Total Eclipse

Jordan Bell gives zero fucks what the Dallas Mavericks think

THIS reminder that Jordan Bell, who did this sick shit Monday night in Dallas and who will likely be the Warriors’ starting center next season, came to the Warriors through a draft day transaction in which the Warriors paid $3.5 million in cash to the Chicago Bulls in order to buy their way into the draft. The Bulls did this, according to team exec John Paxson, in order to “build equity” with the ownership, which is one of the dumbest excuses I’ve ever heard, and would be better stated as, “we needed cash in hand in order to buyout Dwyane Wade, whom we never should’ve signed to that bad free agent contract in 2016, since we knew he’d want out after we made that terrible Jimmy Butler trade.” I understand that the Bulls are somewhat unfamiliar with this whole rebuilding thing, but here’s a helpful little tip: when your team is short on talent, and you need players, you’re better off not selling off a high 2nd round pick but instead using it to, you know, draft a guy who knows how to play. I know, this is a novel concept here. The Bulls season got off to a flying start when two of their better players got into a fight at practice, with one of them breaking the face of the other. What was already looking like a 22-60 team, at best, is now looking more like a 12-70 team.

Yet somehow, the Bulls managed not to have the worst opening week in the NBA season, because no matter how low you set the bar, the Phoenix Suns will find a way to trip over it.
 
One of the things which makes the NBA so much more watchable than other sports leagues is the prevalence of “fun bad” teams, and the Suns generally fit the bill of fun bad, owing in part to having some young players with great potential, and owing in part to the fact that they don’t play any defense, which makes their games wildly unpredictable and, thus, wildly entertaining. But the Suns seem hell-bent on devolving from “fun bad” to just simply “bad.” They kicked it off last week by losing to Portland by 48 points at home in their season opener. They then managed to lose a home game to a bad Lakers team despite scoring 130 points, and got completely humiliated in a 42 point loss to the Clippers:

Head coach Earl Watson was promptly fired after this Clippers debacle, which doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense because the Suns are basically built to be bad this season. If you’re a prime candidate to go all-in on Tankapalooza, then who the hell cares if you’re losing all the time? This is the latest baffling managerial move during the Reign of Error that is Suns owner Robert Sarver, whose tenure has seen the Suns disintegrate from playing the hottest, sexiest basketball in NBA history into a heap of hot garbage rotting in the Arizona sun. The Suns tried like hell to tank last season, shutting down their best player, Eric Bledsoe, with six weeks left in the season and commencing a 13-game losing streak in order to try and accrue as many ping pong balls as possible. This didn’t work at all, of course, and they wound up saddled with the 4th pick in the draft, whom they used on Josh Jackson, whose acumen as a defensive specialist immediately gets called into question when his team is allowing 125.3 points a game, and who’d probably have a better touch on his jumper if he was shooting with a pair of catcher’s mitts. Somehow, GM Ryan McDonough got a contract extension last season despite assembling this slag pile of a roster, which contains a litany of draft busts and endless numbers of guys that make you think to yourself, “how is it possible that a guy picked in the Top 10 of the draft can be such a stiff?”

As for Bledsoe, who is still annoyed that he got shut down for no reason last spring when he was having a good season, he took to twitter in the aftermath of the Clippers debacle and said what everyone in Phoenix was already thinking. He then showed up at shootaround before Monday’s game with the Sacramento Kings, was promptly told to go home, and now McDonough is saying that Bledsoe likely will never play another game in a Phoenix uniform, which sounds more like parole to me than punishment. The Suns tried like hell to blow a seemingly unfuckupable game against a bad Kings team on Monday night, squandering a double-digit lead in the 4th Quarter before bravely staving off the come-from-ahead-loss and triumphing 117:115 in Jay Triano’s debut as head coach. That result may say more about how lousy the Kings are than anything about the state of the Suns, but after enduring about as bad a week as an NBA team can endure, even eking out a narrow win against a bad team constitutes something akin to progress.

Pause for some obligatory Giannis filth

Last season was fairly remarkable by NBA standards in that no head coaches were fired. It took all of a week this season for that change, and I suspect Watson won’t be the last. Coaches are hired to be fired. There are some legit reasons for firing coaches, of course, one of those being that they don’t know what they are doing (which you could argue was the case in Phoenix), but more often than not, they’re the fall guys taking a bullet for a front office that is incompetent and looking to cover their asses. Combine an ass-covering general manager with an impatient and irrational owner who just saw his team get embarrassed, and voilà, the coach is shown the door. And this rarely works, of course, because the new guy is immediately saddled with all of the same sorts of problems that plagued the old one. You can’t fire the players, of course – although they just tried to do that in Phoenix, and Bledsoe will now likely be traded for a bunch of stuff the Suns don’t want as they embrace being this bad on purpose instead of thanks to unintelligent design.

The head man gets all the attention as the tactician and the master strategist, but what’s true in all sports is that it’s the position guys, and the development guys, who are responsible for the true success. You should bear that in mind while watching the two best-run teams in baseball playing in the World Series. Having enormous resources like the Dodgers affords you the ability to pay big salaries, and also affords you a significant margin of error when overcoming mistakes (which is why this attempt to portray them as plucky underdogs, while well-meaning and well-written, is also wrong), but what’s really notable about the Dodgers is just how many reclamation projects they have on their roster. NLCS hero Justin Turner was a Mets throwaway. Leadoff hitter Chris Taylor was a mediocre Mariners middle infielder. Their success speaks to talent at the coaching development level: a change of a swing here, a new arm slot on a fastball there, a whole lot of patience and work, and now you’ve got guys who were wash-ups verging on winning the World Series. This was the way Andrew Freidman worked when he was the GM in Tampa, of course, but now he also has the biggest budget and, just as Moneyball morphed from quaint Oakland baseball counterculture into a championship philosophy when backed by big Boston dollars, Freidman’s emphasis on the organization in totality is paying huge dividends. As much as I hate the Dodgers, I have to admire what it is that they are doing.

And I was making fun of the Houston Astros right at the beginning of this blog, as they were simply the worst baseball team that I have ever seen, but GM Jeffrey Luhnow put the entire operation in place during those horrible years when the Astros were doing stupid stuff like this:

They turned those high draft picks into good talent, and coached up that good talent into being great. And as I’ve said before, that nitty-gitty focus on process and technique that goes into talent development isn’t sexy, takes patience, and it also takes a little bit of luck. There are times you land a player because other teams aren’t smart enough to land him. You have to work to minimize injuries, and even that might not prove successful. Hell, as much as I’ve made fun of The Process here at In Play Lose, I also have to have some sympathy, because it’s downright cruel that the 76ers have landed three stud players in Simmons, Fultz, and Embiid, and had all three of them suffer serious injuries in their rookie seasons.

