Stuff That Sucks

Thank god for basketball

OKAY, we’re going to cover a whole bunch of stuff that sucks today, stuff which I haven’t been writing about mostly because the teams that I follow are terrible. You need stuff that sucks to have stuff that’s cool.

I mean, it’s pretty easy to focus on the NBA when you have the Golden State Warriors in your backyard. Last night, the Warriors decided to put the Blazers out of their misery in this first quarter of Game 4, going scorched earth on Portland in the first quarter and reminding everyone that when they play to their potential, they threaten the sport of basketball with extinction. They’ve done this sort of thing a couple of times this season – I mentioned the Indiana game previously where Klay scored 60, and there was also the game against the Clippers where they scored 50 points in the third quarter and had a 200.0 offensive rating for the third quarter, which is the equivalent of getting a dunk every single time you touch the ball over a 12-minute period. It’s ridiculous what this team can do when they truly hit their stride.

But that’s enough of that stuff that’s cool for now. Let’s get to some stuff that sucks, and we’ll wander off on some tangents while we’re at it.

• My soccer team sucks.
When we last left Norwich City, I was performing an autopsy on the corpse that was their Premier League membership. Coming into this season in Div 2 – and yeah, it’s Div 2, so calling it the Championship is bullshit – the Canaries were among the betting favorites to win the league and return to the EPL in short order. They got off to a great start, and were in first place in last September when they travelled to Newcastle, at which point they blew a 2-goal lead and lost 4:3 to the Magpies, giving up the tying goal in the 95th minute and the winning goal in the 96th.
Pretty much from that moment on, the season has completely gone off the rails. The offense has never been the issue, but the defense is a complete disaster, ranking as the third-worst in the league. They’ve lost 5:0 at Brighton, 5:1 at Sheffield Wednesday, contrived to lose 3:1 to a 10-man Fulham side, turned wins into draws, turned draws into losses, turned close losses into bad losses, and generally turtled at the first sign of trouble. The manager got fired, their three best players got sold during the January transfer window, the season has dwindled to a miserable end, and here the Canaries are stuck in 8th place and out of the playoffs with two games remaining, making for Div 2 misery to come in the coming season.
When the Canaries were last relegated in 2014, having spent three years in the EPL, they took the calculated risk of keeping the core of the team together. They had enough of a cushion financially to do this, and it sort of makes sense to do that: if you have a core of players who’ve been at that highest level, you’d think they’d be able to figure it out against lesser competition. But it’s actually a pretty risky strategy, because if it doesn’t work, you’re left with a bloated wage bill the following season without the means to pay for it. And the fact of the matter is that if you got relegated from Div 1, you’re probably not as good as you think you are, and there are plenty of teams in the second division that could play just as poorly at the first division level as you did. Look at Middlesborough, for instance, whom the Canaries beat in “the richest game in football” in 2015, who were promoted finally in 2016, and who have been absolutely appalling in this year’s EPL. Norwich tried basically the same strategy this season as they did two years ago, keeping the core together after a relegation, but that means you’ve had the same core group together for four seasons now, which means not only are they not very good, but they’re also older and slower.
The second division in England is an incredibly tough league, a 46-game season where most everyone is in a bad mood and everyone has a point to prove. It can be really hard to get out of there. The team needs a drastic rebuild, starting with finding a new manager. The club’s finances are in good shape, but there has been a churn in the front office and I’m not very optimistic about any of this.

• Norwich took about a £200m hit when they got relegated. The drop-off is that enormous. The Lose household’s other favourite club, Swansea City, are also verging on sinking down to Div. 2 as well. This is why you saw Leicester City, for example, take the extreme step of firing their EPL-championship winning manager Claudio Rainieri when the Foxes were verging on slipping below the line earlier this season. Desperate times call for desperate measures. Leicester had a nice Champions League run all the way to the quarterfinals, but they’re still not out of the woods in the EPL.
The Leicester fairy tale seems to have come to an end, but it’s ultimately done so for the reason that most good things in soccer come to an end: namely, the fact that Leicester’s best player last season, N’Golo Kanté, was bought by Chelsea for £32 million. It’s not a coincidence that Chelsea are now in first and Leicester are near the bottom of the table. Kanté was just named the PFA Player of the Year for a reason.
This is the aspect of soccer that you should hate. Big money wins out in the end, and it will always do so. The divide deepens each season thanks to the aforementioned Champions League, which is essentially an ATM machine for big clubs to make a withdrawal from that will permit them to perpetually dominate their domestic leagues. I’ve not quite figured out why it is that other people don’t see that glorified Cup competition for the garbage that it really is. We’ve been told that it’s great because it says that it’s great, even though the product on the field generally fails the eye test. Oh, occasionally you’ll get a great game here and there like that Bayern-Real Madrid match from last week, but most of the time it’s crummy midweek football.
And it’s weird the way that the footballing media has so quickly fallen for this crap. Earlier this season, Tottenham Hotspur manager Mauricio Pochettino was absolutely savaged in the press for having the audacity to sit a bunch of his best players for a Champions League game in preparation for a big EPL match the following weekend. Pochettino’s reasoning was pretty simple: Spurs want to win the EPL – they’re four points behind Chelsea at the moment – and the Champions League was an annoying sideshow. How dare that Spurs concentrate on winning their domestic league. Never mind the fact that Arsenal have been perfectly content to be mediocre for a decade and just keep cashing those Champions League cheques which come with finishing the top four.
As I’ve said before, the Champions League was something of a copout created by UEFA when big European clubs rattled sabres about threatening to go and form a league all of their own. The novelty of such a league, however, would last for about a season, because all of the clubs involved are used to getting their own way, but someone would necessarily have to finish last, at which point it wouldn’t be such a great idea anymore. There is a brutal sort of staleness to domestic leagues at this point outside of the EPL, a sameness and an inevitability to the outcome that makes you wonder why anyone wants to watch.

