Uh ... Don't Do That

As we were just saying the other day, German soccer is on a real good run right now, and their national team is probably one of the 3-4 teams that might – might – be able to give a good run at the Brazilians next summer. And while I'm not qualified to be any sort of a soccer coach, my first bit of advice on how to beat them (or, really, anybody for that matter), would be to suggest that you DON'T DO THIS:

What the hell was that?

Apparently it's now being listed as taking 9 seconds for the Germans to score vs. Ecuador tonight during a friendly in Florida. Ecuador deservedly got beat after that bit of silliness, losing 4:2.

The Germans have a game this weekend vs. the U.S., who lost 4:2 in a friendly tonight to Belgium, a team that looks potentially terrifying here in the future since most of their players are EPL calibre and are also in their early 20s. The U.S. will likely get a beatdown from the Germans this weekend, but it's a good warmup for the CONCACAF Hexagonal. There ain't anyone in this neighbourhood that's even comes close to being as good as the Germans, that's for sure.

Unlikely Hero of the Week

Zion, Ilinois 1915. (foto found by cousin Pamela)

My hero of the week is me, because I've decided, on the occasion of my mumblety-mumbleth birthday, to lose something that I've had for a long time.

My nicotine habit.

Best confidante and best editor Laura said to me once, "sometimes I'm amazed that you're not addicted to everything." I actually have a really high tolerance level for most medications and drugs, which means a lot of stuff just doesn't do anything for me at all. The only two things that I can't seem to do without are caffeine and nicotine. One of those has got to go, and it ain't the coffee, I can tell you that.

I've stopped numerous times in the past two decades but I've never been able to quit. Big difference. And I've always resumed again. Usually, I just try to be nonchalant about it and try to act as if quitting is no big deal. This time I'm doing it differently: by announcing it here before a worldwide reading audience, I am setting myself up for PUBLIC SHAME AND RIDICULE here on the blog if I don't stick to it. Help me out here folks. Help me stay with this.

I think it'll be OK. Just as a warning, I'll probably be cranky, bitchy, agitated and annoyed. So, in other words, I'll just like I always am.

Seriously, I want this to be a positive, life-changing experience, so all shows of support are appreciated. Thanks everyone out there for reading. Keep reading and I'll keep writing, because someone out there will keep losing. But in this case, I'll win out in the end.

Worthy Adversaries

If you had to lose the biggest game of your life, how would you like it to go? Would you rather a close game that came down to the finish, or would you rather get blown out? For competitors, of course, the answer is NEITHER, because it would never even occur to them that they would lose. But this is IN PLAY LOSE where we contemplate such questions, and in light of Saturday's Champions League Final at Wembley between Borussia Dortmund and Bayern Munich, this question sprung to my mind.

If you had to choose, which would you choose?

The game itself was spectacular, one for the ages. Bayern 2:1 Borussia, the winning goal scored at 89' by Arjen Robben, who rid himself of the dreaded 'choker' tag in the process – having missed a penalty in last year's final v. Chelsea, and flubbed a golden opportunity for the Dutch v. Spain in the 2010 World Cup Final. It was a game in which the phrase "hate for someone to have to lose" came to mind. A game truly worthy of being a final.

Had the scoreline read Bayern 4:0 at the end, no one would've been surprised. Bayern won the Bundesliga by 25 points this season, running up a ridiculous +80 goal differential in the process that is something straight out of a video game. They carry the moniker FC Hollywood, a jetset glamour club all about flair and style. Their team is so deep that several players who will likely be playing key roles at the World Cup in Brazil next summer couldn't even get on the field at Wembley. Their 7:0 aggregrate destruction of F.C. Barcelona in the Champions League semis made it clear that this was, player for player, the best team in the world. A dominating victory at Wembley simply would have been a coronation, a confirmation of greatness that most of us already knew.

Borussia, meanwhile, finished second in Germany this season. They have a young team which fielded only one legitimate superstar in their Polish striker Lewandowski. Reaching the final was quite an accomplishment for the Yellow Army, and even though they drew 1:1 twice with Bayern during the German season, Borussia were HUGE underdogs. And huge underdogs tend to play cautiously and conservatively – slow the pace, try to keep it close, park a bus in front of their own goal, maybe hope to go 0:0 and extend into extra time. Hell, even teams with far more talent than Borussia do that vs. Bayern. Last year's rather wretched Champions League final saw Chelsea win through one minute of Drogba brilliance and 119 minutes of cynicism, combined with Bayern's inability to hit the broad side of a barn.

Yet here was Borussia going straight out and punching Bayern in the mouth. Young, cocky, positive, a we-do-not-give-a-damn-who-you-are attitude. They buzzed and swarmed like bees the first half hour of the game, dominating play with a full court press straight out of Louisville, pressing Bayern everywhere and attacking the goal from all different directions. But after about the 30' mark, Bayern found their footing, at which point this game turned into a track meet on grass. Up and down, end to end, chances all over the place for either team. It could've been more like 5:4 than 2:1 were it not for the excellent goalkeeping on either side.

It really was a beautiful game to watch. A shame someone had to lose. Which wound up being Borussia, of course. One wondered if expending so much energy early would catch up with them. In the last 30' they gave up two goals in which their defense looked flat and square while the Bayern superstars did just enough to coax a couple balls into the net.

The game winner, in particular, came from a sequence that seemed unremarkable – just a free kick from midfield and a highball lofted lazily down to the edge of the 18. But then it's a bad bounce, chaos, a scramble play, Ribéry's clever backheel to Robben for a first touch and a leap over a sprawling defender into the clear, shifty little shot cross his body loaded with english that barely had enough momentum to reach the goal. Bang, just like that, 2:1 to Bayern. The goal seemingly came out of nowhere, and with the full 90 all but done there was basically no time for Borussia to recover.

And losing a game in such fashion simply magnifies all of the little moments here and there where you wish that you might have done something different. What if THIS hadn't happened ... what if I had done THIS instead of this ... what if THAT bounce had gone our way ... The devil is in the details, and the details will drive you crazy if you let them.

My high school basketball team was eliminated from the state playoffs by 2 points in OT, the winning shot coming with :01 on the clock. This after we'd cheated death at the end of regulation – down 10 with little more than 2:00 to play and we unleashed a furious rally, tying the game late, only to have our opponents take the lead on a basket with about :07 left, after which our point guard made a mad dash end-to-end and dished off a pass for a driving layup at the buzzer. It was such a crazy finish to reguation time that we were certain we would ultimately win in OT, thinking we'd broken their spirit as they gagged away their double-digit margin in the closing minutes. The ultimate result – losing by 2 at the horn – was a shock to the system. Game over, season over, high school career over for 8 of us on that team. I think we sat in the locker room for about 5 minutes without saying a word, a collection of statues. What could you possibly say?

And in retrospect, I would rather we lost 20. I would rather they just kicked our ass and shown they were clearly better than us in all phases of the game. Losing is losing, after all, but it's easier for me personally to acknowledge that an opponent was simply better. We attempt to qualify defeats, attaching terms like 'moral victory.' I personally hate moral victories, because there is implicit in that idea the notion that you could've won but ultimately didn't. You were 'gallant in defeat,' whatever the hell that means.

During the course of a season, of course, you can look back at your losses – the 'moral victories' and the blowouts and the like – and see if/how you've progressed from that point. Mistakes are correctable. Improvement possible. But there are, in the end, no moral victories in finals or elimination games. You lost. It's over. It's on to the next season, if there is one – and such is the nature of sports that no teams are ever exactly composed the same way the following season. Whatever collection of players you've assembled in that moment is a one-time deal. A good number of players on the Borussia side yesterday will likely never be on such as grand a stage again. 2:1 losses on 89' goals in such situations seem even harder to ultimately accept. In a 4:0 blowout, you are clearly second-best – but 2nd best, in an international competition, really is pretty good. It's OK to know you were 2nd best if 1st ultimately didn't seem possible.

I didn't want to hear people telling me, in the aftermath of my high school basketball team's 2-point loss in O.T., what a great game it was. Fuck that. But you know what? It kinda was a great game, now that I think about it 20+ years later ... hmm ...

And as fans and spectators and onlookers, we don't want 4:0 blowouts in Champions League finals. We want great games, memorable games rife with tension which are great theatre. Winners write the history books but have a tendency of doing it the same way over and over – we played great, we were superior, it was destiny, blah blah blah. That's all so boring and predictable. But ironically enough, it's more often the losers who ultimately make a game memorable. Whom other than the most ardent Bayern diehard would've wanted to watch a replay of a 4:0 blowout? But I could watch the video from yesterday's game at Wembley again and again, even though I know the outcome, simply to appreciate what I've seen.

So I applaud Borussia, in the end, for opting to play the way they did – opting for swashbuckling over cowering in their own half of the field all day, being tenacious instead of tentative. Living by the sword and ultimately dying by it. They lost but they damn sure made Bayern work for it, and the club has made a lot of friends in the process. And that does matter. I do believe "they were worthy adversaries," the old martial arts cliché, is about the more sincere compliment you can ever pay a defeated opponent, even if it sucks to hear. (And it does.) Borussia were worthy adversaries, to be sure. They lost, but German football – and, indeed, football as a whole – was a big overall winner.

And we sports lovers have been fortunate this year in that so many finals – the Super Bowl, the NCAA championship, and now the Champions League – that were actually worthy of the title. It also makes for better parties. I've been to more Super Bowl parties that petered out at halftime than I care to remember – warm beer, stale nachos, half-empty bars. Lame. We're all about the parties here at IN PLAY LOSE. It simply cannot be any other way. If you don't have good parties, then what's the point?

