Robert Rowell is in charge of the Golden State Warriors. He has made that awkwardly clear over the last six months. I don’t have a problem with a non-basketball man running a basketball team; if I owned a professional franchise I would hire a business man to run it, not an ex-athlete. Rowell also made it clear that he is going to abide by business principles perhaps to the exclusion of basketball ones when he stated that his primary goal in constructing the Warriors’ team was “salary protection.”
And even that is fine. I don’t expect franchises to make winning their only goal. It would be nice for the fans if they did but I don’t expect them to. I don’t expect them to operate at a loss. It’s perfectly reasonable to factor in business and salary decisions when constructing a basketball team.
But there is a fine line between using business sense to inform a basketball decision and making a basketball decision that doesn’t acknowledge that basketball has its own set of business standards.
We first saw this with the protracted negotiation for a contract extension between Baron Davis and the Warriors. Davis, as mercurial and injury-prone a player as there is in the league, was always going to be a difficult player to plan the future of a franchise around. The Warriors were understandably nervous about giving him a long-term contract as he moved into his thirties.
Rowell’s solution was to essentially offer Baron a non-guaranteed contract. The front-end of the contract would be guaranteed and the back-end would be guaranteed only if Baron reached certain incentive clauses related to games played.
This sounds reasonable enough. The problem is it’s simply not how the NBA works. Incentive-laden contracts are rarely if ever given out to bench players, let alone to a player of Baron’s stature. And no agent would have seriously considered Rowell’s offer, let alone accepted it.
And now Baron Davis, the best player the Warriors have had in over a decade and the only player to lead the Warriors to the playoffs in over a decade, plays for the Clippers.
Rowell’s next tough decision was dealing with the Monta Ellis injury. When the truth finally came out there was a disagreement in the front office as to how aggressively to punish him, with Chris Mullin on the more lenient side and Rowell on the more severe side. Rowell won the battle, of course, and Ellis was essentially fined $3,000,000 for breach of contract. This was a stiff penalty. By contrast, Vladimir Radmanovich of the Lakers was fined $500,000 for the same breach of contract. It was also well within their rights. They could have voided the entire deal but they chose the fine instead.
And once they made the decision to fine him and not void the contract, that should have been the end of it. The focus should have shifted entirely to getting him healthy and back on the court as soon as possible, especially b/c Monta became the nominal franchise player when Baron left.
But that’s not what happened. By all accounts Monta was physically able to play at least two weeks before he actually came back (displayed most famously when he screamed “Let me play!” to noone in particular after dunking a ball in practice.) The reason his return was delayed was the Warriors were again engaged in some almost unprecedented contract discussion with regard to how contracts work in the NBA. What Rowell wanted to do was fine Ellis, then monitor how he looked after he came back and then decide whether or not to void his contract. Ellis’s agent was understandably hesitant to have his client play with essentially a non-guaranteed contract.
Ellis did come back, though. And from a fan’s perspective, at least he only missed a handful of games when he could have played. Ah, the small victories of a Warrior fan.
The problem is that apparently the Warriors are still withholding the right to terminate his contract if he doesn’t come all the way back from his injury. It’s hard to see how this unusually punitive decision doesn’t damage the relationship between the Warriors and their franchise player. It would also be hard to blame Monta if he was more cautious than usual on the court to protect himself from injury.
I have no problem with a business man running the Warriors; I just wish the man running the Warriors acknowledged the business of the NBA.
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