The Cleveland Carrion

LeBron checks out

IT WAS a great weekend of Lose and let us get right to it, beginning today’s Defeat tour in Cleveland, which is probably something we can do with any Lose entry. To the buzzard points!

• It really didn’t surprise me that much when David Blatt was fired by the Cleveland Cavaliers, despite having a 30-11 record this season, and despite having led the team to within two games of the NBA championship a season ago. We were excited for the game against the Golden State Warriors last Monday while we were still in New Orleans, and a bunch of us gathered at someone’s hotel room to watch – only we got there late, and the game was basically over. And by “late,” I mean just a couple of minutes into it, but Golden State was already up 12-2, and given the fact that GSDubs have won something like 55 games in a row when they’ve built a double-digit lead, and the fact that Cleveland looked as lively as guests on a Monday night at the morgue, the game – which was probably the one single home date Cleveland’s fans had circled on the calendar when the schedule came out – was never even close to being in doubt. It was about the time the Warriors’ lead reached 40 in that game that the notion of David Blatt possibly being fired after this debacle first passed through my head. I didn’t really give it much more thought, as we were all far more interested in heading out to down Sazeracs at the Polo Club, and the game being comfortably over early on afforded us an earlier drinking time.
No coach in NBA history had as good an in-season record when they got fired as David Blatt did. In the aftermath, one story after another has come out, constructing a narrative along the lines of that “the players” (meaning LeBron James) didn’t respect Blatt and didn’t give two shits about the fact he was an über-successful head coach in Russia and Israel and everywhere else, and that LeBron’s “camp” was behind this firing, in the end, and that the “players” wanted “one of them” to be their head coach – assistant coach Tyronn Lue, a former NBA player who “gets” them, and who will now essentially be LeBron’s sock puppet as he pretends to pay attention to Lue while running the team himself. Now, I summed it all up rather cynically there in that last passage, but one of the reasons why I did so is that so many people want to adopt such a cynical position themselves.
LeBron has since said he was surprised by the firing, insisting he had no direct hand in it, but even if he did, who cares? The NBA is a player’s league, first and foremost. All professional sports are player’s leagues in this day and age. And if you have a problem with that, go watch the indentured servitude that is the NCAA. If I am the owner of the Cleveland Cavaliers, and I’ve invested this much in my payroll – the aggregate salaries of the 14 players on the roster is almost $110 million – I’m damn sure going to want to make certain they’re happy with the head coach. Whether or not Dan Gilbert directly or indirectly consulted with LeBron on this manner, he’d seem to be something of a fool not to do so at all.

“Why, you little shit …”

Furthermore, what most people need to realize is that the Cleveland Cavaliers, as presently constructed, are not competing against 29 other NBA teams. They’re competing against two: the Warriors and the Spurs. And as should be plainly apparent, after getting completely humiliated 132:98 by the Dubs on Monday night, that Cleveland can’t compete. I forget which of the blowhards doing color commentary on the Cavs-Dubs game on Christmas said, “the Cavs have figured out how to play against Golden State.” Um, no, they haven’t. They tried to make that Christmas day affair as slow and ugly and painful a game as possible, and they still lost – just like they lost in six games in the NBA Finals. It speaks to their shortcomings that they have to at least try to play that way, which isn’t even all that natural for them given their roster, but then again, trying to play an open game against Golden State is a truly terrible idea for pretty much everyone in the NBA:

Where on earth are you going, Kevin Love?