That One's Gonna Sting a Bit

Apologies for being a little slow here catching up on the LOSE news. I was busy last week as deadline nears at the magazine where I work. But we've had some shocking acts of losing here recently which cannot possibly go unmentioned.

As I have said here repeatedly of late, promotion to, and preventing relegation from, the English Premier League is a HUGE deal. Desperate times call for desperate measures and produce some utterly astonishing results.

This game from last weekend is a fine example. This is from the second division Football League Championship playoff between Leicester City, a club that knows frustration well – The Foxes have lost the FA Cup final four times without a win, which is a record – and the Hornets of Watford F.C., who are far more famous for being once owned by Elton John than they are for anything on the pitch. It's a two-game playoff, with goal difference, or "aggregate," being the tiebreaker.

To set the scene here further: Leicester won the first game 1-0, and Watford are leading 2-1 at Vicarage Road, their home grounds, in the return match's dying moments when a questionable penalty is awarded to the Foxes. The conversion rate on penalty kicks is generally in the 80-85% range, mind you, and a goal here will give the Foxes a 2-2 draw in the match and they will win the playoff, thus advancing to the playoff finale at Wembley, where a shot at the coveted place in the EPL awaits. And in the unlikely event that the Foxes miss the penalty, the game would then end 2-1 in favour of Watford, then overtime will be necessary since the overall aggregate is 2-2. So the Foxes would seem to hold all the cards here, right?

Well ...

I have never seen anything like that. I also have NO EARTHLY IDEA what the Leicester goalkeeper was doing on that play.

To give you another perspective, here is some video shot from the grandstands at Vicarage Road:

I'm not sure how you overcome that sort of a collapse if you're the Foxes. The hangover from that game (and from the heavy drinking which would follow) may last about six months, if not longer.

And thus, with the 3-1 win and 3-2 aggregate score, the Hornets advanced to Wembley where they'll play Crystal Palace on May 27 for the right to join automatic qualifiers Cardiff City and Hull City in getting regularly thrashed competing next season in the EPL. This is a one-game, winner-take-all playoff, and pretty much all bets are off.

Leaf Blowers

"I didn't think it was physically possible, but this both sucks and blows."
– Bart Simpson
 
Down three games to one in the best-of-7 series against the heavily-favoured Boston Bruins, the Toronto Maple Leafs had squeaked out 2-1 victories in Games 5 and 6 to level the series. In Game 7, the upstart Leafs had shrugged off an early 1-0 deficit, outplayed the Bruins on the B’s home ice at Boston Garden (and I don't give a shit what bank has their name on the building, it's the Boston Garden), taken a 2-1 lead in the 2nd period and then, early the third, struck for two more goals to stun the home crowd and pretty much everyone watching – which apparently was everyone in Canada, as CBC reported it’s biggest TV ratings in history. Nazem Kadri’s goal at 5:29 of the third period, giving the Leafs a 4-1 lead, seemed to cement and finalize one of the more impressive, and shocking, about-faces in sports in recent years.

All it did was set the stage from which the Leafs could fall off, because the Leafs were just getting started.

The Toronto Maple Leafs are one of the most inexcusably bad franchises in all of professional sports. While they can claim 13 Stanley Cups in their history, they haven’t won a championship since 1967, the year before the so-called ‘modern’ era began in the NHL, when the league expanded from it’s “original six” and doubled it’s membership to 12 franchises. Not only have they not won a Stanley Cup in 46 years, the Leafs haven’t even been that close, not even reaching the finals during that time. More often than not in that time, the Leafs have been afterthoughts. Indeed, this year’s Leafs squad gave Toronto fans a sniff of the playoffs for the first time since 2004, and most experts considered that to be a grand act of overachievement.

And it’s not as if the Leafs can lean on the crutch of “we don’t have any money.” They are awash in loonies and twoonies. The Toronto Maple Leafs are the most valuable franchise in the NHL, estimated by Forbes to be worth $1,000,000,000 in a league otherwise awash in red ink. Toronto is the largest city in Canada, and the 5th largest city in North America. Through sheer demographic pull, the Leafs dominate the hockey media north of the border, which has also spawned a rather fierce and large battalion of Leafs haters – and with good reason, since the Leafs have done pretty much nothing in four decades to be worthy of such attention other than be based in Toronto. The Leafs have failed to succeed in spite of what seems to be almost unfuckable circumstances. Every external force would lead you to believe that the Leafs should be a dominant force in the NHL, not a meek also-ran mired in perpetual failure.

The North American sports model allows for such long stretches of ineptitude. As I’ve pointed out prior here in IN PLAY LOSE, poor enough performance in the Europe gets you banished to the wandering the badlands of Division Two. In North America, however, bad franchises continue to flounder seemingly ad infinitum with seemingly little or no consequences to the club. At the root of almost all spats involving the spectre of franchise relocations are teams which aren’t very good – which the owner can then blame of a lack of local resources, thus justifying their threats to move to greener pastures. But it also has led to some unique narratives in which failure, in fact, is embraced and ultimately celebrated, held up right alongside the stories of fame and glory. The story of the New York Yankees’ 27 World Series titles is inevitably intertwined with the 80+ years of frustration of the Boston Red Sox, who are almost always really good but never quite good enough. If I was the use the term ‘storied history’ of the Philadelphia Phillies, who have lost more games than any franchise in the history of professional sports, I would do so without irony. After enduring more than 10,000 losses over the centuries, you can understand why Philly sports fans would be apt to do things like boo Santa Claus.

Nowhere is failure celebrated quite like Chicago, however. The Cubs haven’t won a World Series since 1908, and every time they seem to be approaching that pinnacle, some sort of colossal failure or absurd debacle ensues, leading to the notion that the franchise is somehow cursed or predisposed to bad luck. This is a convenient sort of excuse, of course. The fewer chances you have to succeed, the more epic the failures seem to be. Indeed, the aforementioned Bruins suffered one of the most epic chokes in history three seasons ago, winning the first three games of a best-of-7 with the Philadelphia Flyers and losing the next four, including blowing a 3-0 lead in Game 7 at home. All the B’s did was go out and win the Stanley Cup the following season, and that collapse was easily forgotten. But to Cubs fans, of course, Steve Bartman and Steve Garvey and the Amazin’ Mets become supporting cast in the constant narrative of victimhood, the act of winning a World Series being a Promethean sort of task with failure seemingly decreed by the baseball gods.

In the excellent book Scorecasting (which is pretty much required reading for all loyal readers of IN PLAY LOSE) authors Jon Wertheim and Tobias Moskowitz dedicate an entire chapter to the Cubs, attempting to use mathematics and principles of economics to try and discern whether the Cubs are, in fact, cursed. It’s a fun exercise put forth by a couple of long-time Cubs fans, but by every metric they can model, the Cubs appear not to be cursed at all. It isn’t because of bad luck or misfortune that they’ve gone 105 years without a World Series title – it’s because the Cubs have been TERRIBLE.

Furthermore, the authors then venture into theorizing why the Cubs have been terrible for so long, and their conclusion shouldn’t be a surprise – they are terrible because there is no incentive to do otherwise. A string of Cubs owners over the years have made it a point to try and market the experience of going to a game at the 'Friendly Confines' of Wrigley Field, what with the day games and the ivy covered walls in the outfield and the shoehorned ballpark in among the trendy residential neighbourhood where enterprising neighbours sells tickets for rooftop bleacher seats. They actually document how the franchise’s attendance and overall value increases when the club is losing on the field.

“If they’re looking for a guy to push the button when they blow the place up, I’ll do it ... Chicago’s one of the worst places in baseball … really for anything … I read where they got approval for some more upgrades. Count me in the group of people extremely happy to see that. I guess I'm just spoiled. There is a tremendous history associated with it and there is something special about playing on the same field that guys like Babe Ruth did. But really, what kind of history is there? It's not like there has been one championship after another. It's mainly been a place for people to go and drink beer."
– Texas Rangers 1B/OF/DH Lance Berkman

Berkman is a rather outspoken player who is also somewhat of a goof, but he was definitely onto something when he said that. The ticket prices in Chicago are among the highest in the game, yet the beer prices are among the lowest. 100-year-old Wrigley Field may be quirky and charming for a fan, but the players generally dislike it. The place has become a spot for the Windy City’s hip and trendy to see and be seen, a frat party booze cruise where the game itself doesn’t really matter – and, in fact, where losing has taken on a bizarro aura of civic pride. But don’t take my word for it, just ask former Cubs manager Lee Elia. In case you couldn’t make that out on the audio:

“Fuck those fuckin' fans who come out here and say they're Cub fans that are supposed to be behind you rippin' every fuckin' thing you do. I'll tell you one fuckin' thing, I hope we get fuckin' hotter than shit, just to stuff it up them 3,000 fuckin' people that show up every fuckin' day, because if they're the real Chicago fuckin' fans, they can kiss my fuckin' ass right downtown and PRINT IT. They're really, really behind you around here... my fuckin' ass. What the fuck am I supposed to do, go out there and let my fuckin' players get destroyed every day and be quiet about it? For the fuckin' nickel-dime people who turn up? The motherfuckers don't even work. That's why they're out at the fuckin' game. They oughta go out and get a fuckin' job and find out what it's like to go out and earn a fuckin' living. Eighty-five percent of the fuckin' world is working. The other fifteen percent come out here. A fuckin' playground for the cocksuckers. Rip them motherfuckers. Rip them fuckin' cocksuckers like the fuckin' players. we got guys bustin' their fuckin' ass, and them fuckin' people boo. And that's the Cubs? My players get around here. I haven't seen it this fuckin' year. Everybody associated with this organization have been winners their whole fuckin' life. Everybody. And the credit is not given in that respect. Alright, they don't show because we're 5 and 14... and unfortunately, that's the criteria of them dumb 15 motherfuckin' percent that come out to day baseball. The other 85 percent are earning a living. I tell you, it'll take more than a 5 and 12 or 5 and 14 to destroy the makeup of this club. I guarantee you that. There's some fuckin' pros out there that wanna win. But you're stuck in a fuckin' stigma of the fuckin' Dodgers and the Phillies and the Cardinals and all that cheap shit. It's unbelievable. It really is. It's a disheartening fuckin' situation that we're in right now. Anybody who was associated with the Cub organization four or five years ago that came back and sees the multitude of progress that's been made will understand that if they're baseball people, that 5 and 14 doesn't negate all that work. We got 143 fuckin' games left. What I'm tryin' to say is don't rip them fuckin' guys out there. Rip me. If you wanna rip somebody, rip my fuckin' ass. But don't rip them fuckin' guys 'cause they're givin' everything they can give. And right now they're tryin' to do more than God gave 'em, and that's why we make the simple mistakes. That's exactly why.”

