What's Weak This Week

Haven’t we been saying this about NCAA officiating for years?

DUKE sucks, and other news. To the bullet points:

• Never invite Duke to the party. Duke drinks all your beer, they hit on your girlfriend, and then they spill the Doritos all over the floor. They are a walking buzzkill. Duke ruins everything.
Seriously, is there a bigger downer in sports than Duke winning an NCAA basketball title? They won their 5th such title last night, a 68:63 victory over a Wisconsin team who blew a 9-pt. second half lead and proved, once again, that it’s hard to shoot, pass, or even dribble when you’ve got your hands around your own throat. Part of why Duke is so disliked is that their many triumphs at the game always seem to come at the expense of a team that’s potentially far more transcendent and a story line that’s far more compelling. The 1991 Blue Devils beat a previously undefeated UNLV team that was arguably the best single team in NCAA history that didn’t win the championship. The 1992 Dukies beat the Fab Five. In 2010, Duke beat Butler, who carried with them the hopes of mid-major schools and everyone who likes to root for the underdog. This year, Kentucky’s quest for 40-0 – and Wisconsin’s exacting revenge on the Wildcats for a 1-pt. loss in the Final Four a year ago – provided a far more compelling, engaging sort of storyline. But instead, we get Duke winning it all. Again. Bleah. A Duke championship is kind of like eating those grey leftovers in the fridge which don’t taste very good – completely unsatisfying.
I probably have less contempt for Duke than many college basketball zealots (most notably the guys over at Slate, who couldn’t help writing story after story after story this spring about how much they loathe the Dukies), and I still have a fair amount of it. If for some reason, I was mysteriously named Head Basketball Coach tomorrow at East Central Enormous State University, not having a clue what to do in that position, and I had the choice to contact one active coach and say, “hey, what the hell should I do?” Mike Krzyzewski would be that guy – in part because I think he would be the one most likely to respond and most likely to be honest and encouraging about it. His track record at both the college and international level speaks for itself. And in amid the absurd arms race that is college sports in America, Duke is still playing in an 9,000-seat overgrown gym of a facility where everyone’s nuts. That right there should make them more likable than they are, as they’ve chosen retro charm and hardboiled home court advantage over some colossal on-campus colosseum.
If it weren’t for the fact that they’re so damn smug, they’d almost be worth liking.

“Thank you very much, for reminding me of the reason why I left Duke … Never being considered a part of your posh group of yuppies really hurts me to the heart.” – Elton Brand

Jalen Rose, in a documentary for ESPN about the Fab Five, put it even less glowingly, in describing his feelings at the time he was playing for Michigan:

“For me, Duke was a person. I hated Duke and I hated everything Duke stood for. Schools like Duke don't recruit players like me. I felt like they only recruited black players that were Uncle Toms.” 

Now, Rose later clarified that he was referring to his mentality at the time that he was at Michigan, and that he no longer believed that to be true, but his sentiment – that Duke is a bastion of spoiled rich kids who always seem to get their way – is one which is commonplace among those who follow college basketball.
And with that claim comes one that Duke always seems to get the breaks, particularly from the officials. For years, Duke has made far more free throws than their opponents have even attempted over the course of seasons. Now, that’s the sort of stat that can be coached to achieve, of course, through solid defending and taking the ball aggressively to the basket, but given that referees can so heavily influence basketball through the calling of fouls and awarding of free throws, this area is rife for conspiracy theorists. The 2001 Duke championship was particularly dubious on the officiating front. The Maryland fans were so angry after their Final Four loss to Duke that year that they made a point of showing up for the Duke-Arizona final and actively booing Duke throughout the game (which is something of a breach of etiquette at the Final Four, a grand spectacle where the 60,000 fans in the domes are generally disengaged from the game happening 1,000,000 miles away from them). Sure enough, a few crucial decisions went against Arizona in crucial times during the course of that final.
Just as a few crucial decisions went against Wisconsin last night, most notably the image I posted above from about the 1:30 mark of the second half with Duke up by five, where a ball deflected off a Duke player and went out of bounds, the zeebs awarded the ball to Duke, looked on the replay, and still awarded it to Duke, who promptly went down and nailed a trey and put the game out of reach. It was a terrible call, plain and simple. The officials blew that one at a critical juncture of the game. Deliberate? Doubtful. Incompetent? Most certainly. But that’s the sort of thing that always seems to go the Blue Devils way. If it happens often enough, it stops feeling like a coincidence.

