You Gotta Lose Your Mind in Detroit ... Lob City?

“Duh, which way did he go? Which way did he go? …”

RIP Lob City. I’ll miss the Clippers. For Warriors fans, for several years running, Kill The Clippers Night has been one of those days on the calendar to circle, to look forward to, and ultimately to cherish. The NBA season can be general drudgery, of course, and teams often have to dig deep to find some motivation over the course of an 82-game season. But the Warriors haven’t lacked for any motivation when it came time to play the Clippers, because they HATED the Clippers.

If the Warriors decide they want to kill you, they’re going to kill you, and the Warriors loved to kill the Clippers, beating them 12 straight times and putting some humiliating beatdowns on them along the way. Last season, it reached its zenith, as Golden State just toyed with the Clippers. They made it a point to beat the Clippers by 50 in a preseason game. They beat them by nearly 50 during the season as well, and also put up a 50-point quarter against the Clips that was statistically near-perfect, posting a 200.00 offensive rating. The Clips finally broke the streak earlier this season, beating the Dubs in December in a game where Lou Williams scored 50 points and the Warriors attempted to play a game without an actual backcourt – Curry was hurt, and Klay Thompson was “resting,” a sure sign that the novelty of grinding the Clippers into dust had worn off. The Warriors no longer care about the Clippers. The Clips have been rendered just another drudge game to slog through.

The acrimony originally boiled over during a 2014 playoff series, when the two teams got into a fight during a prayer chapel session and then later had to hastily erect a unified front and threaten to walk off the court if the NBA didn’t do anything about Clippers owner Donald Sterling. But the animosity had already been brewing, as the ascending Dubs had grown tired of the Clippers’ act:



The Clippers went on to win that contentious 2014 playoff series, only to lose to OKC in the next round – thanks, in part, to one of the worst chokes in NBA history. Seriously, that one defied all logic and sense. But as if to show that blowing a 7-point lead in the final minute of a playoff game wasn’t a fluke, the Clippers pulled off an ever greater choke in 2015 as they blew a 3-1 lead in the Western semifinal, including gagging away a 19-point lead in Game 6 to the Houston Rockets – a Rockets team with James Harden on the bench, no less. Thus was born one of the more peculiar narratives imaginable, one in which a team which won more games, over a 6-year period, than just about any other team still somehow didn’t know how to win.

The Lob City Clippers have always been something of a paradox, a winning team that doesn’t know how to win, a team playing an exciting style that still wasn’t any fun to watch because everyone involved gave off the vibe that they hated each other. They seemed, in hindsight, as if they were artificially assembled to fill a void in the Los Angeles market left by the Lakers descending into chaos and irrelevance. Bring in Doc Rivers, who had a championship pedigree, to coach and run the show; have a lucky ping pong ball bounce their way in the lottery and bring a star talent, Blake Griffin, into the L.A. market; conveniently acquire an élite caliber point guard, Chris Paul, from the New Orleans Pelicans Hornets – who were bankrupt and being run by the NBA at the time – after the league-orchestrated trade of Paul from New Orleans to the Lakers got nixed by the other owners. Even when they were winning all the games, with Paul throwing flashy lobs to Blake and skywalking center DeAndre Jordan, they were still a whiny, grating bunch who got on everyone’s nerves, an arrogant bunch whose opinions of themselves didn’t match their accomplishments on the court.

“You need luck in the West. Look at Golden State. They didn’t have to play us or the Spurs.”
– Doc Rivers, 2015

And even with all of the winning of late, no one in L.A. really cared about the Clippers, or has ever really cared about the Clippers, who probably shouldn’t have ever been there in the first place, but for years the NBA was perfectly happy letting weirdo owners do weirdo things, so allowing some eccentric Santa Monica slum lord to relocate from San Diego, and then operate, a secondary franchise in the glitzy L.A. market was ultimately better than having that franchise go out of business. Prior to the rise of Lob City, being exiled to the Clippers was just about the worst thing that could happen to your NBA career. (Either that, or being exiled to the Warriors, interestingly enough.) Any Clipper success just sort of felt unclean, given the smarmie, sleazy guy who was in charge of the operation.

Actual sworn testimony from Donald Sterling

But hey, it’s Lob City! It’s a new era for the Clippers, right? Let’s get excited! Steve Ballmer certainly got excited enough to pay $2,000,000,000 for the franchise (which gets other NBA owners excited, of course, since that gross overpay artificially inflates the value of everyone else’s franchise). And the Clippers have been, over the course of the past six years, incredibly successful by their meager historical standards. But they’ve also never delivered, in the end, be it through choking horribly in the 2014 and 2015 playoffs to seeming just out-and-out cursed the past couple of years: the Clips lost Blake and CP3 to season ending injuries in the same game in a 2016 playoff loss to the Portland Trail Blazers, and then Blake hurt his foot in a playoff game against the Jazz in 2017, and out the door they went once more. It was really kind of sad and you could almost feel sorry for them.

Almost, but not quite, because during this run of good play from L.A., the Clippers been incredibly unlovable. The have been a lippy, chippy, chirpy, mouthy bunch who annoy basically everybody, including one-another. The chief perpetrator was future Hall of Fame point guard/locker room lawyer/NBA players union president Chris Paul, who used that last position to skillfully negotiate a CBA for the players which would enable him the largest contract possible, and then, to his credit, skillfully negotiated his exit from the Clippers this past summer: given the chance to opt out of his contract and become a free agent, Paul instead told GM Roc Divers (Doc Rivers’ alter ego, as coined by the fabulous Dunc’d On NBA podcast) that he would opt in for his final season, but only if the Clippers traded him to the Rockets, who conveniently had a trade all lined up for CP3. (Tampering? In the NBA? Really?) Paul got his wish and, almost immediately, the Rockets have taken over the mantle as the most annoying team in the NBA, what with pairing CP3’s whine-and-dime routine with the human flopping fish that is James Harden, who somehow continues to fool NBA officials into awarding him 18 free throws a game.

