Of Laughter and Forgetting

REGULAR readers of this blog have probably wondered where I’ve been for the past few weeks. I did say, in an entry near to the beginning of the month, and the new year, that In Play Lose was going to be more active here in 2017 – but when I speak of In Play Lose, I am primarily speaking of myself, of course, since as I previously posted, even nonfiction is dependent upon a fundamentally strong central character, be they a historical figure or some other subject of the work, or even if it’s simply the author themselves.

I have always been a huge fan on gonzo journalism, be it of the original or the spaghetti sense of form, because inserting oneself into the center of a work of nonfiction does not take away the impact nor make it any less true; to the contrary, the effect can be heightened, since the author not only wants to tell the facts, but create an experience using those facts. If you read the work of Hunter S. Thompson and say, “wow, that story is fucked up and weird,” then he has done his job, because the people he was tailing and trailing and chronicling at the time were, in fact, as fucked up and weird as he said they were, and history has shown them to be that fucked up and weird, but history as also shown us, time and again, that we don’t learn a goddamn thing from it.

“This may be the year when we finally come face to face with ourselves; finally just lay back and say it – that we are really just a nation of 220 million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns, and no qualms at all about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable. The tragedy of all this is that George McGovern, for all his mistakes ... understands what a fantastic monument to all the best instincts of the human race this country might have been, if we could have kept it out of the hands of greedy little hustlers like Richard Nixon. McGovern made some stupid mistakes, but in context they seem almost frivolous compared to the things Richard Nixon does every day of his life, on purpose ... Jesus! Where will it end? How low do you have to stoop in this country to be President?”
– Hunter S. Thompson, 1972

And this blog, of course, is fundamentally about me, the weirdo author, the guy who has spent most of his 47 years on the planet pretty much failing miserably at most everything and as a result, over the course of time, has come to develop a heightened sense of the absurd, the appreciation for the high art of failure, and the ability to laugh off most of life’s most intense and immense disappointments. Most, but not all. There are still some doozies in the closet which I’m not going to break out any time soon. So don’t ask. It’s not happening. You might be able to get it out of me if I’m in a seriously good mood – “seriously good” as in both serious and good, and opposed to exceptionally good mood, which isn’t the correct usage of the word seriously but I don’t give a goddamn right now – and if you buy me a few extremely expensive whiskeys at the bar. But no promises.

And every now and then, I’ll tell some stories here at In Play Lose which are personal in nature – such as this wonderful jaunt through the past that I recalled last summer about the greatest booze cruise in history, a story which many people had told me, both in person and online, really resonated with them,  and about which my buddy Puneet recently said, “I felt like I was there on the boat with you. I wish I could have been there.” That sort of compliment resonates with me, it says more to me than any readership data or book sales numbers ever will. If I tell a story, and it resonates and creates the experience for another reader, then I have done my job.

And I’ve been pretty bad at doing my job for most of the past 25 years – my job fundamentally being that of someone who should be telling stories, be it of the fictional or the nonfictional nature. I do it well, but simply do not do it enough. Which is something that I’m trying to fix here in 2017. In fact, I think it’s something that I need to be doing in a big, big way. I feel a certain sense of moral obligation to do it at the moment, in fact, because if there is one thing that comes with developing a heightened sense of the absurd and learning to appreciate for the high art of failure, it is the ability to laugh.

And this blog is primarily centered on sports because the result in sports is always black and white. There are winners and there are losers. And yet within those absolutes, there is endless nuance, instances where that black and white dissolve and mix and create endless shades of grey. I took a break on Saturday night from what I’m working on, at present, to watch the basketball game, watch the Golden State Warriors completely obliterate the L.A. Clippers by a score of 144:98. And it was ridiculous. Steph was doing Steph things, sinking 50-footers and scoring 25 points in a quarter. The Warriors scored 86 points in the second and third quarters alone and played probably the most beautiful 24 minutes of basketball that will be seen on this earth in 2017. On the halftime show, Magic Johnson compared it to the Showtime Lakers of the 1980s – an apt comparison, although he qualified it by saying, “we were getting layups and dunks, while the Warriors are shooting threes.” I hated the Lakers because they were so damn good, but damn they were so damn good.

But this is In Play Lose and what does this say of the Clippers? This is a good team, a really good team, one of probably the 5-6 best teams in the NBA when they are healthy – which they aren’t at the moment, as Chris Paul is out for two months and Blake Griffin has been in and out of the lineup and still doesn’t look like he’s 100%. (He was a matador out there when he tried to guard Durant, and Doc did him no favors by basically giving him no help.) And the Clippers were absolutely embarrassed by the Warriors. They were run into the ground once again by a Warriors team that likes doing nothing quite as much as it likes embarrassing the Clippers, and have done so repeatedly for the past three years. And the Clippers are fascinating to The Lose, of course, because they were so bad for so long, then got really good, but still haven’t won anything and pretty much never will since they’re stuck on the same side of the country as the Warriors, who own them and know it and love rubbing their faces in it. The Clippers have risen from being an abject failure to being a respectable one, a worthy adversary who still nonetheless succumbs. Theirs is a higher level of failure.

And it’s this which is interests me the most about Lose: the idea that a team like the Clippers does, in fact, create something verging on being great and yet they’re ultimately, in the bigger picture, no better off than some terrible team like the Phoenix Suns. Because let’s be honest here, if the Suns are 10,000,000 miles away from being an NBA champion, the Clippers are about 6,000,000 miles away as they are presently constructed, seeing as how the Warriors beat them by about 6,000,000 points tonight. Being close and not good enough is really not much different than being awful, and is, in many ways, worse than being awful. because being good but not good enough breeds false hope. I’ve been threatening for a while to write my definitive personal history of my devotion to the Vancouver Canucks, a 35-year escapade during which I’ve seen them achieve literally every single sort of failure imaginable, from just being flat terrible to being completely incompetent to seeing them stumble their way to Stanley Cup Final to seeing them be a hit crossbar away from winning a Stanley Cup and being arguably the best team that never won a Stanley Cup, because you don’t 187 division titles in a row unless you're badass, but all it takes is a hot goaltender or some key injuries at the wrong time and you’re sunk. And watching them fail at the highest level is worse than watching them be awful, in a lot of ways. It hurts a lot more. You get used to bad teams being bad, and you can laugh at the general displays of incompetence every couple of days. It’s harder to laugh when the stakes are higher.

But we need to figure out how to laugh when the stakes are higher. We need to laugh all of the time. Laughter is life’s greatest antidote. And in the strange times in which we find ourselves, we need to laugh. We need to laugh all of the time. We need to laugh, perhaps, more than we ever have before.

