Around the Rim and Out

The Clips gonna Clip ...

FIRST up, we have to give it up for the Clippers, who pulled off one of the more remarkable choke jobs that we’ve seen in the NBA regular season in quite a while on Sunday night. “The Clips gonna Clip,” as they say on ESPN, but this sorry failure of a franchise outdid even their own legacy of failure on Sunday, losing 98-97 to Sacramento that night in a game in which the Clippers held a 94-75 lead with 4:59 remaining, only to see the Kings go on a 23-3 run to close out the game. To put this in proper perspective, over the past 20 years in the NBA, teams leading by 18+ points with less than 5:00 to go were 6746-0.

I would say that I’ve never seen anything like this in the NBA, but friend of the blog Quinn, the official Furman Paladin of In Play Lose, managed to comb through the NBA archives and locate this wacko playoff game from 1986 in which the Washington Buzzards Wizards Bullets were down 17 against the 76ers and scored 18 straight points to win the game. I sort of vaguely remember that game. And in the annals of Clippers history, of course, this choke actually pales in comparison to the one two seasons ago in the playoffs, when they were leading by 19 late in the 3rd Quarter of Game 6 against the Houston Rockets, leading the series 3-2 and just a quarter away from the Western Conference Finals, and they proceeded to blow the lead against the Rockets bench, no less, as James Harden was sitting next to Kevin McHale over there while Josh Steph and Curry Brewer – I mean, uh, Josh Smith and Corey Brewer – started draining treys and the Clippers starting kicking the ball all over the gym.

The talent on the Clippers is not only good, but unique: one of the premier catch-and-shooters in J.J. Redick, a sky walking rim runner in DeAndre Jordan, a four with great playmaking ability in Blake Griffin, one of the best all-around point guards the game has known in Chris Paul, and off the bench there is Jamal Crawford, one of the best bad shot makers in NBA history. All of these guys are, by NBA standards, somewhat unusual and unorthodox players, and trying to fit all of these sorts of players together has never quite worked. The Clippers are a team that always seems in need of a group therapy session. They’re easily the most neurotic team in the NBA, and the result of attempting to blend together all of these somewhat unorthodox roundball artists over the years has been a case study in NBA schizophrenia. Apart from Paul and Jordan goofing around in the State Farm commercials on TV, you never get the sense that anyone on this team actually likes each other or, more importantly, likes playing with each other.

The Clippers’ promising looking season has completely fizzled owing to a mix of continued injuries and periodic incompetence. They’re presently the #5 seed in the West, a place which would give them a strangely positive first round matchup against the Utah Jazz, whom they’ve beaten something like 17 out of the last 19 times, and then a nightmarish 2nd round matchup against the Warriors, whom they’ve not beaten in three years, and who toy with the Clippers much like a cat toys with a trapped mouse. The Dubs dropped 50 on the Clippers in a quarter in one game this year, beat them by 48 in another, and beat them by 50 in the preseason just for shits and giggles.

And it’s hard to figure out where the Clippers go from here if they bomb out early in the playoffs once again. The core four of Paul, Griffin, Jordan and Redick have managed to elevate the Clippers out of the muck and into the malaise, as they’ve clearly reached their peak and grown stale. This is where that insane playoff loss to the Rockets comes back to haunt them, as it was clearly their best chance to possibly win a championship. I think the Warriors would have beaten them anyway, but this occurred before the Warriors climbed completely into their heads, when a GS-LA series seemed plausibly competitive. In the present, another fizzle probably means big changes for the Clips, as they’ll almost certainly break that core up and it wouldn’t surprise me if Doc Rivers winds up being ousted from his dual roles of coach and GM.

There are three distinct levels in The Lose’s Paradigm of Purgatory. There are teams that are just perpetually terrible – a realm in which the Clippers (and, indeed, the Warriors) toiled for decades. There are teams that are just mediocre year after year – the Atlanta Hawks of the world. And then there are the teams which are good but not good enough, and wind up failing to meet expectations. That would be the level the Clippers have reached now. That one can be particularly bedeviling because it takes so long to get to be any good, and you finally get there and it’s not good enough, and then you have to worry about trying to maintain that level, and that’s difficult because in attempting to win now, and become good enough, you’ve likely gone about mortgaging your future.

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Like most memos, this one deserved to be filed in the trash

NBA Commissioner Adam Silver sent out a memo to the owners a week ago Monday about an issue which, yet again, sprung into the limelight during one of the league’s supposedly marquee Saturday night national telecast. First, the Warriors punted one against San Antonio and then, a week later, Cleveland did the exact same thing against the Clippers. The Cavs got into the league office’s crosshairs because they had the audacity to decide it was unwise to play Kevin Love – who is coming off knee surgery –and Kyrie Irving – who has had a knee issue troubling him all of this year and the year before and pretty much ever since he hurt himself in the 2015 NBA Finals – on the front end of a back-to-back Clippers/Lakers stint in L.A. And since neither Love nor Kyrie was playing, and the Cavs were likely to get beat by the Clippers, it wasn’t really worth it either for them to send out LeBron James – who leads the league in minutes played per game, and who has been a warhorse in playing the equivalent of about 16 seasons in the 14 years he’s been in the league when you factor in the playoffs. (To put it in perspective, LeBron has now played as many total games in the NBA, at age 32, as Michael Jordan had by the time that he was 40.) The result of Cleveland sitting their big three, of course, was a 30-point gift win for the floundering Clippers in a bad game watched by almost nobody. Needless to say, ABC/ESPN wasn’t amused about this.

And if ABC/ESPN aren’t amused, then the NBA isn’t amused. The NBA doesn’t care if, say, the Indiana Pacers or the Dallas Mavericks pick some meaningless mid-week game to sit all of their best players and allow themselves to get killed by the Warriors. (Which happened in both cases.) They don’t seem to care that the Phoenix Suns just decided to give Eric Bledsoe the entire rest of the season off. They don’t even seem to care that their franchises just write off entire seasons. But god help you if you show them up on a Saturday night on ABC. This is the sort of style-over-substance bullshit that Little Napoleon was all about when he was running the NBA. Don’t speak to how you’re concerned about the fans who paid for a ticket at the Staples Center, hoping to see LeBron play against the Clips and now you’re out a couple hundred bucks. Which one if getting ripped off more in L.A. right now, the jilted Clips fan who missed out on one game against LeBron or the Lakers fan who bought season tickets to watch a team that has lost 44 of their past 55 games and are purposefully, deliberately putting themselves in positions to fail in order to save a potentially lost draft pick? When Kevin Durant said today, in an interview with ESPN, that this was nothing more than the league caring about the fact that a handful of players take a day off here and there, he was absolutely right.

And, of course, during the All-Star break in New Orleans, Adam Silver was saying this to reporters about the issue of resting players:

“I do recognize, though, that there isn’t an easy solution to that problem, and I’m sympathetic to fans who turn out – whether they buy tickets to games or watching games on television and don’t see their favorite player on the floor. But we also have to be realistic that the science has gotten to the point where there is that direct correlation that we’re aware of between fatigue and injuries. And as tough as it is on our fans to miss one of their favorite players for a game, it’s far better than having them get injured and be out for long periods of time. So, we’re always still looking to strike that right balance. The league takes scheduling and health of players seriously. Over the past two seasons, it has reduced the number of back-to-backs and four-game-in-five-days scenarios and plans to start the season a week earlier in 2017-18 in an effort to cut back on those situations.”

So, in other words, yes they acknowledge the problem, and they’re going to pay it lip service, but if the TV execs bitch, they’ll make a big deal about it. The NBA wants to have their cake and eat it, too. These sorts of things could be pretty easily avoided, actually – when you go to make the schedule, and you pick the dates on which you want these marquee ABC/ESPN games to be, you just say “no back to backs” for the teams that will be playing in those games. It’s 10 games out of 1230 in the course of a season. If you can’t figure out how to set that up, you probably need a new line of work. (Of course, given how bad NBA League Pass is, it’s clear the league is in need of some help on the logistical front at the moment.)

I don’t blame the Cavs at all. The league didn’t like the fact that all of this was done on short notice, on the day of the game by Cleveland – whereas the Warriors had made it known the day before that they were holding guys out – but the fact of the matter is that decisions about player health happen at game time. It doesn’t matter how you felt 24 hours earlier. As for the boo-hoo fans who didn’t get to see LeBron in L.A., buying a ticket is never a guarantee that anyone is going to play, because injuries happen and situations change. You take that risk when you plunk down your money for a ticket.

What I found humorous about this is the sentence, "With so much at stake, it is simply not acceptable for Governors to be uninvolved or defer decision-making authority on these matters to others in their organizations.” So, in other words, owners should be telling GMs and coaches that guys should be playing. This flies in the face of the #1 rule of sports ownership, which is that a good owner should hire good people, sign the cheques, shut the hell up and stay out of the way.

And one other thing about this which really annoys me: when players rest and sit out games, it’s almost never the players making that decision but is, in fact, the coaching staff, which is management. I have always found it disconcerting that any sort of dispute, real or perceived, between players and management in a sport winds up being construed as being that “the players did this.” Time and again, when issues arise in sports that lead to some sort of work stoppage, the narrative is put forth about how it is somehow the players fault, that they’re greedy and overpaid and all of that sort of nonsense. This gets back to one rule of thumb here at In Play Lose: in any sort of dispute between players and management, the players are always right. And I mean ALWAYS. So when guys are sitting out games in the NBA, it’s usually because the coaching staff decides it’s a good idea, which means it has little to nothing to do with what players want. So people need to stop portraying it as some movement among NBA players. It isn’t. It’s pretty irresponsible of the NBA sock puppets turning up on networks to portray it that way.

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Speaking of the Cavs, they’ve seen their once sizable lead in the East disappear, and they are now a ½-game back of Boston after losing 99:93 to the Bulls in Chicago tonight. San Antonio destroyed Cleveland 103:74 on Monday night, which was only the latest in a litany of noncompetitive games. Not only is Cleveland losing – they’re a sub-.500 team for the month of March – but they’re also getting pounded on a regular basis. The Cavs started 25-7 but are only 22-20 since. They’ve been beset by injuries, what with J.R. Smith breaking a hand and Kevin Love needing knee surgery, and not having all of their sharpshooters in the lineup has ultimately caught up to them, as the Cavs have needed to outgun all of their opponents this season because the defense stinks.

We’ve all just sort of assumed that the regular season didn’t matter, since this is LeBron and the Cavs and the record won’t matter and they’ll just flip the switch and turn it on come playoff time. And to be sure, there was some lackadaisical play at times from Cleveland this season. They were pretty bored there in the first couple of months. But here we are, two weeks away from the playoffs and with Cleveland getting blown out by the Spurs, and getting run out of the building by the Buzzards at home, and getting pounded by Denver and the like, I’m starting to wonder if the Cavs even have a switch to flip.

No team has ever won an NBA title with a defense as bad as the Cavs presently possess. Since the start of the New Year, the only team worse than they on that end of the floor are the Lakers, a team which is deliberately trying to lose as many games as possible and, thus, as much as escorting guys to the basket. Not only are the Cavs the 2nd-oldest team in the NBA, but according to the advanced UV data, they are also the slowest team in the NBA. So the Cavs are old and slow, and teams that are old and slow have a tendency to get older and slower. Even worse than that, they tend to get really bad, really fast. Critical mass takes over and then, seemingly overnight, they aren’t any good any more.

And I’m starting to wonder if this is what we’re seeing in Cleveland. 22-20 over the span of half a season is no longer a small sample size. The Cavs had a good February, but in March they’ve been terrible, and they won fewer games in January than the Sixers did. Cavs apologists that I read in the cyberworld have been trotting out tired clichés about never underestimating the heart of a champion, and combing the annals of NBA history trying to find examples where defending champions dogged it during the followed season, only to then rise up and defend their title. But guess what? That hardly ever happens. Most of the time, if you’re old and slow, come playoff time, you get run out of the building.

I do think the defense will improve for the Cavs in the playoffs, simply because LeBron will give a damn about playing defense in the playoffs, but other than he and Tristan Thompson, there isn’t another guy on this roster who seems physically capable of stopping anyone. They were so desperate for some rim protection that they went out and signed Andrew Bogut, who every team thinks is great until he actually plays for their team, and he wound up getting hurt 2:00 into his first game. The mystique and swagger of the Cavs can spook a lot of opponents in the playoffs – *cough cough Atlanta Hawks cough cough* – but the East is improved this season. I still have my doubts about those nervous northern nellies from Toronto, but every time Cleveland plays Washington, John Wall and Bradley Beal get basically any shot they want to, which doesn’t bode well. The Cavs have two weeks to figure it out, and unlike the Dubs and Spurs over on the other side of the Mississippi River, both of whom have ample time to rest and experiment, Cleveland shouldn’t be resting anyone over the next two weeks simply because they’re so out of sorts. I love to see the Cavs playing at their peak. It’s great basketball, which is what I want to see in the NBA Finals come June. But it seems hard for me to believe that LeBron can carry this team on his back yet again. At some point, LeBron’s run of consecutive trips to the NBA Finals will end. As it stands, I’d be more surprised if that continued than if it didn’t.

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I thought it was cool that Devin Booker scored 70 points in a game last week, and I wasn’t all that bothered by the fact that the Suns were doing whatever they could to get him to 70 points, because the Phoenix Suns have been terrible this year, and if they find just one thing that brings them some joy during what’s been a dreadful season, that’s okay. You have to win these small battles sometimes, even if you’re constantly losing the war.

I don’t think I’ve seen a team that looks less prepared to play NBA basketball than the Suns. Booker and the aforementioned Eric Bledsoe make up a nice backcourt, but the front court is a mess and the center position is a dumpster fire. At any given point in a game, the Suns seem to have at least two guys on the floor who don’t seem to know where they’re supposed to be. The offense is generally a jumble and the defense stinks. The Suns were late to the tanking party, having picked up a few wins here in the second half of the season, as the Suns have kept playing hard and kept the pace up against a whole lot of teams who couldn’t otherwise give a shit.

It would be very Sunsesque for them to win the NBA draft lottery in a year where the two best players are point guards, which is what they don’t need. That would require their front office to actually make some sound personnel decisions, whereas they’ve been taking the volume discount approach to team building over the years, which involves having so many bad teams that you accrue enough high picks and eventually you stumble your way into a decent team.

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I’ve not said much about this team, and with good reason, but win-loss records aside, having watched a decent amount of all 30 teams this year, I feel fairly comfortable in saying that the worst team I’ve seen all year is the Orlando Magic. How does anyone involved in assembling that team still have a job?

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And finally, your regular reminder that the Knicks are garbage:

Phil Jackson paid $72,000,000 for that. How does that man still have a job as well?

The Dream is Still Alive

Toa Aito!

MY ULTIMATE footballing dream pertaining to the 2018 World Cup is very much alive at the moment, thanks to some poor record keeping on one side of the Pacific, and a poor choice of words by Lionel Messi on the other.

When we last checked in on The Ultimate Good Guys, the Iron Warriors of Tahiti, it was in preparation for the 2013 Confederations Cup in Brazil – a tournament in which they were hopelessly outmatched, of course, getting whomped 1:6 by Nigeria, 0:10 by Spain, and 0:8 by Uruguay. But the Iron Warriors won a lot of fans at that tournament because they understood, in the end, that the experience of playing in such a prestigious tournament and being able to take to a stage as grand as the Maracanã in Rio was far more important, in the long run, than the results. Of course they were going to lose. That was never in doubt. If they played Spain 100 times, they’d lose 101 of them. But not only did the Tahitians have fun in that tournament, they also played the way they wanted to play, results be damned. They didn’t park the bus and try to play for 0:0 draws. Screw that! They played high lines and tried to attack. A good number of those 24 goals they conceded came towards the end of matches, which speaks to where the real difference between amateur and professional players lies, which is conditioning. (This is part of why you should never, ever take seriously any notion put forth about a really good college team in the U.S., in any sport, being able to compete at a serious level with pro teams, even bad ones.) Nothing is more annoying in soccer than a bad team that tries to not lose for 90 minutes. That’s just lame and it’s not fun to watch. To their credit, Tahiti didn’t do that in 2013.

Tahitians love football. When myself and The Official Spouse of In Play Lose were in Tahiti in 2015, football was everywhere. Kids were playing football on almost every single beach – and that last word is the key, because when it comes to playing the beach game, the Tahitians are world powerhouses. They finished second in the last Beach World Cup, and they finished third in the tourney before that, for which they were the hosts. As a result, all of the cool kids in Tahiti are now playing the beach game. But the beach game has a very different skill set to it. You’re not playing on 100 metres of grass, nor are you playing with 10 other teammates. So while the beach guys are thriving, it’s not been so good for the 11-a-side guys. Tahiti were unable to defend their OFC championship, suffering one of the most annoying sorts of exits from the tourney possible where they were eliminated on goal difference despite never losing a game, and about the only other notable thing we’ve heard from them during that time was this horrible act of goalkeeping which went viral.

Fast forward four years from that Confed Cup in Brazil, however, and The Ultimate Good Guys are at it again. They have a huge OFC qualifier tonight at their home grounds, the Pater Te Hono Nui in Parae, against Papua New Guinea. The OFC set-up is a bad one, with groups of three and three rounds of home-and-homes. Groups of three is a terrible set-up because the final games of any qualifying group are always tethered to the results which are needed, and thus the strategy is tailored to the situation, but in a group of three, one team is already done playing and was thus subject to different sorts of playing situations during their campaign. FIFA last tried groups of three in the 1982 World Cup in Spain, and they were pretty awful, with a lot of 0:0 matches and uncreative play, since different teams were at different stages and knew that 0:0 would suit them. The other problem is dead rubbers – in the other OFC group of three, the All-Whites took 10 points from four games and have advanced, leaving Fiji and New Caledonia to play two utterly meaningless games.

Anyway, so Tahiti are in this group of three right now with the PNG and also the Solomon Islands. The Ultimate Good Guys split a pair of matches with the Solomon Islands, winning 1:0 at home on Nov. 7, 2016, and then dropping the away game on Nov. 13, 2016, by a score of 0:1 on a stoppage time goal. The problem befalling them is that, after two games with PNG, they’ll have to sit back and watch and wait to see what happens when PNG plays the Solomons. Even if they were to win both games against the PNG, the Solomons would know the target they were chasing in terms of points and goal difference, and be doing so against a PNG team that, having lost two games, would already be eliminated. This is why the format is stupid. So with three points and zero goal difference, it wasn’t looking so promising for The Ultimate Good Guys.

Aah, but as we mentioned in this post about some more Friends of Lose, the Blue Sharks of Cape Verde (who are having a bad go of things at the moment), nothing changes your fortune faster in international football than the 3:0 forfeit win (and, in the case of the Blue Sharks, a 3:0 forfeit loss). It turns out that, in that Nov. 7 match, the Solomons fielded a player who should have been serving a suspension, so the 1:0 win becomes a 3:0 win, and those extra two gift goals can make a huge difference in a 4-game group.

The Ultimate Good Guys then traveled to PNG on Mar. 23 and captured a 3:1 away win, coming from behind to score thrice after PNG had been reduced to 10 men. This means they are now up three points and +6 on the Solomons. A big win tonight against the PNG at home would put them in good shape to advance to the OFC Final against New Zealand.

And I would love a Tahiti-New Zealand OFC final, as the former is my favorite place in the world and a place I intend to be living one day, and the latter is home to some relatives of mine, all of whom are good enough to stop into San Francisco every now and them but, for some reason, I’ve yet to return the favor. The All-Whites would be the favorites, of course, but this would be a good match-up. And the winner of that two-legged OFC Final gets a playoff with the 5th-place team from South America with a full birth in Russia 2018 on the line. And make no mistake, the Tahitians ain’t winning a playoff against a South American team. That’s not happening. They know it, everyone knows it, but winning really isn’t the point. Simply getting to that point would raise the profile much like it did in 2013. Simply having the opportunity to compete, at that level, regardless of result, will count as a victory.

Meanwhile, across the Pacific, let’s take a look here at what’s going in CONMEBOL. Brazil has got their shit together and are running away with the competition. It’s a big jumble after that, and there are CONMEBOL qualifying matches taking place this afternoon, so the situation might change. As of this writing, Brazil are on 30 pts., Uruguay 23, Argentina 22, Colombia 21, with Ecuador and Chile on 20 – the 2-time Copa América winners Chile having been awful in qualifying, but also having been thrown a lifeline as they were gifted a 3:0 forfeit win when the Bolivians were found to be using a player who was actually a Paraguayan. Whoops.

And now this group has been completely thrown up in the air with the announcement that Lionel Messi has been given a 4-game suspension for verbally abusing a referee. As I said in that post about the Blue Sharks, I have no idea what the magic words are that get you reprimanded by officials in soccer. It’s been motherfucker in basketball for ever. That gets you T’d up worldwide. Every sport is different, of course – one of the best things you can ever watch is miked up, uncensored NHL highlight reels, where you actually hear the referees coming in to break up a scrum and saying stuff like “fuck you guys, fuck both of you and get the fuck off the fucking ice.” I have no idea what the magic words are in soccer, but Messi apparently said all of them.

And the reason this throws it all into chaos is that, while Argentina possesses about £500m worth of talent on their roster, they don’t play like it. Without Messi there playing the maestro and running the show, they’ve been garbage in recent years. He’s going to miss the next four qualifiers, including today’s game in Bolivia, which is a tricky match to begin with. Bolivia are terrible, but they play their home matches at 12,000 feet of altitude, which makes for a miserable outing for the visitors. It is not inconceivable that Argentina will struggle here in the next few months to maintain their place in the World Cup qualifying. They could very easily finish 5th, in fact, which would slot them in that playoff I was mentioning before.

[Update: Bolivia 2:0 Argentina. Argentina may be in even more trouble than I thought.]

And so we have the dream scenario: Messi in Tahiti. Because let’s be honest here, if you’re Argentina, and you’re playing a two-legged playoff to get into the World Cup, you can’t assume anything at that point. Yes, we all know Tahiti ain’t beating Argentina, but the reason we know that is that Argentina would have to show up and give an honest effort. You can’t mess around when it’s a 2-game season. So Argentina wouldn’t want to rest guys in this circumstance, particularly if Tahiti were to host the opening game. They’d likely bring all their stars, and their stars would likely play.

And were this sequence to occur, with Tahiti making its way through the OFC and Argentina stumbling and finishing fifth, thus forcing a Tahiti-Argentina playoff, I will go to this game. I will buy a ticket immediately when it goes on sale and I will take another vacation to the South Pacific. This would be one of the greatest sporting moments in my favorite island’s history – Messi in Tahiti, with a World Cup place on the line. I envisioned this possibility back when I first saw the draw, and it’s getting closer and closer to coming to fruition. I really, really hope this happens.

Update: Tahiti 1:2 Papua New Guinea. The dream is not dead, but it is certainly on life support.

World Poetry Day

TODAY has apparently been tagged World Poetry Day, and I approve of whomever declared this (who does this sort of thing?) and it is the sort of thing that I can get behind contributing to. The Lose has been hard at work here on a new novel, which is entitled Queen of Diamonds and will hopefully be done here by the end of 2017. This is the reason why there have been so many crickets in this space lately.

I wrote poetry for years, a collection of which is available here and here or by clicking on the Dream So Real gadget on the right of this page. I mainly stopped doing it because I got frustrated with the fact that, rather than expressing anything new, I found myself just saying the same thing again and again after awhile. I came to hate the form – or, more to the point, I came to hate the poet more than I hated the poetry. I also found myself gravitating towards long form work instead. Either I write something in one page or 400 pages, but nothing in between. Welcome to how my mind works. It is a dark and scary place.

This is probably my favorite poem that I want to share. I wrote this in 1999 while living in Santa Fe, New Mexico. It was previously published in Sycamore Review, the literary journal of Purdue University which, for some unknown and wonderful reason, decided to feature my work prominently in one of its issues. I hope that you like it.

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Why I Don’t Dance

   DANCE TO THE MUSIC THAT
   HELPED WIN WORLD WAR II
    — Showbill on a library bulletin board

   I didn’t know we dropped
   sheet music on Dresden
   — Geoffrey Escandon, guitarist

About once or twice a month, we
would schedule a band to come
down from the city and set up
their equipment beneath the NO

SMOKING museum piece hanging
from a nail at the south end of
the hangar, the old Air Force base
having fallen into a state

of disrepair since the Air Force
was downsized. Peace is hell. The dance
organizers made sure to book
swing bands or jazz bands or even

rock ’n’ roll, disregarding raised
eyebrows from elders in hopes of
attracting the young people, since
dances, like weddings, should showcase

the young, with codgers reduced to
showpieces. We would justify
these dances by tying in a
4-H fundraiser dinner or

charity auction, which always
was poorly attended since the
same ten items were donated,
and, us guys, we would polish our

automobiles and dress in black
suits and shined, underprivileged
shoes and dollop up our hair like
movie stars, and the music would

resonate, rattle off the beams
and our feet would ache, because they
don’t park æroplanes on parquet
dance floors, and the bands we booked would

usually play two sets in
exchange for a few hundred bucks
and all the apple pie they could
stomach, but we stipulated

they return to the makeshift stage
for an encore, at which point in
time us guys would stop being friends,
elbow and trample, skid across

the concrete to grab the last dance
with the prettiest girl. Mothers
would blush for their daughters’ catches,
offer invites for dessert. Tea.

Our proudest citizens met their
wives this way. We’re a small town in
the wheatfields off the highway. We
love the orange of harvest moons.

DNP-Lose

Obligatory Warriors freak-out gif

THE GAME on Saturday night in San Antonio was absolute farce. The Spurs’ 107:85 win over Golden State featured seven of the teams’ 10 starters sitting out, some with legit injuries – Durant, Leonard, and let’s hope Aldredge comes back healthy soon – and the others on account of needing rest – most notably on the part of Golden State, who held out Curry, Thompson, Green, and Iguodala, all of whom were listed in the box score as “DNP-REST.”

This action by the Warriors was met with the usual scorn and outrage from the NBA sock puppets over at ESPN/ABC, who questioned Golden State coach Steve Kerr’s integrity for daring to scratch the entire collection of his healthiest – and also his best – players from what was a nationally televised game. Not only did I approve of this decision on the part of Steve Kerr, but I also appreciated the showing of the middle finger by the Warriors towards the NBA. All involved insist that wasn’t the intention, but given the circumstances, it very clearly seemed that way to me.

The most annoying responses come, of course, from ex-players. There aren’t a pettier, more jealous collection of former athletes than there are in the NBA. The reason for the jealousy is obvious, of course: money. So much money. Mediocre bench players are signing contracts now worth values far greater than what many of the élite talents made in their day. It’s jealousy, that’s all it is, and this is why all of them should shut up about the state of the modern game. But there you had Jalen Rose on Saturday night, whom I generally like, talking during halftime about how the players being held out for Golden State needed to show some pride, as if somehow the decision were up to them. Guess what? It wasn’t up to them. No professional athlete ever wants to ever come out of any game ever. (Was that enough evers in one sentence?) These are the most competitive people on earth. They want to play all the games, and play all the minutes of all the games.

“Back in our day, we played all the games … Michael Jordan always played all the games …”

Aah, yes, the old ‘Michael Jordan did it’ example. That’s right, the greatest player in the history of the game did it, and managed to be great. Never mind the fact that part of what made him great was having the ability to get through the sorts of difficult situations that others couldn’t, like having to play four games in five days in five different cities. Just because “back in your day,” you played all of the games, it doesn’t mean that you actually played very well. In fact, you probably didn’t play very well at all. And how do I know that, besides having sat through quite a few games over the years in Seattle where teams were dead tired on the second night of back-to-backs? Research.

Consider the predictor put forth in this article by the sleep researchers at UCSF, in which they went through and marked games on the NBA schedule in 2015-2016 where certain teams were likely to lose because of insufficient rest, and 78% of the time, those teams did just that. You can play all the games that you like, but if you’re almost 80% to lose in a given situation, you’re clearly not doing it well, at that point.

Quite honestly, I’m surprised it’s that low of a rate, but I suspect the reason it was that low was that a good number of those 22% of wins came from the Warriors, who logged 53,000 miles last season on the road, more than any other team, but were good enough to overcome it much of the time. The Warriors are logging even more miles this season – 54,000 all told – and some of that cannot be avoided because of geography, of course (to no surprise, Portland is second on that list), but some of it also has to do with flying for one-offs in order to accommodate the demands of national TV schedules. This ridiculous game on Saturday night was the Warriors’ fifth in seven days, and was the sixth in nine days for the Spurs. This game never should have been taking place, and neither team cared about anything other than keeping more guys from getting injured.

Not only was it the fifth in seven days for the Warriors, but it was the eighth in 13 days during a ridiculous escapade which saw them start out with a back-to-back in Philadelphia and Washington, a game in Chicago, a back-to-back in New York and Atlanta, a cross-country flight to play a single game against Boston, then a back-to-back in Minnesota and San Antonio. That’s five time zone changes and 11,000 miles, during which time the team had held one practice. That’s nuts. And lest you think I’m just grumpy that they’re losing lately, their schedule in January – in which they played nine of 10 games at home with the only road game being a bus ride to Sacramento – was also nuts. This 8-in-13 stretch was the worst bit of scheduling I’ve ever seen in the modern NBA – which is saying something for a league where the schedule is terrible for everyone. The flip side for the Warriors basically tanking against the Spurs last weekend is the fact that, on countless occasions this season, Golden State opponents have done the exact same thing to them – figuring they aren’t likely to win anyway, so why put players at risk? – and the games are boring. The games are basically over after a quarter and a half. It’s nice the Warriors win without breaking a sweat, but it’s not good basketball, and yet you can understand why teams are doing it. Given those circumstances, where you’re not likely to win anyway given the lack of rest and recovery time, why not just punt the game away?

Greg Popovich certainly isn’t opposed to that. The Spurs famously got fined $250,000 by David Stern the NBA a few years ago because Pop rested all of his starters for a 4th-game-in-five-nights tilt against the Miami Heat. There was no real reason or protocol for the NBA doing that, of course. It was just Little Napoleon getting his dander up over the fact that one of his teams was willing to kick away a game – and not just any game, mind you, but a nationally televised game vs. LeBron and the Heat which should’ve been a showpiece. As was the case with everything about David Stern, image was all that mattered, and he couldn’t stand that fact that a marquee game had instead been reduced to farce.