James Harden on every drive to the basket

And I kid about the Rockets, but the fact is that CP3’s Rockets have become what CP3’s Clippers never were, which is a viable threat to the behemoth that is the Golden State Warriors, despite having possessed as good a first four – CP3, Blake, DJ, and deadeye marksman JJ Redick – as anyone in the league. There are over 300,000,000 people in this country, yet somehow the Clippers couldn’t find one of them to play on the wing. The bench was always a perpetual tire fire, thanks to GM Roc Divers’ strange approach to team-building. Apart from the one game out of three where Jamal Crawford would get hot – usually too hot, as he would then not know when to stop shooting and shoot his team into oblivion – the Clippers bench units could scarcely get the ball inbounds, much less string two passes together, much less perform competently long enough to let the starters catch their breaths.

Lob City really died when CP3 left town – an act which was somewhat mutual, as he was tired of losing and everyone there was tired of him. He did, however, do the Clippers a favor, as the Houston trade allowed the Clips to at least get something in return, as opposed to having him walk. The summer of 2017 looked to be a bad time for the Clippers, as both Paul and Griffin could walk in free agency. So the Clippers went all-in on Blake Griffin, offering him a 5-year, $171 million contract. Blake was, and arguably still is, a star, after all. He was a high-flyer whose spectacular dunks crystalized the myth of Lob City. He was the #1 overall pick who had spent his whole career in L.A., had brought legitimacy to what was a joke of a franchise.

And pretty much from the moment they signed Blake to that new contract this summer, the Clippers brass were rummaging through the desk drawer, looking for the receipts. Blake’s had a string of injuries in his career – some of them fluky, to be sure, but health is still a skill. His game is much more ground bound now, and to his credit, he’s evolved into a guy who can step out and shoot a three, can work at the top of the key as a passer and a playmaker. But at this point, he has the game of a 33-year-old vet in a 28-year-old body, and any of the skill work you’d want him to do down on the low block was made impossible because Jordan is there clogging up space. Was it really a good idea to give him $171 million?

But this is what happens with free agency in the NBA and elsewhere. You wind up paying big dollars for past results to a player who is, if you’re lucky, still in his prime but, what’s more likely, is past his physical peak and actually on the downside of his career. Coming to realize this has led to an entire rethinking of the free agent landscape across all sports. It’s been particularly stark this year in baseball, for example, where scores and scores of serviceable free agents have yet to sign contracts with the start of spring training just around the corner. MLBPA brass want to make the claim that there is some collusion, on the part of ownership, to keep the prices down and market repressed, and while I wouldn’t put it past them, you can’t argue with the fact that so many of the enormous, long-term deals that players have signed in baseball have turned out to be albatrosses. If you knew nothing at all about baseball, and you went with me to a California Los Angeles Angels of West Covina Anaheim game and saw Albert Pujols play, and I told you he was, at the time, the most expensive player in league history, you’d go, “huh?” And see, I could then explain that he was the greatest and most feared hitter of his generation, and you’d look at him again and say, “but what good is he now?”

Of course the Clippers didn’t want to pay $171 million for a 28-year-old high flyer becoming more ground bound every day, but they also need stars. It’s Los Angeles, after all. There are 10 professional sports franchises in L.A. now, there are also two of the most prestigious collegiate athletic programs in the country. You have to clamor to be relevant. Hell, the Clippers have still been playing second fiddle, in the consciousness of the typical Angelino, to a pathetic Lakers organization that has devolved into soap opera and sideshow. One of their stars walked away from them this summer, and the Clippers desperately needed to keep the other in order to stay relevant. And remember, Ballmer wants to build them a new arena, as well. The Clippers aren’t even the second tenant at the Staples Center. They have less priority than the Kings, much less the Lakers – and with good reason, because the Kings have actually won something. You need stars in L.A. to be relevant, and Blake Griffin is certainly that. So the Clippers decided to hold their noses and do it, offering up a maximal contract to Griffin and putting forth the most preposterous free agent sales pitch of all time in the process.

Are you serious?

And here we are, soon after the Clippers raised Blake’s jersey to the banners in a mock number retirement ceremony, declaring him “Clipper for Life” and doing all but promising to build a statue of him outside Pie In The Sky Arena one day, and Blake Griffin is now a Detroit Piston – traded for, basically, a bunch of stuff. This should be a lesson to everyone out there who is still dumb enough to buy into the league-driven notion in sports that players should somehow be loyal to the franchise that drafted them. There sure as hell wasn’t any loyalty in L.A. towards Blake Griffin, now was there?

And see, that narrative pisses me off. Anyone – literally anyone – who still has a problem with the fact that Kevin Durant went to the Warriors puts forth an argument that is dumb. If you put forth an argument that he shouldn’t have done that, your argument is dumb as hell. Plain and simple. Same goes for LeBron taking his talents to South Beach – sure, he went about it in an amateurish way that was tone-deaf and demeaning, but KD and LeBron had earned the right to make those decisions. This is business, plain and simple. “It’s not personal, it’s just business,” as Abe Vigoda says to Al Pacino at the end of The Godfather. If you support the right of players to have that self-determination, then you don't get to bitch if and when one of them makes a choice that you don't like.

