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| “It’s a stupid game, anyway.” |
Their in-town feline counterparts, the Tigers, certainly merited some consideration for the award in 2014 as they continued their act of squandering a collection of talent often referred to in soccer annals as a ‘golden generation.’ Plan A at Comerica Park has always been to have Miguel Cabrera et. al hit lots of home runs and have their seemingly endlessly deep starting pitching rotation strike everyone out, but even Plan A isn’t foolproof in a game like baseball, where the margins are so small between success and failure. They were swept out of the World Series in 2012 by a San Francisco Giants team which could shift shapes and adapt, which is what you have to do in baseball’s playoffs. You need Plan B. The Tigers didn’t have a plan B back then, and they still don’t have it. They don’t catch the ball, they have no speed, and their bullpen continues to be frightful. The solution to a 2013 playoff failure was to run Prince Fielder out of town, since his $214,000,000 contract and sub-Mendoza line playoff batting average made him an easy scapegoat, and while acquiring Tampa Bay ace David Price for the stretch drive was certainly a nice addition to the arsenal of arms taking the hill every fifth day, they negated this acquisition in 2014 with no viable defenders in the outfield and a revolving door at shortstop worthy of scorn. The Tigers still don’t catch the ball, they still can’t close out a game, and they still have no speed (although their solution to this last quandary was certainly amusing, as the Fielder trade to Texas netted them Ian Kinsler, who’s been picked off more times than any other player during the course of his career). Unsurprisingly, this club flopped yet again in the playoffs, and now the bills have started coming due. Free agency has come a-calling and it will be impossible to keep this team together.
So the Tigers earn TLOTY consideration for missing out on a golden opportunity yet again, which really is an unpardonable sin in sports. You have to make the most of your chances, because it’s so damn hard to ultimately be successful. Professional athletics are the single-most competitive endeavour on the planet, and as I’ve said before, failure is the default.
But unlike sporting endeavours in the rest of the world, where being awful will get you a one-way ticket to the 2nd Division, the North American system entitles clubs to simply continue being awful for decades or, in the case of the Cubs, for centuries. What’s more, with concepts like salary caps and luxury taxes and revenue sharing in place, it’s never been a better time to be terrible, as doing so appears to result in no significant sorts of financial losses. So long as the value of the franchises continue to rise, yearly profit-and-loss statements are immaterial. And forget what Forbes publishes every year in terms of value. There is no telling what the true market values of franchises are when the perpetually pathetic Sacramento Kings fetched $534,000,000 after this mess was finally figured out (the owners may change but the incompetence has apparently remained), while the L.A. Clippers – the Clippers! – went for $2,000,000,000. That’s a lot of zeroes – zero being about all the Clippers have ever amounted to, being about the 7th-most relevant L.A. pro sports franchise during their existence and languishing far behind the Lakers and the Dodgers and the Angels and the Kings and the Ducks and USC football … sorry, couldn’t resist a shot at Troy there … but at least the NBA finally got rid of this troglodyte during the course of that Clippers sale, which counts as a win in any year.
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| Actual testimony by former Clippers owner Donald Sterling, under oath, in 2003 |
“Not much, to be honest. He’s still the same dude.”
– Seahawks DT Michael Bennett, asked what the Seahawks were expecting from Mark Sanchez after Seattle’s 24:14 win in Philly
There are many worthy candidates across the wide spectrum of sports this year – and with the Olympics and the World Cup in 2014, we truly have a deep field from which to choose – but each of this year’s TLOTY nominees displayed incompetence, both on the field and off, that was both impressive and, at times, downright disturbing. For a few of the long-suffering, there has been some signs of life here in 2014. The Houston Astros are making some incremental steps towards respectability after a historically bad run in baseball. They still can’t pitch, but some of their young prospects should be ready to excel. On the football front, the Raiders are playing hard, have beaten three straight playoff contenders at home and appear to have actually found themselves a QB to build around, while there are some signs of hope for the Jacksonville Jaguars as well, who have also put some good pieces in place but need to work on some fundamental concepts like protecting the QB:
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| Eight guys blocking five. What could possibly go wrong? |
And by the way, I lump the NCAA in with the pros for the purposes of this discussion, since the NCAA is a professional, moneymaking organization and the whole notion of the student athlete is a sham. They should be paid, period and end of story. Having said that, Washington State is ineligible for this award, despite efforts both creative and inept to be included in the discussion. Their number has been retired.
