I get annoyed at some sportswriters who think that every team except for the NBA Champion (and sometimes even the NBA Champions themselves) needs to make high profile trades and acquisitions in order to improve their team.

They grade a team on what they did to shake up their team in the off-season, including giving some teams poor grades for ONLY re-signing their free agents and a couple of draft picks.

There are teams that make frequent trades and/or bring on good free agents and they never seem to improve much. There are teams that never seem to make any trades and they are good to great year after year.

That’s not to say that teams shouldn’t EVER make some moves to get markedly better, but I think two things need to be taken into account by every General Manager in the league. (I actually think most of them do, much to the dismay of their local sportswriters and/or fans.)

At the risk of repeating myself, I explain yet again why the boring teams in the offseason are usually the teams playing in the NBA Finals.

Team Chemistry

Rare is the team that gets to the NBA Finals when their key players have only been together for a portion of a season. How does any team expect to get to the NBA Finals if they make significant changes year after year? The only time that teams should really make a significant change or two is if the team is out of the playoffs (or barely in the playoffs) and the next year doesn’t look like it will be any better (and will likely be worse.)

NOTE: Well, I suppose there is the case where a player being there messes up the team chemistry and must be traded away to improve team chemistry, but these cases are extremely rare.

Adding a few role-players here and there is usually a good move, but for a team with 50+ wins, you wouldn’t go out and significantly alter your roster and hope to be in the hunt for an NBA Championship the next year. It happens, occasionally, but I wouldn’t bet good money on it.

Do fans and sportswriters honestly feel that Kevin Garnett coming into Phoenix won’t mess things up? Do they really feel that the future would be brighter with his career running down than with Amare Stoudemire’s just starting? They are at least two years away if they traded for him, because teams don’t normally win after gaining a very good player that changes everything – as Kevin Garnett certainly would. Should the Phoenix Suns really throw away a potential championship next year so that they might gel a team of veterans for the year after? According to many people, Phoenix would have beaten San Antonio if Amare Stoudemire had been taught to stay on the bench. Why should they trade for Kevin Garnett when they already have their winning piece?

It just seems ludicrous.

Yet, year after year we hear about crazy trades being proposed by or suggested to the top teams in the NBA. And it seems like this year, Dallas and Phoenix are those two teams.

For every Miami acquiring Shaquille O’Neal there are a hundred other times that has been attempted and it has failed.

Player Development

Young players get better.

Young players get better faster if a conscious effort is made towards developing their talent.

Young players get MUCH better MUCH faster if they themselves are the ones driving themselves to get better.

It seems silly for teams that are rebuilding with recent acquisitions and picks from the last few drafts be expected to go out and grab some high profile free agent or two when they already have people coming up through the system who fill the need. The top free agents are normally very expensive, normally ruin team chemistry (for at least a year), and normally stunt the growth of the players being developed.

Unless the team doesn’t have somebody who they expect to fill that position, don’t have anybody they expect to pay significant money in the future, and don’t expect to be very good next year either, they shouldn’t mess with the major pieces of their roster. Indeed, they should be very careful that they don’t mess up a good thing.

I don’t want to make it sound like nobody should make significant changes because every year it seems like there are at least 5 teams in the league that are were horrible last year, are horrible this year, and next year isn’t looking any more promising.

I also don’t want to make it sound like filling a spot where a team is weak isn’t a good move, especially if they don’t have anyone they can really develop to fill that vacancy.

But to the people that think that Chicago, Utah, and Golden State need to add a huge piece to the puzzle in order to make it to the next step, I would say that most of their team is young and it is only getting better. Don’t mess up a good thing. Let their players develop. They were at the cusp of the NBA Finals a few months ago. They don’t need to change significantly to improve. They just have to develop.

And for teams that have some veterans who want to have a change to win right now but it isn’t looking promising, I would say that you could bring in a bunch of talent for a chance in two years to win it all, but you do so at the peril of ending up like the Los Angeles Lakers. The Lakers have Kobe Bryant and only a couple of players who are any good or likely to be any good in the future. Why don’t they have anybody? Because they signed up Karl Malone and Gary Payton when they should have been developing their current talent. Because they traded away Shaquille O’Neal for Lamar Odom and Caron Butler. Because they turned around and traded Caron Butler for Kwame Brown.
 
San Antonio is good year after year ONLY because they continue to bring in ONLY role-players (so that they do not disrupt their team chemistry) AND they develop their young players very well. They didn’t pick up Tim Duncan, Tony Parker, and Manu Ginobili in the free agent market or through an amazing trade. They developed them.