I applaud any and all athletes who want to take agency over what are very short professional careers and try to find the best situation for themselves, regardless of the reason. I may think their reasoning is nuts – I thought Kyrie Irving was nuts at the time for wanting out of Cleveland, but he seems to have been proven right – but I applaud them in principle. Sometimes it works out in my team’s favor, like it did with Kevin Durant and the Warriors. Sometimes, it doesn’t: I still remember watching the Seattle Mariners lose three future Hall of Famers in three successive years, as Randy Johnson was traded, and then Ken Griffey Jr. wanted out, and then Alex Rodriguez signed a $252 million contract with the Rangers. Of course it sucked, but you know what? That’s business. That’s life. You go on, and you figure out what to do next.

And “Clipper for life” Blake Griffin knew it was business as well, which is why he leveraged a 5-year, near-max contract out of the Clippers by taking free agent meetings with the Phoenix Suns and others. He was trying to get himself in the best situation possible. He wanted a 5-year max, or close to it – he actually took a slight haircut in the final deal – but then the Clippers used some leverage as well. Blake is an L.A. guy, a guy vested in the entertainment business and, actually, a pretty decent stand-up comedian. He wanted to be in L.A. and the Clippers wanted him in L.A., but not at the 5/175 level Blake was availed to, and so they struck a compromise: a 4-year deal with a player option in Year 5, while Griffin forwent a no-trade clause, a clause which NBA teams are loathe to include. It’s a business arrangement, plain and simple – one which, almost immediately, the Clippers wanted to get out of.

And somehow, almost impossibly, the Clippers found a trade partner, a team that was willing to take on one of the largest contracts in NBA history. That would be the Detroit Pistons, a storied and one-time gloried franchise whose fortunes started to slip about the time they took Darko Miličić instead of Carmelo Anthony with the 2nd pick in the NBA draft and who’ve dwindled into complete mediocrity ever since. Just as the Clippers have been in the past, Detroit is operated by a dual coach/GM executive in Stan Van Gundy. Just as the Clippers, the coaching ability of Stan Van Gundy on the floor has been hampered by the incompetence of Van Stan Gundy in the front office, as almost nothing he has done as an executive has worked. One of the amazing ironies of that Clippers choke against the Rockets is that one of the Rockets heroes was Josh Smith, a huge Detroit free-agency signing who was a disaster and who the Rockets picked up on the cheap, and who Detroit is still paying to this day. Detroit’s roster is a mess, a comedy of errors resulting from overpays, whiffed draft picks, and simply not understanding the CBA. (The Pistons hilariously hard-capped themselves last summer paying out $21 million for Langston Galloway, whom you may not even remember is in the NBA.) The Pistons reportedly lost $45 million last season, and their move into the new Pizza Pizza! Arena in downtown Detroit has been met with a sea of empty red seats. The Pistons are desperate to make the playoffs, desperate for a superstar to put asses in seats, and SVG is desperate to save his job.

Which, of course, is who you should immediately make a trade with. Rule #1 of NBA operations should be to find the guy desperate to make a trade and deal with him.

Now, Blake could be just fine in Detroit. His game could continue to age gracefully, becoming even more nuanced and cerebral. He could stay healthy and see out the 4+ remaining on his deal. But what’s mind blowing about this is that the Pistons willingly just took on $141 million remaining of his contract (and it will almost certainly be the full $141 million, because that last year’s player option is for $39 million and there is no way in hell you’d opt out of that), and paired it with another enormous contract in center Andre Drummond, and a team which had no flexibility at all to begin with now has even less than before. This is your team, Detroit. This is what you’re going to be. The backcourt is still terrible, the bench is not good, the young players haven’t gotten better. Optimists want to point out that you’re pairing Blake with a center, in Drummond who, unlike DJ in L.A., has a multitude of skills and can pass the ball and do more things. Well, sure, Drummond can pass the ball if there is someone to pass to – the majority of his assists this season having gone to baskets by Avery Bradley and Tobias Harris, the two guys who got traded back to Los Angeles in the Griffin deal. I have no idea how this is going to work.

But I can understand how the Pistons are desperate here. Prior to this trade, they’d lost 8 in a row and slipped three games out of the East playoff picture. The deal surprised me on the Clippers end more, because the Clippers have been surprisingly good this year and – GASP! – surprisingly fun. After suffering a whole tonne of injuries during the season, the Clippers have had to go young and scrappy, and Doc has actually had to go back to coaching again instead of just rolling the ball out for his superstars, and Doc’s done a great job on the bench as the Clippers have been actually competitive. Given that the New Orleans Pelicans are quite likely to sink after the awful Achilles injury to Boogie Cousins, and given that the Denver Nuggets continue to blow games and be one of the five worst-coached teams in the NBA, the Clippers actually still had a good shot to make the playoffs … and yet, they decided that now was the time to set themselves on fire.

And while I think it’s a good idea for the Clips to get off that contract, and try to create some more flexibility in their payroll, what is that flexibility for? This is where that strange and entirely fanciful notion of Clippers exceptionalism, built up over the past six years, comes into play. The Clippers are not a free agent destination. They are still a strange organization with no history of success – and now, with a roster absent Blake and, if they can swing another deal, absent the enormous contract of Jordan, they also have no great talent to build around. Almost immediately in the aftermath of this trade, there is a juxtaposition of the Clippers’ present and future fortunes with that of the Lakers, who are trying somehow to free up enough money this summer to have room for two max players. What’s not clear to me is why a Lakers team devoid of functional talent and awash in melodrama is somehow going to become a marquee destination again. Sure, the mystique and the lure of living in Los Angeles can be a draw, but who really wants to be Lonzo Ball’s babysitter? And as big a mess as the Lakers are, that mystique and past history is still of greater allure than anything that the Clippers can offer. This is where NBA logic often runs its course. “Oh, hey, look, we have cap space!” Yeah, sure, you have cap space, but your team is also garbage.