And these are strange times in which we live. Quite honestly, I have no fucking idea what the hell is going on any more. Reading the news, I feel as if I’ve bought a ticket for a night at the O’Farrell St. Theatre of the Absurd and come to discover that I’m actually a member of cast, except that no one has given me a script, because I have no earthly idea what I’m supposed to do. But I was buoyed by my recent trip to New Orleans, where I served as director of the annual Crescent City Open scrabble tournament, a fun but often thankless task that involves being an administrator, an organizer, a public relations person, a computer programmer, a computer troubleshooter, a psychotherapist and, probably worst of all, a referee, because we all know that referees are dumb and as blind as bats. But it was also during the long morning walk in the fog and in and around the top end of the French Quarter – a proud and elegant and proud and timeless area of the city a few blocks removed from the slop and the sludge of Bourbon St. – that I actually stopped acting like a tourist and felt, innately, as if I were actually living in New Orleans and, thus, experiencing it differently. It no longer felt like a filmset, the assortment of locals feeling no longer feeling like extras on that set, and it truly felt real to me – so much so that four wayward Alabamans approached me as I strode down rue des Ursulines and asked me for directions, prefacing it as they approached by saying, “let’s ask this guy. He lives here,” and I was able to give them directions, tell them the café was closed, and suggest the café where I got that really nice large chicory coffee that was in my left hand.

And feeling like you’re “living” in a city, even if you are only visiting, means that you come to feel the rhythms and the biorhythms and the tempos of the place. What I’ve always taken away from New Orleans is that it just might be the single-most creative city in which I have ever set foot. Even the throwaway street buskers are phenomenal musicians. There is music and there is art and there is a verse of poetry waiting to be written around every street corner. And this is not me speaking with blinders on, ignoring the troubles that the city of New Orleans endures seemingly far away from it’s quaint and charming and enticing central corridors. New Orleans is fundamentally a city of heartbreak – and when it comes to acts of creativity, a city of heartbreak is fertile ground for fine flowers. Only in New Orleans does the approach to the saddest moment of life – the end of life – call for the striking up the brass band and the throwing of a parade.

“There is no substitute for madness,” is the last line of a story called Winning by Ron Jones, which can be found in Take it to the Hoop, a collection of short stories, essays and poems about the game of basketball which is long since out of print and which I lost long ago – lost along with my remarkable and diverse collection of books that I’d gathered through college, stolen from a storage shed where they were stored since my stupid ex-wife, may she rot in the hell of her own making, made me keep them there because there was “no room for your books,” and there is no way using bold or italic or all caps to express the level of disdain she espoused in her stressing of the word “your.” I have now righted this one small error, one among many, after scouring the internets and acquiring a used copy of Take it to the Hoop from a group in a Kansas community raising money to build a new library, simply because I want to be able to read Winning again, and also read one of my favorite and also favoritely titled poems of all time: The NCAA Mideast Regionals and Other Existential Setbacks. Those of you who read this blog may remember that I offered up a piece of Christmas fiction a few years ago entitled Winning. I admit it, I stole the name. Bad artists copy, good artists steal, and wannabes like me should opt to go with the good.

And Winning, this story by Ron Jones I want to reread, is not about winning, in the traditional sense. Indeed, the last line of the story speaks to a placard places over the locker room door that reads “there is no substitute for winning,” where the word ‘winning’ has been crossed out and replaced with ‘madness.’ The story is about a guy trying to coach high school basketball at the poor and grubby high school on the other side of the tracks in a well-to-do town during a racially divisive era and it’s a hilarious and wondrous and resourceful and ultimately heartbreaking endeavor in which some semblance of salvation ultimately comes through coming to redefine what it means to win and to lose – which is basically what I need to be doing or, more importantly, remembering that I should be doing, because the greatest single moment of my lifetime, the single most-important moment which changed which realtered the entire course of mine, came when I was sitting on the carpeted floor of a meeting room at a psychiatric institute, laughing so hard that the tears were streaming down my face, and we all were doing that, and someone actually said they felt bad because being insane wasn’t supposed to be so much fun. And I felt bad for all of those suckers out there who were going to their stupid jobs and going through the day-to-day machinations of their lives, enduring the drudgery because they were the sane ones. We’re the crazy people, we’re the chosen ones and the lucky ones. There is no substitute for madness.

Nor is there substitute for laughter, and I’m going to laugh like hell for the next four years. I’m going to laugh my ass off. I’m going to laugh in the face of the people who do things that disgust me, because you’re not going to take away my ability to laugh. I was just chatting recently, in fact, with a person who was there rolling on the floor with me in uncontrollable laughter at the psychiatric institute and, thus, shares the single most-important moment in my life, and she spoke of how her 2016 was a personal dumpster file, to which we concurred than the world can pretty much go fuck itself after what it did to itself in 2016, and that laughter and madness are going to win the day in 2017.

And that means I need to write, and need to write a lot. And one of the reasons why I spoke so much of how I was impacted in New Orleans is that, in a place which feels real to me all of a sudden, a place in which I suddenly feel fueled and infused with the creativity and imagination of the city, it suddenly occurred to me that this other novel I am working on, which I have started and stopped and started and stopped off and on since the fall of 2003, was going nowhere because I had completely gotten the ending wrong. You can’t get to the end if you don’t know where you’re going. I’ve had an ending in mind ever since I started crafting this novel – a novel for which I’m going to put aside my usual propensity for downplaying my abilities by stating that it will be the greatest novel I ever write in my lifetime in I can ever write the fucking thing, but I’ve not done so because I’ve feared that doing so might actually kill me. I’m dead serious when I say that. But there in New Orleans, I realized that the ending I’d had in mind for over a decade was completely, utterly the wrong one, which means the whole goddamn thing – towards which I’d written about 23,000 words here in the first few weeks of 2016 – needs to be redone.

Crap. Now what?

Well now what is we do what we usually do when dilemmas about writing spring up, which is to put whatever it is that’s not working aside and do something else and do something completely different. And I mean completely different. As in, bearing absolutely no resemblance whatsoever to that monstrous magnum opus of mine which continues to do nothing but grow moss. And while I’m at it, make it funny, and make it absurd.

And so I’ve spent most every free moment I’ve had since returning from New Orleans working on a new novel, one which is pure slapstick and farce, and I’m 50,000 words into it and still seem to like it, which is generally an encouraging sign. And in choosing to do this, I also chose to set it during a rather remarkable point in time, which is Europe in late 1989 and early 1990, a time where I happened to be in Europe and got the experience the whole of the world changing in a few fell swoops. There I was in a Paris café sipping a 1664 and not watching football on the television overhead, but watching live coverage of the Romanian Revolution, as the intrepid reporters were ducking and taking cover amid the sniper fire, and return fire, in the streets of Bucharest. I remember sitting in the room across from mine at the university smoking hand rolled drums with a German grad student who had permitted himself the luxury of a fine bottle of cognac or brandy or whatever it was – I don’t recall, since I was most likely already drunk, since I was drunk all the time back then – and it was the day before the Berlin Wall fell and he spoke of the enormous senses of both uncertainty and optimism he felt for his homeland, with the latter ultimately trumping the former. It was a remarkable period of time where we every single thing we thought that we knew about how the world was organized completely collapsed.

