One-Gun Salute

Tyler Collins taking his talents to Toledo

TYLER Collins is King of My Personal Belgium for the week for flipping the bird to all of the fans at Tiger Stadium Comerica Park after misplaying a routine fly ball and turning it into a Little League triple for the Oakland A’s. Certainly, when you’re a reserve outfielder for a not very good team and you’re off to a terrible start – Collins was carrying a .313 OPS at the time – frustration can start to fester, and Collins obviously lost the plot in a moment of madness. And who among us hasn’t wanted to flip off the paying customers from time to time? The customer is not always right. Even so, you just can’t do this. I can understand the sentiment, but you gotta keep your finger gun in the holster. (And for godsake, don’t do something like this.)

If you do something as stupid as this, you can expect to be booed pretty mercilessly from hereon. Collins was sent down to the Toledo Mud Hens after this, although Tigers brass insist it had to do with performance and not with Collins letting the fans know they were #1. But fans are quite forgiving if you put out some good performances. The best way to win them over is to play well. I’d have thought Jonathan Papelbon’s name would be Mudd in D.C. after picking a fight in the dugout with the franchise, but he’s got 7 saves and the Nats are off to a hottish start, and the Nats fans have given Papelbon an appropriately long leash. (If he starts blowing saves, all bets are off, of course.) And Detroit’s a tough town with people who aren’t afraid to flip the bird at The Man themselves, so if Collins comes back and plays hard, hits well and displays some slick fielding, such actions could provide the basis for cult hero status.

To the buzzard points!

• There were three truly dreadful series in the first round of the NBA playoffs, with teams so grossly outmatched that you wondered how they even got to the playoffs in the first place. And two of those teams had pretty good reasons for being so bad, as the Dallas Mavericks and Memphis Grizzlies were beset by massive injury issues as the season went on which crippled them past the point of being competitive. The Griz were particularly star-crossed this season, losing Marc Gasol and Mike Conley for the season and generally resembling a MASH unit. The Grizzlies used 28 players this season, which is an NBA record, including four instances where they hastily signed guys to 10-day contracts and immediately put them in the starting lineup. They had absolutely no chance whatsoever against the San Antonio Spurs, losing all four games in one of the most lopsided playoff series in league history.
But if you’d told me at the season’s outset that the third ill-equipped team come playoff time would be one that returned everyone from a club that reached the conference finals the season before, I’d have thought you were nuts. But the Houston Rockets took dysfunctionality to epic levels this season. They started 4-7, got coach Kevin McHale fired, generally ignored interim coach J.B. Bickerstaff, and stumbled their way to a 41-41 record and a #8 seed in the West, which got them a playoff matchup with the Warriors. You’d think that seeing Steph Curry go down with a series of injuries would’ve buoyed the Rockets, right? In the six quarters after Curry injured his knee, the Rockets got outscored by 60 points.
Perhaps my favorite moment during Houston’s 114:81 capitulation in Game 5 last night came in the third quarter, when Michael Beasley set a useless screen for Jason Terry, who was stuck in the corner in a bad area of the floor. Terry gave Beasley the ball for no apparent reason and promptly ran three feet out of bounds – at which point Beasley passed it to him, after which the two of them started arguing with each other. You just ran a play designed to pass to a guy out of bounds! You’re both wrong! What in the hell is wrong with you?!?!
This team hated each other. This was a bad chemistry experiment which left a toxic cloud filling up the lab. It’s pretty apparent that James Harden and Dwight Howard can no longer co-exist, and if Howard were to opt out of his contract and forgo the $23m owed him, everyone involved would probably be the better for it. Harden put up 35 points in Game 5 while Howard added 21 rebounds, numbers as empty as the nutrition information of the back of a package of twinkies. Chemistry does matter in sports, particularly in a league of opulent egos like the NBA. This is fundamentally a professional workplace, and you have to be able to work together.
In hindsight, what’s remarkable about the Rockets may not be that they cratered this season, but that given the personalities involved, they were ever a good team in the first place. This roster was crafted was the NBA’s preeminent analytics guru, Daryl Morey, and yet it seems so warped and mismatched to render most of those analytics theories moot. In a simplistic sort of nutshell, NBA money ball emphasizes getting three types of shots: three-pointers, high-percentage shots around the rim, and free throws. The Rockets chuck up a lot of threes, but only Harden can actually make them. The bigs on the team, meanwhile, are easy to defend: foul them. Howard, Clint Cappella, and Josh Smith all shot below 50% from the free throw line, so any possession resulting with them at the stripe is a plus for the opposition. And since you’ve got all of these bigs who throw bricks, you can’t have them on the floor late in a close game, which means you’re going small and can’t defend the rim on the other end – and they weren’t playing much defense to begin with. Nothing about the way this team is constructed makes any sense at all.
I would think Morey survives, given that most everything good about this franchise is his doing, but he needs to blow this team up. I wouldn’t expect Bickerstaff to be back on the bench, and this certainly falls in the category of “good job,” but it’s also a tricky job, because your #1 priority is trying to work with Harden, who is a terrific player but who also hoards the ball and plays no defense and has a propensity for me-first behavior.
Another oddity about the Rockets is that they actually made a late push to get into the playoffs, winning their last three to get there, since the 1% chance of winning the lottery was far better odds than they ever had against the Warriors, and since making the playoffs means forfeiting their first-round pick to the Denver Nuggets as part of the misbegotten Ty Lawson trade, Lawson having eventually been released and signed by the Indiana Pacers. (More on them in a minute.) Having behaved in enough of a professional manner to care about making the playoffs, that professionalism certainly didn’t extend much further. Houston was an absolute disgrace last night in Game 5, and put forth about as embarrassing a playoff effort as I can remember. C’mon, have some pride! The Mavericks and the Grizzlies and the shattered L.A. Clippers were playing their asses off with no hopes of being successful, but it was evident last night that the Rockets just flat don’t care. So long Rockets, enjoy your vacations and thanks for the comic relief.

Kool-Aid comes in many refreshing flavors

• The playoffs in any sport are all about match-ups, tailor-making game plans to suit your opponents, and making adjustments on the fly. You don’t bother with too many adjustments during the course of the regular season, when the opponents change nightly and you barely get any time to practice, since you’re too busy traveling between cities and trying to get players healed up, but you can’t operate the same way in the playoffs. The Charlotte Bobcats New Orleans Hornets were down 0-2 to Miami, and got hammered twice by the Heat in the process, and Steve Clifford chastised the media for suggesting he needed to make adjustments. He then did exactly that, of course, going bigger with his lineups and ducking his team’s trey-happy trends, and three games later, Buzz City are verging on advancing to the next round while the Heat seem absolutely flummoxed.
Were it some meaningless game in Sacramento in February (and all games in Sacramento are meaningless all the time), the Indiana Pacers taking a 13-point lead into the 4th Quarter and then deciding to field a lineup which had no Paul George, no George Hill, and no Monta Ellis – in essence, fielding a team with almost no functioning offense – might have made sense. Rest some guys, save some wear-and-tear, try some new offensive sets out, yadda yadda yadda. But the Pacers did so in Game 5 of their playoff series with the Toronto Raptors, and it blew up spectacularly.
The game was in Toronto, the series was tied 2-2, and the Raptors are the most neurotic team in the NBA, a franchise scarred by endless playoff failings. So you’re up 13, Paul George has 37 points through three, the Raptors are imploding at home once more, the fans are restless and the press in two nations is sharpening their virtual pencils and priming to just kill this team once again, and then Pacers coach Frank Vogel, who is usually a very good coach, rolls out an offensively-challenged unit to start the 4th Quarter and leaves them out there when it all starts going horribly badly. By the time Vogel gets George back in the game, it’s too late: the lead has been more than halved, the tide has turned, the Raps are emboldened, the crowd at Mediocre Airline Center Centre is going nuts. The Raptors went on a 25-9 run in the 4th to win the game 102:99, and rather than going back to Indianapolis with a 3-2 lead against a team laden with a dubious psyche, the Pacers now find themselves facing elimination.
And this was not the time for the Pacers to go with some standard-fare bench rotation. You’re not playing the Kings in February here. This is the playoffs. I can certainly understand that Paul George needs a breather from time to time. He’s recovered remarkably from a grisly injury to return to being NBA élite, but you do have to watch his minutes. Fair enough. But Paul George was absolutely murdering the Raptors in this game. He was crushing their collective wills to live every time he had the ball in his hands. If you leave him out there to start the 4th and let him do his thing, he’ll have plenty of time to rest if/when you put the game away.
And if you are going to go with some standard bench rotation to start the 4th, and things start going bad out there on the floor, you need to adjust immediately. Playoff wins are precious, and you’re facing a desperate team. There is no pointing saving it for later if there isn’t going to be much of a later.
I’ve made mention before of the fact that the Giants’ winning the World Series in 2014 was aided by two of their opponents – the Nats and the Cards – leaving their best arms in the bullpens and trying to skate by in crucial situations. First and foremost, you have to save the season! This game was a golden opportunity lost by the Pacers, who are underdogs in this series and squandered a chance to very nearly put the series away.

• And since I mentioned the Heat and the Hornets game last night, won by the Hornets 90:88 with Dwyane Wade not getting a call at the end, the Miami Heat never, ever get to complain about officiating again after the 2006 NBA Finals in which Wade shot 97 free throws and the Dallas Mavericks lost their minds. How about instead you run an actual play in your final few possessions, instead of just letting Wade make something up just because he was able to do it a decade ago and therefore should be able to do it now. With Kobe School thinking like that, it’s as if Byron Scott suddenly got the coaching job in Miami. And it wasn’t a foul. So there.