On with the nominations!
Detroit Pistons
Since we already were hanging around Detroit, we may as well pop by the Palace of Auburn Hills for a moment. The Pistons didn’t actively tank last season, but they gave up halfway through the season when it was apparent that GM Joe Dumars’ ambitious series of free agent signings, once they took to the court, were as a good a match as two left shoes. The Pistons dogged it at the end of the year both to hope to strike it rich in the lottery and protect a provisional draft pick Dumars had foolishly traded away. Dumas was understandably fired at the end of the season, the Pistons have now turned to Stan Van Gundy to attempt to reverse their fortunes and, at 5-23, it’s not really going so well. The Pistons finally bit the bullet and released Josh Smith, one of those big free agents signings from a year ago, essentially paying him $26,000,000 to go away, and the Houston Rockets waited around until he cleared waivers and signed him for cheap. The Lose has no problems with teams overpaying players, by the way. When it comes to sports, I’m a Marxist who believes the labourers should get everything, since nobody pays to watch an owner. But it’s somewhat unavoidable talking about salaries in the NBA, where a guy’s contract is far more important than whether or not they can sink the 3-ball. Understanding Italian politics is easier than understanding the NBA salary cap. And one thing that’s true across the board in sports is that, when you overpay a player and you badly miss on him, no one else is going to solve your problems for you. The Pistons had to take the hit on this one, and this once-proud franchise continues to badly misfire.
Los Angeles Dodgers
We Giants fans have referred to now former Dodgers GM Ned Colletti as ‘Agent Ned’ ever since he left the Giants’ front office in 2005 to take the Dodgers gig, since clearly all of his bad payroll and personnel decisions were proof that he was a double agent secretly working on the Giants’ behalf. And there have been a lot of them, to be sure. Most everything that you can say about the Dodgers in 2014 can be prefaced with the phrase, “for a team with a $250 million payroll.” As in, “for a team with a $250 million payroll, the Dodgers sure were dependent upon Dee Gordon to jumpstart their offense,” and “for a team with a $250 million payroll, the Dodgers sure were dependent upon Clayton Kershaw to win every time out, since if you take their 94 wins and discount the fact that the Dodgers won 21 of Kershaw’s last 22 starts, you wind up with a team that really isn’t very good,” and “for a team with a $250 million payroll, their bullpen sure is six kinds of crap.”
Now, there is no salary cap in baseball, of course, and the Dodgers can certainly afford it, given that their new owners found the $2 billion to buy the club beneath the cushions of their couches, but like I said before with the Pistons, no one is going to solve your problems for you if you grossly overpay everybody. (Except for maybe the Dodgers, of course, who bought up all of Boston’s sludge at the end of 2012, which worked out pretty well for the Bosox, now didn’t it?) The Dodgers of 2014 would up with four starting outfielders for three starting spots – Puig, Crawford, Kemp, Ethier – all of whom are regressing as players, and three of whom have monstrous contracts that basically made them untradable. And you can’t just move one over to play first, since Adrian Gonzalez and his big contract is over there. Meanwhile, the Dodgers also have another outfielder – Van Slyke – on the bench whom they’d like to have playing, and their best minor league prospect is another outfielder. So now you have six guys for three spots, and understandably, none of the six guys are terribly happy about the prospects of sitting on the bench.
In order to go about solving this mess, the Dodgers had to agree to pick up $32.5 million of Kemp’s salary when they finally unloaded him to the Padres this off-season. During the course of their offseason, their whirling dervish of a new GM, Andrew Friedman, has spent $54.5 million to make four guys go away – $32.5 million to the Padres for Kemp, $12.5 million to the Marlins to cover the salaries of Gordon and Dan Haren, and then the Dodgers DFA’d Brian Wilson to the tune of a $9.5 million hit. Even if you have all the money in the world, that sort of inefficiency and sunk cost is bad for business. Remember, this is a zero-sum game, and whatever bad moves your team make will immediately help your competition.
