Tuesday, December 31, 2019

The Lose of the Year



IT was appropriate that, in the last NFL game of 2019, between the San Francisco 49ers and the Seattle Seahawks, the penultimate play of the game was a blatant pass interference that went uncalled. And it was blatant. And good on the 49ers guy for doing it, mind you. If you’re going to get beat in the end zone, grab the guy, take the penalty and play the next play, since not doing so means giving up a TD and losing. But no flag was thrown and seemingly no review made. Oh, well, after the fact, the NFL offered up a horseshit explanation that they’d reviewed and seen nothing, which makes you think whomever may have been doing the reviewing was blind as a bat. That explanation from the league was horseshit. And the reason why I say that is because the officials blatantly ignoring a pass interference penalty is pretty much what they’ve been doing the whole season in response to the new rule instituted which allows teams to challenge pass interference non-calls:


The NFL instituted that challenge as a knee-jerk reaction to the NFC Championship game between the Saints and the Rams. In the closing minutes of a tie game, with the Saints on third down and driving, the officials managed to cock this one up:


Given down and distance, time and score, and what was at stake, this was nothing short of the worst call in NFL history. The penalty would have given the Saints 1st-and-goal, after which they would have taken a knee three times, run the clock to nearly zero, and kicked a winning FG. The Saints would be about 99% to win at that point. Instead, after kicking a FG, the Rams had time to scramble down the field and tie the score, then won the game in OT and proceeded to partake in the worst Super Bowl of all time:


Make no mistake here: that is a terrible call. That is the worst call in NFL history. It is absolutely atrocious. And spare me the whole line about how the Saints had plenty of chances to win the game before that. The Saints were about 99% to win the game if the rule is applied correctly. It is truly abominable.

But what is worse, in the end, is how the league reacted to it, which is to institute a challenge on pass interference penalties, which was always going to be murky because it is a judgment call, and the NFL officials have basically blown it off all season in response, and NFL head coaches are wasting time (and a timeout) bothering to challenge the play. This came about because the Saints, and their fans, and most football fans for their matter, were apoplectic about this when it happened, and it pretty much cost the Saints a trip to the Super Bowl.

But let's be honest here: officials get stuff wrong. In the case of this particular play, the explanation put forth after the game was that the officials thought the pass had been tipped, which would negate any pass interference. It clearly was not tipped. It was a terrible call. But you know what? It happens. It sucks, and it can be infuriating, but it happens.

It happened too much this year, in fact. 2019 will go down as the Year of Bad Officiating. Literally every sport that I watch or follow has been marred by terrible officiating. Pick a sport! The officials were awful. It has been a long time since I have seen a strike zone as bad as in Game 5 of the World Series. We had an entire playoff game in the NBA between the Warriors and Houston Rockets marred by referees refusing to call fouls against the Warriors when they defended James Harden shooting threes. (We will get to the Rockets in a bit.) The St. Louis Blues scored a pivotal goal against Boston in the Stanley Cup finals when the officials missed an obvious penalty and the Blues scored in the ensuing sequence. And then there is VAR in soccer ... oh jesus, where do we begin with that? There were five goals chalked off just this past weekend alone in the Premier League for minute-level offsides infractions, which did nothing other than prove that 21st century technology shouldn't be used to adjudicate 19th century rules of the game. Officiating seems to be getting worse.

Except in college football, where it is as bad as ever:


No biggie, what's a 57-yard difference in starting field position?

And we laugh about this stuff, but the consequences can be enormous. Ohio State lost to Clemson by six points in the national semifinal the other night in a game where a fumble returned for a TD by the Buckeyes was, in my mind, incorrectly overturned. Missing out on the championship game costs Ohio State untold millions. One of those insufferable VAR decisions from last weekend that I mentioned came at the expense of my beloved Norwich City in their 2:2 draw with Tottenham. Norwich are struggling to avoid relegation, and that blown call – a disallowed Norwich goal – probably cost them two points in the table. The EPL saying "we'll do better" is of little consolation if you're going to wind up playing in Div 2 a year from now.