• Having said all of that, let’s be honest about this: Wisconsin blew it. Wisconsin didn’t make shots down the stretch, and, far worse, they didn’t run their offense. Whereas Kentucky were cynical in their exploitation of the nature of the modern college game, Wisconsin were the most successful purveyors of it, doing so with a cerebral approach that had the versatile players and the shooters to back it up. Wisconsin played at the slowest pace of any major team in the country this season (as measured by offensive possessions per game), but also had one of the most efficient offenses. And being patient and methodical on offense was also a great way to play defense – the actual Wisconsin defense was meh, and turned out to be meh down the stretch against Duke, but it’s harder for the other team to score when they don’t have the ball that often.
Wisconsin’s defense wasn’t very good at all towards the end of the game. Duke made some shots, but the shots shouldn’t have been there to make. The Badgers, meanwhile, looked incoherent at the offensive end. They seemed to forget how to play down the stretch, forgetting what got them to the championship game in the first place, and once behind, they really had no idea how to play catch up in a hurry, wasting time and achieving little while doing so.
And speaking of playing in a hurry, I do think that Wisconsin generally needed to play faster earlier in the game. Duke was playing a junky, gimmick defense in the first half – a modified matchup zone with one guy guarding no one in the paint, and the other four players switching on every pass and giving the appearance of playing man – which the Badgers couldn’t seem to figure out. Trying to run a set for :35 against a defense you can’t unlock is just an exercise in futility.
This is where I think Bo Ryan got outcoached: your strategy has to be determined by what you’re seeing unfold on the floor. Not letting that Duke defense get settled in, and also getting the ball to Kaminski around the free throw line and running the offense from there, would’ve been far more productive that taking the bait and having guards constantly driving to the hoop and getting their shots constantly swatted by the Duke floater. Being outcoached by Coach K is no shame, of course. Coach K has 1000 wins for a reason. But it was ultimately really annoying to watch this game and see the Badgers let a very winnable game slip through their fingers.
Or off Duke’s fingers, as the case may be. I did think that the officials were terrible in this game, and particularly brutal down the stretch, when a whole lot of marginal whistles blew which went the way of Duke. But I also think Wisconsin needed to score more points, had plenty of chances to do so and misfired.

• The needless, pointless renovation by the Chicago Cubs of Wrigley Field seems to have taken a turn for the disgusting, as there were only two functioning restrooms for all of 35,000 fans in attendance for the Cubs opening day game with the St. Louis Cardinals. Faced with the prospect of waiting for 30 minutes to use the shitcan, Cubs fans got, well, creative:

No, that isn’t beer in those cups

This is absolutely inexcusable. The Cubs also have no grandstands in the outfield, as their renovation of Wrigley is wofully behind schedule and won’t be finished until June. But hey, they did manage to install that giant Jumbotron screen in the outfield – which no one wanted, and which will almost certainly block the view of the game from some of the buildings across the street, a place where entertaining tenants have been selling rooftop seats to watch the games for years now, much to the Cubs irrational annoyance.
Any justification that the Cubs can put forth about why they are going about annihilating one of the unique sports facilities on earth is completely, utterly lame. The Cubs are one of the most valuable franchises in all of sports – Forbes recently pegged them as the 5th-most valuable franchise in baseball, worth $1,800,000,000 – so any argument about the need to increase revenue falls pretty flat. Sure, the facility was not up to the standards of other ballparks when it comes to amenities for players, and the ownership can argue that it hinders their ability to attract top talent, but the reality is that the Cubs haven’t lost because of Wrigley. They’ve lost because they are the Cubs, the most incompetent and lazy franchise in American sports, the club whose entire bogus narrative is predicated on being lovable losers and who’ve fed off, and profited from, that mystique for years. And saying that all of these renovations will ‘improve the fan experience’ is rubbish, as well – the fans seemed to like venerable old Wrigley Field exactly the way that it was.
This all comes down to greed, pure and simple. It’s a case of giving people what they don’t want at a price you think they should pay. Whatever the Cubs think they’re accomplishing through this renovation, ingratiating themselves to the fan base doesn’t seem to be all that important.

