WE’RE GOING to blow some stuff up today here at In Play Lose, since there has been quite a lot of good lose going on here of late, and it’s hard for me to keep up with all of this failure. Some of this fluid, and I need to write some of this stuff down before situations change.
For example, I was fully intending to blow up USA FC, since I travelled down to Santa Clara last Friday for their Copa America Centenario opener against Colombia at The Pants, a game they lost 0:2 which was typical of the sort of play we’ve come to expect from the U.S. of late: sluggish, disjointed, defensively leaky, and generally low IQ football. We had to fight the Friday rush hour traffic to get down to Santa Clara in time for the 6:30 p.m. kickoff, but we didn’t quite make it and by the time that we’d reached our seats, Colombia had already scored a goal and started packing into their compact shape – setting a high directly in front of me, about 35 yards from the goal, and forming two banks of four in the back – daring the U.S. to figure out what to do and knowing they wouldn’t do it, and the game was essentially over.
So I was ready to kill that team after putting up such a limp performance before myself and 69,000 of my closest friends there at The Pants, but then the U.S. went out on Tuesday night and absolutely hammered Costa Rica 4:0 in Chicago, which was probably the best game they’ve played in the past two years, so I have to hold off on further scathing critique for the moment.
This speaks to a dilemma that The Lose often encounters – so much lose, so little time, and jobs paying me actual money tend to get in the way. Of course, loyal Lose readers could always contribute to the cause by clicking on the handy gadgets on the side of this page and purchase some books … OK, shameless plug over …
Anyway, there is still lots of hot garbage out there worth scowing out to sea. And this is going to be a long blog entry, even by my own standards, since I’ve got a lot on my mind right now, so fix yourself a sandwich and pour yourself a lovely cocktail and settle on in. It’s time to blow some stuff up, and I have a lot of extremely worthy targets.
To the buzzard points!
• For my recent nth birthday, the Official Spouse of In Play Lose took me to Phone Co. Park to see the Giants game, and for some inexplicable reason, we have this propensity for going to games where the Giants inevitably blow the lead in the 9th inning. I think this particular game was something like the third time in a row, and fourth game in five, where the game wound up going extra frames after the Giants bullpen blew the lead, but the Giants offense came through this time, scoring in the bottom of the 10th for a 4:3 win to sweep a 3-game series with the San Diego Padres – which is already the third time this year that they’ve done that. The Padres are 0-9 against San Francisco this year, and given how they played during that series at Phone Co. Park, I’m surprised they aren’t 0-for against everyone else. The Padres win a few here and there simply because they can pitch, but otherwise they are a mess. Some teams are better than their record indicates, but the Padres are worse than their 25-35 record suggests. Much worse.
Against the Giants in this particular series, they didn’t hit worth a damn and when they did hit, they had runners repeatedly thrown out on the bases. Every ball hit into the air was a misadventure, as they dropped two pop flies – one of which allowed the winning run to score in the series opener – and turned fairly routine balls in the air into extra base hits by taking weird routes and kicking the ball all over the place. They played some of the weirdest defensive alignments I’ve ever seen, most of which the Giants hitters routinely beat and one of which involved playing with no center fielder, which led to a fairly harmless outfield knock rolling away for a double. At no point in any of those games, not even when the Giants bullpen was gagging away the lead in the third and final game, did you think for a second that the Padres would win.
The Padres followed up this folly in San Francisco by playing what is easily the most ridiculous 4-game series we’ve seen in baseball season, a home-and-home interleague set with their hated rivals, the Seattle Mariners. (The Pads and M’s are designated “rivals” by MLB, which is news to everyone involved). The Padres lost 3 of 4 games despite scoring 38 runs in the series, since they allowed 43. They lost a game 16:4 in Seattle in which their backup catcher came into pitch and was ultimately relieved by their shortstop (nice 53 mph change up, if you want to call it that). Two days later at Dog Food Park in San Diego, the Padres became the first team in the bigs to blow a 10-run lead without going to extra innings in 25 years, including giving up nine runs in an inning after two outs.
It was at this point that the Padres’ owner, Ron Fowler, decided to pop off and say a bunch of dumb stuff on talk radio, forgetting the #1 rule of being an owner, which is to shut up and write the cheques:
“It’s about as frustrating as it can get. In a normal environment, if you had performed as well as we have over the last three years, you’d probably be unemployed. But it’s baseball, with guaranteed contracts. We’ve got to get through it.”