Officiating is harder than ever. Players are bigger, stronger, faster, more athletic and skilled than ever before. The refs have always been, in comparison, old, slow and fat, but now they just seem older, slower, and fatter. We've invented replay systems to help them out, but replay seems more often than not to prove what Voltaire once said: "the perfect is the enemy of the good." Replay is supposed to be objective, but that's pretty much impossible in an activity which is entirely subjective in the first place. Other than tennis, it sucks in pretty much every sport. About all that replay ever seems to prove is that rules are really vague and often quite badly written. No one knows what a catch is in football, no one knows what offsides is in the other type of football, and games get refereed differently in the last two minutes of each half of an NBA game than they do in the other 44. There ultimately is very little black-and-white here, it's all shades of grey, and to be honest, I would rather live in the grey area.

And literally all that winds up getting talked about now seems to be the officiating. Everyone in the media says "I don't like talking about officiating" as a prelude to doing just that, because there is so much noise and chatter. While there were a lot of really awful calls in sports in 2019, I don't necessarily think that officiating is necessary worse so much as that, with so much emphasis on that aspect of games, and with replay's foibles and failing, it simply stands out even more than before.

I hate replay. I hate it in every sport except tennis. I would rather live with the bad calls. And yeah, that means my team gets screwed sometimes. Norwich got screwed last Saturday by a garbage VAR call. The Seahawks got screwed on Sunday night, got screwed in the Super Bowl against the Steelers, and the reason replay exists in the NFL at all is them getting screwed by the officials and by Vinny fucking Testaverde and the Jets in 1998, which cost the Seahawks a playoff berth. The Sonics got screwed when Phoenix shot 64 free throws in Game 7 of the Western Conference finals in 1993, which is the only time I have ever believed that a sporting event I just watched was fixed.

But hey, guess what? We all get screwed eventually. All of us. Get over it. I actually banned complaining about the officiating from the NBA forum I administrate, because it had become insufferable. And soccer fans are the worst about this, by the way, as they hold on to literally every grudge and grievance seemingly for decades. Jesus Christ, during the Women's World Cup this past summer, I had to listen to Canadian fans who are still mad about a game their team lost to the U.S. women in the 2012 Olympics. Congratulations Canada, you got jobbed! And so did the U.S. men in 2002 against the Germans in Korea, and so did the Germans in the 1966 final against England, and so did England by Diego Maradona and the Hand of God in 1986, and on and on and on. We all get jobbed by the refs in the end. If that hasn't happened to you and your team, consider yourself blessed.

I hate replay, but I also hate the pitch framing catchers and the James Hardens and swan-diving center forwards of the world, all of whom spend so much time trying to trick officials. It's become impossible to watch a sport these days and not notice the zeebs and what they are, and are not, calling. In fact, they are necessarily at the center of attention because, more than ever, teams try to jostle and manipulate and sway the arbiters of the game for their own benefit.

Now, of course, leagues can do better. I mentioned Game 5 of the World Series this year. The umpire behind the plate for that game, Lance Barksdale, had been ranked as 16th best in the league in terms of getting balls and strike calls correct – which begs the question of why is the 16th best umpire calling a World Series game? Umpiring the World Series doesn't have to do with merit, as it turns out. Barksdale is regarded as a good umpire, mind you, but in 2018, they had Angel Hernandez out there in the World Series, whom everyone in baseball thinks sucks, and who had three calls at first base overturned in one game. First and foremost, they have to do better. They have to get stuff right. Too much stuff has been wrong in 2019.

But we all get mad when replay doesn't come to the rescue. The more we try to make it perfect, the less perfect it becomes. We have tried to apply more objective criteria, but doing so just reminds us that it's all subjective, in the end, and not finding objective answers just makes us all even angrier than we would have been if we were just mad at the ref for blowing it in the first place.

That needed to be said. And with that, it's onto the Lose of the Year ...

Not something you see every day, or any day for that matter ...

