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Charles Barkley: 'Mediocre players are making so much money, there's no need to be great'
In a week that has rested as rather contentious for the Round Mound of Rebound, it must have been nice for Charles Barkley to actually see his blustery views not only agreed with, but actually spun forward in a way that makes just about everyone look good except the players behind Detroit’s 22-27 record.
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TNT’s Barkley, who has battled both LeBron James and Dwyane Wade recently in a war of words that has dated back over a decade with James, pinned his focus on a wildly-inconsistent Pistons team prior to Turner’s showing of Detroit’s loss to the Boston Celtics.
“I think they’ve got a lot of players who think they’re better than they are,” Barkley opined just before that defeat, a sentiment that Detroit Pistons head coach Stan Van Gundy didn’t exactly dismiss a day later. From Aaron McMann at MLive.com:
“That would probably qualify most every team in the NBA,” Van Gundy said Wednesday before Detroit hosted the New Orleans Pelicans.
“You have to believe in this league. I’ve seen guys not make it because they don’t believe in themselves enough. Like, you’re going out there and play against the best players in the world every night. You better have a belief in yourself and what you’re doing. I think our guys have that, and I would want that.”
As would every coach. No coach, fan, teammate or team owner would want the tenth man of an NBA team, any NBA team, thinking himself best suited for that role. Every player, no matter how humble nor riddled with self-awareness, should be sated at any point. Especially in a career that, for even the best, is mostly done by your mid-30s.
Of course, necessary ego wasn’t just the crux of Barkley’s overall point.
“That’s what I think their problem is. They got money, and people are like, ‘Whoa. I got money, so I’m a star. I’m a good player,’ instead of earning that respect.”
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“Mediocre players are making $10 million and you’re going, ‘Why am I going to kill myself? What’s the incentive to take my game to the next level?,” Barkley said. “I do think that so much money in the NBA has had a negative affect on the bad players. The great players always want to be great. But I think some of the mediocre players are making so much money in the NBA now, there’s no need to be great.”
Well, this is just daft.
During Charles Barkley’s first MVP season in 1989-90, the NBA’s salary cap was just over $9.8 million, which counts for about twice as much in today’s dollars. Barkley made $3 million as a player that season, not unlike the way MVP candidate James Harden makes over $26.5 million today in a league with a salary cap that reaches over $94 million.
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An average player in Barkley’s league – let’s go with Barkley’s team, the Philadelphia 76ers – might look like center Mike Gminski.
At 30 years of age, the big man turned in averages of 13.7 points, 8.5 rebounds, 1.3 blocks in only 33 minutes a game for the 53-win, Atlantic-winning Sixers. He made $1.7 million for his efforts that season, in the first year of a new free agent contract, a mark that nearly tripled the salary he earned in Philly during 1988-89.
Gminski’s stats dropped in the first year of that agreement despite no change in role, health, or minutes per game. He fell from over 17 points per game in his contract year of 1988-89 to the totals listed above not because he was some money-grubbing character right out of a Vancouver soundstage (a too-tall actor playing the role of an NBA ne’er-do-well) but because Mike Gminski was a solid enough player that had just hit the wrong side of thirty.
He was an average guy doing average things. All while being compensated spectacularly throughout.
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The average salary in the mid-1980s, just before the NBA’s free agent period, stood as a pretty astounding rate of income even if the figures only notched six digits. Even without accounting for inflation or the usual go-to trope that involves us reminding you that schoolteachers, firefighters, police officers and bartenders make far, far less.
The rate of pay matters little, as does the introduction of (mostly) guaranteed contracts. This is all a lot of money, and at some point you hit a saturation point. Players can underachieve at any salary, the same as they can overachieve (what, you don’t think Isaiah Thomas would be working this well at Harden’s salary?). In a league that will forever be about money above all, it is still worth reminding ourselves that sometimes an average player is just an average player.
And teams full of average players do average things, even if the manic ends of things tend to reveal itself as rather inconsistent. A so-so Pistons squad with the NBA’s third-highest payroll isn’t falling apart solely because of money, though. The team may have just about hit its limit at any price. The same goes in Portland, as the league’s second-highest payroll feels the pain of bad timing and divergent ceilings with its mercurial-to-mediocre crew of 2016 offseason signings.
Underachievers aren’t going to kill themselves for the minimum salary, as hundreds upon hundreds of NBA washouts (be they one-time lottery busts, or prospects who used up most of their chances before they even hit professional age) have proven over decades just prior to the final training camp cuts. Changing the average pull from “$100,000” to “$10 million” over the course of a basketball lifetime doesn’t change the bottom line.
The NBA’s average salary isn’t $10 million, it’s just over $6 million, and Charles Barkley is right in pointing out that there are scores of mediocre NBA players making eight figures a year. Whether or not these players are stuck at “mediocre” because of ongoing disappointment or because they’ve hit their limit as contributors is, as always, best done on a case by case basis.
In Detroit’s case, according to Charles, the Pistons have disappointed because they seem set in their ways, ways that co-incidentally or not happen to include the NBA’s third-highest payroll. If Charles had great hopes for Stan Van Gundy’s crew, entering 2016-17, then this is his disappointment to share. He’s paid to do as much.
It could just be that the Pistons aren’t all that great, though, even if they give off the whiff of greatness for spells before undercutting those performances with contributions that seem beneath them. The receipt, as is often the case, may not matter.
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Kelly Dwyer is an editor for Ball Don’t Lie on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at KDonhoops@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter!
