The Dallas Brass Think They Know What Winning Looks Like

What if they're wrong? What if there's more than one way to win, and we already know so?

There’s a saying in the professional world. ‘Measure the output, not the input.’ Essentially, that encourages a boss to look at their employees in terms of what they accomplish rather than the time they spend at their desk. It’s like The Brutalist says, right? It’s not about the journey, really. It’s the destination.

I’ve been thinking about this since the Luka Doncic trade shook the NBA. The Mavericks became convinced that Doncic did not have the work ethic, the Kobe-like desire, to ultimately bring the franchise to the mountaintop. This despite the fact that he did just carry them to the NBA Finals last year on one leg.

It’s a bold approach, to be sure. Doncic is indisputably one of the most talented basketball players we’ve ever seen. And yet, the franchise saw enough to believe he wasn’t going to mature and ‘get it’ after they gave him the massive contract he was lined up to get.

Without further details leaking, it’s hard to say what the basis for that was. All we know is that they believed this strongly enough to deal him, which is, as widely and accurately reported here and elsewhere, not something that happens. Ever! So I’m forced to assume that it had to be bad.

Now, I’m at least a little sympathetic to the concern. This isn’t a new worry, by the way. Other players have gotten this scrutiny before. How about Zion Williamson, whose weight and health troubles seem quite a bit worse?¹ James Harden? You bet. Current Maverick Kyrie Irving has gotten the ‘unfocused’ label before, in the midst of many prior shenanigans that were troubling for reasons other than basketball. New Maverick Anthony Davis has faced a lower grade of this, too. The more he’s voiced complaints about playing center, he’s gotten complaints back that he doesn’t want to do what it takes to win. That, and he also just happened to launch a prank show? No comment. Then we have Joel… I’ll just stop at the first name. After that Super Bowl smackdown, Philly has earned a reprieve from Embiid talk this week.

That all made it especially hilarious when the Mavs’ owner, Patrick Dumont — a man who got his last two jobs by marrying into the family that owns the organizations — cited known silly guy Shaquille O’Neal in his list of hard-charging gym rats. Behold!

"If you look at the greats in the league, the people you and I grew up with — (Michael) Jordan, (Larry) Bird, Kobe (Bryant), Shaq(uille O'Neal) — they worked really hard, every day, with a singular focus to win. And if you don’t have that, it doesn’t work. And if you don’t have that, you shouldn’t be part of the Dallas Mavericks."

Alright. Again, I get this perspective to an extent. He definitely shouldn’t have listed Shaq there, and he probably shouldn’t have strictly listed players who never played for the Mavs. If we extend him the goodwill to ignore the parts that undercut his point, the point is fine enough. You want people in your building who really care about success. Those are the guys who give you the best chance to deliver. Right? Is anyone disputing that?

Well, I guess I am. At least a little bit. As a philosophical exercise, let’s say. And to do that, I’d like to direct your attention to one Nikola Jokic.

Jokes abound that (don’t) the Joker isn’t exactly hyper-passionate about his NBA career. He just wants to go back to Serbia and hang out with his horses. That’s the popular understanding of his relationship with the sport of basketball, is it not? What a shame that we’ll just never know how good he could’ve been if he’d only been as committed as Shaq.

Except, wait — hold your horses there, partner! Quick question: why is he so good then? Why is Jokic the best player in the league and has been for five years running? I must be confusing him with someone else. That can’t be right.

Nobody’s claiming he doesn’t put in any effort. He obviously competes on the floor. You see the passion when he plays. But by pretty much all accounts, he’s not some maniacal grinder. I’ve never seen a single story detailing how much film he watches on his own time. He’s joked about the opposite. He’s gotten his fitness in a better spot than at the start of his career, but he’s clearly not some cut-up adonis. He doesn’t look the part. He just plays it.

In MVP debates past, that’s made people angry. A lot of them have come around by now, so far as I can tell, but there was a certain strain of fan that just didn’t want to admit that someone this effortless could in fact be the best.

In MVP debates further past, the archetype for this kind of figure was someone with innate physical gifts, rather than a supercomputer brain. LeBron has both, but you get the point. This is the Shaq mold, or, way back when, the Wilt mold. Guys who were so big and so fast that they kind of broke the sport. Giannis is sort of in this mold, as is Wemby, but both of them wisely got ahead of the ‘rise and grind’ self-branding thing, so they’re not going to catch any of these strays about resting on the laurels of their physical gifts. As someone like, say, Shaq, memorably did. A lot.

And just because Dallas Dumont curiously decided to name Shaq on his list of greats, let’s expound on that example. Because Shaq is an NBA great. He is, at the very worst, one of the ~15 best players of all time. But his legacy is docked, among other things, for the (informed) perception that he wasn’t as serious as he could have been about his career.

Bill Simmons memorably described Shaq’s career along these lines: he could’ve been a 4.0 student, but he graduated with a 3.7 instead and had a great time. That was his vibe. He could show up without studying, take the test, and ace it. And he knew he could, so he always did. He suffered from the obvious comparison to Kobe, who publicly criticized him for his approach. That was the origin of the well-documented rift between them.

Kobe outworked Shaq every single day of his career and found it frustrating that he couldn’t push Shaq to be more like him. I get that. And yet! I feel like people somehow forget this. Kobe was the clear second option on those three-peat Lakers teams. He was an absolutely fantastic and capable second option, but the second option all the same.

Not that he didn’t try, but there was no amount of work that Kobe could have put in in those years to be a superior basketball player to the singular juggernaut that was prime Shaq.