Great Moments in Failure
Here at In Play Lose, we tend not to overreact to one game. (Unless it is the Falcons choking the Super Bowl away.) We tend to reward those who sustain incompetence over longer periods of time rather than place too much emphasis on one performance. That said, there were some remarkably bad one-off performances in 2019 worthy of mention:

• Washington State losing 67:63 to UCLA is no big deal, since the Cougars have been losing to UCLA in basketball forever now ... except that was a football game, where WSU's QB threw 9 TD passes and they still lost, and where they led 49:17 midway through the 3rd Quarter and contrived to give up 50 points in 15 minutes. Even in the annals of WSU failure, this one is legendary.
• Leading by a run over the Dodgers on July 2, with two out in the bottom of the 9th, the Arizona Diamondbacks lost by promptly walking five straight batters. There is always a dumb new way to lose in baseball just waiting to be discovered.
• Mainstays here at In Play Lose, the always humorous New York Mets blew a 6-run lead in the 9th on Sep. 4 against the Washington Nationals, after those wacky Mazins had scored five in the top of the 9th, no less.
• In a year where the NFL officials blew off pass interference most of the time, leave it to the league's most creative chokers, the Chargers, to commit an egregious pass interference penalty with :03 left in the game (skip to 9:20 of that video for the gory details) to set up a dramatic loss to the Denver Broncos.
• We have seen two 30-point comebacks/choke jobs in the NBA this year, the first being Golden State blowing a 31-point lead against the Clippers in Game 2 of their first round playoff series, and then the Dallas Mavericks gagging away a 30-point advantage against Toronto just recently. Barf.
• The New Orleans Pelicans did this:


• Those wacky funsters, the Washington Bullets Wizards Buzzards, scored 158 points in a regulation NBA game and lost.
• Now, granted, this one was set up by a bad call, but still ... leading 3-0 in the third period in Game 7 of their first round playoff series with San Jose, the Vegas Golden Knights were incorrectly assessed a 5-minute major penalty, one for which the NHL would ultimately issue an official apology. The reason for the apology being, of course, that Vegas managed to then go on and lose, as during those five minutes a man down, Vegas basically forgot how to kill a penalty and allowed the Sharks to score four goals. (The lunacy begins at 2:05 in that video.) I've been watching hockey since the early 1980s and I've never seen a team score four goals on a power play. Sure it was a bad call, but play some damn defense for godsakes. Vegas rallied to tie but lost in OT and their season was over.
• Barcelona in the Champions League. Again. Jesus.
• N.C. State played the worst game of college basketball ever, scoring 24 points and shooting 9-for-54 from the floor. Their opponent that day, Virginia Tech, played maybe the second worst game ever, but at least they scored 47:


Our Special Fun Bad Award
It doesn't have to suck to suck. If your team is going to suck, at least have fun doing so. No team has better embraced the concept of being fun bad in 2019 more than those pewter pirates, those tangerine dreamers, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers:

Form tackle

Bucs QB Jameis Winston put up maybe the weirdest stat line I have ever seen, throwing for over 5,000 yards (one of the 10 best totals ever) while becoming the first QB ever to throw 30 TD passes and 30 interceptions in the same season. Included in those 30 picks were seven Pick-Sixes, an NFL record, the last of which came on the last play of the season:


Quite the mic drop, right there.

Lest you think dunderheaded commentary is confined to America

Give These Fans a Hug:
I'm fairly certain, at this point, that no fan base can truly be quite as miserable as that of the Detroit Lions, who have won one playoff game in 60 years and who literally cannot have anything go right for them. In the odd chance they find a potentially transcendent talent (Billy Sims, Barry Sanders, Calvin Johnson), his career will invariably wind up being truncated for one reason or another. Detroit is where head coaches' careers go to die. The Lions coach poorly, they draft poorly, and even when they seem like they might be getting it right for a brief moment in time, they'll wind up on the losing end of the most poorly officiated game of the season. But the Lions are used to that by now:


It doesn't matter what the Lions do. They seem to be sitting at a blackjack table and finding every single possible way to have the cards add up to 22, even when they are being run well – which they aren't right now. The Lions last great disaster came when they fired head coach Jim Caldwell two seasons ago after consecutive 9-7 seasons and turned the keys over to Matt Patricia, the former defensive coordinator of the Pats, on the heels of said defense being shredded and scored upon eight times by the Eagles in the Super Bowl. Like so many former Pats assistants, Patricia has showed up acting like a smug know-it-all and proceeded to run the team straight into the ground. Pair him with offensive coordinator Darrell Bevell, who called the dumbest play in Super Bowl history and whose bland offense trivialized Russell Wilson's talents in Seattle for years, and you have quite a pair steering this ship straight into the iceberg. The Lions were 3-12-1 this season, blew eight 4th Quarter leads, annoyed their veteran players, failed to protect their franchise QB Matt Stafford, and are still a hopeless mess.

