7-Up

Loris Karius picks the ball from his net, and picks up the pieces of his career

THIS seems to happen at this time every year: there is a whole lot for me to talk about, and yet I’m usually too busy with work to ever have the opportunity to write about it. So, now that I have a few hours here, I’m going to spew out a whole lot of thoughts and probably make all sorts of grammatical mistakes and probably also say a few things that will piss people off in the process. Good. There is so much stuff going on that I almost don’t know where to begin.

Seven thoughts now, as it was my squared-seven birthday last Friday, and I have been watching all of these things take place from the 7 x 7 city:

• As a former goalkeeper, and a lifetime member of the Goalkeepers Union, I absolutely cringed for Loris Karius on Sunday. Karius, the Liverpool goalkeeper, made a pair of unforgivable errors in the Champions League final which gifted Real Madrid a pair of goals in Liverpool’s 3:1 defeat, and it made me feel sick to my stomach. All three of Real’s goals were met with a moment of shock and awe, one of which – a stunning bicycle kick from Gareth Bale – was one of the most beautiful goals you’ll ever see, and was met with a standing ovation from even Liverpool fans, having witnessed a moment of pure greatness, the sort of which transcends which color shirt you’re wearing and is worthy of applause from either side.

But, of course, the other two times Kiev fell silent after Madrid goals, it was due to stunned disbelief. They simply could not believe the display of complete and utter incompetence on the part of the Liverpool keeper which had yielded two goals to the opposition. Not even Real could believe it. They didn’t really even know how they should go about celebrating.

And it made me sick, as a former goalkeeper, because a goalkeeping error is the worst thing that can befall your team. You have to be a little bit off to be a keeper to begin with, given that your idea of a great game is one where you don’t have much of anything to do, and as the last line of defense, you’re expected to bail out all of your dumb defenders in front of you after they go about making dumb plays. Your centre back fails to clear, a shot comes in and you’re quick to react and you push the ball wide. The corner kick winds up looking like a jailbreak, with the offense running rampant, you parry a shot over the bar and bark at everyone who lined up like an idiot and didn’t mark anyone, but it’s all good. You have their backs. But when you’re the goalkeeper, no one has your back. (And if they do, they’re probably out of position, so you should yell at them, anyway.) It’s all on you, there’s nothing but twine behind you and if you mistake, there is nowhere to hide.

The first goalkeeping flub by Karius was one of the dumbest things I’ve ever seen on a soccer pitch: he fields the ball, he goes to roll it out to a fullback to start the play, he tunnel visions it much like a QB throwing an interception into coverage, Real’s Karim Benzema just sort of sticks his leg out and deflects the ball and it rolls oh so slowly and settles in the goal just inside the far post, the luckiest of lucky strikes, a slow roller akin to watching, in slow motion, the vase my cat would knock off the table: it’s falling, disaster is coming, you cannot believe this is happening but here it comes. I’ve been either playing or watching soccer for more than 40 years and I’ve never seen anything like that. It was so weird that everyone just sort of stopped, the crowd went silent, and you’re first instinct was to say, “did that just happen?” It made no sense and no one knew how to react.

WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!?!?!?!?

His second major error was one of those classic mistakes akin to the old mantra in baseball that the center fielder has the hardest time judging the ball hit right at him. It was another strike from Bale, it knuckled a bit, Karius was clearly of two minds about it, not knowing whether to try to catch or try to punch, and he wound up somehow contriving to accomplish neither. His first error was so weird that it was hard to blame anyone – Liverpool players were yelling at assorted officials in the aftermath, since clearly something illegal must have happened in order for a goal that strange to have occurred – but the second gaffe was all on him, an enormous blunder which put Real up by two goals and ended the discussion, for all intents and purposes.

And as I say, as I’m watching this, I’m absolutely cringing. Flashing through my mind are these moments where I did something stupid like let a ball go through my legs, or lost a cross in the sun and spilled it at the feet of an opposing striker. You’re entrusted with keeping order, with keeping things sane, and then you goof up and you concede a goal in a game where a goal is often all the other side needs. It’s a truly horrible feeling. My last year as a keeper, I was also a captain, and we contrived to somehow score three own goals and after each one, I made a point to tell the others on my squad that it was a team game, that it wasn’t one guy’s single error which led to the mistake and the opposing goal. But when you’re the keeper and you fuck up? Oh man. The dirty looks are everywhere. Your teammates are furious with you. They’re so angry and they have a right to be, because it’s your job to be perfect. Nothing less is good enough.

Karius is a young keeper, he improved this season and he is an excellent shot stopper who made several terrific saves during the game to keep Liverpool close. Nevertheless, he and his Belgian back-up have been rather eccentric back there, inducing migraines at Anfield and driving Jürgen Klopp slightly nuts. They’d already been pursuing Alison, the Brazilian #1 who plies his trade for A.S. Roma, but given how comically awful Karius was in Kiev, and given that Liverpool still has some of the £150m or so laying around that they got for selling Coutinho to an overpaying Barcelona, the price to acquire Alison from Roma just got even higher – and it was already thought to be around £60m to begin with, which is an outrageous sum for a keeper, but if you’re Liverpool, and your keeper just cost you the Champions League, you’re probably going to pay it.

Which sucks for Karius, who basically lost his job right before our eyes. He was, of course, despondent afterwards, and he took to twitter to apologize to the Liverpool fans. In the aftermath, Klopp and the club said all the right things about how they would support him and such, but this is a cold business. It wouldn’t surprise me if he never plays for Liverpool again, nor ever plays in a Champions League final again – a pretty cruel death of a dream. The fact is that there are tonnes of small errors here and there which ultimately determine outcomes most of the time. It’s rare it gets decided thanks to some sort of one individual’s calamitous, catastrophic mistake. (Or, in this case, two.) Liverpool’s wonderful anthem is entitled You’ll Never Walk Alone, but I’m not sure many have made a lonelier walk off the pitch than Karius did when it was over.

Jesus, this goal was beautiful

• Real Madrid celebrated winning the Champions League with all of the excitement of someone being told they need to go in for a root canal. In the aftermath, you had Ronaldo and Bale talking about their time in Madrid in past tense, with the latter having been benched this season and having indicated, at least indirectly, that he wanted to leave, and the former, after having perpetually bickered with the club’s top brass over the years, sounding as if he may have finally had enough. The game was so weird to begin with, what with Real having two of their three goals gifted them by the Liverpool keeper, that there was hardly a sense of triumph about the proceedings. Indeed, some of the Real players’ first reaction seemed to be to want to go over and console the despondent Liverpool keeper. They like winning, of course, but they didn’t like winning in that way.

But the whole endeavor was muted from the 30th minute onward, which was the time when the whole game changed and literally every ounce of joy and excitement left the stadium in Kiev, because that was the moment when Sergio Ramos decided to try and break Mo Salah’s arm, and very nearly succeeded. As it was, Salah had to leave the game. Up to that point, Liverpool had the better of the game. They were playing their attacking style, Real was flustered and flummoxed at the back, and the Reds seemed to have the advantage. From that moment on, there was an air of inevitable gloom and doom to the proceedings. Without their star, Liverpool was never the same and neither was the game. Frankly, it didn’t even seem like the Real players were having much fun.

Piece of shit

And it’s hard to have fun in a game when you have a guy who goes out and deliberately injures opponents. One of my favorite stories of all time involved an NHL team whom I happen to like, who had a player with a bad habit of deliberately injuring opponents, and while supporting him in public, their response in practice was to stand back and watch the guy get pummeled in a fight after getting into a scrap. The message was clear: you don’t do that. You put your teammates on the line when you do something like that, not to mention yourself, because guys on the other side are going to be more than willing to try and settle the score. Although I never advocate violence, it wouldn’t have surprised me if, down two goals in the closing minutes, a Liverpool player had gone up to Ramos and clocked him one.

It was a dirty and disgusting play and it ruined the Champions League final. Don’t believe me? Here’s a pretty good analysis. It’s a dirty play by a guy whose been thrown out of more games in La Liga than any other player in history for a reason. Your reputation preceeds you. It ain’t an accident or a coincidence when it happens more than once. I’m perfectly happy to see a guy like Christiano Ronaldo win literally everything, because he’s one of the best players in history, but the problem is that whenever Ronaldo wins a trophy at Real Madrid, it also means that a piece of shit like Sergio Ramos wins one as well. 

And it really bothered me that the collection of dimwits and hare brains employed by FOX Sports to do commentary here in the U.S. didn’t see that for what it was, which is an incredibly dirty play by a guy who is a well-documented shithouse. (Given that these clowns are calling the World Cup, we are in for a long month of June.) WHAT ARE YOU WATCHING? There was nothing accidental about that. Nothing. If you can’t call an obvious act of the game’s dark arts what it is, then you have no business calling a game.
Injuries suck. They suck and we have to begrudgingly accept them as a part of the game – any and every game – and in doing so, we also try to downplay their impact on the final result. This particular injury pretty much ruined the game. And it also might potentially ruin one of the better stories of the World Cup. Salah didn’t break an arm or dislocate a shoulder, which he very much could have done, but now it’s a race against time to get him healthy enough to play in Russia this summer for Egypt – a side that you should root for, because it’s a team whose fans are positively desperate for a little of the joy at the moment, given the political mess that has ensnarled the nation and even filtered over into the football grounds – the one place many Egyptians had come to regard as a place of free expression which is now rapidly being taken away. Salah has become a true hero in leading them to the World Cup, in scoring 40+ goals for Liverpool and putting himself in discussion for the Ballon d’Or. Him going down in Kiev was such a downer. Him having been taken down by a cheap shot made it all the more worse.
 

Thou shalt not score!

• When the Washington Capitals won Game 2 of the Stanley Cup Finals by a 3:2 score over the Vegas Golden Knights on Wednesday, it marked the first time a Washington, D.C., sports team won a game in a final round of any sport in decades. Little did I know, as I was hanging out in the pouring rain with my new Honduran friends while doing a conga line with a Samba band as D.C. United won the MLS Cup in 1997, that I was partaking in pretty much the last moment in time that any professional sports team from Washington, D.C. would ever have any joy ever. If the Hall of Lose is ever to open, it’s quite possibly going to be in Washington, because D.C. sports are the worst. 
But now the Capitals, after years of failing to reach the lofty heights befitting their talent – the result of perpetually being unable to play good hockey while having their hands around their own throats – have somehow managed to slay the dragon that is the Pittsburgh Penguins, and they now find themselves three games away from winning an NHL title. And this is Caps-friendly household, mind you, as The Official Spouse of In Play Lose hails from that area, and I happened to be living there for a spell during the 1997-1998 season, which was the one and only time the Caps made the Stanley Cup Finals, at which point they were promptly swept by Detroit. I’ve got a soft spot for the Caps, and even went to a couple of their home games at the old Capital Centre in Landover before they moved into their new arena later that year in downtown Washington. My rooting interest here is clear.

That they’re playing Vegas is absolutely ridiculous, because Vegas is an expansion team, but in the absurd amalgamation of bad ideas and weird franchises that is the NHL, the fact that an expansion team is now playing for a title seems almost appropriate. I mean, this is a league that as much as gave franchises away to Disney and Blockbuster Video for the fuck of it. It got held hostage by two guys who wanted to create a team in the Bay Area and permitted them to gut the franchise they already owned in Minnesota in order to do it. They keep pouring money by the millions down ratholes in Miami and Phoenix, thinking that it’s somehow a good idea. So why not Vegas? I’m down with Vegas. Fuck yeah! A Washington-Vegas final has got to be more appealing to the league brass than the potential Tampa Bay-Winnipeg final, which would have drawn tens of tens of American viewers.

