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:
