The Nets And Lakers Show What Happens When The Wrong People Call The Shots

The New Jersey Nets and Los Angeles Lakers were the betting favorites to win the NBA championship at the start of the 2021 – 2022 season for the same reason: both were stacked with stars and superstars for whom no expense was spared. The Nets had Kevin Durant, Kyrie Irving, James Harden and La Marcus Aldridge. And the Lakers had legends LeBron James, Anthony Davis and Russell Westbrook surrounded by former leading lights such as Carmelo Anthony and Dwight Howard.

So much talent. So little... success. The Lakers missed the playoffs entirely, despite having won it all two seasons prior. And the walking disaster that is New Jersey got swept by the Boston Celtics, who rode their “team first” mantra to the NBA Finals, where they lost to a better team in the Golden State Warriors.

What accounted for the epic implosions at Brooklyn and Los Angeles, and what can leaders everywhere learn from them?

As we put the 2021 – 2022 season to bed and watch the NBA’s free agency period start with a bang, it’s worth considering the Nets and Lakers as two cautionary tales against the temptation of trying to buy a championship by hiring a bunch of superstars and then giving them too much power at the expense of developing a winning culture.

To be sure, both the Nets and Lakers demonstrate the immense allure of blockbuster trades that bring exciting and world-class talent to a team. The problems arise when there is no strong foundation and organizational leadership with which the superstar must accommodate his own ego and desires; no expectation of mentoring the less experienced players and finding the right fit. Certainly, this was the case with Brooklyn’s Irving, who has played in just 103 of a possible 226 games in his three-year tenure there. Irving has missed 123 games because of his refusal to be vaccinated against Covid, assorted injuries, and a mysterious two-week break.

Absenting himself this way not only made Brooklyn less competitive by depriving them of Irving’s talent and scoring, but also undermined the team’s cohesion and commitment to each other — ingredients that are every bit as vital to the team’s success as Irving’s gifts. If your business hired a sales hot shot who came to work less than half the time and set a poor example to his or her colleagues, what would that do to your team culture?

On the one hand, you might enjoy some enviable numbers here and there from your superstar, but would that counteract the obvious blow to your sales team’s morale? What if the star became ill? What if they grew disillusioned?

As we entered the free agency period, the Nets superstars seem to be more focused on their next gig than on improving the team they’re already on. For Brooklyn, wouldn’t the better approach to having been humiliated by Boston be to regroup, look deep inside themselves as an organization and commit to each other to make next season better?

That’s what great teams do. They learn from their mistakes — physical, tactical, or psychological — and do better next time. But herein lies one of the chief problems of the current itinerant superstar system: they seem to wind up with the wrong people calling the shots.

Only two years after winning it all, the Los Angeles Lakers seem to have devolved from one of modern sports’ best-run organizations to LeBron James’ personal project. After leading Cleveland to the Championship in 2016, James decided he was “the greatest player of all time,” much to the dismay of practically everyone who saw the comment as deeply disrespectful to the game. Then, after leading the Lakers to the same Championship in 2020, he decided he was also the greatest general manager of all time. This must have come as surprising and infuriating news to the Lakers’ actual GM Rob Pelinka, whom James has spent 2021 – 2022 trolling on social media and comparing invidiously with other GMs.

This kind of behavior is not going to win James many friends among the league’s other GMs, who will see how quickly he can turn on them. And James will not always be worth putting up with in exchange for his skills. But the larger point is that James does his teams and himself no favor by flouting the Lakers’ leadership structure. As with Irving, his erstwhile teammate in Cleveland, James has mistaken his own bottomless ego for the team and, indeed, the rest of the world.

That’s not a good mindset for sustained excellence, regardless of how much money the superstar can continue to bring to a team, either in sales or tickets and merchandise. Someday, the sales and tickets and merch will dry up and the thing that will matter most will be our legacy, which will depend less on our numbers (and what we say about ourselves) and more on how we respected the people around us.