Baseball is still a game where patience and process gets rewarded. Because of the disparities in market sizes and payrolls and such, it will always be assumed that big money franchises win because of big money when, in fact, big money franchises win when they invest that in guys who know the hell they are doing. Smarts still matter! The only sports where money trumps all else are auto racing and soccer, where the disparities are so vast between the haves and the have-nots that buying power can simply overwhelm brain power.

Although not always, as Leicester showed everyone a couple of seasons ago. But Leicester, of course, just fired another manager last week, and are on their third manager in three seasons. Everton also fired their manager, Ronald Koeman, in the past couple of days. Both Leicester and Everton are lesser clubs which actually dared to be ambitious, spending a whole lot of money in the past couple of years and, as it turns out, spending it rather badly, as Leicester can not find proper replacements for their championship-winners who get pinched, while Everton contrived to acquire three central midfielders, who all get in the way of one-another, and no actual center forward to receive their passes. Both clubs made quick managerial changes early in the season when they were teetering along the relegation line.

Given the huge hit you take when you get relegated, there are reasons for being cautious. Overambition can get you punished severely in soccer. I was just watching my beloved Good Guys from Norwich City squander away a winnable Carabao Cup match this afternoon against Arsenal, thanks to some poor Canaries finishing and a hint of dubious officiating (although Arsenal fan and World Scrabble Champion Austin Shin now owes me a New Orleans food truck lunch, since Arsenal failed to cover our agreed -1½ goal spread). For a club which has preached patience and process and continuity for years on end, Norwich have sure run through a lot of coaches lately: five in four years, in fact, a run which started when Norwich, after a good finish in the EPL in 2013, got ambitious and spent a lot of money that summer in the hopes of becoming a Top 10 club. They got it all disastrously wrong, got relegated, and have been bouncing up and down ever since. Sometimes that happens, of course, but if you get it wrong in Europe, you can pay for it for years or even decades.

People complain about how top-heavy European soccer is, and with good reason. Last year in the EPL, the team that finished 8th was closer to being relegated than they were to finishing 7th. But one of the reasons why this ultimately happens is that all of the rank-and-file, mediocre clubs in European leagues have no incentive to try to be good, and all of the incentive to worry about being bad. It’s basically profit taking. Who cares if you 10th or your 12th or your 14th? So long as you’re not in the bottom three, it’s all good and ownership is cashing those enormous cheques. There’s no incentive to win, nor to actually be good, just don’t be horrible. That attitude renders half the fixtures in any weekend unwatchable, as not very good teams play not very well and muddle their way to scoreless draws or 1:0 margins. The product, on the whole, is awful. There are no fun bad teams in the EPL.

As much as I’m opposed to drafts, and believe in full-on free market when it comes to the players’ being able to make all of the money, at least with a draft, there is a possibility that it will balance out somewhat over time owing to the distribution of talent. Just because your team is terrible now, it doesn’t mean they have to be terrible forever. Norwich will never win the EPL, but maybe the Phoenix Suns can get their shit together and draft well and win an NBA title five years from now.

Nah, probably not. The Phoenix Suns are garbage. If only Robert Sarver would fire himself. Until then, the sun is definitely not coming out.

Do you have any questions you’d like to ask? Would you like to commiserate because your team sucks? Drop me a line! You can email me at inplaylose@gmail.com, and when we get enough questions and comments gathered up, I’ll do another Hate Mail edition of In Play Lose.

Your Short-Attention Span NBA Preview

Where have you been all summer, Giannis?

WHATEVER interest in the baseball playoffs I may have had left was pummeled to death the other night during that 5-minute, 6-pitch at-bat by Mariner-reject-turned-Dodgers-starting-outfielder Chris Taylor against John Lackey, who at one point took two minutes between pitches before issuing the inevitable walk which set up the inevitable 3-run walkoff homer by Justin Turner, which was inevitable because Justin Turner is really good at baseball and John Lackey is really good at giving up home runs. I was already bored sick watching the baseball playoffs, being someone who finds 32 strikeouts in a game to be not particularly dramatic, but that collective malaise and cluelessness exuded by the Cubs in the 9th inning of that game pushed me over the brink. I no longer care. Go Astros. There. Enough. Whatever was interesting even in the abstract about the NFL has gone bye-bye as well. Frankly, the most interesting things in the entire league were watching Aaron Rodgers and J.J. Watt play and now both are out for the season. I hate the politics and the paid patriotism and the cloak of intellectual dishonesty hanging over the entire operation – don’t even tell me Kaep shouldn’t be in the league when Smokin’ Jay Cutler has a job – and I just don’t care any more. And I don’t care about hockey right now, either, because the Canucks are horrible.

But BASKETBALL BASKETBALL BASKETBALL IS HERE and be still my foolish heart and thank god for something worth watching and paying attention to. But I’ve torn at the moment, because I want to write all about what I want to see in the NBA this season, but I also have deadlines and commitments regarding stuff that pays me more than zero dollars which is going to keep me from writing a proper NBA preview edition. (Shameless plug: if you want me to make more than zero dollars on this site, and maybe want to read a good book or two or three, click on those gadgets at the right.) But I don’t have time right now, so I’m going to make this quick and get this out there in the cyberworld. And I’ll probably start going in strange directions while I do this, because I have a short attention span and am easily distracted.

So I’ve got this league figured out. We’ll break it down into five categories, all of which conveniently rhyme and I may have almost certainly have done this before on this blog, but fuck it I don’t have time for creative ideas. Take all of these predictions to the bank, but don’t cash the cheque, because gambling is a sin, kiddos:

The Least
All of these teams are bad, and now that the NBA is modifying the lottery, this season just might feature the last epic tankapalooza. I say ‘might’ because I’m not convinced they’ve done quite enough to disincentivize losing, and there is not much institutionally you can do about a team that is completely incompetent – a team like, say, the Orlando Magic, who’ve been in the lottery now for approximately 27 years and have managed to assemble a roster on which there are zero players I would want on my team. That’s a bad team right there. Having wasted so much ink over the years on a team that accomplished so little, hipster bloggers and reporters in the NBA can now turn their attention away from the Atlanta Hawks, who’ve blown the whole thing up save for Dennis Schröder, who seems bound and determined to blow up his career all by himself. The Hawks are in full-on tank mode and actually have some trade pieces with which to make themselves even worse as the season progresses, but they may not want to make the effort because it would take a Herculean effort to catch the Chicago Bulls, of whom you can give me any number between 5 and 20 as a win projection for this team and I’d say it was reasonable. [Update: Guys! This isn't helping! Guys!] The Phoenix Suns are still garbage but are at least watchable garbage from a Lose perspective, given that Devin Booker is terrific, given that they play no defense at all, and given that they continue to have at least one guy on the court at all times who has no idea where he is supposed to be. In the “fun bad” category, we’ve at least got the Sacramento Kings to kick around, are there is no way a team with 10 guys on the rookie scale mixed in with 58-year-old Vince Carter and 53-year-old Zac Randolph can be any good, but the kids will play their asses off and probably lose a lot of games simply due to inexperience. People in the NBA desperately want the Los Angeles Lakers to be relevant again, and hype up Lonzo Ball and, hey, have you heard that Kyle Kuzma is jesus? But that’s silly and it’s all geared to next season if/when they sign LeBron and PG13 and Russell Westbrook (nope can’t do that anymore) … never mind that they don’t have the cap space for any of that stuff … but in the meantime, anyone who says this is a good team is engaging in wishful thinking. Oh yes, and then there are the New York Knicks, with the worst point guard situation in the league and with little flexibility – since they grossly overpaid Tim Hardaway Jr., willingly took on Enes Kanter’s contract from the Zombies, and are still paying Noah – no coherent offensive plan, a big whiff in the draft by not drafting Dennis Smith, and a defensive scheme something along these lines:

This illustration by Sam Woolley/GMG might be the greatest .gif in NBA history

The Feast
All of these teams are gonna get chewed up in the West. Two of them will actually make the playoffs. You can make the argument that none of them deserve it. I think the Los Angeles Clippers will be entertaining right up until the point that Blake Griffin gets hurt, because Teodosic is a human highlight reel and I like the idea of running the offense through Blake and also like Gallinari, who may be able to stay healthy since he no longer has any Dutch eurobasketers on which to break his hand in a fight, and the Clippers don’t seem to openly hate each other quite so much now, and they have an actual GM, but all of this is dependent upon getting a full season out of a guy who signed his new $175m contract while wearing a walking boot, and I have zero faith in this happening … Memphis hasn’t drafted a player who they signed to a second contract since Mike Conley, who is now in his 30s. Just think about that for a minute. That’s beyond front office incompetence and verges on negligence. The land of reclamation projects and Grit & Grind is being ground into dust and if this starts off bad this season, I can see them trying to move Marc Gasol. With Gasol and Conley they’ll win some games. Without them, the only rosters worse in the NBA are probably Orlando and Chicago … I just don’t see how the Utah Jazz score. If you’re going to try to win games 90-85, well, good luck with that, but the problem is that they pose so little of an offensive threat that teams really don’t have to worry about guarding them, and can focus all of their energy on breaking down that defense. It sucks that Exum got hurt, since I thought an interesting idea would be to pair him with Rubio and try to run a little bit more, since Rubio can be dynamic on the break … Portland were so desperate to free up money that they traded Crabbe to the Swamp Dragons, who was a guy they actually needed, and they are stuck with Evan Turner, whom they never needed and never should have signed, and while I love the addition of a passing center like Nurkic to the Dame and CJ show, and think they played great together last season, the front court is still awful, and minus Crabbe, a team that desperately needs great shooting to win, because the defense sucks, is now also lacking shooting … literally nothing about the New Orleans Pelicans makes sense. First they were going with two point guards, then Rondo got hurt, and now they’re talking about how they have no real point guard and that AD is going to bring the ball up and Boogie’s going to shoot all the threes, and they no wings at all and the bench is still barren. This just can’t end well. And neither will this blog end well if I don’t start writing faster, but fortunately I can breeze through this next batch.

The East
I care about none of these teams. All of them happen to be in the East. I begrudgingly picked the Toronto Raptors fourth in the East, because I find them dull and didn’t for the life of me understand why they felt to need to resign Serge Ibaka, whose age I won’t question but who plays like he’s 46, and the Raptors will continue on with their low-to-the-ground, pass-averse offense and bore their opponents into submission on their way to winning 48 games and being brushed aside in the playoff, since they’re incredibly guardable if you actual spend more than 3 hours looking at their offense, which no team has any time to do in the regular season. Charlotte is the most boring team in the NBA and that’s all I need to say there. I will admire Indiana for not tanking, because they never tank, even though they should tank, because they aren’t any good … the Dion Waiters Experience will bring some fun and enjoyment to the Miami Heat, although counting on him to be as good as he was a year ago, and also counting on the assortment of spare parts and misfit toys who nearly made the playoffs (along with paying them like something other than spare parts and misfit toys) might not be the smartest idea … oh, god, do I hate everything about the Detroit Pistons. I hate the players, the offensive set-up, the way they’re coached (at least for now, as my guess is you’ll find the first guy fired in Detroit), and for godsake Andre Drummond will you make a damn free throw? It’s really hard to build a team around a guy you can’t have on the floor in crunch time. I would just put him out there and live with it, but there is only so much 35% free throw shooting most coaches can stand. That this team might make the playoffs speaks to just how bad the East really is, since there are probably 12 teams in the West better than this one.

The Yeast
Teams on the rise. These take many forms. Some are bad teams getting better, some are good teams verging on being great. These are the fun teams to watch because you know there is some progress being made. I really like what Brooklyn is doing and while the Swamp Dragons are not good, they’re going to be fun, and there was absolutely no downside to taking a flyer on DeAngelo Russell reviving his career, and Crabbe will shoot a tonne of 3s, and if they’re healthy, they’re probably better than five teams in the East. Dallas is also not good, mostly because the bench is horrible, but Dennis Smith will be the Rookie of the Year, their first five can play a little bit, and they’ll be a pain in the ass to play against … after years of loving and hating The Process, I still don’t have that much trust in the Philadelphia 76ers, since having so much faith in young players usually proves foolish, especially since Fultz seems to have a self-created broken shot and we don’t know what Simmons is going to do, but if they get 60 games of good health out of Joel Embiid this season (bless his heart, he is wonderful), this is probably a playoff team in the East. But the original O/U of a .500 season for this team made me want to drive up to Tahoe and plunk down a boatload of money on the under – which is also what I would do with the Minnesota Timberwolves, while acknowledging that Towns is maybe the best center in the NBA and Jimmy Butler is a boss, because I have no idea how Butler and Andrew Wiggins fit together on the court and have zero faith in Thibs to coach this team to its utmost. And I like Thibs, he was a great mind in Boston and Chicago but now’s he got supreme offensive talents in Wiggins and Towns who don’t seem to be able to guard the floor they’re standing on, and also a team desperate for some spacing has little-to-none. So I’m not as high on the Wolves as I could be, and also I HATE THESE NEW JERSEYS. The offense is terrifying a mile up in the sky, the passing from the post out of Jokic and Millsap will be dazzling, and I’m not as concerned about the point guard spot as others are because all you have to do is dribble it up and then throw it to Jokic as quickly as possible, but they’re still the Enver Nuggets until they find the D. But damn, the offense is going to be sweet. Milwaukee is going as far as Giannis takes them, and if he’s doing stuff like this, and doing it in rhythm with confidence, he may take them a very long way. I’m going to also put Washington here among the Yeast, even though I think the Buzzards are one good trade away from being élite, since the starting lineup is dynamite together. If they stay healthy and shore up that bench, this team could be really dangerous at playoff time, as there is literally no one on any roster in the Eastern Conference who can stop John Wall.