The best way for the Clippers to have ensured a bright future would’ve been to take full advantage of what was the best period in the franchise’s history, and they didn’t do that. This could have been their time, their era. Given how pathetic the Lakers had become, this was their opportunity to truly make their mark in Los Angeles – and yet they didn’t do that. It’s a hard-sell regardless – not even winning a World Series pushed the Angels past the Dodgers in the hearts of minds of SoCal faithful, even though the Dodgers have now been titleless for 30 years. The Clippers, as had been constructed, constitute a terrible missed opportunity, a fluky confluence of talent which couldn’t get it together when the opportunity presented itself, and who didn’t see the juggernaut coming up behind them from up the coast.

In fairness, no one saw the Warriors coming, but the Clippers, more than anyone else, were the ones who got run over. With Griffin’s departure, Lob City is dead, and I’ll miss Lob City. Lob City was good for the league. They were fun to hate, they were good theatre and good television in a league where the sideshows and the melodramas often make up for the fact that the final results possess little drama and intrigue. I liken the NBA very much to soccer, in that the ultimate results seem almost pre-determined. Take a look at the tables of the big European leagues at the moment: other than Serie A, all of the other top leagues are laughably lopsided, the results having pretty much been determined before the calendar year even turned over. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be fun. I will continue to be amused by the fact that the ascent of the Warriors has caused the entirety of the NBA to lose its collective mind, and it’s sad not to have Kill The Clippers Nights to look forward to anymore. Kill The Trail Blazers just doesn’t have the same ring to it. Oh wait, there are still a few home games with OKC left on the schedule …

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.

The Bucks Stopped Here

THIS is probably Jason Kidd’s greatest contribution to the coaching profession: his attempt to get another timeout by having one of his players deliberately run into him and then spilling his soda all over the floor. Kidd was fined $50,000 for this bit of bad acting, having apparently forgotten that there are more cameras in your typical NBA arena than there are in your typical casino, and they cameras caught him gesturing for one of his players to hit him. Points for creativity, however.

Jason Kidd was fired on Monday as head coach of the Milwaukee Bucks. This is, as far as the NBA goes, one of the least surprising developments in a topsy-turvy season. The Bucks have Giannis on their team, one of the five best players on the planet, and after acquiring the disgruntled Eric Bledsoe from Phoenix, the Bucks have enough talent that they should legitimately be challenging for the #2 seed in the East. They have more talent than Toronto, than Washington, and should be soaring. Instead, they went into Monday’s action with a 23-22 record and sitting in 8th place in the East – which would be potentially terrifying were they to finish that way, since God knows that the Celtics, nor anyone else, would want to see Giannis in the first round of the playoffs, but Milwaukee ranks as one of the league’s biggest underachievements so far this season. The Bucks should be better than this. Sure, they’ve had some bad injury luck the past two seasons, losing Jabari Parker and Khris Middleton for extended periods of time, but the fact is that the team has too much talent, the team is too expensive, and the owners are too impatient for them to be muddling around at the .500 mark. Their trademark rangy, pressing defense has been figured out this season, like most gimmicks in the NBA eventually are, so the Bucks aren’t stopping anyone, and the offense consists basically of a play called “Giannis Make Stuff Up,” which actually works a surprising amount of the time. As Warriors blog Golden State of Mind rightly points out, you see a lot of similarities between the Bucks and the pre-Steve Kerr era Warriors: an extremely talented team being held back by a coaching staff’s simpleton, if not downright pre-historic schemes.

Kidd’s response to being fired was to do what he has done countless times before, which is to burn all of his bridges in an attempt to make himself look favorable. He promptly did an interview with ESPN and spun a sob story in which he portrayed himself as a victim. This is what Jason Kidd does. No matter when he changes/leaves schools, he changes teams, he changes head coaching jobs, he always makes it a point to go scorched earth and destroy whatever good will he may have had with the previous organization. Everyone was quick to point out how “upset” Giannis was with Kidd’s firing, and I have no doubt that was true, but guess what? Giannis will get over it. This is the NBA, and the NBA is a business. Giannis will get over it about the time they are winning all of the games – which will happen, in part, because whomever replaces Kidd will know actually what he is doing.

Coaches are hired to be fired. January always features the annual NFL bloodletting, where as much as a quarter of the league’s head coaches get canned. And if you think it’s bad here in the States, look at some of the soccer leagues in Europe. We’re up to eight managerial changes in the 20-team Premier League already – the 8th coming on Monday at Watford – and there are still three months of the season left. It can be hard to differentiate, of course, between a coach being bad and his team being bad. If you don’t have any talent, firing guys on the sidelines seems more like a mercy kill than anything else. Amazingly, the NBA went through the entire 2016-2017 season without a single coaching change. Every team seemed like they kind of had an idea of where they were – if you were in the lottery, or the playoffs, it was because of what was on the floor and not on the sidelines. Owners of bad teams, or underachieving teams, showed remarkable patience and restraint.

