It would be easy to say that the team with the worst record is the title holder. Way too easy. As has been discussed countless times on this blog, the main reason for being that bad is lack of talent. But taking home the soon-to-be coveted TLOTY (figure out how to pronounce that sucker) requires more than just a lack of talent, because losing comes in many forms. It's easy to lose when you suck, because you do stuff like this:
Ladies and gentlemen, your 2013 Houston Astros. The city of Houston had a particularly wretched year in sports, as the Astros went 51-111 and lost their last 15 games in a row, and the Texans, thought to be a potential Super Bowl team on the strength of their best season a year ago, went 2-14 and lost their last 14 games in a row:
Egads. Now see, when we're talking about the TLOTY, the Texans are more what we're after. This is a roster with a lot of top-end talent. We all knew the Astros were going to suck, but 2-14 is inexcusable from this lot. The Texans played as dead as the cows on the side of their helmets. They seem to be modeling themselves after last year's Chiefs to some extent. Get a QB and a coach with a clue and they should be fine.
The TLOTY could also go some of the various drama queen franchises in sports, all of whom made a lot of noise but didn't actually deliver anything good on the floor. These franchises are an assortment of dead fish floating to the surface of the fishbowl they're living in. This would include last spring's Los Angeles Lakers, who put the sorriest lineup out for a playoff game that I've ever seen; the
... and there is no bigger fishbowl than New York of course, where there is always a certain amount of bluster. Typically, you have one New York team that knows what they are doing and wins (Yankees, Giants, Devils) and another team in the same sport that makes splashy signings and calls attention to itself but rarely ever achieves anything (Mets, Jets, Rangers). Well this year in New York, ALL OF THEM have been bad. The Yankees at least showed some dignity and played hard and honoured the classy retirees Mariano Rivera and Andy Pettite, but they are still stuck with A-Rod and his ample baggage. The rest of the New York teams either underachieved or didn't achieve anything at all.
And none of these Big Apple dwellers have been more rotten to the core than the Brooklyn Nets, who have appropriately recently relocated to vapid hipster poseur capital of America to ply their trade, since this is about the worst collection of empty suits to suit up in quite some time. The Knicks suck as well, but they've been incompetent for years, so their abysmal start to the season isn't really that surprising. The 2013-2014 Nets, meanwhile, currently have a 10-20 record with a wage bill totalling $186,000,000 for this season. Over the course of what would be a 27-win season, that averages out to spending approximately $6.8 million per victory, which is taking the concept of The Worst Team Money Can Buy a whole new level. The Nets have also been involved in one of the more creative attempts I've seen to game the system, as head coach Jason Kidd came up with this genius ploy to stop the clock late in the game:
The NBA was not impressed. Kidd was fined $50,000 for this stunt. The Brooklyn Nets are definitely TLOTY candidates, to be sure.
In fact, we can pretty much loop the entire Eastern Conference of the NBA into one big TLOTY candidate. Tanking is hip in the NBA this season. Only three teams in the East are above .500 and the Washington Buzzards sit right at the .500 mark. If the playoffs started today, the 13-15 Toronto Raptors would win the Atlantic Division, and the #8 seed would be the 13-18 Boston Celtics. Yuck. The East stinks in the NHL as well, but not nearly this bad. Over in the NFL, the Cleveland Browns pretty much gave up the farm in about the 3rd game of the season when they traded RB Trent Richardson, the 3rd pick in last year's draft and supposedly the centerpiece of their offense, to the Indianapolis Colts. The Browns tried to downplay this, saying essentially that Richardson wasn't that good anyway. The problem with that is Richardson was supposed to be a showcase back because Cleveland hasn't seen good QB play since Bernie Kosar, and when a playoff team is willing to make a trade like that with you – which the Colts are – it means that a) the guy has some value, and b) the playoff team thinks you're a bunch of suckers. This season was a full-on tank attempt by the Browns, but the problem was that the players and new head coach Rob Chudzinski wouldn't go along. The Browns refused to quit and played hard. Unfortunately, 4-12 talent tends to yield 4-12 results in the NFL, but the 4-12 Browns still didn't land the 1st pick they were hoping for. Chudzinski was promptly fired at the end of his first season, he being a coach they never wanted to hire in the first place but the Browns couldn't find any takers for the job. The Browns are a mess, changing owners and GMs and coaches and QBs virtually every season. The fans and the press in Cleveland, the most tormented sports city in America, are not amused.
