Sunday, December 23, 2018

The Lose of the Year

Tweet of the Year, and possibly the century

GEORGIA had Alabama on the ropes. The Bulldogs imposed their will upon the Crimson Tide in the first half. They held a double digit lead in the 3rd quarter, had the ball in Alabama territory with a chance to knock out the Tide once and for all. But Georgia squandered the chance, let Alabama get back into the game and then proceeded to completely come undone. They played not to lose on offense, forgetting what got them the lead in the first place. The defense, meanwhile, looked like 11 guys running around aimlessly, with no idea what they were doing, when facing Alabama’s backup QB. Panic set in, followed by failure. The end result of all of this for the Bulldogs was a dispiriting, disheartening, come-from-ahead loss and a golden opportunity going awry.

It’s bad enough that Georgia did this in 2018. What’s worse? Doing it twice. Every single thing that I just mentioned above applies to both the Bulldogs losing 26:23 to Alabama in January’s National Championship and losing 35:28 to the Tide at December’s SEC Championship. Even the stadium was the same: the M-B in Atlanta. The only notable difference between the two games was Georgia choosing to run the dumbest play of the year in attempting a fake punt from midfield on 4th-and-11 late in the game with the score tied at 28-all. (A play which Georgia coach Kirby Smith, having learned from the best in Nick Saban and in keeping with every college coach in every sport, made sure to blame on the kids rather than take responsibility for his own dimwitted decision.) Otherwise, the two losses were eerily similar. Blowing the National Championship game alone made the Bulldogs worthy candidates for The Lose of The Year Award. Doing it twice, in the exact same fashion, simply cements their worthiness as nominees.

And in no means is this to say that Georgia are bad. Far from it. They’re an excellent football team who’ve lost four games in two seasons. But two of those losses have come against the gold standard of the sport, and both have involved the Bulldogs coming undone at critical moments and manufacturing a way to wrest defeat from the jaws of victory. This is Lose at the highest level, that point which leaves you with an ache that never truly relinquishes. You’re so goddamn close to achieving your goals, and yet it slips away.

And Georgia’s double act of choking dogdom makes a perfect set of bookends for a year of failure and coming up short. Even-numbered years are all the better for people like me – fans and aficionados of all things done badly – because you also have the Olympics on the docket, as well as major soccer tournaments. So much lose, so little time.

We have a wide variety of nominees this year, ranging from the good-not-but-great to the bad-and-not-even-close-to-good. As is per usual, in keeping with my process-based existence, I tend to focus more on those whose thought processes have proven to be foolhardy rather than those who suffered cruel one-off results – unless, of course, those one-off results were so dreadful that they cannot be ignored. Many thanks to the disciples of Lose who submitted nominees for this prestigious award. All of you are the best. You’re #1 in my book.


And now, the nominees:

From the NFL:
Oakland Raiders
Owner Mark Davis doled out a 10-year, $100m contract in order to woo Jon Gruden out of the ESPN broadcast booth and back into coaching. He would have been better off taking that $100m, stacking it along the sidelines at the Oakland Mausoleum, and setting it on fire. A burning pile of dollars would be a better coach than Gruden, and would also manage to keep everyone warm in the process.
In giving Gruden that sort of security, Davis immediately made his GM, Reggie McKenzie, expendable. From the moment Gruden showed up, McKenzie was rendered the second fiddle. The two eye-opening trades the Raiders have made this season – first shipping disgruntled holdout Khalil Mack to the Bears, and then Amari Cooper to the Cowboys – both have Gruden’s fingerprints all over them. Mack has more sacks on his own this season in Chicago than the Raiders have as a team, and is a favorite to be the NFL’s defensive player of the year. The arrival of Cooper spurred on a Cowboys resurgence, and they are now in the playoffs. The Raiders got a couple of first-round picks for those two deals, picks which will number in the 20s and be selected by Gruden and whatever sock puppet is instilled as a new GM, since McKenzie has now been fired for doing little more than try to appease the franchise’s new golden child and have it go horribly badly. And that’s downright disrespectful to McKenzie, who built this team into a playoff team as little as two seasons ago. But McKenzie isn’t being paid by Davis until 2028. Unsurprisingly, as the Raiders have sunk to 3-11 this season, it isn’t golden child Gruden who has to fall on his sword.
And what does spending $100m on a television color commentator get you in the first place? This seems like a copycat move by Davis, who looks at the other occupants of the arena on the other side of the parking lot that is the Oakland Coliseum Complex wasteland – the Golden State Warriors – with understandable envy. The Dubs, you may recall, plucked Steve Kerr from the ranks of TNT broadcasts, dropped him on the sideline, and have since become one of the greatest teams in the NBA. The difference is, of course, that Kerr actually studied the modern game, and he presented the Warriors with detailed notes and a vision of success during his job interview, whereas Gruden didn’t say a single insightful or, frankly, intelligent thing the whole time he was employed doing Monday Night Football. There is this strange sort of nostalgia about the Raiders organization towards Gruden, who built them into relevance, left in a snit, and then whooped their ass in the Super Bowl as the head coach of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. But that was well over a decade ago, during which pretty much everything about the game of football has changed. Gruden seems woefully out of touch, and his team looks ill-prepared on a weekly basis.
The Raiders have the worst record in the NFL and they are absolute crap. All season long, the organization has been selling long-since forgotten nostalgia for the past in lieu of an actual good product, and doing so because, two years hence, they plan to be playing in Las Vegas. Why any self-respecting person should continue to plunk down money for a product and an organization that so blatantly doesn’t give a shit about them is beyond me. Perhaps they won’t have to, since the Raiders’ lease in Oakland is up and they’re now exploring other options elsewhere for next season. In truth, they probably never should have left L.A. and returned to Oakland in the first place, as the Rams had vacated the market and they had it all to themselves, but Al Davis was the king of the quick buck and was perfectly willing to buy into every unrealistic promise that Alameda County politicos were willing to offer him, stadium deals they could never deliver on which left both the city and the franchise withering on the vine. Gruden’s now been given free rein to tear down a team which was a playoff team two seasons ago, all for the benefit of a fan base which doesn’t yet exist.
The Raiders have been living off that ‘Commitment to Excellence’ nonsense for decades now, and living off their rebellious image, but there is nothing rebellious or edgy about some trust fund baby born with two silver spoons – one in his mouth and the other up his ass – taking over the operations from his deceased father and running the whole operation straight into the ground. ‘Commitment to Incompetence’ is a far more appropriate moniker. Stable and competent ownership is the greatest competitive advantage in sports, and with Mark Davis continuing to do dumb things like throwing $100m down a rathole in the name of bringing back has-been coaches who no longer are in touch with the game, the Raiders are doomed to perpetually be irrelevant  – a status which, for poseurs like Mark Davis, is the worst sort of punishment.

The Detroit Lions are perpetual TLOTY nominees for a reason

Tennessee Titans
A tragedy in four acts:


New Orleans Saints
Expletive, expletive, expletive …

 From MLB:
Baltimore Orioles
In 2018, the Orioles finished 47-115, 61 games out of first place, The 115 losses were a franchise record, surpassing the St. Louis Browns 111 in 1939. The Orioles had an MLB-worst team ERA of 5.18 and batted a league-worst .239. Oh yeah, and the defense sucked as well.
Those were the highlights.
The entire Orioles roster seemed to be composed of guys of whom you’d say, “oh yeah, I remember him, he was good once” – the collective of which, in 2018, were just horribly bad. That said, to be 47-115 bad, you not only have to be terrible, but you have to have literally everything go wrong. I mean, the margins in baseball are so finite that even a truly dreadful team is probably going to luck their way into at least 55 wins. But 115 losses? I mean, that’s almost inconceivable. You have to have your $100m+ power hitter be the worst hitter in major league history. You have to have your big offseason addition to your rotation go 4-15 and post an ERA which starts with the number 5. You have to send up regulars to the plate in key situations whose batting average in those situations is .083. In order to lose 115 games, everything imaginable has to go wrong, and then everything unimaginable has to happen as well. The Orioles just shouldn’t have been this bad. (As opposed to the 100+ loss Kansas City Royals, who were every bit at bad as their record indicated, who were probably were never quite as good as the lofty heights they achieved, and whose GM, Dayton Moore, was probably going to get fired before the Royals went on that magical run to the World Series in 2014 and a championship in 2015, thus making him seem like a genius and making it hard to justify getting rid of him. Good luck to all of you in K.C., because you’re going to need it.)
But having said that, if you’ve managed to lose 115 games, you’ve certainly found your floor and fallen through it, but your ceiling wasn’t that high to begin with. Thanks to eerily unsustainable hitting, excellent bullpenning, and savvy managing from Buck Showalter, this team has been punching above its weight for years, given the fact that no one in the rotation could actually pitch. Showalter’s departure from this team is something of a mercy kill, as is that of GM Dan Duquette, a safe pair of hands in the front office whose ideas about the game have become stale. But given the uncertain state of the organization, given that the owner is near death and there seems to be no coherent succession plan, and given the uninspiring state of the Orioles minor league system, sorting out this mess and trying to piece it back together is a salvage job for Sanford & Son. It’s hard to imagine the Orioles being any worse in 2019, but it’s also hard to imagine them being much better.

