[Thespiralgoeson]

The ring chasing honestly doesn't bother me. I feel like its an inevitable byproduct of the "anything less than a championship is failure" culture that the media and fans have created over the years. Its fairy unique to the NBA too.

I'm very much pro player empowerment. I generally think that players should be able to go where they want, and I actually think the league should make it easier, not harder, to trade players and get out of bad contracts etc... I hate seeing great players waste their careers on sh*tty teams, and I actually want to see great players play together. And frankly I don't see any logical or ethical reason why players shouldn't be able to communicate with each other and decide where they want to go. The complaints seem to usually boil down to people just not liking it.

The Harden thing feels different though. Forcing a trade is one thing, but not showing up to training camp? Sabotaging your team like this? It's just unethical. Then add on the images of him clearly ignoring pandemic protocol, and it just makes him, and yes the NBA, look really bad.

And usually when players force a trade, they've been rotting away on bad teams. The franchise has failed them in some way. It usually comes after years of frustration, and years of the player giving everything he has while the management is just incompetent. That is objectively not true with the Rockets. They've been tremendously successful and have catered everything to him. And what's more, if they're in bad shape right now, HE is the reason for it. He's the one who forced the Paul-Westbrook trade- which in retrospect really looks like one of the worse trades in NBA history. No exaggeration. I'm trying to think of other trades that completely destroyed a perennial title contender. There's not many.