• Every time I watch the Dallas Mavericks play and see Luka Dončić do something spectacular, I am reminded of the fact that there were actually teams who thought a generational talent and 19-year-old MVP of the second best pro league in the world was somehow worth passing on in the draft in favor of centers, at a time when centers have never been less important in the NBA. But that sort of organizational cluelessness is how both the Phoenix Suns and Sacramento Kings roll. It isn't as if the Suns weren't looking for a GOAT:

That nugget there was in a story on the Suns from ESPN's Kevin Arnovitz, who also wrote an amazing piece this year about a Kings executive who stole $13 million from his employer, which could theoretically happen anywhere but, of course, had to happen to the Kings, the NBA's Detroit Lions equivalent where even when they don't do anything wrong, something goes wrong.
But trust me, the Kings do plenty wrong of their own volition. The Kings even copied from the Lions' playbook of firing the coach from their most encouraging team in years for no particularly good reason, dumping Dave Joerger for the recently fired Luke Walton, who was lousy in L.A., even though he had no help from the front office, and who has taken a fun and fast young team and turned it into a slow, plodding mess – aided, in part, by Vlade wasting millions in cap space on redundant free agents who don't move the needle one iota.
After a promising start, meanwhile, the Suns are back to being their usually suck-laden selves, having just lost nine in a row including a come-from-ahead loss to the G-League team posing as the Warriors. No one who leaves Phoenix ever has anything good to say about it:
“The Suns are the worst organization I've ever played for and they can quote me. It was a big brothel on wheels and to this day I think it hasn't changed because some people working there should never manage this team.” — Marcin Gortat

• “We were an awful team. We didn’t intend to be that bad. Honestly, we were terrible, especially after the first 15 games of the season.”
– Jerry Dipoto, GM of the Seattle Mariners.


Nope, no argument here. That "reimagining" of the roster is going just super.
But tankamania is all the rage in the American League right now. As bad as the 68-94 Mariners were, there were actually four teams in the AL that were worse: the 95-loss Blue Jays, 103-loss Royals, the 108-loss Orioles and the 114-loss Detroit Tigers, who even made the Mariners look good on occasion:


These teams are so bad that they are actually perversely skewing the statistics of the league. The Mariners went 1-18 against the Astros last season, the Tigers were 1-18 against the Indians (the sole reason Cleveland was even in the playoff race), while the Orioles went 2-17 against the Yankees, giving up 151 runs and 61 homers in the process. All of these teams varying degrees of hopeless, and selling hope for the future in lieu of fielding anything remotely worth watching in the present.
Here is a little hint though: being bad for purposes of one day being good almost never works, particularly in baseball where long-term talent development is everything. Hell, the Dodgers have had low draft picks for more than a decade, and yet they seem to grow great players on trees. If you don't have that apparatus in place, it doesn't matter if your broken clock of a front office happens to be right twice a day when it comes to the draft. You're more likely to wind up like another long suffering franchise, the San Diego Padres, who have all those supposedly great young players show up at the major league level with raw skills while looking like they don't actually know how to play baseball. If there is hope for any of the teams I've mentioned in this passage, I sure as hell don't see it.

• I'm hard pressed to recall a coach as overmatched as Freddie Kitchens of the Cleveland Browns, who was gifted a great assortment of skill players and used none of them well while putting out an incoherent and undisciplined team which committed 20 penalties in their first game of the season and often looked as if they'd met for the first time five minutes before the game. Meanwhile, their best defensive player got suspended for the season for a fight with Pittsburgh's nth-string QB. This is what happens when you have hope, Browns fans. No nice things for you.

If you're a fan of any of the teams I just mentioned, you deserve a hug. And you probably also need therapy.

