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| The Clips gonna Clip ... |
FIRST up, we have to give it up for the Clippers, who pulled off one of the more remarkable choke jobs that we’ve seen in the NBA regular season in quite a while on Sunday night. “The Clips gonna Clip,” as they say on ESPN, but this sorry failure of a franchise outdid even their own legacy of failure on Sunday, losing 98-97 to Sacramento that night in a game in which the Clippers held a 94-75 lead with 4:59 remaining, only to see the Kings go on a 23-3 run to close out the game. To put this in proper perspective, over the past 20 years in the NBA, teams leading by 18+ points with less than 5:00 to go were 6746-0.
I would say that I’ve never seen anything like this in the NBA, but friend of the blog Quinn, the official Furman Paladin of In Play Lose, managed to comb through the NBA archives and locate this wacko playoff game from 1986 in which the Washington
The talent on the Clippers is not only good, but unique: one of the premier catch-and-shooters in J.J. Redick, a sky walking rim runner in DeAndre Jordan, a four with great playmaking ability in Blake Griffin, one of the best all-around point guards the game has known in Chris Paul, and off the bench there is Jamal Crawford, one of the best bad shot makers in NBA history. All of these guys are, by NBA standards, somewhat unusual and unorthodox players, and trying to fit all of these sorts of players together has never quite worked. The Clippers are a team that always seems in need of a group therapy session. They’re easily the most neurotic team in the NBA, and the result of attempting to blend together all of these somewhat unorthodox roundball artists over the years has been a case study in NBA schizophrenia. Apart from Paul and Jordan goofing around in the State Farm commercials on TV, you never get the sense that anyone on this team actually likes each other or, more importantly, likes playing with each other.
The Clippers’ promising looking season has completely fizzled owing to a mix of continued injuries and periodic incompetence. They’re presently the #5 seed in the West, a place which would give them a strangely positive first round matchup against the Utah Jazz, whom they’ve beaten something like 17 out of the last 19 times, and then a nightmarish 2nd round matchup against the Warriors, whom they’ve not beaten in three years, and who toy with the Clippers much like a cat toys with a trapped mouse. The Dubs dropped 50 on the Clippers in a quarter in one game this year, beat them by 48 in another, and beat them by 50 in the preseason just for shits and giggles.
And it’s hard to figure out where the Clippers go from here if they bomb out early in the playoffs once again. The core four of Paul, Griffin, Jordan and Redick have managed to elevate the Clippers out of the muck and into the malaise, as they’ve clearly reached their peak and grown stale. This is where that insane playoff loss to the Rockets comes back to haunt them, as it was clearly their best chance to possibly win a championship. I think the Warriors would have beaten them anyway, but this occurred before the Warriors climbed completely into their heads, when a GS-LA series seemed plausibly competitive. In the present, another fizzle probably means big changes for the Clips, as they’ll almost certainly break that core up and it wouldn’t surprise me if Doc Rivers winds up being ousted from his dual roles of coach and GM.
There are three distinct levels in The Lose’s Paradigm of Purgatory. There are teams that are just perpetually terrible – a realm in which the Clippers (and, indeed, the Warriors) toiled for decades. There are teams that are just mediocre year after year – the Atlanta Hawks of the world. And then there are the teams which are good but not good enough, and wind up failing to meet expectations. That would be the level the Clippers have reached now. That one can be particularly bedeviling because it takes so long to get to be any good, and you finally get there and it’s not good enough, and then you have to worry about trying to maintain that level, and that’s difficult because in attempting to win now, and become good enough, you’ve likely gone about mortgaging your future.
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| Like most memos, this one deserved to be filed in the trash |
NBA Commissioner Adam Silver sent out a memo to the owners a week ago Monday about an issue which, yet again, sprung into the limelight during one of the league’s supposedly marquee Saturday night national telecast. First, the Warriors punted one against San Antonio and then, a week later, Cleveland did the exact same thing against the Clippers. The Cavs got into the league office’s crosshairs because they had the audacity to decide it was unwise to play Kevin Love – who is coming off knee surgery –and Kyrie Irving – who has had a knee issue troubling him all of this year and the year before and pretty much ever since he hurt himself in the 2015 NBA Finals – on the front end of a back-to-back Clippers/Lakers stint in L.A. And since neither Love nor Kyrie was playing, and the Cavs were likely to get beat by the Clippers, it wasn’t really worth it either for them to send out LeBron James – who leads the league in minutes played per game, and who has been a warhorse in playing the equivalent of about 16 seasons in the 14 years he’s been in the league when you factor in the playoffs. (To put it in perspective, LeBron has now played as many total games in the NBA, at age 32, as Michael Jordan had by the time that he was 40.) The result of Cleveland sitting their big three, of course, was a 30-point gift win for the floundering Clippers in a bad game watched by almost nobody. Needless to say, ABC/ESPN wasn’t amused about this.
And if ABC/ESPN aren’t amused, then the NBA isn’t amused. The NBA doesn’t care if, say, the Indiana Pacers or the Dallas Mavericks pick some meaningless mid-week game to sit all of their best players and allow themselves to get killed by the Warriors. (Which happened in both cases.) They don’t seem to care that the Phoenix Suns just decided to give Eric Bledsoe the entire rest of the season off. They don’t even seem to care that their franchises just write off entire seasons. But god help you if you show them up on a Saturday night on ABC. This is the sort of style-over-substance bullshit that Little Napoleon was all about when he was running the NBA. Don’t speak to how you’re concerned about the fans who paid for a ticket at the Staples Center, hoping to see LeBron play against the Clips and now you’re out a couple hundred bucks. Which one if getting ripped off more in L.A. right now, the jilted Clips fan who missed out on one game against LeBron or the Lakers fan who bought season tickets to watch a team that has lost 44 of their past 55 games and are purposefully, deliberately putting themselves in positions to fail in order to save a potentially lost draft pick? When Kevin Durant said today, in an interview with ESPN, that this was nothing more than the league caring about the fact that a handful of players take a day off here and there, he was absolutely right.
And, of course, during the All-Star break in New Orleans, Adam Silver was saying this to reporters about the issue of resting players:
“I do recognize, though, that there isn’t an easy solution to that problem, and I’m sympathetic to fans who turn out – whether they buy tickets to games or watching games on television and don’t see their favorite player on the floor. But we also have to be realistic that the science has gotten to the point where there is that direct correlation that we’re aware of between fatigue and injuries. And as tough as it is on our fans to miss one of their favorite players for a game, it’s far better than having them get injured and be out for long periods of time. So, we’re always still looking to strike that right balance. The league takes scheduling and health of players seriously. Over the past two seasons, it has reduced the number of back-to-backs and four-game-in-five-days scenarios and plans to start the season a week earlier in 2017-18 in an effort to cut back on those situations.”
So, in other words, yes they acknowledge the problem, and they’re going to pay it lip service, but if the TV execs bitch, they’ll make a big deal about it. The NBA wants to have their cake and eat it, too. These sorts of things could be pretty easily avoided, actually – when you go to make the schedule, and you pick the dates on which you want these marquee ABC/ESPN games to be, you just say “no back to backs” for the teams that will be playing in those games. It’s 10 games out of 1230 in the course of a season. If you can’t figure out how to set that up, you probably need a new line of work. (Of course, given how bad NBA League Pass is, it’s clear the league is in need of some help on the logistical front at the moment.)
I don’t blame the Cavs at all. The league didn’t like the fact that all of this was done on short notice, on the day of the game by Cleveland – whereas the Warriors had made it known the day before that they were holding guys out – but the fact of the matter is that decisions about player health happen at game time. It doesn’t matter how you felt 24 hours earlier. As for the boo-hoo fans who didn’t get to see LeBron in L.A., buying a ticket is never a guarantee that anyone is going to play, because injuries happen and situations change. You take that risk when you plunk down your money for a ticket.
What I found humorous about this is the sentence, "With so much at stake, it is simply not acceptable for Governors to be uninvolved or defer decision-making authority on these matters to others in their organizations.” So, in other words, owners should be telling GMs and coaches that guys should be playing. This flies in the face of the #1 rule of sports ownership, which is that a good owner should hire good people, sign the cheques, shut the hell up and stay out of the way.
And one other thing about this which really annoys me: when players rest and sit out games, it’s almost never the players making that decision but is, in fact, the coaching staff, which is management. I have always found it disconcerting that any sort of dispute, real or perceived, between players and management in a sport winds up being construed as being that “the players did this.” Time and again, when issues arise in sports that lead to some sort of work stoppage, the narrative is put forth about how it is somehow the players fault, that they’re greedy and overpaid and all of that sort of nonsense. This gets back to one rule of thumb here at In Play Lose: in any sort of dispute between players and management, the players are always right. And I mean ALWAYS. So when guys are sitting out games in the NBA, it’s usually because the coaching staff decides it’s a good idea, which means it has little to nothing to do with what players want. So people need to stop portraying it as some movement among NBA players. It isn’t. It’s pretty irresponsible of the NBA sock puppets turning up on networks to portray it that way.
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Speaking of the Cavs, they’ve seen their once sizable lead in the East disappear, and they are now a ½-game back of Boston after losing 99:93 to the Bulls in Chicago tonight. San Antonio destroyed Cleveland 103:74 on Monday night, which was only the latest in a litany of noncompetitive games. Not only is Cleveland losing – they’re a sub-.500 team for the month of March – but they’re also getting pounded on a regular basis. The Cavs started 25-7 but are only 22-20 since. They’ve been beset by injuries, what with J.R. Smith breaking a hand and Kevin Love needing knee surgery, and not having all of their sharpshooters in the lineup has ultimately caught up to them, as the Cavs have needed to outgun all of their opponents this season because the defense stinks.
