Losing to Win
This year’s New England winter seemed colder, snowier, and icier. We use mental tricks to get us through: “The days are getting longer,” Shoveling is good exercise,” the Red Sox equipment truck left for spring training, and premature sightings of Robins and Canadian Geese (truth is…they never left.).
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Our alarms awaken us on those cold dark mornings to wind-chill factors and sports commentators gleefully reporting the losses of the weakest NBA teams. Glee, really? These teams are now on a tacit race to the bottom of the league for the worst record in basketball, hoping to situate themselves for the best picks in the NBA draft in June.
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The process seems flawed. In the real world, keys to success include doing our individual best, collaborating as a team, taking pride in our accomplishments and in our community, and hopefully being rewarded by that community. Remember the 2013 Red Sox…a bunch of bearded, disparate players who selflessly came together for the good of a team. That is the model we try to cultivate: work hard and play to win.
It doesn’t work that way in the NBA. The top teams and players are all set; teams are built around key players, or key players build teams around themselves. If a player is unfortunate enough to play on one of the five worst teams, the player may get paid well, play eighty-two games, and await being dumped or traded at the end of the season. Franchises continue to make money on ticket sales and merchandise; spectators continue to show up, for now…
The annual NBA lottery draft is the golden ticket for losing teams to secure their futures. Only non-playoff teams are part of the process, thus the conversations about tanking and losing in the hope of rebuilding a team around the perfect college player. It has not always worked out well in the past. It is more like a Wall Street strategy: sell short, hope the stock will go down, and sell high… Not a very positive model for the rest of us.
In an effort to improve the system, the NBA created a lottery system for the draft. The team with the worst record, or the team that holds those draft rights, has the best chance to obtain a higher draft pick. So on a given day, the five losing-most teams await the results of fourteen ping-pong balls spinning in a machine for twenty seconds. The entire procedure is as difficult to comprehend as String Theory.
Other sports and systems work differently and set more positive examples. We teach our kids to do their best in school from September through June. College graduates do anything to land unpaid internships; they face a world of networking, online applications, and hope for positive responses from faceless technology. They dream of health insurance coverage, 401K Plans, longevity, and once hired, they do their best to obtain promotions or advancement.
Rather than fostering a status quo or a losing mentality, aiming for low, dreaming about that one key player, or gambling on a system created purely for the entertainment factor, perhaps we can shift our focus to last night’s wins rather than losses. Awakening to constructive thoughts about basketball might provide the positive energy we need to endure these long winter months and carry us into spring. And, let the ping-pong balls fall where they may.