Greatest rant in the history of sports. Apparently the Bleacher Bums at Wrigley Field can recite this verbatim, considering this tirade by their frustrated manager at the time to be some sort of badge of honour. I, for one, find the Cubs’ fans lifelong celebrations of failure to be rather baffling. I also find it impossible to sympathize – the club’s owners have pretty much banked on the notion that the fans are sheep for a century, and made few efforts over that time to legitimately field a competitive product. If that incentive isn’t there, why bother?

This sort of perverse fascination with failure also seems to run rampant when it comes to the original subject of this post, those wacky Toronto Maple Leafs. 46 years of high-profile failure will do that. There is an odd sort of acceptance of failure at play, one which, paradoxically, in tinged with the angst of high expectations. Their fans expect the Leafs to lose, but hope and pray and wonder if this is the year the losing will finally stop. The Leafs particular brand of ineptitude can largely be attributed to the dubious ways of owner Harold Ballard, who did pretty much all he could to run the franchise into the ground. Ballard was a cheapskate, among other dubious traits, and did all he could to maximize his profit margin while knowing full well the margin was always going to be there. Whatever poor product he put out on the ice was going to be a financial success regardless of the outcome.

The new ownership groups since Ballard’s death has done little to change the fortunes of the franchise around. Freed up from decades of cheapskate ways, the Leafs now spend freely and spend badly, whiffing repeatedly in free agency and doing a poor job in the areas of scouting and player development. They hire big name GMs and big name coaches, all of whom manage to do less with more, as big money simply breeds impatience. And while there are a few hockey players who can excel and even thrive living and playing in the fishbowl that is Toronto, quite a few more don’t like the constant, minute scrutiny. (This is akin to the theorizing which comes up every time the Yankees make a trade as to whether the player can cut it in New York.) The misfortunes of the Leafs, much like the Cubs, are ultimately their own making. The fact that simply making the playoffs should constitute an achievement in Toronto speaks to the overwhelming state of disrepair.

And Leafs fans had no real expectations of success in this postseason. Few people expected the Leafs to even give the Bruins a competitive series, much less find themselves playing Game 7. The Leafs were playing with house money. But it’s easy to forget that when, 3¾ games into a playoff series, Nazem Kadri scores to give the Leafs a 4-1 lead and they stand on the verge of a terrific upset.

And then this happened:

Yes, that happened. A collapse the likes of which the NHL has never seen.

It fits in rather nicely with the Leafs’ narrative of failure, even though what happens in the moment has nothing to do with what happened 20 or 30 or 40 years ago. And with such a colossal flop will come even more unrealistic expectations for next season, as the Maple Leafs go about attempting to live this one down. And while a good number of my Canadian friends (of which I have many, since I speak fluent Canadian) have gleefully engaged in some schadenfreude this past week, reveling in the failures of the hated Leafs, I cannot help but feel a bit for them. The reputation for being a choker is one of the hardest to live down. If anything, they overachieved this year simply to reach a point where they failed. But unfortunately, the Peter Principle is often strictly enforced in sports – you rise to the level of your own incompetence. In Toronto’s case, it’s a level which, until Monday, no one in hockey had ever seen before.

Capital Crimes

Today the LOSE presents the first of what I hope to become a regular series of guest posts from fellow long-suffering fans either intrigued or morbidly curious about the act of losing, or maybe just in need of an act of literary exorcism so as to purge some frustration. Tonight’s post comes from world-class scrabbler, perennial Austin Adult Spelling Bee winner, multi-instrumentalist, and long-suffering Washington Capitals fan Geoff Thevenot, author of the outstanding Scrambled and Unscrambled blog, which you should all read when you’re not reading IN PLAY LOSE. Take it away Geoff …

Hi, I'm Geoff. I grew up near Washington, D.C., and I have been a Washington Capitals fan since January 26, 1977, when my father took me, age 6, and my little brother Brian, age 4, to a Capitals game against the Detroit Red Wings at the old Capital Centre down the road. The Capitals won the game, 4-1; the goal sirens and loud cheering enthralled me, as did the entire contents of the game program and the next day's standings and boxscore because I was that kind of kid, and I was hooked for life. The starting goalies in the game were Roger Crozier for the Caps and Ed Giacomin for the Red Wings - my dad taught me how to pronounce Giacomin's surname, which I thought was really cool. No, I'm not old.

What I could not have known at the time was how rare an event I had witnessed. The Caps were a third-year expansion team at the time and would finish with just 24 wins in 80 games. My father had the good sense to take us to a game the Caps might win, against a strip-mined Red Wings team that hadn't done anything right since Gordie Howe left a few years before.

And what I *really* couldn't have known was the legacy I was heir to. The underpowered 24-42-14 team we watched that night, believe it or not, had made a quantum leap forward from where they were two years before. Coaches have won Jack Adams Trophies for less.

***

The Capitals began play in the fall of 1974, handicapped in a multiplicity of ways. The NHL contained just the Original Six teams of ancient legend as late as 1967, owing to the extraordinary stubbornness of its owners, but finally realized the opportunity before them and expanded to 12 teams in one go, and further to 16 by 1972. This thinned out the talent, but there was enough to go around - too few teams before meant that lots of deserving players weren't getting the chance to prove themselves, and the initial rounds of expansion helped fix that. But then a rival league, the WHA, started playing in the fall of 1972, and while not as powerful as the NHL, they had some money to throw around. They notably signed Gordie Howe and Bobby Hull, but they also competed for lesser talents - a second- or third-line player in the NHL might well be a star in the early WHA, and lots of less famous players made the leap as well...also, the talent pool itself was much thinner in the early 70s than it would be later, because the Europeans had yet to arrive. Into the late 70s, over 90 percent of NHL players were Canadian-born; by the mid-90s, only about 60 percent of them were.

But the NHL was still committed to expand once more, and so the Capitals and Kansas City Scouts would start playing in the 1974-75 season. (And they had reason to, if for nothing other than outracing the WHA to those cities.) There was an expansion draft, but it was most uncharitable: each existing NHL team got to protect 16 skaters and two goalies, so the best the Caps and Scouts could do was pick players that the existing teams viewed as no better than their 17th best skater or third-string goalie. And many of the class of players somewhat better than that, guys who could have helped here, were under contract to one of the 14 teams in the WHA. After the season, many observers thought that the 1974 NHL expansions had been a mistake. Can't blame them, though both teams do still exist - the Scouts moved to Colorado in 1976 and then New Jersey in 1981, becoming the New Jersey Devils we know today.

The Capitals, endowed with that foundation of sinking sand, proceeded to weaken themselves even further at the 1974 amateur draft. Look at it and you will cry. The three-year-old New York Islanders, picking fourth in each round but having the key advantage of knowing what the hell they were doing, came away with Clark Gillies and Bryan Trottier. The Capitals, picking first in each round, came away with Greg Joly and Mike Marson. (Their 1975 draft was even worse.)

And then there's this. Yes, that's right, white pants. That happened. Not for nothing are "diapers" and "despair" anagrams of each other.

As bad as you would expect a team forged in all these fires at once to be, the expansion Caps were even more fecal than that. The first thing you notice is the record. They won 8 games and tied 5 on the year, which means they lost the other 67. And away from home, they were far worse: they lost their first 37 road games outright before eking out a 3-2 win against the horrible-but-not-quite-as-horrible California Golden Seals (doesn't that name just tell you they're bad? Good sports teams don't have names like that). But the win-loss record is just the beginning.

Here is one of the coolest bits of symmetry in the sports record book. The record for goals scored by a team in one season is 446, by the 1983-84 Edmonton Oilers. Did you see this team? You wouldn't believe it. The Wayne Gretzky Oilers, at their peak. They lit people up every damn night. Too many weapons, including the ultimate one, Wayne himself. This was before the invention of the devilish (sorry) neutral-zone trap and other defensive strategies; this is what happens when one team has vastly superior talent and game planning at the exact moment in history when no one else has an answer for it, as happened with the 16-0 New England Patriots up until the Super Bowl that year. Video game numbers. Wayne Gretzky put up 205 points (87 goals, 118 assists) - the next best non-Oiler total was 121. They damn near broke hockey. Their like will never be seen again.