We’ve all just sort of assumed that the regular season didn’t matter, since this is LeBron and the Cavs and the record won’t matter and they’ll just flip the switch and turn it on come playoff time. And to be sure, there was some lackadaisical play at times from Cleveland this season. They were pretty bored there in the first couple of months. But here we are, two weeks away from the playoffs and with Cleveland getting blown out by the Spurs, and getting run out of the building by the Buzzards at home, and getting pounded by Denver and the like, I’m starting to wonder if the Cavs even have a switch to flip.
No team has ever won an NBA title with a defense as bad as the Cavs presently possess. Since the start of the New Year, the only team worse than they on that end of the floor are the Lakers, a team which is deliberately trying to lose as many games as possible and, thus, as much as escorting guys to the basket. Not only are the Cavs the 2nd-oldest team in the NBA, but according to the advanced UV data, they are also the slowest team in the NBA. So the Cavs are old and slow, and teams that are old and slow have a tendency to get older and slower. Even worse than that, they tend to get really bad, really fast. Critical mass takes over and then, seemingly overnight, they aren’t any good any more.
And I’m starting to wonder if this is what we’re seeing in Cleveland. 22-20 over the span of half a season is no longer a small sample size. The Cavs had a good February, but in March they’ve been terrible, and they won fewer games in January than the Sixers did. Cavs apologists that I read in the cyberworld have been trotting out tired clichés about never underestimating the heart of a champion, and combing the annals of NBA history trying to find examples where defending champions dogged it during the followed season, only to then rise up and defend their title. But guess what? That hardly ever happens. Most of the time, if you’re old and slow, come playoff time, you get run out of the building.
I do think the defense will improve for the Cavs in the playoffs, simply because LeBron will give a damn about playing defense in the playoffs, but other than he and Tristan Thompson, there isn’t another guy on this roster who seems physically capable of stopping anyone. They were so desperate for some rim protection that they went out and signed Andrew Bogut, who every team thinks is great until he actually plays for their team, and he wound up getting hurt 2:00 into his first game. The mystique and swagger of the Cavs can spook a lot of opponents in the playoffs – *cough cough Atlanta Hawks cough cough* – but the East is improved this season. I still have my doubts about those nervous northern nellies from Toronto, but every time Cleveland plays Washington, John Wall and Bradley Beal get basically any shot they want to, which doesn’t bode well. The Cavs have two weeks to figure it out, and unlike the Dubs and Spurs over on the other side of the Mississippi River, both of whom have ample time to rest and experiment, Cleveland shouldn’t be resting anyone over the next two weeks simply because they’re so out of sorts. I love to see the Cavs playing at their peak. It’s great basketball, which is what I want to see in the NBA Finals come June. But it seems hard for me to believe that LeBron can carry this team on his back yet again. At some point, LeBron’s run of consecutive trips to the NBA Finals will end. As it stands, I’d be more surprised if that continued than if it didn’t.
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I thought it was cool that Devin Booker scored 70 points in a game last week, and I wasn’t all that bothered by the fact that the Suns were doing whatever they could to get him to 70 points, because the Phoenix Suns have been terrible this year, and if they find just one thing that brings them some joy during what’s been a dreadful season, that’s okay. You have to win these small battles sometimes, even if you’re constantly losing the war.
I don’t think I’ve seen a team that looks less prepared to play NBA basketball than the Suns. Booker and the aforementioned Eric Bledsoe make up a nice backcourt, but the front court is a mess and the center position is a dumpster fire. At any given point in a game, the Suns seem to have at least two guys on the floor who don’t seem to know where they’re supposed to be. The offense is generally a jumble and the defense stinks. The Suns were late to the tanking party, having picked up a few wins here in the second half of the season, as the Suns have kept playing hard and kept the pace up against a whole lot of teams who couldn’t otherwise give a shit.
It would be very Sunsesque for them to win the NBA draft lottery in a year where the two best players are point guards, which is what they don’t need. That would require their front office to actually make some sound personnel decisions, whereas they’ve been taking the volume discount approach to team building over the years, which involves having so many bad teams that you accrue enough high picks and eventually you stumble your way into a decent team.
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I’ve not said much about this team, and with good reason, but win-loss records aside, having watched a decent amount of all 30 teams this year, I feel fairly comfortable in saying that the worst team I’ve seen all year is the Orlando Magic. How does anyone involved in assembling that team still have a job?
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And finally, your regular reminder that the Knicks are garbage:
Phil Jackson paid $72,000,000 for that. How does that man still have a job as well?
