NBA teams operate a lot like the markets: Driven by fear and greed.
In the Eastern Conference, where four teams have vied for dominance, the greed of those getting ahead and fear of falling behind has set the tone for another season that will likely be defined by the Boston Celtics, Milwaukee Bucks, Miami Heat and Philadelphia 76ers.
Winning is wonderful. But watching your window close — and falling back to the pack of mediocrity, or worse — is the thing that keeps GMs up at night.
“If you have a window to win now, try to win now,” one Eastern Conference GM told CBS Sports. “You don’t know what’s going to happen in two or three years. People’s attention spans are shorter, players’ patience is shorter, the tax and cap are punitive and make it harder to keep it together. So everything is shorter.
“You end up by nature with shorter windows,” he said. “So you have to take advantage of it. If you’re Philly, for example, you have to walk away [from a James Harden trade] with something that’s competitive. Daryl [Morey] has to win now.”
That’s in part because this offseason has put a new twist on this tale. There’s a sense that the arrival of Damian Lillard in Milwaukee, and the subsequent moves that sent Jrue Holiday to Boston, have lifted those two teams far ahead — and potentially set Miami and Philly on a troubling course.
It’s a shift in the balance of power the East’s Big Four have been battling over since LeBron James left the conference five years ago.
There’s real jealousy in what the Bucks and Celtics pulled off, best epitomized in the Miami media’s manic anger over the Heat not landing Lillard. And the real fear, in both Philly and Miami, that falling behind too far can have far-reaching consequences.
“I think it is closed for Philly,” one NBA front-office source told CBS Sports. “So there should be that fear. And I’m not a Miami believer, either. So I think they’re cooked. But I don’t think they have that fear, because I’m not sure they’re honest about themselves.”
Miami certainly disagrees with that assessment,…
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