The Dodgers won 94 games last season and won the NL West, but promptly bombed out in the playoffs, dependent entirely upon Kershaw to win for them on the hill and having Kershaw inexplicably turn into a pumpkin in October and live up to his snide nickname of “the best 6-month pitcher in baseball.” (Nah, we don’t call him that here in San Francisco, do we?) Ownership in L.A. has made it clear that winning championships is what matters, but after their flurry of offseason moves, which netted them SS Jimmy Rollins from the Phillies and 2B Howie Kendrick from the Angels, the Dodgers are certainly older but not necessarily any better. With such high expectations, this franchise is ripe for further failure.
Anyone want Josh Hamilton? He’s only owed $83 million? Any takers? Anyone?
Oakland A’s
We’ve been over this already. The oddity of the winter meetings this year was that the Mariners came out of it looking like the team to beat in the AL West simply by doing nothing while the A’s and Angels went about making themselves worse. Just saying the Mariners are the team to beat sounds weird in and of itself.
Colorado Rockies
It’s always 2001 at Safeco Field in Seattle, and it’s always 2007 at Coors Field, that being the year when the Rockies caught fire and won 21 of their last 22 games at the end of the season, a hot streak which catapulted them all the way to an appearance in the World Series. And like most franchises who achieve little to nothing, 2007 nostalgia is the Rockies’ biggest selling point to their fans, and there is enough love of that nostalgia within the organization to fool themselves into thinking they know what they are doing. Take out that one good month, and the Rockies have basically been awful for the duration of their existence, but have made few changes over the years to the core staff which has permitted this club to veer so badly off-course. The Rockies completely flatlined in 2014, going 66-96 and playing about .250 ball for long stretches of the season. Seemingly unfireable GM Dan O’Dowd resigned after after the season, walking away with very little to show for 15 years on the job, so at least the club may have rid themselves of the idea that everything is copacetic, but new Jeff Bridich is going to have his hands full. The sad truth is that they’re going to continue to be awful, because they play in Denver, which has been, and always will be, where pitching careers go to die. I’m not sure how you ever overcome that disadvantage, but especially so in a deadball era of a game. And one of the many problems in Colorado is that their two best players – Carlos Gonzalez and Troy Tulowitzki – haven’t shown an ability to stay healthy, which means even if the Rockies wanted to trade them, they aren’t going to get full value on the dollar for damaged goods.
Vancouver Canucks
Sigh. My beloved hockey team deserves a post all unto themselves, as they’ve seen every sort of failure in their 44-year history. They’ve gone from the doghouse to standing outside the penthouse and being unable to find their keys. A franchise that once had 17 straight losing seasons and one which has also lost three Stanley Cup finals – one of which (1994 v. the N.Y. Rangers) is considered one of the game’s greatest moments; one of which (2011 v. Boston) ranks among the nastiest Stanley Cup Finals in history (and then there was this ... ugh ...); and one of which (1982 v. the Islanders) was the unlikeliest, nuttiest, most wonderful adventure a professional sports franchise has ever had.
Canucks GM Mike Gillis decided a change was in order after the Canucks were beaten by the Sharks in the 2013 playoffs, firing head coach Alain Vigneault, whose 7-year track record in Vancouver – 6 division titles, 2 President’s Trophies, a trip to the Stanley Cup Finals – clearly indicated that he didn’t know what he was doing. At the same time, the New York Rangers fired head coach John Tortorella, at which point the two franchises swapped coaches. Vigneault promptly took the Rangers to the Stanley Cup finals in 2014, while about the only thing Tortorella achieved in Vancouver was this bit of infamy. Egads.
Torts was always good for a soundbite in Vancouver, of course, as was his way during his regular and wildly entertaining jousts with the media, but he brought a tight, defense-first system to Vancouver and tried to apply it to a club which had been thriving for years on speed and finesse. “Hmm … so, I’ve got the Sedin brothers, who are only two of the most dynamic offensive players in the game for the past decade. I know what I’ll do! I’ll have them kill penalties and block shots!” Suffice to say, that idea caught on about as well as New Coke. The Canucks found themselves out of the playoffs this past season, at which point Torts was gone, along with Gillis for good measure – and rightfully so, as he’d overseen an ongoing soap opera with his team’s goaltenders, wound up trading both Luongo and Schneider for pennies on the Canadian loony, and given out so many no-trade clauses to other players so as to make adjusting his roster almost impossible.