What’s funny about this match-up is that you have what is, without a doubt, one of the most successful expansion franchises in the history of sports against a Capitals franchise whose expansion season was, as guest columnist Geoff Thevenot pointed out, quite possibly the worst team in the history of the game of hockey – and, as pointed out in this column from future Seattle NHL beat writer Geoff Baker, the NHL learning from the mistakes made in that disastrous original Caps’ season led to an evolution in league-wide thinking about how to handle expansion, an evolution which ultimately made it possible for Vegas to have the opportunity to be this good, this fast. (An opportunity which, to their credit, they didn’t screw up.)
And I’ve been sort of laughing about the Vegas Golden Knights success from afar all season. It was about the time I came across the story of how the Ducks had flown in to play the day of the game rather than the night before (and I don’t think they were the first team to do this) that one on the NBA’s greatest truisms – “L.A. nightlife is undefeated” – had come to fully roost in the NHL. Because L.A. nightlife ain’t got nothing on Vegas, not when you can go and patronize the private bar or the high-energy nightclub or the high rollers casino without leaving your team hotel and then stagger down The Strip to the arena in the morning.

The Last Sonics meet again

• First off, a history lesson here. When I was playing high school basketball, the state of Washington didn’t have a 3-point line. However, the state of Idaho did, and we’d play a few games over there every year. The 3-point shot was something of a novelty at that point, and since, of course, guys on our team were excited about shooting threes, the first time we played a game in Idaho with 3-point line, our power forward, who played at the top of the key, and our shooting guard, who liked playing on the baseline, were both so excited about the prospect of shooting threes, because threes were cool, that our team basically went improv in our regular offense, with those two guys taking a couple steps from their usual places and winding up on the other side of the 3-point line. Both of them started shooting them, and both of them started making them, which wasn’t that much of a surprise, because we had good shooters, and the shot wasn’t so markedly different from the usual 2’s we were tossing up. It was at the point, however, that our guys were making threes that the big center then started to beast underneath and the small forward easily slashed to the basket. This was because the defense had to crawl out further to guard the shooters, and we’d thus created more space on the floor in which to work. There was no conscious plan for this, mind you. It came out of the flow of the game. What seemed obvious to even my teenage mind, at that point, was that shooting threes made a helluva lot more sense than shooting twos. You got more points, and you created more space on the floor.

So you don’t have to tell me the value of shooting threes. I’ve been down with this idea for 30 years. Three is worth more than two. It’s simple math. But one of the things that people make a mistake about, in thinking about basketball, is thinking that it’s a math problem when it is, in fact, a logic problem, in that the whole game comes down to figuring out what works. I’ve used this notion to try and explain to people the phenomenon of the so-called “hot hand.” Often times, the hot hand is not simply a result of one guy “being in the zone” but is, in fact, the result of a team discovering a match-up advantage and then going, time and again, to what is working in the game. You have to figure out what is working on the floor and, even more importantly, when something isn’t working, you have to stop doing it!

And in Game 7 of both the Eastern and Western Conference Finals, we witnessed both the Boston Celtics and Houston Rockets literally shoot themselves out of the NBA Finals. On Monday night, in their 87:79 loss to the Cleveland Cavaliers, the Celtics shot 7/39 from three in one of the most wretched displays of shooting that I have ever seen … up until Tuesday, that is, when the Rockets shot 7/44 from three, and contrived to somehow miss 27 threes in a row, as they coughed up a huge 1st-half lead and wound up losing 101:92 to the Golden State Warriors. It was an absolute brick barrage. It was some of the worst, ugliest basketball that I have ever seen, and what boggled my mind about it was how both teams seemed to have no other plan for what else to do. They were going to launch threes, by God, because three is worth more than two, never mind the fact that two from a drive to the basket, or even one from a free throw getting hacked on the way to the basket and making one of two, was better than making zero when you throw another brick from behind the line.
Now, in the case of the Rockets, it was pretty obvious what was going on: fatigue was setting in. The Rockets got off to hot starts in both Game 6 and Game 7, jumping out to double-digit leads in both, only to fizzle and fade. The Rockets were an old team to begin with – five of their rotation regulars were over 30 – they had an extremely small rotation, and that rotation got even smaller thanks to the unfortunate hamstring injury Chris Paul suffered in Game 5. And the Rockets had to work so hard in these games on both ends of the floor, not only on the defensive end, where they were terrific, but also on offense. For all of their well-orchestrated attempts at generating mismatches, the Rockets got held under 100 points in five straight games. It was a slog and you could see the legs going in those last two games, the shots from three were getting flatter, and the shot quality getting progressively worse.
And shot quality is something that is hard to judge. A lot of commentators have said that, while missing 27 straight in Game 7, so many of those shots were “good looks,” but given that they were clearly laboring, how good were those actual looks, in fact? And in both of these games, the Rockets fell prey to the curse of irrational confidence. The Rockets throw up a tonne of threes, going for the sheer volume approach in lieu of having great shooters. They have got some guys who can make some threes, pretty good shooters but not great ones who’ve been empowered by Mike D’Antoni to shoot, shoot, and shoot some more. And one of the perils and pitfalls which can befall you is that guys who aren’t great shooters take some not very good shots early in the game which happen to go in, and are emboldened to keep taking not very good shots from then on, and don’t know enough to stop taking not very good shots. This is what happened to the 76ers in Game 2 of their series with the Celtics. They bombed away from three, a lot of them being bad shots which happened to go in, and then kept taking the same bad shots long after they’d stopped going in. In both Games 6 and 7, Houston was hot from three early, and then the shooting went off a cliff. And it’s a vicious cycle – with each one you miss, the pressing need to make one grows, which leads to taking progressively worse and worse shots.
And if you’re the Celtics, and the three guys in your backcourt are going 8 of 42 from the floor and, furthermore, you have Jayson Tatum getting to the basket at will and dunking on LeBron, a pretty good idea down the stretch is, you know, maybe putting the ball more in Tatum’s hands, and maybe not to be having your guards chucking up bad, contested shots from three. Is was a mixed mess going on in the backcourt: Jaylen Brown (3-12 from three, 5-18 overall) had shown himself to be reliable from that distance in the playoffs and was just having an off-night all-around on the offensive end; Terry Rozier (0-10, 2-14), meanwhile, picked a bad time to turn back into a pumpkin and seemed like he was pressing when the ball wouldn’t go in the basket, and he took some really bad shots down the stretch in the 4th Quarter; Marcus Smart (0-4, 1-10), meanwhile, is the worst of all worlds in that he can’t actually shoot but is so irrationally confident that he’ll never know when to stop, and as much as I love his heart and desire and defensive tenacity, the fact of the matter is that a guy shooting 23% from three in the playoffs, who refuses to stop taking them, is not ultimately helping you win games.
It was madness watching this stuff. I wanted to bash my head against a brick wall – an opportunity that was present in both arenas, given the number of bricks being tossed. For godsake, would you try something else! In Boston, it meant put the ball in Tatum’s hands and let him run the offense down the stretch. It also meant, oh, I don’t know, maybe try running and pushing the tempo, seeing as how Cleveland’s transition defense is six kinds of crap, and maybe take the ball to the basket, since Cleveland’s rim protection is also crap, and maybe not get into an 86-possession game and turn into statues against an older, slower team who wants to play a slow game and can, in fact, guard statues. In Houston, the Rockets are getting beat down the stretch and need Harden to make a play, and there he is standing 40 feet from the basket while Eric Gordon’s trying to go 1-on-1 and jacking up a 30-footer, the sort of irrational confidence shot which stopped going in hours before. TRY SOMETHING ELSE!
But this has long been a criticism of Mike D’Antoni-coached teams. They’re basically one-trick ponies and, once you figure them out in the playoffs, they don’t have any sort of a Plan B. Now, to be fair here, Chris Paul was the Plan B. The whole point of Houston getting Chris Paul was to give him the ball when the primary action of a play blows up and let him carve out a good shoot in the mid-range – a shot which literally no other guy on the Rockets seemingly ever takes. But without Paul, the Rockets seemed both out of gas and out of ideas. They just kept doing what didn’t work, with tired legs, to boot, and all they could say afterwards is “well, we didn’t make them and they did.” It’s a strange style of play in that it’s based on empirical data and, yet, is also seemingly intended to make the game more random, given the wild sorts of variances which when you shoot from so deep. Jeez, it was tough to watch, but given the tendency of both D’Antoni and also Brad Stevens to keep giving green lights to guys who take bad shots and do not know when to stop, I am not sure just how much either of the losing sides in the conference finals actually learned.

• One of the perils of young, ascending teams accelerating their timeline is that of the lofty expectations which follow. The Boston Celtics just came within a game of reaching the finals while missing the two guys we all thought would be their two best players this season, Gordon Hayward and Kyrie Irving. The immediate thought which springs to mind in the aftermath of their loss to the Cavs is to say, “wow, just think of how good they’re going to be next year! They weren’t even supposed to be in this place in 2018! They were playing with house money!”
I would anticipate that, come next fall, Boston will put forth a great team. All signs are pointing to it. I think they have the potential to be great. Having said that, we would do well to look at 2018 as being a missed opportunity. Any time you get into the conference finals, and you take a 3-2 lead, you have to make the most of that chance. There are plenty of cases in history where teams who looked like they were on the verge of greatness did not, in fact, reach that pinnacle again.
I thought Boston could win the series. In terms of rosters, I thought they had a better team than Cleveland. Obviously, the Cavs have LeBron, who is a cyborg, and his mere presence legitimately narrows the talent gap between the Cavs and pretty much every team in the East, but this series was right there for the taking and the Celtics clanged it away off the back iron.
Boston’s got an easier time of things in terms of decision making going forward in the East, but I’m not sure what Houston does. Four of the five over-30 guys in their rotation are now free agents, including Chris Paul, who is eligible for a 5-year, $219m contract. I have no doubt that there was some nudzh-nudzh wink-wink agreements going on last summer when Paul orchestrated his exit from L.A. to Houston last summer (but don’t call it tampering, whatever you do), but if I’m the Rockets, having just watched my best chance to beat the Warriors go up in smoke when my oft-injured, 33-year-old point guard injured his hamstring in Game 5, how excited am I to be paying him $46m when he’s 38 years old? YIKES! And if you want to just run in back, you’re not going to get the likes of Trevor Ariza & Co. to take 1-year deals. It’s hard to be running it back for a year when three years from now it’s likely to be really sticky.
They have to also re-sign Clint Capela, the only real young and athletic player on the roster, an RFA who a bad team with cap space might be inclined to throw $80m or more at just to fuck with the Rockets and see if they’ll hold their nose and match it, thus putting themselves into further salary cap purgatory. Oh yeah, and James Harden is about to start his DP super max extension. The Rockets want to win, but I am not sure that the new ownership wants to pay $60m or more in luxury taxes in order to do it. We shall see.
It would be easier for Houston, of course, if they could somehow dump the $42m remaining on Ryan Anderson’s contract, seeing how Anderson has become so unplayable that the eight minutes he was on the floor in Game 7 did wonders to cost them their season. (That 4/$80m albatross of a deal being proof that even great GMs like Daryl Morey screw up from time to time.) There are lots of far-fetched scenarios of somehow landing LeBron in the summer time, and while I’m sure Daryl Morey’s come up with several thousand of those in his head, all of them are dependent upon gutting the team he has now and convincing other teams to take stuff from Houston that they really don’t want. This is the nature of a salary-capped league. At some point, the costs of doing business catch up to you. I’m not sure if Houston will wind up being more than a one-off team, but that doesn’t mean it was the wrong idea. I commend the Rockets for going for it in a time when so many other teams are willing to just mail it in and build for 4-5 years from now, a mentality which often proves to be a losing one.