I should point out as well that Real Madrid recently fired their head coach, Rafa Benitez, even though they were only four points out of first in La Liga at the time and had also won their Champions League group. But Benitez had his Waterloo moment, much like Blatt, at the hands of his biggest competitors – a 4-0 thrashing at home that they were subjected to by F.C. Barcelona. The Cleveland Cavaliers, much like Real, are built specifically to win everything and to do it right away. Nothing other than winning a championship will constitute success, and you don’t have any margin for error.
And it was pretty clear to me from watching the Cavs’ match-ups this season against the Spurs and the Warriors that David Blatt had no real idea how to beat those teams. I give Blatt a tremendous amount of credit for figuring out a way to keep winning playoff series last year when his team was completely decimated with injuries, but he offered no real great insight on the floor which separated him from other coaches. And it was pretty clear from the get-go that he didn’t really jibe with his “players” – LeBron and all of the others, to boot – and in this day and age, being disconnected from your team isn’t going to end well. His tenure in Cleveland is dead and the buzzards are circling …

• Speaking of not ending well, what looked like a possible dream season in Phoenix sure did end with a rude awakening, with the Cardinals getting embarrassed 49:15 by Carolina in the NFC Championship game and committing seven turnovers, six of them committed by QB Carson Palmer, who was playing at a near MVP level most of the season and wasn’t close to that effectiveness after injuring his thumb in December.
The warning signs about the Cardinals were everywhere during their regular season finale, when they got completely clobbered 36:6 by the Seahawks at home. You could say the game was meaningless for the Cardinals, but it was also meaningless to the Seahawks, and it didn’t stop them from going out and stomping all over Arizona. Palmer was terrible in that game, the defense didn’t bother to tackle and their special teams got gashed by Tyler Lockett for about 180 yards in punt returns.
Arizona looked nothing like a 14-win team in that game, and their performances simply got worse after that. The Cards’ season peaked a week earlier, when they annihilated Green Bay 38:8 – the same Green Bay that then scared the bejesus out of them in the playoffs last week. Palmer was awful on Sunday in Charlotte, but the Cardinals also didn’t block, didn’t tackle, and didn’t cover any receivers. Larry Fitzgerald dropped passes, and Patrick Peterson fumbled away a punt just at it appeared they were digging themselves out of a 17-point 1st Quarter hole. They did basically nothing right. I was thinking Carolina would win, but I thought it would at least be a better game.
And you wonder just how many chances guys like Fitzgerald and Palmer are going to get. Palmer has been around forever, but only won his first playoff game a week ago, his promising career in Cincinnati having been shortchanged due to a terrible injury he suffered in a playoff game against Pittsburgh in 2005. Without him playing well, Arizona isn’t very good. When he got hurt last season, and the Cardinals cycled through about six QBs, their potentially great season descended into folly. Even when they tried to upgrade the talent all around him, Arizona’s season still came down to Carson Palmer needing to be great, and he was abysmal.

• Even though his team was abysmal as a whole, Bruce Arians gets credit from The Lose for doing the math: down 34-7 and scoring a TD, Arians went for two, because the roadmap to evening the game down 19 points – two TD’s + two 2pts + a FG – is shorter than having to score 3 TDs when down 20. And The Lose found it interesting that a missed extra point wound up making such a big difference in the New England-Denver game: due to Stephen Goskowski’s miss in the 1st Quarter, the Pats were down eight points at the end of the game, and after a rather heroic final drive by Tom Brady, who was absolutely pounded by an onslaught of Denver pass rushers, the Pats had to go for two in the final seconds to tie. This sort of scenario hasn’t happened much this year in the NFL, but it’s precisely why the NFL moved the PAT back 15 yards: they wanted the play to matter which, given that 99% of kicks were converted a season ago, it very clearly didn’t matter. And former Seahawks beat scribe turned international correspondent Les Carpenter points out the irony: it was none other than Bill Belichick himself who advocated for the rule change two years ago.
Also, I said at the time that Belichick’s decision to kick off in O.T. against the Jets was stupid, but I also said I don’t think that game mattered very much … since I figured the Pats would still wind up clinching home field advantage in the AFC. I was wrong. After the Pats lost to the Jets, the Broncos then dug themselves out of a big hole and beat Cincinnati in O.T., and the Pats then threw up all over themselves the following week in a loss to the hapless Miami Dolphins, thus gifting home field to the Broncos. Instead of playing the Broncos in Foxboro on Sunday, they were playing a mile high in the Denver sky. It’s a short season in the NFL and all the games matter. And home field still really matters a great deal in the NFL. Super Bowl 50 will be the third straight match-up of #1 seeds.