But for our final nominees for TLOTY, we head to the Motor City. The Detroit Tigers went to the World Series in 2012, only to be swept by the San Francisco Giants. They have dominant starting pitching and a power-hitting attack led by Miguel Cabrera, the greatest hitter on the planet, but they were done in by a Giants team in 2012 that played great defense, had a superior bullpen (the Tigers' pen was horrendous) and could adapt their attack, possessing a variety of versatile players that could play with power, speed, and also work the gaps. The slow, unathletic Tigers were unable to go with any sort of Plan B, since Plan A – hit a lot of home runs and avoid using the bullpent – didn't work in that series. And you would think the Tigers would have made some adjustments heading into this season, as their weaknesses had been painfully exposed in a four-game World Series sweep. They're a good team, but they weren't far away from being a great one.
OK, so maybe not. The Tigers lumbered right out of the playoffs against the Boston Red Sox, as they still had the same plodding, 1-dimensional attack, the same sloppy defense and the same truly awful bullpen as in 2012. The Tigers should've known better, which is why they are worthy of inclusion here. (Well, that, and I have to admit that I wanted to run that Fielder .gif from the ALDS, because I'm a cad in need of some cheap laughs.) The window is short when it comes to opportunities to win championships. You cannot let those chances get away from you. The Tigers have now traded $230,000,000 man Prince Fielder to the Texas Rangers (another team near a championship level which has refused to adjust and adapt and has failed accordingly), since Fielder was an easy scapegoat due to his playoff struggles, but this team has bigger problems than a guy having what amounted to a bad week. It remains to be seen if this is addition by subtraction. The LOSE thinks not.
But the TLOTY for 2013 simply has to be awarded to those wacky Ford Field funsters, those time-tested choke artists, the Detroit Lions, who turned in one of the more impressive acts of LOSE to be seen in the NFL in quite some time. The Lions have never been to the Super Bowl, haven't won an NFL title since the 1950s, and have only won one playoff game over the course of more than 50 years. Head Coach Jim Schwartz does deserve some credit, as he took over a Lions team that was the worst in NFL history (when you're 0-16, you earn that title) and built them into a playoff team in short order. The Lions have a dazzling array of offensive talent – 5,000 yd. QB Matthew Stafford, creative and dynamic RB Reggie Bush, and Calvin Johnson, who is likely to go down as the greatest WR in the history of the game not named Jerry Rice. They also have a superb defensive line around which to build a defense. The Lions made the playoffs two seasons ago but slumped to 4-12 last year, but it looked at the time like it was just one of those seasons where nothing goes right. When stuff like this happens, it's not your year. The Lions of 2012 lost lots of close games. It seemed like a young team with some premature success in 2011 that just needed to learn how to win.
Well, they still need to learn. The Lions were gifted a division this year featuring three pretty bad defenses, two teams who lost their starting QBs (Chicago's Jay Cutler and Green Bay's Aaron Rodgers) for substantial parts of the season and another – the Vikings – who apparently didn't have a QB at all. The Lions had an easy schedule and should've run through this division and been challenging the Seahawks for the #1 seed. They started 6-3, but even that start had some worrying signs, as they gagged away a winnable game against Cincinnati thanks to terrible special teams play, but the Lions clearly looked to be the class of the NFC North.
But the last seven games featured a full-on meltdown, as the Lions went 1-6 and blew a 4th Quarter lead in all six losses. The Lions turned the ball over, they blew coverages, they didn't tackle anyone, they were undisciplined and made all sorts of stupid mistakes. This truly terrible pick six 5:00 from the end of what should've been a win over the Giants – a game which they ultimately lost to be eliminated from the playoffs – summed up the entire 2nd half of the Lions season: a bad idea followed up with bad execution at the worst possible time.
When the Lions offense is humming, they are spectacular. The game seems so easy. Too easy. It's almost as if they think they can flip the switch or something. Schwartz was fired at the end of the season after this awful finish (and getting into a shouting match with fans didn't help matters), and this should be a plum job for any competent coach, the best gig by far of the half-dozen NFL gigs that are out there. Then again, Detroit has been a place where coaching careers have gone to die for half a century.
This was a unique performance by the Lions this year, an awful season ending collapse against a generally easy schedule, and it was almost entirely self-created. So for their epic and remarkable choke, on top of so many years of calamity, misfortune and incompetence, The Detroit Lions are The Lose Of The Year for 2013.
Thus also concludes the first year of IN PLAY LOSE, and I want to thank all of my readers around the world, yes, world who have been patronizing this corner of the internet. I do have a great time writing this stuff – although I would have a better time if some of the teams I like would stop doing stuff like this. And there will be an abundance losing to contemplate and pontificate and speculate about in 2014, but I'm pretty sure there will also be some triumphant success as well. Happy New Year, and it's onto 2014 – TLOTY nominees take your mark. Ready, set, lose!
