Wizards All Star John Wall curses his coach. That’s why the team is having an underachieving season.
All Star Jimmy Butler made himself such a problem, which forced the Timberwolves to trade him. That toxic culture explains the Timberwolves underachieving season.
Both narratives reinforce a common myth in sports that says a team must have harmonious chemistry to win.
It just is not true.
Draymond Green has gone off on his coach and cursed Kevin Durant, but it has not stopped the Warriors from winning three of the past four NBA titles. The conflict between Shaq and Kobe is well known, and yet my Lakers managed to be the last and one of only two NBA franchises to pull off a three-peat (2000, 2001, and 2002).
The evidentiary examples are not limited to basketball.
In the 1970s, Major League Baseball had a team of characters called the Oakland Athletics (A’s). They were in constant war with their cheap but visionary owner, Charlie Finley, and with one another. One of the players described getting into a fight with a teammate in the shower over a bar of soap. Still yet, the A’s won the American League Western Division five straight years, 1971-1975, and the World Series 3-straight, 1972-1974. The only other baseball team to win three straight is the mighty Yankees. It was not the obvious lack of harmonious chemistry that eventually stopped the A’s. It was the advent of free agency.
The New York Yankees of the latter part of that decade were similar. Its clubhouse was nicknamed “The Bronx Zoo”. They also had a meddling and toxic creating owner in George Steinbrenner. Catcher and team captain, the late great Thurman Munson, did not like the team’s best player and never hid that fact from others. Speaking of the team’s best player; he was also a member of the previously mentioned Oakland A’s team: Mr. Reggie Jackson.
Jackson referred to himself as the “Straw that Stirred the Drink”. He rubbed people the wrong way. He was both self-promoting and self-hating, from an ethnic identity standpoint. He was also quite possibly the greatest clutch hitting slugger in postseason baseball history. He is the only position player to win two World Series MVP awards, one with the A’s and the other with the Yankees, while leading them to consecutive World Series wins in 1977-1978.
Production, when it matters most, trumps chemistry.
There is a saying in football: “If you have two quarterbacks, you do not have one.” The riff between 49ers legends Joe Montana and Steve Young was obvious and even more contentious than Tom Brady and Jimmy Garoppolo, formerly with the Patriots. Montana was more advanced and the incumbent with two Super Bowl MVP awards, but the injuries began to pile up. When Young got his chance, he made the decision for the late coach Bill Walsh very difficult, especially in the back end of 1988, when the team lost consecutive games to subpar Raiders and Cardinals teams, to fall to 6-5, and was in danger of missing the playoffs.
(Photo by George Rose/Getty Images)
For the rest of the season, they would only lose a meaningless season-ending game on their way to winning the Super Bowl. They would repeat in 1989 with what many of us feel was their best team and on the short list of greatest of all time.
None of this is to say that chemistry is not important at all. It is. This is not to say that a player cannot cross the line and warrant accountability. He can, and it seems to me that Wall, Green, and Butler all did. It is to say that teams should think long and hard about getting rid of exceptional talent under the banner of team-cancer or chemistry-killer. Talent has its privileges, be it in professional sports or not. Does anyone believe that Hollywood would have the seemingly endless tolerance for Robert Downey Jr. were it not for his being a proven commodity, from both a talent and box office draw standpoint? Former Cowboys Coach Jimmy Johnson puts it this way: “If a special teams player or back up lineman falls asleep in a meeting, I would cut him. If Troy, Michael, or Emmitt fall asleep, I would go over a wake them up.”
Some may now be thinking, if I curse my boss I would be out of a job. As well you should be…unless thousands of people are willing to pay to watch you do your job. In that case, you may very well get the same leeway as exceptional professional athletes get. The fact is in the NBA, if you do not have one of the best 7-8 players in the league, or two of the top 12-15, you have little to no chance of winning a title. In my lifetime, only two teams broke through without this: the 1979 Seattle Supersonics and the 2004 Detroit Pistons, both of which had Hall of Fame coaches to guide them.
The most interesting part of the tendency to cite a lack of chemistry or toxic culture when a team under performs is the why. I have a few theories that I believe are at play here:
- Unrealistic expectations: both fans and even media routinely wrongly assess how good a team truly is. There are two sources of this one being the “fishbowl syndrome”, which basically gives people the impression that they understand more about something than they really do, because they see the end-product. The second source is a tricky human tendency to substitute our hopes for analysis. Human beings have emotional, ideological, and egotistical ties to their hopes, and as a result, often stretch their realistic possibilities;
- Jealousy: A huge segment of male sports fans (myself included) and media wanted to be professional athletes. Do not underestimate this lingering resentment. The quarterback stole his girlfriend in high school and he never got over the pain of being traded in for a flashier model. Professional sports offer such tormented souls a platform to therapeutically vent about that unresolved teen-age rejection from years ago. I am only slightly kidding; and
- Race: This of the “Shut up and dribble” mindset. More than a few of the fanbase feel that the Black athlete’s primary role in life is to entertain them. When they are not entertained, he is deserving of scorn. One of the best examples of this was the demise of the Eddie Murray/Cal Ripken era Orioles. Murray got all of the blame for the team that started 0-21 in 1988 and was traded the next year, while Cal was left without stain. Simply put, more than a few White fans have a problem….be it consciously or subconsciously, with Black athletes enjoying the privileges they enjoy.
So yes, chemistry is important but nowhere near as much as talent, which is the default narrative often adopted when trying to explain unfulfilled expectations. The degree to which it is cited is more about our longing for simple explanations, even if intellectually lazy and impossible to verify. In 2013, the Houston Astros lost 111 games. That team is on the short list of one of the worst in baseball history. Five players from the 2013 team remained on the team in 2017, when they won 101 games, and the first World Series in franchise history. Of those five was an eventual MVP in Jose Altuve and a Cy Young winner in Dallas Keuchel. What changed? It wasn’t chemistry. All five have spoken about how close the 2013 team was despite the losing. What changed was the improvement of the those who remained and the addition of Alex Bregman, George Springer, Charlie Morton, and of course, Justin Verlander.
This is why I contend that chemistry in sports is overrated.
