Creative Destruction
Ah, the phantom sports blogger has a fever, and the only prescription for that fever is more cowbell. Or a quick blog post.
Anyhoo, you won’t see the great philosophers mentioned on sports blogs across the country unless it’s with reference to the likes of Yogi Berra or St. Louis great Mike Shannon. However, Mark’s post on Wednesday regarding the Mavs and their trade and Mark Cuban treating the team like a $100 fantasy league (pretty funny) was spot on.
As a Mavs fan, this had caused me sports agony for some time. After the Golden State series last year, I said that it was time to bust it up to build it up. And besides that being a knee-jerk sports reaction from rabid, pessimistic fans, this sports concept has its roots in philosophy.
Economic philosopher Joseph Schumpeter, among others, trumpeted the concept of creative destruction, which centers on the positive transformation that can happen through radical innovation.
Out of destruction a new spirit of creativity arises, wrote Werner Sombart, another purveyor of this notion. And, no, I didn’t know his quote off the top of my head. I found it on Wikipedia; however, having worked and survived through the dot-com boom and bust of a decade ago, I was already familiar with Schumpeter.
Alas, I have a sports point.
Ever notice that when pro teams totally change up their unis that they, all of a sudden, get good? Take the Denver Broncos. Take the New England Pats. The Seahawks sure as heck never sniffed a Super Bowl until the blue and silver was replaced by the blue and aqua-green.
The Tampa Bay Bucs finally won a Super Bowl, but it was in unis other than the bright orange of Leroy Selmon and Ricky Bell and Doug Williams.
And when the Houston Oilers up and moved to Memphis and then Nashville, they finally played in a Super Bowl as the Tennessee Titans.
When Mark Cuban took over the Mavs, he produced radical innovation, creatively destroying the entire culture of the Mavericks’ organization, rebuilding it into one that nearly won a world championship.
Sometimes the creative destruction manifests itself superficially, such as with the unis, and at other times it’s the result of a transformational leader. And all Cuban needs to do is to look back in time, to himself, to figure out how to right the Dallas Mavs’ ship.
However, the big reason I wanted to write this post is because I checked baseball standings today. May 1 is a date lots of baseball nerds look to, a measuring stick to see where their teams are headed. While no team is technically out of it, teams like Texas, Pittsburgh, Washington, Kansas City and Toronto have about 30 days to figure out what 2008 is going to be about — rebuilding or contending.
Which brings me to the Florida Marlins. The Marlins were supposed to be 100-game losers this year, having dumped Miguel Cabrera and Dontrelle Willis on the Tigers in another Florida baseball fire sale.
However, the Marlins are the masters of creative destruction. After their 1997 World Series title, they pretty much dumped everybody and rebuilt. Won another Series in 2003 — and, now, they’re tied for first in the NL East after April.
Not where anybody would have expected them to be.
But apparently somebody down in Miami is a fan of the great Joseph Schumpeter, and Dallas Mavs fans should hope Mark Cuban is as well. The best thing a pro sports organization can figure out is when the cause is lost because the sooner it’s realized, the sooner the ship can be righted.
Personally, I think the Mavs were a year too late.