• People say you shouldn’t read much into April baseball standings because “it’s early” and you shouldn’t make much of the fact that teams are/aren’t doing very well. But the term ‘early’ is generally vague, and basically represents a period of time from when the season begins until your team of choice does/doesn’t keep winning/losing so much.
I have no belief whatsoever that the great starts of the Chicago White Sox and Washington Nationals will be sustainable, since the Chisox will invariably come to suffer from the lack of a 14-year-old’s leadership in their clubhouse while the Nats will, at some point, have to stop feasting on a diet sweeter than the dessert line at a Las Vegas buffet. The Nats have the easiest schedule to open a season that I’ve ever seen – Phillies, Braves, Marlins, Twins – and are 14-6 in spite of the fact that they have three of their regulars hitting around .180 and Dusty Baker is already leaving his starters in for too long.
But this is In Play Lose, of course, and we shouldn’t waste our time on teams doing well. Let’s take a look at the basement.
The Houston Astros have the worst record in the American League right now and the Houston Astros can’t pitch. Pitching is hard enough in that amusement park of a stadium in which they play, but they managed to overcome it last year, during their feel-good rise from being a godawful team to being a playoff team, by emphasizing the pitching staff keeping the ball down and playing solid infield defense. The Astros can’t get anyone out, and are giving up more runs than any team in the AL. Perhaps more worrisome for the ’Stros than the slow start is the fact that Cy Young winner Dallas Keuchel’s velocity on his pitches is way down this year. If his stuff doesn’t improve, it doesn’t bode well.
Keuchel and the kerosene kids making up their bullpen got clobbered by Mariners in an 11:1 drubbing on Tuesday, dropping their record to 6-15, and while you can’t imagine a team with this much young talent is going to continue to be this bad, their formula for success on offense last year – hit enough home runs to make up for striking out so much – may not be sustainable, and perhaps we’ll see some regression to the mean in 2016. The Astros were far better than we thought in 2015, but they may be worse this season. But I can’t believe they are this bad.
The 4-17 Atlanta Braves, meanwhile, really are this bad. Freddie Freeman managed to launch a home run in the Barves’ 9:4 loss to Boston at Fenway last night, which was the fourth home run they’ve hit all season, having gone their previous 15 games without hitting one. Their lineup last night was filled out with wash-ups and stop-gaps like Jeff Francoeur. A.J. Pierzynski, Erick Aybar, Nick Markakis, Drew Stubbs and Kelly Johnson. That lineup would have been mediocre five years ago, much less now. They’re 29th in runs, 29th in average, 27th in OBP and 30th in slugging. Oh yeah, and the pitching sucks, too.
There may be some hope for the Braves on the horizon, since they made a few savvy deals with dumb teams like the Padres and Diamondbacks and were able to somewhat decently stock their farm system, but for this self-important franchise and it’s fair weather, fickle fans, 2016 is going to serve up a healthy amount of humility. And hey, what better way for the Braves to attract fans out to the Cobb County exurbs to their bright and shiny new SunTrust Park in 2017 than with a 100+ loss team?

• It must be early in the season, and the season must be weird so far, because the Seattle Mariners were in first place. Being atop the AL West on Apr. 26 was the latest the M’s were in first since the 2007 season. When you’re basically the worst franchise in the history of the sport – having never been to the World Series, and having missed the playoffs 15 consecutive seasons – you have to savor these moments of goodness. And guess what the worst franchise in the history of the sport is fetching?
$1,400,000,000. That’s a lot of zeroes for a franchise that’s accomplished zero.
There was a fair amount of rejoicing among Mariners faithful at the surprise announcement that reviled Mariners chairman Howard Lincoln was stepping down, and that majority shareholders Nintendo of America were going to sell all but 10% of their investment in the club, for the ungodly sum of $1.4 billion, to the consortium of minority owners, all of them local businessmen and fronted by cellular phone magnate John Stanton. Given that they just announced a 61% decline in their profits, this certainly makes sense for Nintendo from a business standpoint.
But therein lies the fundamental, underlying problem which has plagued the Nintendo ownership of the club. Everything they’ve done for 24 years has been about the profitability of the business, but their ownership has been one of benevolent neglect, as they’ve done little to actually consistently field a decent product. Why be any good at baseball? It costs too much to be good at baseball! We can just have bobblehead giveaways and a frequent dabbling in 2001 nostalgia to get asses into seats at the beautiful Safeco Field, which is one of the great parks in America, dontcha know? In fact, it just might be the best of all!
Except for the fact that, from a player’s perspective, it sucks. No team in all of sports has a more acrimonious relationship with their own home confines than the Mariners. It’s a terrible place to hit, and the home-road splits among Mariners players are usually ridiculously skewed: there’s no place like somewhere else. And ‘somewhere else’ is where most every hitter of any quality would rather be, unless the Mariners grossly overpay them and throw $240 million at them like they did to Robinson Canó. Canó and Nelson Cruz have actually worked out OK, but the rest of their forays into free agent hitters have been colossal failures.
The park actually plays a bit more fairly when you close the roof – but ownership doesn’t like having the roof closed, because it detracts from the experience of going to the ballpark. Gosh, I don’t know, it seems like winning might be a good way to enhance the experience, don’t you think? Nintendo has seemingly cared little about that and, in what should be a surprise to absolutely no one, the fan base, which once numbered 3.5 million or so coming through the turnstiles annually during the M’s golden area around the turn of the millennium, has now shrunk to less than half of that.
What was always very strange about the Howard Lincoln era in Seattle – Lincoln having been Nintendo’s lead counsel as well as chairman of the club – is that the top brass always seemed to be incredulous at the fact that fans expected more of them. After all, Nintendo had stepped forth in the 11th hour and ponied up $100 million to save the franchise when it looked all but certain it was headed to Tampa Bay in the early 1990s. We saved baseball in this town, so what more could you possibly want? OK, great, you saved baseball and the fans in Seattle are sincerely, genuinely grateful for that. So what are you going to do next? That earns you some cred and gratitude and a long leash, but at some point, you have to actually deliver a quality product. It’s what you do next that ultimately matters.
It’s said at the end of Lawrence of Arabia that wars are fought by young and brave men, and peace is settled by cynical old ones. There is a reason why radicals and revolutionaries make bad rulers, for it’s one thing to conquer and another thing entirely to govern. And for it’s time, of course, Nintendo buying the Mariners was certainly radical, what with a mass infusion of Japanese corporate money going about purchasing an American club. The club is wildly profitable, of course – witness the pricetag Nintendo is about to fetch, a 14-to-1 return on its original investment – but while the balance sheets have never been better, the on-field performance of the Mariners over the past 15 years has arguably been worse than ever. So on balance, this foray into actually operating an MLB franchise has generally been a disaster.
The whole notion that just because you “saved” something, it somehow makes you smart enough to run it, and also impervious to critique and criticism, is completely idiotic, and you should be wary and downright skeptical of anyone who takes up that sort of position. Just because you have the financial wherewithal, or the appropriate positioning, to be able to take something over, it doesn’t mean you know jack shit about what to do with it.

Don’t worry, Mauricio. Tottenham fans are used to being disappointed.

• The title chase in the EPL this season has broken down to a question of which would happen first: Leicester City remembering they are Leicester City, or Spurs remembering they are Spurs. The Foxes opened the door a couple of games ago, salvaging a 2:2 draw with West Ham with a controversial, last-ditch penalty in a game in which their star striker, Jamie Vardy, earned himself a 2-game suspension for getting tossed out of the game and then calling the referee something that rhymes with a Cucking Funt. But Tottenham, who haven’t won a title in more than 50 years and are famous both for playing attractive football and for gagging at the worst possible moment, pulled out a Spursy performance this past Monday against West Bromwich Albion: dominating the game and hitting the woodwork thrice, leading only by a goal when they could have scored five, and then conceding an equalizer on a sloppy set piece and having to settle for a 1:1 draw. There is often a winner and a loser in such a match, even if the scores wind up level, and this was the worst 1:1 loss imaginable for Spurs, whose two dropped points leave them seven behind Leicester with only three games to play.
Spurs fielded the youngest team in the EPL for much of the season, and both their inexperience and immaturity showed in this match, most notably when their great young midfielder, Dele Alli, stupidly allowed himself to be baited into punching a West Brom player – something the referee missed but the cameras didn’t, and Alli’s now got a suspension which will see him sitting in the stands for the last three games of the season for his troubles. The Foxes can now clinch the title with a win over Manchester United this Sunday at Old Trafford, and if the title isn’t clinched Sunday, then Monday is a likely possibility, since Spurs are playing Chelsea, and all London clubs hate each other, and about the only thing Chelsea cares about at this point is ruining Tottenham’s season. The almost-certain 2nd-place finish, while disappointing in the moment to Spurs faithful craving a championship, is still a terrific result for Spurs, and this team has a bright, bright future if they can keep the core together and add some more depth up front for what promises to be a taxing season to come, given that they will have Champions League matches to play.
So the Foxes are on the verge of the unthinkable and it’s an incredible story, a love story between a modest British Midlands city and their football club, their rags-to-riches collection of players and their truly delightful manager. It’s quite difficult to put what Leicester City has done in an American context, since the sports systems here are so different. The American franchising system in sports doesn’t really compare, since they are closed systems and there is no enormous disincentive to being a terrible team. (And in the case of NBA and NHL, there are actually perverse incentives to be as terrible as possible.) The English League has 92 clubs on four tiers, all of whom find different comfort zones and define success in their own ways. The closest equivalent to it is probably the NCAA, where there are something like 300 different schools in Div. I and sort of divide themselves, and if you think of it in that context, an apt comparison would be Butler, whom I mentioned a few weeks ago: a modest mid-level side with no enormous accomplishments but with a nonetheless proud tradition of its own who suddenly steps onto the greatest stage and proves to be the equal of the big guns.
The story of Leicester City has captured the imagination of a lot of fans across Europe, many of whom have grown tired of the staleness and sameness of the same teams winning all the time almost entirely on account of finances – and a rigged and self-perpetuating system at that, since the prize structure is skewed towards the top-end, meaning that the same clubs keep raking it the money and the gap between the haves and have-nots further widen. (Given that the club made something like €90 million off the Champions League last season, is there any wonder as to why Juventus won Serie A for the fifth straight season despite selling off half their starting lineup?) Leicester are a triumph of tenacity, diligence and creativity.
And almost certainly, the lessons taken from Leicester winning the EPL will be poorly applied somewhere else. Some knuckle headed club directors will think, “we can win the Premier League too!” and go out and spend their gobs of UK TV money extraordinarily stupidly and wind up looking like clowns. But the 5,000-to-1 shot is on the verge of proving that the seemingly impossible can, in fact, be possible, and that gives hope to the lesser clubs everywhere. It’s fairy tale stuff, it’s the stuff of cinema and it would be awesome if they can finish the job with a win this weekend at Old Trafford, the self-described ‘Theatre of Dreams.’

• Finally, I need to give a shout out here to Ozzie Silva, one of the true heroes of In Play Lose, who died on Wednesday at the age of 83. Silva was the owner of the Spirits of St. Louis in the ABA, and mastermind of the greatest hornswoggle in the history of sports. Ozzie, we love that you managed to pick the NBA’s pocket and make David “Little Napoleon” Stern kowtow and kiss your ass for so many years. A toast to you, sir, and long live the Spirits.

Lose News

 The patented box and none defense

WHOA nelly, is there a lot of lose to get through, and we should begin today’s buzzard points with commentary on the franchise for whom the buzzard points are “named,” those wacky Washington Bullets/Wizards/Buzzards, who have shown quite a path to folly this season after reaching the second round of the NBA playoffs a season ago.

