A big NBA trade shook the sports world last week. WFAE’s Tommy Tomlinson, in his "On My Mind" commentary, says trades of ballplayers should shake us in a more fundamental way.
The biggest news of last week — OK, I should stop there.
What I mean is, the biggest news of last week not counting the ongoing takeover of the federal government by an unelected billionaire who can’t even make a decent looking truck — not counting that.
The biggest news of last week was a basketball trade.
The NBA’s Dallas Mavericks traded superstar Luka Dončić to the Los Angeles Lakers for Anthony Davis. It was one of the most shocking trades in league history. Davis is a very good player but Dončić is historically great — his career scoring average of nearly 29 points a game trails only Michael Jordan and Wilt Chamberlain. There is all sorts of soap-opera drama surrounding why Dallas let him go — one current theory being that the team got tired of nagging him to get in shape.
But for our purposes today, who won or lost the trade is not the point. The point is this: Our sports leagues still live in a system where you can just trade one human being for another.
Neither Davis nor Dončić had any say in the matter. In fact, according to most reports, they didn’t even know about the deal until it was basically done.
If you unhook your sports brain for just a second, this is a weird and unfair situation.
Bank of America can’t trade one of their vice presidents to Wells Fargo for one of theirs. Duke Energy can’t tell three engineers they have to go work for Georgia Power now because they got traded for a truckload of transformers.
A few players in major team sports have contracts with no-trade clauses, but the vast majority of players can be traded at most any time for most any reason.
And even worse, those players don’t even get to choose their first job, because teams hold a draft every year to distribute the top players. Did LaMelo Ball, when he was a child, dream of playing for the Charlotte Hornets? Probably not. But that’s who drafted him and so that’s who he plays for.
Players have way more control over their careers when they’re choosing a college than they do when they’re chosen by the pros. No other occupation besides team sports treats its employees as much like pieces of property.
The people who run sports leagues will tell you this is so teams get an even shot at the best players over time. But this has never been true, partly because some teams are willing to spend more than others, partly because some teams are run by managers dumber than a sack of hammers.
It’s OK if you don’t want to shed a tear for Anthony Davis, who is making $43 million this year. But the same rules apply to everybody in pro sports, down to the minor-league baseball players who get by on sandwiches and Gatorade.
Like most Panthers fans, I’m excited to find out who the team picks with its first-round choice in April. But I also know this about that draft pick: Unlike almost every other star student coming out of college this spring, he won’t get to choose where he works.
Tommy Tomlinson’s On My Mind column runs Mondays on WFAE and WFAE.org. It represents his opinion, not the opinion of WFAE. You can respond to this column in the comments section below. You can also email Tommy at ttomlinson@wfae.org.