• This next one is probably going to annoy some people and I don’t really care if it does. One of the mantras we live by here at In Play Lose is a quote by Kingsley Amis: “if you can’t annoy someone, there is little point to writing.” I’ve been meaning to write this for pretty much the entirety of the 99 games that the Houston Rockets played this year, of which I wound up seeing quite a lot of, but the response which I’ve seen and heard from fans in the aftermath of their 99th and last game of the year gives me the impetus to finally write it, as opposed to anything specific which took place in the previous 98 – that impetus being what I read and heard from a whole bunch of people who started whining about the “biased” officiating in Game 7.
Seriously, stop it already. Just stop. If you truly believe that, then why are you even watching? 
You want to get a better sense of what “biased” officiating could actually look like? Go back and watch Lakers-Kings. Go back and listen to Mark Cuban yell “your game is fucking rigged” at David Stern after Wade got awarded a free throw seemingly every time a Dallas Maverick breathed on him. Go back to 1993 and watch Phoenix shoot 64 free throws in a Game 7 against the Sonics mere days after the NBA prematurely leaked their Finals promos on NBC showing Jordan and Charles Barkley. I’ve known countless people who were in and around that Sonics team in 1993, and I’m not sure a single one of them, deep down, doesn’t think it wasn’t rigged – but they don’t want to believe that, either, because if that’s true, then what’s the point of it all?
But I don’t think any of those were rigged. I just thought the officials were TERRIBLE, which can happen sometimes. Always keep Hanlon’s razor in mind at times like this: never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. And I get on officials at times as well. Personally, I think some of them have rabbit ears, glass jaws, and seem to think that people paid an enormous amount of money to come and watch them officiate. And there are bad officials, to be sure. I wish they were better, and there was a lot of frustration all about the NBA this season stemming from the fact that they aren’t better – but then again, who’d want to do that job in the first place?
Players and teams do get rough whistles sometimes. That’s naturally going to happen. I would say that the Warriors probably got the better of it on that front in Game 7 – not because of any bias, but because of the fact that over the course of a playoff series in the NBA, the officiating tends to favor the defense, insofar as that they’re less apt to reward offensive players with bail out fouls when they make bad plays. If you play bad offense – which the Rockets did in droves in Game 7 – you can’t be expecting the officials to save your ass.
And I’ve seen, time and again, that officials tend to be more favorable towards the defenses in the playoffs. It annoyed the hell out of me in 2016, of course, because the Cavs decided that the best way to defend the Warriors was to grab Klay Thompson and Steph Curry on every screen and dare the officials to call it – which is exactly what they should have done! That’s smart defense! You put the onus on the refs, and if the refs let it go, you keep doing it. This isn’t a complaint on my part about 2016. This is me commending Cleveland for coming up with a strategy that enabled them to win a title. It was the right way for them to play. And I’ve seen that happen now time and again in the playoffs. The defenses are going to be given a little more leeway here and there, and once you get the sense that’s how it going to be called, your team had better adjust to the way the game is being called.
And to be perfectly blunt, after watching the Rockets fairly closely for most of this past season, I can go back in my memory of watching the NBA – which goes all the way back to the Celtics playing the Suns in the 1976 Finals – and in those 42 years’ of time, I cannot think of a single team that has less of a right to bitch and whine and complain about the officials than this year’s Houston Rockets, who employ two of the biggest foul hunters that the game has ever seen in Chris Paul and James Harden, and whose frequently being rewarded for said behavior makes them the single-most annoying team to watch in the league. And it pisses me off to say that, because Paul and Harden are great players and I want to see them do great things.
And Harden is great. I say this with complete admiration for the sort of dedication that Harden has exhibited over the years not only to improving his game, but also to mastering the ability to fool the referees. He’s mastered his stepback, and does it with such precision, that he can frequently travel while making that move and the officials will give him the benefit of the doubt. He throws himself into defenders on his way to the hole, or grabs a defender and tugs the guy into him, and he still has the strength and the skill to be able to get up a quality shot. His mastery of this sort of stuff is truly admirable.
Like I say, this is just good strategy. Fooling officials, or pushing the rules to the brink and putting the onus upon officials to make calls, is a part of every game. That football team I used to root for when I cared about football, the Seattle Seahawks, won a Super Bowl through playing overly aggressive defense and daring officials to throw a flag on every play. Alabama does this in college football as well – and, in fact, they lost the NCAA title to Clemson two years ago after the Clemson receivers figured out they could shove the Alabama defenders back. Soccer players dive because they know the gravity of being awared a penalty or a free kick – huge scoring opportunities in a game where scoring is impossible. Hell, now sabermatricians are even trying to statistically quantify it in baseball when they talk about pitch framing – which is, at it’s root, a ploy by catchers to fool umpires into calling balls as strikes. All of this sort of stuff is fair game, in my opinion. You play to win, and you do whatever that takes. Some people think this is cheating. I happen to think that it is good strategy.
I acknowledge the value of that sort of stuff, but it doesn’t mean that I like it. And if you’re going to do this sort of stuff, and the refs are not going to reward you for it, then you don’t get to bitch, because you’ve been crying wolf the whole time.
Twice early in Game 7, I saw James Harden get legitimately fouled and not get the call because he flopped. He flopped like a fish and he embellished the play. And it’s not okay for officials to be missing calls – those were fouls, so get the calls right – but the message at that point should have been loud and clear to Harden, and to everyone else on the Rockets: the officials weren’t interested in rewarding any of those sorts of ploys, and went so far to let the annoyance of Harden flopping trump the actual play. They weren’t having it, so stop doing it. Another key play during the 3rd Quarter of the game which made the Rockets apoplectic was properly explained by the NBA referees: if James Harden doesn’t grab the screener, it might be an offensive foul, but there he goes grabbing Jordan Bell and dragging him. He was trying to game the system again, and the officials weren’t having it.
The Rockets were called for fewer fouls, shot more free throws, and the entire course of the first half was dictated by Klay Thompson drawing three fouls in the first six minutes of the game. Literally none of that is in keeping with the notion that the officials were “biased” against the Rockets. The Rockets lost the game because they got tired, missed 27 threes, and because they put Ryan Anderson out there to be turned into BBQ chicken by Steph Curry during the key stretch of the 3rd Quarter. They’re a team that was wholly dependent all season on Harden’s ability to manufacture free throws for himself. Maybe instead of complaining about “biased” officiating, people should wonder just how wise it is for a team to be so dependent one guy to constantly hunt fouls – and pull fast ones – on opponents and officials alike in order to be successful. At some point, they catch on, and the joke might wind up being on you.

•    … aaaand, we’ve save the dumbest for last.
Step 1: read this article by Ben Detrick of The Ringer.
Step 2: commence facepalming repeatedly.
What the actual fuck are you doing, Bryan Colangelo? If not you, then whomever it is in your family, or whomever it is who is close to you. WHAT ARE YOU DOING? And I suppose it could be a set-up, a long con, someone who has a vendetta against Colangelo and has it out for him … except, whomever it is who would have that vendetta would seem far more likely to be the source of this information to The Ringer, as opposed to just being some random dude who is tech savvy and who thinks all of those burner accounts are “weird.” I mean, that could also be true, I suppose – there are enough Hinkie cultists out there in 76ers fandom who still consider it an affront that The Process got short-circuited by the NBA and handed over to Jerry Colangelo and his kid that one might go looking for this sort of thing. What’s far more likely, of course, given the circumstance, is that someone who has an axe to grind with Bryan Colangelo, and who knows about this weird and creepy burner account behavior, decided to spill the beans. And while this outstanding article by The Ringer makes no direct claim that all of these accounts are, in fact, being operated by Bryan Colangelo, there are far, far too many coincidences going on here.
And it’s one thing to have an account that amounts to a listening post – which is what the @phila1234567 account, that Colangelo admits to maintaining, clearly is. I’m sure that every team has one of those. It’s a gabby, gossipy league, and it never hurts to do some reconnaissance. But it’s another thing entirely to start trashing your predecessor, to start trashing your predecessor in a completely different job, to start trashing your own players, and then to leak confidential medical information to reporters – the last of which is most definitely a fireable offense, and the second to last of which probably should be.
But Colangelo is fairly notoriously thin-skinned, and this is the sort of thing you resort to do, in this day and age, when you’re that sort of person. You feel as if you have some blanket of anonymity online, but the bottom line is that you can, and will, get found out. It’s completely reckless of him – or, of whomever might be doing this in his behalf. And if you haven’t guessed already, I doubt it isn’t him. The coincidence of The Ringer calling up the 76ers, informing them of this story, and then having three of those burner accounts immediately going private and going dark is just far too rich. If I’m wrong, well, I’ll gladly admit as such. But something is rotten in Denmark, Pennsylvania.
And Bryan Colangelo has to go here. He’s compromised, one way or another. The 76ers can’t afford this in a summer where they are one player away from being a legit Eastern Conference champion. The draft is in three weeks, for heaven’s sake. You can’t have your GM even remotely implied in this sort of stuff if you want to woo PG13 or LeBron or convince Kawhi it’s worth it to be traded here. This is a complete disaster for the Sixers. Owner Josh Harris needs to cut bait here, needs to tell Bryan Colangelo that he needs to resign and fall on this sword. I would suggest Harris then reach out to former Cavs GM David Griffin about the job because, if nothing else, his time in Cleveland has served him well when it comes to dealing with drama and putting out fires.
What a mess. What a complete sham. And how 2018 is this scandal? This is the most 2018 scandal imaginable. The more that I read about this, the more dumbstruck that I am. Seriously, how naïve do you have to be to think that, given your position as a less-than-popular GM of an NBA team, this isn’t going to somehow be figured out eventually? Everything gets figured out eventually in this day and age. There are far fewer secrets than ever before. I’m just confounded that this even occurred, and that an exec of a professional sports franchise (or someone who is really close to him) was dumb enough to think this could be gotten away with. It is absolutely mind-boggling.
And also funny, I should add. It is downright hilarious that people in such a position of authority could be so reckless and so naïve.

• Bonus 8th buzzard point, which occurred on Thursday night: what the hell did J.R. Smith just do? Did he really just forget the score? My god. Time and score, J.R. Time and score. Good lord. What the hell just happened?

Sometimes The Lose Wins

This worked out pretty well

ONE year ago, I was on the verge of losing something vital to my existence: my home. We had until the 10th of June to move out of our house. It had nothing to do with us. It had to do with a marital breakup among the owners and the fact that the house was worth about $4,000,000 on the open market, and we were being Ellis Acted into oblivion here in San Francisco.

The entirety of the Bay Area has suffered from a continual housing crisis since I first moved here in 2000, in that there is far too much demand, not nearly enough supply, and no real political or even societal will to do anything to resolve this issue. Having lived in the Mission District for 13 years, and had experiences that run the gamut from watching the tenement slum next door burn to the ground and kill people – there were probably 75 people living in that 11-unit building at a time, none of whom knew enough English to know to call 9-1-1 and alert the fire station two blocks away – to then seeing that building be rebuilt and its units rented out to techies and yuppies for $4,000. This actually simplifies most of my feelings about silly arguments related to gentrification and urban planning and most every other issue in San Francisco – in both the case of the deathtrap slum and the $4k a month reclamation project, it boiled down to the fact that the landlords are money grubbing scum, which is pretty much what most of the landlords are, and they are going to wind up benefitting either way, be the tenants rich and white or be they poor and Spanish speaking. Predators, either way. And clearly I made a mistake from renting a place from someone I thought was a friend for 13 years. That was naïve of me. Landlords are not your friends, not when the house that you live in can sell for $4,000,000. It’s always borrowed time. Amid this mess, which began in early April, my friend Amanda said to me, “I wish that I owned a place, so that I could rent it to you,” to which I responded, “but at that point, we couldn’t be friends any more.”

And let me tell you, having two months to move, with no idea where to go, in a market this tight, is a truly awful life experience that I don’t wish upon any of you. Every single minute of your day is stressful. You cannot enjoy anything. You feel guilty for taking the time to have fun and enjoy yourself for a few hours and do something like go to dinner, or go to a movie or a Giants game. “Shouldn’t I be looking for a house right now?” You chase leads, you look at terrible units and try to convince yourself that they would somehow be alright. You see random numbers in windows as you walk past and hurriedly call them, only to never hear back. Lots of that. Lots of unreturned messages. Lots of vague, evasive emails in response to your query. You set up appointments to look at places and the realtors never show. There were three of us on the search – we had decided to form a unified front, as all of us were needing a place by mid-June and we figured we’d have more luck looking for larger spaces than simply 1-bedroom units, which were and are so in demand – and between the three of us, we probably had 1/3 of our inquiries actually result in a response. Not being shown an apartment, mind you. That rate was even lower. I’m talking about just getting someone to pick up the damn phone and call me back. When it’s this sort of a market, and you’re looking for a place, and doing so from a place of urgency, to the majority of money grubbing scum landlords and their collection of mouthpieces and whores handling their business, you’re basically shit, and you’re reminded of it regularly. Seriously, kids, don’t try this at home.