• Super Bowl 50 is happening in my backyard, of course. The game is taking place down in Santa Clara, but many of the pre-game festivities are happening in downtown San Francisco. And, like most sane people in San Francisco, I’m responding to this by getting the hell out of town.
Myself and The Official Spouse of In Play Lose are going to Las Vegas the weekend of the Super Bowl and my plan is to take $50 over to the sports book before the Super Bowl starts. I’m going to put down $10 on the actual result of the game (the opening line has Carolina at -4½, and I’m liking those odds), and then I’ll divvy the other $40 eight ways and spend $5 each on the eight most ludicrous Super Bowl prop bets that I can find. I’ll likely spend less than a minute researching this, and I’m open to suggestions. It wouldn’t be a trip to Vegas without wagering on the most absurd things possible.

• When you root for a club in the EPL that isn’t one of the powerhouses, you learn to temper your expectations and savor the good moments when they come around, since they do not happen all that often. You have to be realistic, even if the reality is that you’re team is probably going to be relegated.
And at this point, I’d be somewhat surprised if my beloved Canaries of Norwich City manage to stay in the Premier League. They’re in 17th place, just two points above the drop zone, and they possess the second-worst defense in the league, so their goal differential is shot. They’re tenacious and resourceful, good when attacking on set pieces (they lead the EPL in goals scored from corners), but they’ve had a lot of games this year where they play some really great football, only to be done in by naïve defending and amateurish mistakes. And when you’re a fringe team that doesn’t get results when you play well, you’re far more likely to stop playing well and start losing than you are to have those results turn around.
On Saturday, Norwich City somehow contrived to lose at home to Liverpool in what was arguably the single-best game all season in the Premier League – and thus also the single-most disheartening. Norwich were down a goal after 18 minutes and then responded by scoring three, only to have their defense completely implode and give up three more (the last of which was so utterly, mind-numbingly stupid that if left me at a loss for words), only to then equalize at 4-4 two minutes into stoppage time … and then lose it in the 95th minute on basically the last kick of the game.
I happened to be awake for the 4:45 a.m. kickoff, since I’ve been sick and my sleep is a mess, and I’m both glad and distraught that I was. I was glad because it was probably the wildest, wackiest, zaniest game of top-flight soccer that I have ever seen. But in the end, the Good Guys lost, just as they’ve done all season. It’s not looking good for the Yellow Army.

• We’ll close with a hip and deep and groovily moody tune I’m grooving on at the moment, an Aussie collaboration featuring Marcus Marr and the vocal work of Chet Faker, whose work I quite like.
Now in this world where people left to tell you how to think, and say ‘Because I swear I've seen a million different angles of the same,’ we're all the same.

It Doesn’t Add Up

EVEN as a Seahawks fan, I cringed a little bit when I saw this. To the buzzard points!

