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| The natives are restless in Oakland |
• We start off this week’s buzzard points with the Buzzards themselves, who played some inspired basketball in the NBA postseason this year. Paul Pierce made one confounding late game shot after another while John Wall soldiered on with five displaced fractures in his hand. (Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow!) The Buzz managed to go out of the playoffs in one of the more excruciating ways imaginable over the past few days. With the series tied 2-2, D.C.’s Wiz gagged away a 4th Quarter lead in Game 5 down in Atlanta, losing to the Hawks by one at the buzzer. Last night, in Game 6, they fell by three points when Paul Pierce’s game-tying trey came about 0.05 seconds too late and was waved off. They went toe-to-toe with the Hawks, who sprinted to the best record in the East this season but who suddenly look very, very beatable. Save for a handful of plays here and there, there was very little difference between the two.
This came on the heels of their ice brethren, the Capitals, completing yet another postseason collapse, blowing a 3-1 series lead to the Rangers and losing Game 7 2:1 in OT at Madison Square Garden. Since 2010, the Caps have a 4-11 record in playoff games where they have a chance to eliminate an opponent. Astute Friend of the Lose, and excellent Canadian, Matt 'Muffin' Tunnicliffe has pointed out that the Caps are singlehandedly responsible for 18% of the blown 3-1 series leads in NHL history. It’s really sort of hard to label this series a choke, however, since the games in this series were all so damn close, but in the end, a rather star-crossed franchise couldn’t come through when it mattered. Both D.C. clubs had the chance to pull the upset, but neither could seal the deal.
• Everyone involved in Deflategate is getting what they deserved. Most of the arguments put forth decrying the punishment set down by the NFL – a 4-game suspension for Tom Brady, a loss of a 1st- and 4th-round draft pick, a $1m fine – are lame and disingenuous. This falls under the guise of cheating, and most every sport on the planet which doesn’t involve going around in a circle in a motorcar is going to be inclined to come down hard when it comes to cheating. The integrity of the on-field product is paramount, first and foremost. Without that, there is no game at all. The NFL has been a bit slack in its enforcement until late, but they’ve made a point this off-season of dinging pretty good both the Cleveland Browns (for sending texts among coaches in-game, which is a big no-no) and the Atlanta Falcons (for pumping artificial crowd noise into the Georgia Dome). Now, you can take issue with the methods and motivations of the league in suddenly deciding to do these sorts of things, and claim that some selective enforcement is going on, but a good way to avoid this entirely is not to cheat in the first place!
Seriously, most of the Patriots’ mustered defenses sound like excuses made by teenagers caught smoking in the bathroom, and have been delivered with similar aplomb. “Deflating the footballs a little bit is not that big of a deal.” Really? OK, then, so why do it? “Every team in the league is cheating.” And I’m sure that everyone else on the freeway was going 80 when the cop happened to pull you over. It doesn’t mean you can get out of paying the ticket. When has that been an acceptable defense in, like, forever? “They only did this because it’s the Patriots.” Well, yes, in fact, that part is true. The NFL dinged New England extra on this one because they view the Patriots as repeat offenders, having already nailed them in 2007 for Spygate and considering the Patriots to generally be disdainful of the rule book. The Pats have done it to themselves when it comes to that last bit. Their reputation precedes them.
So the Pats get what they deserve, but the NFL also gets what it deserves because no matter what decision Roger Goodell makes in this case, he looks stupid and his judgment and integrity are in question. And he’s set himself up for this, having so badly mishandled the Ray Rice situation a year ago. “Tom Brady gets 4 games for a deflated football, and Ray Rice gets two games for beating his wife senseless? Are you kidding me?” Now, juxtaposing those two cases is foolish, because you’re dealing with two separate issues, so people really shouldn’t be making those comparisons – and yet they are, and it’s entirely the fault of the league, and the stooge running it. This is why, were I an NFL owner, I would’ve pushed for Goodell’s ouster amid the fallout from the Ray Rice incident. From now on, everything that Roger Goodell says and does is going to be judged in accordance to his hare-brained decision-making process in that case. Everything. He has tarnished The Shield he so dutifully swore to protect.
As I said at the time, the best thing that could’ve happened to the NFL last February was to have the Seahawks win the Super Bowl, so that you didn’t have to deal with an entire follow-up season where your defending champion is considered to be tarnished and tainted by large swaths of your viewing public. But at this point, the NFL deserves no such favours. It’s a complete mess and a P.R. disaster for all involved, and deservedly so.
• And I’ll follow this up with a point about Tom Brady’s “legacy.” He doesn’t give a shit. Players don’t care about that. They care about it 20 years from now. In the here and the now, players care about winning. I’ve heard and read so much drivel about what this does to his “legacy” and I couldn’t give a shit. Legacies and myths are made up by those who watch the games, not by those who play them.
• As much as The Lose lampoons the NBA for all of the weird decision-making that goes on in the league’s front offices – a strange mix of fuzzy logic, marginal accounting practices and dubious math – the game itself can be pretty remarkable. The NBA playoffs have been terrific so far, in my opinion. Well, some of the Eastern Conference games have been pretty ugly, at times, but that’s simply following the form from the regular season. There’s been lots of good stuff in the West, and the drama and competitiveness has been compelling across the league.
