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.