And by the way, this is why I’m an active member of the Tenants Union here in San Francisco, and why I recommend that other people get similarly involved. Housing is not a privilege. It is a necessity. It is essential. But I’ve always likened the housing problem in a city such as this to the parking problem – there are way more cars than available places to put them here, but the city likes it that way, because of the many, many ways in which they can capitalize on it financially, be it through parking meters or the insufferable $500 worth of parking tickets you’re going to accrue in the course of the year no matter how much you try to avoid it. It’s that way with housing issues as well. Why would a zoning board composed of realtors want to drive down their future commissions from housing sales by making more of it available? So long as you’re making a shittonne on your investment (that $4,000,000 house that I was living in was originally purchased for $188,000) why would you give two shits about a goddamn renter? These people are trash, they’re money grubbing scum and need to be held in check.

Anyway, so a year ago today – May 25, 2017 – was probably the lowest point in the housing search. It was a foggy and cloudy and dismal morning and I was doing something that I’d always hoped I’d be spending my birthday doing: apartment hunting. Because god forbid that I enjoy anything, at this point. My boss was really helpful actually – “take the week off, get the hell out of the office and find a place to live” – and so The Official Spouse of In Play Lose and I were planning on spending my birthday doing more apartment hunting.

Oh joy. Seriously, this was the worst birthday ever.

We did have one solid lead, a place Doug had found in Alameda that we’d put an application in on sight unseen. We’d asked Doug what he thought of it and he said, “well, it’s a place,” which is something, I guess. Honestly, the three of us were growing pretty desperate. ANYTHING was looking like it was worth making the effort to land, including some places we'd seen which were godfuckingterrible. We had not even seen this place in Alameda, but we called over there on Friday morning to follow up on the application and also inquire about seeing the place, and the manager said she'd be happy to show it to us that day.

Getting from San Francisco to Alameda is something of a pain in the ass on public transportation. It took forever and we finally got there around 11:00 a.m. or so. It was at that point that the manager then said to us, “you didn’t get the apartment, but I'll be happy to show it to you if you like.”

What the actual fuck?

Honestly, she goddamn said that. That is one of the stupidest goddamn things that anyone has said to me in a long time. Seriously, you couldn't have just told us this ahead of time, and not wasted our time? How fucking callous do you have to be to not even show some courtesy? How fucking indifferent are you? Seriously, get bent, you fuck.

So at that point, I’m pissed. I’m really angry and I do well not to bite the property manager’s head off. At least it’s easy to sour grape in this situation and say “I didn’t want that place, anyway,” but quite honestly, I didn’t want that place, anyway, nor would I want someone as discourteous as that being an overlord for the place that I live.

I mean, seriously here, does real estate just turn you into a douchebag? My first apartment in San Francisco was in a building that was bought by a slumlord who was ultimately sued into bankruptcy and oblivion by the city, and they employed a whole bunch of lunkheads who doubled as security agents, wearing black fatigues and acting as if they were some paramilitary unit. One of them came up to me one night as I was smoking outside the building:

Andrew: Do you have any identification?
Lose: Aren’t you a little overdressed, Andrew?
Andrew: Have we met?
Lose: I was just in your office four days ago and you tried to pawn off a home loan on me, you dumb fuck.

Seriously, what the fuck is wrong with these people? But I digress.

Where was I? Oh, right, I was standing there with my spouse for about 20 minutes on a street corner in Alameda, waiting for a fucking AC Transit, positively stewing. It took forever but we finally found a coughing, wheezing AC Transit and lumbered our way back to Oakland in order to catch the BART.

And by that point the sun was breaking through and it was actually starting to turn into a warm and bright day. And it was at that point that I said to KC, “you know what? Fuck these bitches. Fuck all of them. This is my birthday, goddamn it. They don’t get to ruin my birthday for me. Only I get to ruin my birthday for me! They can go on ruining my days again beginning on the 26th of May. So fuck it, let’s go to Swan’s.”

Eat here

And KC liked the idea of going to Swan’s Oyster Depot for lunch, which is quite possibly my favorite place to eat in San Francisco, if not the world, and previously we'd gone to Swan's the day after I got laid off from my job at UC Berkeley in 2010, and doing so proved to be an act of both self-preservation and defiance, an act of "fuck it, life doesn't suck," which did wonders for my sanity, and we were there for like 2½ hours that day, during which time we ate approximately 1,000,000,000 oysters, and for 2½ hours, I didn't care that I no longer had a job.

This seemed like an act which was worth repeating, nearly 7 years later. We needed another reminder that life doesn’t suck.

I’ll take all the things, please. Yes, all of them.

And as we were departing from Oakland's 12th St. station on the BART, intent upon feeding our faces with another 1,000,000,000 oysters in the afternoon and flipping the bird to our landlords, to the attorney threatening to sue us on the 10th of June and to every goddamn phony we’d dealt with in the previous couple of months, KC was scrolling through craigslist and perusing some apartment listings on her phone.

“Here’s a place we might want to go and have a look at,” she said to me. “A new listing, brand new, just a few minutes ago. The apartment is located in the Outer Richmond, out by the beach. It says here that they are showing the apartment at 5:00 p.m. tonight …”

We were the first people to see the place. The tenant himself was showing it, owing to the hasty nature of it all: his wife had just landed a new job in L.A., beginning mid-June, and they had to get out of town as soon as possible. He told us that the building is owned by a family trust, whose primary requirement for tenants is that they don’t burn the building down. They had zero interest in all of the nonsense you get involved in when you’re looking for a place to live in this city – no ridiculous jumping through hoops, no outrageous demands. The place was a flat located way out in the old Russian neighborhood of the western part of the city, and it was just a 10-minute walk from the beach:

Not bad for a backyard, eh? I like my backyard

So, as I was saying before, May 25, 2017, was the high point of the housing search. Seriously, this was the best birthday ever.

I’m still sort of amazed how that came together, because we were truly growing desperate, and growing despondent, with mere days before we were going to find ourselves embroiled in what would likely be a long, ugly fight against being evicted, involving lawyers and courtrooms and judges saying to get the hell out of their courtroom and arbitrators and mediators, during which time we would still be living in the place, living in a situation where the owners wanted us gone and we would all hate each other so, really, who wants to be there at that point anyway?

But none of that came to pass because, out of nowhere, it just sort of worked out. I have no idea how. I’m not going to question it. Luck and timing is everything in this life. Sometimes, stuff actually works out.

I’m not sure yet how the birthday will go this year, but it will probably be less life-altering than the last one. And that’s a good thing. I would do well to avoid that level of stress again at any point in time in the next 10,000 years.

And I should probably also take this opportunity to wish my sister Kimberly a happy birthday as well. We’re not twins. I’m a year older but we share the same birthday – one of those oddities in life that ultimately comes to make you unique. Happy birthday, sis. I hope your birthday is, well, less dramatic.

Get Better

James Harden gets beat for a dunk while coming to realize that he’s lost his keys

HOUSTON winning Game 2 of the Western Conference Finals was a relief. Now, as a Warriors fan, it annoyed me, in the moment, but in the bigger picture, the Rockets winning Game 2 127:105 did us all a service, in that it quelled, for the moment at least, the enormous existential angst about the league that’s been running rampant. It’s pretty much been around since July 4, 2016, of course, which was the day that the Warriors signed Kevin Durant, but after Game 1 of this year’s Western Conference Finals, in which the Rockets – the team whose GM admits to being obsessed about beating the Warriors, the team that’s been heralded as being “built” to beat them – got whooped 119-106 at home and made to look bad in doing so, then all of a sudden, there are not only the usual assortment of tweets, but also regular columnists talking along the lines of how the Golden State Warriors have somehow “ruined” the NBA. (He’s not alone in this, by the way. From Sunday night, I give you a ridiculous tweet by a Jazz beat writer I admire. They’re everywhere, these sorts of takes.)

The Rockets winning Game 2 of the series put a stop to this hand-wringing, at least for the moment, but it’s all flowing back in after the Warriors destroyed Houston 126:85 in Game 3. And if I didn’t find these knee-jerk reactions annoying, I’d probably find them amusing. Aah, yes, let’s long for the glory days of yesteryear when no one was dominating the NBA, when no one was winning six titles in eight years or going to the NBA finals eight times in a decade.

Oh, wait, both of those happened.

Trust me, NBA twittersphere, the league survived the Bulls winning six titles in eight years, and survived the Lakers going to the finals eight times in the 1980s, and you’ll survive the Warriors winning a few titles in a cluster in the 2010s and 2020s. Seriously, you’ll live.

Look, folks, this stuff is cyclical. Nothing is permanent, and nothing lasts forever. But here’s a suggestion, to all of you out there lamenting the fact that your team is fodder against the mighty Warriors, here’s a suggestion that I offer up, both as a fan of said Warriors and also as someone who got so annoyed watching the Sonics get their brains beat in the Lakers for years on end: get better.

Seriously, it’s that simple. Get better. Draft better, scout better, develop players better. Coach better. Be shrewder and more savvy in the front office. Sick of the Warriors winning everything? Fair enough. Get better.

And since I referenced, in the link above, a column by Toronto columnist Bruce Arthur (whose work I generally admire), let’s use the basketball team in his backyard as a reference point here. The Toronto Raptors got blasted 4-0 by the Cavs last year in the 2nd round of the Eastern Conference playoffs. They weren’t good enough. Quite simply, they lacked the sort of personnel on their roster capable of defeating LeBron & Co. in the playoffs. So what did they do in the offseason? Did they get better?

The Raptors lost 4-0 to the Cavs this year in the 2nd round of the playoffs, so apparently not. Oh, I know, there was a lot of talk about how the Raptors “changed the culture” this year, on their way to winning 59 games and taking the top seed in the Eastern playoffs. These are the new Raptors! They shoot more threes! They pass the ball! They run actual coherent plays! And sure, they did do all of that in the regular season, but the fact of the matter is that, when it came to face up against the baddest dude on the block in LeBron, the Raptors had the same problems that they had a season ago – mostly because, for all of their commendable efforts to develop young players to counteract picking low in the draft, when it came down to crunch time, the Raptors were doing the same old things they’ve done every year, and relying upon the same old players, whom they’ve now invested a fucktonne of money in.

If you’re the Raptors, and you get trucked by the Cavs a season ago, you might want to actually take a look at why it is that you have no chance to beat Cleveland: you have one-dimensional bigs who struggle to defend in open space, and you have no scoring on the wing, which means LeBron doesn’t have to guard anyone. The Raptors solution to this was to re-up thirty-something point guard Kyle Lowry to a thirty-something-million a year contract, and also re-up Serge Ibaka, whom LeBron is perfectly content to lay off of and not guard because nine times out of eight, he won’t make the right play with the ball in his hand. That’s not getting better!

But see, according to our Toronto scribe I linked to above, the Golden State Warriors are, essentially, ruining the NBA and making it less fun, which is complete nonsense. What ruins teams in the NBA is terrible decision making. The Warriors had absolutely, positively nothing to do with Toronto deciding, over the course of the last two summers, to invest well over $200 million in Lowry, Ibaka, and also DeMar DeRozan, who was so bad in Game 3 that he got benched and then got himself thrown out of Game 4. The Raptors brass willingly did this, and willingly tied one of their hands behind their back in the process, because none of those guys are tradable, it’s pretty clear they’ve hit the ceiling, and it’s also pretty clear that playing the way they play is not a winning strategy so long as LeBron lives in a zip code east of the Mississippi River. You, Toronto, you didn’t get better, so as far as I’m concerned, you don’t get to bitch.

And see, the Raptors are in the same spot now that almost every other team in the NBA is in, which is that they got greedy and overspent and have left themselves inflexible. I’m wondering if we’ll see some sort of sideways trades this summer, in which one team trades a guy with a contract they don’t like and have to take another guy with a contract they won’t like, either, with the hopes that the new guy will somehow make them better. Every team has got those guys, most of whom signed new deals in the last couple of years and have since proved to everyone in their organization that it was money poorly spent. And it’s not just the bad teams that have those guys, although the bad teams seem to have more of them. Houston would love to get better this coming off-season, but god knows how they’ll do it, seeing as how they have to re-sign Clint Capela, a young center who is great, and are presently paying $20 million a season to Ryan Anderson, who cannot get off the bench against the Warriors.

