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| D’oh, Canada! |
The Year in Lose got off to a spectacular start with the NFL playoffs, where one spectacular choke was followed by another. Choking was hip this year, as we saw colossal playoff collapses of historical magnitude in baseball and the NBA, and everyone in the NFL and NCAA seems bound and determined to invent new ways to lose football games.
And yet we’ve also seen the rising of the downtrodden and the has-beens: the Golden State Warriors won their first NBA championship title in 40 years, the Kansas City Royals their first World Series since 1985, and in the mad-as-hatters EPL, Leicester City has become the first team in the history of British football to be in last place at Christmastime one year and top of the table the next. All three of the clubs which I just mentioned built championship-caliber squads somewhat haphazardly over time, finding a few hidden gems in the way of talent, adding good pieces to the mix and then hitting on a philosophy which best maximizes their collective abilities while emphasizing great team play, first and foremost – be it the Warriors’ endless depth and selfless passing game, the Royals’ emphasis on the perpetual rally consisting of singles and steals, or the Foxes’ pack mentality when it comes to pressing their bewildered EPL opponents. These examples should serve to give hope to all of you fans of long-suffering sides who are perpetually coming up short.
Nah, come to think of it, your team is probably useless.
There are a number of great candidates for this year’s coveted The Lose of the Year award, running the gamut from the ridiculous to the sublime to the even more ridiculous. We have a bevy of wondrous underachievers to choose from, a few catastrophic collapsers, some clubs who withered under pressure, and some others who were just flat-out godfuckingterrible. And while The Lose generally frowns upon, and wags the finger at, those teams who are deliberately tanking in hopes of improving their draft status, the fact that they reached a point where tanking was necessary speaks to a greater, more systematic level of organizational incompetence, and so The Lose has reversed course and decided to give them proper consideration for the award. Sort of. Deliberately being as bad as, say, the Buffalo Sabres and
We’re going to rule out several dog-lame franchises for at least seeing the error in their ways and ridding themselves of awful management. Sorry, Seattle Mariners and Philadelphia Phillies, as bad as you were, you finally did something right. Some of the perpetually hopeless, such as the Cleveland Browns and Colorado Rockies, don’t really merit serious consideration since they are no more or no less hopeless than before. They are simply hopeless. And FIFA has been ruled ineligible for the TLOTY, since FIFA going down hard is fundamentally a win for football, all of sports, and all of humanity in general.
On with the nominees!
Los Angeles Clippers
“You need luck in the West. Look at Golden State. They didn’t have to play us or the Spurs.”
– Doc Rivers, L.A. Clippers coach
“Golden State was the best team in the league, but they also had everything go right for them. They didn’t have one bad break.”
– J.J. Redick, L.A. Clippers guard
Having your hands around your own throat prevents you from shooting, passing or rebounding, but apparently doesn’t prevent you from talking.
A favorite off-season narrative coming out of Los Angeles was that the Golden State Warriors were ‘lucky’ to win an NBA championship in 2015. Now, to be fair to the Clips here, they do have a point about the Warriors not being laden with injuries. The Dubs didn’t lose a whole lot of man games during their championship season. Of course, the Dubs also assembled the deepest bench in the NBA and made sure to use all of it throughout the season, which made a huge difference. Steve Kerr made it a point to manage minutes, and the end result was having a vet like Andre Iguodala possessing relatively fresh legs come the NBA Finals, whereas the Clippers sorry-ass bench was giving them nothing all year.
But what’s ridiculous about the Clips popping off in the offseason was that, while it’s true that the Warriors didn’t have to face them in the playoffs, the reason the Dubs didn’t have to do that was because the Clippers pulled off what was quite possibly the biggest choke in NBA history in Game 6 of the Western Conference Semis. The Clippers were up 3-2 in the series, had a 19-point lead late in the 3rd Quarter over Houston at home, and were apparently too busy anointing themselves as the chosen ones to actually play any basketball in the 4th Quarter: the Rockets outscored them 40-14 in the final 12 minutes (and did so with James Harden on the bench no less) to win 119-107 and send the series back to Houston for Game 7, where the Clips meekly folded up like deckchairs on the Titanic.
When you choke, you don’t get to talk trash. You don’t even get to make vaguely trashy statements and then back away from them. (Rivers insists he wasn’t trying to imply the Warriors were lucky, and then wondered why they’re so ‘sensitive’ about it up at Golden State.) The Clippers seem intent on filling up with hot air all of the rarified air of relevance they can before the Lakers return to prominence and the Clips are returned to page 5 of the L.A. Times sports sections.