Low-Hanging Fruit: Your U.S. Soccer Update
Even in a year when the U.S. women win another World Cup, U.S. Soccer can't do anything right. The federation is in a protracted pay dispute with the gals, which is completely needless and idiotic. Pay the gals!
And let's be clear about something else here, this is not just about issues of equal pay. As their primary employer, U.S. Soccer can also dictate where the gals can play professionally, funneling them into the NWSL, a league of great talent which has been otherwise very poorly run on many fronts. This is important going forward, because it's not going to be long before a big European soccer club is going to decide it's worth it to start splashing more cash. And it is gonna happen, because like everything else in soccer, it will make good business sense to do so. All it took for the overall quality of play in the Women's World Cup to vastly improve in four years' time was a few really big clubs in Europe – Barca, PSG, Juventus, Man City, Arsenal – to up their investment in the women's professional game. It will not be long before one of these clubs decides it's in their interests to truly up the ante. If you're not going to pay the players accordingly, U.S. Soccer – players who are the best in the world – then don't also be cutting off potential for future earnings by dictating that they play in a poorly-run league and then go on dog-and-pony exhibition tours where you show off how great they are and make all the profit from it.
Stop this legal maneuvering and just pay the gals already. Enough. They're the stars. Treat them like the stars. U.S. Soccer has spent untold millions in legal fees to fight this case, all of which they should have just given to the gals in the first place and been done with it. It's not complicated. It really isn't.
Meanwhile, over on the men's side, we still have the same cast of characters, the same mediocre MLS drek, getting schooled by El Tri and, in a new twist, nearly losing to Curaçao in the Gold Cup and getting their asses handed to them by the Canadians in Toronto. But buoyed by the fact that his brother is the COO of the federation, Gregg Berhalter will continue being given every opportunity to show he cannot coach and is free to make all of the poor personnel decisions he wants. Far too many good young players eligible to play for USA FC continue to be ignored, but hey, they can go and play on one of the 12 U.S. national youth teams that don't presently have a coach. So, yeah, things are just ducky.
Seriously, fire all of these people – and unlike after the debacle of 2017, maybe replace them with people who know what they are doing.

A moment of Zen ... 
Brian Flores deserves to be coach of the year for getting to 5-11 with a Miami Dolphins designed to be terrible. Here is a fabulous sequence of tweets from ESPN's Bill Barnwell about the absurdist theatre troupe posing as an NFL team at the start of the season. And for those of you who'd like a good sense of what it's like to be covering one of the migraine-inducing clubs on a regular basis, I would highly recommend you follow, on Twitter, Stephen Noh of The Athletic Chicago, who covers the hapless Chicago Bulls and posts some of the best Lose material imaginable:


... So we have some good nominees here for Lose of the Year, but before we go any further and announce our winner, we should point out a couple of teams who absolutely, positively do not suck, who are in fact great and have great players doing great things, but who happened to come up on the short of it in 2019 and, along the way, behaved deplorably. Curiously enough, they both reside in the same city ...