The Beast
Royalty. My thinking going into this season was that the San Antonio Spurs were going to solve their point guard issue by simply counting on Kawhi to tighten his handle and focus in the offseason on his playmaking, because what’s been lost on people is that this guy literally develops and masters a new skill every year, which is how the Spurs keep being so successful, so we’d all better hope that he gets healthy soon and in the meantime, signing Rudy Gay and Gasol and giving LMA an extension makes no sense to me, it’s as if in their quest to zig when the others zag the Spurs are doubling down on the whole “get old and slow” theory of the game which has gone out of fashion, but system ball wins a lot of games in the regular season, which the Spurs will do plenty of, and also Vote Pop in 2020. I’m not convinced that OKC is anywhere as good as people hope they will be, because there are still too many one-note players and the bench is horrible, and I’m not convinced Russ will alter his game after being spoon-fed and pandered to by the organization last season, nor am I convinced Carmelo Anthony will alter his game either, which means Paul George will have to, and he’s the one guy that shouldn’t. But it should be fun to see them try. If Kyrie Irving brings the same vision and creativity to passing as he does shotmaking, then the Boston Celtics are going to be really good by season’s end, but in the mean time, they’re going to be trying to introduce all of these new players, and given that the roster presently consists of Kyrie, two bigs, and 68 wings, I’m not sure how they ever get a rebound. Cleveland now has the same problem Boston did a year ago – they have no one to stop Kyrie Irving – and who knows when IT will be healthy again. In the meantime, a Rose/DWade starting backcourt is a defensive nightmare and a spacing clogger on what was a devastating offense last season. This team managed to somehow get older and slower in the offseason, which wasn’t what needed to happen. I think they’re smart to start Kevin Love at center, and Crowder simply has to play to add at least one plus-defender, although I don’t see what value Thompson has coming off the bench. (Then again, I’ve never thought he had that much value as a starter, either.) But none of that matters for now, because LeBron will be in a bad mood here and want to clobber people, at least until they start getting lax midway through the season and all of the rumors about his future start becoming a constant distraction. I love pairing James Harden and Chris Paul in Houston, simply because you have a Hall of Fame point guard on the floor for 48 minutes, and it’ll be fun to see if the Rockets figure out how to use Paul’s terrific midrange game to compliment the snipers from deep. This is gonna be fun. But none of this matters, really, because the Golden State Warriors actually went out in the offseason and improved what was already one of the best teams in history. Yes, they got better, and also this season, they don’t need to spend three months integrating Durant into the system while Steph Curry fully comes back from a knee injury far worse than people made it out to be. Due to that uncertainty, the Warriors big four all actually shot worse than their usual from 3-point range last season, and Golden State still had the best offense in the NBA. Oh yeah, and they have the second best defense. The Warriors may win 70 without actually trying. That’s how great the margin of error is. They’ve loaded up the bench and I suspect they’re going to rest everyone regularly throughout the season, because their only real opponent is injuries.

ESPN staff picks for 2017-2018 season

Now, some people may not like the fact that it seems almost like a foregone conclusion to start the season who is going to win the title, but I wound remind everyone that it seemed that way two years ago as well, which did not happen, and I’d also point out that what you’re seeing from the Warriors is like nothing you’ve ever seen in the sport, and I’d recommend you enjoy it while it lasts, because it won’t last forever.

And neither will this blog. I have other stuff to do. Whew! Wait ... what was I doing again?

Do you have any questions you’d like to ask? Would you like to commiserate because your team sucks? Drop me a line! You can email me at inplaylose@gmail.com, and when we get enough questions and comments gathered up, I’ll do another Hate Mail edition of In Play Lose.

Our Team Sucks

THERE was a moment last night during the disaster and the debacle that was USA FC’s 2:1 loss at Trinidad & Tobago where I first uttered the phrase “motherfucking shit bitch,” and nearly threw my laptop. It wasn’t, however, after either of the Soca Warriors’ two goals. It took place moments before the second goal when the U.S. had a corner. The pitch was in atrocious shape after many days of rain, and the players all looked like they were tiptoeing through jello. Just trying to complete a pass in that sludge with any sort of usual weight and accuracy was difficult. The U.S. had bigger players in the box, matched up against a team which hadn’t defended set pieces, nor much of anything else, particularly well in CONCACAF qualifying, but America’s chosen set piece guru Michael Bradley instead tried to play a short corner, which rolled about three yards and promptly started to die in the slop. The chance was wasted, T&T cleared their lines and in the ensuing series of movements, Alvin Jones launched a missile from 30+ yards that somehow found the net to give T&T the 2-goal lead – news of which immediately filtered over to San Pedro de Sula and Panama City, of course, since all three CONCACAF games were taking place simultaneously, and after which both Honduras and Panama suddenly started playing better.

The reason this particular short corner rankled me so much is that it’s exactly the sort of low IQ play I’ve come to expect from Bradley, in particular, and USA FC, in general. It was a dumb idea executed in a dumb fashion. What’s driven me crazy, in the past three years, as U.S. soccer has devolved to the point where it can’t even get a draw against a Trinidad & Tobago team with nothing to play for, is just how dumb everyone involved seems to be. We quote Cruijff often here at In Play Lose: “football is played with the head.” During this up-and-down spell, which has gone on seemingly since the moment they lost to Belgium in Brazil in 2014, there always seems to be this lack of any sort of situational awareness – be it from the players, the coaches, or even the game’s administrators. The U.S. has good footballing talent at the moment – good, but not great. But you don’t need to be great to qualify for the World Cup. You do, however, need to be smart.

We’re going to hear a whole lot of, “if they can figure this out in Iceland, we can do it in the U.S.” here in the coming weeks and months, which is actually sort of dumb. (More on that in a bit.) Want to know the difference between the two? Compare and contrast. The U.S. has one truly great player: Christian Pulisic. Iceland has one truly great player: Gylfi Sigurðsson. Iceland also has 22 other guys on their squad who know where they are supposed to be and what they are doing at any given time. They’re incredibly well organized, well prepared, they figure out what their opponents are going to try to do and go about thwarting it, they have a whole bevy of great set pieces off corners and long throws. Quite simply, Iceland have thought their way into being successful at the game, mastering the parts of the game where superior talent can be neutralized. And when they do get the ball, they get it to Gylfi Sigurðsson and let him try to make stuff up, because he is good enough to do just that. Meanwhile, on this side of the Atlantic, we’re two minutes into the second half last night in Couva, and Pulisic slips over to the left, gets the ball, dips around a couple of guys and blasts one into the goal to make it 2-1, and the BeIn Sport commentator noted how the U.S. was going to change it up in the second half, let Pulisic drift and move into spaces to try and get the ball. Hey, good thinking there guys, it only took you until you were two goals down in the most important game of the year to do what you should be doing every single fucking minute of every single fucking game.