And here we are, 27 or so years later, wondering how in the hell the world ever got so screwed up. No one who felt the rush and surge of optimism and hope in Europe at that time would have ever believe that the world would one day wind up like this. But go back 27 years from then, and you have 1962 and the Cuban Missile Crisis. No one in 1962 would ever have foreseen what came to pass in 1989. Go back 27 years before that and you’re in 1935 amid the Great Depression and run-up to the Second World War. Who would foresee the world nearly ending in 1962? Would you have among the Dust Bowl and the urban blight of the mid-30s that 27 years later, the U.S. would be the most powerful nation on the earth and the richest nation the earth has ever known? Most likely not. The point is that things change, and do so far more frequently, and more rapidly, than we may realize. There is always the potential for the world to radically shift and for civilization to chart a new course, and if you find yourself in a world in which you feel hopeless, you should remember that there are times in the not-to-distant past when optimism seemed to flourish in abundance.

And in order to best figure out how to cope with a world which I find has gone off the deep end, I find myself reading, and re-reading, a great number of my favorite authors from the 20th century, great numbers of whom hail from countries like Czechoslovakia and the military junta dominated eras in Latin America. Authors who figured out how to cope with the worst sorts of oppressions through their own creative expression – expressions which are rife with madness and, yes, with humor. Laughter. The oppressor doesn’t want you to laugh, after all. They don’t want you to find the humor because, of course, the funniest thing is the oppressor himself. The wonderful Czech poet Miroslav Holub did a reading in England when I was there in 1990, fully basking in the glow of the Communists having been swept aside, and he prefaced a poem by saying that in the “old” days, old being several months ago, if you wanted to write about the buffoons running the country, you simply spoke in allegories and set your pieces in mythical German principalities or duchies or kingdoms, because you could get around the censors that way, since mocking the Germans was acceptable and even encouraged after WWII, but everyone in the know would know exactly whom you were referring to. He then read a poem that started with some long and self-important title of a German prince or duke or king and the whole room burst into laughter. So I’ll go back and reread Holub, and reread Milan Kundera, who is still Czech in my mind even though he wants to think of himself as French, and I’ll reread Josef Škvorecký’s wonderful books in which his jazz loving and jazz playing hero cares far more about jazz and girls than he does about politics, but politics always seem to get in the way of his pursuits of both hot sex and hot sax. And I’m going to read and learn from these people once again, because while living in strange times under strange circumstances, they sure did find a way to be both witty and brilliant and found a way to make both themselves and their readers laugh.

Laugh, god damn it. Laugh.

And this is all a roundabout way of explaining that the reason why I’ve not been venturing lately into this absurd corner of cyberspace which I have created is because I’ve been venturing lately into an even more absurd space, which is my own mind, and I apologize for that, because there is always time for Lose, and I am chortling at the train wreck that is the Cleveland Cavaliers at the moment, and loving me some Sixers as they win as many games in January as they did all of last season, and give me the Falcons and the points this coming Sunday. And is there a bigger douchebag in all of sports right now than Grayson Allen? Every Duke loss is still one loss too few. And I should give a shout out to tennis player Mischa Zverev, who really espoused the essence of Lose in his run-up to his Australian Open against Roger Federer when asked about a previous meeting in Halle, Germany, in which Zverev lost 6-0, 6-0.

“I'd rather lose 6-0, 6-0 to Roger in a quarterfinal than to a qualifier in the second round. At least there is something to talk about later.”
– Mischa Zverev

Fuck yeah. If you’re gonna lose, make it memorable.

So anyway, I apologize for being away from The Lose here for a little while, but rest assured that the spirit of Lose runs pretty much through everything that I do.

And I’m not really losing much all that moment, and I’m not going to be losing all that much here in this society, as it’s presently being constructed, since the people presently doing the construction seem to want to bend it back in such a way to benefit aging, lower middle-class white guys such as myself. But the ways in which this is coming about leave me aghast and absolutely appalled. I want nothing to do with any of this. But what can I do? I’m just one person among many. I can do what I do best, which is to make people laugh, which is to tell stories and tell jokes and point out the ridiculousness of everything around me here in my own personal Belgium. Some of those will be short form, some will be blogs, and some will be ludicrous novels that I throw myself into full bore at the expense of everyone else. We need laughter, we need comedy, we need to remember what makes us human. So let’s laugh a lot, here and elsewhere. Comedy = tragedy + time, so let’s laugh as time passes and strictly adhere to that principle.

How the Worst Was Won

All of these teams are awful

IT’S SHAPING up to be one of the most exciting playoff races in years out West in the NBA – at least from the perspective of In Play Lose, of course, where we judge everything on the premise of “if it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing badly.” And there is so much bad basketball at the moment out west. Be still my foolish heart.

As you can see from this snapshot of the West standings, a 6½ game crevasse has developed after currently 7th-seeded OKC, with all eight remaining Western clubs having fallen into the abyss. The Blazers are presently on pace to lose 50 games, and they’re currently the best of this lost – and by “best,” I mean “least bad.” And as you can see from the streak column – L1, L3, L5, L3, etc. – it’s not as if anyone is exactly rising to the challenge.

Now, let’s be honest here: being the 8th seed in the NBA playoffs is not going to end well. In the East, you’re going to get beat on by the Cavs, and it will be a swift and ugly exit. But at least in the East, there are a whole bunch of teams for which getting that 8th seed would wind up resembling some progress in the bigger picture. If you’re the Bucks or the Pistons – a couple of young teams still looking to grow – getting that spot and getting out there for four playoff games would be a valuable learning tool. If you’re the Buzzards, who started so badly this year, reviving your season and being #8 at season’s end is something that you can take as a positive. If you’re the Knicks or the Bulls – two storied franchises perpetually awash in tabloidesque media coverage – at least an 8th seed can slightly mollify the fan bases during what appear to be transition years. The fan bases in New York and Chicago are demanding, but they also want to see some progress from last year, and either team making the playoffs, with their strangely constructed short-term rosters, would ultimately constitute as such.

