7-Up

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jesus, this goal was beautiful

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

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

Piece of shit

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

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

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

Thou shalt not score!

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

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

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

The Last Sonics meet again

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Busting a Move

There is no reason for this gif to be here. I just thought we needed a moose chasing a golfer in Sweden, because moose.

TODAY we’re going to talk about player movement. This is a good time of the year to do that, since we’re approaching the baseball trade deadline. It’s that time of year where bad teams trade good players, and good teams trade bad players in return for those good players.

Okay, well, maybe that’s not entirely true. The players being dealt back aren’t necessarily bad before they get dealt, but most of them will amount to nothing in the end. This is because the bad teams doing the trading of good players usually are bad teams because a) they have no real good eye for talent, and/or b) they have a coaching, development, and/or organizational system which sucks, meaning whatever talent they acquire will likely go to waste.

This is why, when you see some list of all of the great young talent the Chicago White Sox have acquired in the great purge that is their summer of 2017, you should take it with a grain of salt. The White Sox have done almost nothing right as an organization since they won the World Series in 2005, and have returned to the protoypical bad and boring state of irrelevancy which has generally plagued them for a century. The White Sox excel in producing players who are either mediocre or malcontents. How that is somehow going to magically change remains a mystery. As I’ve said before, if a management team runs your franchise into a ditch, it’s foolish to think they’ll be smart enough to get you out of it.

And teams have wised up and come to understand that you shouldn’t go overpaying at the trade deadline. There hasn’t been a truly wretched deadline deal in baseball for quite a while now. The days of the Heathcliff Slocumb deal have long since passed. And yes, realizing that yesterday was the 20th anniversary of that horrible trade by the Mariners “inspired” me to write this blog, so to speak. In terms of long-term damage to a franchise, I’d probably argue that the Mariners’ trade of Adam Jones for Erik Bédard was actually a worse trade, and that Shelby Miller stinker by the Snakes looks to have lasting power in the annals of deals gone awry, but both of those were offseason deals. In the context of the midseason trade deadline, the Slocumb deal is the (Fool’s) Gold Standard of awful. And the Red Sox made out like bandits in that Slocumb deal, but not even they have been immune to the horrible midsummer trade, which I’m reminded of watching TV here and seeing Jeff Bagwell inducted into the Hall of Fame.

The most common currency these days is pitching prospects, which are basically lottery tickets. Want a guy from a bad team? Give them 2-3 pitching prospects from the lower leagues, and if they balk at that price, then give them 2-3 more. Among the prospects the Giants just received for trading 3B Eduardo Nuñez to the Rex Sox was a 17-year-old presently pitching in the Dominican Summer League. As longshots go, they don’t get much longer than that. Failed African kleptocracies possess currency of greater value than young pitching prospects. There’s a reason for this, of course: pitchers are fragile and prone to breaking down. The likelihood that any of those lottery tickets will cash is slim to none.

And this has proven true with pitching prospects at all levels, regardless of prowess or pedigree. Even picking up seemingly can’t miss prospects can blow up spectacularly. In 2011, the Giants traded for Carlos Beltran from the Mets in an effort to boost their chances at defending their World Series title from the year before. (They failed.) Giants fans were decidedly unhappy about the price for a 3-month rental of Beltran: Zac Wheeler, the 6th overall pick in the draft and considered to be the #1 prospect in the Giants farm system at the time. In five seasons with the Mets, Wheeler has produced a total of 21 wins and has spent 2½ years on the DL with arm problems. Giants fans used to complain about that trade, since Beltran didn’t really do much in two months bayside while Wheeler had so much upside, but no one complains much now given the unfortunate trajectory of Wheeler’s career.

Then again, given the constant and perpetual spate of injuries which seems to ravage the Mets on a yearly basis, it’s quite right to question their training and medical staffs. Injuries can be one-off and bad luck, but runs of injuries throughout a club on a regular basis point to a certain level of organizational incompetence. (We can make light of this in the context of chronicling failure, but something as damaging as this story about the New Orleans Pelicans, from a human standpoint, is pretty alarming.) This goes to what I was saying before about bad organizations, insofar as that, one way or another, they go about making good players into bad ones over time. And make no mistake about it, the New York Mets have been a bad organization for years, one which has won in spite of itself of late. For perpetually bad teams, the buying and selling of talent usually proves to be the perpetuation of the same old mistakes.

The whole point of bad teams trading at the deadline, of course, is to dump salary and try to recoup anything for expiring contracts of players you have no intention of keeping. If you’re bad with those guys on your team, you can quite easily go on being bad without them. But as deadline buyers have smartened up over time, dealing guys away at the deadline has become less and less desirable. Not only are you still bad now, but you’re unlikely to get anything in return which will prevent you from being bad in the future. Your best chance to retool through the trade market actually comes in the offseason.

Then again, if you suck, you’ll probably screw up the offseason as well.

The baseball deadline nears just as the flurry of activity surrounding the free agency period in the NBA finally peters out. (Or so we thought, but more on that in a minute.) I continue to maintain that the Golden State Warriors have, in fact, broken the NBA, is as much as that the response from the other 29 teams to this dominant juggernaut seemingly having risen from straight out of the Pacific Ocean is to completely melt down and lose their collective minds. We’ve already killed the Kings and the Bulls for selling off their stars – Boogie Cousins and Jimmy Butler – for pennies on the dollar, but then the Indiana Pacers said “hold my beer” and one-upped them with one of the more mind-bogglingly bad trades I’ve seen of late, swapping their disgruntled star Paul George to OKC for a couple pairs of shoes. OKC can now pair PG13 with Russell Westbrook for a season in yet another attempt to remain relevant before George inevitably jets off to Los Angeles in free agency. The primary piece going back to Indiana is Victor Oladipo, who has now been traded twice in a year, and who the Zombies are happy to get off their books after inexplicably giving him an $84 million extension. Sam Presti didn’t get nearly enough shit for offering that awful contract up last season, nor does he get enough slag for some of his awful drafts in OKC in recent years, because Presti’s greatest strength over the years has been to figure out who the dumbest teams in the league are and trade with them.

