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| Many thanks to IN PLAY LOSE British Columbia Bureau Chief Jesse Matthews for passing along this cartoon to me. All it's missing is a panel reading, “and the refs sucked.” |
This is a new feature of IN PLAY LOSE called Quick Misses. There is always time for more lose, of course, but not always enough time for The LOSE to write about losing. As you may have noticed, I tend to write long form on this blog, but if I put off writing about failure-related topics until I have more time to write, I wind up never writing at all. Quick Misses are intended to fill in the gaps between essays. I’m going to try to keep these short(ish) here, and try to cover a decent amount of ground.
So, on with the buzzard points:
• I worked in the squishiest, most PC office in the history of the world, one where they referred to these as ‘dot points’ instead of bullet points because they didn’t like the violent connotation of the word ‘bullet.’ This was one of the damn stupidest things I’d ever heard and I’d steadfastly refused to participate in that nonsense, because the word bullet, like just about every other word in the English language, has multiple meanings and multiple contexts – and in the context of text and design, that little round thingie at the start of this graf is called a bullet. Nicknames, however, are intended to be representative of specific ideas. Abe Pollin renamed the Washington Bullets in 1997, saying he didn’t like the violent connotation of the nickname and doing so in the aftermath of the assassination of his lifelong friend, Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin. And I can understand that – but the Wizards isn’t much better. Indeed, given the context of the term ‘wizard’ in American history, an argument can be made that choosing Wizards for a sports team is even worse. (Although it’s probably cooler now in the post-Harry Potter world.) The best solution to me for D.C. seems to be to merge the two names together – the Washington Buzzards! Given the carrion and the carnage left behind at the end of an NBA season in Washington, buzzards won’t go hungry. In that spirit of absurdist compromise, I present you the buzzard point.
• If I’m the owner of the Miami Dolphins, I’m firing everyone. I’m firing the entire organization. This is a good start, but it isn’t enough. The Ted Wells Report outlining the behaviour patterns within the Dolphins clubhouse are absolutely disgraceful. Locker room culture certainly can be boorish and sophomoric at times, and sometimes the lines between what is and isn’t appropriate can get blurred. That does happen. It’s not OK, per sé, but it is understandable. But what went on in Miami speaks to a total lack of leadership on all levels of the club. That a culture as toxic as what developed in Miami came to be is the fault of the coaching staff who set such a tone, the players who let it persist in the locker room, and the management who assembled this cast of characters in the first place. All of them failed. Get rid of them all. I’d live with a 2-14 season if it means ridding myself of this lot.
• That segues nicely into my opinion about Michael Sam and whether or not it will be a ‘distraction’ that an openly gay player is on an NFL team. Given that they won the SEC Eastern Division this past fall, Sam coming out to his teammates at the University of Missouri before the season obviously wasn’t that much of a distraction. Sam was the SEC Defensive Player of the Year last year, and is thought to be something like a 3rd round NFL pick owing to the fact that he’s something of a tweener size-wise – an undersized defensive lineman – but there have been lots of anonymous whispers from unnamed NFL front office sorts saying that him coming out and admitting he is gay will hurt his draft status, saying that it will create a ‘distraction.’ Bullshit. If you and your team are ‘distracted’ by this, then your team sucks. When you’re a public figure (which athletes are), you live under a microscope whether you like it or not. You have reporters and camera crews and agents and P.R. lacqueys and the like milling about you all the time. YOUR WHOLE LIFE IS ONE BIG DISTRACTION! Again, it’s a question of leadership. The organization that cares about winning, first and foremost, won’t give a damn about one guy’s sexual preferences. If he can help the team, then a team with clue will do whatever is necessary to let him do that. And a decline in his draft status may hurt him upfront (where you get drafted determines your starting salary, after all), but if he can play at the next level, the potential is there to make it all back and more. If you can play, you’ll eventually get paid. In the immediate, it’s also a pretty nice source of motivation to be downgraded in the draft. It gives you something to prove. As you may recall from this past season, a team which started two 5th round picks and a 6th starting in their secondary, a 3rd rounder being grossly underpaid at QB, and two receivers who the club spent all of $26,000 to sign sure had a nice season. They played with a chip on their shoulder almost as large as the final margin of their victory in the Super Bowl. The potential is there for Sam to have a nice NFL career, and if/when that happens – I say “if” not to doubt his abilities, but to speak to the uncertainty of a long career in a game as violent as football – no one will really care much about his orientation anymore.
• New NBA commissioner Adam Silver ripped a page out of his predecessor’s book in addressing the media during the NBA’s All-Star break in New Orleans, using his most lawyerly of skills to skillfully avoid answering a question about the large number of teams which appear to be tanking this season:
“My understanding of tanking would be losing games on purpose. And there’s absolutely no evidence that any team in the NBA has ever lost a single game, or certainly in any time that I’ve been in the league, on purpose. And, to me, what you’re referring to I think is rebuilding. And I’m not sure it’s just a function of the collective bargaining agreement; I think there’s a balance with any team of the need to look out to the future and at the same time put a competitive product on the floor.”
Lies lies lies lies lies! No one accuses the players who take the court of deliberately attempting to throw games. Players aren’t that dumb. They play hard. They play to win. They push that rock up the hill in a most Promethean of fashion, trying to fight fate, because they know damn well that their jobs are potentially on the line. None of us who speak of NBA teams tanking insinuate players aren’t trying. We do, however, insinuate that their bosses – the owners and the GMs of their franchises – are purposefully, deliberately setting their teams up to fail. And when your GM dumps every asset of your team to get under the cap, that is EXACTLY what you’re doing. Hell, the Boston Celtics have traded so many players for so many draft picks that they may run out of players. I can hear the announcer in Gah-den now: “starting at center (center-center-center-echo-echo-echo), the protected 1st round pick in 2018 ...” No actual player, mind you, just the abstract concept of a draft pick. Blowing up the franchise in the interest of creating cap space has been a time-tested strategy of incompetent NBA GMs, as it staves off having to answer for your own idiocy for a little while. They’ve also been given even more rope to ultimately hang themselves with CBA inventions like the Amnesty Clause (you basically pay a guy to go away but don’t have it count on your salary cap), which gives them a chance to come clean and admit they didn’t know what they were doing when they handed $50m to a 33-year old center with bad knees and limited offensive skills. But you get outed as a fraud eventually, as Chris Grant found out in Cleveland recently.
• That was very Stern-like of Adam Silver, sneaking around a double screen to avoid giving a serious answer. It remains to be seen if he has/will learn from the Little Napoleon’s mistakes. A lot will depend on the nature of the league’s next series of television contracts, negotiations for which are starting soon. The league may get a financial boost from this, simply because some network or another will be dumb enough to pay up. That doesn’t mean the product is any good. And that doesn’t mean it’s bad, either – it’s just that it should be even better than it is, in my opinion, and quite a few franchises are doing their best to make the product as bad as they possibly can, no matter if you call it ‘tanking’ or ‘rebuilding.’
• Wow, I really hate the NBA, but seeing the Lakers and the Celtics battling it out in a race to see who can be as bad as possible does my heart proud.
• Speaking of Cleveland, they’ve had a rough go of it this winter, with huge organizational shakeups for both the
• I hope that Adam Silver watched the Super Bowl parade in people, saw 750,000 fans in the streets of Seattle, and thought to himself, “wow, that is a lot of people who hate my product and hated my former boss. I have some work to do on that front.”
• I do feel inclined to gloat about the Super Bowl, and how much the Seahawks completely dominated the hapless and pathetic Denver Broncos, but I don’t want to beat a dead horse. Well, maybe I do just a little ...
