Is it Dame time for two scorers worlds apart?

Although both the NBA and the football seasons are over, this time of year is still packed with the same level of drama. We are in the midst of transfer/trade season and two names that have been flying around the net for the last three or four years have surfaced again: Harry Kane, Premier League Striker for Tottenham Hotspur, and Damien (Dame) Lillard, NBA Point Guard for the Portland Trail Blazers. Two players in the elite group of their respective leagues and in the last three years, one can argue a top 10 player in their leagues.

Both Lillard and Kane joined their teams with bags of potential, but far from the finished article and in 2012 played their first competitive game for their current teams. Since then, they have become the face of their teams and have gone on to be superstars in the NBA and the Premier League respectively.?With the two players thriving at their teams, they were rewarded with new contracts: a six-year deal for Harry Kane and a five-year deal for Dame Lillard. The season after signing his contract, Harry Kane became the Premier League’s top goal scorer scoring 25 goals. In the season after that (2016/17), he managed to score 29 goals, but this time also led Tottenham to a 2nd place finish in the Premier League, the highest since 1992. Kane was only the fifth player in League history to win back-to-back Golden Boots. The 2018/19 season was probably the most successful season for both Tottenham and Portland whilst their superstars were present. Tottenham got as far as the Champions League final where they lost 2-0 to Liverpool and Portland Trailblazers reached the Western Conference finals where they lost to the Golden State Warriors.

In 2021, Kane expressed his desire to leave his club in order to win trophies. Like Dame Lillard, Kane had many individual accolades but was missing a major trophy! The only problem with this is that he had signed another six-year contract extension in 2018 meaning he was unable to leave as a free agent and whatever Daniel Levy, the Tottenham owner valued him at, he was worth because he was under contract. It has been reported that Harry Kane has again asked to leave in this transfer window and is keen to move sooner rather than later. While I’ve been writing this blog post, on the 1st of July, Dame Lillard has now essentially done the same thing and has handed in a trade request – a formal request to be traded from his team, which he hopes will land him at another team. Football and Basketball vary in terms of the transfers of players; in football, you can spend physical cash on players. For instance, if a player is valued at ￡100 million, you can pay ￡100 million. With basketball, it’s a lot more complex – in essence, you are only allowed to trade players and potential players (draft picks) for a player you want. Thus, if you want a player, you will need to give up a player and/or draft picks. There are a few more technical terms in basketball such as the ‘salary cap’, but for the purpose of you staying with me and not getting bored, we’ll leave that alone!

So, with both players looking to leave their respective clubs, what does this mean for both the players and their teams and what can we learn from this as HR professionals?

Both players have signed mouth-watering contracts, with Lillard in the top 10 highest earners in the NBA and Kane in the top 20 among his Premier League peers. After a few promising seasons, it makes a lot of sense to remunerate your superstars accordingly with the aim of tying them down to your club for the foreseeable future; although that is a good idea, as mentioned in my last blog post, money isn’t the only factor for superstars and in this situation, according to both players winning trophies is at the forefront of their minds and constitutes success to them. Having said that, you do have to question both players’ desire to win trophies as they both signed extensions that kept them at a team not familiar with trophies! If we go back in history to 2016, the year after NBA superstar Kevin Durant lost in the Western Conference Finals to the Golden State Warriors, he left to join that exact team, where he won 2 NBA titles in 3 years, winning the Finals MVP award both times. He put himself in a position to reach his idea of success as his former team was, in his eyes, incapable.

The problem with keeping a superstar at your organisation is when you are unable to provide them with what their idea of success is, you tend to over-promise and underdeliver because you will say and, in some cases, give them near enough everything to get them to stay. Kane and Lillard were given the keys to their teams and became somewhat the key stakeholder at the club which ultimately lead their teams to perform worse in the latter years because rather than their main objective being winning, it became keeping their star players happy – ironically, something that could have only been done by winning! So instead of focusing on the process, the clubs were focusing on the players.

Both football and basketball are not individual sports, so there are other players to think about here. When the relationship between a senior member of the team and the organisation becomes strained, it hurts the rest of the team as the best player in their team is now not leading by example sheerly because they don’t want to be there. In addition, once other stakeholders in the business find out that your top talent wants out, the team gets worse and other organisations are now looking to poach that player. Because they are aware of your player’s desire to leave, they are now able to give up less to get that player, meaning that the worth of that player goes down even though their value remains the same. This is something we are seeing with both players – teams are lowballing both the Trail Blazers and Tottenham as they know that keeping a player who wants to leave is bad for business.

In this instance, I believe both Lillard and Kane have probably stayed too long at their respective clubs, and this is probably the last chance for them to leave and go on and win a major trophy as a key player. This puts their clubs back into a rebuilding phase where they will have to endure some more painful moments until they are ready to try and win again, a process prolonged by holding players for too long. Looking back at when Philippe Coutinho wanted out of Liverpool, we sold him for ￡142 million and were able to reinvest by buying new players such as Alison Becker and Virgil van Dijk – two players instrumental to Liverpool’s recent success.

From the two situations, a key takeaway from this is that if your company is unable to keep someone organically, manufacturing a desire for them to stay at the company, whether it be money, promotion or promises will not work if their idea of success is either unattainable or differs from yours. You don't want to hold on to an unhappy team member for too long as it'll start to radiate through the organisation and is exacerbated when the team member in question is a superstar. Parting ways with an employee is always easier when you are not forced into doing so because you have more time to think further along the line, whether that be by pipelining for new talent or preparing an existing team member to take over.