Then again, Rockets GM Daryl Morey went about engineering the trade last summer for Chris Paul (whom they have to also re-sign this summer by the way) in an effort to try and build a team that could compete with Golden State. Houston “raised its risk profile,” in Morey’s words. Houston got better, and will probably – hopefully – find a way to get better once again, because that’s what they do instead of whining about how Golden State wins all the things.

At the crux of the angst and anxiety in the NBA is the fact that the Warriors – a 2015 champion, 73-game winner and near champion in 2016 – then went out and signed Kevin Durant after that. It completely astonishes me that this is still such a big deal to so many people, but here I was, the other day, after saying something on twitter along the lines of “quit whining and get better,” arguing about the fact that KD signed with the Warriors with some guy on my twitter DM:

some guy: KD going to the Warriors was the ultimate in bandwagoning.
LOSE: Okay, then, where should he have gone?
some guy: back to OKC
LOSE: If he wanted to go back to OKC, he would have. The fact that he didn’t says that he didn’t want to, which is his right.
some guy: He shouldn’t go to the team that just beat him in the playoffs.
LOSE: Okay, so let me get this straight. Because his team lost to GS, he shouldn’t be able to go there. So does that mean he should only go to situations where the team is worse? If you lose in the first round of the playoffs, you can’t sign with any team that advanced further than that? You have to sign with Phoenix or the Kings? Or would it have been OK for KD to sign with GS if OKC had lost to the Spurs in the playoffs that year, since GS wouldn’t have beaten them? Or could he have signed with Cleveland, since they won the whole thing that year but didn’t beat OKC? Explain these ground rules to me here.
(silence)

I’ve said this before but it bears repeating: every single argument put forth as to why Kevin Durant shouldn’t have signed with the Warriors is dumb as hell, and if you, the person who is reading this blog, espouses that nonsense, than you’re also dumb as hell and you shouldn’t be reading this blog. Seriously, get a clue. Guys reach a point in their careers where they have a choice of where to sign, and if you accept that right of players to have that agency over the careers – one which has been meticulously collectively bargained in all sports over the years – then you don’t get to bitch if/when a guy makes a decision that you don’t like.

I fully embrace that concept, even if it doesn’t happen to benefit the team that I root for. Which it doesn’t, sometimes. That’s how it goes. And I’m not saying this because I’m a Warriors homer. It’s gone the other way for me as well. I’ve watched the Mariners trade lose future Hall of Famers multiple years running. I’ve watched the most exciting hockey player I’ve ever seen in person, Pavel Bure, demand a trade and skate away from Vancouver forever. God knows I know never to ever get invested in any player who plays for my favorite soccer club. Norwich City had two truly gifted young players on their roster this past season – one of whom was among the Championship’s Best XI and the other of whom already has had a call-up to England’s senior national team – and I suspect there’s no way in hell I’ll ever see them wearing Norwich’s yellow and green again. This is how it goes. Guys take agency, and guys move on. Who cares what the reason is? Get over it already.

But not even the NBA got over it, which is why, in the last CBA negotiations and in the aftermath of Durant going to Golden State, the league concocted what is one of the stupidest ideas ever, the DP extension, which was intended to enable teams to try and keep their superstars but is, in fact, an incredibly daunting proposition for a club. Do you really want to give one guy $200 million over five years and tether such an enormous portion of your payroll to one guy? It’s a no-brainer for Houston to give that to James Harden, and for the Warriors to give it to Steph Curry, but we’ve already seen the Kings trade Boogie Cousins and the Bulls trade Jimmy Butler ahead of possibly being faced with having to offer that contract. And make no mistake: if a guy is eligible for that extension, he’ll want nothing less than that. Offer less, and he’s gone. The flip side to that, of course, is that if you offer it to a player, it’s so much money that they almost have to take it. But what are you really getting? The Buzzards are almost certainly having buyer’s remorse at the moment, having dropped $200 mil on John Wall, who has a history of knee issues and who was at the center of the constant bickering which plagued the Wiz this past season. It’s not looking like a particularly sound investment there on the part of the Wiz. Oh, wait, it’s the Warriors fault that Washington did that, because clearly, they are ruining the NBA, insofar as being as good as they are leads to a whole lot of other people completely losing their minds.

And KD’s been salty all year, which I don’t really blame him for, since he was only doing what anyone in that position should do, which is to go out and take a better job, and he gets vilified for going to Golden State at the expense of poor old OKC, when maybe, just maybe, someone should actually focus on why it is he would want to leave OKC in the first place. But somehow, we’ve spun the narrative of poor little OKC and their small town folk hero Russell Westbrook, enabling him to go off and play Don Quixote on the court as the basketball media ooh and aah over him padding his stats and chasing round numbers with all the aplomb of a selfish blowhard. Gosh, how could KD ever leave OKC? Gosh, why would anyone ever stay?

This actually speaks to one of my broader notions when it comes to labor relations in the NBA and every other sport, which is that we, as fans and also as media, don’t actually like the fact that players have that power. We pay lip service to the idea that they should have the rights to do that, but only when they make decisions that we personally like. You don’t get to make that choice. It’s not your career. It’s not your job. You’re a fan, and your job is to buy tickets and go to the games.

All of this stuff annoys me, if that wasn’t already apparent.

I didn’t care a whit about LeBron going to Miami. He handled it dumbly, but he did what he thought was best for his career. Oh, so he created a ‘superteam’ with Wade and Bosh? Well, so what? Oh golly gee whiz, he actually wanted to play on a good team with good players. What a novel concept that is. Just because you do that, no one hands you a title. You still have to go out and earn it, and the Heat only did that twice in four tries, with their second loss coming to the Spurs who, if you really stop and think about it, had only one guaranteed, sure-fire superstar on their roster: Tim Duncan, a #1 pick in the draft. The Spurs drafted internationals who were something of an unknown quantity. They traded for Kawhi Leonard, who was the 16th pick in the draft. They built that system and that team over years, often making the most of lower picks in the draft. The Spurs didn’t bitch and moan about Miami forming a super team. They went out and figured out how to beat it.

And to that end, I admire the Rockets for freely admitting that they want to beat the Warriors and that everything they’ve done has been for that purpose. I admire the fact that Boston just keeps making moves to improve, often subtle moves that fly under the radar like trading Avery Bradley, a guy they didn’t want to pay, to Detroit for Marcus Morris, a guy who just might help them because he’s a pretty good match-up against LeBron, and whose defense on LeBron has a lot to do with why the Celtics are up 2-1 over the Cavaliers in the Eastern Conference finals even without their two best players. The system is what it is, so use the system to your advantage in order to keep improving and get better.

Which is what the Warriors did after losing the 2016 finals. They got better. They signed Kevin Durant. They got better. This is what you should do, no matter what position you finish in. This came up recently on a favorite podcast of mine about soccer, when one of the panelists asked if Manchester City could repeat as champions next season, given that everyone else in the EPL élite would strive to improve, at which point it was pointed out that Man City had shown ambition enough to spend £500 million on talent, striving to ultimately put together a team capable of amassing 100 points and winning the league at a trot, so why would we automatically assume such an ambitious club would suddenly become satisfied and not want to continue to improve? You don’t just reach the apex and stop. That’s not how it works. Getting better is the aim (at least it should be, NBA Tankamania aside). The Warriors lost in the 2016 NBA Finals, which they didn’t care too much for, and so they went out and got better. It truly amazes me that people have a problem with that.

Oh, and by the way, the beat reporters here in the Bay Area had been saying as far back as 2014 that the Warriors had designs on one day luring Durant to Golden State. They were going to make that pitch in the Hamptons in 2016 regardless of whether they won the title or not. They’d positioned themselves to do so, owing to some good luck – the spike in the cap, the cheap contract Curry’d signed when he was still an oft-injured mystery – and also some sound planning – more money was available thanks to the 5/75 and 5/87 contracts signed by Klay Thompson and Draymond Green, still excellent deals for the players involving massive amounts of money but which, comparative to their on-court value, seem absolutely ludicrously cheap today. And again, those three All-Stars on the 2016 Dubs roster pre-KD were all drafted by the Warriors – and a total of 50 guys went before them in those drafts, meaning that a whole bunch of teams screwed up on the scouting end. Pretty much all of them, in fact. But somehow, by being smarter than everyone else, the Warriors are ruining the NBA.

Seriously, get over it already. The Warriors have come, and eventually they will go. And I’m not kidding when I say that no one in the Bay Area takes this success for granted, because we all know how fickle and fleeting success can be. This team was god awful for years. This city waited 52 years for its baseball team to win a World Series. It’s been two decades since the 49ers won a Super Bowl, with their last loss being a completely disheartening one: they were the better team, but made enough mistakes to give the Ravens a chance to win the game, and the Ravens did. Failure is the default. Ultimate success is never assured.

And in the meantime, enjoy it. Enjoy great basketball. When the Warriors come to town, boo them accordingly, cheer on your team and hope you can win a game here and there. As a Sonics fan in the 1980s, beating the Lakers a game here and there was a source of joy and satisfaction. It was great to kick their ass and lord over them for a day, even though, come playoff time, you just knew that if you played the Lakers, you were going to get worked. So hope that your team improves, enjoy your occasional success when you beat the Warriors and, above all, appreciate greatness. When it’s gone, you’ll miss it. I hated watching the shell of a team that the San Antonio Spurs had become this past season, as a run of 20 consecutive seasons of more than 50 wins came to an end. It was sad to see, because I’ve come to count on the Spurs over the years and taken it as a given that they would be great.

And it’s a shock to us, when the dynasts and no longer dynastic. Lots of people just sort of assumed that the Patriots would win the Super Bowl because it’s the Patriots, by god, and winning Super Bowls is what they do. We’re willing to choose the conventional wisdom – “the Patriots win Super Bowls” – over the empirical evidence – “the Eagles are better at almost every position on the field” – and we wind up surprised when the Eagles actually win. After going to seven straight NBA Finals, no one would dare pick against LeBron in the East, even though he’s dragging along a roster that couldn’t win 30 games in an NBA season without him. Should they fall to the Celtics in the Eastern finals – which I’ve been saying for weeks now could, and maybe even would, happen – it will nonetheless be a surprise. Five years from now, when 35-year-old Steph and 35-year-old KD find themselves locked in some playoff struggle with Sonics 2.0, there will be lots of pundits talking about how these vets from Golden State have savvy and moxie and the heart of the champions and it’ll see them through, but maybe, just maybe, they’ll lose. And it’ll be okay when that happens, just as it’s okay, in the present, if they don’t.

So stop whining. The NBA is fine. It’s better than it’s ever been, it’s great players doing the greatest things ever seen on a basketball court. If you’re a fan, and the Warriors are stomping all over your team, maybe your team should get better. Seriously, get better. It makes the game better as a whole if that occurs. It is not the fault of the Warriors that your team sucks. Get better already, would you?

And Then There Was Lose

That’s more like it.

THE LOSE thought it best to wait to comment on the NBA playoffs until the first round was completed. And one of the things that I want to say here at the start is this: all of these teams who got beat in the playoffs are good teams. They’re good teams with good players, and I’m inclined to want to watch them.

And being good matters. I’m not into the whole notion of “ringz.” It’s nice to win championships but doesn’t happen too often. I’m not a believer in championship or bust. There is nothing inherently wrong, in my mind, with being a good team that wins a lot of games regularly. It’s easy to forget that when we live in an era of Tankamania – an idea which is predicated on the idea that in order to be great, you have to first be terrible, and there isn’t any point to being somewhere in between. But this is an entertainment industry above all else, and in the present tense, putting a good and winning product out on the floor is a good thing.