But in the West, meanwhile, everyone is terrible. This group of eight is six kinds of crap, and the Warriors and going to beat into the ground whomever comes out of here. And this, of course, begs the question: who really wants to be the 8th seed? If you’re the 8th seed, you’re out of the lottery, for starters, so that means you’ve got a meh sort of draft pick this coming summer. (If you’ve got a pick at all, I should say. The Kings may finally lose their first round pick to the Bulls this summer as a result of a comically awful trade that happened in 2011.) Clearly, you’re not very good, and being the least bad by season’s end is not really what you want to hang your hat on.

I’m inclined to leave the Dallas Mavericks out of this discussion, a first-rate organization who is just having one of those injury-laden disasters of a season where nothing goes right and you just have to write it off, except that they’re only four games out of a playoff spot at the moment. There is no benefit whatsoever to an older team like Dallas getting the 8th seed, at this point. None whatsoever. You’re better off being lousy and restocking with better draft picks. But apparently Dallas just can’t get bad enough, because as terrible as their season as been, the rest of the pack in the West just keeps coming back to them.

You can probably also write off the Lakers here, since after a bright start, the injuries set in and the realities of such a young and inexperienced team caught up with them. Young teams in the NBA tend to get really jacked up and frisky for games against the big guns in the league. As such, they win a few here and there – particularly because the big guns don’t view them as a long-term threat and, as such, they don’t give a shit about a one-off result. But it’s the teams in the middle of the pack, teams that need to take it seriously, that absolutely kill teams like the Lakers – and the NBA is full of games against teams in the middle of the pack, usually in quick succession and often on long road trips which start out bad and end up worse. So the Lakers have sunk and are now about where we thought they’d be – a fun kind of bad team that’s focusing on the long-term process and looking to win in the 25-30 range – but again, everyone else around them in the West has been so awful that the Lakers are still sniffing around the playoffs. They might at least win a game against the Dubs in the playoffs, simply because all it seems to take to stop Steph Curry from making shots is to lay down the Lakers floor inside the Staples Center, but they’d also be likely to give up about 150 in one of the games, since the defense is awful.

If there’s a common thread among most of these teams trapped in the muck at the bottom of the Western Conference trash heap, it’s that the defenses are dreadful. The Lakers are 29th in the NBA in defensive rating. The Blazers are 30th. We’ve already been over how Minnesota’s best players can’t guard anyone. Denver’s games have turned into track meets here of late, as their defensive-oriented yet entirely pragmatic head coach Mike Malone has come to realize that his team can’t stop anybody, and so he’s better off trying to win games entirely with offense. This ploy has always been a good idea in Denver, actually, given the not insignificant advantage of hosting one-off games against road-weary teams at a mile high altitude. But you have to offer up at least some resistance. NBA guys can run all day, and will enthusiastically fill layup lines if given the opportunity. A recent possible 1-8 playoff preview proves instructive here –  the Nuggets put up 119 on the Dubs and made some pretty nifty plays, but at no point in this game were the Dubs ever even remotely threatened. They could score pretty much any time they wanted to. Oh look! Dunks! Layups! Whee!

The two franchises I think would want this spot the most – the Kings and the Pelicans – do so entirely for financial reasons, as they want to get a couple of playoff home games’ worth of revenue out of the deal. The Kings want the spot the most and probably need the spot the least. In another preview of a possible 1-8 playoff matchup last night, Golden State put in about 15 minutes of effort and it was enough to beat the Kings by double digits on the Kings home floor. Oh, the Kings got off to a good start, but then Boogie decided to pick a fight with the furniture and get himself T’d up, and the Warriors, of course, being the savvy bunch that they are, know very well that when Boogie throws a tantrum like that he is never, ever going to get another call from the zeebs, so Zaza just pushed him around the rest of the game while KD would try to slide over and swat every one of Boogie’s shots into the Sierra foothills, and Boogie of course didn’t get any calls and got frustrated and the Kings lost all focus, at which point the Dubs just ran away from them in predictable fashion.

The Kings roster is horrible, littered with useless bigs and laden with wasted high draft picks of yore (former Top 10 picks Willie Cauley-Stein and Ben McLemore were both DNP-CD against the Dubs on Sunday night), and as we just mentioned, they’re likely going to lose that first round pick to the Bulls. But the Kings are desperate to be seen as being relevant again, and also desperate to make some of the revenue they gave away when their cockamamie ownership group made the deal with the devil that is David Stern in order to buy the franchise. And this desire to feast on the crumbs of relevance, of course, will likely prevent the Kings from doing what they should do, which is to try to restart the franchise through trading Boogie and Rudy Gay, both of whom want out already.

The Pelicans, meanwhile, started 0-and-forever but have been about a .500 team since Jrue Holiday came back – which shows just how good Anthony Davis really is, because Holiday’s addition brought the number of actual useful NBA players on this roster up to two, and it’s amazing what two guys can do when one of them knows what they’re doing and the other is Anthony Davis. And I can see the Pelicans trying to make a move here before the trade deadline, because what have you got to lose? The franchise is moribund, Milk Shake Arena is less lively than a New Orleans cemetery, you’ve got a lot of sunk cost in perpetually injured players live Tyreke Evans and Quincy Pondexter, you’ve got more holes in this roster than Swiss cheese, but just getting a third guy out there on the floor who knows what the hell they’re doing might be good enough to get you the 8th seed, get some extra playoff cash and build some positivity going forward.

And, of course, the reason this all is even an issue is the fact that Portland have been terrible. Portland were a 5th seed in the playoffs last year, and played five wildly entertaining playoff games against the Warriors during the second round of the playoffs. It seems somewhat surprising that the Blazers are suddenly this bad, but it probably shouldn’t be, because no one thought the Blazers would be that good a year ago. I mean, if you looked at the Blazers at the start of last year, they didn’t make much sense. The front court is so-so, the center position is a mystery, the defense is bad, and somehow this team is going to win 44 games by having two smallish guards shooting lights out from deep? Yeah, OK, good luck with that – but then they went and did just that, which was pretty awesome to watch. Well, OK, so now we move forward a season, and Dame and C.J. are still great shooters in the backcourt, but the front court is still so-so, the center position is no longer a mystery – instead, it’s just not very good – and the defense is still bad. Regression to the mean is a bitch. 