No longer. Kidd is the third NBA coach fired this season, after Earl Watson in Phoenix and David Fizdale in Memphis – the former being inarguable, the latter being outrageous. I suspect that Kidd won’t be the last. Monday night NBA League Pass is must-see viewing these days, and some serious tactical incompetence was on display all over the place. On the same day that Jason Kidd was being fired by the underachieving Bucks, the underachieving Buzzards from the nation’s capital were getting blown out by Dallas, the Pelicans were contriving to somehow almost get beat at home by the Chicago Bulls, and the Denver Nuggets were actually trying to play ace center Nicola Jokic at the four beside Miles Plumlee – and literally any NBA lineup that involves playing your best player out of position for the benefit of a Plumlee brother is a terrible idea and, quite possibly, a fireable offense. Not surprisingly, the Wiz, Pelicans, and Nuggets are all underachieving. Also not surprisingly, their coaches – Scott Brooks, Alvin Gentry, and Mike Malone – should probably feel their seats getting a little bit warm. All three of those teams should be better. New Orleans has, arguably, two of the 15 best players in the NBA in Boogie and AD. Washington has, inarguably, the second-best backcourt in the league in Wall and Beal. Denver seems to have about 27 guys who you think, “you know, they aren’t that bad.” But every time I watch those teams, I see a muddled mess. (Though to be fair here, the Pelicans have been playing somewhat better of late. They did just beat Boston on the road not to long ago ... oh, wait, then they lost to the Hawks. Never mind ...)

But a good question to ask here is this: how much does a good coach actually add? The NBA is a players’ league. All pro sports are players’ leagues. You’d think a coach’s job in the NBA, or the NFL or Premier League or whatnot, is mostly to play the role of psychologist and “man manager,” as the Brits say. I don’t think Ty Lue is a particularly great Xs-and-Os guy in Cleveland, but he has always done a pretty good job of keeping the peace amid the Cavs’ multitude of egos, which counts for a lot. But does a good coach or manager really make that much of a difference in the grand scheme of things? I know that in the overly sabermetrically obsessed world of baseball, they’ve attempted to quantify the effect a manager has on a baseball team, and concluded that a good manager nets about 1.0 wins during a 162-game season – so, in other words, not much of a difference.

And I’m not saying that I dispute those numbers, but in the case of the NBA, I’m watching teams like the Bucks and the Wizards and the Nuggets, all of whom have plenty of talent, flail about and lose a whole shittonne of games that they should win – most galling being the Wiz, who have been flirting with a seemingly impossible stat all year of having a winning record versus teams over .500 and a losing record against teams below .500 – and then I flip over to NBA TV and I watch the Miami Heat, who are presently 4th in the East, playing the Houston Rockets.

Every time I watch the Heat, I am amazed they win any games at all. I see them play and I think, “this team stinks.” But here we were on Monday night, with the Heat missing its best player, Goran Dragic, going down to the wire in Houston in a game they had no business being in at all. I love me some Spo. Erik Spoelstra is a true witch doctor and, in my opinion, the best day-to-day coach in the NBA for continuing to get the most out of what is a roster with 30-win talent. I love me some Spo anyway, knowing that he was there at the Gersten Pavilion in Los Angeles in 1990 on what was the worst day in the history of college basketball and wanting everyone involved in that event to succeed forever. But Jesus, that team overachieves. They play their asses off, they are disciplined and stick to a game plan, they play as a team and they are now winning. A lot. The Miami Heat are currently in 4th place in the East, ahead of bumbling bozos like Washington and Milwaukee, and doing so with a roster of guys who – other than maybe Dragic – no one in the NBA would actually want. And that, right there, is good coaching. That is great coaching, in fact. Unlike a lot of the lesser franchises in the NBA, who don’t seem to care much whether or not they win any games, the edict in Miami is clear: win games, damn it, and no one cares how you do it. The Heat win games. Spo puts his guys in the best positions to win, and quite often, they do so.

Spo does more with less in Miami. That’s good coaching to me, but there is no real metric or stat to quantify it. Miami does more with less, Boston’s done more with less in recent years, Portland and Memphis have done more with less – which is why Fiz being fired in Memphis was outrageous. But this is all eye-test stuff. If we had some better way to gauge it, we’d probably have fewer bad hires.

And hiring a bad coach winds up being an albatross, since you’re on the hook for the guy’s contract if and when it doesn’t pan out. We recently saw one of the most preposterous hirings in the history of sports when Jon Gruden was coaxed out of the ESPN broadcast booth by a 10-year, $100 million contract to coach the moribund Oakland Raiders. Do we want to take any bets on how much dead money is going to be left on Oakland’s books? Sure, Gruden won a Super Bowl in Tampa (and all these years later, saying the “Super Bowl Champion Tampa Bay Buccaneers” sounds weird to me), but how many coaches last 10 years in a job? Only the best of the best stay in a position for that long. Ultimately, coaches are hired to be fired. You hope it doesn’t go that way, but it usually does. Some teams have wound up owing back salary to two and even three ex-coaches, which is a needless drain on your resources. You have to get this hire right, and do it at the right price.

Great coaching is definitely a plus, but where do you find it? The Boston Celtics hit a home run when they hired Brad Stevens, who is fantastic. I was utterly shocked, earlier this year, when the Celtics beat the Houston Rockets because Stevens flat-out coached them to a win: down three late in the game, he designed an in-bounds play to get Jayson Tatum a lay-up, but designed it in such a way that he’d screened and switched all of his guys on his floor onto their best defensive assignments and into positions where they could best defend the inbounds pass, at which point they did so and drew an offensive foul and went on to win a game. It was pure genius, the likes of which you scarcely see in high-level competition. Stevens has proven to be one of the best in the business – and before he was in the NBA, he was coaching at Butler – a nice university gig, a place he built into a national power, but not necessary where you would think to go looking for the next basketball mastermind. It was an inspired hire by Danny Ainge, but not a sure thing by any means.