– Ron Fowler
I hate to break this to you, Ron, but this ain’t a normal environment. But one thing which is, in fact, true across all businesses, which you are giving credence to with your comments, is the fact that most bad businesses are bad because they have bad owners, and your stewardship of this franchise slots you in that realm.
After the best-became-the-worst offseason in baseball history before the 2015 season, the Padres are now rapidly deconstructing, but trading James Shields to Chicago White Sox only netted them a couple of lesser prospects, and the Padres are still responsible for picking up $28 million of the $58 million that Shields is still owed – and this leaves the Padres in a strange position of rooting from afar for Shields to succeed with the Pale Hose, since he has an opt-out clause in his contract after this season and pitching well in Chicago might lead to him doing so in search of bigger dollars, giving the Padres some much needed relief. Or, Shields could stink in Chicago, much like he did in San Diego, and not opt out of his deal and leave the Padres on the hook for $28 mil – which seems far more likely to be the case, given that the Padres seem condemned to suffer in perpetuity.
Is there a perpetually less relevant team in professional sports than the San Diego Padres? The Padres are usually not as as bad as they’ve been this year, but they’re never very good, either. They have never won a World Series, and naturally ran into buzz saws for opposition the two times they got far – the 1984 Detroit Tigers and 1998 New York Yankees. No Padres pitcher has ever thrown a no-hitter in the franchise’s history, meaning that this franchise is so dull that they don’t even offer up those occasional magical moments to remind their fans how special the game can be. While Tony Gwynn is indisputably the face of the franchise and the greatest player in team history, the 2nd-greatest player is probably Dave Winfield, who’s far better known for leaving San Diego for the Yankees on what was, at the time, the biggest free agent contract in baseball history than for anything he did while he was there. Oh yeah, and they used to dress like they worked at Taco Bell.
The Padres have a lovely downtown ballpark, albeit one that, like most West Coast ballparks, tends to be hard on the hitters, which can certainly make it a tough sell for free agents (as if the fact that the franchise has never done anything of note in 40+ wasn’t a big enough red flag). And the atmosphere in that ballpark is entirely dependent upon how many of the visiting fans are in attendance. Dog Food Park has become something of a de facto home away from home for the Giants, who usually bring about 15,000 fans with them, and the Mets and Cubs and Cardinals fans always turn up en masse to enjoy a weekend getaway, while the Pads fans sit in embarrassed silence. And can you blame them? What the hell is there to be happy about? What is there to be hopeful about?
• I was somewhat casually observing, from afar, when the Mariners recently played three games in Cincinnati against the Reds. And there was no point, in any of those 27 innings, that I ever thought for a second that the Mariners would lose. Whatever lead the Reds managed to cobble up was certain to be given away by the arson squad bullpen we spoke about previously. 2-run lead? 3-run lead? It didn’t matter. Sure enough, the kerosene kids came in from the pen and whatever hope the Reds had for winning swiftly became bombs bursting in air.
The bullpen has been historically awful in Cincinnati, but it isn’t like the rest of the squad is any great shakes. Indeed, their 22-36 record may actually be better than they deserve, seeing as how their lineup, starting rotation, and bullpen have all been performing below replacement level for most of the season. Were it not for the historically inept offensive output of the Barves, the Reds would be the worst team in baseball.
And what’s shocking about this is just how fast this came about. It was only four seasons ago, in October of 2012, that the Cincinnati Reds headed home from San Francisco with a 2-0 lead in their best-of-5 playoff series, having hammered the Giants twice at Phone Co. Park. The Reds had a terrific team that season, an NL Central winning team which, had they mustered one more win at home, would likely have been favorites against the Cardinals in the NLDS, and favorites against the Tigers in the World Series after that.
But then the Rids literally kicked away Game 3 of that series with Giants, losing 2-1 on a Scott Rolen error and letting the Giants off the hook. San Francisco then came out and clobbered the Reds in Game 4 to even the series. They then put two on the board and loaded the bases early in Game 5 against Mat Latos, at which point Buster Posey ripped the soul straight out of the franchise:
The Reds have been sinking ever since. And as the losses mount and the misery deepens, those sorts of moments resonate and sting even more.
