 |
| Who knew curling was so hazardous? |
THE LOSE is not into curling, which is basically shuffleboard while being cold. If I’m going to play shuffleboard, it’s going to be on the deck of a cruise ship with a festive rum drink in my hand. I will admit, however, that I ventured into a curling club near to my home out of curiosity, and the club director game me the hard sell: “We have league night every Saturday, and we have a keg of beer.” Now that’s my kind of sales pitch right there! And I’ll give curling some props because it’s the only sport in the Winter Olympics that a normal person could actually do, which adds a niche sort of watchability of it, and it’s also one of the few sports where being great at it doesn’t require cheating death. That said, were I to curl, with my unsnug 2x4 of a right foot, I’d probably find a way to hurt myself, most likely doing something stupid like falling over the stones, which I’ve now seen two competitors do, the most recent being one of the Russian mixed doubles team.
Oh, wait, that’s the “Olympic Athletes from Russia” mixed doubles team. The fact that you have to use that phrase in these Olympics is one of the dumbest things ever and speaks to how ridiculous that supposed “ban” levied by the IOC against Russia really is – they threw the Russians out of the Olympics, and yet there is 160+ of their athletes competing. The argument put forth is that you shouldn’t punish the athletes who have never tested positive for any sort of performance enhancing drug, and I can see that reasoning, but the whole bloody point of throwing the Russians out of the Winter Olympics in the first place was to say that given there has been systematic doping and total lack of oversight and compliance, it’s impossible to assume that anyone involved in that structure isn’t cheating. They are assumed to be doing so since you’ve gone out of your way to cover it up!
But no, instead, the IOC decided to pussyfoot it in deference to political and monetary forces, which is their way when it comes to this sort of thing. As I’ve said previously, I’ll take the IOC seriously about their desire to supposedly stamp out all drug-related cheating from its midst when it goes back and expunges every single medal ever won by an East German, because everyone knows they were doping and there are plenty of records in the archives to prove it. This ridiculous grandstanding on the part of the IOC in the run up to the Olympics in more farcical and hollow than if they’d done nothing at all.
In the meantime, I should ask any number of cyncial figure skating fans among my circle of friends if, instead of using the term “SWR” to explain ridiculously marked up scores for skaters from that part of the world, they’re now using “SWOAR” instead.
- - -
 |
| Oh for fucksake |
It seems odd to me that the Winter Olympics in Korea have so far been hampered by, well, by winter. I mean, isn’t the whole point of the event that it takes place in snowy and icy conditions? But the cold and the snow and, worst of all, the winds have made a mess of some of the events on the slopes. They’ve already had to restructure the entire Alpine skiing program because of the high winds, rescheduling three races and so severely rejigging a fourth, the men’s Combined, that it pretty much took all of the fun and joy and drama out of the event – the idea being that the speed guys will go super duper fast in the Downhill portion, and then the technicians will try to reel them back in with the Slalom, but then they lopped a huge chunk of the Downhill off and made it pretty much impossible for any of speed dæmons to have any chance of winning the overall title. The high winds severely curtailed the slopestyle snowboarding event, which is one of the most truly beautiful and jawdroppingly awesome events in the entire Games, and when it came for the women’s event, it basically rendered the course unplayable, with competitors falling all over the place. It clearly wasn’t safe for the athletes to be out there and the event never should have happened. But it did happen, and the competitors are fuming over the fact that they felt they’d been put at risk – and rightfully so.
But I have to say that I’ve read a whole bunch of stuff from columnists and journalists decrying how little concern both the IOC and the FIS – skiing’s governing body – had for the women’s snowboarders in deciding to allow this competition to continue, and I find the amount of indignation over this somewhat curious, because this is the Olympics that we’re dealing with here, this is the IOC, and anyone who thinks the IOC truly gives two shits about the concerns of the athletes is fooling themselves. Why would you be surprised by how all of this came about? Athletes come and go, they have short careers and simply pass through history, whereas this nonsense concept of the “Olympic ideal” has been around since the ancient Greeks.