• Have you ever seen a team play so scared with a 31-point lead as the Carolina Panthers did on Saturday? Carolina had a 31-0 lead on the Seahawks at the half, and when the Seahawks scored almost immediately after the break, the Panthers started looking as if they were running through a swamp. The Seahawks soon scored again and a palpable unease overtook the stadium. This is the Seahawks, after all, the 2-time Super Bowl attendees who’ve shown a penchant for the improbable comeback in recent years, mainly because they are at their best when they turn to the section of the playbook called “Russell Wilson Make Stuff Up.” The Panthers held on, in the end, winning 31:24. They did absolutely nothing in the second half, but the Seahawks simply ran out of time. The Panthers are a terrific young team, and this was certainly a good learning experience. It’s one thing to take your foot off the gas, but it’s another to go completely passive and just hope the clock runs out. Dialing back up 31 against Tampa Bay in the middle of the season is probably a good idea. Dialing it back in the playoffs? Not so much.
It would’ve helped the Seahawks cause if Pete Carroll could do the math. They trail 31-7 in the 3rd Quarter. The fastest route to 24 points is scoring on three possessions: three TDs and adding three 2-pt. conversions. The Seahawks score a TD to make it 31-13 and they then kicked the PAT, meaning they’re down 17 points and still need to score on three possessions (2 TDs, 2 PATs and a FG). If you miss it, you’re down 18, which isn’t much different than 17 and still requires three scores. Going for two here is a no-brainer. You have to follow the most direct route to even the score, even if it’s far-fetched. Is converting three straight 2-point conversions unlikely? Most certainly it is. OK, so, if you miss one, you have to wing it and make stuff up from there. That’s what happens when you’re losing the game.
WHY DO NFL COACHES DO THIS? Carroll’s done this sort of stupid thing before, mind you: last year, during this fine mess against Green Bay, the Seahawks trailed 19-0 when they scored a TD and they then kicked the extra point, meaning they were down 12 (needing two TDs) instead of possibly down 11 (needing a TD, a 2-pt., and a FG). My personal favorite act of dumbness is when a team is down by eight, score a TD and kick a PAT because “it’s too early in the game to be going for two.” It’s never too early to do the math!
NFL coaches have always seemed to consider the 2-point conversion to be some sort of annoying college gimmick imposed upon them. Most college coaches have a handy chart made up which they carry around, the margin of the game dictating whether or not to go for two, but the NFL gaffers have always eschewed this for some reason. I know that Bill Belichick did a little informal research back in his days coaching the Browns, which happened to be when the 2-point conversion came into the game. He would go for two at odd times during the game, curious as to how it impacted the outcome. (Which is how you wind up with an 11-8 game.) Going for two infrequently was something that made more sense with kickers converting 99%+ of PATs. Why give up a guaranteed point, when the 2-pt. conversion rate is less than 50%? But now that kickers are missing the longer PATs at a 10% clip, it’s not quite as safe a bet as it used to be, and teams would probably convert a higher percentage of twos if they actually bothered to practice them with some sort of frequency. Regardless, it’s about time coaches start doing more math to help their teams out. Come on guys, be a little smarter here.

• Speaking of Green Bay and fine messes, what the actual fuck was that game on Saturday night? That had to be the most confounding 5-play sequence in the history of the NFL. Up a touchdown, with the Packers facing 4th-and-forever on their own 4-yd. line while out of timeouts, the Cardinals somehow contrived to allow the Packers to go 96 yards in 55 seconds, and permitted Aaron Rodgers to complete not one, but two Hail Mary style passes to Jeff Janis. The Cardinals said after the game they were mindful of being Detroited (and their actual use of Detroit as a verb pleases me greatly), and their genius idea for defending the NFL’s Hail Mary master was to blitz – which doesn’t make any sense at all, since the QB is rolling out on a Hail Mary anyway, to buy time and let his guys get down field, so he’s likely rolling away from the blitz, and now you have fewer defenders available to knock down a pass. Granted, these are low-percentage plays we’re talking about here, but it’s probably a good idea not to somehow make it easier for the offense to pull it off.
The Packers had just cheated death, and after a bizarro double coin toss (and, seriously, how hard is it to toss a coin and make it flip?), the Packers had to play some defense. And I know that NFL defensive schemes are complex, and a game plan is a lot of information to process in a short period of time, but somehow, I suspect “cover #11 in red” was probably near to the top of it. The Cardinals protection breaks down and Palmer improvs it, winging a pass to Larry Fitzgerald … who actually pauses for a moment as he looks around, shocked that there isn’t a single Packer defender within 20 yards of him. 76 yards later, he’s tackled inside the Packers’ 5-yard line and the game is as good as over, with a nifty little shovel pass to Fitz for the TD doing the trick.
This is just the latest brutal postseason loss in a rather remarkable string of brutal postseason losses for the Packers, a model NFL franchise that’s always a title contender but has somehow become prone to the preposterous.