Because make no mistake about it, the Reds were a better team than the Giants that season. They were the better team and they threw it away. This is why I always speak of making the most of your opportunities when they come. They don’t come often, and the fall from the top can be swift and steep. It can take far longer to scale that summit than it does to fall, and right now, the Reds can’t even look towards a summit. It’s more like they’ve sunk into the Marianas trench.
• There is no team I want to kill more than the Oklahoma City Thunder. I hate that team. I truly, truly hate that team. And I have very good reasons for doing so, of course:
I hate everything about that team. I think that the team I used to be a season ticket holder for was stolen. I think their owner is a sleazebag, I think the money for the purchase came from a crook (and obviously, I wasn’t alone in thinking that), and I think the whole thing was aided by Little Napoleon himself, David Stern, who got his little snot nose bent out of joint because some politicos in the state of Washington had the audacity to tell him they didn’t want taxpayer money to keep propping up his voodoo economics – voodoo economics he as much as kowtowed to when he locked out the players for the umpteenth time. I think the Oklahoma City Thunder embody pretty much all that is wrong with the business of professional sports in North America, and I cannot wait for the day that the two superstars they lucked into having are no longer there to save them and they sink to the depths of the NBA, because no player worth their salt will ever want to play for that shit team in that shittowne.
And now that I’ve got that out of the way, I’m going to attempt to be objective.
And I am not going to engage in any sort of schadenfreude in this, which is hard for me to do, because I really HATE this team, and the opportunity presents itself quite nicely after what happened in the Western Conference Finals when the Thunder first found themselves up 3-1 in the series against the Golden State Warriors, and then later found themselves leading by seven points with 5:00 remaining in Game 6, on their home floor, AND THEY LOST THE SERIES, and I just want to jump up and down and point and laugh at them for being a bunch of choke artists, but this is In Play Lose here, a forum where we try to explore failure with a critical eye. And so this is going to be hard for me here, because there are really very few teams on this planet whose misfortunes I will invariably revel in to the point where it will compromise my judgment.
One of those is the Dodgers. I hate the Dodgers. I’ve hated them for a lifetime. This is how much I hate the Dodgers: the one-and-only time that I played rotisserie baseball, I was participating in a league that was restricted to National League players, and I refused to draft any Dodgers. It probably cost me the league title, in fact, because my team made up of Cardinals and Phillies and Astros wound up finishing second, but Dodgers doing well on baseball fields was an evil which I didn’t wish to profit from. And this sort of thinking is completely irrational and stupid, of course. At the aforementioned Giants game, I was sitting in the right field arcade, where the fans spent most of the game getting on Matt Kemp. Now, admittedly, Kemp was making himself an easy target out there by making a mess of almost any ball that was coming his way, but Giants fans particularly hate Kemp because he is a former Dodger – which is ridiculous, of course. The Dodgers drafted Matt Kemp, after all. It wasn’t like he had any real choice in the matter. We’re getting all over this guy because he was essentially the unwilling property of some other team that we don’t like. If you think about it that way, it’s all kinda stupid.
But Oklahoma City is different. That was MY team. That was a team I had invested my money in back when I lived in Seattle and it’s gone, so I cannot ever like that team and cannot ever want them to be successful. I still remember when OKC made the NBA finals against Miami, and ESPN did one of those silly nationwide polls about “Who do you want to win the NBA Finals?” and 48 of the 50 states were colored OKC blue while two more – Washington and Florida – were emblazoned in that weird reddish hue of the Heat. I briefly broke my vow never to watch the NBA again that season simply for the joy and delight of watching OKC get stepped on by the Heat, after which I stopped watching it again, only to be tempted into coming back to the game once more by the Warriors four seasons ago. And now the Warriors are NBA champions and rank among the greatest teams in the history of the sport, and they play the most beautiful basketball that I have ever seen, and the idea that their run would somehow be cut short by THAT STUPID FUCKING TEAM FROM OKLAHOMA CITY was absolutely revolting to even think about, much less watch unfold over the course of those first six games of that series.
Can you tell that I’m getting this out of my system?
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| Awww, c’mon Russ, you’re being a little bit hard on yourself |
So I want to laugh and chortle and guffaw at just how stupid and incompetent the Oklahoma City Thunder were down the stretch of Game 6, and brand them as nothing more than a bunch of chokers who will never win anything, but I can’t do that. And there are a couple of reasons for that.