Where the problem comes with being good in the NBA is that teams wind up being locked into certain cores and groups of players, and once that happens, you have very little flexibility to change. This is a function of the salary cap, which puts benchmarks on the amount that teams have to spend on players. There’s a minimum floor, there are top end caps and tax thresholds, and there are slots where certain players and entitled to certain amounts. Those hold true for everyone. You have to spend that money. There are more than a few players in the NBA who have so-called “max” contracts not necessarily because they are élite players, but simply because the team had the slot available and had to spend the money on someone.

So what frequently occurs, of course, is that a team gets locked into a core group of players and that core maxes out their ability, but very few good teams are good enough to win titles and once you’ve maxed out and reached your ceiling, and you’re locked into enormous financial commitments for players who are no longer improving, the only way to go is down. We are tantalized by young teams with talent and potential, in part, because it’s exciting to see growth and imagine the possibilities, whereas a lot of fundamentally good teams look, in the bigger context, to be stale and staid and stuck.

And one of the things which has been a plague for the NBA the past couple of seasons is the overwhelming sense that a whole bunch of good teams are stuck. Not bad teams, mind you, but actual good teams that win a lot of games. They can’t get better, they can’t realistically compete for a title, and they’re cost-constrained. Now what? Far too many of the eight teams recently vanquished from the NBA playoffs find themselves in this exact predicament. 

This is a case of the road to hell being paved with good intentions. None of these teams are actually trying to get themselves stuck. They’re making what seem, at the time, to be sound personnel decisions that, cumulatively, come to wind up looking not so good.

Being stuck and good sucks, but being stuck and bad is far worse. Detroit is stuck and is bad. Charlotte is probably an even better example. Hornets 2.0 was actually a 3-seed in the playoffs two seasons ago. They’ve built up their entire roster with the idea of being good, and with the idea that it’s going to cost money in order to do it. They’ve done things like sign Nic Batum to a $25m a year contract which, at the time, seemed like a bit of an overpay but it wasn’t that far above the going rate and, more importantly, if Batum didn’t get that money in Charlotte, he’d likely have gotten a similar amount elsewhere. Their entire roster is built this way – guys signed in good faith on the part of the organization for a few dollars more here and there. The problem being, of course, that in 2018, none of these guys are any good any more. They’re old or hurt or whatnot, so now Charlotte has a bad team with a bad roster that’s also an expensive roster. Their best player, Kemba Walker, is only their 5th-highest paid player. They’re up against the tax, which they do not want to pay. (The legendary competitive drive Michael Jordan had as a player does not seem to extend quite as much as an owner when it comes to absorbing extra cost.) The only way to create some financial relief is by attaching something they want to a trade of something they don’t want, since no one else in the league wants $20m+ of Dwight Howard or Nic Batum. The Hornets are not only bad in the present, but they’re completely screwed going forward. Those days in which they were gagging away a first round series against Miami are going to look like the salad days for residents of Buzz City in a couple of years.

So, if you’re a fan of one of these types of teams which dotted the first round of the playoffs – a good team, a playoff team that cannot make it out of the first round and now seems stuck – at least take heart in the fact that your team has been good. There will be plenty of time for theorizing about team building and roster construct this coming summer, but rather than lament about the uncertain future, at least you can bitch here and now in the present about the fact that your team wasn’t very good in a best-of-7 series.

• No team was worse in a best-of-7 series than the Portland Trail Blazers, who were swept by New Orleans and played a supporting role in this year’s edition of Small Sample Size Theatre, in that getting thumped so convincingly by the Pelicans actually convinced more than a few people that New Orleans was good enough to beat Golden State in the second round. The advanced data would suggest that the Blazers actually generated a decent number of good shots and simply missed them, to which I would respond that missing good shots is Exhibit A of not playing well. More than anything, it was just a bad match-up for the Blazers: they have no one to guard Anthony Davis (who does?), and Jrue Holliday decided it was a good time to remind everyone that he’s one of the better 2-way players in the game and spent the whole series thwarting Dame Lillard. New Orleans were bigger and more assertive defensively, and compounding the problem was the fact that Portland runs the least transition in the NBA, whereas the Pelicans run up and down the floor and play faster than any other team in the league. Being both smaller and slower is not a winning combination.

Immediately in the aftermath, there were rumblings about Terry Stotts possibly losing his head coaching job, which would be stupid. Stotts has done a uniquely good sort of coaching job in Portland the past few years, one in which the Blazers’ continually overachieving during the regularly season saves his boss’ job, because GM Neal Olshey hamstrung this team for the next five years by getting drunk on cap space in the summer of 2016 and doling out awful, unmovable contracts to the likes of Myers Leonard (who?) and Evan Turner – the latter of whom has become the source of fan ire this past season, as if it was somehow his fault that Olshey drove a dump truck full of money up to his house and poured it out in his driveway. It would help if he weren’t next to useless on the floor, of course: every one of the many moments he has the ball in his hand is a moment that neither Dame nor C.J. does, and the greatest advocate of that in the league are the 29 opposing defenses.

Portland’s had the same problem for years now: their backcourt is great and their frontcourt is meh, and at this point every year, the question that arises is, “can you win in the NBA with that backcourt?” Well, sure you can, if your frontcourt isn’t meh. People say the Blazers should trade either Dame or C.J., which is a perverse sort of game of whack-a-mole in which you solve one problem by creating another. They managed to get some salary relief this season by moving third guard Allen Crabbe’s $70m contract to Brooklyn, but the problem was that Crabbe was a guy whose shooting ability the Blazers actually needed. The roster is still a mess.

But it’s been a mess for several years now, and every year Stotts goes back into the laboratory and cooks up a scheme enabling his team to then outperform. They won 49 games and got the 3-seed in the West through some slick offensive sets and through some tenacity on the glass and on the defensive end. There is some frustration in stagnation, of course, but in truth, the Blazers are actually continuing to punch above their weight, and that is noteworthy and admirable. The worst thing they did all year was draw the short straw come playoff seeding time.

• One of my favorite moments in the first round of the playoffs came in Game 1 between the Houston Rockets and the Minnesota Timberwolves. Minnesota were down three with 8.8 seconds remaining, having been just thrown a lifeline in the form of Chris Paul throwing a pass into the stands. Minnesota needs a three to tie, and they are inbounding from their own sideline in the backcourt.

As it turns out, the Wolves have, on their roster, one unique player who is useful in this circumstance: Jamal Crawford. Crawford may be a day older than coal, but he can still create a 3-point shot for himself. He’s one of the best ever at doing that. (Now, whether it goes in or not is another story, but you can say that about every guy on the Wolves who puts up a three.) Furthermore, he is indisputably the best ever at creating a 4-point shot for himself. This is important because the Rockets are likely to foul, forcing Minnesota to shoot two down three, but Crawford’s good enough at getting up his own shot that the Rockets would have to be extremely careful not to give three free throws to Jamal, who is also a 90% foul shooter. You couldn’t think of a better player to have in this situation.

And the Houston Rockets respond to this threat by covering Jamal Crawford with … James Harden, whose defensive deficiencies are the stuff of NBA folklore. 
And Houston does this, of course, because they know exactly what Minnesota is going to do, which is have all of the on-court awareness of a traffic cone. Minnesota will throw the ball in to Jimmy Butler, who will go down and try to shoot it himself, because that’s what Minnesota always does in these situations. Houston is so sure this is going to happen that they put a guy who can’t guard his own shoes on the Wolves’ best option for getting up a quick three. 
And sure enough … Butler gets the ball, the Wolves stand around and do nothing, he’s picked up by the Rockets best defender, P.J. Tucker, who doesn’t actually have to foul him because Butler dribbles into a no-man’s land, and he winds up taking a spinning turnaround long two, as his foot is on the line. Bad shot, bad play, game over, Wolves lose a game that could possibly have been stolen.

And that’s not to knock Jimmy Butler. I love me some Jimmy Butler, and he did all he can in the playoffs after returning from knee surgery. But what it speaks to is the complete lack of awareness, and lack of any sort of coherent offensive plan, which runs rampant through the entirety of Timberwolves. And that alone makes any meeting with the Rockets a pending disaster, because one of the things the Rockets do, which I love, is dare their opponents to actually pay attention. 

As an example, the Rockets switch everything on defense. They’re perfectly content to do so, even if, at times, it means their guards are matched-up with bigs underneath. This is because the Rockets do the math: as explained previously here by Mike D’Antoni’s brother, the post-up is one of the most inefficient plays in the game. They know that teams will break down their normal offensive patterns when they see a switch of a guard onto a big down low and try to force the action, and that teams will mess-up the cross-matches going back down the floor. They want to try and bait their opponents and fool them into doing this. Having said that, the Rockets are also stubborn in how they will adhere to what they’re doing, sometimes to a fault. They’re not going to change what they do even if it’s not working – which is how they got thumped by the Spurs in last year’s playoffs, when the Spurs yielded whole areas of the floor where the Rockets could take shots and the Rockets refused to take them. If, for example, you design some primary actions whereby you can get small Houston guards switched down low on a talented and offensively-skilled big, your guy can eat and eat really well, and keep on eating because Houston will keep switching. Gosh, if only Minnesota had one of those types of guys on their team.

Oh, wait, they do. Karl-Anthony Towns. Remember him?

And what is KAT doing when the Rockets switch on the primary action and he’s matched up against someone like Chris Paul, who is something like nine inches shorter than him? He’s routinely, systematically drifting off into the corner to “preserve the spacing” on the play. What the hell is that? Seriously, what the fuck is wrong is you? That should be an instant read – CP3 is switched onto KAT, feed the big guy in the post and let him eat. But instead, you have KAT scoring 5 points in playoff losses and rarely seeing the ball, and you’ve got Thibs saying “Karl has to be more assertive on the offensive end” in the post-game interviews after playoff losses, and I’m wondering if KAT being more assertive involves him saying, “give me the motherfucking ball, motherfucker,” in order to get their attention. That’s generally not a great way to endear yourself to teammates, but given how hard-headed everyone in Minnesota is, it may be the only way. 

Seriously, I’ve hated literally everything I’ve seen from Minnesota for the past two seasons. That they somehow finished with the 4th-rated offense in the NBA this season speaks to how flawed the metric is for rating offenses. The Wolves have gone all-in on loading up on guys who can create their own shot. The downside to that is that no one on this team can actually pass the basketball, and even worse, they don’t appear to be able to think their way through a game – which doesn’t really bode well when you’re playing against teams that actually know what they’re doing. If the primary action of a Minnesota play doesn’t work, everyone on the court collectively shrugs and then whomever has the ball just goes one-on-one.

Oh yeah, and the defense sucks.

That they were even close to winning several of their games with Houston stemmed from the fact that the Rockets didn’t play all that well and couldn’t throw the ball in the Gulf of Mexico. (50 point quarter in Game 4 aside.) And most of the narrative about the Wolves falls along the lines of “a young team that needs to grow,” which belies the fact that they really aren’t all that young, save for KAT and Anthony Wiggins, who is sending Glen Taylor scrounging through the desk drawer and looking for the receipts after giving Wiggins a max contract. 

Tom Thibodeau has parlayed his role as the defensive mastermind of the 2008 NBA champion Boston Celtics first into a head gig in Chicago and then as a head coach and president in Minnesota – a combo of jobs which proves to be a bad one most of the time – and while me, the Celtics admirer, genuinely appreciates what he did in Boston, the fact is that the 2008 Celtics are one of the most unremarkable and self-important NBA champions in history. Yet he’s managed to con people into thinking he’s a good coach, parlaying that Boston success into conning first the Bulls, and then Minnesota, into thinking he’s some sort of coaching guru when his offensive schemes are pre-historic, and for some reason he gets amazing leeway when it comes to signing old Chicago wash-ups like Derek Rose and needlessly playing two bigs and running an offense that wasn’t even cutting edge in 1998. The Wolves win games in spite of him. Their guys just make shit up and occasionally the ball goes in the basket. Not to mention the fact that he is grossly overplaying guys, just like he did in Chicago, which shortened quite a few careers there. And meanwhile, the defense still sucks.

