NBA: DeAndre Jordan Reality Show Entertaining But Bad For League

While NBA fans were transfixed by Wednesday’s drama in Houston involving the on-again, off-again agreement between free agent center DeAndre Jordan and the Dallas Mavericks, which ended with Jordan—sequestered at his home with his former and future Los Angeles Clippers teammates—re-signing with the Clippers.

That came after Jordan had agreed to a deal with the Mavericks five days earlier. Instead, Jordan re-upped with the Clippers for four years and $87.7 million, according to CBSSports.com, with a player option for the fourth year.

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There were emoji wars on Twitter, an All-Star player sending out a photo on social media of a chair wedged against the door of Jordan’s home and reports of a card game breaking out.

The threat of this scenario has always been there, given the NBA’s free agency system including a window of more than a week during which teams and players can negotiate, but not sign, contracts.

This isn’t to say that Jordan or the Clippers did anything against NBA rules. They didn’t.

And that’s the problem.

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The scene was entertaining, good for some cheap laughs, but at the end of the day, commissioner Adam Silver had to be grimacing after his league was dragged through a carnival that was broadcast live on national television and social media.

It was reminiscent of a fictional scenario during the sixth season of the Emmy-award winning drama West Wing, when a national convention disintegrated into a pie fight and veteran political operative Leo McGarry commented on the fact 52 million watched it on television.

“Who knew if we set our hair on fire and jumped up and down people would actually tune in to watch?”

That was the scenario for the NBA on Wednesday night.

It’s really not the way a multibillion-dollar business operation ought to be run, something that Yahoo Sports’ Adrian Wojnarowski reported did not escape the notice of the guys in the suits who are supposed to be running the thing.

It seems like a reasonable scenario. Don’t let the players agree to deals until those deals can be real. It’s the best way to avoid a repeat of the Jordan sleepover/hostage crisis/clown show from Wednesday night.

There are benefits to the current system. Eight days allows for players and teams to take their time in negotiating.

But too often, those negotiations turn into something more like a teenager trying to convince the prettiest girl in the school to go to the prom. Marketing opportunities, cartoon presentations, entourages, posters, banners—an entire marketing department’s weight and resources thrown behind trying to make a grown man feel like the most popular kid in the class.

It’s a byproduct of an AAU culture I’ve been critical of before. Before they are teenagers, star players get accustomed to having their every whim catered to.

And for a player who has climbed from second-round draft pick to NBA star such as Jordan, free agency provides him perhaps his first opportunity to be that girl that everyone wants to dance with.

This isn’t the first time an NBA player has backed out of an agreement in free agency. But it was certainly the most unprofessional, ethically questionable one.

Jordan, sequestered at home with Doc Rivers and an entourage of Clipper players, playing cards and refusing to even field phone calls from understandably irritated Dallas officials is not exactly a how-to guide on how to conduct one’s business affairs in a professional manner.

Getting rid of the moratorium could create a scenario with more chaos—visions of general managers and owners demanding signatures at 12:01 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time on the first day of free agency dance in my head.

But in the end, it’s the NBA that looks bad.

Bear in mind this is a league that has suffered from credibility problems dating back 40 years; through the cocaine scandals and apathetic play of the 1970s, allegations of lottery fixing in the 1980s, high school players becoming instant millionaires in the 1990s and early 21st century, referees convicted of fixing games for gamblers, trades inexplicably being overturned by the commissioner’s office when one of the franchises involved in the deal is conveniently under league control  to teams actively assembling D-League level rosters in the interest of securing more ping pong balls in the lottery.

Those of us who love the NBA are the easy ones; we’re going to watch and will continue to regardless of whatever shenanigans are taking place. It’s fun, entertaining, engaging.

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It’s not as if I wasn’t watching the proceedings and laughing all the way.

But those who regard the NBA as less than other professional leagues were just handed more ammunition to fire at the league, a house in such disorder that a player can publicly declare a deal is in place and then just as publicly renege on that agreement in a spectacle that was more reality TV than serious business.

Is ending the moratorium the answer? I have my doubts.

But business as usual just succeeded in making the entire NBA look like a ship of fools.

That can’t be the image Adam Silver wants to project to his partners in television and the rest of the business world, where their highest-priced assets aren’t tweeting emojis out to the world like so many pre-teens.

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