What’s farcical about it, of course, is that professional sports leagues continually, consistently go about using scheduling which all but guarantees subpar performance. The Thursday night games in the NFL are just atrocious from a quality standpoint, and you can understand why – the players involved simply haven’t recovered from the Sunday beforehand. In the NBA and the NHL, there are too many games in too few days, and the quality of play suffers, the risk of injury rises, and when there are injuries, the quality of play suffers even more. This is obvious. It’s a no-brainer. People complain about the fact that fans pay for tickets, in part, because they want to see the biggest stars in action, and so going to see a game and coming to discover that Steph or LeBron isn’t playing is a rip-off. I definitely understand that argument, particularly when it comes to cross-conference match-ups. Games are often dynamically and premium priced based upon match-ups by the clubs themselves (to say nothing of values on secondary ticket markets), and LeBron and the Cavs coming to town are naturally a bigger draw than some random mediocre team like the Denver Nuggets. (Folks in Memphis, in particular, were annoyed that LeBron sat out, since it was Cleveland’s only visit of the season.) But guess what? I don’t want to see bad basketball, either. That cheapens the product just as much as superstars being no-shows.

This is a problem in all sports, both here and also abroad. Seriously, watch any coverage of a non-major tennis tournament, and you’ll see guys and gals tanking all over the place. And why wouldn’t you? If you’re not on your game, and you’re a bit injured, and you’re playing in some irrelevant, secondary or tertiary tournament, what the hell is the benefit of trying to play through it? There’s a reason why domestic cup competitions in Europe have basically become a joke ever since the advent of the Champions and Europa Leagues. There are too many games on the schedule now and something’s got to give. Top clubs in Europe are sometimes playing upwards of 60 games in a season now, which is just preposterous, and one of the reasons why the quality of play in competitions like the World Cup, the Euros and last summer’s Copa América Centenario suffered somewhat is that guys are exhausted! Guys like Ronaldo and Messi want to play every minute of every game. You practically have to lock them in a closet to keep them out of the lineup. Well, gosh, that domestic cup match against some third division team seems like the right time to rest everyone, now doesn’t it?

Players need to fight for this stuff. They’ve done so in baseball, where the union has been adamant about making sure that mandatory days off for the players are built into the schedule. For example, you cannot make up a rainout on a date that causes the players to have to play more than 20 days in a row. The superstar players who call the shots in the players union in the NBA seemed to have been far more concerned about figuring out how to get themselves paid more than they were about the fact that the schedule is appalling in the most recent contract negotiations. Even so, word is the league is looking to lengthen the season 7-10 days, as it would lessen the fixture congestion and cut down on the dreaded back-to-back games, the success rate during which is greatly minimized. I mean, hell, I want as few of those as possible if I’m an owner, since those games tend heavily to result in loses, and I hate losing under any circumstance. I would rather you just get rid of the NBA, NHL, and NFL preseasons entirely, since the players don’t want to be there, the fans don’t want to be there, and no one wants to be there. (I do understand it’s somewhat different in baseball, where the unique motions and mechanics of the game do require a certain amount of pre-season preparation for a long regular season.) Doing so would be a money loser for the owners, of course, as would shortening the seasons, since both of those mean losses in gate receipts, but it’s always seemed to me that better quality of play = higher demand for your product, which means you can actually charge more for it. Having spent all of $9 to go to an NBA game in January 2016 in New Orleans, I can tell you that the demand for the product isn’t anywhere near as great as the league owners would like to think.

The Warriors were fed up on Saturday. They’d hollered in the ear of Adam Silver about this 8-in-13 stretch the moment they saw the schedule this past summer. Word was that they were thinking about sitting everyone of use for the Spurs game even before Kevin Durant got hurt and Steph Curry forgot how to shoot. They were pissed off about the schedule, and deliberately tanking a showcase game might actually get someone’s attention in the league office about going back and reëvaluating the scheduling procedures. Good on them for doing it.

The Warriors clinched a playoff spot with 25 games to go and don’t really care about playoff seeding. Quite honestly, neither do the Spurs or the Cavs, which is why I suspect you’ll see even more DNP-RESTs popping up in their box scores between now and Apr. 15 and I have no problem with that, as all of those teams are playing the long game here. So much depends, come playoff time, on the health of your players. We’ve been shortchanged the past two seasons in the Golden State-Cleveland match-ups by the fact that one team has so clearly been so much healthier than the other. I want to see good basketball. No, I want to see great basketball. Given the costs involved – the money at stake, the costs to the consumers – having a great product doesn’t seem like that much to ask.