And the Blazers compounded the disaster in the offseason by doling out awful free agent contracts. They signed Evan Turner for too much, who they don’t need and who has been terrible. They then felt forced to match the gaudy offer sheet the Nets threw at third guard Allen Crabbe, who was a restricted free agent. Restricted free agency is one of the great troll jobs in all of sports. If you have money to burn, you throw a whole bunch of it at a guy you think another team can’t afford to lose, and put the onus on them to match and suck up the costs. The Blazers did this very thing a few years ago when they made a huge offer to Enis Kanter, which OKC then had to swallow and match, which is how the normally market-savvy Zombies wound up with a $73m backup center who cannot guard anyone. So the Blazers went and matched the offer sheet to third guard Crabbe, apparently suffering from an immediate buyer’s remorse at signing potential third guard Turner, and then tried to solve their defensive issues by signing Festus Ezeli from the Warriors – who didn’t want him anyway, because he has bad knees, and to the surprise of absolutely no one, Ezeli is now out for the year with knee issues that, unfortunately, may never fully heal. What doesn’t make sense about any of this is that none of these guys, ultimately, make the Blazers that much better. They’ve now capped themselves out and still have the same sorts of issues they had before, having simply papered over the cracks a season ago but not solved any of the problems. In terms of actual difference-making talent, the Blazers seem to have more of it than any of these other teams, and you would think Portland might figure it out and separate from these others, but they cannot get on any kind of a winning run because the defense is so bad that they lose too many games they should win.

Now, bad playoff teams are nothing new in sports, of course. We’ve had two cases, in recent years, of sub-.500 teams winning their division in the NFL and hosting playoff games – and then winning those games, in fact, with one of those games being memorable and the other being probably the worst playoff game in NFL history (see the third buzzard point). The L.A. Kings were a sub-.500 team during the regular season when they first won the Stanley Cup. The indignity of the work stoppage which wiped out the 1994 World Series spared baseball from another indignity, which was that the AL West was so bad that year that the Rangers were leading the division despite being 10 games under .500. And in the NBA, most historians recall MJ going off for 63 against the Celtics in 1986, but most people forget that the Bulls were 30-52 that year. Everything is cyclical in sports, and sometimes this is how the leagues stratify. There’s good and bad. Sometimes, there’s good and really bad with not much in between.

And 8th seeds have won playoff series in the NBA, of course (sigh but also yay), but generally those teams have been decent and simply wound up #8 because of the quality above them. This does not apply to the state of this year’s West. These teams are absolutely awful. It’s comedy gold. The only thing successful here is me getting through this entire blog post without talking about the Phoenix Suns. The less said about the Suns, the better.

Deal or No Deal?

Get this man some help!

WE ARE approaching the halfway point of the NBA season, and we’re starting to see, at least in the West, everyone starting to slot themselves. The gap between the good and the bad in the West is HUGE, with a 5½ game spread between the 7th and 8th place spots in the conference, which is only ½ game smaller than the gap from the LOL Kings, in 8th place, down to the Phoenix Suns, who are dead last. The East, meanwhile, is kind of muddled – only 6 games separate 3rd place from 12th, and the table shakes up completely seemingly every couple of days or so. So basically, pretty much everyone save for the 76ers and the Nets, and maybe the Miami Heat, is only a good 2-week stretch of basketball away from being in the playoff race.

Now, that’s not the same thing at all as being realistically in the playoff race, of course. The Phoenix Suns can scarcely string together two possessions of good basketball in a row, much less two weeks. But playing a sport successfully – which every NBA player does simply to reach that level – is based on a certain level of optimism and belief. Part of why I always resented Sam Hinkie so much when he was running the 76ers is that, with his actions and his attitudes, he very clearly viewed the guys that he was employing on his roster as crap. He thought they were crap and wanted them to be crap. He set them up to fail. Players always play to win. There are guys on 30 teams in the NBA who firmly believe that they can make the playoffs this year. If you don’t have that killer instinct, you’re not going to be any good at the game. It’s the management that sometimes play to lose, and sometimes this is couched in the nonsense about “taking the long view.” It seems somewhat two-faced and cynical, if you ask me, but I can understand why it is that they do this, even if I don’t like it.

But at the moment, there are a whole bunch of teams on both sides of the continent clamoring to get into the playoffs, which means that all of the machinations going on behind the scenes are even more complicated than is the norm. As we move through the next couple of months here, it’s going to be interesting to see how the trade market shakes out, since there will be an abundance of posturing and positioning going on, but it’s hard to say who is actually going to make any moves. The trade deadline (and for The Lose’s international audience, you can think of this as the transfer window) is one of the more fascinating elements of sports, in that it brings a whole lot of issues to the forefront that can, in one fell swoop, immediately be addressed. Maybe this team needs a point guard, maybe this team over here wants to move a soon-to-be free agent. Questions about economics, public relations, and organizational philosophy come to the forefront. For anyone who studies the management of the game, this is one of the more fascinating elements.

For example, let’s take the Toronto Raptors in the NBA. The Raptors have lost a little ground here in recent weeks, as they’ve been forced on a seemingly endless road trip over the holidays thanks to the inanity that is the World Junior Hockey Championships taking place in their home building. (And yes, my Canadian friends, caring so much about high school kids is stupid. And yes, we care far too much about high school football in this country.) The Raptors have slipped back a little bit on this road trip from hell, but at 23-11, they are in second place in the East, only three games behind the Cavaliers in the standings.

And the Raptors have been terrific this season. They have a historically good offense, posting an offensive rating better than any team in recent memory save for this year’s Warriors. They are a bit of an oddball team in that their two best players – Kyle Lowry and DeMar DeRozan – are ball-dominant guards who play together and go about succeeding in old-school ways. Lowry is slow, can’t jump, and yet he is one of the smartest players in the game, one of the game’s best technicians, and has become an élite level shooter. DeRozan, meanwhile, is all mid-range and driving to the basket, bucking all NBA trends of shooting from deep. The rest of the team is complimentary players, role players who are comfortable without the ball and able to play off of DeRozan and Lowry. The talent on the rest of the roster is both deceptively good and deceptively lacking: they have a lot of glue guys and versatile guys able to fill roles, but not a lot of other shotmakers or playmakers. But as a unit, the Raps function remarkably well.

But not quite well enough. This is a team which had only won one playoff series in 20 years before reaching the Eastern Conference finals last spring, where they were beaten by the Cavs in six games and the series never really felt that close. But Toronto is even better this year, as both Lowry and DeRozan are shooting exceptionally well, but are they good enough to beat the Cavs in the playoffs?

A better question would be to ask if beating the Cavs in the playoffs is even a goal, because the Raptors are selling out their home games in National Airline Center No Spell It the British Way Centre, and Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment Ltd., who owns the Raps, are pretty happy at the moment with their profit margins, and #fearthenorth became a thing last spring as the Toronto sports fans, desperate for anything good after several decades of abject misery, turned out en masse to fill up the fan zones outside the arena during the playoff push last season. The Raptors are good, really good even, but how good is good enough? Does the club want to be champions, or are they happy winning 55 games a season and making reasonable playoff pushes? This is the balancing act we spoke about a little bit in this Lose post from last spring, where we asked the question of would you be happy with your team always being good, or would you prefer they had it all come together in some sort of one-off event to win a title. Further complicating matters is that the 31-year-old Lowry is due to be a free agent this coming summer, and will likely command a 5-year, max contract upwards of $175 million or more. His age is a bit of a red flag, but he’s blossomed into an all-NBA player and an Olympic dream teamer in Toronto and led the Raps to lofty heights they’ve never known, so they probably have to bite the bullet and re-sign him, just as they had to do with DeRozan last year. But as we saw with Kevin Durant this past summer, there are no guarantees you are going to do that. Assuming that they do re-sign Lowry, however, he is still in his prime but his game, while being relatively age-proof since he does not base it on athleticism, is still likely going to start to decline in his 30s. Both he and DeRozan are at their peak of performance right now.

