Fire Marbury

Stefan Marbury is a point guard for the New York Knicks professional basketball team. He makes around 21 million dollars a year to play basketball. That comes to about $256,000 a game for a 82 game schedule.

He has had a running disagreement with coaches and management since he entered the NBA. He played two and a half years with the Minnesota Timberwolves before a dispute with coaches over his role in the offense led to him being traded to New Jersey. His team won no playoff series.

He then spent two years in New Jersey and three in Phoenix and predictably had personal successes but his teams never won even one playoff series. In January 2004 he was traded to New York to play for his hometown team.

He played for the US Olympic team and scored an US Olympic record 31 points in a game, of course his team only managed a bronze medal. He spent the 2005-2006 season feuding with Larry Brown. It makes sense that Marbury would no better than Brown, after all Marbury has won a grand total of ZERO playoff series as an NBA player and all Brown has done as a coach is win the NBA championship. By the way he also won a NCAA championship making him the only coach in history to have won both an NCAA and NBA championship. Nonetheless at the conclusion of the season the Knicks fired Brown and kept Marbury. That is some fine management there Knicks.

The Knicks then hired Isiah Thomas as Head Coach to begin the 2006-2007 season. After a slight improvement in the team and that year (winning 33 rather than the previous years 23 games in an 82 game schedule) Thomas and Marbury began locking horns early in the 2007-2008 season. Marbury left the team after learning that Thomas was removing him from the starting lineup. I am no fan of Thomas’ coaching prowess however he certainly has forgotten more about winning than Marbury will ever know. He won a NCAA title while playing for Bobby Knight at Indiana, and won two NBA titles while a player for the Detroit Pistons. At the season’s conclusion Thomas was fired, Marbury was retained.

Mike D’Antoni was hired to coach the Knicks this season and he and Knicks management tried in the off-season to trade Marbury. This proved difficult as Marbury’s toxicity to every team he touches has gone from a hypothesis to a proven theory and no other team wants him and his $21 million salary.

D’Antoni did not play Marbury in the first 14 games of the season believing Marbury’s heart not to be in the game and no doubt hoping to still effectuate a trade. After many injuries to the Knick’s other guards D’Antoni approached Marbury to enter their game against Detroit on Wednesday night. Marbury refused.

The Knicks have suspended Marbury for one game and docked him $400,000 in pay. Are you kidding me? I wonder what Isiah Thomas former coach Bobby Knight would have done? I suspect that Knight would likely been arrested for assault and battery on his point guard and then acquitted by a jury because his actions were justifiable.

Maybe Marbury has a legitimate beef with D’Antoni and Knicks management (though I doubt it from past history). Maybe he is completely in the right. I do not care. When you are making $256,000 per game to play basketball you do not get to make those decisions your bosses do. Your coach and general manager will decide when and if and in what manner you play. That is the trade off. If you would like to be a coach, take a huge paycut and become one. Surely some Division I college could use an assistant with NBA experience as a recruiting tool if nothing else. Of course Marbury would make less in a year than he now makes for not playing in games.

About ten million Americans are currently unemployed with more losing their jobs everyday. The vast majority of these people make less in 5 years than what Marbury makes in a game and they do so in jobs that are far less glamorous and far more like work than playing basketball, yet when Marbury is asked by his bosses to work, he refused. Marbury should now join the ranks of the unemployed. Guaranteed contract or not I would also quit paying him. There is no doubt some clause in his contract that arguably would allow the Knicks to stop paying him. Let him sue to get his money. Let the NBA players Union file a grievance. Have the Knicks and their team of high priced attorneys drag out the proceedings for a year or more. If he does not want to work he does not need to be paid. Marbury may well win the suit but make him win. With his record that is no sure thing.

2008 may go down as the year that the complete inability of the wealthy in this country and the world to even contemplate what it is like to not be one of them was shone in the light of day. AIG Executives hold junkets at high priced resorts that most taxpayers can not afford to bring their families, a week after being bailed out by those same taxpayers. It never occurred to them that this would not sit well with those taxpayers; they could not contemplate it. The big three auto executives go to capital hill to beg for taxpayer’s money to keep their ailing companies afloat and arrive in corporate jets. It never occurred to them that this would be seen as a problem by the plebes they were begging money from. Finally Stephen Marbury refuses to enter a NBA game and collect his $256,000 for the night because of a perceived slight from management while millions would gladly do so for free. I would expect that when Marbury was a schoolboy star in NYC he would have done the same, but now he has more in common with the executives at AIG and GM than that dreaming schoolboy. He can not contemplate what it is like to be among the 10 million without work through no choice of their own.