The record for goals allowed is exactly the same - 446. That's our expansion Capitals. Yes, you heard that right: when facing those Caps, a league-average NHL offensive team turned into the Wayne Gretzky Oilers at their peak. So what happened when a really good team faced them? We have your evidence: the first-year Capitals were placed, cruelly, in a division with the Montreal Canadiens, the powerhouse of the mid-to-late 70s. In their six matches, the Canadiens outscored the Capitals 49-9. (The Caps couldn't score either - they netted a sad 181 goals on the year, far below the league average of 273.)

There are just so many beautiful indices of the first-year Caps' ineptitude, I can hardly decide what to present first. The expansion Capitals are to hockey what Pedro Carolino's "English As She Is Spoke" was to English pedagogy:

- Since the '67-68 expansion that marks the modern era of NHL hockey, by my count, 16 players have achieved a plus-minus rating of negative 50 or worse; a plus-minus that wretched is a singular achievement. The expansion Capitals had EIGHT such players on the roster, including one (Jack Lynch) who managed to rack up a -54 in just 20 games; Bill Mikkelson, who played 54 games for the team that year, set the all-time record for worst plus-minus at -82.

- The Capitals had a 17-game losing streak, a 10-game losing streak, a 9-game losing streak and two 7-game losing streaks. All in the same season.

- There is a formula, commonly referred to as the Pythagorean formula, that predicts wins and losses from runs/goals/points scored and allowed in various sports, and it's usually pretty close to its target. When it's not, we can surmise that a team may have been unusually good or bad in clutch situations, or unusually lucky or unlucky. Almost every historically awful team also shows up as unlucky by this analysis, which makes intuitive sense - the worst teams ever should be those that were both bad *and* unlucky, right? Not these Caps, though: this formula suggests they should have ended up with something like 11 standings points, even less than the record-low 21 they actually had. There's a good reason they exceeded expectations: they got to play their expansion brethren, the Kansas City Scouts, who would have been the league's worst in almost any other year, and a few other troubled franchises. The league was unusually stratified at the time. In an NHL with a more normal competitive ecology, these Caps might have struggled to win even five games. Their record overrates them. (The 92-93 Ottawa Senators and San Jose Sharks, with win-loss records nearly as bad, would have blown the 74-75 Caps off the ice, no doubt in my mind. It was a different league by then.)

- To illustrate this further, there is a stat on hockey-reference.com called Point Shares, which attempts to mine the data and figure out how much each player contributed to his team's standings points for the year. In most cases, the point shares for all the individual players on a team add up roughly to the team's point total: for example, the 2009-10 Penguins add up to 100.15, and the team actually had 101 standings points. For normal teams, the average difference is about 4-5 points. The first-year Caps break this model: they had 21 standings points, but the sum total of their players' contributions is estimated to be...2.7. Yes, two point seven. As a team. In 1988-89, Mario Lemieux had 19.56 point shares by himself.

- Who was the 74-75 Caps' best player? Tommy Williams was a 34-year-old right winger who had spent the previous two seasons as a mid-line player for the New England Whalers of the WHA, after a largely undistinguished run of seasons in the NHL in the sixties. Williams would have had to hustle to make the third line on most NHL teams, but on these Caps, he was the man. He led the team with 58 points, tying him for 70th place in the NHL; Denis Dupere was a distant second on the team with 35.

- The first-year Capitals had three coaches. Teams with three coaches in a single season tend not to have the good records, as a rule. Jimmy Anderson was let go after his 4-45-5 start, but apparently he was not the problem, as Red Sullivan (these names sound like they're from the 1940s; surely fedoras and whiskey are involved in here somewhere) guided the hometown heroes to a 2-16-0 mark. Milt Schmidt, who I think was also the GM but am too lazy to check at the moment, finished out the year behind the bench with a rousing 2-6-0 record.

- A week in the life: During the week of February 18-25, 1975, when I was busy attending pre-K, the Capitals lost consecutive games 6-1, 9-4, 10-3, 7-2 and 6-2. You'd think they'd have gotten tired of that, but no, they went on to lose twelve more games in a row, including losses of 8-0, 12-1, 7-2 and 8-2. Ten of these seventeen games were at home.

- My father attended a second-year Caps versus Canadiens game. He has reported since that the entire game was played at one end of the ice, and that the Capitals appeared to be in slow motion like on the TV. The game ended 11-0 or something.

- The Caps surrendered eight or more goals 16 times. Yes, one fifth of the time.

- The Caps were shut out in 12 games and scored just one goal in 17 others.

- The Caps scored about 13% of the time on the power play, while giving up power play goals 29% of the time. And those don't even count toward plus-minus ratings.

- The Caps gave up 255 goals - on the road. Their *average* road game in 1974-75 was a 7-2 loss.

- Starting goalie Ron Low played 48 games and racked up a GAA of 5.45, and he was clearly the best goalie on the roster. The backup goalie, Michel Belhumeur (great name), was in net for 27 decisions and did not win any of them.

- As you'd expect, almost no one on the roster lasted more than a couple of years longer in the league after the year ended. Defenseman Yvon Labre (whose #7 was eventually retired by the Capitals, the equivalent of a Purple Heart), a castoff from the Penguins, lasted the longest.

- Their final game was an 8-4 win over those Penguins, who had already made the playoffs and thus started their drinking at 11 am instead of 11 pm. In music, this is called a Picardy third - a hopeful major triad at the end of a mournful minor-key piece.

WE'RE STAYING UP! ... WE'RE STAYING UP! ...

There is a considerable sigh of relief here today at IN PLAY LOSE World HQ, having paid close attention to the penultimate weekend of play in the EPL. The beloved Canaries of Norwich City F.C., having made a complete mess of things in the second half season and squandered points the past couple of weeks, were staring into the abyss of relegation with two games left to play and a road trip looming next week to what will likely be a suddenly very cranky Man City. Must-win game today. Absolute must.

Fortunately, the schedule dictated their opponent today at Carrow Road was West Bromwich Albion, one of those middle-of-the-table teams safely into the EPL for next season but not competing for a spot in European play. In short, West Brom had nothing to play for, and thus didn't care at all. 

Norwich City 4:0 West Brom. Coupled with the other results from the weekend, the Canaries are now safe. They actually leapfrogged a whole bunch of teams and are now in 12th place, of all things, which shows just how many bad teams the EPL has this season.

Carrow Road was apparently quite a festive atmosphere today, awash in chants of “We’re staying up! We’re staying up!” as the Canaries continued hammering the hapless Baggies. The takeaway from this, of course, is a bit odd – “We don’t completely suck!” really isn't that much of a rallying cry. But it was something to play for, the objective was met, the benefits are enormous and the feat is, in the moment, worthy of considerable joy. The Canaries are in a good place here going forward, and with another £50m+ to bankroll for next season they will have some options.

And I am looking forward to seeing them here this summer when the Good Guys come to California. One of the delightful oddities of America's place in the game of soccer is that players from elsewhere generally like coming here, because there is enough of a subculture of knowledgable fandom established to give them a worthwhile reception, but not the sort of lunatic, frenzied, paparazzi type atmosphere that surrounds big European leagues. A good number of the EPL clubs will make their way to the US this summer, as is their norm, including the Canaries, who are playing here in the Bay Area vs. the San Jose Earthquakes on ...

July 20th, which is when I'll be in Las Vegas.

Nertz.

Even on a glorious, day, there just has to be some LOSE involved.

The Worst Team Money Can Buy, May Edition

As a shiny new feature at the LOSE, it seems like a good time to offer up a monthly award for The Worst Team Money Can Buy, where we look back and try to figure how it is that a team with money to burn can be so awful. This also gives me a chance to be a smartass. I try very hard to be compassionate, since I know how much losing sucks, but there are times where compassion is most definitely unwarranted.

There is a conventional way of thinking, most prevalent in baseball but not reserved for it, that success will correlate to the size of a team’s payroll. I happen to think this notion is extremely simplistic, and that having more dollars at your disposal can also provide more opportunities to screw everything up. And with spending big comes big(ger) expectations – the bigger you spend, the harder you fall.

We have quite an assortment of nominees for this month’s WTMCB. Honorable mention needs to go to the Minnesota Wild, who spent a truckload to sign the two best available free agents – Parise and Suter – to matching long-term deals and then could do no better than muddling their way to an #8 seed in the playoffs and 2nd place in a lousy division well behind the old, slow Vancouver Canucks. They get dinged here for needlessly raising expectations – signing two players gave the club a grand total of two players that anyone would actually want. We all should have known better, but it's the NHL playoffs so anything is possible. They might redeem themselves with a good showing vs. the Black Hawks.

I would also give the L.A. Dodgers a wag of the finger here, since it boggles the mind that a team with a $200m+ payroll is fielding a team with a 3B hitting .098, but the Dodgers have also had terrible luck on the injury front. Couldn’t happen to a better bunch, in my opinion, and there is still plenty of opportunity to the Dodgers to claim this soon-to-be coveted award. They’ll find a way to win it, I can assure you of that. They're well on their way, but have been outdone so far this baseball season by a couple of brass-in-pocket, rocks-in-the-head franchises.

Finalist #1 for this month’s award has to be the Toronto Blue Jays, who are in about the 13th year of their 5-year rebuilding plan. Impatience has understandably started to settle in north of the border, and GM Alex Anthopoulos decided to go big in the offseason – signing NL Cy Young R.A. Dickey from the Mets, signing would-be NL batting champ Melky Cabrera, and then making the most monstrous one-sided deal imaginable, taking full advantage of the fire sale in Miami by acquiring pretty much every player on the Marlins you’d want not named Giancarlo Stanton. And while I have no reason to trust anything that Marlins owner Jeffrey Loria says about his franchise’s rather atrocious off-season behaviour, his summation of his franchise’s actions were “we weren’t any good with these guys, so we can be bad without them.” And judging by the performance of Marlins North so far, he may have a point. The Jays had some bad luck here with injury woes for Jose Reyes and Josh Johnson, but Dickey’s been lousy, the offense stinks, and the Jays always seem to have a roster full of headcases and problem children that don’t seem to play well together and ultimately underachieve. At 11-21 and in last place in the AL East, with four competent teams above them in the standings, it’s looking like a lost season in Toronto. I suspect there might be job openings.

Also with an 11-21 record here in early May is Finalist #2, the California Los Angeles Angels of Studio City Anaheim, who made a big splash in free agency last year with Albert Pujols et. al, but started terribly and underachieved last season because they couldn’t pitch, the response to which was to go out and sign Josh Hamilton, another outfielder, which doesn't help much unless Hamilton has developed a curveball all of a sudden, and they didn’t really need him because whiz kid wünderkind Mike Trout can pretty much play the entire outfield by himself. Managing to find a sucker convince the Yankees to take Vernon Wells’ rotting corpse of a contract off their hands was good, but then they lowballed Trout, which was stupid, and they’ve got so many zombie dollars strewn about their future payrolls now that signing Trout and Mike Trumbo (their two best players, pretty much, and also two of the youngest) is probably going to be impossible. Hamilton has been awful, Pujols can barely move, and THEY STILL CAN’T PITCH. The problem with both the Jays and the Halos is that they’re already too far behind at this point in the season, and the Angels are in 4th place in the AL West with two teams above them who actually know what they’re doing. (Notice I said two. The Mariners are in 3rd.)

But there can really be only one winner of a loser here, and I’m going to give this award out for their entire body of work over the course of a recently completed 86-game season. This year’s Los Angeles Lakers were, without doubt, the worst team money can buy, as they went about assembling a starting lineup that would’ve been a good fantasy basketball team in 2008. I hate fantasy sports in general, and fantasy basketball is particularly stupid in that the whole would never be the sum of the parts simply because there wouldn’t be enough basketballs. This team sure did look good on paper at the start of the season, as the Lakers got every past-their-prime big name available to them and expected the team would be spectacular, but they were a complete flop. They did Mike Brown a favour by firing him after five games, then Mike D’Antoni came in with his Phoenix Suns offense from the mid 2000s, which works when you have a bunch of guys who can actually move. But Steve Nash was hurt all the time, and Dwight Howard was hurt all the time, and Kobe was taking bad shots all the time and then had that terrible Achilles injury, and Meta World Peace was weird and Pau Gasol was getting blamed for everything even though he was about the only guy who showed up every night. The chemistry was worse than my high school science experiment in which I grew fungi on moldy cheese in the basement for two months. Somehow the league made sure the Lakers snuck into the playoffs, but that 4-0 sweep at the hands of the Spurs in the first round was the most dismal playoff performance imaginable, as a rash of injuries finished off whatever backcourt depth they had and reduced the Lakers to playing with some D-League signees as their starting guards. And Dwight Howard did what he could to get himself thrown out midway through Game 4. Even he had seen enough, and one would think the Lakers have seen enough of him.

This was a poorly constructed team that was ill-thought out, and the shock of just how bad the Lakers were wore off eventually, giving way to acceptance of what a disaster this team had turned out to be and an ambulance chaser's sort of fascination with seeing just how low they could go. And, as an eternal Laker hater, I gleefully award them this month's award for the Worst Team Money Can Buy.

A King's Ransom

The LOSE loves absurdity, of course, and nothing is more ad absurdum than the continued (mis)adventures of the Sacramento Kings. This past Monday, the NBA’s Relocation Committee – which consists of the owners of seven other NBA franchises – voted “unanimously” to advise against the Kings being relocated to Seattle for the 2013-2014 season. (I put the word unanimously in quotes because when dealing with matters such as this, the NBA owners like to build consensus and show themselves to be a unified front.) From a purely economic standpoint, doing this makes no sense whatsoever: the Seattle ownership group consists of multibillionaires and would be, if accepted, among the wealthiest ownership groups in all of professional sports; the proposed new downtown arena in Seattle, paid for in a public-private partnership, if done correctly would offer no significant hit to taxpayers while also further enhancing the value of the franchise, which would control all of its own revenue streams; a dynamic new Seattle franchise would be a contributor to the NBA’s internal revenue sharing plan, whereas the Sacramento franchise will always be reaching its hand into the jar. And the Seattle group is willing to put their money where their mouth is, having agreed to a purchase price of the franchise – originally $341,000,000 for a 65% stake – far greater than the Kings are actually thought to be worth. This buy would thus set the value of the franchise at around $525,000,000 or so, which vastly exceeds the record purchase price of an NBA franchise. Imagine what the Lakers or the Knicks or the Celtics are worth if someone wants to pay $525m for the Kings.

THE KINGS!

“I was at my son’s soccer game, which consisted of watching 20 kids moving in a swarm in pursuit of the ball without any direction or sense of what they are doing. It reminded me of some of those Kansas City Kings teams I covered.”
– Kevin Callabro, radio play-by-play man for the Seattle SuperSonics

The Kings are, without question, one of the sorriest excuses for a franchise in the history of professional sports, a vagabond club which has one exactly one league title and called five different cities home, wearing out their welcome seemingly wherever they went. First they were the Rochester Royals, then the Cincinnati Royals, then they became the Kansas City-Omaha Kings, dropped the Omaha, then dropped the Kansas City and relocated to Sacramento in the early 1980s. The Kings relocation to California’s capital gave the city instant cred, gave it status us a big league city and the fans flocked to Arco Arena, bringing their cowbells along with them and establishing themselves as one of sport’s most loyal bases even though they’ve rarely had much of anything to cheer for. Thanks to the skills of savvy GM Geoff Petrie, who assembled an interesting mix of draft picks and seasoned vets, the Kings of the turn of the millennium offered up one of the most exciting, dynamic teams the league has seen, featuring a dynamic offense built around a rejuvenated Chris Webber’s unique skill set – a mix of high basketball IQ sophistication with multifaceted athleticism. They were on the verge of a trip to the NBA finals in 2002 when this happened.

Which was the single most disgusting display of officiating that I had seen in the NBA since … well, since this game. Note the free throw count for the Suns.

That Game 7 loss to the Phoenix Suns in the 1992 Western Conference Finals was one of the most bitter defeats in club history, and still makes people angry. It appeared tainted by the fact that the NBA had already been promoting an Finals matchup between Jordan’s Chicago Bulls and the new look, Charles Barkley-led, we’ve-survived-the-1980s-cocaine-era-and-are-no-longer-bankrupt Phoenix Suns. It was difficult even for someone like myself, who is skeptical of all conspiracy theories, to watch 3 Sonics foul out and watch a steady procession to the free throw line by Sir Charles and by Kevin Johnson (remember that name) and not believe the fix was in. This is because the outcome of a basketball game is the among the easiest of sports to manipulate, since fouls called by officials lead to free points to one team and push players closer to disqualification on the other.

And while I’m not about to shout out “the fix is in,” given that it’s common knowledge, or at least common perception, that the NBA’s officials have different sets of rules for different players – the superstars get the breaks, the rookies get no respect, etc. The fact that is assumed to be true by a great number of even the game’s most ardent supporters speaks to a serious credibility problem. (It also doesn’t help that an NBA official was imprisoned for fixing games.)

The NBA denies this, of course, because admitting something like this publicly would give it all the credibility of the WWF. But when David Stern took over as NBA commissioner in 1984, with the league in a state of near-ruin, he revamped the league through the constant, endless promotion of the league’s greatest players. Now it helped, of course, that two of the games brightest stars – Larry Bird and Magic Johnson – came along simultaneously and landed in Boston and Los Angeles, two prestige franchises with the greatest histories of success and the greatest wide-spread appeal. Then along came Michael Jordan, who landed in big-market Chicago to revamp the moribund Bulls (thanks in part to the knucklehead Blazers taking Sam Bowie – LOL), and, along with the games three biggest icons leading their teams to repeated championships came the salad days – record television ratings and an NBA boom that was international in appeal. So would a league that constantly markets their superstars as the league’s greatest selling point, and depends on their successes for further success of the league as a whole, ever dare allow them to be upended? From a competitive standpoint, the answer should be “yes,” but if you believe that the NBA is little more than style over substance, it’s pretty easy to accept that extra couple of steps Jordan gets on the way to the hoop as business-as-usual.

And the NBA conspiracy theorist would take it one step further – not only does the league care about some players more than others, they also care about some franchises more than others. Dynamic teams in the most dynamic markets make for the best television, after all, and would a Milwaukee-Utah NBA Final really have that much appeal? It’s easy to look at the league and start dividing it into the Haves and the Have Nots – the haves being a list consisting of something like New York, L.A., Boston, Philly, Chicago, Miami, Detroit, Phoenix and Orlando, with the have-nots being everyone else. In that way of thinking, it’s not a coincidence at all that the New York Knicks got the first pick in the very first NBA draft lottery – clearly, it must have been rigged! And you can extrapolate that line of argument out further, to the point where the league’s offices are permitting a charmer like this to continue running the L.A. Clippers, and stepping in and perpetually trying to keep the New Jersey Swamp Dragons Brooklyn Nets afloat despite their greatest efforts at self-destruction (or, even worse than self-destruction, of moving to St. Louis! Thanks to this amazing bamboozling of the NBA, St. Louis will never see an NBA franchise ever, lest you think the league doesn’t hold grudges). If you’re not one of the haves, the league ultimately doesn’t give a shit about your team. They don’t care how many games you win, or how many fans park their butts in the seats of your arena. And if some predatory group comes along and tries to heist your team away, hey … sucks to be you, now doesn’t it? The Oklahoma City Zombie Sonics could’ve very easily been the Zombie Bucks or Zombie Pacers or Zombie Nuggets. Seattle just happened to be the club for sale at the time.

Now I don’t want to buy into ANY of those notions. I don’t believe the games are fixed or that the draft is rigged (were that the case, San Antonio wouldn’t have struck gold twice), or that the league office goes about manipulating the outcomes. But then you watch a game the Phoenix Suns shoot 64 free throws in Game 7 of the Western Conference Finals against some group of misfits out of the forests of the Northwest, and start to wonder if the skeptics and conspiracy theorists have a point. And then you watch this – seriously, go to YouTube and watch this garbage once more – a game so dubiously officiated that the California Attorney General threatened legal inquiries, and you start to wonder about the entire structure of the league, because any organization that would permit something as seemingly blatant a go at match fixing as that should have ZERO credibility as a competitive enterprise.

And given that they are kindred spirits in the “We Got Jobbed By the NBA” club, this should, in theory, make the cities of Sacramento and Seattle kindred spirits. But here the two cities are in 2013 pitted against one-another, trashing each other, trying to make themselves look good in the eyes of the league. And when I say “the league,” I mean Commissioner David Stern, of course, because what he says is the rule. He will occasionally trot out the line “I work for the owners,” when it suits him, but the vast majority of owners in the NBA owe it to Stern granting them the right to own a team. He is the kingpin of the cartel that is the NBA. If he wants something done, it is done.

And really, you have to look at all professional sports in America as cartels, simply because they are entitled to act as single, central entity with franchises. This is in stark contrast to, say, the English Premier League which I referenced in this previous post.

There are 20 clubs in the EPL, but the number of actual professional clubs in Great Britain is far more than that – there are 92 clubs in the four divisions, and countless more semiprofessional sides in various regional leagues below that. Football leagues in Great Britain (and, indeed, in most of the world) are essentially loose associations of clubs which have grown organically over time, many of whom were originally neighbourhood associations or interest groups (the juggernaut that is Manchester United, for example, started out as a football club for railway workers). Membership in the highest strata of the game is, in fact, open to the highest levels of sport, as it is entirely performance based.

Suppose the powers that be here at IN PLAY LOSE HQ decided to start a professional football club in, say, Aberystwyth. (There, I’ve now given myself license to say Aberystwyth repeatedly.) Was IN PLAY LOSE F.C. to continue to earn promotion through on-field performance, year by year, we would move into higher levels of play. Doing so isn’t easy, of course – with each promotion comes the need for more financial commitment and superior club management – but the opportunity is there to rise through the ranks. If IPLFC keeps winning, we keep movin’ on up.

There is also a certain level of Peter Principle to all of this, in that a club is ultimately promoted to the level of its own incompetence. So let’s say that IN PLAY LOSE F.C. charges its way through the multi-tiered English League, much to the blessing and joy of the people of Aberystwyth, but the reality is we are still a small club and the XP The Divine Ruler Football Grounds doesn’t have that large of a capacity (we are based in rural Western Wales, after all), so maybe we don’t have the resources to compete with the Manchester Uniteds and Liverpools and Arsenals and get sent back down to League One in short order. Well, that happens. But we still have some decent finances here, and we can field a team that can beat on the Ipswich Towns of the world in Division 2, and be pretty successful at that. The club has found a level at which it can be comfortable. That possibility exists in the multi-tiered structure. Everyone has opportunities.

This structure also prevents franchises from being godfuckingterrible for decades on end like you see in the U.S. with teams like the Cubs and the Lions and the Arizona Cardinals, keeps the quality of play high at the top (since top players inevitably gravitate to Division One), and there is always an infusion of new talent and new ideas into the leagues as clubs come and go. Win and you’re in, suck and you disappear back to a level where maybe you won’t suck anymore. And if you really screw things up and go broke, go into “administration” as they say in the U.K., you can just start again at the lowest level and work your way back up again. (Witness the oddity of Rangers, the most dominant club in the history of Scotland, toiling in Division Four this year after going broke.)

Suffice to say, it doesn’t work this way in the NBA, or in any other professional sport in North America, all of which are based upon the model of Major League Baseball, which has an antitrust exemption dating to the 1920s – a rather bizarrely narrow ruling at the time which has held up somehow as precedent over the years. The three other major sports leagues have structured themselves in a similar fashion … and then quickly rewritten their charters and bylaws any time the spectre of antitrust litigation gets waved in their direction. In essence, the leagues operate as cartels, offering up new franchises when it suits them, but keeping a tight control over the number of franchises available. This is done, in part, to control the supply in this world of supply and demand, thus driving up the value of the franchises on the open market. And we, the public, we eat this stuff up, loving the competition and the contests. We eat this stuff up. And we develop bonds with our local franchises, we buy tickets to the games and jerseys with our favorite player’s number on the back. We even refer to it in third person, as if we are a part of the team. (I just did that the other day, in fact, taking about the Giants – “the Arizona Diamondbacks must hate us right now.”)

But this is a cartel we’re dealing with here, and when you’re dealing with a cartel, the junkies ultimately have no real sway. The entire success of the NBA is, in large part, predicated on the idea that you’ll keep going to the games, that you’ll keep showing up and being fiercely loyal even if your team stinks year after year. Loyal to the point where you and your fellow citizens of your city will pony up untold amounts in tax revenue to finance their business. It’s been estimated that the NBA receives as much as $3,000,000,000 annually in the form of public subsidies – tax breaks, revenue concessions, and municipalities picking up the tab for the stadia in which they play. And that’s where your ‘loyalty’ is tested (another hallmark of cartels – loyalty must be absolute or the punishments are severe). You are your collective citizens of municipalities must finance new arenas, in the end, because there are only a finite number of franchises, see, and the demand for those franchises is greater than the supply, so if you don’t want to go along … well …

This sort of thing can happen. RIP Seattle SuperSonics.

It’s at this point that I should disclose, yet again, my personal biases in all that I am saying within this essay: I was a season ticket holder for the Seattle SuperSonics. If you’ve all done you’re homework and watched this documentary, you’ve come to know the sad story of how the Sonics ceased to be. And I’ve turned my back on the NBA ever since that happened, having watched a grand total of two NBA games in their entirety since 2008. One of those would be the last game of the NBA finals a year ago, in fact, which was a chance to engage in some schadenfreude while watching the Zombie Sonics, aka the Oklahoma City Blunder Thunder, have their heads handed to them by the Miami Heat. The other was Game 6 of the NBA Finals the year previous, when those same Heat were defeated by the Dallas Mavericks, whom I like, in large part, because of owner Mark “Your Fucking Game is Rigged” Cuban, one of the few owners with the stones to challenge the league hierarchy, and one of the two dissenters in the 28-2 vote by the NBA which permitted the Sonics to be moved to Oklahoma City. (I would give the other dissenter – Paul Allen, who owns the Portland Trailblazers – some props as well, except that I can’t really do that because, well, because Blazers.)

It’s been hard for me to stay away, because I’ve always been a basketball junkie, willing and able to watch pretty much any game, at any level, between any teams. Men? Women? Doesn’t matter. Pro? College? European? Sure, bring it on. I was always willing to overlook what I perceived to be a flawed and unscrupulous business, because I love the sport and loved the team that I had season tickets for – the Sonics of the early 1990s being a bunch whose unofficial motto was “play crazy,” a volatile collection of insanely talented players with a mad genius of a coach in George Karl who, when on their game, were as good as any team I’ve ever seen. And I remember the building in Seattle, how it was LOUD and extremely intimidating to opponents, the lower bowl of the seating designed to provide the fan with the best view of the action, the ability to make the most impact on the game, and the best entertainment experience imaginable.

Which was exactly the point. KeyArena, the old Seattle Center Coliseum, was essentially custom-remodeled to the specs of the Seattle SuperSonics. It was basically built to order for the Sonics in 1994 and received a sterling review at the time.

And yet here came the Okies in 2008, stating they’d need a new arena to compete when the old arena hadn’t even been fully paid off. The residents of the city of Seattle and the state of Washington, having ponied up for the Sonics in 1993, had done so again to build a new ballpark for the Mariners (and you see what $500,000,000 gets you) and done so again to build a new stadium for the Seahawks, and people were tired of doing this again and again and again and not seeing greater returns on their investments. At least not obvious returns, anyway – there has been quite a bit of debate about the actual value that building sports venues brings to a community. Some studies look at it straight-up, dollar-for-dollar, and question the actual benefit. Other studies take the approach that the benefits are nuanced, that being a “big league” city improves the tourism biz, the convention biz, raises the city’s profile. But in the end, it becomes hard to justify the constant, continuous outlay of public funds for what is, essentially, an exclusive and exclusionary business for a tight circle of elites and little more than a passionate pastime for everyone else.

Me personally, I don’t have any real issue with the use of public funds for such projects – I appreciate the entertainment offered in such venues, and believe that having such opportunities improves the quality of life – but I can certainly understand others’ reticence at doing so.

The Citizens for More Important Things was a group founded specifically to thwart the use of tax revenue for the purposes of building sports stadia. I personally have always thought of the group as a bunch of bombastic, bloviating NIMBYs, but they were successful in leading the drive to pass Initiative 91 in the city of Seattle, an ordinance that prohibit Seattle from supporting teams with city tax dollars unless such investments yield a profit on par with a 30-year U.S. Treasury bond – essentially, it bans the practice of financing sports venues with tax money, viewing it as being akin to corporate welfare.

OK, I can see the logic in this, even if I don’t agree with it and would’ve voted no had I still been a resident of the state. But if you’re a business like the NBA, and essentially dependent on public subsidies to prop up your entity, I-91 is a patent rejection of everything about the way you do business – even if it should be abundantly obvious that your business model is completely, utterly flawed. Suffice to say, this hasn’t gone over well with David Stern, who comes off surprisingly petty for someone of his status.

I really hate that guy. The man is the the walking definition of “Napoleonic Complex.”

I hate the NBA because the league and the team I had grown up rooting for turned it’s back on the city whose fans adored it, packed up and moved to Oklahoma City. I hate David Stern and that carpetbagging sleazebag Clay Bennett and his wholly despicable sidekick Aubrey McClendon. I hate the politicos in the city of Seattle and the state of Washington who essentially sold out the city. I hate Howard Schultz for selling to these bozos and would boycott every one of his 116,000 retail outlets were it not for the fact that I’m ALSO ADDICTED TO COFFEE! ACK!

But I don’t hate the game. If anything, I have found this resurgent Golden State Warriors team to be rather exciting. There are few things in sports – in life, even – as beautiful as watching Stefan Curry shoot a basketball. (Hyperbole? Perhaps, but this Golden State Warriors team is like crack to a basketball junkie like me. I may have weaned myself off but I’ve never really quit. I’ve just stopped. Big difference.) It’s possible that the W’s could ultimately restore my faith, at least somewhat, although I’m going to be leery of the league and will never consider it legit until the league returns to Seattle. Which seemed likely up until a few days ago, as the Chris Hansen group, having spent 3 years and about $100,000,000 putting into play their plans to bring the NBA back to Seattle, were poised to acquire a 65% stake in the Sacramento Kings from the Maloof brothers.

Aah, the Maloofs. Good New Mexican lads, the Maloofs, a family of beer distribution magnates who have also dabbled in Albuquerque-area politics and ultimately branched out into the world of Las Vegas casinos. They loved the glitz and the glamour of owning a franchise in the most stylish and trendy of American sports, and with the Kings ascension in their early tenure as owners, they seemed like they were the toast of the town.

But it would appear the Peter Principle applied to the Maloof Bros. investment strategies as well. Their Palms Casino venture collapsed, they’re heavily in debt, and they have one major asset left – the Kings, who have slowly disintegrated for a decade now as Edmonton Disease has started to creep in. The fans of the Kings, who’ve packed Arco Arena for decades (and I refuse to call if whatever the hell it’s Sponsor du jour name is) and have generally had to put up with a lousy product, did nothing wrong in any of this, of course. It isn’t about them anymore. It’s about their owners recouping their losses. Professional sports in North America are always sold to the public as being something of a civic trust, but that only goes so far as the owners not being able to make far more money elsewhere. Thus up came the demand from the Maloofs for a new arena to be built, which was voted down rather understandably in the middle of an economic depression. After that came a dimwitted plan to move the franchise to Anaheim which fizzled, then talk of moving to Virginia Beach (which seemed to be news to everyone in Virginia Beach), and finally, having poisoned the waters for themselves in Sacramento and created impossible animosity, the Maloofs decided to sell to Hansen and his assemblage of Seattle businessmen with pockets about as deep as the Marianas trench:

graphic courtesy of the folks at Sonics Rising

It would stand to reason that the NBA would want people like the Hansen group in their midst, and would want to rid themselves of the Maloofs. The greatest kink in the armor of such seemingly iron-clad entities are rogue owners who act like idiots. As Al Davis proved in his (mis)handling of the Oakland/L.A./Oakland Raiders, the leagues themselves don’t actually have much power to prevent their members from acting badly. In fact, they have to ultimately go along with some bad ideas and they pay the consequences for it. This whole mess involving Seattle and Sacramento, ultimately, is the end result of a decade’s worth of bad decisions by the NBA, a chain of events which would make you question just how great a commissioner Mr. Stern really is. Consider:

• The NBA approves the move of the Charlotte Hornets to New Orleans. The Hornets were an instant success in Chrlotte, selling out the league’s largest building, reaching a playoff level reasonably quickly and establishing fashion trends in the process (ooh, teal, pretty), but they were owned by George Shinn, who turned out to be cuckoo bañanas and went about poisoning one of the sport’s great oases. He was lured to New Orleans by all sorts of promises that the city of New Orleans and state of Louisiana ultimately couldn’t deliver on. (See, it can cut both ways here.)
• The New Orleans Hornets promptly fall apart, to the surprise of absolutely no one.
• The league “feels bad” about how things went down in Charlotte, having left a popular market mainly so as not to undermine one of their own owners (lest they set a precedent of trying to prevent individual owners from doing as they wish), so they award an expansion franchise to Charlotte, which has some new owners and have gone about building a new arena it probably didn’t read, and the end result of this is the Charlotte Bobcats, one of the worst franchises in sports that is presently being run into the ground by Michael Jordan. (More proof that great players don’t make great coaches or administrators, but that’s the subject of another blog.)
• Meanwhile, the flatlining Hornets are now faced with an even bigger problem, in that their home city gets drownd by Katrina. The franchise then relocates for a season to Oklahoma City – a city which positively ADORES them. It seems like an ideal home.
• But the NBA doesn’t want to “look bad,” and doesn’t want to look like a greedy, selfish entity taking advantage of a natural disaster, so the Hornets then go back to New Orleans, where they were already floundering, and continue to flounder to the point where the league has to ultimately step in and by the franchise.
• And once that happens, of course, any ideas about competitive balance and avoiding conflict of interest go flying out the window, since this unwanted investment is now subject to all sorts of politics and manipulations that wouldn’t otherwise apply. Ultimately, they find a local owner – Tom Benson of the Saints – to take this problem child off their hands, selling at a price – $338m – that, compared to the money being thrown around in Sacramento, looks like a pretty bad deal for the NBA. Benson’s Super Bowl winning Saints were a feel-good story as they brought some joy and hope to a city desperately in need of it. (Never mind that he was often hinting at moving the Saints so as to extort concessions and improvements to the Superdome from local officials over the years. Nah, we won’t mention that. Oh, wait, we just did.) And while I approve of the rebranding, because Pelicans are cool, I am skeptical of how viable this operation ultimately will turn out.
• Meanwhile, the Okies who stepped up and hosted the Hornets, and probably should’ve had the Hornets after it was over, have gotten themselves in the good graces of the league after their stint as hosts and then go about looking for a franchise to acquire and move to OKC – and are encouraged to do so.
• Sonicsgate
• The league “feels bad” for the fans in Seattle who supported the franchise for 41 years. (No, actually, the league doesn't really give a shit.)

So now the league has made various degrees of messes in four different cities in this process. The Zombies are impeccably run, to their credit, and have staved off the possibility of Edmonton Disease creeping in mainly because they lucked their way into landing Kevin Durant with the 2nd pick in the draft. (The 1st pick being Greg Oden by the Blazers, the same franchise that picked Sam Bowie over Michael Jordan all those years ago. Nice going Blazers. Imagine what would’ve happened if those picks had been reversed – think the Zombies would be such a success story? As it is, they’re only as good as the willingness of Durant to stay – a statement not intended to deride OKC but to speak to the true nature of all of this, which is that you’re only as good as the players you have, and wow, this parenthetical is getting really long.) My, what a stellar operation this is.

But, of course, Seattle wants their franchise back. Chris Hansen, the point man in the group to bring the NBA back to Seattle, has already spent 3 years and about $100,000,000 or so on the project, including the purchasing of land downtown on which to build the arena. 44,000 people put their name on a waiting list for possible season tickets earlier this year. 44,000 junkies, just like me, willing to overlook all of this previous ugliness because we love the game and want to see it again.

Suckers, in other words. The more evidence that you give that you want something, the easier that it is to be used.

Which is ultimately what happened to Seattle, of course. Upon attempting to acquire and relocate the Kings, the wheels started to turn in Sacramento where the mayor, Kevin Johnson (there’s that name again), who understands the “quality of life” argument of having professional sports (and also understands the danger to one’s political life upon having a professional sports team move from their city on their watch) has since sprung into action, recruiting a variety of Northern California businessmen to pony up a matching offer to the Hansen group in Seattle, and forcing through, on the third or fourth or whatever attempt, a plan for a new arena in Seattle which will leave the city on the hook for $258,000,000, if not more – some estimates put that figure at closer to $340,000,000. They’ve essentially been walked through this process by the NBA, of course, to which it’s easy to conclude that this fight over the Kings between Sacramento and Seattle never had anything to do with Seattle at all. Because, in the end, the league which is has lived off public subsidies and repeatedly practiced corporate extortion is going to get at least $258m out of Sacramento – which is $258m more than Seattle, where the arena was going to be primarily privately financed, with the balance paid by tax revenues created by the building.