U.S. Soccer is not smart. Time and again in the past three years, we’ve gotten mixed signals and, not surprisingly, we’ve also had mixed results. I said the other day in the mail bag that the USA FC had been making some progress under Bruce Arena. Sorry guys, I jinxed it. But I’m as guilty as everyone, in that it seemed absolutely unthinkable to me that the U.S. couldn’t get a result in Trinidad & Tobago. The difference being, of course, that it wasn’t up to me actually get a result. No one involved in U.S. Soccer seemed to treat this game last night in Couva as a game where, if all goes wrong, disaster could occur. Arena left some of his best players at home – their European homes, I should add, but we’ll kill them for that shortly – and the U.S. sleepwalked through the first half, clearly bothered by the awful pitch that they were playing on but not doing anything to adapt to it. Then they’re down two goals and, all of a sudden, everything starts getting weird in San Pedro de Sula and Panama City, and the U.S. found themselves in the weeds.

This is why you don’t leave it late. Weird stuff happens on the final day of qualifying. Weird stuff happened four years ago, if you recall. These games get nuts, and weird stuff starts to happen. Chile basically got eliminated from the World Cup last night because Peru and Colombia forgot the rules – the Peruvians fired an indirect free kick straight at the Colombian keeper, who touched it on its way in the goal, thus making it a direct free kick. That goal pushed Peru past Chile in the standings. But Chile have been garbage in the CONMEBOL qualifying – a result due in part, I suspect, to everyone on that rather short squad having played far too much football, as none of their top players have had any sort of a summer break since about 2012. But if you put yourself in a position where bad stuff can happen, bad stuff often happens, and now the two-time Copa América champs are getting a long summer vacation in 2018.

I was also watching the Dutch yesterday attempting to go about trying to win 7:0 against Sweden, which is what they needed to do in order to qualify. The Swedes seemed remarkably complicit in this, looking at times in the first half like they were, in fact, trying to lose 7:0. Sweden were terrible. Except the Oranje then missed about four gilt-edged chances in the first half where not scoring seemed inexplicable, and while it was 2:0 at the break, it could have been, and probably should have been, 4:0 or even 5:0 at the break – at which point 7:0 becomes doable. The Dutch wound up going out on goal difference, tied with Sweden on points – Sweden having picked up two bonus points in qualifying thanks to French goalkeeper Hugo Lloris losing his mind. But the Dutch played their way into that mess, just as Chile did in CONMEBOL. You don’t deserve any breaks. Chile, in fact, had already got themselves a break, picking up some extra points in the table because the Bolivians had fielded an ineligible player. Even then, they still couldn’t qualify. When you play like garbage, you deserve what you get.

And the U.S. has been garbage for a large part of World Cup qualifying. Hell, they’ve been garbage since 2015, when they lazed their way through the CONCACAF Gold Cup in a confused haze. They pop up with a good result here and there which teases you and makes you think they are on the right track, but then they go and lose to Guatemala or some such nonsense. There has been this perpetual sense of confusion surrounding the entire program, be it Klinsmann deciding to trot out a groovy new formation he read about the other day in a magazine, or him trotting out a lineup full of all the guys we’ve come to know and hate in some dimwitted attempt to hold Argentina scoreless for 120 minutes and win on penalties, or the perpetually strange notion held by Bruce Arena types that guys who play in the Premier League and the Bundesliga somehow aren’t good enough to win games in Honduras and Trinidad & Tobago. Not only is there a cluelessness about this entire operation, but there is also an arrogance, one bred from achieving modest success and thinking that success was stellar.

Having said all of that, it still took stuff like this happening to knock the U.S. out of the 2018 World Cup:

That’s not a goal. It might be a penalty, it certainly is a mess, but it’s not a goal. While that was happening in Panama, Honduras was going up 3:2 on El Tri on a shot which slammed off the crossbar, off the back of the Mexican keeper’s head and in. Of the two goals from the Soca Warriors, one was a once-in-a-lifetime strike from Alvin Jones, the other a harmless cross which deflected off Omar Gonzalez for a dreaded own goal. Both of those are pretty fluky, in the grand scheme of things. All of that weird stuff had to happen in order for the U.S. to wind up being eliminated.

Well, another thing had to happen as well, which was that the U.S. had to play like crap.

It never should have gotten to this point. This campaign should have been over weeks ago, but the U.S. kept dropping points it shouldn’t have been dropping. The U.S. response to the obvious ploy from Costa Rica and Honduras – surround Pulisic with five guys and kick him repeatedly – was basically to say, “hey guys, stop doing that.” Even what seemed like a good performance – 1:1 at Azteca against El Tri, a game in which Arena got it tactically right – looks, in hindsight, like a missed opportunity: Gee whiz, the U.S. might have some trouble down their left flank, with Carlos Vela running at 67-year-old DeMarcus Beasley and look, there goes Vela running at Beasley and cutting in on his left foot like everyone on the planet who watches this game knows he wants to do and he scores to the surprise of no one. It ends up 1:1 and it’s two points lost. That happened again and again and again. Drop two points here, two points there, and you’re in trouble.

This team should never be in trouble in this region. Yes, the away games are all trap games, played on bad pitches in terrible weather conditions. Yes, CONCACAF isn’t nearly as weak a region as soccer snobs like to think it is. (It’s actually the third-most successful confederation overall.) But don’t make any lame excuses here. Want difficult conditions? Go to South America and play in Ecuador at 9,500 feet or Bolivia at 12,000 feet of elevation, go play in a tropical downpour in Colombia, or on a frozen pitch with snow on the ground in Argentina. World Cup Qualifying can be hard, and honestly, it should be hard, but the U.S. has the run of this region, for godsakes. They play the only tournament that matters in this part of the world in this country every single time. There aren’t any excuses. The U.S. should do better than this. We have better players than Panama and Costa Rica and Honduras. We have the best goddamn player in the whole region, for christsakes. Just having him and 10 guys who know where they are supposed to be at all given times should be enough.

U.S. soccer has been caught daydreaming, conflating the really positive results in the World Cups of 2010 and 2014 with the notion that we, as a footballing nation, have been verging on an becoming part of the footballing élite when, in truth, we have stopped improving. The improvements basically stopped after Brazil, and ever since, we’ve been regressing while the others in the region have gotten better, and done so with a shallower talent pool. I want to throw my laptop when I see the sort of dimwitted short corner that Bradley played for no purpose because I’m sick of seing Bradley do that sort of thing – but he’s not alone in doing that sort of thing, he just gets more flak because he’s so important to this team and is the captain. But Bradley also embodies, in a lot of ways, the exact sort of player that USA FC is chock full of, a guy who went to Europe and cut his chops and earned respect playing in Serie A who then jumped to MLS and has pretty much stopped improving from the moment he returned to this continent. The core of this team is guys like that, or guys who never ventured abroad and raised their level of their games. It may seem, for a young American player, like a bit of a come down to do something like go and play in the Eredivisie or play in the English Championship or go and play in Belgium. Belgium? Really? Hey, guess what, there’s a whole team of guys out there who started out playing in Belgium: the Belgians, who scored 43 goals in qualifying and just might win a damn World Cup next summer, all of whom learned to play in Belgium and grew into the types of players big European clubs want to buy. For CONCACAF, MLS is a godsend – a chance for players in the region to play regular first-team minutes and know they’re actually going to get paid on time. For the U.S., it isn’t. It is an easy way out, an excuse not to strive to excel. You want to get good at this game? Get your ass to Europe or to Mexico. Don’t play it safe. Don’t be lazy.