But the Torts caper was a disaster from the getgo. The #1 rule of professional coaching is that you have to know what your players can do and you have to adjust, not them. I had numerous discussions on Canucks message boards about this, as commentators were blaming the players for not adapting – or not being willing to adapt – to the system. That’s not how it works in professional sports. It’s a players game. Put the players in a position to fail, and they will – and, even worse, they’ll also get you fired. Now, to the Canucks credit, they’ve regrouped rather quickly and are a pretty decent team again, but Lord’s Stanley Cup, which hasn’t resided in Vancouver in a century, continues to be elusive – and annoyingly so, given that the L.A. Kings have now won two of them in short order while seemingly doing as little as possible in the regular season, eking their way into the playoffs and then collectively channeling their inner Gretzkys come the spring.
New York Jets
Geno Smith. Need I say more?
New York Knicks
Taking the top job at Madison Square Garden is apparently Phil Jackson’s attempt at proving the naysayers wrong who insist his success as a coach was entirely due to having Jordan and Pippen and Shaq and Kobe. The Knicks are currently 5-26. The naysayers are chortling.
Los Angeles Lakers
“As far as the Lakers ... personally, I just hope they suck forever.”
– Mark Cuban
Speaking of Kobe, the Lakers are must-see TV this year if you like reveling in schadenfreude and also liked smashing your toy trains together when you were a child. The Lakers have been the most dominant, most iconic sports franchise of my lifetime. They were the franchise which everyone always wanted to play for, and thus always had its pick of the greatest players on the planet. But now they’ve completely disintegrated, and, as a Laker hater, I absolutely love it.
This less-than-flattering article painted a grim picture in Los Angeles and pointed the finger directly at Kobe Bryant, the crux of the article being that the Lakers gave him a massive contract extension, in part, because no other marquee player could stand to play with him. Kobe certainly has been an élite player and a warrior during his career, but the key to that last statement are the words ‘has been.’
In the present day, Kobe is a vortex on the floor, a swirling and sucking eddy of despair from which the ball never returns. He shoots and he shoots and he shoots some more. He is currently missing more shots per game than all but 35 players in the league are attempting. Clearly, his best days are behind him – not that he doesn’t keep trying to lead way, and not that the organization doesn’t kowtow to him when he does. When asked why they ran a play at the end of a game for Kobe down a point to OKC, even though Kobe was 3-for-14 from the field, coach Byron Scott’s answer was “32,000 points in his career.”
To which point guard Jeremy Lin responded, “I like gamewinners, too.”
Lin has been one of the guys to conveniently be fingered and take the fall for the Lakers failings, losing his starting job. Not that you can blame anyone on this team for being frustrated, given that the offense is a vortex. Kobe Bryant literally shoots his team out of games. His teammates know it and resent it. Just watch one of their games and note the Laker players’ body language. They all seem exasperated.
The Lakers’ followed up the aforementioned 1-pt. loss to OKC by traveling to Sacramento, where Kobe shot 8-for-30 in a 108:101 loss. He’s taken a few days off since then, needing to rest and recover … and lo and behold, in his absence the Lakers have seven guys hit double figures, play a creative and active offensive game and upset the Warriors, the best team in the league.
Coincidence?
It’s telling that the two best games the Lakers played this year are the game with the Warriors which I just mentioned and an OT win in San Antonio where Nick Young scored 29 off the bench and took the game winning trey in OT instead of Kobe. Otherwise, the Lakers have been awful, posting a 9-20 record and sporting a defense which is verging on being historically bad.
The Lakers got a bad break, of course, when lottery pick Julius Randle suffered a season-ending injury in the very first game of the season. But the entire Lakers apparatus seems broken at the moment. You cannot blame any player worth their salt for wanting to stay away from that mess. But as is usually the case with the Lakers, you have to enjoy them being down while it lasts, because it’s not likely to last that long.
The entire sport of college basketball
Seriously. Watch the games sometime. The games are awful. With the changes in the rules and the more systematic, mathematical approaches on the offensive end, the NBA has become interesting again. There is movement on the floor, there is motion and passing and spreading the court. The college game, meanwhile, is no longer the bastion of imagination and innovation that it used to be. All you have now is overly physical, overly defensive teams who do no phases of the game particularly well.