But a lot of the greats seem to come from nowhere. Gregg Popovich was coaching at Division III Pomona-Pitzer before he jumped to the Spurs. Steve Kerr was a TV analyst, and a great number of people here in Bay Area hated the fact that he had been hired. It’s mysterious and shrouded in intrigue, the coaching search. You have no idea at all who is going to be any good. Maybe you can take a guess and say that a head guy who has his shit together must have underlings who have their shit together as well, and you should hire off his staff. It pleases me to say that three current NBA coaches were on staff with George Karl for the Seattle SuperSonics in the 1990s – Terry Stotts in Portland, Duane Casey in Portland, and Thibs in Minnesota. But then you look at the NFL, where Bill Belichick and Pete Carroll have had their staffs raided for years now, and none of those guys succeed in the top job. (Not that this stops folks from trying, as the Pats are primed to lose both their offensive and defensive coordinators this offseason to Indianapolis and Detroit, respectively.) Great coaching is really hard to find. It’s hard to quantify and it’s even harder to identify. It’s one of those things that you know you need, but don’t necessarily know why you need it, much less know where to get it.

The tendency in this situation, of course, is to be risk averse and go for the proverbial “safe pair of hands,” some retread who has coached before and been around the league. It may be a safe choice, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good one. Most guys end out of coaching for one reason, and one reason only: they don’t win enough. And speaking of retreads, and speaking of the broadcast booth, almost immediately the two lead analysts on the ABC/ESPN broadcast team – Marc Jackson and Jeff Van Gundy – have been floated as possible candidates for the job in Milwaukee. As for the former, well, I already mentioned how the Bucks mirrors what it was like in the pre-Kerr Warrior days … back when they were coached by Jackson, who also did a whole lot of behind-the-scenes shit at Golden State the likes of which will possibly keep him from ever landed a head job again. As for the latter, well, after his 5-minute rant about the lack of respect for officials by the players during the Golden State-Houston game on Saturday, I’m in favor of him getting a new job so that I never have to listen to him again. (Jeez, Jeff, if you were a coach and your team was getting outshot 16-4 at the foul line and their starting center was averaging 4.7 steps every time he caught the ball, something tells me you wouldn’t be so gracious to the officials, either.) Van Gundy is well-regarded by Milwaukee’s owners, who are New York guys who remember when JVG coached the Knicks, but that was, like, forever ago. Seriously, can’t we have a little more imagination here?

The Bucks have said they’ll interim the gig for the rest of the season and then do a full search this summer – which is smart, because it’s likely to be the best job on the market and they should be diligent in a search. Who wouldn’t want to coach this roster? Who wouldn’t want this job? Fizdale seems like a no-brainer, if he wants it, but the Bucks brass need to get out and look around. You have a great young core, a new arena opening, and this should be the salad days. Fear the Deer. But it’s also an expensive roster, they have very little flexibility, and they also have a history of in-house dysfunctionality. They have to get this one right. The Deer have reason to fear.

Get Help

photo by James Snook/USA Today

IT’S ALL fun and games here at In Play Lose – at least, we want it to be that way. We laugh at losing. We laugh at loss. You can come back from a loss. You can recover and regroup. But sometimes, we are reminded of the sorts of losses that cannot be overcome.

Myself and everyone in the extended W.S.U. family were shocked to hear the news from Pullman that 21-year-old Tyler Hilinski, the heir apparent to the starting QB position with the Cougars next season, had taken his own life on Wednesday night. Hilinski was a terrific talent who, in his limited opportunities this past season, had shown incredible promise – leading a rally to a 3OT win over Boise State in one game, throwing for over 500 yards vs. Arizona in another. By all accounts, he was also extremely popular with his teammates and with the media members who cover the W.S.U. program. No one – literally no one – saw this coming. There were no warning signs, there were no red flags about depression or mental illness. Seemingly out of the blue, out of nowhere, a young man with a bright future before him is gone.

This doesn’t have to happen. Ever.

And sure, it may only be when someone elevated in status to something of a celebrity – and being a backup QB on a college football counts as such – that we feel compelled to make this sort of proclamation, but it’s when the afflictions of mental illness and depression come to drastically affect those who seemingly have it all – and thus seemingly have the most to lose – that we actually stop and think about the true extent of the problem. Just last year, two of the talismen of modern music – Chris Cornell and Chester Bennington – committed suicide as well: two people with storied careers, with families, with literally millions of people, all over the planet, who loved them for what they did. If people who seemingly have so much can succumb to the peril of mental illness, then no one is truly immune.

I am a tireless advocate for mental health services, although one of the things I’ve come to realize in the past decade is that I’m not doing enough. I can do more, and I should do more, even if it’s simple as saying, again and again, to anyone who is listening and anyone who can hear, that what happened to Tyler Hilinski doesn’t have to happen to you, or to anyone else. Get help. Don’t be afraid. Get help.

My story is here and I don’t need to recap it, other than to point out that the stigma of mental illness, the shame of mental illness, is far, far greater than most people realize. It takes incredible courage, grace, and humility to come to accept that you have a problem with depression, or some other form of mental illness, and you need to get help. It is seriously the hardest thing you’ll probably ever do. In that moment, all of your past mistakes and failings seemingly magnify, exponentially expanding in importance. You feel like a piece of shit. And all of the sudden, in that moment, the future is completely muddled and confusing, it’s daunting and overwhelming. You don’t know what to do. You don’t know where to go from here.