But we’ve encouraged laziness. We have a talent development system in this country that doesn’t work. We’ve missed qualifying two Olympics in a row, which is valuable experience. (Jeez, all of those young Honduran kids who played in the Olympics instead of the U.S. kids seem to be developing in a hurry.) We’ve been shorting our talent pool in this country for years now. We’re still enamored with pay-to-play at the youth level, where suburban soccer moms plunk down $2500 a year so their kids can travel and play. That’s not how this should work. This is a game of the common people everywhere else in the world for a reason. We have this terrible collegiate structure, where they play too many games in too short a time frame and grind up too many players. That’s a waste. All of that is a waste and all of that needs to be addressed.

This is where the dual appointment of Jürgen Klinsmann as coach and also technical director was a big, big mistake. Technical director is all about developing talent, and about all Klinsmann accomplished, in terms of talent development, was finding a bunch of European kids eligible for American passports. Which was a good thing of him to be doing, mind you, and I’ve always found the contempt and disdain some American soccer snobs – including soon-to-be former head coach Bruce Arena – have for a bunch of German guys to be insulting and completely short-sighted. But it shouldn’t be lost on anyone that the best player who has ever been produced by this country, Pulisic, felt like he needed to move to Germany as a high school kid in order to get good at this game. Our national team has been stuck in the mud, and the talent pool needed to feed this team has been neglected and is rotting to the core.

Big changes need to happen and big issues need to be addressed, and this is where we go back to the, “well, if Iceland can do it, than why can’t we?” line of thinking. It’s actually easier to make the sorts of changes that, I believe, are required in a small country than it is in a big one. You can institute a sweeping change of philosophy in a place like Iceland, or in a place like Belgium – which is what happened when they bombed out of World Cup Qualifying a few years ago – a whole lot easier than you can in a place which is a huge, fractionalized, splintered nation like the U.S. Having said that, the Germans did it after they stunk up the Euros in 2000, and look at where they are now. The French did it after imploding and missing qualifying in 1990 and 1994, and look at where they are now.

And, as you can see, U.S.S.F. President Sunil Gulati is getting right on that:

“So wholesale changes aren’t needed if the ball that hits off the post [from Clint Dempsey] goes in? You don’t make wholesale changes based on the ball being two inches wide or two inches in. We’ll look at everything, obviously, and all our programs, both the national team and all the development stuff. But we’ve got a lot of pieces in place that we think are very good and have been coming along. Tonight obviously wasn’t what we hoped for.”

Care to add to that, Bruce Arena?

“There’s nothing wrong with what we’re doing. Certainly, I think if our league continues to grow it benefits the national team program. We have some good players coming up. Nothing has to change. To make any kind of crazy changes I think would be foolish.”

Oh, come on. The table doesn’t lie. The table says you finished 5th. The table says you won 3 games out of 10 in the Hex, and further says that you won one frickin’ away game, against St. Vincent & the Grenadines, in the entirety of the qualifying cycle. For years, we’ve trotted out the same group of players stuck in neutral, with no clear plan of how to play, and they promptly produce like a team stuck in neutral with no idea what they’re doing.

Arena then offered up this gem in the post-match presser:

“If we had qualified for the World Cup, there needed to be a number of changes for the World Cup roster.”

Aah, okay, so it wasn’t important enough to make those changes ahead to time and actually give yourself the best chance to win the game you needed to win. Yeah, okay, that makes a lot of sense.

Fire these people. Seriously, fire them all. Arena will certainly be out. Gulati should be out. I’m leary of thinking any American presently involved with MLS is the answer, since I think the way MLS is constructed and plays out is part of the problem, and you can’t solve problems with the same thinking that created them. I have no idea who you get to coach this team, but if we’re going outside the U.S., I’d prefer it be someone from the southern part of this continent, if not the southern part of this hemisphere. They play pretty good football in Mexico, in Argentina and Brazil. Maybe we should start learning from those people.

I don’t care how much money the federation has made and that it was broke when you took over. I don’t care. I want some goddamn results. But my expectations are still reasonable. See, here is the thing: we Americans, when it comes to soccer, have modest expectations. We would love to win a World Cup some day (who wouldn’t?), but more than anything, we want to see some progress. We want to get better. We actually enjoy, and revel, in the fact that we have to up our games and strive to be great, be creative and resourceful and tenacious, whereas we can just show up in some other sports and clobber everyone. That drive to improve, and that emphasis and pursuit of improvement, has been the basis of the support behind American soccer for years. Improving at the global game, over the past 30 years, has brought out the best in us as a sporting nation, at times. It’s what has always excited us as fans. It’s a challenge, and we enjoy the challenge. But now we’re not going to get that chance in 2018, and that’s a huge, huge loss. Through being arrogant, lazy, and soft, this team threw everything we have liked about it out the window. The momentum built over three decades has ground to a halt. It’s almost like we’re starting all over again.

The next tournament of note that the U.S. has to look forward to is the Copa América in Brazil in 2019, and I want to see the young players out there, I want to see the good players out there, the ones that actually play on a high level and learn how to compete. I’m tired of this lot. I’m tired of the Bradleys and the Altidores and the revolving door at center back and the toxic waste dump that has been the left back position for the past decade. U.S. Soccer needs to stop patting itself on the back and maybe start watching its back. Have some pride, have some humility, and for godsakes, use your heads! Some good could come out of this, in the end, but in the meantime, about all that USA FC has managed to accomplish is to further my blossoming drinking problem. And for that alone, I hold them all in contempt.

Hate Mail

Oh, get out of there, cat

OKAY, so welcome to the first ever Hate Mail edition of In Play Lose. Feel free to submit any comments or questions that you have to inplaylose@gmail.com. The Lose has been, well, in need of a spark here, and I appreciate all of the comments and questions that I received.

But before we begin, we need to properly prepare:

That’s more like it. Alright, let’s do this.

- - -

Question about the Mazins, coming from Shitstain, N.J., which sounds like a beautiful place: 
OK...I have a question about those ’mazin lovable losers from Queens. At one point could the argument be made that a team with an extraordinarily high amount of injured pitchers (like all of them) could be blamed on the pitching coach/staff? It seems like every pitcher that gets near the rotting guts of Shea Stadium ends up on the shelf for extended periods of time. WTF?
– To Shea! To Shea!