For starters, saying that Oklahoma City “choked” takes away from what their opponents accomplished. 28 of the 29 other teams aren’t coming back in that series. The Golden State Warriors won that series because their stars – first Klay Thompson in Game 6, and then Steph Curry in Game 7 – took over the games with shot making skills that no one else possesses, or has ever possessed, in the history of the sport. At its base, everything that the Warriors do is based upon the fact that Steph and Klay take, and make, the hardest shots in the NBA. They take shots which are bad shots for everyone else in the league and they make them – and because they make them, you have to account for them and guard them and plan for them and scheme for them, at which point the rest of the Warriors are free to run roughshod over you. It’s a tightrope and high wire act at Golden State. They have radically altered the geometry and the mathematics of the game, but when Steph and Klay can’t make those shots, the most invincible force in the NBA can suddenly seem mortal and ordinary.
Klay’s 11 treys and 41 points in OKC saved the Warriors’ season, and then Steph finished the job in Game 7. Prior to that, it appeared that they had met their match. I kept wondering at what point in the series the Warriors would find themselves again, as they looked all out of sorts and their offense wasn’t working and the Thunder were all over them. But it’s nuts just to think about it – I’m watching these games and hoping for the Dubs to go back to being otherworldly, to go back to doing things no one else can do in the game, or have ever done in the game, for that matter. With their success, the expectations have become absurdly high, and that they managed to reach those heights in the clutch simply adds to the lore and the legend.
And as for Oklahoma City, they were great. They were absolutely great in the playoffs. For the last five games of the Spurs series, and for most of the first six games of the Warriors series, they looked like a completely different team. In fact, I would suggest that their loss in Game 6 of the playoffs was less of a choke and more of a regression to the mean. Golden State rose from the dead and returned to being the team we know, and unfortunately, Oklahoma City reverted to being the team we know.
Here’s a video breakdown of OKC’s offense in the 4th Quarter of Game 6. This is bad offense. 12 of the last 13 OKC possessions consist of one pass or less. No ball movement, poor spacing, one-on-one playmaking leading to turnovers and bad shots. Hero ball. That’s not good basketball.
But that’s OKC for you. This is what they do, and they’ve been doing this for years. They have outrageous natural talent on that team, with great athletes all over the floor, yet they run the most simplistic offensive schemes in the NBA. Russ and KD play hero ball while the other three guys on the court are basically furniture. And when you’re checked out on the offensive end of the floor – and why wouldn’t you be, since you’re not going to get the ball – you tend to then check out on the defensive end, as well. It’s hard to call Game 6 a choke by OKC because choking somewhat implies that something out of the ordinary just happened, but nothing out of the ordinary happened here. Oklahoma City does this all the time! The Thunder blew more 4th Quarter leads than any other team this season for a reason. They do stupid stuff!
And indeed, what got them to within 5:00 of the NBA finals was the fact that, in the playoffs, the Thunder had stopped being themselves. They flummoxed first the Spurs and then the Warriors because all of their tendencies had gone out the window. “Wait? What’s going on? This team is passing the basketball! There is ball movement and spacing, everyone is involved and engaged and contributing, and holy shit there is a lot of talent on the floor. Steven Adams is a stud in the post. Where has he been all season? And now Serge Ibaka is making plays too? I had forgotten he was even in the NBA! Hey, suddenly it makes sense to have a defensive specialist on the floor like Roberson who can also slash and hit the offensive glass. And holy shit, when everyone’s engaged, they actually play defense! Stifling defense! Durant is a human pogo stick on defense who can contest any shot anywhere on the floor, Adams can protect the rim and Ibaka can switch onto just about anyone. Wow, this team is terrifying! What do we do?”
But then, when they were up seven points with 5:00 left in the 4th Quarter of Game 6 – statistically, they’re around 93% favorites to win, at that point – midnight struck for cinderella and OKC suddenly turned back into a bunch of pumpkins. As much as I’d been waiting for the Warriors to snap out of it and remember who they are, there was also this faint hope that Oklahoma City would remember who they are, as well, which is exactly what happened. They collapsed in Game 6, and then their offense stalled out in the 3rd Quarter of Game 7, when they only scored 12 points and threw the ball all over the gym and resumed with their usual finger pointing and bickering on the floor. And in the aftermath of this series, it’s easy to suggest that OKC’s playoff performance foretells of greater things next season, but the meltdown in Game 6 wasn’t the aberration. The aberration was the fact that they were in the position at all to go melting down.