But life will get better if you get help. I promise you, it will get better. It may take a while, it may take years and you may have to be patient, trusting in a process of living that feels foreign to you, that feels impossible at times. But at the same time, you also take control. You learn about how your mind works and learn how to reshape it. Knowledge is power! And at the time, admitting that you have a problem with depression, with mental illness, with some sort of substance abuse or other addiction, feels like the lowest point in your life and the worst moment in your life, but in fact, you come to realize that the worst moment was the moment right before that, when you weren’t doing anything about it, and that coming to accept that you needed help was, in fact, the best thing you’ve ever done.

I was institutionalized in 2006, and it was the best thing that ever happened to me. I’ve been blessed the past 11 years. Has it all been great? Of course not. A lot of it’s been truly terrible, in fact, but all of it was time that wouldn’t have existed otherwise. Time is precious in this life. It’s everything, really. Life is always about the process, which continues onward and changes. The great landmarks in your life – good or bad – are not ends in themselves. You still go on. I still talk with someone who I met while attending the psychiatric institute 11 years ago. We’ve both had challenges, traumas, and disappointments along the way. But in the end, we are blessed to still be here, to have families and friends and loved ones, to still be able to aspire and dream, to still be able to experience everything life offers. It reminds me, whenever I talk to her, that I should talk more about mental illness – both the terrible ways in which it can effect you and the ways in which you can overcome it. After all, you can’t tell people not to be afraid and talk about it if you’re afraid to talk about it yourself, now can you?

But I’m not afraid to talk about it. I was for my first 37 years on the planet, but not any more. It’s not a shame or a disgrace to be suffering from a mental illness. I’m proud of the fact that so many people in my extended communities have reached out to me in their times of need. People have confided in me, asked me for help, trusted me to be an advocate and a source of both knowledge and wisdom. I take this stuff very seriously. This isn’t fun and games.

Get help. If you’re struggling with depression, get help. Call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: (800) 273-8255. Call a mental health professional in your area. They are problem solvers, they will work with you and try to find a solution. It can be difficult and trying at times, because solving mental illness issues is not a catch-all, one-size-fits-all kind of thing, and I know that it’s hard to be patient when you feel like you need help right away. But no one needs to die alone in their apartment with a gunshot wound to the head. This doesn’t have to happen. Ever.

And if someone does reach out to you, saying they need help, listen to them. Practice empathy. Listen and learn from them, love them in any way that you can. Fuck knows, there isn’t enough love and empathy in this world. Give it out, and give it freely. It can truly make a difference in another person’s life.

Job Security

I have no idea what Marcus Williams was doing here

THE LOSE is in New Orleans for MLK weekend, like I am at this time every year, and it was fun to be out and about, walking in the city on Sunday afternoon during the hometown side’s NFC playoff game against the Minnesota Vikings. People love the Saints here. They love them far more than they do the Pelicans, that’s for sure: we braved the unseasonably frosty conditions here in the Crescent City on Friday night and went over to Milk Shake Arena to watch the Birds play the Portland Trail Blazers – two pretty good teams, two playoff teams – and the building was basically half-empty. So there is indifference on the basketball front, but New Orleans was locked in and tuned in for the Saints. They were watching in the bars, in the fancy restaurants, even in the Jimmy John’s and the Domino’s Pizza franchises. You could tell what was going on in the game simply by hearing the collective cheers and groans filling the air periodically. I didn’t need to be watching the game. I could tell what was happening simply by listening.

So what was the reaction on the final play? I think the Times-Picayune summed it up quite nicely with their headline in the Monday morning edition:

But actually, I think the expletives were the secondary reaction, the first having been a state of stunned silence. I’d made my way back to the hotel, and the dining area was filled with both hotel guests and staffers alike – including one frenzied parking attendant who’d run in, hoot and holler with delight at the Saints’ growing fortune, run back outside and hurriedly park another SUV. The Saints were :10 away from completing an incredible comeback, rallying from down 17-0 to lead 24-23. The Vikings were out of timeouts, were on their own 39-yard line, and were pretty much out of options. They basically needed a miracle.

Which is what happened.

And as this play was unfolding, I kept thinking that there has to be a flag on the play. There has to be a penalty, an infraction, because this can’t possibly be happening! Nope, no flags. A 61-yard pass from Case Keenum to Stefon Diggs, on the final play of the game, and the Vikings win 29-24 to advance to the NFC Championship in Philadelphia. 29-24 to advance to the NFC Championship against the Iggles in Philadelphia. The Vikings may have gotten that miracle they needed, but one team’s miracle is another team’s mistake. And to call it a mistake by the Saints would be an understatement. Quite simply, it’s one of the worst plays by a defense in the history of the NFL.

Or, as we like to say here at In Play Lose, this game was job security.

Nope, still don’t know what Marcus Williams is doing. (photo by Hannah Foslien/Getty Images)

But before we kill the Saints for this, we need to show some love for the Vikings, who are a tortured franchise in a generally tortured sports city. The Vikings were losing all the Super Bowls long before the Buffalo Bills made it cool. They’ve not been to a Super Bowl in over 40 years – during which time, the most noteworthy thing they’ve done is make the Herschel Walker trade with the Cowboys, which is the worst trade in the history of the NFL. They are never all that bad, but rarely all that good, and when they have been good, they’ve found a way to screw all of it up, often in cataclysmic fashion. The 1998 Vikings were arguably one of the best teams in NFL history, going 15-1 and setting an NFL record for points scored, only to lose to the Falcons in OT in the playoffs, thanks in part to kicker Gary Anderson, who hadnt missed a kick all season, flubbing a field goal. Bad kicking is a long-running theme in Minnesota: more recently, they were the subject of a horror film called The Blair Walsh Project.

