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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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.
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| 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.
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.
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.
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| 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?
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?