And since Minnesota is so starved for success – they hadn’t made the playoffs in 14 years – and because they had to endure the absence of Butler for two months in the middle of the season due to a knee injury, Thibs will likely get a pass for this team’s truly gross performance. But there is enough individual talent on this team to add up to more than an 8-seed in the playoffs. This team should have been better than it was. It shouldn’t have been playing a play-in game in game 82 of the regular season of the Nuggets just to make the playoffs in the first place. That it did speaks to a level of general incompetence in the organization, but you can’t remove the coach in this sort of situation because, as we’ve seen elsewhere, that would require the exec who is also the coach to admit that he the coach doesn’t know what he’s doing.

• If Joe Prunty weren’t already a lame duck coach in Milwaukee, his in-game decision making in Game 7 would have constituted a fireable offense. Leading 15-12 late in the first quarter, Prunty decided to turn to his bench … 

The Celtics went on a 20-2 run to close out the quarter, and the Bucks were running uphill from there.

Jesus, what an incoherent mess of a team. The Bucks have all of these long, rangy types, and yet their defense couldn’t stop conceding wide open shots to a Celtics team that was desperately in need of wide open shots in order to succeed, given that their two best offensive players are on the shelf. They would foolishly overhelp and leave open shooters, they would reach on defense late in the shot clock and pick up needless fouls and concede free throws. Brad Stevens took what the Bucks defense gave them: his two slashers were filling those gaps, Horford was patient in the post game and worked the Bucks down low, and Scary Terry Rozier used the lack of attention span from the Milwaukee guards against them time and again. 

On the offensive end, meanwhile, you’d wind up with nonsense like three Bucks all standing within two feet of each other on the block, while on more than one occasion a Bucks 2-man game got stymied by running into their own guy, a third guy standing in a spot where he wasn’t supposed to be. Every player on the Bucks has a tell. You know what they’re going to do from the moment they get the ball. Giannis can win games on his own even if you know what he’ll do ahead of time, but he can’t win all the games by himself. Not yet, anyway.

And Giannis is still our future overlord, of course, but Giannis still has lots of bad habits on both ends of the floor – habits due, in part, to the fact that the Bucks don’t do anything to make the game easier for him. The obvious ploy in this series, of course, was to play Giannis at center, put the ball in his hands at the top of key and let him go to work – but that lineup fares badly for Milwaukee because the other four guys on the court can’t figure out where it is they’re supposed to be at any given time, so Giannis has no good passing angles and can thus be at least be slowed down, if not stopped completely. Even worse, whichever empty suit is patrolling the sidelines can’t even figure out which four guys should be out there with Giannis playing center to begin with. 

If I’m the Bucks, knowing now that Mike Budenholzer has worked his way out of a job in Atlanta, I’m calling him immediately. Coach Bud got far more accomplished in Atlanta with far fewer raw materials than Giannis and also Khris Middleton, who was just a stone-cold assassin in this series. There is a lot of chaff on the roster, of course, and there is a big question of what they’ll do with Jabari Parker – he of the -39 rating in 29 minutes in game 7, a skilled offensive player who seemingly can’t guard a chair and who has unfortunately missed two whole seasons with knee injuries. I’d be inclined to let him walk as a free agent this summer, but then again, if you had a coach with a clue, maybe he could carve out a scheme in which Jabari’s considerable offensive upside could be realized.

This was a huge missed opportunity for the Bucks. They played like garbage most of the season, but maneuvered themselves into a favorable match-up in the first round with a beat-up Boston side. Having the best player in the series on your team is usually a huge advantage. We’d have thought going in that was the case for the Bucks with Giannis, but unfortunately for Milwaukee, it turns out the best player in this series was Brad Stevens.

• I was grateful for this ESPN deep-dive, published yesterday, in which they attempt to discern just what in the hell is going on with Kawhi Leonard in San Antonio. This was actually an underreported story during the regular season. If this had been going on in Cleveland, given that franchise’s propensity for self-creating drama, it would have been splashed constantly across every site in the country. I know the Spurs want to be low-key about everything, and I know Kawhi Leonard wants to maintain a low profile in the media, but we just went through a season where one of the five best players in the world missed 73 games and then the entire playoff series with a mysterious injury that’s never been fully explained, and somehow this was of less importance than talking about “WHAT’S WRONG WITH THE WARRIORS?” which is nothing, and “WHAT’S WRONG WITH CLEVELAND?” which is … well, how much time do you have …

And I was really looking forward to seeing what Kawhi was going to do this year. He’s added elements to his game every summer. I sort of anticipated that Kawhi would work to improve his playmaking, given that the Spurs were desperate for point guard play last season. He’d tighten up his handle, he’s got the feel and vision and basketball IQ to become an excellent passer … Kawhi running the point? Jesus, that could’ve been cool.

But instead, we got no Kawhi this year. Instead, we had this injury mystery – and to be clear here from the get-go, I have ZERO doubt that Kawhi was truly injured. Kawhi doesn’t want to waste time on the sidelines. Basketball players want to play basketball. And team doctors can say that guys are ‘cleared to play’ all they want to, but if guys don’t feel like they’re ready to play, they shouldn’t be playing. Guys know their own bodies better than anyone else.

But everything else about this story speaks of mistrust between team and player – or, as framed frequently by the Spurs, between team and player’s entourage – and as that ESPN story explains, there are all these weird ulterior motives seemingly at play, and there is an enormous frustration level now for everyone involved – for Kawhi, for the team, for the players, for Coach Pop. The Spurs brass are understandably a bit miffed at the moment, and now have to decide if they want to invest $219 million in an extension for a guy who they think stiffed them for a whole season.

Kawhi’s absence, of course, exposed just how awful the Spurs offseason was. They’d positioned themselves well to try and land Chris Paul, and were caught off-guard when CP3 decided to go and play off-guard in Houston. They gave away lots of future flexibility to the likes of 30-somethings like Pau Gasol and Rudy Gay and an LaMarcus Aldridge extension. Aldridge was a beast this season, mind you, playing at an all-NBA level and earning every penny of it, but the Spurs are even older and slower than before, and they looked completely hopeless against the Warriors in the playoffs. But, of course, put the world’s best 2-way player out there on the floor, and the Spurs would suddenly have been a legit challenger to the Dubs and the Rockets. That’s how good Leonard is, which is why they’re going to have to bite the bullet and offer him the $219m. If they don’t offer it, he’s gone, and you simply cannot get enough value back in trade.

The Spurs were such a bummer this year. Oh sure, they did what they usually did, which was out-execute all of the bad teams, and enough of the visiting teams, in order to rack up a decent number of wins, but they were horrible on the road and against the good teams, where the scheme couldn’t compensate for the overall lack of talent. If anything, the entire Kawhi saga has served to nuke that narrative of the perpetual motion machine that the Spurs have built up in the past two decades. They’re prone to the same sorts of bickering and in-fighting and sniping as every other franchise in the league. And so too did the gloss and lustre come off of Kawhi the quiet superstar. Even if he’s legitimately injured, which I believe he is, the optics of it all have been bad.

Oh and one more thing about the Spurs: Manu Ginobili is not allowed to retire. Few people bring the joy and the imagination to the game quite like Manu does, so he cannot leave. He must play until he 80. There. We’ve voted on it.

• Speaking of bickering and sniping and in-fighting, here’s a live look-in at the goings-on in Washington:

When Giannis says, in the aftermath of losing to the Celtics in Game 7, that he felt like the Bucks were the better team, you can at least see his point if you squint and look hard enough. If any member of the Washington Wizards does that after their meek exit in six games against Toronto, you’re reminded that this team would be better served if someone went and got a gag order issued by a judge. And then you have John Wall coming out in his postseason presser and throwing all of his teammates under the bus, apparently having also thrown under the bus the mirror that he should be looking into, since he’s part of the problem.

All you need to know about how dysfunctional this team was this past season was that a team with big aspirations, and big opinions of itself, managed to only go 21-15 against sub-.500 teams. Given that so many of the sub-.500 teams were actively trying to lose games this year, to rack up 15 losses against that sorry lot is only possible with a lack of focus and cohesion. In a year where the East was wide open, given that Boston lost Gordon Hayward five minutes into the season and Cleveland was a festering cesspool, a team that was actually as good as the Buzzards think they are would’ve been up at the top of the standings from the get-go and managing their roster down the stretch to prepare for the playoffs. As it were, John Wall then is forced to miss two months with a knee injury, the team is in trouble and has to scramble to get an 8-seed in the playoffs.

Now, to be fair here, it’s unclear just how many of the early season struggles of the Wiz owed to the fact that Wall’s knee was killing him. That doesn’t help matters. He was clearly struggling. But then, lo and behold, he goes out of the lineup and, at first, they win some games! And the ball movement is good, the offense is crisp, and you’ve got a few people starting to whisper that maybe Washington is actually better without John Wall – which they aren’t, of course, as this run of play had more to do with the fact that the other guys on this team came to realize that they’d goofed off for much of the season, their margin of error was now gone, and they needed to actually focus and start playing better. But, of course, this being the Buzzards, where everyone involved appears to hate one-another, guys were suddenly talking about great “team” wins on social media in what were considered by every Buzzards observer to be poorly concealed jabs at Wall and his propensity for hoarding the ball.

And I love me some John Wall. Wall becoming a daredevil going 100 mph on the fast break is one of the most breathtaking things in the sport. But whereas I’d be worried, as an opposing coach, about what do against Wall, that’s still better than being terrified about Bradley Beal, which is what should happen because the guy can be just unguardable at times. Oh wait, I know how to guard him – let the Wizards do it for me! Let Wall pound the rock and go one-on-one and only throw it to Beal in bad areas of the floor. And as much as I love Wall in the open floor, the guy takes a beating. He’s got bad knees already and he’s due another $160m in the next four years – yeech – and he’s going to have to modify his game. He can do that, of course, but pretty much everyone in Washington has to, at this point, which would require them to, oh, you know, maybe actually play as a team and try listening to a coach for a change. They’re going to have to, given how much of their cap is eaten up by the enormous contract of Wall and the maxes doled out to Beal and Otto Porter (whose injury didn’t help matters against Toronto). They managed to make enough small moves to cobble together a bench unit this season that wasn’t an affront to the game of basketball, but no big moves are coming.

I felt a little bad for Scotty Brooks. I’ve never thought he was a particularly good coach, and he certainly should be used to not being listened to after having coached OKC, but he looked exasperated by the end of the season, as the Wiz were coughing up 19-point 4th Quarter leads in Cleveland and blowing games to tank commanders like Orlando – games they needed to win to avoid getting stuck playing Toronto in the first round. Scotty was clearly wondering what he has gotten himself into.
This team was a colossal disappointment, a mix of bombast and bluster, a heap of dung and slag. It was the type of team which teases you with their potential but never leaves you feeling satisfied.

• I generally don’t watch much of the Miami Heat, because I find them to be generally unwatchable. Their defensive strategy seems to be to foul the opposition repeatedly on every single play and dare the officials to call it. The offense doesn’t work all that well, either, and there are stretches of their games where they look like a lottery team. Other than Goran Dragić, I’m not sure there is a single player on their team that I’d actually want. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I missed the Dion Waiters Experience this season, as he was out after an ankle injury, and he took with him the irrational confidence and wild shotmaking ability that made Miami fun a season ago. I wasn’t the only one who missed Waiters. Miami really could have used his offense this postseason.

Waiters revived his career in Miami, and was rewarded with a nice contract. This has been the way that Miami does business over the years. You come to Miami, you buy into what they do, you play well, and they tend to reward you with a contract that’s generally above market rate in terms of both dollars and years. And this is a commendable way of doing business, an admirable way and one of the reasons why Miami is considered a top-notch organization. 

But it’s not useful to have a whole team of guys with extra-long, extra-pricy deals if none of them are actually very good. There is a feel-good and collegial sort of vibe to this team, and a sense of strength in numbers, in that Coach Spo will plug and play any and everyone on the roster to good effect at times, but it was so abundantly clear during their first round defeat to the 76ers just how disparate the levels of talent were between the two teams.