• The Buzzards hatched a pipe dream plan at the end of last season to somehow try and woo local native and favorite son Kevin Durant to D.C. when he becomes a free agent this coming summer. The Buzzards wanted to clear out a whole lot of salary cap room for KD, so they went into this past season with a team staffed almost entirely by players whose contracts would end this coming summer as well. The edict also came down from up high to head coach Randy Wittman that the team should be playing modern, fast, sexy basketball – never mind the fact that Wittman is an old-school, defensive-oriented coach, and never mind the fact that the Buzzards, as constructed, didn’t really have a roster to play that way. It should probably not be a surprise, then, that the Buzzards cratered this season and missed the playoffs, which Wittman paid for with job.
The new coach, Scotty Brooks, is the former coach at OKC, and Kevin Durant apparently thinks very highly of Brooks. Connect the dots as you wish. Everyone associated with the Wiz are insisting that this hire wasn’t a blatant attempt at pandering to KD, and that Brooks really was their guy all along … or, at least, he was their 2nd-choice guy after Tom Thibodeau, who instead took a 5-year, $50 million offer to become coach and president of the Minnesota Timberwolves. Brooks got 5/35 to coach in D.C., which seems like a ludicrous amount of money to shell out for a coach. The biggest problem with outlaying $35 million for a coach is that you’re likely to wind up with $15-$20 million in dead money on your books, since coaches are hired to be fired. It makes even less sense to lay out $35 million for a coach who, quite frankly, isn’t very good. Sure, the Zombies in OKC reached the NBA finals during his tenure, but that had pretty much everything to do with having KD and Russell Westbrook and James Harden and not much to do with the assortment of simpleton offensive and defensive schemes Brooks had cooked up. The Zombies had a talent advantage far more than a tactical one.
Then again, Brooks’ coaching rep may have been revived somewhat by seeing what new OKC coach Billy Donovan has instituted this season – which looks a whole lot like what they were doing last season. OKC runs the most simplistic stuff in the NBA, verging on amateurish, consisting of Russell Westbrook charging to the basketball and/or throwing it out to Durant while the other three guys on the court are basically furniture. The Zombies are the worst passing team in the NBA, and three of their starters actually average less than an assist per game. They are there solely to fill out the numbers while Russ and KD go about playing hero ball. And when you have two of the five best players in the NBA on your team, you can get away with that … for a while, but eventually you get trumped by an opponent who actually knows what they’re doing. You can’t imagine Donovan gave up his job-for-life at Florida to come in and do this, since it clearly isn’t going to work on a championship level, which calls into question whether or not the Big Two in OKC are even paying attention to Donovan at all – and whether or not they were paying to Brooks all of those years. Quite honestly, if Kevin Durant had deeply, truly wanted Brooks to be the coach in OKC, given his caché and given that it’s a superstar’s league, do you really think Brooks would’ve been fired?
Which is why this latest attempt by the Buzzards to pander to Durant is foolish. Yes, sure, he’s from the area. We get that. But not all guys like going home and being the constant center of attention. And more to the point, after 10 years in the league and scoring titles and MVP awards, don’t you think KD wants to win? And that ain’t happening in Washington, where the Buzzards have only five players under contract for 2016, have no first round pick, will have to pony up a max contract to Bradley Beal, who appears to be made of glass, and who now have invested $35 million in a coach that everyone around the NBA thinks was one of the biggest hindrances to his previous team being able to win a championship. But everything about the Buzzards’ courting of Durant has been ludicrous, and there obviously was no Plan B in place for if/when KD didn’t come to be the savior of the franchise, which now seems almost certainly to be the case. In short, the Buzzards are completely screwed.
This is the sort of lunacy that you see in the NBA. Teams were dumping contracts and shedding salaries for about two years in the hopes of trying to lure LeBron. Teams just give up entire seasons at a time on the hope and the prayer that a ping-pong ball will bounce their way. Ultimately, what allows consistently good franchises to continue to thrive is the fact that some other franchises behave consistently stupidly. There’s a reason why teams like the Buzzards and the Kings continue to be so bad for so long. Sorry Buzzards, but Durant ain’t comin’ your way. I do know of one good possible destination for him, of course ...

•  Suffice to say, there has been a fair amount of anxiety among Golden State Warriors fans after Steph Curry turned his ankle in Game 1 of the playoffs against Houston. Steph has a history of these gnarly ankle injuries, after all, since it’s what held back his development at the outset of his career, and so you fear the worst when he goes hobbling off and misses two games of a playoff series. If there was anxiety among the Dub faithful during Games 1-3, then Game 4 was cause for sinking into deep despair, as Curry slipped on a wet spot and injured his right knee. Monday’s MRI revealed a Grade 1 MCL sprain, and he’s out of action for two weeks minimum, and it was hard to look at it in any way other than a dream 73-win season had just gone up in smoke. How could the Warriors win an NBA title without Steph? Could they even beat the Clippers in the second round?
But it’s amazing how the playoff narratives can turn. Less than 12 hours after Curry’s diagnosis sent reverberations all throughout the league, Chris Paul broke his right hand in Game 4 of the Clippers-Blazers series. As much as Curry means to the Dubs, Paul means that and more to the Clips. They simply cannot win without him. Further adding to the Clippers’ misery is the fact that Blake Griffin, who didn’t look fully healthy to begin with, reinjured his quad on Monday night in L.A.’s disastrous Game 4 loss in Portland. Both are now out for the entirety of the playoffs, and the question has shifted from, “can the Warriors beat the Clippers without Steph Curry?” to, “will the Warriors even be playing the Clippers?”
All of us can accept the abstract idea that injuries are a part of sports, but the past two days have shown us how all of your best work and preparation can seemingly come undone in the flukiest of circumstances. Steph Curry slipped on a wet spot on the floor. Chris Paul got his right hand caught in an opponent’s jersey. There is no way on earth to game plan for everything. Injuries are low-probability occurrences – the result of a single moment amid thousands – and yet, paradoxically, we all assume they are, in some way or another, inevitable. I don’t necessarily view teams as lucky when they avoid injuries so much as view others as being unlucky for having incurred them.
It would be easy to use injuries as an excuse, yet few who fall short ever do. The Seahawks lined up to face the Patriots in the Super Bowl with their three stars in the defensive backfield all having suffered injuries which would’ve possibly been season-enders, and yet there they were trying to play against Tom Brady and, well, it didn’t go so well. I’m always amused come playoff season when the whole rah-rah, macho ethos of playing with injuries comes up. Sure, you can play with injuries, but it doesn’t actually mean you play well with them. You see this a lot in the NHL, where everyone is incredibly secretive about injuries, and you’ll watch a guy in the playoffs and wonder why it is that he looks awful out there and his production has slipped, and he’ll then admit when it’s all over that he’d been trying to play with some truly gnarly injury for quite some time, at which point you understand why it is that he hasn’t been playing worth a damn, but if he was hurt and couldn’t play worth a damn, then why was he out there in the first place?
Curry’s injuries have added at least intrigue to what was a terrible 1st round series with the Rockets, who actively hate each other on the floor and who responded to James Harden’s game winner in Game 3 with dismay at having to change their offseason travel plans and play another meaningless game. The Dubs will put the Rockets out of their misery soon enough. But it’s been my opinion for the past two seasons that the Warriors are basically unbeatable, since they have to play badly in order to lose and they’re not going to play badly four times in a 7-game series, and that the only way they could possibly lose in the playoffs is if Steph Curry got hurt. Well, now I’ll guess we’ll find out.

• Speaking of Tom Brady, the endless stomach-turning soap opera that is Deflategate is back in the news, with the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals ruling reinstating Brady’s 4-game suspension. That this nonsense has carried on this extent – 15 months, multiple appellate courts, and more than $20 million in legal fees – speaks to the bombast of all parties involved. In the end, the U.S. courts are not about to overturn the NFL’s Collective Bargaining Agreement, which was agreed to by the league and the players union and which gives the office of the commissioner to act as both judge and jury in disciplinary matters, solely for the purpose of Tom Brady saving his reputation. The system may be screwy, but it’s what was agreed to by all parties at the bargaining table during labor negotiations.
I’ve believed all along that, when it came to doctoring footballs, Tom Brady and the Patriots broke the rules. Having said that, I have no doubt that other QBs and teams do the same kind of thing, and that it just so happened that the Patriots were the ones who got caught. While I don’t entirely dismiss the significance of such an infraction (and I think a good many people foolishly understate the importance of the league’s need to maintain the integrity of the game), I also think the infraction itself wouldn’t have been that big of a deal if it hadn’t been the Patriots who’d been caught, given the previous Spygate mess and given the perception throughout the league (and, more importantly, the resentment within it) that Bill Belichick and the Pats hold the league’s rules and policies in disdain and contempt.
I also think a lot of this mess would’ve been avoided if, at the time it occurred, the Pats just owned it and moved on – but they couldn’t own it and move on at the time, of course, because it was right before the Super Bowl and doing so would’ve meant having Jimmy Garappolo out there playing QB against the Seahawks. And with the destroyed cell phone and the like, it looks like Brady & Co. were trying to cover it up, and if you know nothing else about law and politics in this country, you should know that the cover-up always makes things worse.
Everyone involved in this mess winds up looking stupid and far too headstrong for their own good. It’s been suggested that, having extracted $1,000,000 in fines and a draft pick from the organization, it would behoove Roger Goodell to be a good winner at this point and reduce the suspension. But why would he do that? The NFL just spent 15 months and have gone through the courts to reaffirm Goodell’s right to play judge and jury. Going back on his original ruling would just make him seem even more weak and inept than he already is. And while Brady says he’s considering his legal options, nothing about this 2nd Circuit ruling seems to indicate that the courts are particularly interested in hearing more of this case. At some point, Brady and the Pats need to just give up on it. They aren’t going to win this one. In the long run, they may win in that the role of the commissioner will likely change, but continuing this case in court seems like a Hail Mary that not even Tom Brady could complete.

• Whereas the entire Brady foray into the American court system had an air of frivol about it, nothing could be further from the truth regarding the longest-running tribunal in British history. Some 27 years after a crush at Sheffield’s Hillsborough Stadium in the run-up to the FA Cup semifinal game between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest resulted in the deaths of 96 people, a jury has concluded that those 96 people suffered wrongful death owing to gross negligence on the part of local authorities.
This case was, and continues to be, absolutely disgusting. (This ESPN 30 for 30 documentary on the subject is worth watching.) I was in the U.K. not long after this occurred, and authorities there had engaged in a cover-up and a smear campaign, one which essentially blamed the victims and portrayed Liverpool’s fans as being nothing more than a bunch of hoodlums and lawless thugs.