So the Vikings have a well-earned reputation for being chokers, and what will be lost in the aftermath of Sunday’s miraculous ending is just how hard they tried to choke this game away as well. What do you do when you have a 17-point halftime lead? Maybe not be throwing interceptions, or having punts blocked, or allowing Drew Brees to shred your defense. The Vikings were terrible in the second half in all phases of the game, and the Saints were primed to steal one. It was all set up for yet another colossal Minnesota failure, and you can understand why it is that the Vikings fans might feel like they are cursed.

Which is sort of how the New Orleans Saints felt, in fact, before they won the Super Bowl in 2010, before which they were a joke of a franchise whose most memorable contribution to NFL lore was its fans donning “New Orleans Aints” paper bags over their heads during a 1-15 season. The Saints’ path that year went through the Vikings, in fact – who blew their chance to win the NFC Championship by getting penalized for having 12 men on the field with :19 left and getting pushed out of FG range, and the Saints went on to win in OT. When you feel like you’re cursed, a lot of time what breaks the curse is a break here and there, a fortunate bounce here and there. All sports are games of inches – for example, it was the length of Richard Sherman’s fingers which finally broke the Seahawks jinx – and when you come out the other side with a win and a breakthrough, after so much frustration, you can understand taking on the mindset that you are a “team of destiny.” And now it’s all lined up for the Vikings, of course: they play the Eagles this coming weekend, who are missing their starting QB, and if they win that, they’ll become the first team in history to play the Super Bowl on their home field. Team of destiny, anyone?

Now, The Lose doesn’t believe in destiny – but The Lose suggests you not poo-poo the notion of belief. Confidence is everything, and so much of excelled performance comes from the simple notion of believing that you can, in fact, succeed. This is why so many guys will wildly outperform expectations, often for prolonged periods of time. It may be a one-off or a fluke, and come the following season, they’re not as good any more, but in the moment, the Vikings probably believe they have fate on their side. Fate won’t win the game for you – that comes down to preparation and execution – but fate, and faith in fate, can sometimes seemingly will you to wins.

But as I said before, one team’s miracle is another team’s mess, and the Saints made one of the most preposterous messes I’ve ever seen on a football field on Sunday night. Let’s keep in mind the situation here: there are :10 left, the Vikings have no timeouts, and they are on their own 39-yard-line, and they can’t stop the clock if they are tackled in bounds. If you’re the Vikings, you have some options here, all of them bad. You can fling up a Hail Mary and hope for either a lucky bounce of the ball or maybe a pass interference call. You can try some sort of a hook-and-ladder play, or try to lateral it and rugby style your way down the field. About the best bad option is a throw to the sideline and having the receiver somehow get out of bounds, as the Vikings need about 25 yards in order to get into reasonable field goal range.

But the Saints are ready for that, as they’ve got defensive backs stacked two-deep along the sidelines, intent on funneling the Vikings to the middle of the field. Indeed, Keenum’s throw to Diggs achieves basically none of the necessary objectives for Minnesota. It’s a deep throw, which takes too much time. It’s not close enough to the sidelines for Diggs to get out of bounds. There is another Vikings receiver in the area, which you rarely see, and which makes me wonder if they had some sort of a miracle lateral idea in mind. As far as last-ditch, last-second plays go, it’s not even a good one from the Vikings, and all Saints safety Marcus Williams has to do is grab Diggs and tackle him and the game is over.

And he didn’t tackle him. What the actual fuck just happened?

It seemed as if Williams was of two minds on this play. He could have tried to make a play on the ball, but was wary of the possibility of a pass interference penalty. Instead, he tried to go low and completely whiffed on hitting Diggs, instead taking out one of his own guys in the process. The simple play here was the answer: let Diggs catch the ball and just grab him, hold onto him and the game is over. He went for a big hit instead and he got it all wrong.

It’s a truly terrible play, as bad a defensive play as I’ve ever seen in the NFL. The Mile High Miracle of 2012 immediately sprang to mind, of course, when the Broncos somehow contrived to allow a 70-yd TD pass in the final minute against the Ravens. But even in that case, the long bomb over the top is one of any number of possible outcomes. Part of why the Ravens were successful is that, given the circumstance, the Broncos still couldn’t expect the long bomb, as the Ravens had other things they could run. But in this case, the Vikings have no good options at all, the Saints can easily account for whatever the Vikings may try, and it all goes according to plan … except for the fact that the plan involved actually tackling the guy.

And I feel bad for Williams, a rookie who had a great season and whose interception in the 3rd Quarter had a lot to do with the Saints being ahead in the first place. These sorts of  fatal, individual errors can come to define your career. (Mention the name Kyle Williams to any 49ers fan and they will start to seethe before your eyes.) When you commit such a dramatic, colossal gaffe, with little or no recourse, it magnifies the mistake, of course, even though it shouldn’t. Every play leads to the next one, and in a game of several hundred plays there are hundreds and hundreds of mistakes. The Saints were in this position to win because Minnesota had messed up all over the place in the second half – but the Saints were forced to rally because, in the first half, they were terrible on both sides of the ball and got completely dominated. But even so, the last mistake is always the worst mistake.

2018 has been a good year for The Lose so far. Georgia coughed up a 2-TD lead in the BCS championship, the Chefs somehow blew an 18-point halftime lead against a meh Tennessee Titans team, and now the Saints safety goes full-on Toro! Toro! Ole! in the dying seconds in Minneapolis. I suspect I’m going to be busy this year.