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