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| 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?