• Between fumbling within the last 90 seconds and the needless back-to-back 15-yard penalties on Vontaze Burfict and Adam Jones pushing the Steelers in position for a winning FG, the Cincinnati Bengals reinforced their reputation as the dumbest team in the NFL. Marvin Lewis has always had a penchant for employing players with million dollar talent and 10¢ heads, and once again it came back to bite him in the ass.
I find it interesting that with each playoff failure (this is five years in a row now) come rumblings about Lewis’ job security in Cincinnati. This is what happens when you raise the expectations. Cincinnati hasn’t been to a Super Bowl since 1989, and were atrocious most of the time between then and when Lewis came along, but being a perennial one-and-doner doesn’t mollify the masses for very long. Progress is always relative. Once you plateau, you grow stale and regress, and then you start heading in directions you don’t want to go.
I’m not sure the Bengals are to that point yet, but they aren’t on the level of the Pats nor Denver in the AFC, and it’s pretty obvious from all of the goings on in that playoff game that the Steelers are in the Bengals’ heads. Lewis is going to be under considerable pressure to have his team take the next step. But considering the job he’s done there – Cincinnati was a terrible job before his arrival, and likely will be again after his departure – he won’t be unemployed for long. As we saw with this year’s bloodletting (the number of NFL head coaching positions open pushing double digits), there are always plenty of bad jobs available. 

• When I see something like the Rams/Raiders/Chargers three-way tussle over the open L.A. market, I start wondering if the NFL is actively trying to make people hate them. The Raiders and Chargers had formed a pseudo-alliance under the guise of being joint tenants at a new football facility in Los Angeles, but the NFL owners were ultimately wooed by Rams billionaire owner/certified douchebag Stan Kroenke’s plan to build an NFL Valhalla in Inglewood.
Along the way, all three franchises have gone scorched earth with their home municipalities and fan bases, burning all of their bridges and acting as if they already had one foot out the door. Not so fast. After this latest vote by the owners in the NFL, the Rams are leaving St. Louis immediately, while the Chargers will have an “option” to relocate in another year – unless, of course, they somehow strike a deal in San Diego. Yeah, sure. I’m sure there will be hugs and kisses and a love-in for all parties involved. The Rams are gone, and the Chargers are as good as gone as well.
Who knows what the hell the Raiders do at this point? I can certainly understand that they hate the Oakland Coliseum. The Coliseum is a dump. There are Roman amphitheatres which are in better condition than the Oakland Coliseum. (Quite honestly, and scarily, Qualcomm in San Diego is worse.) But there is no incentive for anyone in Oakland government to help them out in building a new stadium, and the Raiders are steadfastly opposed to sharing Levi’s Stadium with (and thus paying rent to) the 49ers. I’m not sure what they do.
And for all of you would-be Los Angeles football franchises, I say this: good luck. L.A. hasn’t really cared much about not having football. The joke for years has been that watching football is literally the only thing you can’t do in L.A., a lot of it outdoors in that beautiful weather and a lot of it a whole lot cheaper than the season tickets and PSLs will be in Kroenkeville. You have to be entertaining in L.A., or the fans will tune you out in an instant – and this incarnation of the St. Louis Rams isn’t good at any aspect of football other than acting boorish and piling up needless personal foul penalties.
About the only thing good about this move by the Rams and, eventually, the Chargers, is an end to the L.A.-based extortions. The NFL has been milking this L.A. sow for decades now, using the vacant and massive market as leverage in hostage stadium negotiations with municipalities, and this should put a stop to that. Given that public opinion on these sorts of massive public expenditures has continued souring, the NFL may soon have to figure out another way to rip all of us off.

Dubs run a 1-on-5 fast break with two guys tying their shoes. No problem.

