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| LeBron checks out |
IT WAS a great weekend of Lose and let us get right to it, beginning today’s Defeat tour in Cleveland, which is probably something we can do with any Lose entry. To the buzzard points!
• It really didn’t surprise me that much when David Blatt was fired by the Cleveland Cavaliers, despite having a 30-11 record this season, and despite having led the team to within two games of the NBA championship a season ago. We were excited for the game against the Golden State Warriors last Monday while we were still in New Orleans, and a bunch of us gathered at someone’s hotel room to watch – only we got there late, and the game was basically over. And by “late,” I mean just a couple of minutes into it, but Golden State was already up 12-2, and given the fact that GSDubs have won something like 55 games in a row when they’ve built a double-digit lead, and the fact that Cleveland looked as lively as guests on a Monday night at the morgue, the game – which was probably the one single home date Cleveland’s fans had circled on the calendar when the schedule came out – was never even close to being in doubt. It was about the time the Warriors’ lead reached 40 in that game that the notion of David Blatt possibly being fired after this debacle first passed through my head. I didn’t really give it much more thought, as we were all far more interested in heading out to down Sazeracs at the Polo Club, and the game being comfortably over early on afforded us an earlier drinking time.
No coach in NBA history had as good an in-season record when they got fired as David Blatt did. In the aftermath, one story after another has come out, constructing a narrative along the lines of that “the players” (meaning LeBron James) didn’t respect Blatt and didn’t give two shits about the fact he was an über-successful head coach in Russia and Israel and everywhere else, and that LeBron’s “camp” was behind this firing, in the end, and that the “players” wanted “one of them” to be their head coach – assistant coach Tyronn Lue, a former NBA player who “gets” them, and who will now essentially be LeBron’s sock puppet as he pretends to pay attention to Lue while running the team himself. Now, I summed it all up rather cynically there in that last passage, but one of the reasons why I did so is that so many people want to adopt such a cynical position themselves.
LeBron has since said he was surprised by the firing, insisting he had no direct hand in it, but even if he did, who cares? The NBA is a player’s league, first and foremost. All professional sports are player’s leagues in this day and age. And if you have a problem with that, go watch the indentured servitude that is the NCAA. If I am the owner of the Cleveland Cavaliers, and I’ve invested this much in my payroll – the aggregate salaries of the 14 players on the roster is almost $110 million – I’m damn sure going to want to make certain they’re happy with the head coach. Whether or not Dan Gilbert directly or indirectly consulted with LeBron on this manner, he’d seem to be something of a fool not to do so at all.
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| “Why, you little shit …” |
Furthermore, what most people need to realize is that the Cleveland Cavaliers, as presently constructed, are not competing against 29 other NBA teams. They’re competing against two: the Warriors and the Spurs. And as should be plainly apparent, after getting completely humiliated 132:98 by the Dubs on Monday night, that Cleveland can’t compete. I forget which of the blowhards doing color commentary on the Cavs-Dubs game on Christmas said, “the Cavs have figured out how to play against Golden State.” Um, no, they haven’t. They tried to make that Christmas day affair as slow and ugly and painful a game as possible, and they still lost – just like they lost in six games in the NBA Finals. It speaks to their shortcomings that they have to at least try to play that way, which isn’t even all that natural for them given their roster, but then again, trying to play an open game against Golden State is a truly terrible idea for pretty much everyone in the NBA:
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| Where on earth are you going, Kevin Love? |
I should point out as well that Real Madrid recently fired their head coach, Rafa Benitez, even though they were only four points out of first in La Liga at the time and had also won their Champions League group. But Benitez had his Waterloo moment, much like Blatt, at the hands of his biggest competitors – a 4-0 thrashing at home that they were subjected to by F.C. Barcelona. The Cleveland Cavaliers, much like Real, are built specifically to win everything and to do it right away. Nothing other than winning a championship will constitute success, and you don’t have any margin for error.
And it was pretty clear to me from watching the Cavs’ match-ups this season against the Spurs and the Warriors that David Blatt had no real idea how to beat those teams. I give Blatt a tremendous amount of credit for figuring out a way to keep winning playoff series last year when his team was completely decimated with injuries, but he offered no real great insight on the floor which separated him from other coaches. And it was pretty clear from the get-go that he didn’t really jibe with his “players” – LeBron and all of the others, to boot – and in this day and age, being disconnected from your team isn’t going to end well. His tenure in Cleveland is dead and the buzzards are circling …
• Speaking of not ending well, what looked like a possible dream season in Phoenix sure did end with a rude awakening, with the Cardinals getting embarrassed 49:15 by Carolina in the NFC Championship game and committing seven turnovers, six of them committed by QB Carson Palmer, who was playing at a near MVP level most of the season and wasn’t close to that effectiveness after injuring his thumb in December.
The warning signs about the Cardinals were everywhere during their regular season finale, when they got completely clobbered 36:6 by the Seahawks at home. You could say the game was meaningless for the Cardinals, but it was also meaningless to the Seahawks, and it didn’t stop them from going out and stomping all over Arizona. Palmer was terrible in that game, the defense didn’t bother to tackle and their special teams got gashed by Tyler Lockett for about 180 yards in punt returns.
Arizona looked nothing like a 14-win team in that game, and their performances simply got worse after that. The Cards’ season peaked a week earlier, when they annihilated Green Bay 38:8 – the same Green Bay that then scared the bejesus out of them in the playoffs last week. Palmer was awful on Sunday in Charlotte, but the Cardinals also didn’t block, didn’t tackle, and didn’t cover any receivers. Larry Fitzgerald dropped passes, and Patrick Peterson fumbled away a punt just at it appeared they were digging themselves out of a 17-point 1st Quarter hole. They did basically nothing right. I was thinking Carolina would win, but I thought it would at least be a better game.
And you wonder just how many chances guys like Fitzgerald and Palmer are going to get. Palmer has been around forever, but only won his first playoff game a week ago, his promising career in Cincinnati having been shortchanged due to a terrible injury he suffered in a playoff game against Pittsburgh in 2005. Without him playing well, Arizona isn’t very good. When he got hurt last season, and the Cardinals cycled through about six QBs, their potentially great season descended into folly. Even when they tried to upgrade the talent all around him, Arizona’s season still came down to Carson Palmer needing to be great, and he was abysmal.
• Even though his team was abysmal as a whole, Bruce Arians gets credit from The Lose for doing the math: down 34-7 and scoring a TD, Arians went for two, because the roadmap to evening the game down 19 points – two TD’s + two 2pts + a FG – is shorter than having to score 3 TDs when down 20. And The Lose found it interesting that a missed extra point wound up making such a big difference in the New England-Denver game: due to Stephen Goskowski’s miss in the 1st Quarter, the Pats were down eight points at the end of the game, and after a rather heroic final drive by Tom Brady, who was absolutely pounded by an onslaught of Denver pass rushers, the Pats had to go for two in the final seconds to tie. This sort of scenario hasn’t happened much this year in the NFL, but it’s precisely why the NFL moved the PAT back 15 yards: they wanted the play to matter which, given that 99% of kicks were converted a season ago, it very clearly didn’t matter. And former Seahawks beat scribe turned international correspondent Les Carpenter points out the irony: it was none other than Bill Belichick himself who advocated for the rule change two years ago.
Also, I said at the time that Belichick’s decision to kick off in O.T. against the Jets was stupid, but I also said I don’t think that game mattered very much … since I figured the Pats would still wind up clinching home field advantage in the AFC. I was wrong. After the Pats lost to the Jets, the Broncos then dug themselves out of a big hole and beat Cincinnati in O.T., and the Pats then threw up all over themselves the following week in a loss to the hapless Miami Dolphins, thus gifting home field to the Broncos. Instead of playing the Broncos in Foxboro on Sunday, they were playing a mile high in the Denver sky. It’s a short season in the NFL and all the games matter. And home field still really matters a great deal in the NFL. Super Bowl 50 will be the third straight match-up of #1 seeds.
• Super Bowl 50 is happening in my backyard, of course. The game is taking place down in Santa Clara, but many of the pre-game festivities are happening in downtown San Francisco. And, like most sane people in San Francisco, I’m responding to this by getting the hell out of town.
Myself and The Official Spouse of In Play Lose are going to Las Vegas the weekend of the Super Bowl and my plan is to take $50 over to the sports book before the Super Bowl starts. I’m going to put down $10 on the actual result of the game (the opening line has Carolina at -4½, and I’m liking those odds), and then I’ll divvy the other $40 eight ways and spend $5 each on the eight most ludicrous Super Bowl prop bets that I can find. I’ll likely spend less than a minute researching this, and I’m open to suggestions. It wouldn’t be a trip to Vegas without wagering on the most absurd things possible.
• When you root for a club in the EPL that isn’t one of the powerhouses, you learn to temper your expectations and savor the good moments when they come around, since they do not happen all that often. You have to be realistic, even if the reality is that you’re team is probably going to be relegated.
And at this point, I’d be somewhat surprised if my beloved Canaries of Norwich City manage to stay in the Premier League. They’re in 17th place, just two points above the drop zone, and they possess the second-worst defense in the league, so their goal differential is shot. They’re tenacious and resourceful, good when attacking on set pieces (they lead the EPL in goals scored from corners), but they’ve had a lot of games this year where they play some really great football, only to be done in by naïve defending and amateurish mistakes. And when you’re a fringe team that doesn’t get results when you play well, you’re far more likely to stop playing well and start losing than you are to have those results turn around.
On Saturday, Norwich City somehow contrived to lose at home to Liverpool in what was arguably the single-best game all season in the Premier League – and thus also the single-most disheartening. Norwich were down a goal after 18 minutes and then responded by scoring three, only to have their defense completely implode and give up three more (the last of which was so utterly, mind-numbingly stupid that if left me at a loss for words), only to then equalize at 4-4 two minutes into stoppage time … and then lose it in the 95th minute on basically the last kick of the game.
I happened to be awake for the 4:45 a.m. kickoff, since I’ve been sick and my sleep is a mess, and I’m both glad and distraught that I was. I was glad because it was probably the wildest, wackiest, zaniest game of top-flight soccer that I have ever seen. But in the end, the Good Guys lost, just as they’ve done all season. It’s not looking good for the Yellow Army.
• We’ll close with a hip and deep and groovily moody tune I’m grooving on at the moment, an Aussie collaboration featuring Marcus Marr and the vocal work of Chet Faker, whose work I quite like.
Now in this world where people left to tell you how to think, and say ‘Because I swear I've seen a million different angles of the same,’ we're all the same.