So if you’re Toronto, and you’re three games behind the Cavs in the East, and you have two of the best guys in the NBA in DeRozan and Lowry in their absolute primes of their career. Do you make a move? Do you decide to go for it, try to challenge for the title? And if so, is there a move you can make which can do that? And Toronto has pieces to trade if they want. They have some good players on good contracts, they have young prospects with upside, they have a decent collection of draft picks after some shrewd moves in the past. Do you go for it?

And if you decide to go for it, who do you try to get? The most obvious candidate is Paul Millsap in Atlanta, who will be a free agent this summer and has shown little interest in re-signing with the Hawks, who are one of those teams that bounce between 5th and 9th in the East standings depending upon their mood and the day of the week. Millsap is a stretch four, which fills a need for the Raps, who lack rebounding and could use more shooting and tend not to play much defense, but if you add Millsap, is it going to be enough to challenge the Cavs and LeBron, who has been systematically stealing Millsap’s lunch money in the playoffs the past couple of seasons.

OK, so if you’re the Raps, maybe Millsap won’t get you past the Cavs and the cost in a trade will be steep, so why don’t you think bigger? Hell, you’ve got Drake bumbling about on the sidelines pretending like he’s a part of the organization, so why not put him to use and get his people to call some people and work the back channels, and maybe call up Boogie’s people in Sacramento … not that Sacramento is going to trade him right now, seeing as how they’re the 8th seed in the West at the moment and no franchise would more happily be the 8th seed and get stomped all over by the Warriors than the Kings, but let’s say the Kings do what they usually do this time of year and completely crater and succumb to utter dysfunction over the next couple of weeks. Boogie hates it there, he’s been a malcontent and he’s given no indication he’ll re-sign in Sac in 2018 no matter how many banks they break to sign him. He’s also the best damn center in the NBA. Would he fit in Toronto? Hell, you’d make him fit. When you’re talking about an élite talent like DeMarcus Cousins, you go about finding ways to make him fit. And the Kings are dumb, of course, they’re one of the dumbest franchises in the league, so you might be able to “win” the trade by giving up 2-3 players and a #1 pick, since otherwise Boogie walks in 2018 and the Kings get nothing for him.

If you’re Toronto, do you make that call to the Big Tomato and talk trade? It can’t hurt, can it? When he was the GM of the Sonics in the early 1990s, Bob Whitsitt used to joke about how every time he had some reason to call Chicago, he made it a point to ask if Michael Jordan was available. The responses ran the gamut from, “Bob, you’re crazy,” to “Bob, you’re drunk,” but the point is that he was always willing to ask.

There are lots of trade rumors that float about, along with lots of really bad proposed trades but forth by rosterbators, a lot of whom don’t seem to understand just how complex this stuff really is. You have to have something to trade and, perhaps more importantly, the other side has to have a reason to want to trade with you. The Celtics have seemingly a million assets at their disposal for making a deal, the two juiciest of which are the rights to swap draft positions with the Nets this summer, and the Nets #1 pick in 2018 – by-products of one of the more confounding trades in NBA history. But just because you have those assets, it doesn’t mean you necessary have to, or want to, make a deal. Boston could theoretically dangle those two goodies out there and forge a trade for just about anyone in the league – or they could sit back and see a horrible Nets team flounder the next two years and possibly get a pair of top-3, or even #1 overall, draft picks out of the deal.

The Millsap-to-Toronto idea makes sense – the Raptors could use a guy with Millsap’s skill set, while the Hawks would be better off getting something in return as opposed to letting him walk in the summer – but both teams have a history of being somewhat conservative and risk averse when it comes to trades, particularly during the season. Both want to “win” all the trades, so the deal might not make sense in that regard, and maybe these aren’t an ideal pair of trade partners. It’s hard for Toronto to “win” a Millsap trade, simply because trying to make that trade implies a certain level of necessity. If Atlanta knows Toronto is going all-in and truly trying to compete with the Cavs in the East, the Hawks’ asking price is going to get higher. This is what we mean when we talk about trading from positions of strength and weakness. It’s part of why any sort of honest assessment of Hinkie’s tenure in Philadelphia should never include the line “he won all the trades,” because his fundamental objective for three years was to lose all of the games, and it’s easy to win trades when you’re not actually trying to win any games. Now the 76ers have a mismatched roster and have to make a deal, but everyone knows they have to make a deal, so the asking price for a Nerlens Noel – lost on the bench on Philly, but still young and with some upside – continues to get lower and lower. The 76ers are dealing from a position of weakness, and are unlikely to win that trade.

It’s not just as simple as swap Player A for Player B. Everyone has an agenda and everyone has an objective. Franchises are all at different stages and different places, so what’s best for one team isn’t what’s best for another – and what’s best for a franchise can suddenly shift and swerve. The Kings are a good example of this: Boogie has been uncoachable at times, he’s gotten coaches fired, he’s quarreled with everyone and not exactly been a great teammate, and he’s shown no interest in staying in Sac after his contract expires. They also have Rudy “Welcome to Hell” Gay who is desperate to leave, so much so that he decided to actually start playing well this year in order to turn himself into trade bait and make himself more attractive to other teams. Both these guys should probably be moved in the long-term interests of the franchise, and probably should be moved immediately so as to maximize their value.

But then the Kings start winning a few games here and there, mostly because of Gay being good and Boogie being great, and thanks to the Blazers being awful and unable to guard their own shoes, and thanks to Denver being young and dumb and Minnesota being younger and dumber, the Kings now find themselves in a playoff position, which is a position they haven’t been in forever. So now you cannot possibly justify making those sorts of deals, you can’t justify it to the fans who’ve been filling the arena for the past 10 years and had nothing to show for it. Hell, instead of being sellers at the deadline, the Kings might actually be buyers if they had something to trade which anyone else wanted. Which they don’t, but you get my point. The market has changed simply because the circumstances have changed. Now, if the Kings implode and go something like 9-16 between now and the end of February, it will change again. You’ve got a moving target here, so how the hell are you going to be able to make a deal?