The Warriors, of course, were somewhat amused by the chirping going on further down the California Coast:
“Didn’t they lose to the Rockets? That just makes me laugh. That’s funny. Weren’t they up 3-1, too? Yeah, tell them I said that. That’s funny, man. I wanted to play the Clippers last year, but they couldn’t handle their business.”
– Klay Thompson
“I’ve actually got my ring fitted for my middle finger, so they can kiss that one.”
– Andrew Bogut
And also, the Clippers branding campaign, with new logo and jerseys, completely sucks.
New York Knicks
Yeah, I know, they have Porzingis now and he’s a stud and Knicks fans finally have a budding homegrown talent to call their own and cheer for – one they booed when he was selected at the NBA draft, mind you – and there looks to be some hope for the future, but the Knicks were trotting out some of the sorriest NBA lineups I’ve ever seen towards the end of last season, when they’d finally given up the ghost and gone into full-on tank mode, and all the while Phil Jackson was using his most professorial tones to speak of how his now-prehistoric triangle offense could work in the modern game and how jump shooting teams could never win championships.
The Knicks cratered and finished 17-65, and deserve special mention for two unique instances from last season. For starters, there was this particularly appalling display on April 11, when the Knicks conspired with the Orlando Magic to play the single worst quarter of basketball in the history of the NBA.
And secondly, Alexei Shved:
Enough said.
Sacramento Kings
Boogie Cousins playing some tenacious D
In their collective haste to vet Vivek Ranadivé as a new potential owner for the Sacramento Kings, and thus stymie the evil assortment of Seattleites, the NBA and its owners apparently overlooked the fact that he was cuckoo bananas. The Kings have been tripping over their own sneakers ever since Vivek took the keys from the Maloof Brothers over there in The Big Tomato, and pretty much every move they make as a franchise has simply compounded the disaster.
Vivek fired head coach Mike Malone after a relatively decent start to last season, essentially because the Kings weren’t playing a particularly attractive style of basketball – never mind that they didn’t really have the players to do it, of course, and Malone was doing what any good coach would do and choosing pragmatism over style. Vivek then brought in George Karl, and I’ve always loved me some George Karl but he does have some downsides, most notably his penchant for personality clashes with star players. Sure enough, he and Boogie Cousins are oil and water, and Karl went about not-so-secretly shopping Cousins as trade bait in the offseason, apparently not realizing that, in this day and age of twitter and instagram and hot takes and instant news, it’s pretty hard to secretly do anything.
And Karl was doing this on his own since it’s not really clear who the GM is in Sacramento. Vivek did one of those classically dumb maneuvers in hiring Vlade Divac in an executive role – Vlade being a link to the Kings’ glory days, thus scoring points with the locals, but not really possessing any sort of managerial experience. Vivek then basically made Divac the GM, which was news to the guy who actually held the position. Divac promptly made a truly horrible trade with Philadelphia in the offseason, showing that he had no understanding whatsoever of the salary cap or the free agent market or any other aspect of the fuzzy mathematics which dominate the running of an NBA franchise. His justification for that bad move was that it would free up money to sign some quality free agents – but his definition of ‘quality’ is dubious at best, with targets being the likes of Wesley Matthews, who tore his Achilles last season, and Monta Ellis, who actually took less money to sign with the Pacers rather than have anything to do with the Kings.
They did manage to sign a few guys no one else wanted for far too much money – so-so shooter Marco Belinelli; Kosta Koufos, whose job is to get in Boogie Cousins’ way on offense and also take away minutes from Willie Cauley-Stein, since George Karl also doesn’t like playing rookies; and they also signed Rajon Rondo to the sort of me-first, 1-year deal that never ends well for a club since, if Rondo revitalizes his career, he’ll sign somewhere else a year from now, and if Rondo doesn’t, well, the Kings will be even worse off than they were before. Rondo’s sufficiently stuffing the stat sheets at the moment, which might land him a nice deal elsewhere or possibly a trade at the deadline (his recent showing of himself to be something akin to human garbage notwithstanding). And Karl keeps clashing with Boogie, who swore at Karl up and down in the locker room earlier in the season, which led to a meeting between players and Divac in which he actually asked, “should I fire George?” Now there’s some great front office leadership for you.
