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| 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.
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| 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.
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.