OK, so who else needs to make a deal? OKC, for starters. Russell Westbrook is playing at a level the likes of which we’ve rarely seen, averaging nearly a triple-double a game. And he has to play that well in order for OKC just to be decent, never mind good. Westbrook has 16 triple-doubles and OKC are 13-3 when he registers one. When he doesn’t, they’re 8-12. OKC are 21-15 on the season, with a schedule that’s been home-friendly so far and laden with bad teams, and most of those wins have been close games, games that wind up being close because they manage Westbrook’s minutes in OKC, sacrificing 10-15 of the game in which their back up unit gets killed with the idea in mind that Russ will somehow save them down the stretch. And by “save them,” I mean that he will literally take every single shot in the last 4:00 of the game if he has to. Given that the offense has basically one option, it’s both a testament to Westbrook’s ability and something of a miracle that OKC has that many wins at all.

Russ is winning games on his own, which is unsustainable. OKC needs to get this man some help. They have a roster filled with redundancy, filled with specialists and technicians and one-note players – a roster, in short, built around the idea that they would still have Westbrook and Durant. Above all else, they desperately need some shooting. The defenses are so packed in that there isn’t much room to operate. OKC needs shooting.

Them and about 25 other teams, which means that shooting is expensive. OKC’s ethos is that they want younger players with some cost certainty attached since, you know, they’re a small market and can’t sign free agents and blah blah blah. So where are you going to find a guy who fits that profile? And what do you have to offer in return? OKC’s best trade chip is probably Kanter, a guy with great offensive skill but a guy who can’t guard his own shadow whom they’re paying way too much to be a backup center, but whose contract on a team where he’s a starting center would be a bargain. But what does a guy like that bring you in return? Teams that have shooting, in general, don’t need more offense – they need defense, of which Kanter plays none. The most logical trading partner for OKC might theoretically be Phoenix, partly because the Suns are garbage and going nowhere, partly because the Suns are stupid and eminently fleecable, and partly because they do, in fact, have some shooting on that team that might be for sale, but Kanter doesn’t work in Phoenix because the Suns already have a glut of big men – albeit none who are any good – and they don’t need to add yet another one. And what does adding another shooter ultimately get OKC? Are they that much better in the long run? Maybe you wind up a 5-seed in the playoffs in the best-case scenario, but adding one guy isn’t going to make you good enough to compete with the Dubs and the Spurs and the Rockets, so the price you pay might not be worth it.

OKC would be likely be looking to make a deal like that with next year in mind, which pretty much throws away all of the exceptional work that Westbrook is doing in the here and the now – work which, in the here and the now, still isn’t good enough. And herein lies the dilemma. This is the ultimate juggling act going on, as your team tries to figure out your objectives for now, for next year, and the year after that, and do it all in one moment in time, when you can’t possibly know what the future has in store. No one in the NBA, and I mean no one in the NBA, could have ever foreseen the confluence of events which ultimately led to Kevin Durant becoming a Golden State Warrior. All of this is educated guess work.

Teams in baseball, in general, tend to be a bit more aggressive at the trade deadline, with buyers being willing to take on short-term rentals and sellers being willing to dump salary, but this is due entirely to baseball being an open market where guys move much more freely in free agency from team to team in the offseason. If a short-term guy doesn’t work out, he moves on and you spend in the offseason. In the NBA and NHL, you also have endless complications of the salary cap to think through, and in-season trades of players in the NFL is almost unheard of. Soccer is a bit different, in that’s is a straight buy/sell proposition and contract swaps almost never happen, but the same sorts of complications arise primarily due to the players have even more power and ability to dictate movement internationally than they do in any of the North American-based sports. Two of the bottom-feeders in the EPL this year, Swansea and Hull, wound up in the same really awful situation this past summer where they had no available money to buy players, since the clubs were in the process of being sold, but then some of their current players (and in the case of Swans, their best players) wanted to leave and the clubs felt compelled to sell in order to maximize their value – which has, unsurprisingly, left both clubs short on talent and short on options, and ultimately far short on wins and points in the table. And you don’t get a #1 pick if you finish last in the EPL. They throw your ass out of the league and you get to rebuild with £200 million less of a budget as you wander aimlessly through the malaise of the second division.

But I sort of feel like that in a place like Toronto, the future is now. Maybe a Millsap deal doesn’t give you more than a 20% of beating the Cavs come spring time, but the low-percentage play is still better than the no-percentage play. Maybe you make a bold move like that and make up that 3-game deficit and sneak in for the #1 seed, which would give you that extra home game. Maybe you force the Cavs to work harder than they want to for the next few months, since the Cavs seem perfectly content to coast through the season at the moment, exuding lots of energy only when necessary. Standing pat with the team that you have isn’t going to get you anywhere next year, either – neither the Cavs nor the Warriors are going anywhere, so you’ll have the exact same issues. And you’ve spent years trying to rid the franchise of the moniker of an NBA version of Siberia. Toronto is cool now, it’s become a basketball town and you can lure guys there to play – and one of the best ways to lure guys there to play, as well as keep the guys you have, is show yourself to be a franchise that wants to be a big player come springtime, because ultimately players want to win more than they want almost anything in life. I don’t know what you do here. The Raptors are much like the Clippers, in that they’ve moved from the realm of always being terrible to the realm where they can be disappointing on a higher level. Failure on higher levels is still ultimately failure, and the window for success shuts more swiftly than you may realize.

Ring Out Your Dead

Welcome to Jacksonville. Good luck. You’re going to need it.

ONE of the biggest days of the year in Lose occurs the day after the NFL regular season ends, when teams cut bait, cut their losses and clean house. We’re up to six head coaching vacancies already, which is almost a third of the league. Three coaches had already gotten axed during the regular season – Gus Bradley in Jacksonville, Jeff Fisher in Los Angeles, and Rex Ryan with the Buffalo Bills, who promptly showed their general enthusiasm for this season by getting waxed by the Jets in a loss that included quite possibly the dumbest play we’ll see all of 2017. You can add San Diego’s Mike McCoy to the list, as well as Chip Kelley in San Francisco, who was fired along with GM Trent Baalke in the classic bumbling 49ers fashion whereby they go about leaking it to the media before ever talking to anyone whose about to lose his job.

The sixth vacancy is in Denver, where Gary Kubiak is stepping away for personal reasons, and there are likely to be more: Sean Payton may be a hotter commodity outside of New Orleans than within, and may try to finagle out of his contract if the Saints don’t can him first; there are rumblings of discontent with Chuck Pagano in Indianapolis; the Potatoes sure look like they have quit on Jay Gruden in Washington, given how poorly they played in a must-win game against a Giants team with nothing to play for and their minds somewhere off the Florida Coast; and who the hell knows what the Jets are going to do?