“Within 30 minutes of the disaster unfolding, senior police officers knew they had made catastrophic errors. Their response was to deflect the blame and claim the deaths were the responsibility of disorderly fans. It was a story all too easy for the British public to accept. Throughout the 1980s, hooliganism had blighted the game. Liverpool supporters, in particular, were easy to smear. After all, their actions had played a major part in the Heysel disaster at the 1985 European Cup final against Juventus, when 39 people were killed. High-ranking politicians and police officers at Hillsborough briefed journalists that Liverpool fans robbed the dead, molested corpses and urinated on police trying to help the injured. It was an outrageous lie.”
– Tony Evans, former Times football editor

Politicians and law enforcement officials were using one terrible tragedy from four years earlier as a justification for why another occurred. And I can tell you from being in the U.K. not long after Hillsborough that the lies and the rumors and innuendo about Liverpool and its fans permeated everything. They were thugs, villains, hooligans. If Liverpool F.C. came to your town and brought it’s troupe of hoodlums with it, you’d better be ready: extra police, extra security barriers, and maybe you should put some plywood up over the windows of your business. Friends of mine who’d said they’d visited Liverpool and stood on The Kop at Anfield for a match were thought of as being crazy, if not suspicious. It was all a load of nonsense, and spoke to our worst sorts of propensities for self-preservation at all costs. Rot in the hell of your own making, those of you who saw fit to perpetrate such lies. I’m glad there may finally be some peace and some closure for the families who lost loved ones that day.
And I think that rather than come to view Liverpool F.C. as a bastion of hoods and thugs worthy of loathing, this tragedy simply made me want to like the club even more. Among the “big” clubs in England, Liverpool are probably my favorite. I’ve been once to the city, but didn’t have the chance to visit Anfield. I wouldn’t mind having that chance in the future.

• An exchange between New York Rangers defenseman Dan Boyle and New York Post reporter Larry Brooks, he of John Tortorella fame, after the Rangers season came to an end in the first round of the playoffs against Pittsburgh:

Boyle: I don’t want him here.
Brooks: What? You know, the feeling’s mutual, man.
Boyle: Nobody likes you. Nobody respects you. Just so you know.
Brooks: OK.
Boyle: At least I’m leaving here with the respect of my teammates. Instead of [expletive] someone like you, who tries to bury somebody. That's all you do. It's not a critique. I'm telling you I don't want you here. I have no respect for you. I want you to get the [expletive] out.
Brooks: I don’t care what you think,
Boyle: I can tell you to get the [expletive] out if I want to!
Brooks: You can, but I don’t have to listen to you.
Boyle: Yeah, ya do! I want him out. And that other [expletive] clown, Brett, or whatever the [expletive] his name is. Where's he at? Everyone else is fine. I want him out. It’s my right. Can they not all stay here? I have tons of respect for some of these guys. I just don't want him here. That should be fine … Can you just [expletive] leave?
Brooks: If you had asked me politely, I might have.
Boyle: POLITELY? Why would I be polite with you? Are you kidding me?
Brooks: Grow up.

Charming.
For the record, Boyle is 39 and his contract is up in New York, and Brooks pilloried his signing as a free agent in a column last October. The clown Brett he was referring to was fellow Post reporter Brett Cyrgalis:

Seriously, yelling at reporters who are trying to do their job is stupid. (Unless they ask something as stupid as this.) Contrary to what most athletes think, it is the media and the press that makes you relevant and not the other way around. If we do not talk about you, then no one out there cares. Quite honestly, at this point no one should care about Dan Boyle, anyway. He was nothing more than a serviceable player on a team that wound up going nowhere. But I am sure he was a gritty leader and a great locker room guy and all of those other hockey clichés you throw around about guys who do nothing of use on the ice.

• Music? It can only be Prince. They played nothing but Prince during NBA telecasts after his death, and you should play nothing but Prince pretty much ever. You would not be worse for it. This is my favorite Prince song, and I am gonna play it, damn it:

Prince

As my wife said to me earlier today, "I want to be 1% as sure of who I am and who I want to be and how to express myself as Prince was."

THERE ARE no words to express how sad I am to hear about Prince's death, and to explain what an artistic hero of mine that he was because of his talent, innovation, and zealous independence. Rest in peace, Prince. Today we all found out what it truly sounds like when doves cry.

But rather than be sad, it's much better if we celebrate his life through his music. I recommend that you just sit back and let Prince take care of things. This is concert from 1982, before he was a mega-star, and it's truly remarkable and worth taking in. If there was one artist on this earth I would want to play for me, and I had my choice of them all, it would be him.

I am getting tired of writing obits. 2016 can bite me.

Swings and Misses

Remember when Mario Balotelli used to be good at football?

LET’S cut right to the chase. We don’t have time for an intro. To the buzzard points!

• The Lose doesn’t care much for golf, considering it to be a good walk spoiled in much the manner of Mark Twain, yet it is competition and a difficult one at that, one in which the margins of victory are so small – often just a single-stroke out of 280+ over the course of four days of play – that the differences between being good and being great are minute and nearly microscopic. The game can be pretty unforgiving, particularly on the mental side of things. If it starts going bad for you in the middle of a round, it’s not like you can call timeout or make a substitution. You have to tough it out, figure it out on the go and get through it. And golf has always been a sport where results are all that matter. If you suck for the first two days of a tourney, they cut you and you’re gone with no dollars to show for it. If you suck for a whole season, they relegate you, kicking you off the PGA Tour and sending you back to the dreaded “Q School.” Quite honestly, I think some other sports would be well served to do this sort of thing. The 76ers should’ve been relegated and been playing the Fort Wayne Mad Ants in the D-League several years ago. (Not that I’m making fun of the Mad Ants here. I love me some Mad Ants. If any of my friends go to the North American Scrabble Championships in Fort Wayne, Indiana, this summer, and don’t come back with Fort Wayne Mad Ants apparel in tow, you have clearly failed at life.)
Anyway, while I don’t care all that much about the game itself – personally, I only play golf while carrying a wine bottle with me in the golf bag – I understand it’s incredibly difficult, and The Lose appreciates everything to be done well, in part because it gives me something to write about when it’s done really badly. And golf done badly, at it’s highest level, makes for spectacular viewing. Golf is a game where there is probably a greater sense of disconnect between the élite and everyone else than in any other sport, in that whereas most of us at least had some illusion of being good at a sport at some point when we growing up, no one that I know has any such illusions about golf. We’re all bad golfers. All of us. We’re all terrible. And if you can be bothered to sit through watching an entire golf tourney, you’re generally going to see the game’s élite separated by only subtle moments here and there – Player A will hit the green and sink a long putt, whereas Player B may be on the fringe and take a par, and that will wind up making the difference – but rarely do you see it decided in spectacular fashion. That’s not normal. Tourneys being won on miraculous shots are magnified simply because they hardly ever happen, and the same can be said of tourneys being lost by catastrophic and inglorious collapses that leave the audience dumbstruck.
Which is precisely what Jordan Spieth did on Sunday. Spieth, who is the #1 player in the world, having won two majors already at the age of 21, was cruising his way to winning The Masters on Sunday, having fired four consecutive birdies on Holes 6-9 to open a sizable lead with only 9 holes to play … and over the course of the next 40 minutes or so, that lead completely evaporated, as he bogeyed the 10th and 11th and then hit the ball in the water twice and took a 7 on the Par-3 12th. He basically gave The Masters away in that sequence, winding up finishing tied for 2nd, a collapse scarcely seen in a major tournament before.
How exactly does someone overcome a choke like this? Well, the solution is pretty simple, and it would be the same solution if he hadn’t choked – go on to the next tourney and try it again, which is this coming weekend at the Texas Open. The Masters is one of the so-called “majors” in golf, but what does that actually mean? There is history and prestige to winning the tournament, but fundamentally what you do to win the tournament – complete 72 holes in the fewest number of strokes – is no different than in any other tournament. This is why I talk about that you must fear metaphor. The mechanics of the game are the same no matter what you do, but it’s the meaning that you attach to the game which changes. And like I say, it works both ways, good and bad. I remember an interview from long ago that the young Boris Becker gave after first winning Wimbledon. He was asked if his goal was to win the U.S. Open that fall and he said no, that his goal was to win the tournament in Indianapolis later in July, simply because Indianapolis was the next tournament on his schedule. Win or lose, that’s how you should always approach it.
Spieth handled the disappointment well (then again, what’s he going to do? Throw a tantrum on live TV?) and he’s a bright young player with a terrific future and an already accomplished past, so here’s to hoping he wins a few more and puts this one behind him and that, at some point in the distant future, he’ll be asked to recall the 2016 Masters and be able to laugh about it. I sure hope he’ll be able to laugh about it, since everyone else will be.

• Baseball season is here and be still my foolish heart. So much lose on a daily basis, all summer long. The American League looks to be a muddled mess, with about 13 teams being able to make a case for being in the race at the start of the year. I have no idea who is any good or bad in the AL. But the hot lose-on-lose action is going to be in the National League, which looks like it’s housing the 5-6 worst teams in baseball. There are the Phillies, of course, who were also wretched a year ago (and who’ve already managed to run into two double plays when the infield fly rule was called during the first week of the season), and the Braves look to be dreadful as well, and it’s not looking so good in Milwaukee or Cincinnati, either (and you can’t attribute much to the Reds’ good start since most of it came at the expense of the Phils), and the Rockies still can’t pitch, so they’ll likely be propping up the standings from the bottom and they even managed to make the Padres look good over the weekend, the Pads having been swept and been outscored 25-0 in three home games with the Dodgers at Pet Food Park to open the season, only to then score 13 and 16 runs on successive nights in Denver.
So that’s six teams who ran the gamut from pretty bad to really bad, two in each division, all of them looking like a 10-game losing streak waiting to happen, and it seems to me that what’s ultimately going to separate the actual good teams from one another on the NL is the extent to which they beat up on the bad ones. You can’t be losing 2 of 3 to the Brewers or 3 of 4 to Atlanta. There are lots of easy wins to be had and the top clubs in the NL need to be ready to feast, since it looks like there are far too many good teams for too few playoff positions.

• If I had to hazard a guess as to who will win the American League, I’d probably put my money on the Toronto Blue Jays. Between the baseballing Jays and the basketballing Toronto Raptors, who are the #2 seed in the Eastern playoffs in the NBA, there is a lot for my sports loving friends north of the border to be excited about in the coming months, which is a good thing, since apparently everyone in Canada forgot to play hockey this year.
The NHL playoffs commence here in a few days, and for the first time since 1970, they will feature no Canadian franchises. But even 1970 deserves something of an asterisk, since there were only two Canadian teams at the time, and the NHL was going through one of it’s weirder periods, being a daffy sort of league known for occasionally doing things that don’t make much sense. The league had rapidly expanded from 6 teams to 12, and in an effort to get the new kids up to speed had split the league into the old guard in the “East” and the the expansion franchises in the “West,” awarding four playoff spots to each division – and thus guaranteeing a recent expansion franchise a spot in the Stanley Cup finals – even though the Original Six teams were far superior. The Montreal Canadians, at 92 points, finished tied for fourth in the East that season, losing out on a tiebreaker for the final playoff spot to the Rangers while finishing with six points more than the West-winning St. Louis Blues and 28 points more than any other Western Division team. The Toronto Maple Leafs, meanwhile, were lousy and finished last in the East, but Toronto’s always lousy so that’s nothing new.
The seven Canadian franchises have no weird twists or shifts in league policy to blame for their malaise in 2016. None of them made the playoffs, nor were any of them particularly close. The best of the bunch, the Ottawa Senators, finished eight points out of a playoff spot. It’s always a shock not to see the Montréal Canadiens in the playoffs, since it happens so infrequently, but the Canadiens endured that sort of lost season due to injuries – most notable to goaltender Carey Price – that can happen sometimes in sports. There’s not much you can do when that happens. It’s just not your year and you just have to heal up, write it off and not read much into it. Edmonton’s hopes for the season, which weren’t all that great to begin with, pretty much evaporated when Connor McDavid, the #1 pick in last summer’s draft and the latest player to be burdened with trying to carry this franchise on his shoulders, promptly hurt his shoulder and missed two months.
The three other Western Canadian franchises – Vancouver, Calgary, and Winnipeg – all crashed in burned after making the playoffs last season, although it should be said that advanced metrics didn’t really like any of those teams a season ago, viewed their success as somewhat fluky and would consider this crashing and burning more to be regressing to the mean. It was particularly depressing for this lifelong Vancouver Canucks fan to watch them start the season blowing leads late and racking up the Bettman points by gagging in OTs and shootouts, since those are the sorts of games that fringe teams need to salvage in order to keep themselves going. If fringe teams are losing close games early in the season, they tend to atone for that by losing by even larger margins late in the season. At one point, the Canucks lost three straight games 5:2, which no team had ever done, and then later lost nine in a row and went about a week without scoring a goal. I thought for a while that they were tanking, but then they went and won all three games against playoff teams on a California swing, so they screwed up that as well. The Canucks couldn’t even bomb out right. Watching this team was a waste of my time.
Then there are the Maple Leafs. No, let’s not go there.
The Lose is very pro-Canada when it comes to hockey. (Except for the Flames and the Oilers, who can both suck it.) It was outrageous and shortsighted in the mid-1990s when Gary Bettman came into the league with his dumb Southern strategy and all of a sudden Canadian franchises were deemed to be unable to compete financially, on account of a weak Canadian dollar at the time, and pretty soon you had the Nordiques playing in Denver and the original Jets going off to suffer a painful death in the Arizona desert. It was a dimwitted and shortsighted strategy which still hasn’t quite worked. The NHL has more badly performing franchises than any other league and it has little to do with market sizes and weak Canadian dollars and has far more to do with them being located in places where ice doesn’t actually form. Canada is where the game is loved and idolized and mythologized, and Canadians deserve better than the nationwide incompetence they were subjected to this season.

• The biggest reason that The Lose is happy the NBA regular season is finally ending is that Kobe Bryant is finally going to go away. Sure, it’s great he’s play 20 years and won 5 championships. I’ll give him that. But his last two seasons in L.A., where he was making $25 million a year mostly because no other free agent worth their salt would sign to play with Kobe, have been utterly farcical.
It’s bad enough that Kobe’s lost his game. Injuries and age have taken their toll. It happens to everyone and it’s tough to watch, particularly when it’s a player who’s been historically great. But what makes Kobe’s fall from lofty heights all the worse is that Byron Scott and the entire Laker organization have basically let him do whatever the fuck he wants out on the court to the detriment of his team and teammates. Among players who shoot as much as Kobe has this year, none have ever had a worse field goal percentage. Meanwhile, on the other end of the floor, the Lakers’ defensive rating when Kobe is on the floor is among the worst in the history of the NBA. Byron Scott actually had the audacity, after the Lakers lost by 48 to the Utah Jazz recently, to suggest that some of the players on the club needed to be held accountable for such a laughingly bad performance – which is completely inane, since Kobe’s been putting up one bad performance after another for two years straight and had carte blanche to do so, and so why should anyone on the team take Byron Scott’s words to mean anything, since there is clearly a double-standard here?
The Lakers have been a train wreck from the outset, naïvely thinking they could compete for a playoff spot and then having Scott coach them like it, sitting his young players out in the 4th Quarter when they should’ve been out there getting experience, consequences be damned. They gave Kobe all that cash primarily because he was still a box office draw, yet as the Kobe Going Away Tour has been carrying on in NBA arenas, he’s often been sitting out home games to compensate, which doesn’t play so well with your regularly paying customers. The Lakers have the second-worst record in the NBA, but if the ping pong balls work their mysterious ways and they fall out of the Top 3 in the lottery, they’ll have to forfeit their first round pick to the Sixers as a result of some bad trade or another over the years. D’Angelo Russell’s recent foray into undercover investigative journalism is only the latest in a series of headaches. They are a total mess worlds away from being competitive again.
Kobe’s last game is this Wednesday as the Lakers host Utah, and I just read the second-dumbest NBA column I’ve read all year (this being the dumbest) which suggested that Kobe’s finale should be the headline game on ESPN that night instead of the Golden State-Memphis game in which the Warriors are trying to break the 1996 Chicago Bulls’ all-time win mark. OK, sure, I’m a Dubs fan so maybe I’m biased, but let’s think about that for a minute … watch a washed up superstar go 7-20 from the field and guard no one and never pass … watch one of the great teams ever try to make history … well this is In Play Lose, after all, so maybe I should tune in to that game at Staples Center after all …
Anyway, congrats on your retirement, Kobe. Now go away.

• I always like to close out a Quick Misses post with some new music I’m listening to, and right now I’m listening a whole lot to Azel, the new record from Nigerien guitar maestro Bombino, who is probably my favorite single musician in the world right now. Bombino’s music is what happens when you take the transcendant, trance-infusing tones of the Sahara desert and mix it with a rock ’n’ roll attitude. I love everything on this record, but this track called Inar is a particularly good one. He’s playing here in San Francisco at The Independent later this month, and I’ll be there with my dancing shoes on and with an enormous glass of whisky in my hand so that dancing so much won’t hurt as much in the morning. Enjoy:

The Process is Dead. Fuck the Process.

Sam Hinkie checking the job postings on craigslist

FIRST off, a correction. In the past, during my many writings about the plight of the Philadelphia 76ers, I have made mention of the fact that Sam Hinkie, Philadelphia’s GM and President of Basketball Operations, came to the Sixers from the San Antonio Spurs. In fact, he came over to Philadelphia from the Houston Rockets. The Lose regrets the error, and curses our crack staff of editors and fact checkers here at In Play Lose World HQ for being so lax.

And now we need another correction, because the previous statement is incorrect. Sam Hinkie is now the former GM and President of Basketball Operations for the Philadelphia 76ers. The Lose regrets that error as well. (Well, not really.) And now that we’ve done our duty and attempted to maintain our journalistic integrity, it’s time to trash his ass.

Sam Hinkie resigned on Wednesday, and now The Lose is wondering just what in the hell I’m going to write about now. Now that baseball season is upon us, there will be no shortage of lose, of course, particularly in the National League, where there are about six teams which look like they’re going to be absolutely dreadful, none more so than the San Diego Padres, who hosted the L.A. Dodgers for three games as Pet Food Park to open the season, lost all three, and got outscored 25-0 in the process. With this atrocious and truly hopeless opening salvo to the season, Padres GM A.J. Preller, who undertook the worst MLB offseason spending spree ever last year, has immediately leapt to the top spot in The Lose’s unofficial list I keep in my head called, “Guys Who You Wonder How They Have a Job in Pro Sports.” It’s an unofficial list with no set number of members. A good number of the list’s occupants have found themselves being laid off in the past year or so – Ruben Amaro, Jack Zduriencik, Billy King – and it’s not looking so good for some others – I’m looking at you, Byron Scott – but Preller has rapidly ascended the list, having charged to the top with such brazen managerial incompetence that it has most likely left the Padres doomed to suck for the next 5 years, if not longer. (And this is already the franchise with the worst overall winning percentage in MLB, so the bar for success here is set pretty low.) I know it’s early in the baseball season, but the Padres look hopeless and Preller has already shot into the #1 spot.

In part because the previous occupant of the #1 spot, Sam Hinkie, just resigned on Wednesday.

And to be clear here, I wish no ill will on any of these people. Folks losing their jobs suck. This is not some act of schadenfreude on my part. I have no ill will towards any of the terrible Pro Sports execs who I mentioned above. As I said before, what the hell am I going to write about now? Incompetence is good for The Lose business. It’s essential. Hinkie participated in a podcast with ESPN’s Zac Lowe this past Tuesday, which is worth a listen. He’s somewhat evasive and not particularly forthright in the interview, but given that he was obviously under some pressure (witness the fact that he resigned the very next day), you can certainly understand why. He seemed very bright and engaging and interesting, and I wish him nothing but the best from hereon out.

But having said all of that, you have to look at his body of work and wonder just how in the hell the ownership group in Philadelphia were dumb enough to a) hire this guy; and b) stick with him through three seasons so bad that Roget hasn’t found a synonym for ‘bad’ to describe just how bad it was. During Hinkie’s tenure, the 76ers’ record was 47-195. That’s a .194 winning percentage. The 76ers won on Tuesday night 107:93 over the corpse of the New Orleans Pelicans, a team whose five top scorers are injured and out for the season, thus raising their record to 10-68 and avoiding matching their club and NBA record for futility – the 1972-1973 76ers team that finished 9-73. After seeing their team lose 22 of its previous 23 games, the Sixers fans at Enormous Banking Conglomerate Center in Philadelphia were so giddy about this win that they chanted, “M-V-P! M-V-P!” in the direction of the game’s top scorer, serviceable journeyman forward and all-around good sport Carl Landry. (More on him in a moment.) When you start the season 1-30, and then go 1-22 later in the season, making it to the 10 win plateau counts as something of an accomplishment, I suppose.

It had gotten so bad in Philadelphia that earlier this year the organization hired former Suns and USA Basketball mastermind Jerry Colangelo as a ‘consultant.’ It has been suggested repeatedly that this was done at the behest of the league offices, because the NBA was embarrassed about the sorry state of the franchise – and, more to the point, the other 29 owners were outraged about the state of the 76ers, because what should be a marquee and lucrative franchise wasn’t generating the sorts of revenues it should be producing given that it had become such a laughingstock. And even though no one involved in the league could come right out and say it, what was going on in Philadelphia was clearly a case of an organization that was systematically tanking, trying to be as bad as possible in the hopes of gaming the system and improving its odds of winning the NBA draft lottery, hoping to somehow land a bona fide superstar. As I’ve said before, I hate the draft lottery and wish the league(s) would do away with it entirely, because it fundamentally provides a perverse incentive not to be successful – and when teams who have only a 1% of winning the lottery strike it rich, like the Chicago Bulls and the Cleveland Cavaliers have done, it only further legitimizes the strategy, because the 1% chance of winning the lottery that you get when you barely miss the playoffs is still better than the 0% chance you have if you’re the 8th seed and you’re playing the Dubs or the Cavs. For a league that has spent much of the past 30 years being hounded by accusations that games aren’t on the up-and-up – how did Mark Cuban put it? Oh, right, “Fuck you! Fuck you! Your game is rigged!” – the idea that one of your franchises is engaging in deliberately and systematically trying to fail doesn’t sit well in the corporate offices.

But it was pretty clear when Colangelo came on board that he wasn’t just a ‘consultant.’ In the 76ers pecking order, he was suddenly slotted above Hinkie, and reports indicate that Hinkie was going to be pushed even further down the totem pole in favor of Bryan Colangelo, the former GM of the Suns and the Raptors who happens to be Jerry’s son. He’s been named NBA Executive of the Year on two occasions, Bryan has, but his body of work as a whole as an NBA exec has been somewhat mixed. Quite bluntly, he wouldn’t be getting this job in Philly if his last name wasn’t Colangelo. Hinkie’s response to this impeding demotion was to pen a 13-page letter of resignation which is baffling and absolutely bizarre. (And for all disciples of In Play Lose, this is now officially required reading.) It reads like the opening of someone’s dissertation, rife with quotations and philosophical bents but lacking anything of substance.

And the substance is what’s at issue here. The substance is that the 76ers have won .194 of their games and so embarrassed the league that it’s looking into trying to rejig the lottery so as to somehow dissuade this kind of nonsense from ever happening again. They’ve attempted to game the system and its rules, running payrolls well below the salary floor and propping them up with zombie cap figures from contracts of players long since waived, running through endless numbers of players on endless numbers of 10-day contracts, and making trades for the express purpose of trying to make the team, as a whole, even worse than it was before. It’s at the end of that ludicrous letter that Hinkie tries to use his clearly superior mathematical skills to prove his point:

“In the upcoming May draft lottery, we have what will likely be the best ever odds to get the #1 overall pick (nearly 30%), a roughly 50/50 chance at a top-2 pick (the highest ever), and a roughly 50/50 chance at two top-5 picks, which would be the best lottery night haul ever. That same bounce of a ping pong ball (almost a flip of a coin) will determine if we have three first round picks this year (unusual) or four (unprecedented). That's this year.”

To Hinkie, all of the wheeling and dealing and horse trading has been, in essence, a math problem. That the 76ers could possibly wind up with four first round draft picks – their own plus three others (read here to try and make sense of it) – sounds really great, except for the fact that a large reason why the 76ers are 10-68 and still going through all of this mess is that, under Hinkie, they’ve drafted terribly. At some point you have to actually show that you’re capable of judging NBA talent.

We mentioned Carl Landry before, and he’s part of a “great” trade the 76ers made in the off-season. Knowing that the nitwit Sacramento Kings were desperate to free up cap space to try and sign some mediocre free agents, the 76ers agreed to take on Landry, Jason Thompson, and Nik Stauskas from the Kings. In exchange, the Kings agreed to give the 76ers rights to swap places in the draft with the Kings in 2017 and 2018. Everyone agrees in NBA circles that, for the Kings, this was a stupid trade. An absolutely stupid trade. You don’t give up swap rights to your picks when there is no guarantee you’re going to be any good. But the Kings, of course, have no idea what they’re doing and are run by a bunch of delusional weirdos, a good number of whom actually believed they’d contend for a playoff spot this year when all indications are that they’re likely to be dreadful for the foreseeable future. This wasn’t a good thing to give up, and so the early line on this was that the Sixers won the deal.

But you’re only going to “win” the deal if, in 2017 and 2018, your team is actually better than the Kings and you have something to swap! In the abstract, this deal may be a “win,” but it does absolutely nothing to help your team actually go about winning that deal by winning more games! Landry is basically there in Philly to be salary cap filler, Stauskas was already a bust in Sacto and the 76ers were simply taking a flyer on him, and Thompson was promptly traded to the Warriors for Gerald Green, another player the 76ers didn’t want but also one who basically can’t play any more, so they waived him and paid him $10,000,000 to go away and counted that 10 mil on their salary cap. This trade doesn’t count as a win, because nothing Sam Hinkie did here actually contributes to any improved performance on the floor.

And that’s where none of this works. All the back room procedural shit means nothing if it doesn’t result in wins. Wins! And simply promising it’s all going to get better some day doesn’t really cut it when what you have to show for 100 or so roster transactions is three good players on your team, and all you have to show from three drafts is the drafting of three centers, a point guard who can’t shoot, and a Slovenian guy with three years left on his contract in Turkey. There were some decent players in that 2014 draft. And sure, franchises whiff in the draft and miss on guys, but to come away with absolutely no useful players when you have two first round picks and you’re coming off a season in which you lost 26 games in a row is unforgivable.

This team was so young and so bereft of leadership this year that they finally had to relent and trade for Ish Smith to play the point – an unspectacular player but a safe pair of hands – and give up two of those precious draft assets to do so when they could have just signed him in the offseason in the first place. They wasted the third pick in the 2014 draft on Joel Embiid, who has missed two seasons with foot problems, and even if he comes back healthy next year, you now have all three of those centers still on your roster and nowhere on the floor to put them all, which means you’re going to have to move one of them and probably take a loss on the deal, because everyone knows you need to move one of them. Throw another four 20-year-olds out there – four 20-year-olds from what is shaping up to be not a great draft, by the way – and now the team is even younger and more raw and more inexperienced than before, and not likely to be any better, and it’s not a sure thing that they’ll ever get better, seeing as how there’s been no indication in three years that this team has any aptitude for developing players at all. But at least now, you can say that having all of these draft assets might bear some fruit, since it won’t be Hinkie doing the drafting.

But hey, we have cap space! Oh boy! Having cap space means little with the salary cap soaring in upcoming years. Everyone will have cap space then, free agents will be more able to choose than ever before, and as the Kings found out after making that dumb trade, having money to spend means nothing if your franchise is a toxic waste dump. No player worth his salt is going anywhere near Philly for years. The Colangelo family is going to have to do a lot of smoothing things over with the agents out there, a lot of whom Hinkie has pissed off, and the fact that he’s been systematically setting players up to fail for three years doesn’t make the organization look so good with the NBA rank-and-file. (Here’s a great story of how Kristaps Porzingis did basically everything possible to avoid being drafted by 76ers. He may be onto something there.)

Sam Hinkie clearly knows how to do the math, but he also clearly doesn’t have any eye or feel for NBA talent. Another thing he clearly knew how to do was spin a tall tale, since he somehow convinced the new ownership group in Philadelphia that he had some method and formula which would ultimately lead to great success. They’ve labeled this ‘the process’ in Philly, and if you read any Sixers fan message boards, it’s alarming to see just how many fans bought into this rubbish and drank the Sam Hinkie magical kool-aid, when it seemed pretty obvious from the get-go that it was a bad idea and was doomed to fail miserably. But P.T. Barnum was right. There really are suckers born every day. The 76ers have less resembled a functioning NBA team in the past three years and more resembled a combination of used car dealership and theatre of the absurd. If you actually bought into ‘the process,’ I hope that it also came with a year’s supply of snake oil. At least you only had to suffer through that for a year.

Better to have lost and been loved ...

This shot went in somehow

“The difference in college basketball between winning and losing is so small. The difference in your feelings is so large.”
– North Carolina coach Roy Williams

THE NCAA title game was terrific, which finals rarely are in any sport. Kris Jenkins’ buzzer-beater gave Villanova a 77:74 win over North Carolina, coming just 4.7 seconds after Carolina’s Marcus Paige tied the score with one of the most ridiculous shots I’ve ever seen. The Lose had no rooting interest in this game, as I appreciate both of their head coaches for insisting on still coaching offense and encouraging creativity through what has been an appallingly deadball era in the game, during which many supposed “genius” coaches have simply taken to trying to defensively suffocate the opposition. Calling Villanova an underdog is something of a stretch – they won a championship in 1985, have consistently been near to the top ever since, were ranked #1 in the polls for a bit this past season, and were ranked #1 in the nation by some of the statistical metrics – but it’s nice to see a relatively fresh face win the title and break the sport even more out of the stasis and predictability that was coming to stymie it. The final was a terrific game, well played and extremely competitive, and the denouement made it one of the sport’s more memorable acts. I’d have been happy to see them play another 5-10 minutes of OT, just because it was a great game. It truly was a shame someone had to lose.

The one-and-done nature of the NCAA tournament contributes greatly to it being the most dramatic endeavor in American sports. Losses can be so sudden and swift. In an instant, your season is over or, even more, your career is over, since a good number of the college kids involved will never play basketball at this sort of level again. That fact adds an element of cruelty to it all, since your last game is a loss and you almost certainly didn’t play your best game. The losses can certainly be traumatic. I don’t think that the DePaul basketball program has ever recovered from 1981, when they were ranked #1 in the nation and lost in the second round to a St. Joseph’s team so nondescript that the winning bucket was scored by a guy named John Smith. The iconic image from that game, captured and documented on film, is that of DePaul’s star, Mark Aguirre, clutching the ball tight to his chest in the aftermath, the tears rolling down his cheeks. I always rooted for him after that. I was happy when Aguirre got a ring with the Detroit Pistons later that decade.

And what’s all the more galling is that most of the time, you lose in the NCAA tournament because first and foremost, you didn’t shoot very well, and after you’ve spent much of the previous 22 years throwing a ball at a rim in gyms and on playgrounds and in the backyard, you’ve probably gotten pretty good at shooting the ball, only to have this fundamental skill of the game betray you at the worst time possible. Not playing your best, and not showing what you truly are capable of doing, adds to the disappointment.

With time comes perspective, of course, particularly if you were a player at a lesser school of whom nothing was expected. Reaching the NCAA tournament in the first place is the true accomplishment. The details of how you exited the tourney, in most cases, will disappear into the dustbin of history. Unless, of course, you lose the way North Carolina did last night, which condemns you to being part of the montage.

Television loves their montages of great buzzer beating moments in the NCAA – and they should love them, because the drama of the NCAA buzzer beater, and the explosion of emotions good and bad when it occurs, is like nothing else in sports. It makes for great TV. And so you can be sure that every March, from now on, you’re going to see a commercial or an opening montage in which Kris Jenkins hits a 25’ jumper at the buzzer. He’s joined the ranks of Bryce Drew and Lorenzo Charles and Rip Hamilton, immortalized in glory for their spectacular last-second NCAA exploit, whereas North Carolina now joins the ranks of Ole Miss and Houston and Washington (LOL Husky scum), in suffering the worst possible indignity of getting beat at the buzzer and now having to see that moment replayed again and again and again, over and over and over, ad infinitum, being reminded time and again how they failed on the biggest stage they’d ever stepped onto. This feels like a fate straight out of Greek tragedy, the repetitive nature of which is designed to slowly drive you insane. You definitely want to avoid the montage. (And for god’s sake, stay out of a documentary.)

CBS has compiled a nice montage of legendary NCAA moments which serves as the opener to their  telecasts, and one of those moments in particular resonates with me: the image of Gordon Hayward racing up the court with the ball in the dying seconds of the 2010 NCAA Championship Game between Butler and Duke. Hayward launches a stunning heave from half court …

… aaand thanks to a clever edit, you don’t see whether the shot goes in or not.

Go back for a moment to 2010. Here was Butler University, a well-respected educational institution in Indianapolis with a good basketballing tradition, but certainly not a great one, reaching the NCAA championship game – and that mere fact alone seemed unthinkable. But the Bulldogs were blessed with a coach, Brad Stevens, whose mind for the game and tactical acumen greatly exceeded the status of his program. Under his tutelage, several of his players had developed into legitimate NBA-caliber talents. Butler had snuck up on everybody, becoming really good when no one was paying attention, and over the course of the month of March 2010, Butler had become the ultimate NCAA Good Guys, champions of little guys everywhere, a triumph of hard work and tenacity and resourcefulness. And then it comes down to the final seconds, they’re down two with almost no time left, but Hayward has the ball and he’s their best player and he heaves it up from half court, and when it leaves his hand and you watch the rotation and trajectory of the shot and you think, “my god, that just might go in …”

… but it didn’t go in, of course, and Duke prevailed over Butler 61:59. Butler had become the ultimate NCAA Good Guys during the 2010 tournament, and they wound up losing to the NCAA tournament’s undisputed Public Enemy #1. Duke hates fun. Duke ruins your day. They’ve been ruining the narrative of the NCAA tournament for the better part of 25 years.

Duke won their first title in 1991, having pulled a stunning upset in the semifinal of an undefeated UNLV team which, player for player and play for play, was probably the best team we’ve seen in college basketball in the past 40 years. The following year, 1992, saw Duke defeat the Fab Five in the final, the Michigan team of Chris Webber and Jalen Rose and Juwan Howard whose five starters were all freshmen.

Duke’s third title, in 2001, changed the dynamic of the Final Four insofar as that what had once been a stale, neutral court environment ceased to be that way, because the Maryland fans were so angry about the Terrapins’ loss to Duke in the semis that they booed the Dookies constantly and mercilessly throughout the final game against Arizona. A narrative which has dogged the game for decades is “Duke gets all the calls,” and sure enough, the officials pointed Duke’s way at a few critical moments in the semifinal, as well as in the final against Arizona, as they seemingly always did. (This narrative conveniently leaves out the fact that Maryland blew a 23-point lead, of course.) A legitimate complaint about the game of college basketball over the years, in my opinion, is that the annoying and insufferable hero worship of the college basketball coach extends to the actions of the officials on the floor. Pit two teams against each other, one coached by a legend (which Coach K is), and another by an also-ran, and you can take a pretty good guess as to which team is going to get all of the 50-50 breaks from the zeebs. I don’t think there is any intentional malice in this, mind you. Referees are human and are affected by external forces, such as the sway of the crowd. This is why the home team generally gets the breaks from officials. As a player, you know this going in and you try to play through it, knowing that your team is going to get the breaks in your own gym. But when a team who “gets all the calls” seemingly “gets all the calls” all the way to winning a championship, the narrative and legacy it leaves behind is that it’s not a fair fight, it’s an unfair game.

Duke then beat Butler as mentioned above for Title #4, a stunning rebuke of little guys and romantics everywhere, and Title #5 came a year ago against a Wisconsin team that had defeated previously undefeated Kentucky in the semifinals. Kentucky had a chance to be the first team in the history of the game to go 40-0 in a season, a truly remarkable accomplishment, a stamp of ultimate greatness. Nope, sorry, instead we got Duke again.

Duke is no fun. Duke kills your dreams and stomps on your ideals. You should never invite Duke to the party. Duke ruins everything. They ruin a good narrative, they ruin a great story.

And ultimately, from the perspective of history, the narrative is what matters. A large part of the advancement of any sport is the selling of its legends. This gets completely tiresome during a baseball season, of course, because at some point in every single game you watch or listen to, someone involved in the broadcast feels a compulsion to retell some story of the team’s past. Cricket is even worse on that account. The game going on itself seems almost like an afterthought at times.  

“He bowled 65-3 when Australia was 187 all out during the first innings of the Ashes match at Lord’s in 1977, or was it ’78? … oh, and by the way, there’s two runs, and England are now 181 for 6 …  now where were we? Oh yes, it was 1978 ...”

In the case of those last two sports I mentioned, you wonder at times if there is anything at all to the sport but past narratives.

And since there is an international audience who reads this blog, a good number of whom probably know nothing about American college basketball, and care little about the plights of a bunch of 20-year old American college kids, I should probably use an analogy that the international audience can understand. If college basketball is soccer, then Duke are the Germans.

* * *

Johan Cruijff, Netherlands v. Uruguay, 1974 World Cup

“Football is played with the head.”
– Johan Cruijff

Johan Cruijff died just recently at the age of 68, and football and the world of sport are definitely the worse for it, as Cruijff was probably the most influential figure the sport has ever known. As a player, you’d have to rank him as the best European player ever. His prowess on the football pitch places him with the Peles and Maradonas and Messis of the world. He was that good.

But what makes him the most influential figure in the game is not only his skills on the pitch, but his success as a manager and executive. Cruijff was fundamental in the creation of the F.C. Barcelona style of play still prevalent today, and his greatest triumph came in the building of the Barca youth academy which has cranked out great players for decades, many of whom composed the core of that Spanish national team whose achievements rank it as among the best ever – winning the 2010 World Cup and Euros in 2008 and 2012, the only country to win three majors consecutively. Cruijff’s fingerprints are all over Spanish football, and he was the integral force in Dutch football, which had become something of a backwater pre-Cruijff, having not been to a World Cup in more than 30 years. Suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, Ajax Amsterdam and Feijenoord were winning European silverware in the late 1960s and early 1970s, while Cruijff was busy winning three Ballon d’Ors. The Dutch had suddenly gone from being also-rans to international powerhouses, with Johan Cruijff leading the way.

And this Dutch success was not simply down to great talent, although Cruijff & Co. had plenty of that. (You don’t get a move named after you for nothing.) It was success based more in the way that the Dutch thought about the game. Cruijff’s most famous quote above (and there are many famous quotes to choose from), speaks to this. The Dutch played the game with their heads. They thought about it differently. There is a reason why there are so many Dutch coaches involved in the game on a worldwide level, as this approach has become pervasive over time. Cruijff was an innovator, a contrarian, rebellious by nature and willing to challenge the orthodoxy. He thought up ways of doing things on the pitch that no one had ever conceived of, and then went about doing them. Watch a great game of football today, and Cruijff’s influence is everywhere. Systems and tactics and techniques you take for granted were radical back in the early 1970s, when those crazy orange-clad guys straight out of Europe’s bastion of hippie counterculture were doing stuff on the pitch that no one had ever seen.

The World Cup final of 1974 is arguably the most talked about, most written about sporting event in the history of humanity. An entire bookshelf’s worth of literature has been written about that game: sports books, of course, but also books on sociology, philosophy, psychology and even history. The game had that much of a resonance. The game opens with a stunning sequence (just watch the first few minutes) in which the Dutch keep possession of the ball, systematically march down the field, and the first German to touch the ball at all is the goalkeeper who is picking it out of his own net. It’s the single most devastating foray that the game has ever seen, about three minutes worth of fury which provided a legitimacy and validation to all of Dutch football and serves as the foundation of their legacy as one of the greatest teams of all time.

And then they played the remaining 87 minutes of the match, and the Dutch proceeded to lose. One of the commonly repeated jokes about the 1974 World Cup final is that the Oranje did everything in that game except remember to score the second goal. The Dutch ultimately lost the World Cup final 2:1 to the hated Germans.

But to Cruijff, ever the contrarian, the Dutch had, in essence, “won” the World Cup. The Dutch of 1974 were memorable, after all. They were innovative, they were creative and exciting, whereas the Germans were a typically methodical, humorless, bland outfit that not even their own sporting public enjoyed all that much. After the 1974 World Cup was over, no coaches nor football managers were going to be attempting to replicate what the Germans were trying to do – but everyone wanted to figure out what the Dutch were doing and copy it, learn from it. That impact on the game, in the mind of Cruijff, was the true success.

An interesting notion, on Cruijff’s part. Certainly, it’s easy to be skeptical about such an attitude:

“Cruijff said afterwards, ‘We were very successful in a way because we were acclaimed for our style and everybody said we we were the best team.’ But it deflected attention away from the failure. Over the years it became an excuse. The Dutch thing became beautiful losing. It became a national brand in their football. But that’s not how it was pre-’74. The guys who played in that team were used to winning and Rinus Michels invented Total Football not as a way of making beautiful patterns on the field but as a way of winning. The Ajax team that were European champions three years running were much better than everyone else and won. That was the plan for 1974. Holland weren’t there to make up the numbers and finish second and get acclaimed for their loveliness and their open-mindedness and their philosophical nature. They were there to win. So it was one thing before July 7, 1974, and then afterwards it was kind of retooled and reimagined as, ‘actually, we succeeded anyway.’ But they didn’t. It was a failure. But a success in other ways. It was always a prickly thing that you couldn’t come to terms with or move on from. It was an unresolved trauma. The beauty and achievement was creating a wonderful brand of football.”
– David Winner, author of “Brilliant Orange: The Neurotic Genius of Dutch Soccer”

Certainly, the idea of losing elegantly seems to be inherent to Dutch soccer. The Oranje have lost three World Cup finals. A fourth team, in 1998, was the best team in the tourney yet somehow contrived to lose on penalties in the semis after drawing 1:1 with Brazil in a game they totally dominated, squandering chance after chance after chance. But it’s never been a case of simply winning or losing for the Dutch. They have to look good doing it, a fact which is often written into national team manager’s contracts. The Dutch were heavily criticized for taking a cynical, clinical approach to the 2010 final with Spain, often resorting to playing the man instead of the ball while conniving to create a counterattack opportunity. Never mind, of course, that it was probably the right approach given the opponent, and had Robben not blown his breakaway opportunity, the tactics would have worked. At some point, you should really stop trying to look good and start trying to win the game, don’t you think? You can claim all you want that the results don’t matter, but it’s still a results oriented business:

“The virtuous Dutch against the ugly Germans? I don’t think that works any more. Replaying the war? I don’t think that really works. What happened was they took so long to face the problem directly. The first reaction was ‘Oh, it doesn’t matter.’ They had a party when they came home. They had a reception with the Queen and it was as if they were rehearsing for all the future disappointments. But their feelings were very raw. They pretended they were satisfied sometimes. Knowing that they were the best and that they came up with this completely new way of playing football which was better than everyone else’s – that was a part of it. It wasn’t okay to come second. It was an enduring pain. And it happened again in 1978 and happened again in a slightly different way in 1998 when the best team should’ve won it. Dennis Bergkamp – an embodiment of the mentality that disasters aren’t that disastrous and the joys aren’t that joyful – he’s still haunted by 1998, which was his generation’s 1974. Holland should’ve won. They were the best team. They were the team the French didn’t want to play in the final. They were better than the Brazilians and yet they failed. And it nags at him, but he can’t do anything about it some 16 years later. It’s too late. You can’t replay the game. It’s that moment: you had to take your chance and you didn’t. That’s why it lingers and gnaws away. And because a World Cup comes around every four years, it’s not like a Champions League or a league title. It’s once in a lifetime and that’s why it hurts.”
– David Winner

I get all of that, and I agree to an extent, yet Cruijff has a point. History is complicated. Nixon once quipped that history would judge him favorably, yet historians wouldn’t. One of the more laughably stupid themes of the entire Deflategate kerfuffle is the idea that it would somehow taint Tom Brady and the New England Patriots’ legacy. Guess what? In the moment, you don’t give a damn about your legacy. You give a damn about winning. How you are perceived and remembered in the future isn’t up to you. Your legacy gets determined for you, and sometimes it has nothing to do with results. A large part of Barca’s successes, and the successes of Spanish football as a whole, trace back to the expat Dutchman who steered the club for decades, yet Cruijff’s legacy, first and foremost, is defined by having captained and led the side who were the purveyors of the game’s most storied failure.

