The jokes about Chris Bosh, I'm sorry, but he makes them so simple to make. Even if they're not all that funny.
The idea that Chris Bosh -- who if you've forgotten, enjoyed the best statistical offensive season of any power forward in the NBA during 2009-10 -- continues to lump himself in with giants like LeBron James and Dwyane Wade is the ha-ha bit. Then there's the part where Bosh blames a good chunk of the NBA's ongoing lockout on his and James' jump to Miami, along with Carmelo Anthony's trade to New York.
What comes next is stuff like this, via the Sun-Sentinel and Pro Basketball Talk:
"With us doing what we did, and Carmelo going to the Knicks, I think that has a lot to do with it. Hopefully we can keep that and guys can come and go and make the deal that's best for them and their family."
I mean, if you look at the free agents coming up in the same situations, with Chris Paul, Dwight Howard, Deron Williams, they can control their own fate," he said. "They have the power to control that and I think that's a great thing. In any job you want freedom to negotiate."
It's one thing to try to deal with even supposedly ardent NBA fans like Bill Simmons as they point to stars wanting to go elsewhere as a major NBA problem. It's another to deal with fair-weather NBA fans when they complain about the same thing. It's entirely something else to reason with major NBA stars who may have actually left one of the biggest markets in North America to play for a team in one of the smaller, relative, markets. Like a Bosh, um, did.
Players have forced trades for ages. Wilt worked his way toward California, as did Kareem, all via trade. Magic and Larry were lucky to end up, via the draft, on the two most celebrated NBA teams of any era.
And just as the 1995 (Alonzo Mourning), 1999 (Kevin Garnett, though he took the money and stayed in Minnesota) and 2005 (Steve Nash) collective bargaining agreements were being discussed, stars used free agent leverage to either force trades, contract extensions, or new deals with new teams (in respective order) just as the deals were being hashed out between the league and the league's players. This is nothing new -- Bill Simmons, radio show caller, or Chris Bosh.
(Also, Dwight Howard might leave Orlando next year; but that's only because Magic GM Otis Smith is terrible at his job. It's not as if he wants to leave a warm climate, a team that does everything to pamper him, and a state with no income tax just to appear in more shoe ads. It's because the Magic have hamstrung themselves because of terrible deals.)
Carmelo Anthony forced a trade from a very good team to an average team that happened to play in New York. The Knicks hamstrung their future, signing 'Melo to a massive pre-CBA extension and jettisoning several draft picks, for the right to another scoring forward. That trade was reliant on the Knicks making a terrible deal, just as Carmelo's own Nuggets did when they sent endless amounts of assets to New Jersey and Philadelphia for Kenyon Martin in 2004 and Allen Iverson in late 2006. This is how these things work, when you take in a league like the NBA in context, instead of only allowing your brain to worm its way back to last July.
Also, the NBA's lockout is ongoing due to the insipid leadership of both sides of the table, leadership representing dual factions that have myriad and quite reasonable excuses for holding out. Neither is beholden to altruism, and save for the limiting of free agent deals from five to four years for players jumping teams, very little has popped out to impress upon us that owners are severely concerned with players jumping from small markets to big. On top of that, the NBA has been loath to disclose just how much it wants to split up revenue amongst markets both small and big, unlike the NFL. As it has been since the beginning of this -- if the team is properly run, the players will stay.
Unless Miami has cap space, of course.
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