All the while, reports continue periodically surfacing that Vivek would like to offer the head coaching job to John Calipari, because obviously Calipari would want to quit his plum University of Kentucky job, which also affords him status as the most popular man (and probably also the most powerful man) in the entire
The Kings are a mess and will continue to be a glorious mess, ranking among the most hopeless franchises in all of sport. Whether Karl will be fired or Boogie and Rondo will be dealt or whatnot, it’s sure to be entertaining and sure not to end well.
Los Angeles Lakers
“I’m the 200th-best player in the league right now. I freaking suck.”
– Kobe Bryant
Los Angeles Kings
Slagging on self-important Southern California sports clubs is sort of like shooting fish in a barrel, but they are all such blowhards that it’s impossible to resist.
There was talk of a Kings “dynasty” after they won their second Stanley Cup in 2014, only to see the Kings crash out and miss the playoffs entirely in 2015. Kings apologists were quick to point out that they were the victim of some bad luck, of course – the Kings had the best puck-possession stats in the league, which should theoretically have translated into more goals, and that they were done in by their horrible performance in extra time, as the Kings were 1-7 in O.T. goals and 2-8 in shootouts, and all of those lost points in those 15 games did them in.
Of course, the Kings’ overall record last season – 40-27-15 – was the exact same record as when they won the Stanley Cup in 2012. The Kings were an 8-seed when they won the cup that year, and were a 6-seed when they won it in 2014. As compelling a case that can be made for the Kings being unlucky, you could also argue the Kings stumbled upon a remarkably successful formula of dogging it during the season, doing just enough to get into the playoffs and then deciding to turn up. (And frankly, it’s an indictment of how lousy the league has become, in my opinion, that a sub-.500 club won a Stanley Cup in the first place.) The Kings began to believe their own bombast, were awash in one ugly distraction after another, and maybe, just maybe, they really weren’t that good all along.
Los Angeles Dodgers
It’s not been a good offseason for the Dodgers. First, Greinke opts out and signs with the Snakes. Then a trade with the Reds for Chapman goes horribly wrong for the wrongest of reasons. They sign Iwakuma, he ‘fails’ a physical, and is suddenly scooped back up by the Mariners. (I guess he hadn’t studied hard enough for the first one.)
And come to think of it, the season sort of sucked, too. Oh sure, they won the NL West again, but when you have a $300 million payroll, you should win the Whatever League Anything division. With such a big payroll comes huge expectations, and once again, the Dodgers fell predictably short.
That $300 million wage bill included massive amounts of payouts to other clubs – accounting for a quarter of the Marlins’ payroll, at one point – to solve the Dodgers’ problems for them, taking guys off their hands with bad contracts they couldn’t otherwise ever hope to move. But not even GM Andrew Freidman has enough money in the till to sell off all of the problem children on this club.
They would probably play a lot better if they didn’t all hate each other. The team chemistry in this club was so noxious and toxic that they should’ve had Hazmat Suit giveaway night at Chavez Ravine. And chemistry does matter in sports. This is a professional workplace, after all, and you’re much less apt to fulfill your potential at any job if you hate your co-workers. (I know this from experience.) (Don’t ask.) Getting rid of Hanley “Human Turd” Ramirez should have helped matters, but guys like Yasiel Puig are still around, and with all of those enormous contracts they’ve doled out and taken on come egos too enormous for manager Don Mattingly to handle. Mattingly had this look of bewilderment on his face all season long akin to someone who suddenly realized that they had lost their keys. Mattingly’s been mercifully relieved of his duties and taken a similar positions with the Miami Marlins – and in this context, working for a dysfunctional organization headed by Jeffrey Loria might, in fact, be an upgrade.
Jimmy Rollins played about like you would expect a 57-year-old shortstop to play, and the assortment of drama queens platooning in the outfield all underachieved. The team still lacks speed, the defense is meh. The Dodgers came out swinging for the fences at the start of the season, hitting home runs and wowing everybody, but opposing pitchers eventually caught onto their one-dimensional offense, and the offense regressed so horribly as the season progressed that, come playoff time, they’d turned to late August call-up Cory Seager to save them and were reduced to starting Justin Ruggiano in left field, who’d been previously DFA’d by the Mariners. In 2014, the Dodgers were essentially a .500 team whose win total was padded by having Clayton Kershaw. In 2015, they were essentially a .500 team whose win total was padded by having Clayton Kershaw and Greinke. For $300 million, you can and should do better.