Chicago White Sox
The White Sox are so irrelevant that they managed to lose 100 games and no one even noticed. They are the sports world’s equivalent of a tree falling in a forest. Nobody cares what they do. No one believes whatever they did really happened.
Quite honestly, I don’t really care how many prospects they have stashed away in AAA and AA at the moment. You’ve heard a lot of buzz about teams like the White Sox and the San Diego Padres who have these supposedly great farm systems. So what? Something which teams like the White Sox and the Padres also do extremely well is go about ruining the career outlooks of so many of their young players, which is why they’re perpetually irrelevant. The Lose always cautions about optimism about prospects. They’re probably not as good as you think they are, and they probably won’t achieve what you want them to achieve.
But in the case of the White Sox, none of it will matter anyway and you won’t even notice.

Cartoon by acceptably drawn baseball

Seattle Mariners
The Seattle Mariners were in the unique position this season of simultaneously overachieving and disappointing. Their 89 wins was one of the better seasons that this tormented franchise has ever mustered up, but they blew a double-digit lead in the AL wildcard race, fizzling down the stretch and winding up a fair distance behind the Oakland A’s, who had one of their periodic hipster-cred inducing, feel-good sort of seasons where they sustain a seemingly unsustainable pace long enough to worm their way into the playoffs despite their paltry payroll, thus fooling a whole lot of people into thinking they know what they are doing and making their inevitable regression in coming seasons seem like it a shock when it was all too predictable. Seriously, stop buying in on the A’s.
But back to the Mariners here, they won 89 games and had a pretty good season, but nothing is ever simple with this organization, who also had to endure some old sexual harassment cases being unearthed, some nasty racism allegations by a former employee presently being investigated by MLB (allegations which have now also morphed into a lawsuit), and also their regularly scheduled player suspension for being a drugs cheat. And once the season was over, GM Jerry Dipoto let it be known that he was going to be “reimagining” the roster.
Oh boy.
The Mariners are, in Dipoto’s mind, in the position whereby they are good but can’t be good enough, and so in order to be good enough, they have to first be terrible for a couple of seasons, and so he’s set off on a full-on teardown of the roster with the idea of the Mariners being good again around 2021. Dipoto is so obsessed with making trades – he’s responsible for something like 5% of all trades in baseball during his tenure – that he was making them from a hospital bed in Las Vegas during the winter meetings, having apparently gone so long without making a trade that he was going into withdrawal. He’s been dealing fast and furiously ever since the season came to a close. Out the door went catcher Mike Zunino to Tampa Bay, #1 starter James Paxton to the Yankees, closer Edwin Díaz, who was the best in the game (the Mariners were 61-0 when he entered the game with a lead in 2018) and perennial all-star 2B Robinson Canó to the Mets, all-star SS Jean Segura to the Phillies, 1B Carlos Santana, acquired from the Phillies in the Segura trade, to Indians, and set-up man Alex Colomé to the White Sox.
And for what? Prospects, mostly, a good number of whom the Mariners seem to value far more than the teams that gave them up. The Phillies were perfectly happy to give up former élite prospect turned failed MLB SS J.P. Crawford in exchange for Segura. If you’re swapping guys who play the same position, and you’re giving up the best asset in the deal, you have to ask yourself why it is the other team is so willing to dump the lesser one. Most likely, it’s because they aren’t any good. The Mariners got some backup catcher from a 100-loss White Sox team in exchange for Colomé, who will now take over for Zunino, whose pitch framing was elegant as opposed to this guy from the White Sox with defensive skills described online as “constantly chasing passed balls to the backstop.” In the Zunino deal they got OF Mallex Smith from the Rays, who may be good but who, in the only Tampa Bay game I watched all season, seemed brainless on the basepaths and seemed bound and determined to run for the cycle and get thrown out at every base. For Paxton, the Yankees gave up two AA level pitching prospects they no longer consider anything more than third or fourth starters, at best. For giving up Canó and Díaz, the M’s had to take on Jay Bruce, who they don’t want, and reliever Anthony Swarzak, who no one wants, and a funny thing often happens when you trade for guys you don’t want: you get stuck with them, because no one else wants them, either. They did get Santana from the Phillies in the Segura deal, and then swapped him to Cleveland for Edwin Encarnacíon, who they also don’t want. The big prize in all of this wheeling and dealing is some 19-year-old outfielder in the Mets organization whose swing will likely be ruined after spending time in a minor league organization that’s ranked among the worst in all of baseball and has produced all of two all-star position players in the past 17 years.
Do I sound skeptical?
I grew up watching this stupid team and I’m done with them. They have the longest run of not making the playoffs of any franchise in North American sports. In the 17 years since the glorious 116-win season of 2001, they’ve lost 40% of their attendance, and now they’re going to sell the fans a 5-year plan?
This had better work, because Jerry Dipoto is writing his own career obituary if it doesn’t. There are just enough nerds out there on Mariners online fora, the sort who think you play baseball using a computer, who will squint and convince themselves that this is somehow going to be interesting and worth embracing à la The Process in Philadelphia, but those people constitute the minority among the fan base, and I doubt most of them will bother to go to a game in the next five years, during which time the Mariners are likely to be dreadful.
And I do mean five years. Dipoto can spout bullshit about how they’re going to be good again in 2021, but that’s a best case scenario. Literally everything has to go right for that to be the case. In the meantime, I’m sure the ownership will be happy to mollify the 9,000 in the crowd with bobbleheads and 2001 nostalgia nights. And it’s interesting that Dipoto has said, repeatedly, that their goal is to be fully competitive in 2021, which happens to be when the new arena opens in Seattle and the sports calendar in Seattle starts to get really, really crowded. Come five years from now – the realistic case, not the best case – the Mariners will be vying for the entertainment dollar with the Seahawks (always competent), an NHL team (new and fresh), quite possibly an NBA team (I would say ‘probably’ and not ‘possibly’ given the market size), a soccer team that wins titles and draws 40,000 fans, a WNBA team that’s won three titles and will possibly win more, and, oh yeah, also a major university that, you know, wins stuff! Why would you waste your money on a bad baseball team?
And what’s baffling to me is that ownership was willing to sign off on this plan – particularly given that those racism allegations are still an open investigation, and if those are proven true, then the entire front office is getting fired. But then again, ownership doesn’t give a shit about the fan base in Seattle and never has. This is a club that sold for over $1 billion, after all, without ever achieving anything in its 40 years in existence. There is really no incentive for ownership to care. They rake in the money whether the team wins 89 games or tanks.
And this is a tank. It’s not a reimagining. It’s a tank. And guess what? Tanks almost never work. Citing the Astros and the Cubs is foolish, since the former were so bad it didn’t matter whether they tanked or not, and the latter had deep enough pockets to invest in all levels of the farm system and build a superior organization from the ground up, whereas the Mariners will most likely try to go cheap. This is nothing short of the dumbest organization in baseball, one that’s lacked the acumen to develop its own talent for decades and which has given its fans nothing to show for it.
And this should be a warning sign to Major League Baseball. You shouldn’t have teams like the 89-win Mariners, the AL Central-winning Indians, and the Arizona Diamondbacks, who were leading their division going into September, all being willing to open the store and tear up competitive clubs the following season. This does speak to a structure whereby vast numbers of clubs don’t feel as if they can be competitive, and don’t believe it’s financially prudent to bother to try. If that’s the case, then what’s the bloody point?

From the NBA:

Chicago Bulls


Fred Hoiberg hadn’t shown himself to be a particularly good coach during his tenure with the Bulls, which came to an end after a 5-19 start to this season. Then again, it’s hard to know if he was any good, since the rosters that he had to deal with during the past four seasons – handed to him by the tag-team clownshoes front office duo of Gar Forman and John Paxson – have been completely misfit. Hoiberg was a guy who wanted to play pace-and-space, play up-tempo with shooting and speed, and he was saddled the first two seasons with the refuse from the Tom Thibodeau era (more on that clown in a minute), and was blessed with the likes of Wade and Rondo and Jimmy Butler (more on him as well), all of whom like to pound the rock in the floor, all of whom are prone to wanton acts of selfishness, and none of whom had an inkling of respect for this supposed whiz kid coach from Iowa State. Then the Bulls blow it all up, trade Butler and tank, do dumb things like spend $40 million to sign Jabari “They Don’t Pay Me to Play Defense” Parker and give an enormous extension to Zach LaVine, then everyone gets hurt and the Bulls are just terrible, and Hoiberg gets fired just after he finally starts getting guys back healthy who might actually be able to run the offense he’d always imagined.