• Meanwhile, in Miami, the Marlins reminded all of us, on baseball’s opening day, that their use of the justification of “improving the fan experience” in their billion-dollar gouging of Dade County for a new ballpark was a crock of shit on. There’s a lot of rain in South Florida, see, and it keeps fans away, which is why they needed a retractable roof … which they left open, during a thunderstorm. Yes, there was a rain delay in a ballpark with a roof. The Marlins are apparently as incompetent as they are disingenuous.

• With their 2:1 OT victory over the L.A. Kings on Monday night, the Vancouver Canucks got a little breathing room in their quest to make the playoffs, opening up a 4-pt. lead over the Kings in the standings. It was a must-win for the Canucks – and the fact that it was a must-win at all speaks to just how stupid the NHL is.
If you were to look at the NHL from a straight won-loss record, the Canucks (46-34) are 2½ games ahead of the Calgary Flames (43-36) and 6½ games ahead of the L.A. Kings (39-40). Why are we even talking about the Kings at this point? They should be out of it, right? Yet in the standings, the Canucks are 4 pts. ahead of both Calgary and the Kings (97-93).
This is because the worst thing that the Canucks do as a team is not lose games in overtime. They’ve only picked up 5 of the infamous “loser points” all season, tied for the lowest in the league. The Kings, meanwhile, are the masters of losing in OT, having done it 15 times this year. So even though they are a sub.-500 team, they’ve got 10 extra points on Vancouver in the standings and, before the Canucks won on Monday, were threatening to knock a team that has 7 more wins than they out of the playoffs. As it is, they may knock out the Flames, who’ve only picked up 7 loser points all year. And as Nate Silver pointed out recently, it wouldn’t be the first time that’s happened with the Kings.
This is completely asinine. The Kings have been doing half-assed, laze about routine for years now, doing just enough to get into the playoffs. That they’ve won two Stanley Cups doing so only further trivializes the regular season. But the league trivializes the regular season all unto itself by settling games with a trick show shootout and awarding loser points. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that there are 3 available points in an OT game, but only 2 in a game that is decided in regulation, so if the score is tied late in the 3rd period, it behooves you to be conservative and play for the OT – which is basically happening now, as the 3rd period of deadlocked NHL games has all the excitement of a slow dance. Players will fully admit that they’re playing for OT – and why wouldn’t they do that? It’s the right course of action, since an OT game is worth more for everyone involved.
The Lose has said before that you should bring back the tie to the NHL, believing that there is nothing wrong with it. I’m not sure why it is the league thinks it’s so important that every game has to have a winner when the sport is necessarily low-scoring and, thus, deadlocks are inevitable. I think using the shootout to decide is garbage and I don’t believe the NHL’s contention that fans actually like it. It’s a gimmick and it cheapens the game. While I don’t necessarily agree with the assessment of 538 in that article linked above – that you should just play until there is a winner – it would be better than this nonsense the NHL currently has. The fact that teams are ultimately being overly rewarded for what amounts to playing not to lose a lot of the time, for losing some games but not others, or for winning what amounts to a glorified lottery, and that this is costing teams playoff spots, should call into question everything about the way that league conducts business. The game is already in something of a dead ball … er, dead puck era, anyway, one which owes in part to a lack of imagination and creativity both on the ice and behind the bench. You can’t legislate imagination into the game, but you can certainly stop actively discouraging it.