San Diego Padres
Grantland’s Razy Jazayerli performed a fine midseason autopsy on the San Diego Padres and their disastrous offseason, which was the result of first-year GM A.J. Preller’s mix of inexperience and blind ambition. The Padres then compounded the disaster at the July trading deadline, fielding a host of offers from across baseball for the likes of Craig Kimbrel and Justin Upton, who were set to leave in free agency, but deciding instead to stand pat, even though they were about 15 games out of first at the time and had little to no hope of making the playoffs.
“We like our team,” was the line out of the San Diego front office, although it seemed more like a refusal to acknowledge he’d screwed up in the first place.
Teams like the Padres always act from a point of blind optimism, ignoring all of the red flags about players like Upton and James Shields and Matt Kemp and Wil Middlebrooks in the hopes that they’ll all suddenly revive their careers and revert to being top-calibre players, even though every statistical indicator would suggest otherwise. The Padres’ shortfall this past season was, therefore, none too surprising.
Oakland A’s
“No, really, they’re not that bad. They’re just unlucky. Look at the run differential! All of the advanced stats and sabermetrics point to the A’s turning this around! They’re really not that bad. And have I mentioned that I’m auditioning to be Billy Beane’s personal ottoman?”
The A’s had the worst record in the American League.
All be wary of the Cult of the GM. You have been warned.
The Texas Two-Choke
Both the Houston Astros and Texas Rangers exceeded what was expected of them in 2015. Gone are the ’Stros of yesteryear who have delighted Lose aficionados again and again. Texas, meanwhile, overcame a disastrously injury-riddled 2014 season and surprised us all, overtaking the surprising Houstons down the stretch to capture the AL West title.
Then came the playoffs, and both of them choked.
As the Kansas City Royals came up in the top of the 8th inning in Game 4 of the ALDS against the Astros, trailing 2-1 in the series and 6-2 in the game, FanGraphs calculated that the Royals had a 0.4% chance of winning the World Series. The Astros turned the game over to their bullpen, which was their first mistake. For all of their terrific young talent, for all of their solid starting pitching, the Achilles heel of the Astros looked to be their bullpen. Luke Gregorson is not a closer, people. He is not the solution to your problems. Astros set-up man Oliver Perez, meanwhile, was so bad when he was in Arizona that Giants fans would jump for joy whenever he entered the game. The Astros substandard bullpen floundered at the critical moment, and the Royals promptly batted around in the 8th, scoring five runs and adding two more in the 9th for a 9-6 win, sending the series back to Kansas City for Game 5.
The Astros arrival on the scene came a year too early. No one involved in the organization expected the Astros to be as good this season as they were, and thus, no one was prepared to make the sorts of moves necessary to push the Astros past the finish line when they were running away with the AL West at midseason. It’s understandable for GM Jeffrey Luhnow to be cautious, of course, and unwilling to part with some of the Astros abundant young talent in exchange for some like Kimbrel, for example. Sure, you want to hold on to all of those pieces for as long as you can, but the truth is that when you have a chance to win in the here and the now, you have to make efforts to try and do it, because there is no guarantees you’ll ever get that opportunity again.
With a swiss-cheese-and-duct-tape approach to the bullpen, the Astros fizzled out down the stretch, eventually being overtaken by Texas in the AL West, and the Royals as much as annoyed them to death in that fateful 8th inning, fouling off pitch after pitch until the Astros relievers, unable to get the punch-out they needed, finally served up a hittable pitch. In this day and age, you cannot win without a quality bullpen. You simply cannot. This was a difficult lesson for everyone in Houston to have to learn.
Texas, meanwhile, decided to kick their World Series chances all over the SkyDome astroturf, committing errors on three straight plays during what was the most bizarre inning in baseball history and essentially handing over the deciding fifth game of the series to the Toronto Blue Jays. And for the perpetually star-crossed Rangers, who’d been winning all season thanks to a mixture of smoke and mirrors, this sort of failure probably stings a bit more than that of their Lone Star State counterparts. Whereas every indication is that the Astros are on the up-and-up, most statistical indicators in baseball would have you believe that the Rangers were over performing this season and, thus, are due to regress. This was a tough one to take.
