Free market blues

Lots of pearl-clutching from the usual suspects these days about the Imbalance of Power in the NBA, and how it's ruining pro buckets because if the Golden State Warriors can add Wilt Chamberlain to what is already an All-Star team, then all his lost.

Oops. Sorry. That wasn't Wilt they signed.

It was Boogie Cousins.

Easy to get confused, though, for all the caterwauling that's been going on. Yes, Boogie Cousins is probably the best low-post player in the league right now -- he averaged 25 and 10 last season -- but to hear all the gnashing of teeth and rending of garments, you'd have thought it was Wilt the Warriors had signed, notwithstanding the fact that he's dead and all.

Look. I get it. We all do. The Warriors signing Boogie, absent a rash of catastrophic injuries, makes next season irrelevant. There will be no reason to watch, other than to see how he fits in. It's going to be the Warriors against three or four other superteams in the West for the NBA title, and then an exhibition series against whatever sorry humps come out of the Eastern Conference.

This is not a good situation if you want to maintain the fiction that what you're giving the public is actual competition and not something perilously close to scripted. It is concerning. And it makes the Blob think the NBA should institute a best-interests-of-the-game clause that would empower commissioner Adam Silver to nix any trade he deems not good for the league as a whole.

Bowie Kuhn invoked such a clause in the mid-1970s, when Charlie Finley tried to sell his World Series champion Oakland As virtually wholesale. (David Stern did much the same thing when he nixed New Orleans trading Chris Paul to the Lakers, but the NBA held an ownership stake in the New Orleans franchise at the time, and so that was a bit different). The present-day NBA would likely have a much tougher time getting a best-interests clause past the players' union, but it seems worth the effort.

Absent that ... well, what do the pearl-clutchers suggest be done?

The hard truth is this is nothing more nor less than the free market at work, basketball players doing what doctors and lawyers and accountants and, yes, journalists have done forever. The most amusing aspect of all the pearl-clutching has been listening to sportswriters and commentators bash players for doing exactly what they've done themselves: Seek out their best employment situation. No one sneers "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" at them, after all, when they leave some lesser place to join ESPN.

That's just moving up the ladder, in their case. But when Kevin Durant or Boogie Cousins do it?

Why, how dare they! The NBA should ...

Should what?

Abolish free agency? Severely restrict player movement? Follow the mood of our current national leadership and try to turn back the clock to, oh, say the 1950s or so?

Good luck with that. Truth is, there's simply certain toothpaste you can't put back in the tube (though God knows Our Only Available President and his gang of vandals get an A for effort). If what we're seeing now is the consequence of greater control of their situation by the players ... well, it just makes up for the decades upon decades when they had no such control.

Maybe if the owners had been farsighted enough to cede some of that control when they had the power to do so, they'd never have had to cede so much of it now. Unchecked pendulums do tend to swing from one extreme to the other, after all.

As the NBA is discovering now, to its dismay. As the country is.