Ultimately, the reason why you should be concerned about the IOC’s handling of a state-supported doping case is not because state-supported dopers have an unfair competitive advantage, but it’s because taking those sorts of drugs can kill people! This is why the message put forth by the IOC in regards to the ‘OAR’ is so troublesome – oh, hey, you just go on ahead and keep on doping over there, and win some medals and such, and if some kid drops dead in one of your training centers pumped full of this junk, well hey, at least they’re out of the public eye when it happens. And that sort of catastrophic event, unfortunately, is what it takes to get someone’s attention. It didn’t occur to anyone that maybe, just maybe, you shouldn’t be designing luge tracks where sliders can go 90 mph until a Georgian crashed off the course at Whistler and 2010 and was killed – but by that point, of course, it’s too late to do anything about it. So a few gals on snowboards got blown around in the wind the other day. Well, you know, no one died, so ultimately it wasn’t so bad, now was it? On with the show! The show must go on!
The Olympics are, first and foremost, a television program. We’d all like to think it’s an athletic competition above all, but it’s not. It’s a TV program. Networks rule the roost, come hell or high water, and the sports have to fit the proper programming windows around the world, which is why you have figure skaters doing routines at 9:30 in the morning and why biathletes are shooting in the dark. Athletes are entertainers, first and foremost, and what history has shown, time and again, is that behind every entertainer is some shyster or scofflaw who benefits far more from the entertainer’s labor than they themselves do.
- - -
 |
| The Suns with an interesting variation on moving without the ball |
One of my Christmas presents from The Official Spouse of In Play Lose is a pair of tickets to see the Sea Dubs – the Santa Cruz Warriors, the
“I’m going to be the first to say it. They’ve got to send the whole Phoenix team to the G League for that. I’m sorry. Except Devin Booker and T.J. Warren. The rest of them have got to go to the G League.”
– Denver Nuggets guard Will Barton
The Phoenix Suns have reached a new level of ineptitude, a depth at which they are no longer simply incompetent but are, in fact, contemptible. Watching the Phoenix Suns will make you hate the game of basketball. A week ago, in the first game of the ESPN doubleheader, Cleveland and Minnesota played one of more exhilarating games we’ve seen in the NBA all season, with the Cavs winning 130:128 in OT on a buzzer-beater by LeBron in a game where the two teams combined to sink 40 3-pointers, which is an NBA record – and whatever good vibes you may have had from seeing the game played at a spectacular level were almost immediately erased in the nightcap, as the Suns proceeded to score all of 9 points in the 1st Quarter, allow the Kawhi-less Spurs to score 41 points in the 2nd Quarter, and trail by as many as 53 before ultimately losing by 48 … at home, no less. Only a last-second alley oop dunk by the Suns prevented them from joining this dubious list of teams who got beat by 50, and it was the worst home loss in franchise history, besting (worsting?) their 47-point loss to Portland in this year’s season opener. It was a hideous and hateful performance by the Suns against San Antonio, one that almost seemed designed to kill your love of the game.
Throw in this past Monday’s 129:83 drubbing here in the Bay Area by the Warriors, and the Suns have now become the first team in 49 years to lose three games by 46 points or more in one season – a laughable result, as the Warriors thought so little of the Suns that Steve Kerr and his coaching staff essentially took the day off, letting the players run the huddles during the timeouts as well as the morning shootaround and film session. And it wasn’t like the Warriors were racing up and down, trying to run up the score. If anything, they went easy on the Suns. The pace wasn’t terribly fast, and the Warriors as much as treated the game like preseason, working on their sets and progressions. Hell, they could’ve won by 60 if they’d wanted to, since the Suns could scarcely string two passes together, routinely had their pockets picked for easy steals, missed open shots, missed contested shots, took bad shots, took even more bad shots and missed all of those as well, messed up their defensive rotations, and played with all the verve of the residents of a morgue. Some people chimed in afterwards and said that the Warriors essentially autopiloting this game was a sign of disrespect to their opponent. Hell yes, it was a sign of disrespect, but the Phoenix Suns disrespect the game of basketball pretty much every time they step on the floor.