As for the defense? I am not sure it could get any worse than this:


Egads. But I suppose that, if you’re going to have bulls running about, you also need some toreadors, and in the likes of Parker and LaVine and Lauri Markkanen, the players on this team swish the cape and yell “Toro Toro Olé!” with the best of them. No matter how offensively adept some of these guys may be, none of them can guard their own shadows.
The Bulls have now completely overreacted and fired Hoiberg and replaced him with would-be tough guy Jim Boylen, whose immediate actions in charge of the Bulls nearly led to a player mutiny, and whose offensive acumen is so prehistoric that it makes Thibodeau seem like a progressive. Since Boylen took over, the Bulls’ offense has been wasting time on the shot clock and throwing it in to the post, rendering all of their natural attributes useless, and it’s humming along at an efficiency rate that would rank it as one of the worst NBA offenses in the past 20 years. So far under this new regime, the Bulls’ net rating ranks it equivalent to the 7-59 Charlotte Bobcats team that won the fewest games in NBA history. This is not progress.
This was all the doing of GarPax, yet somehow, the two-headed monster that is GarPax still has a job.
And, to be fair here, it’s not like Hoiberg was doing a great job coaching this team. It was pretty clear that no one in the dressing room was listening to him – most notably LaVine, the team’s leading scorer and theoretical best player, who blew off Hoiberg’s play call completely at the end of a game with predictably disastrous results:


But the bigger picture here is that what should be one of the marquee franchises in the NBA, particularly given the championship legacy of the 1990s left behind by Michael Jordan, is an absolute joke. Chicago is a great city, a huge city, and they’ve won six titles there, but when have you ever heard a potential free agent of any ilk in the NBA list the Bulls as a possible landing spot? You don’t, and the reason is that this is a cheap, lazy, and flat-out incompetent organization. Nick Friedell, the ESPN beat reporter for the Warriors who used to cover the Bulls, said in the aftermath of the Hoiberg firing that GarPax thought they were getting “Steve Kerr 2.0” when they hired Hoiberg – a statement which speaks to the delusion of those doing the hiring, of course, but if you are hiring Steve Kerr 2.0, then maybe you should, you know, give him guys on the roster that suits his system and, more to the point, let him try to coach them when it actually occurs. But nothing this team has done, in the past four years, suggests that anyone involved has a coherent plan. I know that scoring over 20 points in the clinching game during the Bulls’ 1991 championship season earned Paxson a lifetime of cred with the organization, but as a front office guy, he’s proved to be just godawful in recent years, and you sort of wish that supply of cred would one day run out. As it stands, this team which GarPax thought would show some competitiveness and growth this season is a disheartened, disorganized mess. They’re almost certain to need yet another new coach, since Boylen’s opening salvo has been absolutely disastrous and, quite frankly, his disastrous college tenure at Utah would seem to indicate that he does not have a clue what he is doing.
The Bulls were hoping to be fun bad this year – a team that is rife with young talent who will make the sorts of mistakes you want them to make as part of their growth – but instead, they are just bad and now they are also boring. They may as well punt the season in the hopes of landing the #1 overall pick and being able to draft Zion Williamson, because #NotTryinforZion is more likely to prove rewarding than the death march that’s going to be the last 50 games of this season.

Live look at Washington Wizards HQ

Washington Wizards Buzzards 

Memphis Grizzlies

Phoenix Suns
How many bad GMs does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
I mentioned the Grizzlies a year ago, of course, but with some better health, they are around .500 and in the playoff race in the West. Meanwhile, both the Buzzards and the Suns make for strong nominees this year all on their own. Washington is sinking like a stone in the East. The defense stinks, they cannot get a rebound, everyone hates each other, they all fought in practice, and GM Ernie Grunfeld made it known to the rest of the league back in November that anyone and everyone on the roster was available in trade. The Suns, meanwhile, have picked up right where they left off last spring, when they were the winners of NBA Tankamania and won the NBA draft lottery:


A common theme among these three teams is that they are run by marbleheads. We can allow Griz GM Chris Wallace to take a brief victory lap for drafting outstanding rookie Jaren Jackson Jr. this past summer, but it’s only going to be a brief one, since it’s the first decent player he’s drafted in a decade. He’s been dreadful at his job for years now, but has held onto it mostly due to the constant and confusing flux at the top of the Grizzlies food chain as the owners engaged in a bizarre game of chicken, with one naming a price for the other to pay in order to buy them out, the result of which being that the organization was stuck in neutral for several years.
Grunfeld, meanwhile, has been at the helm of the flaming dumpster fire that is the Buzzards since 2003. It has been a case of death by 1,000 paper cuts in Washington, as Grunfeld has made, in recent years, a number of moves which were marginally bad, but still somewhat defensible. Signing John Wall to a DP contract that will pay him $170m over the next four years? Well, he was getting MVP votes just a couple of seasons ago and earned the right to be eligible for that contract. Matching the Swamp Dragons’ lucrative and ludicrous poison-pill offer sheet to Otto Porter? Well, they need him, and this is the price you pay sometimes when your guys get into restricted free agency, which is a situation that no one likes. Giving $60+ million to Mahinmi? Okay, that’s not a good one, but everyone was giving out bad contracts in the summer of 2016, when everyone was drunk on cap space. On and on it goes, and all of these moves save for maybe the Mahinmi one are defensible – with the problem being that the cumulative effects of all of these overpays is being locked into a roster that a) isn’t very good, and b) has a bunch of volatile personalities who showed last season, when they melted down and stumbled to an 8-seed in the East, that they cannot co-exist. Grunfeld should have pushed the button and blown the whole thing up at the end of last season. Oh yeah, and maybe they shouldn’t have also dumped $35m into Scotty Brooks, who can’t coach, which pains me to say because I have some love in my heart for all former UCI Anteaters, and it’s not like Brooks has been dealt a winning hand here.
In Phoenix, of course, owner Robert Sarver fired his GM, Ryan McDonough, right before the season. McDonough’s résumé wasn’t exactly stellar: three of his Top-10 draft picks had their options declined, and a fourth, Josh Jackson, has been one of the worst players in the NBA this season. Sarver hired James Jones in the GM role as something of a sock puppet, as Sarver has apparently decided to be more “hands on” in the aftermath of McDonough’s waste of a tenure, which is bad news for everyone involved. He’s a terrible owner, and managed yet again to make himself look like a fool by begging for arena improvements from the city and threatening to take the team to Seattle, to which Seattleites said, “uh, no thanks, we’re not that desperate,” and he and his allies wound up getting dunked on by a senior citizen at a Phoenix city council meeting.
So these are three of the duller tools in the NBA shed we’re talking about here, and when the three of them attempt to make a trade? God help us all. The three of them earn a joint nomination for the TLOTY for their Dec. 14 attempt at a 3-team trade which featured the single most incompetent act of NBA general managing since the days of the Wrath of Kahn in Minnesota – a particularly dire 5-year stretch in the Twin Cities under the auspices of GM David Kahn highlighted by his maneuvering on draft day to draft a player who wasn’t eligible to be drafted.
In this proposed deal, the Suns would ship Trevor Ariza, whom they signed to a pointless 1-year, $15m deal in the offseason, and who sure seemed to be in high demand for someone who was doing nothing this season, to the Buzzards. The Buzz would then ship Kelly Oubre, their only legit young asset, to Memphis, and perpetually annoying Austin Rivers – no longer of any use to anyone since being separated from his coach/GM/dad in L.A. – to Phoenix. Memphis would, in turn, fill out the deal by sending to the Suns both Wayne Selden and MarShon Brooks.
Or was it Dillon Brooks?
See, there are two guys named Brooks on the roster in Memphis. Dillon Brooks is a 2nd-year player who had a nice rookie year during an otherwise disastrous season for the Grizzlies. MarShon is a journeyman, a former 1st-round pick who bounced around and bounced out of the league, went to China, came back and was yet another of the Grizzlies’ reclamation projects. A team like Phoenix would love to get their hands on a young player like Dillon Brooks who is cheap and has promise. They have no use for a guy like MarShon Brooks. If it’s MarShon instead of Dillon, the trade makes no sense at all for the Suns. Conversely, trading away a young player like Dillon would make no sense for Memphis.
So who is it? Apparently, no one knew. The Grizzlies thought they were dealing MarShon, the Suns thought they were getting Dillon. Amazingly, these three sides never managed to get on a joint conference call to clarify the intentions. The people in Washington were apparently acting as the intermediaries, but apparently they didn’t know what Memphis wanted to do, either. It’s hard to say what happened here, since everyone’s claim seems to refute everyone else’s claim. In the end, they couldn’t agree and the trade broke down. *facepalm*
What is clear, however, is that everyone involved comes out looking like an idiot. Neither Dillon nor MarShon Brooks left Memphis. Scotty Brooks is still coaching Washington, much to the chagrin of many a Buzzards fan. If this slapstick were made into a movie, they’d have to get Mel Brooks to direct it. Washington and Phoenix eventually bypassed Memphis entirely and swapped Ariza for Oubre and Rivers, which still didn’t make much sense for the Suns, as they don’t really want Oubre and immediately released Rivers, meaning they now have $33m in dead money on their books this season. Not great.
When you have these sorts of rum raisins running your franchise, it doesn’t ultimately matter much what you put out on the court. As I said before regarding the Raiders, ownership – and the front office – is the greatest competitive advantage in sports. Or disadvantage, as the case may be.

Minnesota Timberwolves
When we last left Team Thibs, aka Team Turmoil, the Timberwolves were actually going to attempt to play this season with their team in a state of open warfare, as it was obvious that the disgruntled Jimmy Butler and the anointed franchise players Karl-Anthony Towns and Andrew Wiggins couldn’t all co-exist on the same court. Butler, who had been acquired from Chicago a season ago, wanted a contract extension in the summer, didn’t get it, asked to be traded, didn’t get that either, held out from training camp, showed up one day at practice and talked all sorts of shit, and then started doing stuff like sitting out of games on account of what he called ‘general soreness.’


Jon Krawczynski, who covers the Wolves for The Athletic, authored this astonishing story which followed, day by day, a dysfunctional situation in Minneapolis that was part soap opera and part Greek tragedy. The Wolves started 4-9 and clearly everyone involved was absolutely miserable. Butler didn’t want to be there and wasn’t shy about letting people know it, the owner wanted him gone, his teammates wanted him gone, and it was only after Butler blasted him in the media that Tom Thibodeau finally wanted Butler gone as well.
Everyone comes out of this mess looking bad: KAT and Wiggins come off as soft, weak-willed losers; Thibodeau looks like a stubborn bullhead who shouldn’t be running a franchise; GM Scott Layden seems useless; owner Glen Taylor seems to be some doddering and ineffectual old man; and Butler looks like a clubhouse cancer and a big phony and, frankly, like something of a dick.
Ultimately, the Wolves found a worthy trade partner, acquiring Robert Covington and Dario Šarić from former TLOTY winners the Philadelphia 76ers, for whom “The Process” is now over and it’s time to win games. The whole point of Sam Hinkie’s metastrategies was to acquire élite talent, and many years’ worth of machinations have netted them one badass center (out of the three they tried, two of which were wasted high draft picks they could not get 10¢ on the dollar for), a soon-to-be extremely high-priced guy who has burned down his last two locker rooms, and two #1 overall picks who can’t shoot. More proof that talent acquisition in the NBA is still an imperfect science.
The Wolves, meanwhile, rallied to .500 in the aftermath of Butler’s departure, playing with a Ding Dong The Witch Is Dead level of jubilation, but have since regressed to being a likely candidate to miss the playoffs because, for all of the dick moves Butler pulled in Minny, he was right about this team: they suck. A lot of that falls on Coach Thibs, who runs a regressive offense that completely wastes Towns’ talents and caters to the likes of shoot-first, shoot-second types like Derrick Rose – who has had a nice career resurgence, mind you, but if Derrick Rose is driving your offense in the modern NBA, you might want to get out of the car and call a Lyft. At least the defense is a little better of late, I suppose, as Taj Gibson & Co. have adopted some creative new strategies to stopping opponents from scoring:

Resourceful!

The New York Knicks
Obligatory Knicks content:
Okay, I think we are done here.

From the NHL:
Ottawa Senators
It’s not just the play on the ice which has landed the Sens on this list of nominees – although that can’t be entirely discounted, since the Sens have generally been ass. (There is some dispute about this among my Ottawa correspondents, with one of them insisting that the Senators are actually fun bad, while another replied, “nah, they’re pretty much ass.”) They also have an owner in Eugene Melnyk that everyone hates,  all parties involved in the push to build a new arena have started suing each other, and in the offseason, they traded their best player, Norris-winning defenseman Erik Karlsson, to the San Jose Sharks for a bucket of pucks and a used pair of skates. But the Ottawa Senators have also found themselves mired in seemingly endless problems related to the unique scourge of modern existence which also felled 76ers GM Bryan Colangelo: an inability to understand the consequences of dimwitted behavior on social media.
First off, GM Pierre Dorion as much as admitted that he had a burner twitter account. Later, several Sens players were outed for trashing a member of the coaching staff while riding in an Uber in Phoenix, the video having been released by the driver and gone viral. Then, the Ottawa Citizen discovering a number of fake Twitter accounts that had begun a troll campaign to support the team and its owner amid all of the bad press – and saying ‘discovered’ is generous, since it wasn’t hard to figure out:

Morons

This all comes on the heels of the wife of one player alleging that she’d been subjected to season-long online harassment by the girlfriend of another. Literally everyone involved in this organization needs to log off forever. Seriously, put the phone down, all of you. Put the phone down and no one gets hurt. And while you’re at it, try playing better.

NCAA:

Western Kentucky
Old Dominion
For playing the weirdest game of football in the history of the sport, and quite possibly one of the dumbest:

 
Connecticut
The 1-11 Huskies earn a nomination for their defensive prowess, or lack thereof. The Huskies yielded 50.4 points and 617.4 yards per game, marks which rank them as the worst defense in NCAA FBS history.
Head coach Randy Edsall after their season-ending 57:7 loss to Temple: “All I know how to do is go find guys that want to be here, that want to give everything they’ve got. Because I ain’t putting up with that ... I ain’t putting up with that anymore. This game’s too hard to play if you don’t love it, and if you don’t love the grind, and if you don’t like to be in that weight room and you don’t like to be with teammates and you don’t like to not let a teammate down -- you shouldn’t play this game. Shouldn’t play it. And that’s what we’ve got to get. We’ve got to get guys that love the game, that want to pay the price each and every day in everything that they do, and get those guys that we had before that have a little chip on their shoulder, that haven’t enabled and entitled, and that want to work, and understand what team is all about. That’s what we’ve got to find ... Because this game ain’t for the weak of heart. It isn’t. And we’ll go find those guys.” (Note from the Official Spouse of In Play Lose, who was doing some editing: “How the fuck do you proofread this?”)
Well, gee, coach, if your defense is that bad, you know, maybe you might also want to try coaching better. It’s not like you nor, well, anyone else in your entire self-preservationist profession to throw your kids under the bus or anything like that. And while we’re at it, maybe try recruiting better players. Hate to break it to you, but if the players aren’t any good, well, that’s sort of on you.
Football is a lost art at UConn these days, but the women’s basketball team seems to be doing fine:





The Pac-12
As I’ve previously explained, Washington State is ineligible for the TLOTY. Their number has been retired and hangs from the rafters. They will be among the very first inducted into the Hall of Lose when it one day opens its doors. The reason for this, of course, is that W.S.U. has managed to find so many ways to lose in the history of the school that ‘to Coug’ is actually an entry in the Urban Dictionary. No one has found more confounding ways to lose, in all sports, over the course of the past century than the Cougs have.
And then they went and found a new one.
So, at some point while no one was watching, Washington State got actually good at football. I have no idea how this happened. The Cougs were 10-1 going into their season finale, leading the Pac-12 North, and verging on being in legitimate consideration for a spot in the ultra lucrative national playoff. They had a marginal case, of course, given their strength of schedule, but what would have bolstered their case was being undefeated, which they would have been were it not for a rather controversial 39:36 loss at USC earlier in the season.
The reason for the controversy was that, late in the game, the officials missed what was an obivous targeting foul on the Trojans, and the ensuing 15 yards would have put the Cougars first and goal inside the 10. Instead, W.S.U. had to attempt a long, game-tying FG, which the Trojans blocked. And the penalty was obvious. It was just godfuckingobvious. You’d have to be blind as bats not to have seen it.
One possible explanation for the officials’ inaction could be that, perhaps, they were unsure of what was and wasn’t a foul after, earlier in the game, another blatantly obvious targeting penalty – this one on the Cougars – had been inexplicably overturned by the crew in the Replay Center. You can see how some doubt can creep in at that point. What’s a foul and what isn’t? If the Replay Center doesn’t have your back, then who knows?
And as it turned out, that original targeting penalty was overturned in the Replay Center because “a third party did not agree,” according to a conference report. It turns out that the decision had been manipulated by Pac-12 general counsel and senior vice president of business affairs Woodie Dixon – which, of course, immediately begs the question of how many other times has that happened? Because guess what? It almost surely didn’t happen just once. To suggest that would be akin to the kid who gets caught with his hand in the cookie jar saying he never did it before.
This is a new one on me. This is one weird sort of a scenario in which to wind up losing a game. W.S.U. head coach Mike Leach had some less than stellar things to say to Dixon in the aftermath of this loss – a loss which didn’t seem all that relevant at the time, but grew in importance as the Cougs continued to win, since that one loss was possibly, if not likely, going to keep the Cougs out of the playoff and cost everyone in the conference a healthy payout in the process.
Now, that scenario wound up being avoided as the Cougars reverted to type and gagged away their season finale to the Huskies, costing themselves any shot at a Pac-12 title and condemning themselves to yet another irrelevant bowl game in San Antonio. But the optics of this were just awful all the way around. If someone other than officials are making officiating decisions, the entire sport is compromised. There is no standard of fair play at that point, and if there is no fair play, there is no game.

Never change, Rutgers. Never change …

Virginia
It was going to happen at some point. A 16-seed was going to beat a 1-seed in the Men’s basketball tournament. It had nearly happened thrice before. That it finally occurred in 2018 was, statistically speaking, not a surprise.
The manner of the defeat, however, certainly was a surprise.
Virginia got trucked. The 16th-seeded Retrievers from the University of Maryland-Baltimore County ran the Cavaliers out of the building, winning 74:54 and snapping an 0-135 run by the 16s over the years. It was a stunning collapse by the Cavs, who’d won the ACC, were the #1 overall seed in the field, and were expected to contend for the national title.
As far as losses go, you’d be hard pressed to find one more historic or, frankly, more embarrassing than this one. It will take a long time for Virginia to live this one down. It’s hard to take them seriously after that. No matter how good they might be this year, or next year or whatnot, they’re still worthy of ridicule. “That team got beat by a 16-seed! Hahahahahaha …”
The problem with this loss is that, several months on, I do suspect that we won’t really give the victors the credit that they deserve. I mean, what is UMBC? It’s some weird branch campus that I pass on the freeway when we’re driving from BWI to my in-laws house in suburban Baltimore. It doesn’t really stick in the memory. I fear that the Retrievers’ achievement will ultimately come to be more about how Virginia failed than how they succeeded. Which shortchanges their accomplishment, of course: UMBC were great that day, those kids played the game of their lives and were clearly the deserving winners. But colossal upsets like this can come to feel more like colossal, incomprehensible collapses on the part of the vanquished. Like I said at the time of the Serena Williams meltdown at the U.S. Open, does anyone actually remember who beat her? (You don’t remember. You just went and googled it. Admit that you did.) This is one case where, I suspect, we’ll remember the losers for far, far longer than we’ll praise the winners.

Uh, wrong way there, buddy ...

The NCAA as a Whole
This is an evergreen. Ripping this entire organization for its continued hypocrisy and its corruption is shooting fish in a barrel. This past year’s ludicrous show trial regarding bribery and the seedy underworld of college basketball recruiting ultimately managed to accomplish very little, although I suppose anything that leads to guys like Rick Pitino being forced out of the game can’t be all bad. But far more people should have lost their jobs than actually did. College coaches and administrators are remarkably good when it comes to insulating themselves, distancing themselves from all wrongdoing and setting up appropriate scapegoats – usually assistant coaches, four of whom wound up being indicted. Being an assistant coach is something akin to being the second in command in a dictatorship, insofar as you’re tasked with doing all of the strongman’s dirty work, but you’ll get offed immediately if it somehow goes sideways or even for something as simple as the strongman deciding you no longer suit their needs.
What’s remarkable as well is that all of these people involved seemed to have this belief that doing something like oh, you know, profiting wildly on the backs of unpaid teenage laborers is somehow noble and just. Here is Syracuse head coach Jim Boeheim – whose program’s virtuous record includes both a drug and academic fraud scandal – talking about the idea of players being compensated:

Delightful.
Seriously, fire all of these people. The only meaningful way the NCAA will ever reform is if it blows itself up. And while I can’t give North Carolina’s Roy Williams too much credit – he heads a program so deeply mired in an academic fraud scandal that the school’s argument for leniency was that it was essentially a failed institution – he is one of the few guys who will, from time to time, actually provide an honest self-assessment:



Our Olympic Heroes:

German Hockey Team
The Germans were verging on a historic upset, taking a 3-2 lead with 3:00 left against the heavily-favored Russians – oh, I’m sorry, it was the OAR – in the Gold Medal game of the Olympic hockey tournament. They were then given an even bigger break when Russia – I did it again – when the OAR was assessed a penalty soon after the go-ahead goal, which meant that, with a man advantage, the Germans could pretty much just skate around and play keepaway for 2:00 and kill off almost the entire game while the OARussians chased an improbable shorthanded goal. This is almost an unfuckable situation in the game of hockey.
And the Germans blew it. Oh, man.
For a team like the Germans, just even getting to that point in the competition was incredible. They do not have that many NHL-caliber players on their team, compared to a Russian OAR team that was dotted with KHL élite intermixed with former NHL royalty. The Germans were enormous underdogs who played great and outplayed their opponents for the better portion of the game. But come on here! How could you blow that game? How could you do that? My god.

Lizzie the Hungarian skiing tourist is the In Play Lose Hero of the Year. Go big, Lizzie!

From the EPL:

Manchester United
It was never going to end well at Old Trafford. Pretty much from the moment that José Mourinho was hired as the manager of Manchester United, the realm of football punditry was writing the obituary. “Give it until the third season. By then, he will have accumulated an enormous amount of high-priced talent, all of whom have come to not be able to stand him, and whatever good results have been achieved along the way will be forgotten about, because the quality of play and the mood around the dressing room and the training ground will be so dire.” And, of course, Mourinho was fired about midway through his third season at United.
United actually finished second last season in the Premier League, albeit a mile behind their crosstown rivals Manchester City. They won a Europa League and also an FA Cup under Mourinho’s tenure – achievements which would be laudable at most other clubs. But Manchester United is not most other clubs. They have to win, win a lot, and be entertaining while doing it. And this team was far from entertaining. They were, to put it kindly, pragmatic.
But a team employing the likes of Romelu Lukaku, Marcus Rashford, Anthony Martial, Alexis Sánchez, and Paul Pogba shouldn’t need to be pragmatic. That attacking talent is élite and almost unparalleled. That team should be on the front foot all the time and should be so dominant offensively that whether or not the defense is any good shouldn’t matter. (Hint: it isn’t any good.) But José Mourinho is the ultimate in pragmatic managers – the term “pragmatic” having come to be a negative in football, one implying a lack of any flair or dynamism. Whenever any truly important game arose on the schedule, you could count on José to set this team up in an ultra-defensive formation more intent on grinding out a slight win, at best. It’s all been a waste of time, a waste of talent, and a waste of money.
And it is a waste of money, because as much as José bitched about not being able to buy players, he bought about £400m worth during his tenure, and turned them into stiffs. José has become the ultimate rotisserie manager, someone who wants his team ready-made for him that he can just roll out there and will win for him. He wants to do this in lieu of actually coaching, which he cannot be bothered to do. There are, to be sure, a number of top-level football clubs in Europe who want to just pay to solve all of their problems. But here’s a tip, José: the transfer budget isn’t the be-all, end-all. Try coaching for a change. Sure, Pep at Man City and Jürgen Klopp at Liverpool have spent a lot of money on players, but they actually bother coaching those players, who all seem to get better under their tutelage, whereas your guys regress so badly that selling them would result in a fraction of the value that Man United originally paid.
And let’s be honest, who wants to play the sort of terrible football that Mourinho espouses? He’s been playing this stodgy, stiff, uncreative crap for years now. It got him results in the past, but the game of soccer is faster, more athletic, and more aggressive than ever before. Guys will still allow themselves to be transferred to Manchester United because of the prestige and the big paycheque, but no one wants to play like this. A truly ‘pragmatic’ manager would realize he has an ungodly amount of attacking talent amassed and turn them loose. Instead, Man United have only played well when they were behind, at which point the players just ignored José’s instructions from the sidelines and let their natural abilities and instincts take over.
So José is out midway through his third season, like we all could have predicted, and with Man U far out of the EPL title chase. The football is bad, the players are jaded, and Ed Woodward and the money-grubbing scum who run the club are still oblivious. Given the bright-and-shiny-object nature of how they run the club – which led them to hire Mourinho in the first place – they’ll likely whiff on a successor, but so long as tourists keep showing up to Old Trafford wearing knockoff Man U jerseys, everything will be copacetic. It’s a depressing state of affairs at one of the world’s premier sporting organizations, but I wonder in anyone involved realizes just how dire the situation really is.

Most Definitely Not the Premier League:

Ballybrack F.C.
Over in Ireland, in the Leinster Senior League, the Dublin-area club Ballybrack F.C. attempted to get out of a fixture by faking the death of one of its players, Fernando Nuno La-Fuente – which was news to La-Fuente, of course, who’d simply gone back to his native Spain:
"I was playing some video games and suddenly I got a call from work and they said, ‘You’re a celebrity.’ That's how I found out that I was dead.”
Suffice to say, after making gestures such as taking out adverts in the Irish press offering heartfelt condolences for La-Fuente, and holding moments of silence in his honor at all of the league fixtures, LSL administrators weren’t particularly amused by Ballybrack’s ruse. I mean, there are far simpler ways to weasel out of playing a game, such as having someone run outside to the parking lot and slash the tires on the team bus, after which you call up the league officials and tell them you got a flat.
The club somehow escaped expulsion from the league, when by all rights, it probably should have been tossed. In the end, I think everyone involved finds it so stupid and ludicrous that simply having the club become an international laughingstock is punishment enough. It pleases me to report that everyone is alive and well, and that they all had a good laugh.
Aah, grassroots football is amazing.

Special World Cup Nominees:

Spain
Julen Lopetegui deserves props this year for managing to get fired from two of the three biggest jobs in Spanish football within the course of six months. Lopetegui was at the helm of the Spanish national team, who were one of the favorites to win the World Cup, when for some inexplicable reason, he felt a need to rush into signing a contract to coach Real Madrid in the upcoming season, doing so while still in charge of La Roja. This wasn’t taken well by the Spanish federation, who promptly fired his ass. He then slunk off to Real with his tail between his legs, only to discover that it wasn’t the Real team he would have been hoping to coach, since Real went and sold Cristiano Ronaldo to Juventus in the offseason. Lopetegui’s Real sides struggled for goals, lacked any sense of cohesion or coherence or any semblance of a clue, and he was then summarily axed once they’d fallen to mid-table in La Liga.
And much like Mourinho’s fall at Manchester United, Lopetegui’s floundering at Real Madrid was entirely predictable. It was going to take some time – maybe a whole season, maybe longer – for Real to adapt to his ways, but Real is the most impatient sports entity on the planet. All it took was a couple of bad results and seeing F.C. Barcelona sprint away from them in the table for everyone – the players, the fans, the ridiculous Spanish media, and the front office – to turn against him. He did himself no favors, of course, with his awkward exit from the national team. Given the optics of such a clumsy departure, nothing less than a flying start in Madrid could ever be construed as a success. Sometimes, people are set up to fail. In Julen Lopetegui’s case, he did that setting up all on his own.
As for Spain’s performance in the World Cup? They were crap. They stumbled and lucked their way through the Group stage, and then got bounced on penalties against Russia in the Round of 16 in one of the most boring games of soccer that I have ever seen. They’d fooled everyone – yours truly included – into thinking that they could win another World Cup with a string of impressive results in qualifying and friendlies. Obviously, having your coach fired on the eve of the World Cup is an incredibly large distraction that cannot possibly benefit your performance, even if you hate the guy. (Which there are no indications the players did.) But without any direction coming from the sidelines, Spain reverted to doing what they know, which is a style of football that is old and stale and got figured out four years ago in Brazil, when the then-defending champ Spaniards got bounced out of the tourney in the Group stage. Watching Spain plod along and make 1,000 backwards passes while never threatening a defense was arduous and torturous and insufferable.
They shouldn’t be down for long, because there is a lot of great young talent in Spain. Then again, there has been a lot of great young talent in Spain for years now, and so far, it hasn’t amounted to anything. The past two World Cups constitute wasted opportunities.

Argentina
Oh, Jesus Christ, where do we begin? Well, first off, we should state the obvious: it’s all Lionel Messi’s fault.
Well, maybe it wasn’t his fault that Argentina lost two penalty shootouts in the last two Copa América finals against Chile. I mean, sure, he missed a penalty at the end of the second one, but it’s not like anyone on the field was doing anything stellar in either of those goalless draws, in both of which the Chileans won the lottery that is penalties. It wasn’t really his fault at the World Cup in Brazil in 2014, when they lost to the Germans in extra time on a 119th minute goal. He was obviously injured, and had been for most of the tourney, but still won the event’s Ballon d’Or. It wasn’t really his fault in 2010, when Maradona was ‘coaching,’ or 2006, when they lost to the Germans on penalties. I don’t really think it was Messi’s fault when they got dumped in 2002 or 1998 or 1994 or 1990, seeing how he wasn’t playing, but I’m sure some Messiskeptic Argentine supporter can explain to me that the 11-year-old Lionel Messi should have been out there stopping Dennis Bergkamp in France. “Oh, he’s not a true Argentine, because he grew up in Spain.” Oh, okay, but the ‘true’ Argentines have been crap when it matters for most of the past 25 years, when Argentina haven’t won anything.
It’s not really Messi’s fault that, in the construct of Argentina’s present side, he is forced to play out of position and forgo being the wrecking ball that terrorizes La Liga weekly, since for some reason Argentina doesn’t have a single decent midfielder in the whole country. It’s not his fault that he has to drop 70 and sometimes 80 yards back to get the ball because the link-up play is lousy. It’s not his fault that he puts the ball on a platter for all of those many Argentine forwards like Gonzalo Higuaín, an enormously talented striker who puts on the blue and white stripes and suddenly forgets how to play, and responds to receiving those passes on a platter from Messi by blootering them high into the heavens. It’s not Messi’s fault that he’s dispossessed, repeatedly, by the extra defender sucked inside when Angel di Maria needlessly drifts towards the middle, seeing as how he can’t bother to stay on the wing for more than two seconds. It’s not his fault that he has to go up against three and four defenders because his teammates are standing around, waiting for him to do something messianic and not actually moving into space.
It isn’t Messi’s fault that the 2018 version of La Albiceleste was ill-prepared, poorly thought out, overly top-heavy, and poorly constructed. Jorge Sampaoli left some pretty good players at home who didn’t ‘fit the system,’ which makes you wonder how sound it is to create a system that trivializes the best player in the world and leaves the other 10 guys running around aimlessly, having no idea where they are supposed to be. Messi shoulders some blame for missing a penalty against Iceland in their first World Cup game – never mind the fact that Argentina probably should have been down 2-1 or 3-1 at that point, since every forward movement by Iceland was met with panic, last-ditch defending the likes of which you’d see in a U-13 game. That draw with Iceland, followed by getting hammered by Croatia, sent the entire operation into freefall, and all of the pre-tournament concerns, after a dreadful qualifying campaign and dreadful run of friendlies, proved to be merited. The whole camp descended into chaos, with Sampaoli being rendered basically a puppet, with reports of players on the pitch actually coaching the team, and it culminated with them getting cut to ribbons by the French in the Round of 16.
This team was a turkey waiting to be carved from the get-go. A large part of why I was so bullish on Croatia in this tournament was because I knew they were playing Argentina. I slag on people for their Messi hate because he’s the best goddamn player on the planet, and maybe the best ever, and something which is an annoying constant is that bad organizations, and their supporters, ultimately tend to wind up blaming the problems on their best players, when it’s usually everything else that deserves the scrutiny and the scorn. Somehow, it’s Messi’s fault that most every modern Argentine squad is disorganized and poorly constructed and plays down to its competition. Their squads are completely overloaded with forwards while, somehow, in a country of 44,000,000 people, they can’t find six guys who can play midfield or play any defense. And never mind the goalkeeping, which has been a train wreck for years:


But perhaps some help is on the way on the goalkeeping front. The country isn’t producing many decent players at the moment, but it is apparently producing some dogs that play mean defense:



We kid because we care, of course, but there are systemic troubles in Argentine football that go far beyond not being able to beat Iceland in the World Cup. The AFA is in disarray, and the players are sick of dealing with such a mess. The recent two-legged Copa Libertadores final between Buenos Aires rivals River Plate and Boca Juniors was one of the most anticipated domestic events in the history of South American football and should have showcased all that is great about Argentine football. Instead, it descended into chaos, had to be abandoned, wound up being moved to Madrid, and instead showcased everything wrong about Argentine football, and a fair amount of what’s wrong in Argentina as a society, as well.
And this is sad. Argentina is one of the cradles of the game of soccer. The love and joy and passion for the game there is like few other places on earth. The nation has produced some of the game’s greatest players, and also some of its greatest thinkers as well, as Argentine coaches have had, and continue to have, success all over the world. The entire system, at present, is in ruins. As well expressed by Eric Kinderman, the Dubai bureau chief for In Play Lose who is of Argentine descent: “No other team or club has as much bullshit to deal with, in regard to management and goings on in the background, than Argentina. It’s a wonder they got as far as they did, courtesy of Mr. Messi.”

Not in the World Cup Because They Are Terrible Nominees:
U.S. Soccer
Yep, still terrible. Oh, but wait, U.S. Soccer is going to have a vice presidential election with only one candidate this coming February, and what could be a better symbol of openness and transparency than that? Let me do my best Taylor Twellman impersonation here for a moment: “What are we doing? WHAT ARE WE DOING?” Clearly, we didn’t get rid of enough of these people after 2017’s World Cup qualifying debacle. Perhaps we should send USA FC down to Couva to get lit up by Trinidad & Tobago again in order to finish off the job.

Canadian of the Year:

This Defensive Back from the B.C. Lions


Proud Canadian, good friend, and fellow Norwich City supporter Andy Saunders will often offer up the famous “Dead or Canadian?” category when hosting his trivia nights. But really, why only choose one?

None of This Is Funny:

USA Gymnastics

Michigan State
Dr. Larry Nassar had the nerve, during the sentencing portion of his trial for multiple sex crimes, to actually complain to the judge that it was difficult for him to listen to the more than 150 young women who had survived his abuse confront him. Keep in mind that in a letter Nassar had previously submitted to the court, he dismissed his many accusers in this case as seeking media attention and money and dared to write, “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned,” only to then cower when coming face-to-face with so many of them in a courtroom. The shoe was on the other foot. The women had the power and the control, as granted to them in the hearing by Judge Rosemarie Aquilina, and Larry Nassar was reduced to the meek, sniveling worm he really was.
That Nassar was able to damage so many young women’s lives in the first place, as a doctor working for both USA Gymnastics and at Michigan State, was a testament to just how much power can corrupt. There were plenty of people who knew what he was doing, and powerful people at that, and they willingly turned a blind eye. It just wasn’t as important as winning, after all. You can easily toss off some complaint from a disgruntled athlete. Athletes are replaceable. They have short careers and short shelf-lives, whereas those cushy careers as coaches and administrators can go on in perpetuity. If you have an issue with one or two of them along the way, you just sweep it under the rug and try to suppress it so it won’t tarnish your reputation.
And, as is always the case, the cover-up is worse. Turning a blind eye to a few rumors gave a habitual sexual predator in an unchallengeable position carte blanche to go on ruining lives. One or two cases became more than 150. How does someone sit by and do nothing, knowing this is going on? How does someone become so morally bankrupt?
Endemic to this sort of power structure is an inherent belief that you are above the law, that you are above reproach. It’s why the entire structure of the NCAA is so twisted. The entire enterprise is predicated on cashing in on the talents of those who are transitory. Since they have no say or sway, and are merely passing through, you can go right ahead and be as terrible as you want to be. It’s only when we see just how truly terrible these people can be that we act aghast when, in fact, we should be dismantling structures that enable such behavior in the first place.
The wreckage from this case is going to be enormous. Michigan State’s president lost her job, and has been charged with lying to police during the investigation. Reports now indicate that the university is attempting to stonewall further legal inquiries into the case, which is more of the same from M.S.U., as a scathing report recently released by the Michigan Attorney General spoke of a “culture of indifference and institutional protection” that persisted at the school.
Over at USA Gymnastics, meanwhile, they’ve run through multiple presidents in the aftermath of the Nassar case, and were so insensitive and oblivious that they briefly touted former congresswoman Mary Bono – who was actually working for the law firm consulting the organization during the Nassar trial – as somehow being a worthy head of the organization. The scandal runs so deep in USA Gymnastics that there appears to be literally no one in the entire operation with clean hands. They’ve been decertified now by the USOC and USA Gymnastics has now filed for bankruptcy protection, as they are faced with millions, and quite possibly billions, of dollars’ worth of lawsuits.
Good. Sue the fuck out them. Sue them into oblivion and sue whatever pathetic attempt at restructuring the organization comes up with. Throw them all in jail right next to Larry Nassar. It’s about time we see the sorts of higher-ups at USA Gymnastics and Michigan State for what they really are: accomplices.

Maryland
It’s only when something goes horribly wrong that we see college coaches for the cockroaches that they really are. The fact of the matter is that college coaches are paid to win games. That’s what they’re there to do. They are not paid to care about people, and so you should never, ever be surprised when they don’t.
What’s troubling about the sorts of behavior that was going on in the football program at the University of Maryland under head coach D.J. Durkin is that, sadly, the culture he was festering isn’t that different from at many other places. And that’s depressing to say, but so long as you win enough football games, no one cares. And, as mentioned above regarding the Larry Nassar case, it’s only when something goes horribly wrong that anyone truly notices just how messed up it all is.
Well, something went horribly wrong at Maryland, where Jordan McNair, a 19-year-old football player, died after an offseason team workout curated by Durkin's strength and conditioning coach, Rick Court. Durkin, of course, being the phony self-preservationist that most head coaches are, immediately tried to distance himself from this, but college coaches are such control freaks that, no matter what they insist, they have knowledge of virtually everything that goes on in their program, and their assistants are always acting with the head man’s blessing. Court somehow walked away from the university with a $300,000 settlement after this was over when, by all accounts, he was one of the prime contributors to a toxic culture created by Durkin – although everyone who was involved in the university’s follow-up investigation, during which time Durkin was suspended, tried to spin that it somehow wasn’t toxic.
The story reached its ultimate point of absurdity with a battle between the school’s president, Wallace Loh, and the university’s Board of Regents over what to do with the suspended Durkin. The board essentially told Loh, who wanted Durkin gone, that they themselves had no power to fire Durkin but did have the power to fire Loh, who thus had to back down from his position. They then held this bizarro press conference in which the head of the Board said that Durkin had basically promised to do better and was being reinstated. (As if Durkin was somehow going to say anything else.) This led to a multifaceted mutiny – some players walked out of a meeting with Durkin, the faculty wanted him gone, the deans wanted him gone, the student government wanted him gone, and the school got positively savaged repeatedly in the press. Loh then pulled as good a shiv as we’ve seen in academia in some time by first announcing his retirement, effective at the end of the school year, and then firing Durkin, anyway.
All of that Game of Thrones political theatre stuff aside here for a moment: a kid died here. Let me say that again. A 19-year-old kid died and had his “fat ass dragged off the field,” which is apparently what was said about his soon-to-be dead body. Durkin, and Court, and anyone involved who enabled them to run riot and ultimately kill a kid, are all pieces of human garbage. Forget keeping your damn coaching jobs. You’re lucky that you’re not up for manslaughter in a court of law.
And if you’re the Board of Regents at the University of Maryland, how myopic do you have to be not to see that this was going to end one way, and one way only – with Durkin going down? Why would you willingly tie your fate to this guy? Your jobs, as guardians of a school, are first and foremost to educate young people, and paramount to that is their safety, yet you’re going to willingly send a guy whose means and methods killed a kid into the homes of other parents and try to convince them that their child will be safe under his watch? How can you possibly side with this guy and think he is in the right?
Oh sure, I’m sure there is big money involved in all of this, since Durkin was making plenty of money as the head of a major college football program and that money almost certainly came out of some rich booster’s pockets, but there is no price tag on a 19-year-old’s life, and the widespread damage to the institution is far greater than can even be calculated. Indeed, it was the head of the Board who wound up resigning soon after Durkin’s firing, realizing what an absolute mess he had created.
Everything about how this was handled is absolutely disgusting. Everyone involved needs to get their priorities in order. Sadly, I suspect that few of them will.

- - -

So, as you can see, we’ve got some outstanding candidates this year for The Lose of The Year. Quite honestly, there are no bigger losers than everyone I just mentioned who were involved in the ‘None of This is Funny’ category. They are all awful people. But they are not worthy winners, because I do not want to give awful people an inch.

And this blog is supposed to be funny. Failure should be funny, goddamn it, and I want to end this year on a positive note – as positive as a negative result can be.

First, let’s talk about the runner-up:

The Runner Up:

Houston Rockets
Clang!
Oh sorry there, the Houston Rockets just missed another 3-pointer. Clang! Wow, there are so many bricks flying about that I need a hard hat. Clang! Damn, this is like a construction site. Clang! Excuse me here while ... Clang! ... while I take cover …
Clang!
The Houston Rockets missed no less than 27 consecutive 3-point shots in Game 7 of the Western Conference finals, a game in which they bolted out to a double-digit lead in the first half, only to be reeled in and passed by the Golden State Warriors as the Rockets were throwing one brick after another. Clang! And I freely admit that I’m a Warriors fan, mind you, so I was glad of the ultimate result, but even so, this was just painful to watch. Clang! What should have been a moment filled with a great sense of accomplishment, as the Dubs had vanquished their most worthy of adversaries on the way to another title, instead didn’t feel all that good. Clang! Actually, the way in which the Rockets fell to earth felt almost tragic.
Clang!
We try to talk mostly about process here at In Play Lose, of course, since all games are ultimately one-off events, and the results of one particular game don’t necessarily reflect the process which had been undertaken. The Houston Rockets created one of the most efficient and effective offenses in NBA history last season, won 65 games, and had a double-digit lead in Game 7 against the Warriors before they collectively, inexplicably, forgot how to shoot.
Clang!
Which can happen, of course. Shooting the basketball can be subject to tremendous variance. Even when you’re Steph Curry, the greatest shooter that the game has ever seen, there are going to be night where the goddamn ball just won’t go in the goddamn basket. Clang! Somewhat understandably, coaching tends to deemphasize shooting in favor of working on principles of things like defense and rebounding, areas of the game thought to be more within a player’s control. From a purely statistical point of view, the idea of a team missing so many in a row … Clang! … is astronomical.
Clang!
But we’re not talking just statistics in this case. We’re also talking about the human psyche at play. Blind statistical analysis can come up with that missing 27 threes in a row is, like, a 1-in-70,000 chance or godknows what the odds are, but blind statistics are rational, and don’t care whether or not it’s Game 7 of the Western Conference Finals or some random Tuesday night game in Sacramento. In the moment, within that one game, it’s easy to start to press, especially one where the stakes are so high. We see, every year in the NCAA, teams getting bounced from the tourney who just go ice cold and they can’t throw the ball in the ocean. The longstanding joke in basketball is “shoot if you’re hot, and if you’re not hot, shoot until you get hot,” with the idea being that you shouldn’t have a conscience when it comes to shooting the ball, but we do have consciences, we do let misses bother us, and once we miss a few here in a row, it can start snowballing.
Clang!
Will you stop throwing bricks, Rockets! I’m trying to talk here!
Clang!
Sigh.

 
Clang! Clang! Clang! Clang! Clang!
Jesus Christ.
Now, some of those are open shots that guys just flat-out missed. That’s going to happen sometimes. Some are tough shots that guys on the Rockets are capable of making and didn’t. But a lot of those are just bad shots. Really bad shots. They’re not open, they’re forced, they’re tossed up by guys who are having off-nights but being given the green light to shoot them regardless.
Clang! 
Once you start missing shots, it can be really hard to stop missing them. When it’s Game 7 and you’re in the process of blowing a double-digit lead, you can start to press and lose your technique. Go back and look at those misses again, and while a few just rim out, far more of them are just absolute bricks.
Clang! 
But that’s the Houston way. The Rockets shoot more threes than any team in NBA history, and were committed to it even when it was killing them. I admired that sort of zealous commitment – it worked for most of the season, after all – even if I personally find the way that the Rockets play to be terrible to watch. They are the NBA’s equivalent of Three True Outcomes baseball. That’s not a compliment.
Three True Outcomes baseball is what happens when everyone involved figures out the most efficient ways to do everything, and decide to do nothing but. The most efficient offensive play is a home run. The most efficient defensive play is a strikeout. When the entire game is geared towards the former – which happens 4% of the time – and the latter – which happens 25% of the time – the game ceases to be interesting. Add in all of the walks, and you have an enormous swath of the game that doesn’t involve much happening. Someone I know mentioned to me during Game 1 of the World Chess Championships that nothing much was happening, and I pointed out that the average time between moves – about 4:00 – wasn’t a whole lot more than the average time in between balls in play – about 3:48 – in a Major League baseball game. Part of why I didn’t bother to write much about baseball this past year is that I was too bored.
Right along with the growth of Three True Outcomes baseball has come the frequent usage of defensive shifts – a smart strategy which I’m surprised has taken so many so long to come around to doing. Defenses have shifted left-handed hitters into near extinction. If you’re a lefty hitter, and you hit a ground ball to the left side, you have a .193 chance of getting on base. There has been talk in baseball of outlawing shifts, but the fact is that shifts have become so popular because so many of the hitters are stubborn in their approaches:



Bunt! Hit to the opposite field! For the love of pete, make an adjustment and take what the defense gives you! For godsake, do something else!
And to be clear here, I’m not advocating for inefficiency. Advocating for inefficiency makes no sense. But from the standpoint of a spectator, seeing sports reduced to simply the most efficient of strategies is, frankly, boring. We like variance, we like unpredictability. That’s part of what makes it exciting. And sure, the most efficient way is the ideal way to be doing things, but it helps if you’re also able to do something else. There is always more than one way to be successful. And the opponent is going to do everything in their power to stop you from doing what is it that you want to do, so when that happens, it’s best if you have something else in your bag of tricks. This is in keeping with one of my theories of football, which is that at some point you have to stop trying to establish the run and start trying to win the game.
All right, so where were we? Clang! Oh, right, we were talking about the Rockets. Clang!
The Rockets shoot threes, they shoot layups and free throws and make it a point to try and avoid doing anything else, since those are the most efficient shots in the game in terms of points per possession. They run basically one play again and again, letting James Harden iso against whatever opposing defender they’ve decided to target. It’s mind-numbing to watch, yet it can also be devastatingly effective. And the Rockets, as I mentioned, were zealously committed to the cause, so much so that they were willing to go down in flames doing it.
Clang! 
They had suffered a terrible blow, of course, when Chris Paul injured a hamstring in Game 5 and had to miss the last two games. Paul represented Plan B, a guy who could work all about in the midrange effectively when Plan A – James Harden isos leading to layups or threes or free throws – wasn’t working very well. He gave them a new dynamic, something that had been lacking the previous season, when the Rockets went down to San Antonio in the 2017 playoffs, with the Spurs having decided to completely cede entire swaths of the floor to the Rockets and basically dare them to shoot from there, which the Rockets just would not do. Without Paul’s creativity in the midrange available in a time of need, the Rockets had no Plan B, so they just kept chucking up threes even when they were missing.
Clang!
And as much as we favor the notion of process over result, the fact is that the result is how you wind up getting judged, and while one game may not be indicative of sound process, when it comes down to a one-game situation, you have to figure out how to win it. If something isn’t working, you have to do something else.
Daryl Morey specifically designed a team that he believed could beat the Golden State Warriors in the 2018 playoffs, and they damn near pulled it off. Ultimately, however, they failed, and this new season’s rendition of the Rockets have underwhelmed: the off-season signees were disastrous, the role players lost from a season ago have yet to be replaced, and Chris Paul’s hurt all the time, which is making the enormous outlay of money that is his new contract look like a really bad investment. Their championship window seems to have suddenly been slammed shut so tight that you cannot even throw a brick through it.

- - -

And our winner of The Lose of the Year in 2018 is something of a lifetime achievement award – but not because they were terrible all the time, mind you. Quite the opposite, in fact. They were at the pinnacle merely four years ago. It’s a lifetime achievement award in the sense that in the lifetime of this team, they’ve reached the loftiest of heights and then seemingly suddenly but, in fact, rather inevitably, sunk straight to the bottom. Behold the life cycle of success:

The Lose of The Year:

Die Mannschaft

Nobody's home

In 2010, at the World Cup in South Africa, we see the “New Germany” in action. They are fun, yes, fun. Really? Fun? Germany? What? They are young, they are brash, they play fast and loose and free, they miss penalties and do stupid things and make up for it with their pure talent. And it’s a fun group, a diverse group in keeping with the evolving nature of German society. The German game, which seemed in dire shape after finishing last in the 2000 Euros, had gone through “Das Reboot” and was now fully energized and alive once more. The Germans come home from South Africa with a 3rd-place medal in 2010, overachieving and letting it be known that they are once again a force.
Four years later, in Brazil, a team composed of the same core group of players from 2010 reaches the pinnacle. It’s a team that play all sorts of ways. They can possess the ball, they can press if need be, they make smart decisions and always seem to make that correct next play. The Germans show their traditional resolve in eking their way through some tough matches, but then they open it up in the semifinal and absolutely obliterate the host Brazilians 7:1 in one of the most eye-opening performances in the history of the game. And then they show their true resolve in the final, winning 1:0 over Argentina in extra time in a game where they were second-best for the better part of it. With that tremendous talent, they’ve also added some steel and grit and tenacity. They are worthy champions.
And understandably, the Germans are among the favorites for 2018. When I’m in Las Vegas, and I peruse the World Cup odds prior to the draw for Russia 2018, the Germans are listed as the betting favorite, and with good reason. They’re the defending champions, after all. They have a wealth of experience. And they still have so many of those great players – Müller and Özil and Kroos and Khedira and Neuer and Boâteng and Hummels and on and on – who have been the foundation of the  program for much of the past eight years, if not for all that time. It would seem a wise bet to put down money on the Germans.
And, as it turns out, it also would have been a waste of money, because Russia 2018 comes around, and … the Germans are crap. Absolute crap. They are a pile of shit who deserve no better than finishing last in their group.
Mexico runs them into the ground and the 1:0 final scoreline flatters the Germans, who could have lost about 6:0 with some better Mexican finishing. El Tri are the better team and deserve to win. The Germans then get a miraculous, last-minute free kick from Kroos to beat the Swedes 3:2 and stay alive, but, in truth, the Swedes blow the game. The Swedes are the better team for most of the 90 minutes. Then in a game they simply have to win against the South Koreans to advance, they get run ragged. The Koreans are the better team, and the better team wins 2:0.
And it’s important to note the fact that, in all of their three games in Russia, the opponents are the better team on the day. The Germans finish last in their group and fail to advance to the second round for the first time in 80 years. They only take three possible points out of nine, and it is at least two more points than they probably deserve.
What the actual fuck just happened?
Winning is hard. It’s really hard. And once you’ve reached that top flight, and you’ve earned that ultimate prize, it’s natural for people to assume that you can do it yet again. After all, you had the talent to win the first time, right? But as we’ve seen time and again, motivation doesn’t always follow suit. Defending a championship presents an entirely different set of challenges. It requires a shifting of mindset. It’s a lot different being the predator than the prey. When you win, you become the latter. You’re a target and everyone wants a piece of you, just as you wanted a piece of whoever was on top before.
And it’s easy to look at this German boom-and-bust cycle as being over the course of three World Cups, but it’s easy to forget all of the time in between. That’s eight years’ worth of time. That’s a long time for a group of athletes to maintain a top level. When they weren’t playing for Die Mannschaft, all of them were playing on élite club teams in Europe and logging loads of mileage. How many matches of football have some of these players logged in that time? Over 300? Over 400 even? The wear and tear takes its toll. Injuries and age catch up to everyone, eventually.
So the formerly young and frisky Germans of yore showed up in Russia with a collection of guys who were old and slow – and, also, who were sick of each other. As soon as things started going poorly, stories of dissent and discord and cliquish, clannish behavior in the German camp began to leak out. Now, dissent and discord and cliquish, clannish behavior is pretty common, of course. These are competitive people, and they’ll get mad at each other from time to time. In the aftermath of the Germans’ collapse, playmaker Mezut Özil went on quite a rant while announcing his retirement from Die Mannschaft, one which would seem to indicate that they weren’t that happy of a family over the years after all. (Though, to be fair, Özil set himself to be a scapegoat by doing something as foolish as posing with a dictator, which didn’t go over very well, and following that up by playing like garbage in Russia.) When you win, your tolerance for bullshit is considerably higher. A lot of disagreements will be forgotten about and buried. Losing makes it all the more unbearable.
But back to the ‘old and slow’ problem for a minute here. This team was a bunch of statues. They were slow, unathletic, ponderous and plodding. Once El Tri had put forth the blueprint on how to beat this team – stand them up, outlet the ball to a man just off the shoulder of the German central midfielder, turn and face, play into space, fill the lanes and run like hell – the Germans were toast. Even the supposedly-slow Swedes were running them up and down the pitch. The Germans just could not keep up.
Germany’s fate was akin to that of Spain in 2014: old and slow guys trying to play possession football getting stretched and trumped by athleticism all over the pitch. And in both cases, the failure stemmed from a held over, championship-winning coach failing to adapt his ideas and relying too much on a player pool whose time had passed them by. In order to sustain success, there has to be a certain amount of churn. You need new blood, you need new ideas and new infusions of talent.
And as I mentioned before, while the Germans were worthy title winners in 2014, they had one truly gobsmacking result in the tournament. Otherwise, they were winning a lot of close games – a good sign, mind you, and a good thing to be doing, but they weren’t actually that much better than everyone else.
The Germans followed up this disaster with a truly pathetic performance in the first ever UEFA Nations League this fall, finishing dead last in their group and getting relegated. Getting almost nothing from two games with the French was understandable, but they also blew a 2-goal lead at home to the Dutch, and got beaten like a drum by the Dutch 3:0 in Amsterdam while looking about as bad as any German team I’ve ever seen. Head coach Joachim Löw was trying to integrate some newer and younger players in the squad in these UEFA matches, and as it turns out, the kids aren’t alright. It’s not going well right now for the DFB. This program needs another Das Reboot sooner than later.
So we will commend this core of German players for their extended run of success and excellence, but they say that all good things must end, and we must send them on their way, because right now, this team is trash. The German National Team are The Lose of the Year for 2018.

- - -

Thanks to everyone who contributed their nominations for the TLOTY award, and thanks to everyone who has read in the past year all over the world. I do it all for you. Many thanks also to my correspondents, sources and crack staff – emphasis on crack – who listened to me and put up with me as I bounced all sorts of ideas off of them.

This entry is dedicated to Kate, who always encouraged me to express myself in the most creative and absurd ways possible. I usually try to post this on the 31st of December, but I’m leaving this with you a few days early, as I’m off to Santa Fe at the end of next week to attend her memorial service. So consider this entry a Christmas gift from me to you, and it’s so bloody long that it’ll probably take you until the 31st of December to read.

And I like to close out this specific entry, every year, with some music from the year which has moved me. I like all sorts of music, and I am never sure what type of music is going to resonate with me. The songs that I have heard from this particular record surprised me more than any that I heard all year. It is often the case that the most insightful, most meaningful musings about this bizarro experiment of a nation that is America come from those who do not come from, and who came to, this country. Nairobi-born, Minneapolis-transplant J.S. Ondara’s gorgeous record Tales of America, which is actually due to be released this coming February, is a meditation on what America has come to mean, and what it means to be an American. It is an act of introspection and contemplation, the kind of which a good number of people in this self-absorbed, self-important, unempathetic, unaware nation ought to be doing.

All the best to everyone. Happy Holidays, and I’ll see everyone on the other side of the New Year.

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