Shaq won each of the three Finals MVPs in recognition of this fact. The man was scoring 36 ppg. He was unstoppable. You could very easily make the case that, alongside Shaq, a slightly lesser player in place of Kobe — how about T-Mac? Vince Carter? D-Wade, which we later saw? — still wins a few of those titles, if not all three.

So what’s the lesson there? I think it’s fair to say we have a sports culture — maybe culture overall — that lionizes an unhealthy obsession with winning at any cost. The guys who were willing to do anything, and alienate everyone, if it meant success. Single-minded focus to the exclusion of all else. This is best illustrated by Jordan and his spiritual successor, Kobe. Part of that’s understandable: people want to look up to those who made the most of what they had, not the guys who kinda fucked around and still succeeded. Tons of today’s players continue to cite Kobe’s Mamba Mentality as a core part of their outlook on their career. That’s great. Good for them.

Let’s just not pretend, as the Dallas brass are currently doing, like there’s no basis for betting on talent instead. There’s a line there, of course — paging Ben Simmons — but the reason everyone’s so up in arms about this deal is because it is very rare to land someone with Doncic’s talent.

You have to get extremely lucky just to get that far. I’m not going to pick out someone on the Mavs bench, because that feels mean, but it doesn’t move the needle for your franchise that _________ __________ gets to the gym early and leaves late. It helps. You can always use more of that. It’s good to have a strong culture.

But let me tell you something you probably already know. Most guys in the NBA work pretty goddamn hard. It’s not easy to make it there. The reality is, most professional athletes have already come closer to maximizing their innate talents than not. They’re one of ~500 people in the league.

In that ~500, there are less than 10 at any given time that can bring you to a title. If all ~500 could work their way into that conversation, then most of them would. It’s a very select group. Don’t shoot the messenger, but that’s the way it is.

This isn’t about fairness. It’s not ‘fair’ that someone like Shaq can do narrowly north of the bare minimum and be an absolute megawatt star. Part of the reason Shaq didn’t work as hard as Kobe — brace yourselves — is that he didn’t have to. Sorry! I know. Bad lesson for the kids. But it’s true.

Doncic is not 7’1”, 324 (though, by the reports out of Dallas, he’s a little closer to that second number than they’d have liked). As a result, he’s probably going to have to be a little more disciplined than Shaq in order to continue having the level of success we’ve already seen him have. And I do want to grant a little bit of grace to the people in the Mavs organization who Doncic probably treated very poorly in order to garner this bad of a reputation inside the building. I believe them when they’ve said, essentially, that dealing with Doncic sucked.

Problem is: your job, in that position, is not to make your life easier. It’s to do what’s best for the team. Your tunnel vision needs to be fixated on that, not a narrow prescription of one way to win according to one archetype that you happen to admire. And I’m not convinced that Nico Harrison and Dumont are going to be able to get those blinders off. Maybe they’re the ones who just don’t get it.

⚽ New Search Party out this week, this time on Man City. I’m not much of a ‘footie’ guy, if I’m being honest, but I endeavored to widen my interests for this video. Dig it:

🏈 I’m not going to spend a ton of time dwelling on how wrong I was about the Super Bowl, because I’m an idiot, but I’ll say this: that was probably the worst game I’ve ever seen Patrick Mahomes play. I continue to think he’s one of the best to ever throw a football, but man. That was an all-time dud. He was egregiously bad. Hoops heads tend to hold stuff like LeBron’s 2011 loss against the Mavs against his historic legacy. I think it’s fair to do the same to Mahomes when he plays like that on the big stage, especially because his regular-season performance has declined for years with the (mostly fulfilled) promise that he always shows up when it counts. He’s now gotten smacked in the Super Bowl twice, even if he was running for his life for much of both of them. Because everyone watches this game, this is one instance where garbage-time stat-padding doesn’t really work. His box score by the end looks a lot better than it was. But let the record show: at the half, Mahomes was 6/13 for 33 yards and 2 picks, one of which went back. Oof.

🦅 Which is all to take absolutely nothing from the Eagles, who were fantastic. Football’s a complex sport and all, but it’s also not. If you can get pressure rushing four, you’re usually gonna win. They were all over Mahomes at a rate somehow higher than his first disaster against Tampa Bay in 2021. Oh, and they never had to blitz to do it. Vic Fangio! Never blitzed! Because he didn’t have to! Saquon Barkley was a non-factor; didn’t need him. Jalen Hurts was great, though he only needed 22 throws, almost all of them with all the time in the world. It’s all sort of laughable, the degree of the mismatch on Sunday. Kansas City finally ran into a team that made it a problem to play a left guard at left tackle. I look back and feel like the Ravens probably should’ve been the ones to come through the AFC. That’s not how sports work, and they wouldn’t be very interesting if everyone played their level best all the time, but… dude. I don’t know what else to say. Talent wins? That the Carson Wentz trade, in the end, provided the Eagles with the services of DeVonta Smith, A.J. Brown, Jalen Carter, and Cooper DeJean? That’ll work. That was the worst beatdown since the 2013 Seahawks dismantled the Peyton Manning Broncos, and I’m not sure what else to make of it except the vastly better team won on Sunday.

⚜️ Finally, as a fellow native of St. Louis, I would like to quibble with Jon Hamm’s loyalty. When did we decide that we were defecting to Kansas City? Did I miss a memo? I texted the hometown text chain immediately on seeing him in the pregame. What? Explain. That and the negotiations over the “three-peat” copyright seem, in hindsight, like some karmic oversights. At least we got to skip the proposal.

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