What's more, many of the people that negotiated the last CBA are in totally different negotiating positions after an era, and want to take advantage of what they had originally lost or hold on to what they had originally won. And this is where the fundamental disagreements stem from that cause lockouts.

On the surface this all appears to be straightforward economics and politics. But there is a fundamental fallacy here - wrought of the heat of negotiations - that bears mentioning: The lockout is not a zero-sum interaction of the negotiators: This is where Barry's essay comes in.

The 1999 regular season - as Jeff Van Gundy helpfully reminds us - was "an abomination of basketball." After one of the great stretches in NBA history - the second Bulls threepeat - the league seemed to cut its ties with its fans as coldly and as destructively as the Bulls ownership cut its big three and Phil Jackson.* The quality of play suffered, older players (who in normal situations would love 50-game seasons) were tired out by the ugly back-to-back-to-backs that wore down their already slow recovery times, and overall, while the Spurs deserved to win the title (extremely convincingly), Phil Jackson placed an rhetorical asterisk on the title that is hard for even this diehard Spurs fan (esp. the Twin Towers) to completely remove.

*Yes, I know, a little reductive. I read "Playing For Keeps," though, and it was certainly a tough situation by the Bulls that the foursome managed to get through.

What am I getting at here? I'm getting at the idea that these lockouts - as negotiating tactics - are not just kind of bad or mediocre for everyone involved. I'm getting at the idea that - as with monocultures or unsustainable foreign policies or bad trades - the twice-a-decade CBA format represents a fundamental problem with the NBA's negotiating structure - a fundamental failure to solve problems in ways that do not deconstruct ultimate goals like market reach, advertising money, and good, healthy basketball at the highest level. Sure, the evidence is in the lockout, but the evidence is also in the ridiculous half-solutions that come out of non-lockout negotiations.

When Tim Duncan refused to leave Wake Forest before he had spent four years dominating his field, Duncan not only made himself an anachronism rooted in an amazing dedication to family (he claims he stayed to keep a promise to his mother). Duncan also showed himself to be an astonishingly complex decision-maker: The rookie scale was initiated in the CBA of 1995 (I believe) before what became Duncan's junior year. Kevin Garnett's - and Juwan Howard's, hilariously enough - infamous $100M+ contracts happened of course before the rookie scale. Though in retrospect Duncan's decision looks at worst nuanced and as best a stroke of self-aware genius, he gave up (in the short term) tens of millions of dollars, and is only now - in his twilight - being fairly compensated for the value he brought to the Spurs' organization. An injury or two along the way and we could all be singing "This Nearly Was Mine" at his terrible misfortune.

Now, whatever you may think of this whole Duncan situation, I believe very strongly that the astonishing variation in rookie scales between his freshman and senior years is in itself an incredibly strong piece of evidence that these CBAs bring distortively radical solutions. This isn't analogous to Bill Gates deciding to leave Harvard, on the precipice of a substantive revolution. This is basketball now or basketball in three years, and yet relative to the market situation, Duncan's choice had an analogous level of variability of fortune and significance to the league...almost solely because of an emergency, sudden CBA solution to a mid-level problem. Duncan may be worth hundreds of millions of dollars, but pure league politics - rooted in cultural assumptions (read Terry Pluto's unfortunate "Falling From Grace" for a primer) and bad ownership and completely unrelated negotiators - should not have been the major economic factor in his choices. Ultimately, if the NBA wanted a market system then Duncan should have received what he could negotiate, and if they wanted to shift from elements of a market system then so be it: but the entire negotiating position of Duncan's eventual draft class should not have hinged on a sudden decision that completely changed the nature of contracts. Yet this is what the CBA consistently encourages, just as it encourages the waves of absurd contracts we saw in 2010. We have a fairly stable (though dynamic) league, and yet a lot of decisions are made around a completely artificial bombshell that arrests our attention every five years.

Even worse from a player's perspective is the notion that they might enter a draft only to lose a season of solid development to a lockout. Tiago Splitter was one of the Spurs' most exciting foreign prospects entering last season, but he missed training camp because of a hamstring injury during FIBA. And - not-really-dirty little secret - since NBA players don't practice that much during the season together, Splitter was never able to develop into the Spurs complex offensive schemes. A young seven-foot big that could defend and provide more of a driving presence than starter Antonio McDyess and more height on D than sixth man Dejuan Blair...exactly what the Spurs needed against, oh...say...Zach Randolph and Marc Gasol, not to mention against any of the powers they could have faced if they could have held on in the first round. Splitter's hamstring injury (at least on the margins) hurt the Spurs' title hopes in 2011 to an incredible extent. Would Splitter be a star? No, but he could have been the difference. I know from extensive viewing of the Spurs (and some considerable scouting of Tiago) that Splitter's lagging development certainly hurt the extent to which the Spurs were able to play brilliant and structured basketball in a great series.

I'm not at all bitter about Splitter's injury. Injuries are generally not deliberate. But I do believe that on two loaded teams, a training camp issue to an eighth man might have made the difference in one of the best series of the playoffs. Imagine what happens to basketball in general when not just Splitter but entire teams miss training camp. The starters will lag behind and the brilliant offenses and defenses of the best coaches may never materialize, a constant fog of injury and disorganization distorting their active intelligences into mere triage and attrition. Because of the Blazers' surreal situation, Nate McMillan is arguably more prepared for the lockout than any other coach and that's an awful thing to have to say. This dire situation is amply precedented by 1999: It won't be just Bynum and Bogut being terribly out-of-sync and in obvious pain for long stretches....but Kobe, Chris Paul, and LeBron, and an army of role players having systematic problems just setting up plays. Bankable superstars will miss training camp and never - except in gametime situations and occasional intrasquad scrimmages - practice fully with their team. The NBA missing training camp - as it already sort of has - hurts the global brand of basketball and the 30 NBA teams as fully as any revenue sharing system could possibly hurt them. I am bitter about lockouts. Lockouts are generally deliberate.

Any negotiating system that systematically eats its revenue stream alive - or systematically provides a credible threat to do so - is a broken system that Wendell Barry could only shrug at with disappointment. We injure ourselves more systematically than we could possibly do accidentally. The league moves into disappointment as if populated by a thousand Tiago Splitters. Dig me?

All that David Stern has done for the sport of basketball in his branding, his global reaching-out, his refusal to contract teams as a point of pride - all of it is threatened or mitigated by the lockouts that he, the owners, and the players have allowed to occur. All of this in total (and possibly willful) ignorance of their ultimate goals to the public* and to themselves as a whole entity. I don't know where to begin with solving this but I think the changing the status quo is a good start: We have a CBA as a "five-yearly shock to the system" instead of a continuous and substantive evolving negotiation between players and owners. While continuing negotiations are inherently built on shifting power and incentives and cynical negotiators, we know from every branch of the social sciences that methodology matters. And a shock to the system that we dance around and silently** dread until it becomes catastrophic is not sound or defensible methodology.

*the libertarian in me cannot help but note the massive public subsidies teams receive for arenas, built partially on the premise that the arenas will guarantee decades of consistent economic activity
**the NBA systematically practically muffles frank public discussion by players and owners with fines


We have guaranteed contracts, and we have guaranteed revenue cuts. But we don't have guaranteed training camps, we don't have guaranteed good-faith negotiations and we don't have the healthy infrastructure of systematic politics and informal legal attention and intelligence that is the backbone of every successful global organization. I wish I knew where to start, I'm just someone applying for jobs in computer science, obsessed with proper solutions to problems on small and large scales.

Thanks for reading.