The simple solution to this is to fire all the coaches. Given the lack of skill on display, it’s debatable whether or not any of them are particularly good at their trade. In truth, it’s far easier to coach defense, to be conservative and risk-averse. It’s somewhat self-preservationist by nature, and college coaches are nothing if not that.
Suffice to say, The Lose is not a disciple of the Cult of the Coach that engulfs the NCAA’s two primary sports. The Lose also holds the entire collection of apologists who report upon those sports in a certain amount of contempt – many of whom were formerly coaches, of course, and who find convenient excuses like one-and-done players (a result of the age limitations imposed by the NBA) to explain why the game has deteriorated. Considering the number of one-and-dones every year is minute compared to the 4500 or so players playing Div. I NCAA basketball, you can see where the idea that it makes a huge impact on the game as a whole is nonsense. They make an impact because the most successful current program – Kentucky – takes full advantage of one-and-dones and recruits them en masse for a single-season shot of glory. I’ve never much cared for John Calipari, but he is right in doing that. The entire system is a cesspool, so why claim otherwise?
The whole game sucks at the moment. It verges on unwatchable. The NCAA tournament, long a staple of great competition and great theatre, was reduced to a dreadful snoozer this past spring. If there was ever a time when college basketball needed another Loyola Marymount to come along, it’s now.
New Orleans Saints
After doing everything right as an organization in their climb towards winning a Super Bowl, the Saints have done almost everything wrong since. There was the bounty scandal and the suspensions, there were earth-shaking upset losses in the playoffs, there was bad defense and a lot of it, there were bad drafts and bad free agent signings, and now there is salary cap armageddon looming on the horizon, as the Saints are already way, way, way over next year’s salary cap in the NFL. The Saints were thought by some to be Super Bowl contenders at the start of this season, but have completely collapsed and are going to miss the playoffs entirely – which is somewhat hard to believe, given that they play in the NFC South, which this is year is one of the worst divisions in the history of professional sports. (But not the worst.) It’s been sad to see, as the Saints have been one of the most entertaining teams in football for a decade now, but a closer look reveals that other than Drew Brees, the Saints just aren’t any good any more.
FIFA and the IOC
These two organizations lost whatever credibility they had left in 2014, which wasn’t much to begin with. These two corrupt bunches of bombasts are doing a fine job of trying to kill off all the good that their sports have accomplished over decades.
Unsurprisingly, cities across the globe are having second thoughts about hosting the Olympics after the bill for Sochi’s Games totaled over $50 billion, and with the continued problems in Rio de Janeiro’s preparations to host the Summer Games in 2016. The only bidders left for the 2022 Winter Games are Beijing and Almaty, Kazakhstan. Pretty much no democratic nation on earth wants anything to do with the Olympics at the moment. The costs have gotten too high, and the benefits of hosting are no longer worth that sort of investment.
FIFA, meanwhile, has been halfheartedly going through the motions of investigating itself amid accusations that there was widespread corruption and vote fraud amid the process for awarding the World Cups to Russia in 2018 and Qatar in 2022. Saying the investigation has lacked transparency would be an understatement. Black holes are less opaque.
The irony of this, of course, is that both the IOC and FIFA are likely going to have to turn to the United States to save them – a nation for which the two organizations hold varying degrees of contempt. The IOC has actively encouraged an American bid for the 2024 summer game – and by ‘actively encouraged,’ what I mean is that any American city that wants it bad enough can pretty much have it, at this point. As for FIFA, well, I’ve always thought the Russian bid for 2018 was with merit and attribute a lot of guffawing about the bid to English sour grapes. As for 2022, well, it was interesting that FIFA awarded the World Cup to an oil-rich nation like Qatar, because I’ve thought ever since that an oil-rich city is going to host the World Cup final that year.
Dallas.
The Philadelphia 76ers
I know that I said before that teams who are actively trying to lose don’t impress me, but the 76ers are impossible to ignore. Haven’t I used up enough cyberink already on this lot? The Sixers followed up their misery from a season ago by starting 0-17 this year. It wasn’t clear if/when the Sixers would ever win a game, and it took a trip to Minnesota to play the beat-up and downtrodden Timberwolves in the worst game played in the NBA this season to finally notch a victory: 104 missed shots, 19% shooting from the 3-point line, and the game having to be restarted when it was realized the teams were going in the wrong direction, which the NBA has a very specific protocol about. That was definitely an appropriate opening to this game, given that it’s easy to question the direction both those clubs are headed. The Wolves continue to be one of the most useless franchises in all of professional sports, and nothing the 76ers have done the past couple of years has implied there is the slighest bit of competence involved. But 48 minutes and 100+ bricks tossed later, the 76ers had their first win. I know that I am fond of saying there are no ugly wins, but …
Philly’s now scrambled their way to mark of 4-24 (and to the 76ers’ credit, they scrambled back from 23 down to beat Miami the other night), thus making it unlikely they’ll live up to their moniker(s) by posting a 6-76 season record. That may be the only thing the 76ers manage to accomplish this season.
Gads, this team is horrible. They rank near the bottom of nearly every offensive category. The coaching staff has been employing a volume-discount sort of approach to the offensive end of the floor, and the 76ers play at one of the fastest tempos in the league, which means that they shoot a lot, they miss a lot, and they commit a lot of turnovers. The defense isn’t much to write home about either, but as you can see, they’ve been working hard on defending the pick and roll:
Uh, yeah.
The 76ers are built to be terrible. Other than Michael Carter-Williams and maybe Tony Wroten, there isn’t a single player on this team with much of an NBA future. They were built to be terrible last year, as well, but it didn’t net them the #1 pick they were coveting, and since they had so much fun having Nerlens Noel on their roster, who was hurt and couldn’t play, they decided to draft Joel Embiid, who is hurt and can’t play. Their latest soiree has been to trade with the Nets for the $11 rotting corpse of a contract belonging to Andrei Kirilenko, not because they want him to play but because they need the $11 million on the books to reach the salary floor required by the CBA. AK-47 is, understandably, unamused by this and has failed to report, thus making the situation in Philadelphia even weirder, if that was possible.
The 76ers ship is presently being helmed by GM Sam Hinkie, who learned his craft from the San Antonio Spurs. While the Spurs are certainly a model organization, it should also be pointed out that the #1 reason for the Spurs success over the years is that they got stupid dumb lucky in the lottery not once but twice. It’s a whole lot easier to make moves to improve your club when you have first David Robinson, and then Tim Duncan, to build around. Former Spurs assistant GM Sam Presti obviously learned from the best, having followed a similar course of getting stupid dumb lucky in OKC. He didn’t get the #1 pick, but had the good fortune of having Kevin Durant fall their way with the #2 when the idiot Trail Blazers, picking ahead of them, ignored all of the red flags surrounding Greg Oden. This idea of being as bad as you possibly can for a prolonged period of time, so that you can amass enough players to be good again, is an iffy notion, at best. A few teams have pulled it off in sports (the Tampa Bay Rays and the Kansas City Royals come to mind), but what’s far more likely to occur is that you’re going to continue to be terrible (how many high draft choices have been squandered by the likes of the Browns and the Cubs and the Edmonton Oilers?) It seems like wishful thinking to me, counting on the guys whose decisions lead your franchise to being awful to somehow lead you back to being good.
So many worthy nominees, so little time. But really, there is only one team which TLOTY could go to this year. There was only choice, and this team set itself apart from the competition during one particularly disgraceful evening in Belo Horizonte:
I give you Brazil. Words fail.
On a personal note, I apologize to my many loyal readers for not blogging as much as I have done in the past. I’ve been somewhat busy and, in an act decidedly out of character, I’ve been doing a lot of winning in 2014, what with the publishing of the novel and the wedding and the like. I do intend to do quite a bit more blogging here in 2015, as there is never a shortage of good material (and given that the 49ers are about to do something as stupid as firing Jim Harbaugh, I may be busier sooner than later). But I’ll just say right upfront that you shouldn’t expect much new material from me in the springtime, as myself and The Official Wife of In Play Lose are planning to be venturing to the land of some heroes of this blog’s past for a few weeks:
Have I mentioned that we win at life?
