As Jerry Seinfeld used to say, sports fans are just rooting for laundry.
But sports fans have far different reactions to who starts the wash cycle.
The stunning (I guess; I don’t follow basketball) trade that sent Luka Doncic to the Lakers and Anthony Davis to the Mavericks (many are saying the Mavs were had), prompted Suns forward Kevin Durant to make an observation that is true of all professional sports leagues: When the player wants a new team, it’s a problem. When the team wants a new player, it’s no big deal.
“Players are held to a different standard of loyalty and commitment to a program but the organizations don’t get held to that same standard from the outside,” Durant said, via Duane Rankin of the Arizona Republic.
Durant is right. It happens all the time. Teams can do whatever they want. The fans might not like the outcome, but they never question the teams’ right to do whatever they want when it comes to treating their players like interchangeable parts in a machine. But when that same interchangeable part would like to make its way to a different machine, fans decry their selfishness and lack of commitment to the cause.
It doesn’t change the end result. The fans will still boo the player in a new shirt, even when the team is the one that decided to change the laundry. Giants fans, for example, now hate running back Saquon Barkley, even though it was well documented (thanks to the team’s ill-advised turn on offseason Hard Knocks) that the Giants chose to let him walk.
If Barkley had been the one to agitate openly for a new team, it would have been worse.
It’s strange. It’s unfair. But that’s just the way it is. The fans’ loyalty to the laundry causes them to accept the decisions by the team to reclaim its colors far more readily than they’ll accept the player’s effort to shed them.
Will that ever change? Players have become more empowered to seek their preferred destinations in basketball. But, still, a player in any sport takes more flak for acting in the player’s best interests than the team gets for doing the exact same thing.
The best (and worst) example in the NFL comes from the draft. This year, it became more clear than ever that certain quarterbacks were suppressed if not ruined by their first stops in pro football (Sam Darnold, Geno Smith, Baker Mayfield). But if incoming prospects should try to avoid what most view as a Harry Potter-style sorting hat linking them to supposed destinies that should be accepted as an honor and a privilege instead of a curse and a hardship, most fans and many in the media would direct insults their way.
Hopefully, the day is coming when former college players with a bank account bursting at the seams from unspent NIL money will be more willing to say to a team with a track record of dysfunction that they’d prefer to start their careers in different laundry — and that they just won’t wear the shirt at all if the team chooses to draft them anyway.
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