And that matters most, in the end. If you own a professional sports franchise and you’re concerned about the long-term value of the franchise, privately funding your own building is the best way to go. Time after time, this has been proven to be true, including here in San Francisco (first with the Giants and soon with the Warriors), because not only are they successful sports franchises with noticeable brands, but they are also landowners of extremely valuable pieces of real estate, which means controlling ALL the activities in the building and thus controlling ALL the revenues. In the end, if you’re looking at a long-term investment, such a move, while expensive upfront, is really a no-brainer.

But as you can see from my outlining of the Charlotte vortex from before, long-term thinking isn’t exactly the forte in the NBA. It’s much easier to just hold up a city and make them build it for you, and pay for it so you don’t have to. And you don’t want to set a precedent of letting cities off the hook, now do you? If they privately finance an arena in Seattle, and prosper, then who’s to say the cities of Milwaukee and Minneapolis and Memphis won’t just say to the Bucks and the Wolves and the Grizzlies, “hey, it worked out in Seattle, so why don’t you just build an arena yourself?” And building your own building cements you to a community, slams the door on the possibility of using relocation as a bargaining chip. The NBA would much prefer their owners keep their foot firmly entrenched between the screen door and the door jamb – they aren’t necessarily leaving, but there’s always a possibility to depart. And this is the most twisted part of sports in North America, in the end, one which has reared its ugly head time and again. Franchises are desperate for the loyalty of the local fan base, yet have no loyalty ultimately in return. Pretty much every major city in the U.S. has seen a professional sports franchise move to “greener” pastures. (About the only major exceptions I can think of to that are Detroit and Phoenix – and given the perpetual plight of the Coyotes, the latter may not be able to make that claim for much longer.) And I say “greener” because quite a few of those moves haven’t worked out so well. Witness the Charlotte/New Orleans Hornets/Pelicans I referenced earlier, or the thrice-previously moved Rochester Royals/Cincinnati Royals/Kansas City-Omaha Kings/Sacramento Kings, a franchise notable primarily for getting screwed in the NBA playoffs, for being unable to win a championship with a player who averaged a triple double on their roster, and for little more than moving a whole lot of times.

Yet here the Kings were at the center of this heated battle, coveted by one city which has tethered far too much of their identity to it (“You can’t take our Kings! It’s all we have!” has been a fairly constant cry coming out of the Great Tomato) and one city which feels like it was screwed over by the NBA once before and willing to pay greatly for it to return, willing to overpay to the tune of driving up the value of the Kings franchise some $150m or so. This fight over such a seemingly irrelevant franchise is, in fact, an ad absurdum moment in the history of North American professional sports, a point where sheer madness has taken over. Why would two groups of people spend so much for a business which has, historically, offered so little?

In the end, the NBA has chosen against relocation because they’ve extorted enough from the city of Sacramento to make it worth their while to stay there. This sort of ploy is common enough, but it only works if there are cities which are willing to play along – and cities, wanting these franchises, willing to play the role of stalking horse. The NFL, for years, has made threats about relocating franchises to the vacated L.A. area – even though there has NEVER been a coherent stadium plan, and even though the city has shown no particular interest in either building a new stadium or acquiring a new team. (We W.S.U. skeptics would chortle that, in U.S.C., the city of Los Angeles already has a professional team.) Major League Baseball, meanwhile, has filled in their most prime stalking horse markets in Denver and Phoenix and Washington and Tampa Bay with expansion franchises, and after a wave of stadium reconstruction in the 1990s and through the turn of the millennium, they have found that the tactic of extorting ballpark deals from cities no longer really applies. The Oakland A’s have attempted to threaten relocation, but where would they go? There are no viable markets anymore, not even Montréal, which rightly extends the middle finger after the loss of Les Expos. The NHL is even worse – having overexpanded and clumsily relocated Canadian franchises in the 1990s, the league finds itself diluted and littered with D.O.A. franchises with no viable suitor cities save for the Canadian cities from whence they previously came!

In making this choice to deny the relocation of the Kings to Seattle, the league is, essentially, banking on the fact that Seattle, as a city, will keep clamoring for its product, much as Tampa Bay clamored for Major League Baseball for decades – an idea which, to me, seems rather foolish on the part of the league. Quite honestly, I think Seattle could learn a thing or two from Montréal at this point, make it a point to extend the middle finger in the direction of the league offices. Why play this game? And last time I checked, I don’t see too many other cities clamoring for NBA franchises at the moment. After the latest round of labour disputes, the NBA claims that the new CBA with the players will allow all of their franchises to be profitable, but that’s unlikely because there will always be disparity, there will always be haves and have nots in this system and conditions inevitably shift over time. And it will be the same group of franchises that are in trouble and clamoring for new arenas and new public subsidies, whereas some of the larger ones have taken it upon themselves to fund their own solutions. The league’s already got a host of problem children franchise and the number of interested cities on the outside seems to be ONE. Take that ONE away and this whole way of doing business doesn’t seem so smart.

But that means no basketball in Seattle in the end, and that makes me sad. And since the city has now been burned twice by the league, why should they carry on. Chris Hansen’s group insists he is pursuing “options” but those options don’t seem terribly good. The new building in Seattle is contingent upon acquisition of an NBA team. This whole plan seems to be going up in smoke.

As for Sacramento, well, good luck. The arena plan, on something like it third go-round, seems rather iffy. Delays and cost overruns are rampant in this sort of thing, and the citizens of Sacramento may be in for some sticker shock when it’s all said and done. There are already lawsuits suggesting fringe dealings going on, and the plan may not fare so well when put to a public vote. If that falls apart or (more likely) takes impossibly long to build, then the franchise is going to start sagging rather quickly and the league will have this same mess on its hands once again. The potential new owner, a software magnate named Vivek Ranadive, is a minority partner in the Golden State Warriors at the moment, which means he’s an insider and the league likes to deal with their own (Clay Bennett was a minority owner of the Spurs before he swindled away the Sonics). He would also be the first owner of a professional sports franchise of Indian descent, and has used the potential of opening up further marketing opportunities in India to pique David Stern’s interest, since making the NBA a global entity has been one of his pet projects over the years. Which is somewhat bogus, in my opinion, because it’s a rather ludicrous idea that people halfway around the world will care about a sport because of an owner. Fans don’t care about owners. They care about players. And the fans won’t care about the Sacramento Kings unless, through some dumb bit of luck, they land themselves a transcendent sort of superstar player, the sort who would actually stay there much as Duncan and David Robinson did in San Antonio, or Stockton and Malone in Utah.

And it’s telling that quite a few experts out there believe the league is using Seattle for leverage, extracting the best sort of public deal out of the city of Sacramento, but no one suggests the league would then turn around and use Sacramento as leverage the next time round were the Kings to leave. This is because when they say “You can’t take our Kings! It’s all we’ve got!” they really mean it. The reality is that it’s pretty much a dead market and will always struggle to compete unless the franchise is impeccably run and/or finds a superstar like I mentioned before. And I mean that as no disrespect to the city of Sacramento, either, which is a decent enough place. It’s just not going to ever be high on the list of free agent destinations. Locals in the know will tell you that if the Kings leave Sacramento, the NBA is pretty much never coming back.

What do the NBA honchos have to say?

"I think some people are surprised at the preliminary decision the relocation committee has made because they say well but look at Seattle. There are more corporate headquarters, There's more TV households there's the potential to generate more revenue there? Shouldn't you move a franchise to the market where there is more revenue? Our response is not necessarily, that if you look at total value over time and brand building and community support that continuity is important."
– NBA Deputy Commissioner Adam Silver

That’s bullshit.

The league stands to make FAR LESS in Sacramento. And while I’ve stated for the record here that I was a Sonics season ticket holder, I can look at the sizes of the markets, the economies of the markets (Seattle’s is bustling while Sacramento’s has struggled with economic recovery, much like the rest of the state where it is capital and in which I now live), and there is no comparison. A well-financed and essentially debt-free Seattle franchise stands to make FAR MORE money, contribute FAR MORE MONEY to the NBA’s coffers, and ultimately be worth FAR MORE – which, in turn, makes every other franchise in the league worth that much more. So by choosing to do this, from an economic standpoint, the league is ultimately devaluing itself, and if Seattle shows the NBA the finger (which is should do), the league will also be losing its prime source of leverage when the Milwaukee Bucks the next team in trouble starts begging for a replacement for their arena, which was already most likely paid for by a city or a state and, like a car you drive off the lot which immediately depreciated, started becoming obsolete the moment that it opened.

Now, in no way to I advocate franchise relocation as a concept that leagues should embrace. I think it's the worst aspect of professional sports, insomuch that it insulates bad businessmen from being responsible for the results of their bad business practices. But clearly, this is the only way that Seattle can get back in the NBA game. Stealing a franchise from another market makes me feel somewhat unclean, but I would get over it. And if the NBA is going to allow this sort of thing, then they should just do what's best for themselves and stop pretending that the fans of (insert city of choice) have anything to do with it at all.

And from a purely economic standpoint, in a big picture, this decision by the NBA is a damn stupid idea. And thus, the ad absurdum that is the NBA today, in which a group of businessmen offer to invest, all told, about $1,000,000,000 or so altogether in the NBA, take one of its failed franchises and longest-standing problems off its hands, and the league essentially says “no.”

The league has said all along “one city is going to be unhappy,” but it seems conceivable in the end, and I dare say likely, that EVERYONE is going to wind up unhappy to a certain extent. And everyone involved, in one way or another, seems to have lost their minds. Everyone loses! In play lose! The only way not to lose at this silly, crooked game is not to play.

Wait, is that a basketball game on TV? Turn that up ...