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Fouled Out: I once was a roto geek | | | ||
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 | Friday, January 14 The Wizards? Snap out of it, Michael Special to ESPN.com | |||
Have you ever walked down the street and noticed a well-dressed CEO-type guy with a very unattractive woman and wondered to yourself, "What's up with that?"
Michael Jordan is that suave, CEO-type guy. And the Washington Wizards are that unattractive woman. And I wonder, What's up with that? Of all the teams in the NBA that Jordan could run and/or buy, the one least suited for him is the Washington Wizards, a team so poorly run and managed that it makes Roscoe P. Coltrane look like Perry Mason. We have to exclude the Clippers here, because Donald Sterling and the Clippers are in a class by themselves. They simply don't care. But the Wizards, they care. Or at least they say they do. Owner Abe Pollin still talks about the 1978 championship like it happened just yesterday -- and in his mind, it probably did -- and that his team is always on the verge of returning to its title-contending ways, that all they've had is a little bad luck over the years that have kept them from being a dynasty. Bad luck? Are you kidding me? What the Wizards have gone through for the past 20 years is bad management -- or, more appropriately, mismanagement. Was it bad luck when they gave away Rasheed Wallace for perennial troublemaker Rod Strickland? Was it bad luck when they gave away Chris Webber for creaky Mitch Richmond? Was it bad luck when they gave Juwan Howard $15 million a year? Was it bad luck when they hired bumbling Bernie Bickerstaff because he was, in Abe's words, "part of the family?" With family like that, I'd rather be an orphan. Please. If any publicly held company was run like this, the CEO would be thrown out so quickly he couldn't even utter the words, "Sorry I'm an imbecile," before he landed on his keister on Massachusetts Ave. Here's all you need to know about Pollin: When the team decided to change its name from "Bullets" because, they said, they did not want the team to be associated with the violence in the city -- and I want to change my name because I don't want people to associate me with Francis in "Stripes" (Lighten up, Francis) -- Pollin put on some hoax that it was a contest to name the team; when Wizards was the alleged choice, the team interestingly didn't release the results of the vote. There was a rumor in D.C. that Pollin had picked Wizards well before the contest even was announced because it was the nickname of the elementary school his granddaughter went to. Cuckoo. Cuckoo. The image is pretty funny, though. Jordan comes rolling into the Wizards offices in his $2,000 suit looking so good he wants to kiss himself, and he sidles into Pollin's office, where Pollin is wearing his white tennis outfit and his Gilligan hat, after which he sells his share of the team to Jordan for $5 because he is so utterly overmatched by Jordan and his aura. The stage was set for this during the lockout, when some owners and players met to discuss the issues. Honest Abe, in his ever-present naivete, asked the players to "just trust us," which is the same as sending Dennis Rodman into a brothel in Amsterdam and asking him not to touch the merchandise. (Speaking of Rodman, I don't mean to toot my own tuba, but just last week I predicted how these roto geek owners who think they know how to run a team are going to screw up their franchises by making boneheaded moves. And less than a week later, Mark Cuban is trying to sign Rodman, who is so serious about playing these days that he can't start until after he attends a few Super Bowl bashes.) Anyway, at that lockout meeting, after Pollin made his plea, he and Jordan got into a shouting match, with Jordan telling Pollin, "If you can't make money, then sell your team." Pollin apparently took it to heart, and in his infinite wisdom, he is selling it to the man that embarrassed him in front of all his colleagues. Abe, have you no shame? So Jordan could assume control of the team's decision-making by next week? Well, the first thing he will do is fire team president Susan O'Malley, whose idea to re-sign Juwan Howard in original negotiations was to literally have a band playing and cheerleaders dancing outside David Falk's offices on Wisconsin Avenue. That really goes over well with today's NBA player, let me tell you. He also is going to relieve Wes Unseld of his general manager duties. Wes is a good guy, but he is just not a very good evaluator of talent or manager of the salary cap -- which, as it happens, is a general manager's job. The reason this is such an odd pairing is that Jordan is an astute businessman, and it seems as if he is putting himself into an organization that really has no place to go. They are locked in to Howard for four more years, they are locked in to Strickland and Richmond for at least two more years. And no matter what the allure of Jordan to potential free agents is, if Washington can't pay them, Jordan could show up on their doorsteps singing Christmas carols and it won't matter. When Jordan was in the process of negotiating to buy the Hornets, I wrote a column that once again applies to this situation. What is to be made of the alliance between Jordan and Falk? David Stern loves Jordan, which is why he is behind the scenes brokering these deals for Jordan to buy a team. Stern hates Falk, his nemesis. So what happens when Jordan becomes part owner? Does Falk route all his clients to Washington, which in some businesses could be thought of as collusion? Does Stern force Jordan and Falk to split? It will be interesting. I can almost guarantee you that when Jordan takes control, you will see Falk doing everything he can to get Howard out of Washington, perhaps pulling the same type of power play that he did with Stephon Marbury. That would free up a great deal of money, but I just can't see any unwitting GM willing to take on Howard's humongous contract for a player that underachieves so dreadfully. And until that happens, the Wizards are pretty much stuck. The funny, almost poetic, part about this is that Jordan is partly responsible for the organization's destruction. When Washington made the playoffs four years ago for the first time in 167 seasons, they played Chicago, and put up a pretty good fight in each of the three first-round games they lost. After the series, Jordan called the Wizards the team of the future. In their immaturity, Webber and Howard listened to Jordan, and the next year they thought all they had to do was step on the court and win. Any time something was brought up about them not playing well, they would recall how just last season Jordan called them the team of the future. What they failed to realize is that Jordan does that to every opponent after he whips their ass, just to give them a false sense of security, play mind games with them, make them think they are better than they are so the next time he meets them he can whip their asses again. That one little sentence he uttered was the beginning of the end for a once-promising future. Now it's up to him to build it back up. Frank Hughes covers the NBA for the Tacoma (Wash.) News-Tribune. He is a regular contributor to ESPN.com.
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