Washington Nationals
When the Washington Post does a 3-part exposé of a post-mortem on your season, it’s not a good sign. (You can read the gory details from the crime scene here, here and here). What could have, and maybe should have, been a championship season was marred by injuries at the start of year, discord during the middle, and finally full-on chaos with Bryce Harper and Jonathan Papelbon fighting in the dugout – and to add to that nonsense, the ever-oblivious manager Matt Williams, seemingly the only person in the entire person in the entire park who was unaware that a fight took place in his own dugout, sent Papelbon out to pitch, at which point he blew another game and was rightfully booed off the field.
Even with Harper, the NL MVP, in their lineup, the Nats lineup regressed from a season ago. Max Scherzer’s two no-hitters somewhat camouflaged the fact that the starting pitching wasn’t as solid as it should have been, either. Throw in an underwhelming bullpen, a sloppy defense, a clueless manager, and a GM who thought that trading for Papelbon would put them over the top when they had so many other needs to address, and you have a team that was absolutely lifeless come August and had no answer to the rise of the Amazing Mets.
I wrote about their failings earlier this year, and the Nats have been shortlisted for the TLOTY now for months, having pissed away yet another opportunity to get the World Series monkey off their backs.
San Francisco 49ers
Probably no team in the history of sport has had a worse offseason than the 49ers did this past summer. Meanwhile, the product on the field has been, um, not good:
Watching QB Colin Kaepernick’s horrible regression has been particularly tough to watch. You start to wonder if the NFL is ever going to be a fit for guys such as he and RG3 who are such gifted runners, and thus also make such inviting targets for opposing defenders. As time has gone on, the 49ers have tried more and more to make Kaep a pocket passer, even though when he was at his best his first couple of years in the league when he was running, scampering about in the pocket and making stuff up. This is the same dilemma the Panthers and Seahawks have faced with Cam Newton and Russell Wilson, respectively: you invest $100m+ in a QB and you want him to be around long enough to be productive while cashing those cheques, but in doing so, you’re taking away from the aspects of his game that makes him truly a unique threat.
Newton and Wilson, however, have adjusted their games, and both are performing now near to MVP levels, running when need be but, more importantly, using the threat of the run to keep the defense honest and off-balance. Kaepernick, meanwhile, has been hemmed in by a dysfunctional 49ers offensive scheme. In the game above, against the Seahawks, he made no efforts to scamper or scramble at all. The Seahawks were shocked to see a statue back there wearing the #7 jersey in the pocket, and with the 49ers lack of running back options, their offense ground to a near standstill. But since Kaep is the QB and has the $100m+ contract, he’s obviously the reason for the offensive struggles and has since been benched. Never mind that they cannot run the ball, their once-dominant offensive line can’t block anyone, and the receiving corps lacks talent. Other than that, the offense appears to be in great shape.
The locals are not impressed:
The 49ers brass have all been busy patting themselves on the back for being brilliant the past few years, when it’s pretty obvious that their success stemmed entirely from the exploits of Jim Harbaugh. It’s been quite a fall, slipping from near Super Bowl champions just three seasons ago to a team with double-digit losses. And everyone will get to see the colossal clusterfuck that is Levi’s Stadium when the 49ers host Super Bowl 50. Given that El Niño is here and it promises to be an extremely wet winter, a downpour that day could turn the worst playing surface in the NFL into a quagmire. It would make the Super Bowl into one gloriously ugly spectacle, but those involved the 49ers deserve to be embarrassed for all of the messes that they’ve made.
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Indianapolis Colts
They earn a nomination simply because of this, but being the most disappointing team in the NFL certainly doesn’t hurt.
New York Giants
The best 55-minute team in sports. I’ve never seen an NFL team, in one season, blow so many winnable games in the closing minutes, many of them due to clock management ineptitude. With a veteran coach in Tom Coughlin and a veteran QB in Eli Manning, this just shouldn’t be happening on their watch.
Kansas
A good rule of thumb in the NCAA, with a smattering of exceptions: good basketball school = bad football school. The reverse also tends to be true (good football = bad basketball), but good basketball = bad football is much more pronounced. Look at some of the hardwood powerhouses when they take to the gridiron. Kentucky? Terrible. Maryland? Garbage. Duke? Usually crap. Indiana? Consistently among the worst football programs in the country.
And Kansas? 0-12 this season. And not just any old run-of-the-mill 0-12, mind you, but an 0-12 which began with a 41:38 loss to those pesky Jackrabbits of South Dakota State highlighted (or should that be lowlighted) by this flash of incompetence. That was their one truly winnable game on the schedule, and it only got worse from there.