These NBA playoffs feel like something of a strange new world, since the old guard have fallen by the wayside. Of the 8 teams reaching the second round of the playoffs this year, none has won an NBA title in the past 17 years. And with the new blood has come new ideas. The boring era of isos and 2-man games and backing down into the paint has given way to deep threes, movement of and off the ball, and the high post pick and roll. The NBA, at its best, has always offered up athleticism verging on dance, but now you’ve added a heightened cerebral component to the game as well. The NBA has become mathematics in motion. It’s space age stuff and it’s great to watch. Well, I think it’s great, anyway:
Thanks Phil. Did you try to dial that tweet up on your rotary phone? You’re showing your age a little bit, there.
This modern NBA is a little weird to me, I have to admit. It’s taken some getting used to. Perhaps the oddest bit has been attempting to think of the Clippers as anything other than a joke and laughingstock. As long as I’ve been watching this game, the Clippers have been terrible. What have you done to my Clippers? Who are these impostors?
Fortunately, the Clippers decided to chalk one up for the nostalgic set Thursday night in Game 6 of their playoff series against the Houston Rockets. Given a chance to end the series, the Clippers resorted to their losing ways of yore as they took a 19-point lead late in the third quarter, and then proceeded to blow it. They got outscored 40-15 in the 4th quarter to a Rockets team that had James Harden sitting on the bench for the entire period.
All props go to Houston for their inspired play, and also to coach Kevin McHale for realizing he had a hot lineup on the floor and rolling with it while Harden sat beside him. Harden was 5-20 from the field at that point, and with each of his misses – often forced shots amid stagnant offensive sets – the Rockets’ collective life essence seemed to further ebb away. His absence seemed to free up his teammates, who played loose and free in the 4th Quarter, playing as if they had nothing left to lose.
As opposed to the Clippers, who ceased to play entirely.
Seriously, Clippers, what are you doing? The Clips didn’t defend, and they completely froze up on the offensive end. There’s more movement among statues at Forest Lawn then there was to the Clips offense. The Clippers stopped playing. Simple as that. They punched their own tickets and tried to run out the clock. And once Houston got close, the Clippers had nothing left in the tank. They are wholly dependent upon their starters to make things happen (all you need to know about the state of the Clippers’ bench is that 67-year-old Hedo Turkoglu has been getting playoff minutes) and they seemed as worn out as they were stunned by the end.
We’ve seen some remarkable rallies of late – the Seahawks v. Green Bay comes to mind, along with the Royals vs. the A’s in the AL playoff. A trio of World Series crowns have helped lessen the sting of the memory of the Giants’ Game 6 collapse vs. the Angels in 2002, but it’s never fully gone away. Professional athletes are the most competitive people on the planet, and when they throw all caution to the wind and play with abandon, they do, in fact, have the talent to pull off what seems impossible. This is why you never, ever take your foot off the gas pedal.
I still remember, nearly 20 years later, how angry Michael Jordan was when his Bulls got throttled by the Sonics in Game 4 of their NBA championship series. The Bulls had a 3-0 lead in the series, didn’t show up for Game 4, and were down 30 in the 3rd Quarter. His teammates lolligagged and Jordan was mad. Sure enough, the Sonics won Game 5 as well and Jordan got T’d up in the process. Suddenly, they had a series on their hands again. We’ve seen several times now in recent years in baseball and hockey how a 3-0 series lead turned into a 4-3 series loss (most recently by those gagmasters, the San Jose Sharks, against the Kings). It doesn’t happen often, but once is too often. Never give the opponent another chance. Ever.
Now the Clippers have to win a Game 7 on the road, which has happened only 17.6% of the time in NBA history. The Clips-Spurs series was one of the best 7-game series the league has seen in years, and the Clips-Rockets is maybe one of the most confounding. Houston looked deader than doornails after getting blown out in Game 4, but now L.A.’s defense has been awol for two games and their lack of depth is catching up to them. Even if they defy the odds and win Game 7, I’m not sure the Clips have enough in the tank for going seven more run-and-gun, high-octane, first-team-to-120-wins matchups with the Warriors. Having to play a nervy and needless Game 7 certainly doesn’t help matters.
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| You can actually pinpoint the second when the Grizzlies' hearts rip in half ... |
• This blog is not about politics, although politics is probably the ultimate contact sport of them all, but The Lose will make a point here of saying that in two of the biggest elections of the year – Israel and Great Britain – it was apparent to me that the side with the better political athletes prevailed, even when it wasn’t entirely clear they would do so. The side which could better anticipate the voting trends, and then adapt to the conditions on the ground, won out. This should be a warning to all of my leftward-leaning Canadian friends, whose fall election is shaping up to be one of the better 3-way duels since the final scenes of The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly. Know who the real opponent is and figure out how you need to beat him.
• The thrill is gone.
RIP B.B. King. Few people could match your talent, your work ethic, and your class. You were one of the best. You and Lucille just keep on playing …