So if you’re OKC, now what do you do? Kevin Durant is a free agent, and he has a wealth of options. A lot of NBA experts assume that KD will sign the “1+1” deal because that makes the most financial sense. I would suggest that’s a dangerous assumption, because it implies that OKC is going to be willing to offer that contract in the first place. They may wind up having to do that, in the end, simply because they’ll have no other choice, but it’s a prickly and somewhat stingy organization by nature that doesn’t like yielding that much control. If KD signs a 1+1, and comes back for the 2017 season, OKC has basically one season to try and win a championship, because come the summer of 2017, it turns into salary cap hell.
It’s salary cap hell to some extent already, because the weird quirk in the salary cap which has allowed OKC to skate buy paying both Russ and KD is coming back to bite them. They have no cap space at all to work with this offseason, so they’re hard-pressed to afford to replace anything that they lose. Last season, the Portland Trail Blazers basically trolled the Thunder and fucked with them by throwing $73m at Enis Kanter, an RFA whom the Thunder had the right to match, and the Thunder had to suck it up and bite the bullet and match and essentially pay $73m for a backup center who cannot guard his own shoes because his role on the Thunder was irreplaceable. I would imagine some team will throw $50m at Dion Waiters this offseason, who is also an RFA, and as much of a long, strange trip as the Dion Waiters Experience can be, they don’t really have any other options. They have no draft picks, they’re way over the cap, and making any sort of a deal is coming from a position of weakness. Then the summer of 2017 rolls around and Durant could trigger his option and become a UFA and you’ll have to pay him about $35m a year, and Westbrook becomes a UFA and he’ll cost about $30m a year, and Ibaka’s a UFA as well and he’ll probably be around $20m a year, and at some point you’re also going to have to pay Adams, who is 22 and blossoming into a terrific player, and if Kanter was worth $73m on the RFA market then what will a team with money to spend (which is everybody, at this point) be willing to offer Adams? $100m? $125m? It’s not out of the question. And yeah, I’m throwing around ridiculous figures here, but this is the reality of the modern NBA. So if you add all of that up, and throw in the NBA’s luxury taxes for going over the salary cap, OKC’s payroll would be in excess of $200m for the 2017-2018 season if they tried to keep this team together, and that’s just not going to happen, and the worst-case scenario is that you lose KD, Russ, Ibaka and Adams and are left with $120m sunk into a badly defending center and the Dion Waiters Experience, at which point you’re hoping there are some élite talents available in the 2018 draft, and probably also the 2019 and 2020 drafts as well. So the Thunder need to win now (now being next season), but if KD signs a 1+1 and comes back for another year, he’s going to be swimming in the biggest fish bowl in sports. If he got annoyed with every reporter asking him about his future this season, that unwanted attention will be magnified by the prospect of the whole team breaking apart.
And you can look at the glass as half-full if you’re the Thunder after this past off-season: “we were so close to winning a title this year. We were so close and just need to take that last step.” Or, you can also look at it half-empty, wherein the Thunder really can’t play any better than they did in this year’s playoffs and it still wasn’t good enough to get them a championship. OKC maximized their potential for a couple of rounds of the playoffs, but expecting that team to finally toss away all of their self-destructive tendencies and play that way for an entire season just might be too much to ask.
As much as I hate that franchise and everything about it, I do have to begrudgingly give them some props. The Warriors were pushed like no team has pushed them in the past two years. For that fact alone, OKC proved to be worthy adversaries. But that’s all you’re gonna get from me, OKC. Now go away.
• They call Old Trafford the ‘Theatre of Dreams,’ but lately theatergoers have been subjected to a steady diet of Greek tragedy, a ponderous and plodding piece of theatre leading to an ending that was fated all along. And what better way to liven things up on stage at the Theatre of Dreams than by hiring the sport’s biggest drama queen?
