What to do when your championship window has closed

So, your team has passed its window. It happens to great teams and it happens to teams that looked like they might be great. It happens to you, if you’re walking on a street near something that has windows. It is the great, the truly great, leveler.

Take the Dallas Mavericks. Because they only won one championship, it’s hard to remember how long they’ve been good. But they averaged more than 50 wins a season — not counting the strike season because I didn’t want to do the math — for 14 years, which is as Spursian as you get without being the Spurs.

They’re not going to win 50 games this year. They didn’t last year, and they were better last year. Now they have one win in five tries. They are not a threat to anybody and they’re likely to miss the playoffs.

What should they do? What should any other team like them do?

What should, say, Oklahoma do? They’re no real threat to anybody out West either, even though Russ is going to be the first man in history to average 40-10-10. Russ could leave. If he stays, they could build around him, but they could also trade him for a crazy return. What should they do?

What should New Orleans do? They seem pretty unlikely at this point to keep Anthony Davis after this contract. We can presume he’s not enjoying losing while putting up 40-15-10.

Obviously, what all these teams should do is try to win. But that’s complicated.

The sentence I’ve probably written most often in my basketball writing career is: The real problem with basketball is it’s impossible to win the championship. And it is. The reason things like tanking attract such a religious fervor is because fans of bad teams know this pretty well. What else are you supposed to? Honest to god, not even half the teams in the current NBA have won the championship in the last 40 years, and it just seems that high because there are three different teams who haven’t won since 1977, 1978, and 1979: Blazers, Bullets, Sonics.

And obviously, you gotta be doing SOMETHING to try to win, but just between you and me, most winning teams happen kind of by accident. If you figured that Steph Curry, Klay Thompson, and Draymond Green would form the core of the most dominant teams in history (for most of the season anyway), when they were drafted, I would get on the stock market instead of reading the rest of this article. It’s not that you don’t have to be a little bad to get the 7th or 11th picks in the draft — on Draymond, everyone just whiffed — but you don’t really have to TRY to be 11th worst. It’ll just happen. The Mavs might do that this year, or a lot worse/better.

As for the Cavs, you obviously can’t do better than drafting LeBron James, but they didn’t win because of that, they won because he came back after they got ANOTHER number one pick because he left. Meanwhile, the Jazz are planning to have the young building blocks of a championship team that is some day going to break through from now until every one of them dies of old age.

In short, I agree that a lot of strategies people use to get better are better than nothing, if only by some percentage points. But I think, also, that a lot of times what ends up changing your fortunes is something you never expected at all. Who would have thought that Tyson Chandler would be the missing piece for a Mavs team that had been struggling to break through for 12 years, while we was, at that time, averaging 6.5 and 6.3 for Charlotte? The Mavs did not, having picked him up because he had the same kind of contract as Erick Dampier, who they tried to trade as a huge piece of cap space for a good player, and accidentally did.

Ultimately, I think, if your window has passed, you should do your best to make the next smart move, not the one 10 moves into the future. Sign good players, draft good players, and keep good players. Your first pick might be LeBron, but your 11th pick might be Klay Thompson. Your free agent signing COULD be Kevin Durant, but it might be Tyson Chandler. My advice is stay decent, and make small moves. You never know, ‘cause nobody ever has.

And if you have Russell Westbrook, freakin’ try to keep Russell Westbrook.

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