The Jayhawks are now on their 4th coach in 6 years, and winning the Orange Bowl over Virginia Tech in 2008 seems like it happened 1,000 years ago. Kansas basketball coach Bill Self has arguably the best job in the country, but you could also suggest that the Kansas football job is the worst, and you probably wouldn’t get much argument.
USA FC
Jürgen Klinsmann got outcoached by a temp.
Ricardo “Tuca” Ferretti was merely keeping the seat warm on the El Tri bench. His predecessor, Miguel Herrera, having just guided El Tri to the CONCACAF Gold Cup – albeit in about the most dubious way imaginable (did I mention dubious?) – made himself a Lose of the Year candidate all on his own by promptly getting into a fight with a reporter at the Philadelphia aeroport and getting himself fired. Entrusted with the club for their one-game-take-all playoff with the U.S. at the Rose Bowl, the winner earning a ticket to the Confed Cup in Russia in 2017, Ferretti devised a fairly simple strategy of employing three center forwards in a tight formation, encouraging them interplay amongst themselves in the tight space and occupy the four U.S. defenders while the Mexican fullbacks pinched down the wings, hemming the Americans in. This game plan was based upon two simple principles:
1. The Mexican forwards were their best players and you want to give your best players the chance to make plays. [The midfielder Guardado is actually their best player, in my opinion, but he was coming off an injury while playing at PSV Eindhoven in the Champions League]
2. The U.S. wouldn’t be able to figure out what to do, given that no one involved in USA FC during the Gold Cup – Klinsmann in particular – showed the ability to think their way out of a paper bag.
120 minutes later, Mexico had a 3:2 victory. Now, lest you think this was some act of managerial brilliance on the part of Ferretti, he more or less negated his own ploy by promptly switching to a “traditional” Mexican 5-3-2 formation each time El Tri scored, at which point the Americans promptly took the game to them and equalized soon thereafter – and, at which point, El Tri promptly switched back into their original game plan and fenced in the U.S., who could scarcely string two passes together, much less get the ball out of their end.
The loss to El Tri was just the latest in a string of horrible performances in 2015 for USA FC, who snoozed and sleepwalked their way to a 4th-place finish in the CONCACAF Gold Cup. In the immediate aftermath of the Mexico mess, Klinsmann committed one of the classic no-nos of coaching, sending home Fabian Johnson and calling him out publicly for supposedly faking an injury during the Mexico game. Throwing your players under the bus and airing dirty laundry is a bad idea in soccer, and most every other sport, for that matter. It tends to get you fired. Johnson, who plays for Borussia Mönchengladbach in the Bundesliga, responded to this by promptly scoring a goal against Juventus in the Champions League – he being the only American player involved in that competition – and going on a goal-scoring tear with his club, thus reminding Jürgen that he’s the best player the Americans have got, and suddenly – magically – all was forgotten and forgiven.
Johnson is one of the Germans with American lineage whom Klinsmann has unearthed in recent years and given an American passport. This is about the extent of his talent development success so far. I personally have no problem with him doing this. (Unlike some other people. Thank you Abby, and good luck in your retirement. Now please stop talking, since you sure do say a lot of dumb stuff.) But Klinsmann is both the coach of USA FC and the technical director for U.S. Soccer as a whole, and is thus fundamentally responsible for American soccer development. An even more damning result for him than the match with El Tri came on the very same day, when the U.S. Under-23s were beaten 2:0 by Honduras in an Olympic qualifier. For U-23s, it’s vital to qualify for the Olympics and gain the experience of playing in those high-pressure, high-intensity atmospheres. Mexico and Belgium are two nations in particular whose young players greatly benefitted from having the Olympic experience. It was viewed as imperative for the development of U.S. soccer that the U-23s get that Olympic berth. The development of a new generation of American soccer players doesn’t seem to be going so well.
And there is an overarching sense now that Klinsmann has promised more than he can actually deliver. He touted his hand in reinventing German football when taking the dual U.S. jobs – a record which has come under quite a bit of scrutiny, as many of his ex-players in Germany have said he’s little more than Richard Simmons in lederhosen, a health nut obsessed with the fitness of his players while Joachim Low was actually the real coaching genius. I suspect that’s somewhat overblown – it was through Klinsmann’s initiatives that German football turned around from it’s sorry state a decade ago, no matter who ultimately carried them out – but he came in promising to be proactive and creative and attack-minded, yet we saw most of the U.S. success in Brazil stemming from being tenacious and pragmatic and resourceful, which is something USA FC has been doing pretty well for the better part of the past 20 years. He isn’t giving us anything new.