“I’m ex-player, ex-technical director, ex-coach, ex-manager, ex-honorary president. A nice list that once again shows that everything comes to an end.”
– Johann Cruijff

* * *

And what we’ve seen time and again, over the history of sport, is that it’s not the winners who we most fondly remember – but, in fact, it’s those who come up short who are far more beloved than those who prevail.

Which is not to say that champions aren’t revered. The ’27 Yankees, ’85 Bears and ’96 Bulls are among the most revered and legendary teams of all-time. As the Warriors have been chasing down some of those records set by the ’96 Bulls, it’s been met with a somewhat astonishing backlash from basketball old-timers, all of whom seem to think that the game is somehow played in a vacuum and that you could stick the ’96 Bulls and 2016 Warriors on the court and the Bulls would somehow prevail. This is, quite frankly, completely idiotic, as the game has changed in 20 years, the schemes are far more sophisticated and the skill sets far more developed. Everything that you do in the present gets learned from and improved upon in the future. The Warriors would wipe the floor with the Bulls, and the San Antonio Spurs would do the same, for that matter, but the Dubs are messing with history here, you see, and I’ve found it rather amusing to see the Warriors transitioning from being perceived as heroes to villains, when as far as I can tell, all they’ve been doing is going out and winning basketball games at a slightly more frequent rate this season than last.

But the Dubs are a good example to point out here, since their cutting-edge style of play is directly drawn from that of one of the most beloved teams in recent NBA history, the Seven Seconds Or Less Phoenix Suns, who were the greatest show in the game from 2004-2008 and who revolutionized the game of basketball … and who couldn’t win an NBA title. It’s in this article about the Suns where Bill Simmons and Chris Connelly float an idea which I’m vamping on in this post, that of being ‘critically acclaimed’ and thus lovable even though the success wasn’t ultimately there. Notice how the 1974 Oranje are high on that list of critically acclaimed athletes and teams, as are the Fab Five and we’ll get back to them in a minute, and also a team near and dear to my heart, the Loyola Marymount team from the turn of the ’90s who routinely scored 140 or 150 points in a game and whose best player, Hank Gathers, dropped dead in the middle of a game. (It still makes me sad to think about this.) Loyola Marymount played their hearts out in the 1990 NCAA tourney without him and reached the final eight, only to be crushed by UNLV, and LMU coach Paul Westhead – an English professor as well as a coach – was remarkably philosophical about it all. The winning and the losing in the NCAA tournament ultimately didn’t matter all that much, in a greater context. Hank Gathers had died and eventually you’d have to come to terms with it. There were never going to be enough games to hide behind. Had they won the whole tournament, they still would have their day of reckoning where they came to grips with Gathers being gone. In the end, Loyola Marymount made many friends simply through their inspired play in the most unimaginable of circumstances, and it was how they carried themselves through difficult times, and in defeat, which said more about them than any actual result on the court.

Indeed, one of the reasons why Duke has become reviled over time is the perception that they are sore winners, that they are elitists possessing a sense of entitlement. They also usually have some sneaky little shithead on their team, be it Christian Laettner or J.J. Reddick or Grayson Allen, who thrives upon antagonizing the opposition and who occasionally resort to dirty tricks in order to do it. This narrative isn’t entirely fair, of course. Duke reached the championship game in 1990, the year before their first title, and they were absolutely annihilated 103:73 by UNLV, a humbling beatdown if there ever was one. For all of his titles over the years, Coach K’s best team of all was one that didn’t actually win the title, the 1999 team which lost in the final to Connecticut, a program which is equally successful and equally obnoxious, if not more so. That ’99 Duke team was ranked #1 almost the entire season, didn’t play anywhere near their best game in the final, and still only lost by three to UConn in a game that went to the buzzer, at which point they were forced to show a shocking humility and grace seemingly unbecoming of the program.

But that happens, of course. It’s in defeat that you see that humanity come out. The most ruthless killing machine of sport in my time on this earth – the Soviet hockey team – lost a game to the U.S. at the Lake Placid Olympics in 1980, and what was stunning about it was just how human they suddenly seemed. The coach made a bad decision – yanking his goaltender, Vladislav Tretiak, in a fit of rage after the first period – the players began to make inexplicable errors, and they tightened up once the momentum had shifted the Americans’ way. (Several great documentaries have been made about this team, Of Miracles and Men and Red Army.) The Duke documentary that I mentioned earlier chronicles the so-called ‘Laettner Game,’ Duke’s 104:103 OT win over Kentucky in the 1992 NCAA East Regional final that is considered by many to be the greatest college basketball game of all time – and given the pedigree, and somewhat dubious history, anything that can wind up with both Rick Pitino and Kentucky portrayed in a sympathetic light is noteworthy, but Kentucky were nothing less than gallant in defeat on that particular day.

And for the record, that’s not the greatest college basketball game ever played. It’s the second-best game ever played. This is the best game ever played, #2 NC State beating #1 Maryland 103:100 in OT in the 1974 ACC championship. Maryland had six future NBA players on their team, shot 61% and lost. It’s a game which changed college basketball forever, since this was the #1 and #2 teams in the country essentially playing a loser-out game, since back then only the conference champions got to go to the NCAA tourney. The NCAA tourney then began to expand the following year, since it seemed ridiculous to leave a team like Maryland out of the field. Interestingly, Maryland declined an invitation to the NIT that year, deciding to let their great season come to an end:

“Why risk losing to an inferior team just because we didn't come to play? Then our legacy is destroyed. In the end, I think we were vindicated by the fact that when they  (N.C. State) were asked who the best team was that they played, and they said it was us.”
– Len Elmore, Maryland center

And after Duke beat Kentucky in that Laettner game, they went on to win the national championship against Michigan, aka The Fab Five, one of the most groundbreaking teams in sports. It seemed nuts for Michigan to start five freshmen at once, but The Fab Five changed the game of college basketball with their style and their swagger – a style and swagger which occasionally masked what made them successful on the court, which was a high IQ game and a group of five who played wonderfully together as a team. After losing to Duke in the 1992 final as freshmen, the Fab Five returned to the final as sophomores, only to lose 77:71 to North Carolina in 1993. The pivotal moment of the game came when, down a bucket in the closing stages, Michigan’s Chris Webber called a timeout that his team didn’t have. It was a brain cramp, pure and simple, but far too many Fab Five-haters, many of whom trawled and trolled as hero-coach worshipping journalists, chortled it up in the aftermath, hailing Michigan’s loss to a Dean Smith-coached Carolina as a triumph of substance over style, which was utter nonsense. And with that loss came the end of the Fab Five: Webber jumped to the NBA immediately, and it was later revealed that there had been improprieties involving a Michigan booster, so all of the Fab Five’s achievements were officially stricken from the record books. They vanished almost as quickly as they had arisen. There is almost a James Dean, Rebel Without a Cause sort of quality to the Fab Five which has made their fleeting success seem almost larger than life.

And who even remembers that North Carolina team from 1993? Name me one guy who played in that final who was wearing powder blue? Winners are surprisingly unmemorable a lot of the time. This is because winners, in fact, tend to play it safe. They aren’t groundbreakers or revolutionaries. They tend to fall in line with orthodoxy and convention.

Memorable losers like The Fab Five, or the SSOL Suns or the Clockwork Oranje, do things differently. They have different approaches and different ideas. The phrase ‘ahead of their time’ has become a cliché for a reason. People around the NBA didn’t think it was possible for a team like the Suns to win the title – only to see, seven years later, the Golden State Warriors play in much the same manner and do exactly that. You may lose in the moment, but Johan Cruijff was right: in the long run, if you’re memorable, you’re the ultimate winner.

Which is why, when I see the opening NCAA montage, and see Butler’s Gordon Hayward launching it from half-court in the dying seconds, you don’t have to see whether or not the ball goes in the basket. It doesn’t matter whether it did or not. By simply getting to that point, Butler were the winners. In the long run, the actual outcome of the game only matters to a select few. They promptly undid their hipster indie credit the following year, reaching the title game yet again and then losing to Connecticut 54:41 in what was, quite simply, the worst basketball game that I have ever seen. The two teams combined to shoot .261 from the floor in the game, missing 88 shots between them. Yeech! At that point, Butler were no longer lovable losers. They were just bad. Their time had run its course. But in that first finals loss against Duke, Butler captured imagination, they excited minds and they showed what was possible. It’s better to have been loved, and lost, than never to have lost at all.

We need narrative, we need myths and legends to maintain our interest. And those who come before us and who fail ultimately move us forward, as we attempt to improve in the areas where they came up short. Copying what winners do, ultimately, simply muddies the waters, because everyone does it and the end result is a suffocating sameness and staleness. Great ideas come from everywhere, but the execution of those ideas is often longer in coming. If we didn’t have legendary and lovable losers, we’d lose a great deal of the texture and context. Success changes that narrative, of course: in two cases in baseball, long-suffering franchises have recently become big winners, with the Red Sox and Giants each winning three World Series after going more than a half-century without winning any. You may shed that lovable loser tag at that point – I can look forward to reading about “arrogant and entitled Giants fans” on message boards now, as we march towards yet another Giants even year bullshit pennant – but that legacy of failure makes success all the more sweet, and the stories of how you came to fail, just like all good narratives, are bound to just get better and better (and funnier and funnier) as you get older, aging like a fine, fine wine.