• It’s always seemed fitting to me that the most pretentiously poseurish franchise in sports plays it’s home games in Brooklyn. Reality has settled in for the Nets, who are now 10-28 and who fired head coach Lionel Hollins – more of a mercy killing than anything – and “reassigned” GM Billy King last week.
It was on King’s watch, under direction from owner Mikhail Prokhorov, that the Nets went on a ludicrous spend-and-trade rampage in concert with the 2012 move from the New Jersey swamplands into the opulent Barclays Center in Brooklyn: foolishly overpaying for Joe Johnson; trading for Deron Williams and Gerald Wallace and, worst of all, dealing all sorts of picks and draft conditions in exchange for acquiring Celtics graybeards Paul Pierce and Kevin Garnett. In doing all of this, they also bloated their payroll obligations to $186 million, meaning they’ve had almost flexibility for modifying the roster since then, and they sold off so many futures that they don’t control any of their draft picks until 2019. Not only are the Nets terrible, but they have no young talent and very little in terms of rebuilding options. Few teams in the NBA, or all of sports, are quite as hopeless as the Brooklyn Nets.
Prokhorov wanted to make a splash when he moved the Nets to Brooklyn, hoping to assemble a team that would immediately challenge for Eastern Conference supremacy in the NBA.  The slow, old, oft-injured Nets barely stumbled their way to a #8 seed in the playoffs that debut Brooklyn season and have been generally irrelevant since. Nowadays, they make so little of a ripple on the New York sporting scene that both the New York Times and New York Daily News have actually stopped covering them on the beat. All Prokhorov managed to do was mortgage the future to pay for a house that was on fire.
Whomever inherits this mess has arguably one of the worst jobs in sports on their hands: the Nets have a few decent players, but no great ones, and certainly no one you’d consider a franchise cornerstone. You could tear the whole thing down and trade everyone, but everyone knows you’re desperate for draft picks and you’re likely to only get fractions of the dollar on the deals. There has been some suggestions that the Nets should go the other way and go shopping for some serviceable vets to try and win a few more games, if only to lift the miasma hovering over the franchise. There are no easy answers here.

“My opponent says there are no easy answers. I say he isn’t looking hard enough!”
– Bart Simpson

• Can we please do something to get the NBA to modify the rules so we don’t have to endure games like this? No NBA fan wants to plunk down $65 a ticket to watch Andre Drummond shoot 36 free throws. Honestly, I’d rather go to the dentist. I hate the Hack-a-Shaq strategy, I think it makes a complete mockery of the game, and the simple solution is just to consider such a ploy to be an intentional foul, award a team two free throws and then also give them the ball back. No one wants to watch that crap.

• The Lose has been tardy when it comes to writing the blog here in January, partially owing to real life interceding – tight deadlines this month – and partially owing to my annual pilgrimage to New Orleans for the Crescent City Open. It was a typical scrabble tournament for me, one including a mediocre finish (10-9-1, 33rd place) and a range of play running the gamut from mediocrity to periodic incompetence. The Official Spouse of In Play Lose, meanwhile, had one of her best tourneys to date and came home with a Top 10 finish, so the household is certainly happy.
I love the fact that a broken down, crumbling former athlete like myself still has a competitive outlet in scrabble, even though I’m not any good at it. What always seems to amaze me about scrabble is just how many people involved in the enterprise at the top level seem to forget that it’s actually a competition. Read the epigram of this blog. Sartre’s quote about soccer applies to scrabble, and just about everything else in life. Scrabble is a game between two players. It’s not a math problem. It’s competition. Your opponents don’t roll over and play dead for you. Sometimes, they actually make their own good plays and beat you because of it. Sometimes, they make bad plays and beat you anyway. Sometimes – gasp! – you lose!
But I’m of the opinion that in most walks of life, people don’t actually like competing – they like winning. None of us are particularly good losers, perhaps me worse than most. I used to be notoriously bad when it came to (not) handling defeat. But at least I’ve come to understand that failure in any of life’s many arenas is a source for good material, so I’ve come to approach defeat with humor and curiosity, and I’ve mellowed out. Mostly. I only broke one pen in New Orleans, so that counts as progress.

• And finally, RIP David Bowie, whose music I’ve always liked and, more importantly, who I always admired for his willingness to take artistic risks. I didn’t always like the strange art house, experimental phases he frequently went through in his music, but I appreciated the hell out of him for trying it. More musicians, and artisans, and people in general, should dare to be so bold. And I’d rather remember him fondly for his beautiful music than mourn his passing, so I’ll close with my favorite tune of his: