Jokers Rule NBA Offseason

Each summer, shortly after the championship parades are cleaned up and all the postseason hardware is divvied between the league's elite, the NBA airwaves are saturated with rumors and reports of potential player and coach movements, possible trade scenarios, and other personnel transactions. Of these often fictitious rumblings, a fractious few actually come to fruition, and are generally met with an indignant "huh?!" or a quizzical "what the?!"

Well, if the Academy Awards can give Oscars, than, by gosh, we should be able to give the most infamous offseason NBA mover an award, as well. It is in this vein that I give you the NBA's first-annual "Crazy" nominations.

Early returns on the NBA's annual offseason "Crazy" award (given in homage to the person or people responsible for the "Most Noteworthy Thing That Can't Possibly Happen, But Somehow, Inexplicably, Does" during the always turbulent and convention-defying break between the NBA Finals and the following pro basketball preseason) have some rather interesting coaching situations emerging as favorites ahead of the usual quarry of ridiculous contract signings and pointless locker room in-fighting.

At first glance, the casual fan may assess this summer's NBA landscape a bit differently. After all, seeing Michael Redd's name next to that many zeroes is enough to send even the most intrepid of those among us straight to the nearest defibrillator. Within a month or so, we should see equally maddening contracts for a bean-pole roll player who's played less than 25 minutes per game (Stromile Swift), a bad shooting guard trapped in a good power forward's body (Antoine Walker), and a consistently proficient stat-hound incapable of leading a team to a winning record (Shareef Abdur-Rahim), among others.

Recent history has shown that the player's pay schedule in the NBA, while structured and consistent, is horribly flawed. These resultant bizarro-contracts are just something fans will have to get used to, but they sure do make excellent fodder for tearing down the "House That Stern Built."

Once you clear the fog of confusion created by the realization that relatively ordinary, semi-educated men are earning contracts worth more than the gross domestic product of the Falkland Islands, you can more clearly see the more astonishing signs that things just don't make sense in the king's – er, I mean commissioner's – fiefdom. Of particular note are decisions made regarding the direction of a team relative to coaching.

Take the Larry Brown situation. Here you have arguably the greatest coach, in terms of a coach's truest purpose, there has ever been. No, he is not as highly-decorated as the Red Auerbachs, Phil Jacksons, and Pat Rileys of the league. But here is a man who has consistently taken teams that have long been considered the shock-absorbers on the magic bus that is the NBA — teams that have bore the brunt of the impact from the bumps, potholes, and virgin trails encountered by the league — from second-class status to playoff contention.

The Los Angeles Clippers, for crying out loud, were a playoff team with Brown at the helm! This great coach and master motivator of men is now having to wonder if he'll be needing to fill out change-of-address forms this offseason. Sure, he has some health problems, but I would think a couple of Eastern Conference championship banners, a World Championship trophy, and a track record so consistently good would be worth waiting around for.

Phil Jackson is another of the summer's spotlighted coach who has used re-emerged from his Montana-based Zen trances and anti-Kobe Bryant book-writing in a manner that forces you to furrow your brow and say "What the?!" While it has been very well-documented, it bears repeating. Jackson lambasted Bryant in his book, "The Last Season" (released in the fall of 2004), and rightly so, exposing the petulant superstar as the spoiled, self-serving brat that he is.

Interestingly enough, the book features one line where Jackson is telling his girlfriend, Jeannie Buss (daughter to Lakers owner Jerry Buss), that he will not coach the Lakers, or at least "not if Kobe Bryant is on the team next year" and a second line where he points out that "we [Kobe and Phil] both knew I would never coach him again." How do you take words like that back? While Jackson may now have upwards of $10 million reasons to return thanks to his new contract, he has lost a healthy percentage of his once almost otherworldly credibility and dignity. The fabled Zen Master has become the feeble Zen Puppet — further proof that love does indeed make a sane person go mad.

The latter of these examples would normally be a lock for a "Crazy", if it weren't for some recent news from the Great Northwest.

Seattle Supersonics coach Nate McMillan, fresh off an improbable division-winning campaign that saw his charges overachieve to a 52-30 record, was inexplicably not "taken care of" as a lame-duck coach in the final year of his contract. The team that he had spent the past 19 years of his life representing did not offer a contract extension or any promises of future tenure (in fact, the management painted him into a corner with a seemingly impossible public expression of the team's playoff expectations during the preseason). Had this been the end of the saga, perhaps the SuperSonic front office would be in line for the "Crazy" ... however, McMillan somehow managed to outdo his former employers in the curious business decision department with his next move — to Portland.

To say the Trailblazers are a franchise in transition is a monumentally understated sentiment. Heck, to say the Trailblazers are a franchise in the midst of unimaginable turmoil could even be considered a euphemism for the actual truism regarding this moribund group. Many would opine that Portland is one of a very few spots still open for "Mr. Sonic", who makes his move relatively late in the hiring game. But the writing has been on the wall since last November, and if McMillan wanted any of the other positions in places like Cleveland or Minnesota (which, coincidentally, hired McMillan's assistant coach, Dwayne Casey), he surely could have made the necessary in-roads. Even if timing was an issue, the New York Knicks and Milwaukee Bucks are both enticing, available locales, certainly more appealing than Rip City.

Alas, McMillan has eschewed relatively greener pastures in favor of a purgatory rife with ne'er-do-wells and half-baked prima donnas. Money, as is generally the case, certainly played a superceding role in his decision — though, like most every other professionally affiliated entity, Nate would never admit that. Perhaps a modicum of arrogance factored into the equation. Who could blame any self-respecting person from thinking a little bit of his influence could go a long, long way, even where so many before have failed?

None of those factors will be of any consolation to Coach McMillan as he squanders whatever momentum his tenure in Seattle provided to his burgeoning coaching career. To steal a very apropos line from ESPN's Stuart Scott, Nate McMillan will almost certainly be "drooling the drool of remorse onto the pillow of regret" by next January.

At least he gets one award for his trophy case — the cherished "Crazy," which may not carry the prestige of a Coach of the Year trophy, but at least it's not an Emmy.

Who knows, if McMillan plays his cards right, he may get one of those, too, for his made-for-TV documentary chronicling his life and death as an NBA head coach.

Or, if he's really unlucky, he'll have to stay in Portland for the length of his newly-minted contract. Now that's crazy.