• Tanking in hip in the NHL these days. It’s the new teal. It’s been hip in the NBA for years, and Gary Bettman has finally brought one of the NBA’s most obnoxious tendencies over to the NHL after all this time. There are two elite prospects available in the draft this year, and several teams – the Buffalo Sabres and Arizona Coyotes – have gone into full on 76ers mode this season, trying to be as horrible as possible so as to try to strike it rich in the NHL draft lottery. (A third team, the Edmonton Oilers, are almost as bad as those other two while actually not trying to tank, which is saying something. The Oil are just flat out terrible.) The fans in Buffalo have gotten into the spirit of the affair, actually cheering against its own team as the Sabres went about winning a game against Arizona a couple of weeks ago. The whole situation is embarrassing, and I’ve read a whole bunch of stories in the press coming up with suggestions of how to change the lottery system to prevent this from happening.
And I have a simple solution to that, which is the same for the NBA. Get rid of the lottery entirely.
The problem with tankers in the NBA and the NHL is not the 1-2 teams which are awful and will clamor to get the first pick. It’s all of the other not very good teams which will sort of informally tank along the way. The NBA lottery proved yet again last year, when Cleveland had less than a 2% chance of landing the top pick but did so regardless, that you’re better off, as a not very good franchise, hoping to strike it rich than you are trying to compete for a low playoff spot. (This doesn’t hold quite so true in the NHL, where #8 seeds have won the Stanley Cup before, and where the low-scoring games make upsets possible.) The low percentage play is better than the no percentage play. Again, it’s a cynical application of mathematics. In both the NHL and the NBA, there are far too many teams that just give up along the way. That goes against the spirit of the game. Too many teams have benefitted from this sort of cynical thinking to discourage others from following suit. The only way to put and end to it is eliminate the lottery once and for all.

• Have I mentioned that myself and The Official Wife of IN PLAY LOSE are going here in a matter of days?

Have I mentioned that? I wasn’t sure if I did. Just checking.

IN PLAY LOSE FTW!

Why The Lose? Your One Sentence MLB Preview

Baseball season is upon us, but it’s an odd-numbered year, so I don’t care as much as I should. We have an thing for even-numbered years around these parts, as you know:

A coveted San Francisco address

ODD years tend to be years in which the Giants don’t hit, get a whole bunch of people hurt, and generally go about retooling after the roster has been picked at by the other 29 teams in the majors. Winners are always a hot commodity, of course, which is one of the reasons why it’s so difficult to repeat as champions in any sport. Guys who win championships and then become free agents have a way of winding up being grossly overpaid the following seasons and, when you win the title, your club is immediately the target of everybody else, so pilfering players takes you down a peg. The Giants lost 3B Pablo Sandoval to free agency, Hunter Pence broke his arm in spring training, and I have no idea how this team is going to score any runs. Who cares? There is yet another brand new flag flying over at Phone Co. Park which we can admire all season long. Flags fly forever. And if there are consequences for winning down the line, so be it.

Baseball is the losingest of all games, of course, which is why it’s a favourite subject matter here at IN PLAY LOSE. Even élite teams lose two months’ worth of games over the course of a summer. And the game has something of a clockwork element about it even though the game doesn’t have a clock. Your team sucks today? Try again tomorrow! If you enjoy the pace and the rhythm of the game, you can find something to like about it on a daily basis, even if your team sucks. And trust me when I say that. I grew up watching the Seattle Mariners in the 1980s. If that team didn’t kill your love for the game, nothing will.

With the start of the season comes prediction time, of course – but since this is IN PLAY LOSE, we have to do things a little bit differently. Today we present our 1-sentence preview in which I explain why it is that, come Dec. 31, I might actually be writing about your favourite team in the context of winning The Lose of the Year award. This is not a prediction of who will be the best team, although I will probably mention that. This is also not necessarily a prediction of who will be the worst team. Certainly, bad teams are more likely to be blogged about than good ones, but failure encompasses more than just day-to-day failure. The epic chokes, the woeful underachieving, the poorly constructed roster – all of that is great stuff. Predicting the epic choke is impossible, of course, but we can look at some clubs and get the sense that, if/when the moment comes where they could rise above it all, they still would be more likely to fall on their faces than not. As such, a team is just as likely to be LOSE fodder if they are good as they are if they are bad.

And since I have a short attention span, I’m going to keep this quick. One sentence and one sentence only. Here is your IN PLAY LOSE baseball preview, ranked in order from least likely to most likely to be fodder for the blog. Do these things, and some hack in San Francisco will make fun of you:

30. Baltimore Orioles: because I’m generally high on the O’s, probably more than I should be but it’s served me well the past few years, yet also realistic about their chances and, thus, not really surprised by anything they do, good or bad.

29. New York Mets: because the Mets aren’t going anywhere, are likely to be improved, but whatever inevitable Big Apple-centric drama unfolds around them isn’t going to do anything to make them particularly relevant.

28. Houston Astros: because they’ve graduated from being historically awful to just being bad – improving, but still bad – and just being a run-of-the-mill bad team isn’t going to get you much press.

27. Milwaukee Brewers: because, well, there isn’t really that much of note about this team, according to IN PLAY LOSE official Wisconsin correspondent, Steve ‘Team Cheese’ Drumwright: “the good thing is that they didn’t really lose anyone in the off-season, but the bad thing is that they didn’t really lose anyone in the off-season.”

26. Arizona Diamondbacks: because hating on the Snakes was so much easier when GM Kevin Towers was making dumb trades and mouthing off about his players in the press and Kirk Gibson was inciting beanball wars, but now that Tony Larussa has come in and ‘analyzed’ every aspect of the organization – and promptly fired everybody – the Snakes will still likely be really, really bad this year but maybe one of the most inexcusably poorly managed franchises in sports finally has some hope.

25. Kansas City Royals: because getting red hot and playing really well for a couple of weeks in the playoffs, while commendable, doesn’t change the fact that this was a pretty average team who lived on a very thin margin last year, and the law of averages would suggest your bullpen isn’t going to be perfect and having no power in the lineup will come back to get you, meaning some regression from the World Series appearance is likely in order.

24. St. Louis Cardinals: because while I wonder if this team’s reputation preceeds it, as I’m not particularly crazy about their offense, the Cardinals do have a seemingly endless supply of good young arms and a culture of winning and they will probably find their way into the playoffs like they do every year, but not be particularly flashy and/or noteworthy about it.

23. Texas Rangers: because while they deserve a mulligan for last year’s injury-ridden disaster of a season in which Dr. James Andrews should’ve been put on the payroll, all of the injuries masked the fact that the Rangers were due for a serious slide to begin with, and Yu Darvish’s injury this spring might mask that fact a bit more, but I do think that lack of talent is going to be more of a problem than lack of healthy bodies this year in Arlington.

22. San Francisco Giants: because odd year bullshit.

21. Cleveland Indians: because I don’t think I’m going to need to say much about this team, which is going to be really good.

20. Cincinnati Reds: because how can you explain the fact that, over the course of three years, this team has gone from being so good to not very good at all, other than to think that Buster Posey killed the franchise’s collective will to live back in 2012, from which they have not ever really recovered:

Greatest gif in baseball history

19. Minnesota Twins: because the Twins have to go somewhere on this list, and any time you’re #19 on one of these you’re neither good nor notable, but if the Twins are the 19th-best team in baseball at the end of the year it will constitute a damn miracle.

18. Toronto Blue Jays: because they are entering the 18th year of the 5-year rebuilding plan in Toronto, during which the good ideas haven’t worked, and the bad ideas haven’t worked, and this year’s plan involved improving the pitching staff by trading for more hitters, which means nothing the Blue Jays do when they inevitably underachieve will be a surprise, but it will likely be somewhat entertaining nonetheless.

17. Pittsburgh Pirates: because I wonder, if the Pirates make another quick exit from the playoffs, if amnesia starts to settle in among Bucs’ faithfuls, who will start being annoyed at their team not winning championships and forget how godfuckingterrible this team was for two decades.

15/16. Seattle Mariners/Washington Nationals: because quite honestly, I don’t expect to be writing at all about either of these teams unless it’s in the context of doing something stupid which costs them the World Series, which is where I think both of them will be at the end of the year, as the two franchises who have never been to the biggest of shows both finally get there, and do so in the same season. But I get two sentences here because this is two teams we’re talking about at once, so I will say that Nats were done in by their own sloppy play last year, along with Matt Williams having Bruce Bochy run circles around him, and I would hope they’ve learned from their mistakes while, in the case of the Mariners, well,  haven’t I already written enough about the Mariners already?

14. San Diego Padres: because going on a ‘bright shiny object’ buying spree, where you grab every good-looking player available and ignore their ample downsides, rarely pays off.

13. Chicago White Sox: because see #14.

12. Miami Marlins: because the Fish rot from the head, and you should never take anything seriously that Jeffrey Loria says or does.

11. Colorado Rockies: because I really do think this is the most hopeless franchise in all of sports, and doubt they will ever be able to develop a functioning pitching staff – even if they were to bottom out with the worst record and get the top pick of the draft and draft a stud pitcher, her would be spooked to the point of being ineffective after two seasons at Coors Field – and because they look to be almost as dreadful as last year, when they played .200 ball for about three months, and because you wonder at what point Tulo and Cargo just say “trade me, damn it,” in an attempt to salvage their careers before advancing age and injuries finally do them in.

10. Tampa Bay Devil Rays: because they’re still the Devil Rays in my book, damn it, which was a cool nickname, and because I look at a team with a new front office, new manager, one good player, and no offense, and see the worst team in the majors, even worse than #9 …

9. Philadelphia Phillies: because at some point this year, The Lose should write up a piece about the long-term costs of success and whether or not they are worth it if/when you happen to win a championship, which I believe that they are, and it will almost certainly be in the context of the Phillies enduring a 100-loss season featuring a lack of talent and players from their championship heyday who are now old, slow, and injury prone and whose contracts make them immovable.

8. Detroit Tigers: because The Lose is quick to scold those who waste opportunities, and the Tigers’ formula for success – 1-dimensional power offense and great starting pitching – hasn’t been as successful as you think and just doesn’t translate in the playoffs in this bullpen-speed-defense-and-details era of modern baseball, and yet the organization refuses to address its greatest needs and, as a result, the Tigers’ collective star is starting to lose its luster.

7. Boston Red Sox: because I’m not sure what’s more comical, the idea of having Hanley Ramirez in the outfield or signing Hanley Ramirez in the first place, and because I’m not sure why Panda’s running his mouth and bad mouthing his former employer after seven years of both adoration and patience by the bay – neither of which is going to be prevalent in Boston if he doesn’t perform – and because this team, as constructed, has an air akin to a great big, bloated balloon which is due for a popping.

6. California Los Angeles Angels of Oxnard Anaheim: because this team has bats, but has question marks with arms, gloves, feet, and between the ears, and have probably spent worse than any team in baseball in recent years, if not all of sports, setting them up for an even greater sense of disappointment.

5. New York Yankees: because A-Rod heading back to the Bronx promises to be as awkward as a blind date at the Jr. Prom.

4. Chicago Cubs: because it’s the Cubs, of course, and because I suspect the expectations are too great and patience and perspective in too short a supply for a promising team that needs a little time to jell.

3. Oakland A’s: because ridiculing the Moneyballers for their feel good, indie sort of failures is sort of like shooting fish in a barrel, and while there is a possibility that this latest reinvention of the A’s by Billy Beane turns out to be OK – it is the A’s, after all – this club looks to have far more downside than up.

2. Atlanta Braves: because this team hasn’t looked to be this bad since the 1980s, and while I am not an advocate of schadenfreude, if there is ever a club that deserves it, it’s this self-important franchise with its fair weather fans and obnoxious tomahawk chop.

1. Los Angeles Dodgers: because as I said on Dec. 31, 2014, if you took out Clayton Kershaw from that team last year, it really wasn’t very good, and while they made a flurry of moves in the offseason, I think that those moves are lateral in nature if not a step back and have made them slower, older, and more brittle, and given the enormous expectations that come with the enormous payroll, this cannot possibly end well and it will be wildly entertaining if and when it doesn’t.