The life of a professional athlete is implicitly tied to the knowledge that you are inherently replaceable. Someone younger, hungrier or quicker is always waiting right around the corner to take your spot and to take from you that which makes up your livelihood. As such, sports have fostered a culture of trading and re-trading, in which any supposed increase or depreciation in value makes a player that most poisoned of terms: “trade bait.” This column is not written, however, to talk about the damaging psychological effect this can have on the players, but rather to look at how this culture of trading has rendered fandom a more transient experience.
Modern fandom, in all Big Four leagues in America, comes with the caveat that, at any point, your favorite players can and will be replaced, often without warning. Just look at my favorite NFL team, the Philadelphia Eagles, who this week shocked the football world by making a blockbuster trade that sent running back Lesean McCoy to the Buffalo Bills in exchange for linebacker and former Oregon Duck Kiko Alonso. While coaches and GMs clearly make these decisions with football interests in mind, what often goes underreported is the breaking of attachments that such a trade requires. McCoy’s legions of fans must sever their ties to a man who now plays for another team, while McCoy himself must uproot the life he currently leads and transfer all his material goods to another city. A life of transience and impermanence is imposed on the modern fan and player by a sporting system that prizes the trade above all else.
We can see this prizing of the trade system across all the major sports, but perhaps most of all in the NBA. You only have to look at ESPN’s Trade Machine to know what attracts readers. I admit I’ve done my share of tinkering in the machine, concocting trades that send Kevin Durant to the Knicks in exchange for Andrea Bargnani and the pink unicorn that also exists in this fantasy universe. Yet that tool exists because trading is commonplace in the NBA and because NBA players (excluding stars, who by and large choose their own destinations) are somewhat like modern-day vagabonds, never knowing when their whole way of life could be irreparably changed. Look at Tony Massenburg, who played for 12 teams in 15 years. Look at current Knick Lou Amundson, who lived out of a hotel for parts of multiple seasons. These are the forgotten men of the NBA, who have no roots because they play in an ever-changing landscape. How can players concentrate on spreading the floor, when they have no floor which they can call their own, no hardwood floors to come home to?
In the past year, the Knicks have traded or waived everyone I liked on the team. There is no one left. Of course, I forgive them with a heavy heart, because I have been conditioned to stomach this as being best for the team and because the Knicks are currently in the midst of what we will charitably call “unplanned tanking.”
Iman Shumpert, my favorite player in the world, is now a Cleveland Cavalier. His trading card — here we could note the irony of a business designed around “trading” to get your favorite players — still resides on my wall. He was my Pablo Prigioni, the league’s oldest rookie at one point and a charming terror of the backcourt, who is now a Houston Rocket, traded for two second-round picks that will most likely amount to journeymen NBA players to be traded for two second-round picks in 2021. Amar’e Stoudemire, the man who made New York basketball fun for a brief, glimmering season, is now a Dallas Maverick, and maybe he’ll actually get to win something this year. He won’t be winning with the Knicks, though.
The transience of NBA life is chemical at heart; it is clinical and savage in a way that precludes emotion. Bonds break and get reformed every day, and new amalgamations of 12-15 players are formed. Now I support Langston Galloway and Lance Thomas, men whose names I did not know a month ago. I still support Iman, although my all-consuming hatred for LeBron prevents me from supporting the Cavs. But he can never touch my soul, spark primal joy at the sight of a swished three, like he could when he played under the bright lights of Madison Square Garden.
T.S. Eliot once wrote, “Do I dare disturb the universe?” In the NBA’s constantly-shifting universe, disturbances are part and parcel of the daily grind. In one instant, a GM’s decision means another 3,000-mile flight for a player who has done it so often that he could probably tell you that DFW connects through PHX to get to LAX. So we move on, and the new players who will replace your idols enter a universe whose current is inevitably quick. And they await their future replacement.
Goodbye Pablo. Goodbye JR. Goodbye Amar’e. Goodbye Tyson. Most of all, goodbye Iman. I hope they have good hairdressers in Cleveland.
Send Dylan Fugel your best trade concoctions for returning Shumpert to the Knicks at dfugel ‘at’ stanford.edu.