And you can certainly understand why Miami wants to keep doing what they’ve been doing, given that they’ve won three titles, but not even repeated acts of sorcery from Spo can masque the fact that the roster is not very good. Another problem seems to be that they are stuck in their own nostalgia at times. The return of Dwyane Wade from Cleveland at the trade deadline amused me, in that the Heat were winning a lot of close games in crunch time, but given his equity with the franchise, Wade was bound to wind up being inserted in crunch time lineups when, by all rights, he had no business being there. To his credit, Wade got in shape upon returning to Miami and provided a few vintage moments here and there, including a great performance in their lone playoff win, but this was in no way a viable solution. If anything, it was a solution that went searching for a problem. They were fine in close games with their close-to-the-vest approaches. It was when they needed to open up the games that the Heat struggled, as they are lacking playmakers.

And the other big issue, which reared its ugly head in the playoffs, is the fact that Miami has invested an ungodly amount of money in center Hassan Whiteside, who got played off the floor by Joel Embiid and then bitched about his role to the press to such an extent that Pat Riley felt the need to respond. This was one of the sneakily bad contracts given out in the summer of 2016, and one that was made worse by the circumstances. Remember, the Heat were one of the teams Kevin Durant was willing to take a meeting with in the Hamptons that summer, but before that meeting occurred, they dumped $100 million into Whiteside – and while there was no guarantee KD would want to come to Miami, that gargantuan deal made it virtually impossible for the Heat to put that deal together even if KD did. And I have no idea why anyone in Miami thought that it was a good idea to invest so much in a less-than-complete player like Hassan Whiteside in the first place, much less one with a propensity for selfish play, and much less even still who is playing a position which has never been so less in demand. 
Nor do I have any idea why felt a need to match the offer for backup point guard Tyler Johnson given in RFA by Brooklyn. I mean, I like Tyler Johnson, but the Nets poison pilled and backloaded the deal, and the contract explodes starting next year to $19m a year. (The Nets, who had nothing to lose, used this ploy on Washington and Portland as well, offering wacko deals to RFA’s Allen Crabbe and Otto Porter that the others felt they had to match – the moral of the story being that if you have to hold your nose and do it, don’t do it.) Guys like Whiteside and Johnson are not  guys you can really build around and win with, and they are unmovable guys now! You can’t do that!

And what should be one of the league’s glorious franchises is, in fact, rather unsightly. The Heat were completely out of ideas against Philadelphia, and seemed far more determined to want to try and fight the Sixers than try to beat them playing basketball, but the Sixers wouldn’t take the bait. But when it came to actually playing the game, the Sixers simply blew them away.

• One team that didn’t get blown away was Indiana. In fact, the Pacers followed up last season’s playoff performance against Cleveland, where they set a record for the best point differential for a team that got swept (-16), by setting a record this year against Cleveland for the best point differential for a team that lost in seven games (+40). If any of these vanquished sides this year can make a legit claim that they were the better team in their series, it’s Indiana – and that’s with LeBron absolutely playing out of his mind, no less. By the eye test, the Pacers were the better team, and the better team lost.

And it was a frustrating series to watch, because Indiana could have won all seven of the games. The Pacers are sort of a strange team, in that they’re sort of a versatile bunch of generalists who don’t have that much of an identity. They shoot well from three, but don’t shoot many threes, in part because they also shoot well from two. They started out the season playing among the fastest teams in the league, but by the end of the year, they were playing among the slowest. They’ve got a bunch of guys whose greatest strengths seem to be, above all else, that they know what they’re doing, with the idea being that Indy can throw a whole bunch of competent guys out on the floor at any time and carry on, and yet it was in all of these small moments here and there in this series where the Pacers would lose focus and make mental mistakes – turn the ball over or fail to properly execute breaking a trap - that ended up costing them this series. They could never seem to settle on what kind of an approach they wanted to take to attacking the Cavs – a team whose defensive flaws are many, so it’s not like you’re lacking for choice. Indiana could run them up and down, could drive it to the basket, could do whatever they wanted ... but never seemed to make up their minds. And the one thing the Pacers have never done well is rebound, which killed them in Game 7, as the Cavs dominated the offense glass to both create extra possessions and slow the game down – which proved crucial, given how LeBron was gassed by the end of this series and running on fumes.

As annoying as this series was to watch, and as frustrated as the Indianapolis faithful most certainly are after losing yet again to LeBron in the playoffs, this has been a really nice year for the Pacers. They are different from all of these aforementioned first round losers in that they’ve got considerable room to grow. They’ve got money to spend, and they’ve got a core of young players to build around. They far exceeded any and all expectations, having gone off in Vegas with an O/U of around 30 wins at the start of the year, and GM Kevin Pritchard struck it rich by trading Paul George to OKC for Victor Oladipo – who will win the NBA’s Most Improved Player award and who received MVP votes – as well as center Domantas Sabonis – miscast as a stretch four in OKC and showing great potential now in Indy in his more natural position. Everyone, including me, thought this was a terrible trade for the Pacers, one which was somewhat cynically done so that the Hoosiers buying tickets in the Fieldhouse would be mollified by seeing, out on the floor, one of their favorite adopted sons in Oladipo. But Oladipo showed up to camp in great shape, ready to push the pace and run the offense, and he was terrific all year. Funnily enough, when you tell guys in the NBA that their role is to be furniture, they act like a piece of furniture, which is basically what Oladipo was last year in OKC, and now the $80 million extension he signed while in OKC, which felt destined to be an albatross, suddenly looks like a great value contract.

Oh yeah, and speaking of OKC …

• I saved the best for last here, but I’m going to attempt to write about the sound and the fury signifying absolutely nothing that was OKC in the most objective way possible. And this is hard for me to do, of course, because I hate that franchise with a passion, and find an OKC loss to be the most enjoyable thing in all of the sport. But here goes, so bear with me.

Perhaps the best line about OKC which I heard all year came from ESPN’s Royce Young, who said that OKC could take any team to seven games in a series – they could take Houston or Golden State to seven games, or they could take Phoenix or Sacramento to seven games. They were all over the place. Once this supposed ‘superteam’ had been constructed, with Paul George coming from Indiana, and with Carmelo Anthony coming from New York in exchange for Enes “Can’t Play” Kanter, they were going to be a worthy challenger to the Warriors for supremacy in the West. Oh, of course, it would take some time to ‘figure it out,’ but come playoff time, this would be a dangerous team and legitimate threat.

And not once did I ever believe that. 
There would be glimpses, of course – they’d beat the Warriors or put 148 up on Cleveland or win at Toronto – but ultimately, whatever success this team could garner was unsustainable, as it was entirely dependent upon their ‘Big 3’ making tough, contested shots since, yet again, the offense was a complete quagmire and literally nothing ever came easily for anyone.

And it’s always been that way at OKC. The ball doesn’t move. It stops and everyone else stops as well. A first action doesn’t work, and the default setting is for Russell Westbrook to just do something, anything. 

Which, frankly, is the way that Westbrook seems to want it. His competitive drive is unquestioned, and I truly think that Russ does what he does on the floor because he truly believes it gives his team the best chance to win. A lot of nights, he’s proved correctly, in fact. And while I’m not interested in going back and deconstructing the MVP race from a year ago, I firmly believe that the way in which OKC plays – with one guy dominating the ball while everyone else stands around waits for the scraps – is not a winning strategy. The narrative was that Russ had “no help” in a 47-win, 5-game playoff season. So Presti goes out and gets him help in PG13 and Melo, and it results in a 48-win, 6-game playoff season. 

And it’s impossible to say what does and doesn’t constitute “help” because it’s impossible to view anyone on this roster outside of a Russ-related context. People have tried to make the case regarding Oladipo that he wasn’t the same player a year ago, but how would you even know that, since he almost never was on the floor without Westbrook, and had to be subservient to Russ’ whims. Same goes for Steven Adams – a promising young center and a definite badass, but someone who is almost never on the court without Russ. What can he actually do on his own? I have no idea. The bench has been so worthless that it almost seems like it is deliberately constructed in an attempt to make Russ look better, since OKC always looks completely hopeless whenever he is off the floor. Everything about this team, for the past two years, has felt artificial and contrived, with the entire narrative being “look how great our small-town hero Russ is.”
At no point did I ever believe they were ‘figuring it out’ this season, and whatever flashy moments of brilliance occurred obscured the greater reality that this team really wasn’t very good. My most retweeted foray onto twitter of all time came in response to Russ mashing a dunk and stomping around and scowling against Charlotte, which drew oohs and aahs from the Russ stans out there, and completely ignored the fact that Charlotte responded to said dunk by going on a 22-2 run and handing OKC yet another confounding loss in a season of confounding losses. OKC apologists could also point to the devastating injury sustained by defensive specialist Andre Roberson, which was a real downer, as something which undid their season, but if your season is really being undone by a guy who can’t shoot a lick, perhaps you’re not as close to élite as you think. They played down to their competition repeatedly, struggling regularly with the Dallases and the Phoenixes and the Sacramentos of the world, all the while saying they would ‘figure it out,’ but never actually doing so, because there was nothing really to figure out.
This team was a fraud. It was a fraud from the get-go, and I’m amazed that anyone bought into it. Actually no, I’m not, because it’s the same group of people who think Russ ‘plays harder’ than everyone else simply because he stomps around and scowls.

A phenomenal and inspired comeback, led by Russ and PG13, from 25 down against Utah in Game 5 saved the season, but they were down 3-1 in the first place because of their nonsensical defending of Utah’s pick-and-rolls and because of Westbrook deciding he wanted to shut down Ricky Rubio, after Rubio lit him up for a triple-double in Game 3, and then wasting his time picking up four fouls in the first half of Game 4 doing that, while the Jazz just shrugged off this made-up beef and went about running more pick-and-rolls which OKC couldn’t defend. It was such a selfish and small performance by Westbrook, who then atoned for his sins in Game 5, and who then took 43 shots in their Game 6 loss, including 19 threes, which was both preposterous and, quite possibly, necessary since everyone on the offense just stood around and waited for him to do something. As much as I don’t like the way Russell Westbrook plays and think that he pads numbers and chases stats, there has never been any sort of a coherent strategy in place to do anything besides that. You can’t play this way and hope to win, but good luck getting Russ to change. (Now he can do what he wants, remember?) 

And now OKC is in a mess. They swung for the fences and they whiffed, and going out meekly in the first round of the playoffs is an unquestioned disaster. This entire season was intended to be a sales pitch and an audition to the soon-to-be free agent George, but even if he wants to re-sign for OKC – which seems unlikely, given their awful performance this season – their cap situation is dire: including luxury taxes, the cost of reassembling this team next season would run well over $200 million, to which ownership will rightly ask why it is they are paying over $200 million for a 5-seed. It would help matters if Anthony would opt out of the $28m he is owed next season, because he is miscast as a catch-and-shoot guy, can’t guard anyone, and was routinely hunted by the Utah offense to the point where head coach Billy Donovan had to bench him in the playoffs, which is pretty much the only decisive thing Donovan’s done in the last three years. But there is no way in hell that Anthony would do that, since he isn’t likely to garner more than a fifth of that amount on the open market. Volume shooters who hoard the ball and can’t shoot from three and can’t defend aren’t exactly en vogue in the NBA, except in OKC, of course, where they already have one of those guys in Westbrook and definitely don’t need another.
And while I revel in OKC failure, the fact is that if the effort on the court had matched the effort it took to compile this team, OKC would probably still be playing. That Oladipo and Sabonis bloomed in Indianapolis while George is likely to walk, and Kanter had a nice year in New York while Anthony was a bust, doesn’t change the fact that they were trades GM Sam Presti looked, at the time, as if he’d won. They were, at the time, seemingly no-brainer trades. And even if he didn’t win those deals, it was worth it to try. When trading for Chris Paul, Rockets GM Daryl Morey said that thanks to the dominance of the Warriors, it was necessary for Houston to “raise the risk profile.” Doing so is quite likely going to lead to one helluva good series in the Western Conference Finals. And I would much prefer to be profiling teams that take big risks, try to amass talent and wind up missing than those who simply give up and throw away multiple seasons trying to amass ping-pong balls. We can question the methods and mistakes, but ultimately, losing in the playoffs is the right sort of losing.