We should remember that it took a decade for his German experiment to finally bear fruit and result in a World Cup triumph, but Klinsmann doesn’t have a decade here. There needs to be progress and it needs to happen sooner than later. Qualifying for the next World Cup really shouldn’t be an issue – playing against St. Vincent & the Grenadines doesn’t really frighten me too much – but with an aging core, an uncertain talent pool, a mishmash of lineups and tactical approaches, they are clearly not improving and, this year, regressed quite horribly.
Oranje
Those wacky Dutch went from being ranked fourth in the world to finishing fourth in their Euro 2016 qualifying group and being eliminated. An expanded Euro 2016, mind you, with 24 teams, which makes this collapse even more inexcusable. You’ll see Wales and Albania and Northern Ireland on the football pitches of France next summer, but not the Oranje, who finished behind Iceland (what?), the Czechs (huh?) and Turkey (no, stop fucking with me here) in the table.
The Oranje tend to throw up on themselves every few years, succumbing to in-fighting and constant bickering and refusing to play like a team, but the talent level is such that they ultimately hit the reset button and straighten themselves out. The Dutch seemed more determined this year to get Guus Hiddink fired than do anything else, but new manager Danny Blind hasn’t found the winning formula yet, either.
I suppose the Oranje could always call upon Louis Van Gaal again, seeing how he got them to a 3rd-place finish in Brazil, and seeing how his rebuild job at Manchester United appears to be going quite awfully at the moment. He may soon find himself out of a job soon, and quite possibly replaced by José Mourinho. Speaking of which …
Chelsea
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| José Mourinho watching from the stands after being tossed at West Ham. |
And Leicester City, at present, are everything that Chelsea aren’t. Leicester play fast, they have great tenacity and resilience, they mount comeback after comeback and, most importantly, they play as a team. They are a collection of cast-offs, scrubs, and bargain bin buys who are proving that the whole are more than the sum of the parts. Chelsea, by contrast, have spent this entire season looking old, slow, fat, out of shape, disjointed, disinterested, and they have played for most of the past two months as if they are trying to get Mourinho fired. Well, they finally got their wish.
If he hadn’t already burned all the bridges, Mourinho made sure to bring some kerosene and matches to finish the job. After the Leicester loss, he said in this press conference his game plan was sound was that he’d been betrayed by the players – a statement all but guaranteeing he would lose the dressing room forever – and he then went on to say that it was only because of his managerial acumen that Chelsea had as many points as they do, because the players were basically shit.
And on that second point, he may be onto something. My hunch is that Mourinho made it clear to management that some sweeping changes needed to be made during the January transfer window, but in doing some calling around and some clandestine shopping of players, they came to find out that a squad whose players valued probably £250m or so back in June, on the back of winning the EPL title, was now probably worth only half that. And anyone they would want to buy and bring in would probably cost a fortune. Chelsea were willing to spend £31m on Everton defender John Stones back in August, and if I am Everton now, knowing how awful Chelsea are and how desperately in need of a center back they are, I would tell them Stones will cost £50m now, if not more, and dare them to grossly overpay. With every bad performance, the costs gets steeper and steeper. Chelsea had no choice but to get rid of Mourinho. He was becoming bad for business.
It was surreal last weekend seeing fans at Stamford Bridge booing the players as they were going about thrashing hapless Sunderland 3:1 in their first post-Mourinho match, all the while singing the praise of their now departed manager. That the Chelsea fans had bought into Mourinho’s god complex shows what a bunch of delusional weirdos they are, because it was pretty obvious that once the results went bad and the frustration mounted, the self-anointed “Special One” had no idea how to fix it – which is his job, for godsake! But that’s Mourinho for you, he being one of a select few managers in the game who basically want easy jobs where they don’t have to actually do any coaching to make players better but can simply snap their fingers and have the club solve all of its problems with its chequebook. If he really wanted to prove his mettle, he’d go and take that open Swansea job and get that lot playing worth a damn again, but instead he’ll wait until a plum offering comes open – Man United? Paris St. Germain? – swoop it up and bask in grandeur for a couple of seasons, and then come the third year, he’ll be out the door and everyone there will be sick of him. Just as everyone is sick of Chelsea now, and has been for quite some time, to be honest. Their shocking fall from grace leaves most English football fans feeling pretty giddy and gleeful.