•  My hockey team sucks.
I’ve been through every imaginable sort of failure in 35 years of following the Vancouver Canucks. I’ve seen them lose Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Finals twice. I’ve seen them grow into the most dominant team in the league and fail to win a title. I’ve seen them be plucky underdogs writing fairy tales. I’ve also seen them be hopeless, hapless, and incompetent for years. I’ve seen them lose to an 8th seed in the first round of the playoffs. I’ve seen them go from being really good to old and slow. They’ve achieved every sort of failure imaginable over that time.
But this was the first year where I ever saw them tank.
This team wasn’t any good to begin with. They got off to an insane start, winning their first four games without the benefit of ever being ahead in regulation time in any of them, but then the 8-game losing streak came along. Even so, the Flyin’ Whales managed to get themselves into a playoff position 50 games into the season, at which point they fell off yet another cliff. It was at this point in the season where they basically gave up, and a 7-game losing streak to close out the year left them with the 2nd-worst record in the league. Not only are they bad, but they’re also boring. The offense is horrible. They were 29th in scoring and 29th on the power play. In half a decade’s time, they’ve gone from being the most exciting team in the sport to being a handy remedy for my persistent and lifelong case of insomnia.
Oh, but I shouldn’t say they were tanking. They were “playing the kids,” as they shipped out some old guard vets from the glory days at the trade deadline, and what was probably the most discouraging about them “playing the kids” is the fact that the kids aren’t very good. Some teams that play the kids have some talent in the pipeline that simply needs experience. This is absolutely, positively not the case with the Canucks. The front office has been grossly incompetent now for years, and there is just a flat-out lack of talent all around. It was easy for them just to give up on the season and lose, and there isn’t a whole lot to be hopeful about.
And I feel bad for the Sedin twins, who are two of the greatest players of their generation and aren’t going to have a Stanley Cup title to show for it. This happens, of course. It happens to a lot of great players. I’d love to see them get one more go with a team that knows what it’s doing, even if just for a playoff run. The team in Vancouver, as constructed at present, is basically unwatchable, and probably about three years away from being any good again.

• But I have to be honest here, I kind of don’t care about the NHL playoffs any more.
I think I stopped caring about the time the L.A. Kings started dogging the entire regular season, doing just enough to get enough into the playoffs and then winning the Stanley Cup. Most everything bad in hockey over the years can be blamed on the L.A. Kings in one way or another. The whole tournament just seems like a crap shoot, at this point, even more so than baseball. I find the results feel rather random and unsatisfying, and thus it makes me even further disinclined to watch the regular season at all.
I’m not sure where the balance is here. I was just mentioning before how there is a staleness and sameness to the results in soccer, where the results often seem inevitable from the get-go. As much as I like watching the Warriors, I’ll freely admit that the prospect of them dominating the NBA for the next five years (which could very possibly happen) may not make for the most exciting viewing in a broader context. And c’mon, admit it: you’re sick of the New England Patriots on some level. Yes, they are a testament to true excellence, but then they win another Super Bowl and it’s annoying. But at the same time, I do want the regular season to actually mean something. I’m not sure where that balance lies.

• I meant to rail on this a couple of weeks ago when talking about how stupid the NCAA is. At Washington State, the basketball team sucks. College basketball is a terrible endeavor. The Cougars suck. They’re horrible and have been pretty much from the moment Klay went off to score 60 in the NBA.
But as bad as the Cougars were this year, the Husky scum from the University of Washington were even worse, contriving to go 9-22 despite the fact that their best player, Markelle Fultz, is going to be either the #1 or #2 pick in the NBA draft, which is a rather level of ineptitude. Well done Huskies. Be still my foolish heart.
After going 9-22, the Huskies fired head coach Lorenzo Romar, whose ability to recruit good talent over the years was seemingly matched by his inability to coach it. In firing Romar and his staff, the University of Washington also managed to throw away what had shaped up to be a top recruiting class for the coming season headlined by Michael Porter Jr., who was the national high school player of the year. Porter had committed to Washington and now has opted to do his obligatory one year of NCAA forced servitude at the University of Missouri. The reason he chose Mizzou? His dad is now an assistant coach there, having served this past season as an assistant coach at … Washington, of course.
This is one of the sleaziest things that college basketball coaches do. If there is a kid out there who is a great talent, and whose dad happens to be a coach, you go and hire the dad to be on your staff in the hopes that the son will follow along. You can call this the Danny Manning approach to recruiting, as it was famously perpetrated by Larry Brown when he coached at Kansas in the 1980s. In the case of Michael Porter Jr., his dad was previously an assistant coach with the Missouri women’s team before he somehow miraculously made the jump in status all the way up to being a lead assistant at a men’s program at a major Div 1 university. Now, to be fair here, I have no idea how good of a coach he really is, and he may be quite good at what he does. But to think that he would have had even a sniff at the U.W. gig were it not for the fact that his kid is considered a can’t miss prospect is, well, far-fetched. I’m sure there would have been plenty of capable candidates out there for that job who are far more accomplished, but who didn’t happen to have such a plum pedigree.
And see, this is the sort of shit that goes on in college sports in America. This whole way of doing business is complete garbage. Why do we enable this crap? Why do we watch? Remind me to ask those questions of myself next year when the Final Four comes back around.

• Oh yeah, and my baseball team sucks, too.
Some clownshoes baserunning by the Dodgers last night led to a rare SF victory, but the Giants are mired in last place after having just been swept by the Rockies at Coors for the first time in about 15 years. The offense is asleep, the left field position is a tire fire – Giants LFs started the year 0-for-19 – there are injuries all over the place, the 5th starter, Matt Cain, presently has the best ERA (good for him, but no so good for everyone else), the bullpen picked up right where it left off in 2016 and blew the save on opening night, and now Madison Bumgarner, their ace and icon, is out for at least two months after crashing a dirt bike on his day off. Egads.

Lots of stuff appears to suck right now. So much lose, so little time. I guess you could call it job security and I should embrace the suck, analyze and explicate it … so, uh, when’s the next Warriors game, anyway?

Catch-22

Mad hops

22 POINTS about the state of the NBA. First the failures, and then it’s onto the playoffs after that. I’m going to keep this quick, because I have a short attention span. To the buzzard points!

• Erik Spoelstra is Coach of the Year for his act of sorcery that was somehow taking a Miami team with a garbage roster, that was designed to be terrible, and which started the season 11-30, and getting them to a .500 season and within a game of the playoffs. The Heat were far more fun, and frankly far better at season’s end, than about half the teams that wound up making the playoffs. It’s surreal to even think that the Heat’s season turned for worse with the ankle injury that led to the demise of the Dion Waiters Experience. The Heat are now in a strange place going forward, in that the roster still isn’t very good, but neither is the draft pick they get, and they could resign Waiters, who was brilliant for them, but choice free agents are few and far between this summer, which means Waiters could get really expensive, and I can’t believe I’m talking about Dion Fricking Waiters as being a choice free agent at all.

• “We’re a shit team, but we’re an underrated shit team.”
          
– Dallas Mavericks coach Rick Carlisle, with the quote of the year in the NBA.

• Just because the Cousins trade didn’t result in a playoff spot for the Pelicans, it doesn’t mean that it was the wrong idea. New Orleans wasn’t going anywhere to begin with. Now they have an offseason to come up with an offense for both Boogie and AD, but their more pressing problem is that they probably will have to overpay to resign Jrue Holliday, and you could pretty much replace every other player on the roster and not be the worse for it.

• The Lose is very much opposed to the Coach as Executive model. The main reason for this is that it makes it that much harder, and that much more expensive, to get rid of someone who has dual roles in the organization and doesn’t seem to know what they’re doing in either case. And that’s all I need to say about the Detroit Pistons.

• Along the same lines, I hated literally everything that I saw out of Minnesota this year. Andrew Wiggins wins a box of twinkies for putting up the most empty calorie numbers in the league. He and KAT can stuff the stat sheet, but if you don’t guard anyone, who cares? Having said that, the coach-friendly basketball media wouldn’t dare suggest that the real problem in Minnesota was a bunch of strange lineups and inexplicable offensive sets, but instead it’s about how immature the players are. Fortunately, I’m not in the coach-friendly basketball media. That was the worst coaching job in the NBA this season.

• Two helpful hints for the Denver Nuggets. Firstly, if you want to make the playoffs and you’re vying for the last spot, maybe don’t trade a starting center to your closest competitor. The Nurkic trade to Portland was one of the strangest deadline deals I can recall seeing. Secondly, maybe guard someone. Anyone. Anyone at all.

• Phonerz J. Day, the Official Jeremy Lin Fanboy of In Play Lose, is quick to point out to me that with Lin in the lineup, the Nets were merely bad, as opposed to being reprehensible without him. It speaks to the nature of the NBA now that simply having a safe pair of hands at the point enables you to actually almost function as a competent team. As expected, Brooklyn were a fun bad this season. GM Sean Marks had the right idea last offseason, which was just to throw a lot of money at restricted free agents and force teams to swallow their pride and match the offer sheets. Anyone you might land is an upgrade on the roster, and if you miss, some other team takes a hit because of it. I’d expect the same thing this summer. There is no downside for the Nets, at this point, in trying just about anything to acquire talent.

• We’ve been over the Sacramento Kings already. It would be the most Kings thing ever to a) land the #1 pick in the lottery, which they would then have to flip to the 76ers; and b) have the ping-pong balls bounce in such a way that the Pelicans get either the 2nd or 3rd pick, since the pick NOLA traded for Boogie is Top-3 protected.

• I don’t really have much of anything to say about Charlotte, because they’ve become the least interesting team in the NBA. Kind of a lost season for them in which there were a whole lot of injuries and basically everything else went wrong. But it speaks to the continued mediocrity of the East that this was a #4 seed in the playoffs last season, because I don’t actually look at this team as being all that much worse than they were a year ago.

• You can usually rely upon the NBA’s Chief Exec for one completely inane quote a year, and Adam Silver came up with this peach when asked about teams completely giving up on the season like the Phoenix Suns did: “I would categorize that as a different kind of resting.” (Yes, he really said that.) The Suns were always going to be terrible, but then they made it a point to sit every vet on the roster and lose 13 in a row in order to ensure they’d have the worst record in the West and 2nd-worst overall. The way the NBA could end this charade, of course, would be to eliminate the draft lottery entirely, and also eliminate the ability of teams to protect draft choices in trades. So long as you continue to enable those two things, and continue to perpetuate a system of perverse incentives, teams are rightly going to throw in the towel and give up, because the nonzero chance of landing a top pick exceeds the 0% chance you have of beating the Warriors when you’re the #8 seed in the playoffs, and every loss improves your odds. A season ticket in Phoenix or Philadelphia is a far bigger rip-off for the fans than some one-off Saturday night game where LeBron or Steph Curry doesn’t play. But the NBA won’t do that sort of thing, of course, because it’s a problem it’s created for itself, and you can’t blame the players for it. And yes, this spiel about the league’s wider problem with tanking is my way of getting around saying anything more about the Suns.

• The Lose loves the fact that the Lakers won five in a row at the end of the season, thus slipping to third-worst record in the league. If L.A. misses the Top 3 in the lottery this year, not only do they have to give up their pick to Philly, but they also have to transfer their 2019 draft pack to Orlando – consequences of the bad trades for Steve Nash and Dwight Howard many years ago. The Lakers started 10-10 and then partook in one of the more concerted tanking efforts I’ve ever seen, going 11-45 before they inexplicably started to win at the end of the season. They won games despite trying not to – Luke Walton would yank anyone having a good game out at half and sit them the rest of the game, and then they were doing nonsensical things like running isos for Metta World Peace so he could shoot threes. They won anyway. They won in spite of themselves, and I applaud the players for having pride and playing hard and showing the collective middle finger to the front office who expected them to fail. Meanwhile, the six Buss siblings in charge of the franchise have been battling it out amongst themselves in the boardroom and in the courtroom in a plot line straight out of Game of Thrones. Jeanie Buss’ first action, having wrested control of the club from the others, was to put Magic Johnson in charge, which may be good on the P.R. front but not necessarily good on the basketball front. His hiring of Rob Pelinka as the GM doesn’t exactly fill me with much confidence – Pelinka being noteworthy for being Kobe’s agent, and managing to coax out of previous Lakers’ brass a final contract for Kobe that single-handedly crippled the franchise for about five years. Then again, Pelinka must have known what he was doing as an agent, since none of his other clients have signed in L.A. in recent years.

• The writing was probably on the wall in Orlando for now ex-GM Rob Hennigan before this pic of his literal writing on the wall – his offseason strategizing which included a wish list of players and a suggestion of possible trades of existing players – got tweeted out by an agent of a player signing a late-season contract. I mentioned previously that Orlando was the worst team that I saw all season. It’s not because of their record but because of the fact that it’s the most bizarrely constructed roster imaginable and, whereas you have some hope for the future with players like Booker in Phoenix and KAT in Minnesota and Embiid in Philadelphia to hang your hat on, there isn’t a single player on this roster, after five years of drafting in the Top 10, who you could legitimately say could even start for a competent NBA team, but less be good enough to build a franchise around. And then you had the whole Serge Ibaka axis of trades, where you gave up your best player, Victor Oladipo, and a good draft pick to OKC and wound up getting a bench player, Terrence Ross, and a bad draft pick from Toronto. What on earth was that? I have no idea what team is doing.

• We already saw the downside of Hinkieism play out in Philadelphia this season, as having amassed so many big men, with no space on the floor for all of them and not enough minutes to go around, that the 76ers had to ship Nerlens Noel to Dallas for about 50¢ on the dollar. Now, The Lose in no way thinks Nerlens Noel is a great player, but he could be a very useful player, particularly in a place like Dallas, where they had a disastrous and injury-laden season but otherwise know what they’re doing. There were no takers for Okafor, and Philly’s going to wind up getting about 20¢ on the dollar for him if/when they ever move him. Sam Hinkie, of course, did wonders at accruing assets, but at some point assets have to actually translate into players who can stay on the court and win some games, which still isn’t happening in Philadelphia, as Simmons missed the whole year and Embiid only played 31 games – albeit delightful games, mind you. And it doesn’t matter if they wind up with three lottery picks if the ping pong balls fall in such a way that the Kings’ and Lakers’ picks wind up in Philly’s possession if they don’t actually get any guards in this offseason. Hinkie apologists, of course, look at all of Philly’s assets and say he “set them up for the future,” which assumes rather foolishly that Hinkie would’ve had any idea what to do with all of this stuff, and also assumes that the NBA’s other GMs would’ve continued to be stupid in dealing with him – an assumption which, when talking about anyone other than Sacramento or Phoenix, is an unwise one.

• Rather than waste ink and air on the New York Knicks, I’ll let the pros handle this one. Even that rather comprehensive analysis sells the dysfunction short, simply because there isn’t enough time in the day to talk about how bad this team is. Seriously, you could probably write an entire book about the train wreck that was the Knicks season, and still wind up leaving out some of the gory details.

To the playoffs!

• Ty Lue hinted during the run in, as the Cavs were gagging up leads and generally proving unable to guard their own shadows, that he was holding back some defensive ploys for the playoffs. Whatever the secret defense is, he might want to share it with his players. The Cavs shot about 70% at times in the first half, but were barely able to eke out a 109:108 win in Game 1 in which they again coughed up a huge lead, ultimately prevailing in part because the Indiana Pacers ran one of the dumbest out-of-bounds plays imaginable down one with 20 seconds left – a play in which they stand around like statues and act as if they’ve never seen a double-team before. Obviously, you take the wins and you move forward, but gadzooks, that team can’t stop anyone at the point and they can’t protect the rim. It’s not like Indiana’s a juggernaut on offense and the Pacers got almost any shot they wanted.

[Late Monday Night Update: The defense is still bad, but Cleveland prevails 117:111 in Game 2, in part because the Pacers fell way behind after going away from what was a successful strategy in the 1st half, which was having Teague repeatedly torch Kyrie, who did little to disprove my contention that he is, in fact, the worst on-ball defender in the NBA.]

• A good adage in the NBA playoffs has always been that the team with the best player on the floor always has a chance to win, and while we’re all right to think Toronto may have the depth and diversity needed to make a deep playoff run (and also probably right to question whether they have the mental fortitude for it), it’s pretty obvious watching Game 1 that the other guys wearing the green have the best player, and he’s the best player by far, and we all may have discounted that. Giannis is probably going to wind up somewhere in the 5th-7th range in the MVP voting for a reason. He may be even better than we think he is, at this point in his career, which is good enough to win a playoff series all by himself. I swear, if that kid ever develops a jump shot, we may all just have to give up.

• The most noticeable thing about the San Antonio-Memphis series is the fact that Kawhi Leonard doesn’t have to actually do anything. The Grizzlies have had this hole in their lineup pretty much forever, always seeming to have one guy on the floor who can’t shoot. The Spurs, somewhat wisely, have Kawhi “guard” that guy, which means he doesn’t have to do any heavy lifting and he can just drift around and play free safety. Oh, if for some reason the Spurs get in trouble, I’m sure they’ll shift Kawhi over and have him go ruin Mike Conley’s day, but in the mean time, Kawhi can just dominate on the offensive end of things. He can’t get away with this in the future against the Rockets, of course, but in the short term, it makes for a nice breather.

[Late Monday Night Update: Memphis coach David Fizdale is my hero of the day. Pass the hat around, because the fine for that rant will be substantial.]

• The Lose was a big advocate of the Celtics using their many Nets draft picks to try and swing a big deal this spring. I mean, think about the situation: the Cavs are vulnerable in the East this year, and while I wouldn’t think the Celtics would stand that much of a chance in the finals, they have shown an ability to beat the Warriors and make things really uncomfortable for them the past two seasons. And sure enough, the guy I would’ve liked to see them go get – Jimmy Butler – was dropping 30 on them yesterday in the Bulls win over the Celtics in Game 1. What a horrible team the Bulls are to watch. Yesterday’s game was a case where their biggest weakness – the fact they can’t shoot a lick – turned out to be their greatest strength, because the Celtics are a terrible rebounding team. The Bulls strategy for that game was basically to throw a brick and chase down the rebound, and it worked. But back to the Celts here for a moment: we love Isaiah Thomas, we absolutely love him and I, like everyone, wish him nothing but the best in the light of the tragedy of his sister being killed over the weekend. He played a great game yesterday in light of that. Isaiah is great, but he’s also about 5’7” and poses a really awkward dilemma for Boston going forward: if you’re the Celtics, do you want to give a big contract extension year after next to a 5’7” guy who will be 30 years old? You don’t feel great about that, of course. The easy solution to that dilemma would be to have the #1 pick in this year’s draft fall in your lap in a year where the two best players in the draft are point guards, at which point you anoint Fultz or Ball as your point guard of the future and Isaiah suddenly becomes expendable. That possibility is why, ultimately, I don’t think Danny Ainge was willing to make a deal this spring which would’ve brought Butler or possibly Paul George over. It’s an attempt to solve a future problem by not addressing a present need. But I’m not sure where the answer is here. I think for the Nets swap rights and a bunch of stuff, getting a Jimmy Butler from the Bulls would’ve been worth it, but I can also see why they didn’t make the deal. But like I said about the Sixers, at some point amassing assets has to translate into good players, and while I think the Celtics are a nice team, I always think all of that wheeling and dealing has also netted them a flawed team.

• The Rockets are uniquely poised to annoy OKC into submission, because they have Patrick Beverley on their team. Beverley, of course, infamously ran into Russell Westbrook in the 2013 playoffs. Westbrook injured his knee and the season was basically over for OKC, and Beverly was Public Enemy #1 in OKC after that – at least up until KD left, anyway. Beverly is a great, tenacious defender and is also a complete pest, and now that he’s healthy, the Rockets can fully embrace a strategy which the Warriors partake in regularly when playing OKC, which is to basically bait and agitate Westbrook to the point where he tries to go all superhero and then completely loses track of any sort of team concept. (Everyone in the NBA media here in the Bay Area know this, of course, which is why no one here is particularly impressed by Westbrook’s season of stat padding.) With a roster of specialists and one-note players, there is never a Plan B in OKC, and that was only a game until Harden found his stroke, at which point it became a laugher. Westbrook was the third-best point guard on the floor last night, as Beverly ate him up before being swallowed whole by Steven Adams:

• If I’m the Blazers, I do not play Jusuf Nurkic in this series. The arrival of Nurkic turned the season around in Portland, as suddenly the Blazers have a skilled, 15-and-10 big to go with their devastating backcourt. He broke his leg two weeks ago, and there have been reports he wants to try to play against the Warriors. Don’t do it. It’s not worth it. You’re not beating the Warriors. CJ and Dame went for 75 yesterday and they still lost by double digits because their front court is a tire fire. Nurkic will help in that regard, of course, and will at least keep Draymond busy and not allow him to play free safety and block everything at the rim, but you need more than one more guy to beat the Warriors. The Blazers guards played about as well as they possibly could on Sunday, but the rest of the roster is no good, they don’t pass the ball well enough, and any time the Warriors want, they can just throw the ball to KD, who scored the quietest 32 points ever. It’s not worth risking the future and rushing a 22 year old with a broken leg back for this series.

• In thinking about the Eastern playoffs, and thinking up crazy possibilities and outcomes, I keep coming back to the same question again and again: who in the East is going to stop John Wall? Certainly not the Hawks.

• Oh, you wacky Clippers. Never stop clippin’ you Clips.

Lose Thyself

How did you fuck this up? YOU’RE STANDING RIGHT THERE!

“I wish I loved anything as much as the Masters loves itself.”
– Scott Pianowski, Yahoo Sports

NOW that the NCAA Tournament has concluded in decidedly unsatisfying action, CBS can pivot and suck up to the bastion of smugness and self-importance that is The Masters. There are no sacred cows here at In Play Lose, and one which deserves to be taken down more than any other is golf. Golf is garbage. Golf is a good walk spoiled and a waste of open space. Golf is the only sport where I actively enjoy watching guys screw up and look forward to it happening. When Jordan Spieth choked away the Masters in 2016, it was the first thing I’ve found about golf worth caring about in decades.

That it’s such a stupid game takes away from some things about it that are laudable. For instance, I love the idea of the cut. If you suck the first two rounds, they throw your ass out of the tournament and you get no money. Good. You played terrible, you deserve nothing. Likewise, if you’re not in the Top 125 for the season, they throw your ass off the PGA Tour and you have to go to Q School to get back. I appreciate that players police themselves and that they report their own infractions. All of that is good stuff. But then you have something as dumb as what happened on the LPGA Tour last weekend, when Lexi Thompson, who was well on her way to winning the tournament, was suddenly assessed a four-stroke penalty in the middle of the final round on account of a rules violation from the previous day – a violation which no one involved in the tournament had noticed and was imposed after it had been pointed out by a television viewer in an email, and you see just how stupid the rules of this game actually are. That the rules of a game can permit a viewer at home to directly affect the outcome like this is the single-most most ridiculous thing that I have ever heard of in sports.

When you are a spectator, you are there to watch and nothing more. You should never have a direct hand in the outcome. Players make mistakes, like Lexi Thompson did in that case, and officials make mistakes as well, some of which seem outrageous – in the NCAA Final, it seems impossible that the zeeb standing right there missed North Carolina’s Kennedy Meeks being out of bounds with :50 left in the game and the Tar Heels clinging to a 1-point lead. (We’ll get into that mess in a minute). But missed calls are a part of the game, ultimately, and we shouldn’t be altering results from afar – afar being, in Lexi Thompson’s case, as far away as someone’s livingroom.

• Speaking of undo outside influence on sports, one of the most awkward and preposterous of scenarios is going to come into play here in the next few weeks when the media members vote on the All-NBA teams. This is because the NBA, in their knee-jerk reaction to Durant going to the Warriors, and the superstar-driven Players Union, in their desire to get paid above all else, created one of the worst systems imaginable for determining compensation, which is to create a tier of players eligible for enormous extensions from their existing clubs based upon being named to All-NBA teams.
The consequences of this are fairly enormous. For a player, it could mean up upwards of a $70,000,000 difference in the value of their future contract. For the team, meanwhile, it also can create an enormous dilemma: do you really want to invest that much for that long in one player? One of the reasons why the Sacramento Kings were desperate to unload Boogie Cousins was the fact that they couldn’t justify to themselves doling out a $200,000,000 contract to a guy who is a complete head case and a complete pain in the ass. There are two players in particular – Paul George in Indiana and Gordon Hayward in Utah – who have had tremendous seasons, who are in the discussion among the media set for receiving votes for all-NBA, and whose future contract situations for their employers are likely going to be determined by whether or not they get enough votes from reporters and broadcasters to be named all-NBA.
And if I’m part of the NBA media – a lot of whom I follow online, and a lot of whom take this seriously – I want absolutely no part of this vote. It’s not up to me to make the news. It shouldn’t be up to me to have a hand in determining the fates of the Pacers and the Jazz and the Kings and anyone else. But the NBA has proven remarkably good over the years at creating its own absurdity. Whatever CBA the two sides come to ratify every few years is always full of loopholes and absurdities and unintended consequences. You can understand why the image-conscious set in the league’s New York offices get so upset when LeBron and Steph and the sort are sitting out games, however – their brilliance on the floor does well to mask all of the lunacy that takes place off of it.

• The Lose is down with women’s sports, and has always been down with women’s sports, and one of the things which I find curious is the fact that we here in the U.S. laud and praise and fawn all over our women’s national soccer team, who are great but who also act like a bunch of drama queens a lot of the time, and yet we pay pretty much no attention at all our women’s national basketball team, who are arguably one of the greatest teams in the history of sports. The U.S. women have won six Olympic gold medals in a row and have lost one game in that past 18 years. They’re so dominant that whomever they pulverize in the Olympics or the World Championships are basically just happy to be there. We’re a nation that loves winners and loves excellence, but the U.S. women’s basketball team may, in fact, be too good for their own good, because if all someone ever does is win, there really is no drama and no competition and, thus, there is no reason to watch it after a while.
Thus you have the dilemma of the University of Connecticut women’s basketball team, who only seem to make national headlines now when they lose – which doesn’t happen often it at all. The Huskies had their 111-game winning streak snapped last Friday in Dallas, losing 64:62 in OT to Mississippi State and it was national news, because it had been so long since UConn had lost a game that losing no longer seemed possible.
And in an instant, the sport of women’s college basketball became interesting.
The two teams played a year ago in the Sweet 16, and UConn won by 60 points. Mississippi State were listed as a 21-point underdog for the game last Friday, were +2000 straight up in Las Vegas, and a Huskies win was considered such a given that you could still get +400 betting on the Bulldogs straight up at halftime of the game, even though Mississippi State had an 8-point lead. And this was for a national semifinal, mind you. Mississippi State were a #2 seed in their regional, meaning they were considered to be one of the eight best teams in the country going into the tournament. Any #1 vs. #2 matchup on the men’s side would likely produce one of the tourney’s best games. On the women’s side, when the #1 is UConn, it’s just another blowout.
Being one who is a purveyor of everything that is done badly is only truly possible if you appreciate excellence first, and Connecticut certainly are that. But there is a sense of self-perpetuation about the Huskies at this point – if you’re the female equivalent of a 5-star recruit, there is nowhere else you’d ever even think to go to school, and unlike on the men’s side, where the best players are gone after one or two years, the women play four years of college, meaning not only does Connecticut have all of the best talent but they get to keep them all for four years time and actually develop cohesive squads. But other than the odd blip here and there, when a freak athlete like Brittney Griner winds up at Baylor, the game consists basically of UConn and everyone else.
And ultimately, that isn’t good for the game as a whole. You can certainly appreciate that sort of greatness for what it is, but when it feels as if all that UConn has to do it show up and roll the ball out and they’ll win, it almost trivializes the efforts that it took to be that good in the first place. Soccer fans will understand this feeling, to be sure – why would a casual fan even bother to follow Serie A or the Bundesliga after a while, when it’s obvious from the get-go that Juventus and Bayern Munich are going to win the league? If a team goes 111 games without a loss, it feels about as close to inevitable as it can get, but we don’t like inevitable and we only like dynasties to a point. The great upset, like Mississippi State pulled last Friday, is inevitably a triumph of the imagination and a reminder of what is possible. And it’s only when you tap into those possibilities that you can truly grow.

• Having felled the Soviet Union on the sport, the gals from Mississippi State then promptly messed up their own personal Miracle of Ice by losing to Finland. Mississippi State got beat by South Carolina 67:55 in the NCAA Final, and it might have helped their cause if their head coach, Vic Schaefer, hadn’t made one of the more moronic coaching moves I’ve seen in a long time, which was to have point guard Morgan William – who hit the game winning shot against UConn, and who scored 41 in MSU’s regional final win over Baylor – sitting next to him on the bench during the entire 4th Quarter, when South Carolina went on a 12-0 run to put the game away.
We’ve created this bastion of largesse that is the cult of the college coach in America and, as such, we have a tendency to absolve them of blame when they screw up. College coaches, being a selfish and self-preservationist lot, have of course figured this out and always do a nice job of subtly shifting the blame to their players when they lose. And since the sports media in this country that covers college sports is predominantly composed of former coaches and guys who seem to aspire to be coaches, it’s easy for them to gloss over the fact that coaches do, in fact, screw up.
They do it a lot, in fact, and sometimes on the highest stage. (An associate of Dean Smith’s once said the only two things he wouldn’t talk about were his divorce and “the Marquette game,” the 1977 NCAA Final where his strategic ploys backfired, he got outcoached by Al McGuire,  and Marquette wound up an upset winner.) Some in the media attempted to ascribe ulterior motives to Schaefer’s ploy against South Carolina – he was “trying to send a message” to his player, who was, in fact, having a pretty bad game – but I’m dubious of attaching any motivation other than that he played a hunch and it blew up in his face. The aphorism Hanlon’s razor is applicable here: never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

• The men’s NCAA final followed a fairly typical script in which the team that, to my eye, seems to be the better team – in this case Gonzaga – plays poorly and loses, while the team that isn’t as good – North Carolina – wins by doing whatever it can to make the game into a mediocre mess. Both teams were basically dreadful, and the officials contributed to the morass by calling 44 fouls and killing the flow of the game. Some of my more conspiratorial of friends have suggested this game followed another familiar pattern, whereby the lesser-pedigreed team ultimately got screwed over by the officials, but what more seemed the case to me was that Gonzaga blew the game in the first half, when North Carolina was terrible and the Zags had numerous chances to build a big lead, only to miss open shots and let the Heels back in the game. I had no real dog in this hunt: I would have liked to see Gonzaga win since I’m from that part of the country, but I also have always appreciated the fact that Roy Williams is one of the few coaches who wants his teams to attack and play fast and be creative in an era where most supposedly “great” coaches take the easy way out and just play defense all the time. I just wanted to see a good game, which I didn’t get.
I cared very little about the NCAA tournament this year. For the first time in over 30 years, I didn’t fill out a bracket. The Midwest Regional final between Oregon and Kansas was the first full game of college basketball I had watched all year. I used to be able to excuse the generally nervy and poor play you’d see in the NCAA tourney simply because the event was a great theatre piece. But while it’s improved somewhat with the new rule changes, the game still basically sucks. I’ve never had any delusions that college basketball was anywhere near the NBA in terms of caliber, but the margin seems greater to me than ever. You can understand why it is that the NBA is disinclined to want to draft any kid who has spent four years playing college basketball, since it’s likely the kid didn’t improve, and likely didn’t learn anything about playing the game while they were there.
And this is unfortunate, because basketball, as a whole, has benefitted greatly over the years from the lab experiment nature of the college game – coaches, when facing talent gaps, have always had to come up with different and unique approaches. Most everything that is good about today’s NBA – the pace, the spacing, the geometry – finds its origins in the lunacy that was Loyola Marymount in the late 1980s. There hasn’t been anything remotely innovative on a college floor in years. What shortening the shot clock in the NCAA has primarily achieved is cutting down the amount of time teams waste running some meaningless offensive pattern that’s been drilled into them by their head coach. They all still go into panic mode with :10 on the shot clock, having gone about making themselves eminently guardable, but at least it happens sooner.
And the whole business of college sports is so rotten that I can’t get too enthused about it – along with the fact that we basically pay lip service to the rot, like the Monday night telecast did when glossing over the perpetual academic fraud case at North Carolina. Keep in mind that Roy Williams earned a $250,000 bonus for winning the national title, while his players all got groovy T-shirts and hats.
And if you didn’t need reminding of just how fucked up the world of big-time college sports is, I recommend that you watch the recent Showtime documentary Disgraced about Patrick Dennehy, a Baylor basketball player who was murdered by a teammate in 2003, at which point Baylor head coach Dave Bliss attempted to cover his ass and got caught, on tape, telling staffers they should lie to the authorities and portray the deceased as being a drug dealer, among other things. This has always been a case of interest for me simply because I was living in Santa Fe and working in the media when Bliss was the head coach at New Mexico, before he took the Baylor job, and where Dennehy played for one season before transferring. Bliss had come to New Mexico from SMU, where his best player has since admitted he was paid amid other allegations, and while there were never any formal allegations of impropriety at New Mexico there were always rumors and innuendo floating about. One of the problems with big-time college sports is that there are always rumors and innuendo flying about, and officials turn a blind eye to the fire that accompanies that smoke. But we do turn that blind eye to it, going so far as to try and gloss over behavior that turns from unethical to criminal, much as what has happened at Penn State and, now on two occasions, at Baylor. Amazingly enough, Bliss got another coaching gig eventually, which he just resigned in light of this documentary and after running his mouth again, whereas the assistant who turned him in has never gotten another job and is now doing educational work with the Texas prison system.
Bliss was toiling away at Southwestern Christian University, lest you think the rot and sleaze of college sports only affects the big time programs. My favorite recent example of this was an article in Sports Illustrated documenting a spate of graduate transfers in college basketball. The graduate transfer rule has been around for a decade, and states that if you graduate from your university but still have eligibility to play, you can enroll at a different school in a graduate program and play immediately. No one ever gave this much thought until Russell Wilson did it and went from being the starting QB at N.C. State to leading the Wisconsin Badgers to a Rose Bowl. More and more players are doing this, particularly in college basketball, and among the great comments in this college sports suck-up piece bemoaning the scourge of graduate transfers from smaller programs to larger ones is the idea that some coaches are, in fact, attempting to slow their kids’ academic progress. Are you serious? What in the hell is wrong with these people?
As time goes on, I further and further distance myself from the corrupt, unjust, and disgusting industrial complex that is the NCAA. I just want nothing more to do with it. That means caring less and less about things like the NCAA tournament – an event that I used to love. I just can’t make myself care any more. I’m better off for not caring. Watching the NCAA Final is proof, in fact, that I probably still care too much. If I’m going to point the finger at others for perpetrating the hoax of college sports, I should also point it at myself for watching it all this time.