The Suns were missing guard Devin Booker in both of these recent 40-point shellackings. Booker is a 24-point a game scorer who is out injured at the moment, and the Suns having 18 wins is a testament to just how good Booker is, since Booker has to basically do everything on his own on the offensive end, seeing as how he has no one competent enough to pass him the ball, nor competent enough to turn his passes into assists. The Suns have the worst defense in the NBA, the second-worst offense, the worst point differential, and the most losses. If anything, their record of 18-40 is an overperformance on their part. To their credit, they get to the foul line more than almost every team in the league, but they also foul more, and thus give up more free throws, than almost every team in the league, which means their games are not only displays of complete incompetence, but are also maddeningly ponderous with all the stops and starts.
The Suns roster is an amalgamation of bad ideas and failed philosophies. They’ve wasted three Top-10 picks on big guys who can’t play, valuing raw upside potential while having no apparatus in place to help those guys actually develop into sound NBA players. Someone asked me after this past draft which of the top prospects I thought would be a bust and I immediately said Suns forward Josh Jackson, who put up a -43 while shooting 4-18 against the Dubs on Monday. I said this not because I think he sucks, but because the Suns are bound to mismanage and misuse him. Their two best players, Booker and T.J. Warren, were taken more towards the middle of the 1st Round in the draft, when the light when on and it suddenly occurred to someone in the Phoenix front office that you should take the best player available. What? Draft a guy that can play? What a concept!
I hate this team. I absolutely hate this team. Whenever I watch this team play, I’m amazed that anyone involved with its construction and operation still has a job. In fact, GM Ryan McDonough actually got a contract extension, though it’s not quite clear what he’s done to deserve it other than have the good fortune of having Booker fall into his lap in the draft. The Suns fired coach Earl Watson three games into the season – two of which were 40-point losses – but interim appointee Jay Triano has done little to distinguish himself apart from drawing up one groovy inbounds play which took advantage of a loophole in the rules no one ever thought of. (There is no goaltending on an inbounds pass because it’s a pass and not a shot.) The Robert Sarver reign of error in Phoenix is reaching pre-Joe Lacob Warriors era levels of despair, having taken over what was a franchise known throughout its history for playing high-level, exciting, sometimes revolutionary basketball and driven it straight into the ground.
NBA Tankamania is about to take off after the All-Star break, a full-on race to the bottom with eight teams having 18-19 wins and 37-40 losses among them – and the Knicks seem hell-bent on making it a 9-team race, having given up on the season after the Porzingis injury. I’d put the Suns as favorites to reach the bottom and I wouldn’t even call it tanking, because the Suns are so bad that the operation’s best efforts wouldn’t look much different than its worst. People in the baseball world have gone back and attempted to portray the Houston Astros as having tanked, forgetting that they were truly that bad to begin with, a 110-loss team which also possessed the worst farm system in baseball and had literally become unwatchable, putting up 0.0 ratings on their local TV broadcasts. Much like those Astros, the Suns don’t have to make any special efforts this year to go about being the worst franchise in the NBA. They’re already there.
- - -
So there was high palace intigue at the USSF’s meetings in Orlando last weekend, and the final results left quite a few people unsatisfied, and with good reason. After all, if an organization is serious about reform, and then elects the sitting VP to the top position, the optics wind up looking pretty bad. In the end, Carlos Cordeiro proved to have some pretty savvy political chops, having dared to announce his candidacy for the position before outgoing president Sunil Gulati had decided whether or not he was going to seek reelection, which rankled many of soccer’s top brass but also earned him some cred with those within the organization who wanted change. This allowed him to build enough of a base to defeat the establishment’s preferred candidate, Cathy Carter, and then pivot to the rank-and-file and urge them not to go for one of the anti-establishment candidates, most of whom were former players and none of whom possess any proven business sense. It was well played by Cordeiro, a former Goldman Sachs exec who admits he doesn’t understand as much about soccer as he would like.
What Cordeiro will actually do remains to be seen. He said all of the right things and made all of the right promises – most importantly that he intends to be more inclusive and consensus-building when it comes to decision making. Cordeiro says he intends to hire a GM for both the men’s and women’s programs, which is a start, but he comes off as something of a technocrat whose solution to most problems is going to be to form a committee. This approach makes me nervous, given that committees tend to set out to design horses and wind up designing camels, but given the previous approach, in which an autocrat sees fit to do something as dumb as name Jürgen Klinsmann the technical director, I suppose we can hardly do worse. And as I said before, the USSF has been an overly insular organization, one in which assorted entities have entrenched themselves – and sometimes also enriched themselves – and one of the problems with an insular organization is getting those sorts of people to give up what they have for the greater good. Far too many decisions wind up being made for the benefit of far too few. Cordeiro has stated one of the prime objectives is solidifying the joint U.S./Canada/Mexico bit for the 2026 World Cup – which I’m all in favor of, because given how truly terrible we’ve been as a nation when it comes to developing talent, the automatic bid which comes with being host may be the only way that we can qualify.
That was a joke. Sort of.
The fact of the matter is that the talent development wing of U.S. soccer is broken. It’s too expensive for kids to play, it’s too expensive and time-consuming for adults who want to coach. The entire apparatus is exclusionary in nature, far often becoming a question of one’s ability to pay rather than one’s ability to play. That all needs to change. And this doesn’t just speak to our presently inept men’s national team, either. On the women’s side, one of the great effects of Title IX was that it gifted U.S. soccer an enormous talent advantage over the rest of the world, but as big European clubs continue to see a value in investing resources in the women’s game – which they are starting to do, and will continue to do – that edge is going to get smaller and smaller.
But it’s hard to get the sorts of entrenched self-interests in an organization such as the U.S. Soccer Federation to see the forest through the trees. Everyone involved in this election had skin in the game and potential conflicts were everywhere. What’s clear is that final kingmakers in this election were the Athletes Council, who held more than 20% of the vote and who made sure to vote in a block, thus giving themselves the power to swing the election. What’s not clear is whether or not they acted out of greater interest or out of self-interest. Given the propensity for everyone in the game to squabble over salaries and bonuses and whatnot, the former cannot necessarily be assumed. That’s not to be accusatory, either. I’m just inherently skeptical of the entire process.
The big loser in all of this was MLS, who has been painted as one of the bad guys and an impediment to reform. There’s some good reason for this, of course – it’s an entity which still hasn’t figured out its place in the footballing world, and seems far too self-important for its own good. But the frustration with MLS is also misguided, in that the goal of the league is, first and foremost, to be a good league. That MLS and it’s marketing wing, SUM, have wound up heavily funding and financing the USSF can run counter to that goal. Sure, MLS wants to have good American players coming through the pipeline, but first and foremost, they need a product on the field, and they’re going to use guys from anywhere on the globe they can find in order to make that possible, nationality be damned, which is as it should be. This sort of thing is not new, mind you – people in England bitch all the time about there not being enough English players in the EPL – and the point is that you cannot look to MLS to be a vanguard for the American game as a whole. It should reflect the American game, but not define it.
I don’t know where any of this is going, but as I’ve said previously, I don’t care that the federation is now profitable. Not having money was a legit excuse for not putting out a good product in the 1980s, but here we are missing World Cups in 2018, and that excuse no longer holds. One of the themes we touch on repeatedly here at In Play Lose is that the people who create the problems are very rarely the ones capable of finding the solutions. My hope is that U.S. Soccer will remain mindful of the need for serious reforms and reach outside of itself in search of new ideas. But in the past, everyone involved in U.S. Soccer thought they were doing good things instead of actually going about doing them. It’s hard to reach out when you’re too busy patting yourself on the back.
Do you have any questions you’d like to ask? Would you like to commiserate because your team sucks? Drop me a line! You can email me atinplaylose@gmail.com, and when we get enough questions and comments gathered up, I’ll do another Hate Mail edition of In Play Lose.