And Chelsea’s astonishing collapse this season afforded them the opportunity to make a late push for the TLOTY, but there was one side whose body of work during 2015 outdid them all, an outfit so inept and incompetent and delusional that the award could go to no one else:
Philadelphia 76ers
Congratulations, Jahlil Okafor, you’ve been drafted to play center for the Philadelphia 76ers! How do you feel?
Thought so.
Under the regime of head coach Brett Brown and GM Sam Hinkie, the 76ers have amassed a record of 38-157 over 2½ seasons. Only in the bizarro world of the NBA would head coaches whose teams make the playoffs get fired while a guy with a .194 winning percentage be floated the idea of a contract extension. Not that anyone really knows whether Brown can actually coach or not, given that he’s had little in the way of legitimate talent to work with, and the roster turns over so fast that he spends most of practice introducing himself to whichever player just signed a 10-day contract.
Remarkably, there is a surprisingly large segment of Philly fandom who have evidently bought into what they now refer to as “the process,” all of them apparently unaware that they’ve purchased front row seats to a performance of The Emperor Has No Clothes. What’s even more baffling to me is the fact that the Philadelphia ownership group bought into this as well. The Sixers routinely play before 5,000-10,000 empty seats and it’s reported that the 76ers’ dwindling contributions to the revenue sharing pool finally ticked off the other owners enough to implore the NBA to do something about the Sixers, who presently have a 1-30 record and are an absolute embarrassment to the league, if not to all of sport.
Hinkie came from San Antonio, of course, because everyone in the NBA wants to be Spursy. He theoretically learned from the best about how to run a championship franchise, but about the only lesson he seemed to take from his time in San Antonio is that success is only possible if you’re stupid dumb lucky in the NBA lottery. Hinkie has been the past three seasons doing nothing more than attempting to game the system, taking advantage of the NBA’s perverse incentive for losing and trying somehow to give the franchise the best chance possible to land the magic ping pong ball, and the top-level pick in the draft which goes with it. He is the ultimate used car salesman, floating the floor to the rank-and-file 76ers ticket holders and promising something he ultimately has no power to make happen. He can only improve the odds so much.
And what, ultimately, does that get the 76ers? Zac Lowe of ESPN tried to do a fair assessment of “the process” right about the time the club – at the urging of the league, according to most reliable sources – brought in Jerry Colangelo as a “consultant.” Ownership may be content to put up with 60-loss seasons with the promise of glorious future days to come, but all signs would indicate that the NBA is growing tired of the Sixers’ constant besmirching of its good name. And can you blame them? In Lowe’s piece, he tries to make sense of this nonsense and figure out the method to the madness. And in the abstract, I can understand it, but at some point, this has to stop being a math problem and start being about basketball. Hinkie & Co. can churn the roster and try to game and meta-game the system all they want, but none of that means anything if they can’t judge talent.
And nothing the 76ers have done in three years indicates they can. Three years of draft maneuverings yielded them a point guard who couldn’t shoot and was traded, a center who was hurt and who can’t shoot, yet another center who has been hurt for two years, a Croatian guy still playing pro ball in Turkey, and yet another center who’s been getting into bar fights. “Winning all of the trades” and amassing a bunch of draft picks means nothing if you don’t have a clue who to pick. Hinkie uses Robert Covington as a success story and case study to justify his constant roster churn, but if you make 100 roster moves and all you wind up with is one guy who is even a marginal NBA player, perhaps you might want to reconsider your methods. The majority of those moves have been done simply to keep the payroll down. None of the players mean shit to the Sixers, in the end. They are there to fail, they are expendable and they know it. And given that every player knows this, it’s a miracle Brown can get them to play hard at all.
But the 76ers do play hard. They don’t well and they don’t play particularly smart, but they do play hard. I’ll give them that. When you’re 1-30, you don’t have much to go on. With all the talk in the NBA of whether or not the Warriors will win 72 games or more, a far more interesting question is whether or not the 76ers will win 9 games or less. My money is on the less, because this is the sorriest excuse for a professional sports franchise since the 0-26 Tampa Bay Buccaneers of the mid 1970s.
There can be no other recipient of The Lose of the Year than the Philadelphia 76ers. In the end, it was an obvious choice.
