Empty the Bench

By: Brendan K. O’Grady

If you’re Trevor Ariza, Ron Artest, or the Los Angeles Lakers, this all makes perfect sense.

If you’re Ariza, you feel disrespected.

It’s hard not to take this personally when you just played a critical role in helping anybody win a NBA championship for anybody, let alone a storied franchise like the Lakers. This is the team synonymous with your city, the place where you grew up, where you played college ball. This is the team you dreamed of playing for as a pro… and the team that, in the end, declined offering you the security of the long-term contract that you’ve damned well earned.

Any other competitive team would be thrilled to have you, and you’d likely be the crucial missing piece for any one of them. You are that good. (Maybe.) And when you win that second ring with somebody else, you’ll be in store for an even bigger payday than this one. And then the Lakers will be sorry…

If you’re Mitch Kupcheck and Jerry Buss, you feel like you can’t count on getting lucky breaks again. You see Kobe Bryant a year older and finally showing the mileage of over a 1,000 NBA games (plus extra-curricular Team USA activities.) You let Shaq leave under the pretense that you were going to ride out the rest of Kobe’s prime for as many rings as that could net. You realize that, sure, you could bring back the same roster and probably win the West, but Orlando, Cleveland, and especially arch-nemesis Boston are all coming back a little better, a little stronger. And they’re coming back at YOU.

You look at Ariza and you see a player who’s never played a fully healthy season before last year. You see a player whose recently reliable three-point stroke is the sole, tenuous difference between his being a do-it-all starter or a more of a defensive specialist off the bench. And you see a player who now has a bad attitude about only being offered what every other contender is willing to pay him… and you see that he’s threatening to out-and-out walk.

And, then, you look up and see a smiling Ron Artest, who’s ready to sign a contract for relative peanuts.

Why Ron Artest is not a good fit for the Lakers after the break…

If you’re almost-30-years-old Ron Artest, you feel like this is the last, best chance you have to be remembered for basketball. You’re hungry for a ring while you’ve still got enough skills to be wanted by the best teams in the league. You’ve been posing as a #1 option for long enough to know you’ll never win anything if you’re taking all the shots.

You dream of earning a legacy for your play that might eclipse (or at least match) the infamy you’ve already gotten for… well… for everything else. And you believe that you’re good enough to provide that extra shot of firepower that the Lakers will need to repeat that they wouldn’t otherwise have. And besides, you’re Ron Artest: you’ve never needed a logical reason to do anything. Why start now?

If you’re one of these three, this is how things had to be. And it does make sense, in every way possible… except for the actual playing of basketball games.

Everybody else in the world, watching this from the outside, realizes that this will never work. Artest is as likely to end up the 6th man (with Odom returning to the starting lineup) as he is of sublimating himself to a tertiary scoring role behind Kobe and Pau. Artest’s defensive prowess has probably receded to around wherever Ariza’s is now and is certainly not the upgrade he would have once represented.

He was probably more attractive to the Lakers as another option on offense, but haven’t the stories of his poor decision-making and wasted possessions from Sacramento and Houston reached Los Angeles? And couldn’t you just, you know, give Pau more touches?

No, this most certainly will not work. Not for anybody involved. The Lakers will roar in the West, but fall short if for no other reason than repeating a championship is damned hard to do, Ron-Ron or not. Ariza is set to join a depleting Rockets team that matches his scrappiness in spirit, but in all reality is probably about to start heading the wrong way in the standings.

If nothing else, this turn of events reminds us that, more often than not in the Association, the wrong thing often begins because it feels like the right thing.

Brendan K. O’Grady writes about fantasy basketball and the NBA at-large full-time at his own site, 2nd Round Reach. He has a single-digit vertical leap.

Zach Randolph Photo Credit: Icon SMI