J-E-T-S  MESS MESS MESS!

So if you’re an aspiring NFL head coach, it’s time to get that résumé in order – or, if you’re an ex-coach, it’s time to go into spin control mode and try to position yourself to get another gig. And welcome to the mess, because wherever you go, it’s likely to be one.

Being a head coach in the NFL has to be one of the worst jobs imaginable. Your life’s work is judged in the public eye on a weekly basis in black and in white: a loss is a loss, and the results speak for themselves. You’ve got a huge base of customers – not just fans, mind you, but paying customers who but their asses in seats eight times a season – who will second-guess everything you do, win or lose. You’ve got rich fat cat bosses who can’t help but meddle and interfere with what you’re trying to do. You’ve got GMs and personnel guys over your head whose job it is to provide you with the talent necessary to be successful, and quite possibly have a far different opinion of what constitutes talent than you do, and then you have 53 players that you’re responsible for, all of whom think, to some degree or another, that you’re a tool. It’s perhaps because the job is so bad in the first place that there are so few people who seem to be any good at it.

I mean, let’s be honest here, who out there in the NFL who still has a head coaching job is someone that all of us armchair QBs would actually argue is “good” at his job? I passed this question along to Scott Pianowski, The Official NFL Guru of In Play Lose, since he follows the league a whole lot closer than I do and, from my distant and somewhat detached vantage point, it sure as hell seems like a lot of these guys don’t know what they’re doing.

We tried to compile a list of NFL head coaches that we like and this what we came up with: Mike Tomlin in Pittsburgh and John Harbaugh in Baltimore immediately came to mind. I think Bruce Arians has done pretty well in Arizona while Scott suggested Andy Reid, who gets pilloried every time he mismanages the game clock but has successfully won both with the Iggles and the Chefs. We both think Adam Gase and Dan Quinn have shown some good things in Miami and Atlanta, respectively. And then it gets a little murky. Marvin Lewis? Well, Cincinnati was a joke before he got there, and now they’re merely disappointing. Then there are a whole bunch of guys – Mike McCarthy in Green Bay, Jack Del Rio in Oakland, Ron Rivera in Carolina – where it’s hard to discern if it’s a case of good coaching or simply really good QB play. And the rest? Meh.

But to me, at least, Bill Belichick and Pete Carroll are on an entirely different level – and Belichick and Carroll are interesting test cases for what constitutes great coaching in the NFL.

Belichick is the ultimate shape-shifter, his schemes constantly adapting depending upon personnel and the ways that the NFL is trending. If you look over his tenure at New England, you’ll notice just how frequently he adapts, particularly on the offensive end: they’ll emphasis power running one year, scat back receivers in the slots the next, and then they might go with two big tight ends and a centralized passing game after that. He’s always zigging where people are zagging, coming up with new looks and wrinkles on the offensive end. He is always looking for players with high football IQs who can be versatile, able to transfer over to multiple positions to fill whatever need arises.

Carroll, meanwhile, has built a near dynast in Seattle by emphasizing defense and physicality while imposing the tenor and the tempo of the game upon its opponents. The Seahawks have gone about redefining the sorts of physical specs you want in players. They want big corners, swift linebackers, and linemen who are high-energy players that he can constantly rotate and keep fresh. Carroll’s approach emphasizes having position coaches on his staff who are excellent teachers, believing first and foremost that skills and techniques can be taught. As such, the Seahawks have constantly been able to restock their talent base. It can look a bit ugly on the field at times, as young players are obviously engaged in some intense on-the-job training, but eventually they figure it out and the Seahawks go back to whacking people.

Keep in mind, both the Pats and the Seahawks are perpetually drafting in the 20s, if not the 30s. Literally every team in the league has a better shot of landing players through the draft, and yet the Pats and Seahawks keep drafting in the 20s and the 30s year after year because they keep winning all of the time. And we should also keep in mind that Belichick and Carroll both got fired from their first head coaching jobs. Carroll got fired twice, in fact – in 1994 after a 6-10 season with the Jets, and then in 1999 after three seasons coaching the Patriots, where he was replaced by … Belichick, who’d failed miserably in Cleveland, winning only a single playoff game and antagonizing the entire Browns fan base in the process with his impromptu cutting of starting QB and local hero Bernie Kosar. I mentioned previously that I attended the first post-Kosar Browns game, which was against the Seahawks at the Giant Concrete Mushroom Fungus in Seattle, and it was one of the worst football games I’ve ever seen. At no point did it seem like either the Browns or Belichick knew what they was doing. So as you can see, this isn’t an exact science by any means. The guys who are clearly the best also screwed up a lot and, after failing at previous jobs, there was naturally a bit of skepticism in Boston and Seattle about being hired to their present job.

But if you go back to that list we put forth above – which, admittedly, we sort of just threw together off the top of our heads – that’s not a lot of guys. That’s far fewer guys then there are jobs. In the NFL, just like any other business, it appears to be hard to get good help these days.

But like I said at the beginning, this is also one of the worst jobs imaginable. Why would you want this job? Sure, being great at coaching requires enormous self-confidence, just like being great at anything else, and that hubris might lead you to think you could take over coaching a franchise like the Jacksonville Jaguars – which has been, and continues to be, one of the worst ideas for a franchise off all time, never mind one that exists – and make them successful. I mean, look at these jobs that are available at the moment. Other than the Denver gig, which is a no-brainer, and maybe the Indianapolis gig if it comes open, the rest of them are really bad jobs! Who wants to work for Jed York in San Francisco after he’s one-and-doned head coaches in consecutive seasons? Who wants to work for Stan Kroenke? Or you can report directly to this guy in Buffalo. But in the end, people take the gigs, simply because there are only 32 of them. A bad job that’s a dead end road to nowhere somehow seems like a better option than not taking a job at all.

Coaches are hired to be fired, in the end. Even good ones can wear out their welcome and grow stale over time, like Tom Coughlin did with the Giants. And while both the Pats and the Hawks have spent quite a while trying to develop an organizational philosophy, from top to bottom, if you take a guy out of that system and plunk him in a head gig elsewhere and he doesn’t necessary flourish: witness the endless number of failed head coaches plucked from Belichick’s staff over the years, and ex-Jag coach Bradley worked under Carroll in Seattle, which has become the en vogue team to raid for coaching talent in recent years. And, of course, the truth is that most of the time, teams are bad because their players are bad. You can make bad players better, but it’s hard to make them good – and it’s often the guys making this very hire, the GMs, who are responsible for the dire state of the talent base and are firing coaches in order to save their own skin. You have to get this hire right, lest you end up showing up in this corner of cyberspace a year or two from now.