Houston Rockets


I find that observation quite fascinating. I would, in fact, suggest that the media who cover a team tend to take on many of that team's characteristics. I'm not so sure that I would call the media surrounding the Golden State Warriors media "elitist" per se, but the entire operation has had a sense of smugness about it for the past five years, so I can see where some of that attitude can rub off. So sure, I can see how you might think along these lines. In fact, that tweet above is more proof this phenomena exists, whereby media members take on characteristics of the club they follow, because that guy is part of the broadcast team for the Houston Rockets, and he comes off in that tweet as being every bit as much of a whiny brat as the team chock-full of whiny brats that he covers.
I was positively dreading a Warriors-Rockets playoff series. The Warriors carnival/circus became so unenjoyable last year that even had they won the title, it wouldn't have felt terribly satisfying. And then here come the Rockets for a second round series, a rematch of the West finals the season before, and you have the two most irritating teams in the NBA as it pertains to how they bitch and moan and petty politic the officials on every play. It became absolutely exhausting in short order. I just knew it would get miserable in a hurry, and it took all of one game for that to happen.
Because, of course, one team didn't get the calls, that being the Rockets. And they were bad calls. In the first half, James Harden was fouled multiple times shooting threes, and they weren't called. They should have been. They were totally wrong. But it was also obvious why those calls weren't given, which was made perfectly clear on the deciding play of the game, with the Rockets down three, when Harden went up for a three and then FLOPPED. James Harden does that. He flops. He flops and he flails, and he has made every single referee look like an idiot in the process on national television, and rightly or wrongly – wrongly in my opinion – the officials in Game 1 of that series were not going to give him that call. And for a team who had basically banked on James Harden's ability to draw phony fouls on threes as a cheap source of points for several years, them complaining about it afterwards had a definite element of The Boy Who Cried Wolf about it.
And boy, did they complain. Game 1 of that series sent the Rockets into hysterics. Daryl Morey and the front office then produce a report saying they'd done a detailed audit of the West finals the previous season and concluded that, over the course of those seven games, the officiating had cost them 93 points. Never mind the fact that this conveniently overlooks just how many bogus points they accrued from Harden and Chris Paul flopping and drawing phantom fouls, which I'm sure Houston thought was all a-ok. This team missed 27 3-pointers in a row in Game 7 of that series, and then they wanted to go back, a season later, and blame the officials for why they lost. Seriously? Are you serious about this? Hey here is a tip: don't miss 27 threes in a row!
And I say that as a fan of Morey, who is one of the best GMs in the game, and also as a fan of Harden, who is one of the greatest scorers I have ever seen. It is truly impressive that he has mastered the ability to draw fouls, that he has perfected the is-it-or-isn't-it-a-travel stepback move into a three. It's finding an edge and then perfecting your craft to where you can take advantage. It's admirable.
But just because I admire it, it doesn't mean that I like it and doesn't mean that I want to watch it. There is usually one move in every game of Houston's where Harden is trying to draw a foul, the ref doesn't take the bait, and he winds up looking foolish. I hate watching the Rockets, I hate the way they play, and I hate the way they bitch when things don't go their way.
And, of course, for the second year in a row, the Rockets gagged when it really mattered, losing on their home floor in Game 6 to the Durant-less Warriors, who've now beaten them four times in the playoffs in five seasons and appear to have rented office space in the Rockets' collective heads. Well, the Warriors suck this year, so if/when the Rockets blow another playoff series, they will have to find something else to complain about. And I'm sure they will.

Houston Astros
First off, this story is pretty disgusting. In the aftermath of winning the AL pennant, Houston Astros assistant GM decided to gloat and taunt a female reporter – one who has covered domestic violence cases, and who taken the Astros to task for their trading for 2018 trade to acquire Roberto Osuna, who was in the middle of serving a 75-game MLB suspension for alleged domestic violence against the mother of his child.
"Thank God we got Osuna! I'm so fucking glad we got Osuna!"
What sort of piece of human garbage would do something like this?
Of course, there is an old adage in journalism, "never pick a fight with a guy who buys ink by the barrel," and suffice to say, a whole lot of ink got spilt over this. The Astros, of course, immediately tried to deny it and lie about it, which didn't really fly, since multiple reporters corroborated the account of the events. They then misspoke, misstated, and mis-everythinged, creating a P.R. dumpster fire for themselves, Taubman wound up being fired, and only when the heat got too much and the pressure failed to subside did the owner of the club begrudgingly apologize.
But we shouldn't be surprised by this, nor should we be surprised by the fact that this same organization violated MLB's rules and barred a Detroit reporter from the clubhouse because Justin Verlander had a beef with him from years past. Frankly, we shouldn't also be surprised that the Astros are in the middle of an alleged cheating scandal involving the stealing of signs, a belief so wide-spread in the game beforehand that the Washington Nationals actually changed the way they relay the signs during the World Series in order to prevent any funny stuff. None of this should be a surprise, because the Astros are an organization that have been deliberately opaque, showing contempt and disdain for anyone who may question them, and acting as if the rules are an annoyance which needn't apply. It's the same sort of shitty attitude which the Patriots exude, which (combined with some healthy envy, of course) is why so many people in the NFL are sick of that team.
The Astros are a great team. They've got some cool players, they're fun to watch ... and I hope they lose every game, just like they were doing back when I first started this blog. Seriously, try acting like decent human beings. Other people do it, and they can also be remarkably successful as well. It's not hard.

Since I am speaking of franchises with deplorable ways, shout out as well to another loser, the Jacksonville Jaguars, whom the NFL Players Association are now actively discouraging their members from signing with, seeing as how 25% of all grievances the union has to file are with the Jaguars, who have taken to levying ridiculous fines and forcing players to show for 'voluntary' workouts. Is it any wonder why the Jaguars are terrible? This is a workplace, first and foremost, and who wants to deal with that on a daily basis? And don't even get me started on the football team in Washington named for a potato ...

But there is really only one choice for The Lose Of The Year. There could only be one, because 2019 was the year of the greatest free agency bonanza in NBA history, an event so big that people basically became obsessed with the gossip and paparazzi and rosterbation of it all and pretty much forgot to watch the actual basketball taking place. And amid all of the bluster and bombast of NBA free agency armageddon, one bastion of delusional thinking rose to new heights and deserve to have their jersey retired:


New York Knicks
In Europe, the most lucrative sports entities have, for the most part, reached that level through a long track record of success. There are some exceptions – namely Manchester City and Paris St. Germain, clubs who have become petrostate playthings and promptly rocketed up the table with all of that cash sloshing about – but the biggest clubs in Europe are all dominant forces in the game who have been winning for decades: Barcelona, Real Madrid, Juventus, Bayern Munich, Manchester United, etc. You can resent them for winning so much, but their track records are undeniable. Over the course of a century of playing soccer, they have reached that position of power and status, and incredible valuation, by winning all the time.
Compare that to North America, where there is no relegation, no grave penalty for losing – in fact, there are perverse incentives to be bad – and, as such, how valuable an entity is has very little to do with what it has achieved, and oftentimes has far more to do with where it is located. Run down the list of some of the most valuable franchises in North American sports. The most valuable franchise in the NHL, the Toronto Maple Leafs, haven't won a title in over 50 years. Two of the biggest commodities in the NFL – the Cowboys and the aforementioned Redskin Potatoes – haven't been relevant on the field in over 20 years. The Yankees and Dodgers are incredibly rich, but also impeccably run, and they have legacies of success, but then you also have two of the biggest brands in the sport, the Cubs and the Red Sox, who built up much of that value over time by reveling in just how unsuccessful they had been. Come to Wrigley! Losing is cool! Cheap beer! Nowhere is the absurdity of this more on display, however, than at Madison Square Garden, the home of the $5 billion New York Knicks.
Let us let a New York resident tell it ...


The Knicks are one of the most hopeless franchises in all of sports, a team whose entire cachet is based entirely on their zip code. They've won two titles in their 73-year history, the last one coming in 1973. They're not a particularly good franchise, nor have they really ever been save for a stretch in the early 1970s. But they own the most coveted piece of real estate in the NBA in Madison Square Garden – or, at least, they would like to tell you that's the case. I get tired of Lakers exceptionalism, because that franchise was a joke for much of the past seven years, but at least the Lakers have won stuff. What have the Knicks done? Not much.
But 2019, of course, was the summer where it was all going to change, because Free Agency Armageddon was here, and, of course, they would want to play for the Knicks, they would want to ply their trade at the Garden and restore the glory to the franchise. Rumors about Durant to the Knicks started in the summer of 2018 and ran rampant. Hell, the Knicks even started putting pictures of Durant on their marketing and promo materials, even though he was on another team. But the Knicks wanted even more. They wanted another star to go with Durant. Oh, wait, Kyrie Irving is unhappy in Boston. Hmm ...
But the Knicks needed more space, more cap space, so they swung a deal to trade their best player, the disgruntled and oft-injured Kristaps Porziņģis, to the Dallas Mavericks for three first round picks and a bunch of stuff. They also moved a bad contract of Tim Hardaway Jr. in that deal, freeing up $74m in cap space for the summer of 2019, enough to sign two max players. Oh, and hey, the Knicks are now so bad, in the spring of 2019, that they may just land the top overall pick in the draft as well and, oh, dare to dream ...



Or, in their case to sign four power forwards, which is what wound up happening.
And, of course, they wound up with the #3 pick instead of #1 in the lottery, the top pick falling to the New Orleans Pelicans, who drafted Zion, and who then used this new-found position of strength from which to make a more favorable deal with the L.A. Lakers when it came time to make an Anthony Davis trade.
KD and Kyrie both came to New York, alright, signing with the Brooklyn Nets, who'd gone about creating two max slots of their own, and done so without all of the active, open, blatant near-tampering that the Knicks were doing, what with the promo materials and the owner, Jim Dolan, going on radio and bragging about how they were gonna get two max guys in the summer. KD and Kyrie both wanted to be in New York, as it turned out, they just didn't want to play for the Knicks.
And why would they? I remind you of one of your most fundamental principles here at In Play Lose, that which was christened "Edmonton Disease" by an NHL writer several years ago: in a salary cap league, where contract lengths and values are dictated by the CBA, the offers for free agents from various clubs will basically be about the same, and if dollars are equal, then other factors will come into play in a free agent's decision. This was coined in an effort to explain why the Edmonton Oilers, and other small market teams, would always struggle to keep top players. Dollars being equal, why be in Edmonton when you could be in, say, New York? But the same principle applies to all of those in the bidding, regardless of your address. If your organization is a shit show, then why would someone want to play for you?
And the Knicks are a shitshow. They've been that way for years. They have the worst owner in the NBA, a guy so thin-skinned that he bans fans who dare suggest he sell the team. They've had endless numbers of coaches and GMs and team presidents, some of them big names who don't know what they're doing, and some of them guys who do but who've been undermined by a meddlesome boss. They don't draft particularly well, their team president feuded in the media with their best player for years, there is constant tumult and turnover, and they never stick to a plan for more than about 10 minutes. The atmosphere around the whole organization is toxic and the franchise is a joke, but it's also one ultimately operated by a bunch of delusional weirdos who seem to think they're somehow exceptional. For what reason? What have they done?
Needless to say, all of that pie-in-the-sky thinking amounted to nothing. The Knicks got no max guys in free agency, but having all that space is not a bad thing at all. You can use it to make deals from a position of strength, to solve other team's problems for them, to acquire more draft assets and capital. Yeah, you whiffed, but that happens sometimes. It's time to go to Plan B. It doesn't have to be the end.
Nope, it's the end. This season, the Knicks are paying $63m of that $74m in previous cap space to four guys they signed in a panic who all play the same position. So much for Plan B. B as in bizarre or bonkers. They've already fired their coach, David Fizdale, after a dreadful start to the season that was shocking in how not shocking it was. As terrifyingly bad as this team has been, what is even more terrifying is how predictable it has been.
And it's amusing to think that it was the Nets who undid all of their plans for the summer of 2019, the same Nets who found themselves in NBA purgatory after seemingly trading away their entire future to the Celtics. The Nets built it all up the right way: good drafts; good under-the-radar signings; create space to create leverage; occasionally throw a wacky contract at an RFA that another team felt forced to match, thus hindering the opposition; establish a culture of accountability, but also fun on the court regardless of the results. The Knicks should be doing all of that. But doing so would only be possible if they first acknowledge that they aren't, in fact, exceptional. There is nothing about them that is, and nothing has been for quite some time.
And Knicks fans deserve better than this. Those are good fans, patient fans. They've put up with a lot of bullshit. The only thing they are gonna win any time soon is The Lose Of The Year Award for 2019.

- - -

I needed to write this. I've barely written all year, having sunk into a deep depression and abyss which has carried all throughout 2019. I basically couldn't concentrate for months, so writing anything seemed impossible. Thank you for permitting me this opportunity to scribble away and laugh a bit, which is the whole point of this exercise. Failure is funny, and laughter is life's best medicine. Feel free not to take anything I've just written seriously, because I certainly haven't, and it's better that way.

The mistakes are all mine. We regret the errors.

Let's close with some music. This is my favorite find in music in 2019. This is a Dutch band who play Turkish folk songs reimagined as 1970s psychedelic rock, with equal parts funk and fuzz in their sound. I saw them perform and they were brilliant. Pretty much my favorite record I heard this year. I'll leave you with this and, hopefully, I'll be around this corner of cyberspace once more in 2020.

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