Obviously, insanely bad injury luck happens sometimes. I certainly understand this season, as both of my teams were cursed. The Giants had every member of their opening day lineup, their #1 and #2 starters, their closer, and their two best prospects all land on the DL. The Mariners, meanwhile, used 61 players and used so many pitchers that their pitching coach couldn’t remember them all. These things happen sometimes, and often it translates to a lost season.

And the Mets injury woes this season were ridiculous. Christ, they had two guys get injured swinging a bat, one of whom blew out his shoulder and the other of which hit himself in the face with a batted ball. Those are the sort of freaky things which make you feel like you’re cursed. That said, this seems to happen far too often to the Mets, who seem like a walking MASH unit every season. And from the entire drama over Matt Harvey’s arm trouble a few years ago, to Noah Syndergaard refusing to take an MRI earlier in the season, the sense you get is that there is a lack of faith in the Mets training staff. When you have so many injuries every single year, you have to start looking at how you’re doing things related to training and injury prevention. When this stuff happens so regularly, it stops being random luck and starts being a damning indictment. I’ve mentioned this before in regards to the New Orleans Pelicans, who can’t stop getting guys hurt. It kills your organization after a while.

Here’s a question from Atlanta about the NCAA:
You don’t like the NCAA much. How would you reform it?

Pay the players. Plain and simple. The argument put forth is that if you do that, there would be some universities who could no longer afford their athletic programs. Okay, and the problem with that is what exactly? Pay the players. Hell, let the shoe companies and the boosters pay the players. Just stop it with this bogus nonsense about amateurism and that they are there to be student athletes. They aren’t. The football and basketball coach, in general, doesn’t give a shit about anyone who can’t help them win. Pay the players, declare them to be employees of the school’s marketing department or whatnot, but stop it with this bogus ideal of the student athlete which doesn’t exist and, quite honestly, has never existed.

And I say this as someone who grew up around a large university where major college athletics played a significant role in the culture of the school and the community. I have, in fact, seen the value of this, in that there are, in fact, quite a few kids who are afforded the chance to attend an outstanding university and receive a quality education and they go about making the most of that opportunity. I don’t have any issue with schools giving scholarships for athletes – they do it for musicians, they do it for dramatists, they do it for engineers, they do it for kids from all walks of life. But to make these kids indentured servants to the university is truly appalling.

And fire all the coaches, while we’re at it, particularly in college basketball. Fire them all. They aren’t educators, they aren’t teachers, they are control freaks who care about kids only so long as the kids are in their presence. “Four years pass and you’re gone, kid, so do as I say because I’m here forever.” Fire all of them.

The short answer is that I don’t think you can earnestly reform it without paying players. Until that happens, it’s garbage.

Someone doesn’t like my work:
LOL you suck at everything what have you ever done?

I scored 61 in a basketball game once. I once hit two home runs in an inning. (But the game got rained out, so the game didn’t count.) I was 57-not out when I played cricket. I had 35 saves in a soccer game, which was a state record, including taking one square in the face which left me with a black eye for the prom. I’ve had my moments here and there. But yeah, I suck. Who gives a shit? What did you ever do? Probably nothing. And one thing I don’t do is waste my time trolling people, because people I’ve known in my life who do that sort of thing are generally useless people with meaningless lives – people such as yourself, in fact. So get stuffed.

This is a good question from Sacramento, California:
How difficult has it been for you to adjust to writing about stuff (Warriors) that is good?

I look at the Golden State Warriors as being a transcendent sort of force which, when this run is over (and it will happen at some point) will have changed the sport of basketball. When that sort of thing occurs, you really should sit back and enjoy it. Having said that, of course, the Warriors blew a championship in 2016. They are human. Not writing about that at the time was a big whiff on my part – although, as it turned out, it merely set the stage for what we have now, since they went out and signed KD and now they are just ridiculous, and will be ridiculous for years to come.

This stuff is still, ultimately, fragile and fleeting. The Chicago Bulls were the greatest thing I’ve ever seen on a basketball court 20 years ago, and while you could, in the abstract, foresee a time without  Jordan and Pippen and whatnot, the idea that the Bulls would one day become one of the most hopeless and colossal messes in the NBA seemed unthinkable – and yet here we are in 2017 with a Bulls team that might not win 20 games. One of the reasons why I’ve sort of chosen to truly embrace the goodness that is the Golden State Warriors is because goddamn, this team was just godawful for the better part of 40 years. That’s some serious misery. As a resident of this community, I feel as if it would be emotionally and intellectually dishonest of me not to embrace that success. It does, in the end, help me to better understand failure. You need stuff that sucks to have stuff that’s cool, and vice versa.

General question from Victoria, B.C., O Canada!:
What sports don’t you like?

On principle, I can at least appreciate pretty much anything that’s done well. That doesn’t mean I like watching it, however. I only like watching golf to see people mess up and hit the ball into the trees or the lake. Tennis doesn’t do much for me, either. In general, I am opposed to any sport that has judges, since judges have proven, over time, to be biased and corruptible and, quite often, biased and corrupt. I work in auto racing, and while I love the machines and how they’ve come to be over time – which is fascinating and nutty and full of colorful characters with lunatic ideas – I find that the actual races don’t do much to hold my short attention span. Blood sports don’t interest me at all. Nothing annoys me more than having my social media timelines filled up with UFC. Blech.

But there’s lots of stuff I like. I love basketball and soccer the most. I always could watch football so long as I viewed the players as chess pieces, but when I actually think of them as human beings getting their brains scrambled, it doesn’t appeal to me much. I’ve sort of fallen out of love with hockey but could be persuaded to come back. Same with baseball – the “three true outcomes” style of play is boring to me, since seeing 4% of plays result in home runs instead of 3% doesn’t change the fact that 21% of the time guys strike out and 10% of the time they walk, which are the two dullest plays in the game. But the game is cyclical and will shift in time. I love rugby, I have spent a day downing a case of beer at a cricket match and seeing the appeal. The Olympics are amazing if you can ignore all of the political sideshows: I’ll watch a million hours of that every few years.

Sorry, Cleveland:
Please tell me the Browns have hope.

The Browns have hope.

I don’t actually believe that, but you wanted me to tell you that, so there you go.

Good timing for this question from Los Angeles about USA FC, who smacked down Panama 4:0 on Friday night:
You hated Klinsmann. Is this team any better?

Yes, it is. USA FC is actually now in a fascinating place, in my opinion, a place which it has never been in before, and a place in which literally no one involved – players, coaches, etc. – know what to do: that place being that literally every single time that USA FC lines up for a match against a CONCACAF opponent – and, to be honest, against quite a few nations from elsewhere on the earth as well – the U.S. has the best player on the pitch, because Christian Pulisic is the real deal. He is that good, and barring injury, he is going to be that good and even better for the next 10 years. I’ve read and heard a number of people who cover the German game speaking of how Borussia Dortmund staffers snickered about Barcelona spending €105 million on Ousmane Dembélé, because Barca was buying the wrong player. Pulisic’s potential is literally sky-is-the-limit type stuff. He’s the best player in this entire region and he’s 19 fricking years old.