They’d barely finished engraving Manchester United’s name on the FA Cup trophy when United pulled the trigger on a move that was the worst-kept secret in all of soccer, sacking manager Louis Van Gaal and replacing him with Jose Mourinho. Winning the FA Cup was all the silverware Van Gaal had to show for three years on the job, and the on-field look was bad. The football was terrible, a cynical product verging at times on being unwatchable. Rather than win with superior talent, United instead attempted to numb their inferior opponents into a stupor and simply wait for them to screw up. With some £200 million in wage bills and another £300 million more in transfer fees doled out to assemble this squad, you’d think you’d get more bang for your British buck than slow, unathletic build up using side-to-side square passing while clogging up the middle of the pitch. This is not the Man U way. When you’re one of the biggest clubs in the world, not only do you have to win, but you have to look good doing it, and Van Gaal’s United failed on both fronts. For Manchester United Inc.’s international brand, what’s almost as important as being good is continuing to be relevant.
The Van Gaal experiment was always doomed to fail. He signed a 3-year deal, and had made it clear from the beginning that it was his last job and he wasn’t going to sign a new deal after that. There’s fundamentally a very good reason why clubs are wary of letting coaches reach the final year of their deals – if the coach seems as if he’s a lame duck, the players feel free to tune him out, and Van Gaal was a lame duck from the moment he took over. It’s been pretty obvious from the play on the field that few of the guys wearing a red shirt were particularly happy to be there (it’s been reported that several players told management they’d ask for transfer if Van Gaal were retained), and this story of Mou taking over at Old Trafford has been floating around in the British press ever since he got whacked at Chelsea. They’re apparently replacing Greek tragedy with opera buffo at the Theatre of Dreams, because this marriage of media whores and megalomaniacs will likely be a comedy of errors.
Oh, it will start out alright, of course. Mourinho will come in and spend a lot of money. He loves doing that. He’ll spend a lot of money on players that they want, and spend a lot of money on players they don’t need. We already know this is going to happen, since it also seems inevitable that Man U will go out and sign Zlatan Ibrahimovic to play striker for them, who is still a great player and all but a) he’s about 68 years old; and b) their two best players at the moment are 18-year-old Marcus Rashford and 19-year-old Antony Martial, both of whom are strikers, and it would make far more sense to just pencil those two into the lineup for, oh, maybe the next 10 years or so and try to build a team around them. But Mourinho has no patience for talent development and no patience for young players, even though United’s academy turns them out in droves, just like Chelsea’s academy turned them out in droves, but kids were just cash cows to Chelsea so every kid at United may as well start looking forward to a long career in Belgium or the Netherlands while waiting for that opportunity at United which will never, ever come.
And the results will be marginally better next year, as Mourinho’s militant pragmatism will take hold but he’ll whitewash it a different color of paint, and a 1:0 win over West Brom with Mourinho on the bench will somehow seem better to the Man U faithful than a 1:0 win over West Brom with Van Gaal on the bench. And by the second year, he’ll have spent even more ridiculous sums, and they’ll trot out 11 players who can win simply by rolling the ball out and telling them which direction to run, and Man U will likely win all sorts of trophies and Mou can bask in his glow of being “the special one” once more. But as soon as any hint of trouble arises, whatever sort of free-flowing and attractive football the players have concocted on their own will immediately dry up and be replaced by pragmatism and cynicism and oppressively defensive tactics – tactics which are quite easy to replicate with any sort of team or collection of players, and Man U will most certainly be the latter, a collection of players lacking any sort of cohesion or unity who will first turn on each other and then turn on the manager, a guy who is a “masterful man manager” when he’s winning and simply “a pain in the ass” when he’s losing. And they’ll all end up hating each other and hating Mourinho as well, who will then turn on his players and start throwing them under the bus and throwing management under the bus as well.
Wait, I think I’ve seen this play before. That’s because it happens everywhere that Mourinho goes. He’s never a long-term solution. He’s a quick fix. He makes you relevant in a hurry, you speed ahead and then the engine redlines and finally bursts into flames. This marriage of convenience between Manchester United and Mourinho just isn’t going to end well. It’s going to end in a messy divorce and all of it promises to be wildly entertaining. All that you can do is sit back with your beer and your popcorn and your cotton candy and enjoy your ticket to the circus.
We’ll blow some more stuff up later, because I have quite a bit to say about matters far more serious than what I’ve covered here. But for now, let’s peace out and play some music. One of my favorite bands, Dengue Fever, is performing this Friday at The Chapel in San Francisco, I will be in attendance and you should be as well, because this band absolutely shreds:
