MY TOTALLY AWESOME PLAN TO REVAMP THE NBA DRAFT

The NBA Draft kind of sucks. It is nowhere near as exciting as the NFL Draft and by its nature it rewards bad teams and their mediocre to poor management and ownership.

There has to be a better way – and now, there is and it would work like this

Allow players to decide where they play, just like every other business in America.

How it works:

1.       Every NBA team submits a list of 60 NBA eligible players to the league office. The 60 names most often sited create a pool of that year’s selectees.

2.       Any NBA-eligible player not on the initial list is free to sign with any team as a free agent after the selection event is completed.

3.       Have each of the 60 players pick a number – 1-60 – out of a hat. Players select from the hat based on some kind of random computerized process.

4.       The player who selects the #1 can go to whichever team he wants. The player who selects the #2 can go to whichever team he wants, except the team selected by the prior player. On it goes.

5.       Every team gets the same amount of money within the salary cap to sign two players from the pool. The contracts are 2-year guaranteed deals.

6.       If a team and a player cannot reach a deal, the player’s recourse is to forgo selecting a team and wait until the following year. If that happens, he retains amateur status and can back to school or retain pro status and play overseas.

7.       A player can opt out of a team selection, only once.

It solves everything wrong with the current NBA Draft system.

• It stops teams from tanking, because there is no longer any incentive to lose on purpose.
• It creates a system that is inherently fair to players, teams and fans. Players choose the place they want to work, franchises are forced to spruce up their image and winning to attract those players, and we finally end a situation where teams are like plantation owners and players are like the help.
• It would be ungodly exciting for everyone to watch.
• It creates a system where the best of all possible synergies between player and team is created. Players inherently want to go to a place they can succeed.
• It provides more, not less, opportunity for players to succeed and franchises to get it right. Players can find the best situation for them and franchise get to test-drive players for two years and not be forced to lock into a three-year deal on a player that isn’t working out. In the current system, teams hate to give up on a Kwame Brown because it makes them look bad, but if Kwame selected them and it didn’t work out, they can let him go and move onto the next opportunity without blame.

I welcome any additional thoughts and comments.

MAYBE THIS TIME...MAYBE??

Have you ever played a silly game, like tossing playing cards into a hat with a friend and you keep missing the target? And you take a moment, grip the card carefully and exclaim, “OK, this time it goes in.” And then you flip it forward and it misses the mark. Then you say, “OK, THIS TIME!”

And you miss again.  All this is repeated again and again, until you finally make it.

I’ve been thinking about this scenario for the past 24 hours in relationship to the horror in Orlando and our national disgrace related to assault weapons.

Could it be that after so many heart-wrenching mass shootings, after so many funerals and so many ineffectual thoughts and prayers, we might finally actually get the card in the hat and actually do something constructive about the proliferation of assault weapons in our country?

For years, I’ve been saying to myself: OK, this time…this time we will finally take action to reduce the number of assault weapons in circulation.

I really thought after Sandy Hook, after all those kids were killed, I thought it was time. I was wrong.

I really thought after the Aurora shooting, after a massacre in such a general location as a movie theater, I thought it was time. I was wrong.

I thought after San Bernardino, after tragedy struck at an innocuous holiday party for a bunch of low level government bureaucrats, I thought it was time. I was wrong.

Could the massacre at Pulse in Orlando finally be the one?

I get it. The odds of meaningful gun reform are long. Really long.  But, here are a couple of things we may wish to consider.

·         People who steadfastly support the NRA are by their nature, fearful people. True, they fetishize guns and love the macho power of assault weapons, but at their heart, they are afraid. They fear the unknown and unseen madman who can strike at any moment, at any place.

·         At its core, the situation of Omar Mateen is terrifying on so many levels. He was on the FBI watch list, and yet cleared to buy an AR-15. He passed background checks to become a security guard. He lives in a country where he can purchase assault weapons with no problem whatsoever, but was denied purchase of body armor. He was not a member of ISIS, but apparently become radicalized because of a simple website.

Think about that for a second. If Omar Mateen can become a mass shooter, literally anyone can. He wasn’t some crazed loner, like the Aurora shooter, or some mental defect like the Virginia Tech or Sandy Hook shooters.  He was an angry man – apparently extremely homophobic - and easily walked among us.

And the FBI, questioned him in 2014 and didn’t have enough to stop him at all. 

·         And, he didn’t strike some military base or some meaningful target to further the goals of ISIS. He simply cloaked himself in the violent and nihilistic rhetoric of ISIS to carry out his personal homophobic rage on a gay nightclub. He simply exploited the idea of ISIS to vent his hatred of people completely disassociated with that terror group’s designs.

If law enforcement and our intelligence community couldn’t stop Mateen, they can’t stop anyone of similar intent. And if he could be radicalized by ISIS propaganda – really, only for the justification for mass murder against personal objects of disgust – then anyone can.

And so I come back to the idea that this time it might be different. I think Mateen represents a kind of watershed moment of clarity surrounding our feelings of safety and security.  I think many people - maybe enough people - are going to realize that NOTHING could have stopped him from doing what he did and NOTHING is going to stop others from committing similar acts of terror and hate on their own bete noires. And more importantly, many people – maybe enough people – are going to realize that in order to take back a certain level of safety and security we have to at least make it harder for these would-be mass murders to kill us in such great numbers.

Mateen was a literally a stew. A stew of rage, intent, outward normalcy, malleability, access and an assault weapon. There is only one ingredient society could realistically remove from this stew that would have saved lives on June 12 – the gun.

Maybe this time?

 

PARTNERS IN LEGEND

When you swim, the water acts as both benefit and curse. The water provides the resistance that slows and stalls you from reaching the speed you’d love to achieve. But the water is the thing you push against to get anywhere. The curse of resistance is actually the benefit of propulsion.

I thought about that when I heard the sad news of Mohamad Ali’s passing and thought about the legendary partnership between the greatest athlete of the 20^th Century and the greatest announcer of the same era, Howard Cosell.

Their verbal sparring was legendary, to the point of being uncomfortable.  When I was just a little kid and witnessed their heated conversations on TV I thought they were really mad at each other. I thought this big, hulking monster was savaging this obnoxious, verbose yellow-blazered maniac.

It was only later that I learned how those performances were necessary resistance that actually propelled the legend of both men forward.

In order to make his act work; in order for this 1960’s black athlete to be taken seriously as the smartest, most charismatic and larger-than-life figure the world had ever seen, he needed a white foil to take it all out on.

And Cosell was there, along for the ride in its entirely, to be the resistance Ali needed to get to the other side. To become THE GREATEST, Ali needed, perhaps the greatest second banana in history.

Further, the sportscaster only burnished his legacy be being inexorably linked to the most recognizable and famous person on the planet for more than two decades. After all, in the 60’s and 70’s, if Ali walked into a room with Bob Hope, John Lennon, Richard Nixon, Lucille Ball, Joe Namath, Pele, Mick Jagger, Wilt Chamberlin and the Pope – everyone would stop talking, turn around and say, “hey, there’s The Champ!”

Indeed. There would still be a Mohamad Ali without Cosell, but I’m not sure there would have been, “The Greatest.” And, Howard Cosell would still have been a great and revered broadcaster, but not the single greatest in history.

If there is a heaven, both of these giants are together again: the most charismatic superstar and the most articulate broadcaster those of us left of earth have ever seen and heard.