And when you have the best player on the pitch in every single game, you have to coach and play appropriately. You have to line him up against the other team’s worst guy and let him turn the poor sod into BBQ chicken. You have to get him the ball all the time. You have to counter the inevitable physical play, because the guy will get all the attention and will be kicked and tripped constantly. (Which is what happened during that disastrous Costa Rica-Honduras two-step recently, where Pulisic had five guys around him kicking at him the whole time.) If that means you need a hard man and an enforcer out there, sobeit. If that means using him as a creative decoy sometimes, sobeit. (Which is how Argentina got the final of the last World Cup when Messi could barely move.) You have to think and play the game differently. It’s a nice problem to have.

Arena has no idea what to do in this case. The U.S. has always been tenacious, resourceful, and mentally tough – good traits, but those you need in lieu of talent. Now the U.S. has a wünderkind talent and how they figure out how to use him going forward will determine how good this team can be. It’s a star’s game, in the end, much like basketball. If you’ve got one guy who is that much better than everyone else, everything you do has to be based on him. This requires a total shift in American footballing mindset. It may take a while.

Klinsmann was well on his way to messing that up as well when he was fired, which I approved of. I’ve been, on balance, somewhat meh about USA FC – in part because I continue to be amazed at the fact that there are 300,000,000 people in this nation and yet we have 67-year-old DeMarcus Beasley playing left back – but I’m well over Klinsmann’s random back threes and blaming every single person in American soccer other than himself for his poor results. Qualifying through The Hex has been a mess, but in general, I think they’re going the right direction, albeit in fits and starts. I have no earthly idea who replaces Arena in a couple years, however.

Here’s a comment from a loyal reader in Cape Verde:
Hello I come from Cape Verde and my English is bad. I read your work in order to get better at it.

This is probably the greatest compliment that I have ever received. I would add, however, that the idea someone is using what I write to learn English is somewhat terrifying. I’m not sure that I can handle that responsibility. But thanks for reading. And as bad as you might think your English is, I can assure you that my Portuguese is far, far worse.

I got two emails from Africa on the same day:
I live in Niger. Why no more African football on the blog? More African football, please.

I’ve been disappointed with CAF qualifying for the World Cup. There have been some surprises – no Cameroon, Algeria, and likely no Ghana in the World Cup – and there has been, of course, the obligatory lunacy, but the quality of play has been wanting. I think there are more good teams in Africa but fewer great ones. It seems like they’re in sort of a transition phase at the moment, with stars aging out and younger talent not yet fully establishing itself.

And I’m a little bummed that two of my favorite teams – my beloved Blue Sharks and also Les Étalons from Burkina Faso – got stuck in the same qualifying group, and may both wind up getting screwed because of that South Africa-Senegal game having to be replayed. Still love the African game, but I don’t really feel like any of these teams are going to do very well in Russia next summer. The Super Eagles have been terrific in qualifying and the best of the bunch, but trouble always seems to find them come World Cup time.

Question from Spain, which is cool. Go España:
Basketball! Who will win the East this year?

The In Play Lose NBA Eastern Conference preview

Honestly, I don’t think it matters much, since the East is hot garbage. Either Cleveland or Boston. I’m not enamored with either at the moment.
 
Okay, this one is right up my alley:
What’s the worst loss you have ever personally suffered in a game?

I remember a 3rd grade basketball game where we lost 26:0 and I think I might – might – have been the only kid on the team who didn’t cry after the game. I was on the worst softball team in the history of the city of San Francisco, we were 0-10 and our closest game all season was 16:8 – a game in which we were down 16 runs going into the last inning and somehow scored eight to make the beer taste better afterwards. We lost a game 30:0 that season as well, if I remember correctly. My team getting no-hit in baseball was not cool. I gave up eight goals in a soccer game once. That wasn’t fun. What was even more annoying than that was twice losing 1:0 when we scored upon ourselves. I lost a scrabble game by 428 once, which seemed like a lot until my wife lost a game by 550. (And by scrabble schlub standards, we’re both pretty bad ass. Bad games happen sometimes.) The women’s basketball team I was coaching lost by 93, which made me mad because they ran the score up on us and I told the opposing coach after the game that if he’d done that cheapass cherry-picking shit in the U.S., some of his players would’ve wound up getting hurt. He didn’t care for that.

I can guess what state this question comes from:
How long are you going to be butthurt about Sonics moving to OKC?

How long are you going to be butthurt about the fact that Kevin Durant got a better job? Have fun this season watching two of the most self-absorbed players in the NBA drive Paul George all the way to Los Angeles.

On a related note, a comment from loyal reader Mr. Williams, of the law firm of Williams Morgan + Williams, in San Leandro, California:
Long live the SuperSonics! David Stern and Clay Bubba Whatever can rot in OKC. But don't forget Roger Goodell (spit!) and Über Liar Stan Kroenke. Ripping another team out of my hometown STL. Fuck them and Fuck the NFL! Long live the St. Louis Rams and The Greatest Show on Turf!! And the SuperSonics! Kevin Durant looks fantastic in a Dubs jersey, BTW.

I do revel in the irony that the NFL dangled the idea of moving franchises to L.A. for 20 years, using that in order to extort stadia in places like Minneapolis using public money, and then when they finally did move franchises to Los Angeles, they completely assed it up. After 20 years, L.A. cares less about random football teams and more about football teams that are actually run by someone who a) knows what they are doing; and b) isn’t a douchebag. Neither Kroenke nor Spanos fits either of those qualifications.

And one more along those lines from Tacoma, Washington:
When do you think Seattle gets an NBA team back.

Best guess would be X = Y + 2, where X = year Seattle has a team and Y = year Anthony Davis leaves the New Orleans Pelicans, at which point that franchise is as dead as a doornail.

My attempts to locate the source of this question have proven unsuccessful:
Why are you bad at scrabble?

Well, for starters, my world knowledge sucks. I rack manage pretty well, but my board vision isn’t terribly good. I tend to space out too much and let phonies go. I get wound up far too tightly before tournaments, to the point where I feel sick and get migraine headaches. I take tough losses so badly that it tends to adversely affect me for 2-3 games afterwards. Oh yeah, and my end game sucks, too. I win some games here and there because I am lucky, and because I’m usually playing against people who are completely deranged. Other than that, I’m awesome.

And then there’s this from Dublin:
Why didn’t you run away with one of the Irish girls? (A reference to this.)

I’ve been asking myself that question for 27 years now.

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Thanks for the questions and the comments and we’ll do it again sometime in the future. I thought I’d close with some Tom Petty, who died at age 66 last week. A true working musician, a musician’s musician who was interested in craft above all else, didn’t give a shit what people thought, and who was truly among the great modern storytellers with his songs. I always admired his work, even if I didn’t always like it. But I usually did like it. I thought he was terrific.