Which is a description that fits Indiana well, at the moment. Presti must have known he should make a deal with Indiana GM Kevin Pritchard because it was Pritchard, as GM of the Portland Trail Blazers, who picked Greg Oden instead of Kevin Durant with the 1st pick in the 2007 draft, and that pick of Durant at #2 served Presti quite well over the years. Indiana apparently had a three-team deal worked out whereby they’d move George to Cleveland, the Cavs would trade Kevin Love to Denver, and the Pacers would get a bunch of promising stuff back from the Nuggets, but the proposed 3-team trade has a funny way of winding up being a no-team trade. For some reason, Indy pulled out of that deal – apparently neither the Cavs nor Nuggets quite know why – and then they scrambled around and cobbled together this dog of a deal with OKC. Oladipo is a decent player, but not great by any means, and now they are on the hook for $84 million of decent-but-not-great. The best, and also most cynical, reason that I figure this deal took place is that the Pacers thought they were going to stink regardless after trading PG13, so the best way to keep asses in seats at The Fieldhouse was to bring back a guy who played down the road at the University of Indiana. And I don’t think that aspect of this trade has been played up enough. Seriously, if this decent-but-not-great player owed $84 million hadn’t played at I.U., I think there is ZERO chance Pritchard trades for him. NBA fans, even in Indianapolis, are far savvier than that. It’s small-time thinking on the part of what’s become a small-time franchise.

But that brings up something which a lot of people forget, which is that these sorts of decisions by franchises aren’t always made for reasons pertaining to on-field performance. Quite often, other forces and factors come into play. Sales reasons, marketing reasons, or hell, maybe the guy is a pain in the ass and you just want him to go away. Those reasons aren’t necessarily any better or worse, in terms of making a deal, than reasons relating to on-field performance. I think playing on the Hoosiers sentiment with Oladipo in Indianapolis is stupid – I’d argue the best way to keep asses in seats is through winning basketball games – but you can understand that line of reasoning when it doesn’t appear that you’re going to be any good, anyway. One of the more amazing non-trades I can recall from my Seattle days came in the panic that followed the Sonics choking in the 1994 playoffs. Head Coach and Acting GM George Karl cobbled together a deal to trade Shawn Kemp and the #7 pick in that draft to the Bulls for Scottie Pippen, a deal which didn’t come to pass, in part, because Kemp was the Sonics most marketable star at the time, and it was reported that many season ticket holders and corporate sponsors made it be known to the business office that their support was being pulled if Kemp was dealt. In retrospect, of course, that deal would probably have been good for Seattle, but in retrospect, most everything about the RIP Sonics could have been done better.

And one of the reasons the Indiana Pacers dealt Paul George was because he’d told them, in no uncertain terms, that once his contract was up, he was leaving. The trade in professional sports is something of a strange relic from earlier times when the franchises had complete control over the players and could dictate the entire course of their careers. While clubs in baseball and the NBA and such will insist the trade is vital to their interests and the ability to do it is essential, the players haven’t nearly figured out the ways in which they can leverage the situation in their best interests. Because ultimately, trades don’t make much sense in the abstract – why should I be told that I have to now pick up and relocate to someplace else where I don’t necessarily want to be? It’s been reported that numerous possible trades of George were, in fact, scuttled by his agent catching wind of the possible deal, calling up the potential suitor, and saying “we’re not signing with you, so don’t bother.” And it surprises me that more guys don’t do this sort of thing. Obviously, role players and 25th men on the end of an MLB bench don’t have nearly the sort of leverage, but stars have the power to shape and control and chart their careers, often failing to realize just how much power they actually have.

And we should applaud players for taking control of careers, instead of taking the sides of ownership and management. Don’t buy into any argument a sports league puts forth about trying to promote competitive balance through salary caps, revenue sharing, luxury taxes and the like. That’s not about competitive balance. That’s about cost certainty, which is entirely different. Major League Baseball finally clamped down on one of baseball’s biggest freeloaders, the Oakland A’s, and told them to stop skimping on payroll and claiming to be broke while raking in the easy money provided by revenue sharing. MLB had to force the Florida Marlins to promise they’d spend revenue sharing money on players after they’d been found to be turning rather nice profits while fielding horrible teams with horribly low payrolls. In North American sports, there are few incentives to be good and plenty of incentives to be terrible. Hell, the Seattle Mariners are worth over $1 billion, even though they’ve never won anything, they’ve lived off of the aegis of the state of Washington, who built them Safeco Field, and they made it a point to actively fight and thwart Chris Hansen, the guy who wanted to buy the Sacramento Kings, when he wanted to build a new arena down the street from their ballpark. They’ve not been good neighbors, and they’ve not been any good. How much are they worth again? A billion dollars? As in billion with a B?

North American sports fans are strangely conditioned to take the sige of management when it comes to all labor-related issues. One of the reasons for this is that fans root for teams for decades, whereas players inevitably come and go. Fans have a sense of loyalty to their favorite teams, and they assume that players should as well. This is naive, it always has been, and always will be. We also buy into dumb narratives about players being selfish, not caring about the team, and not caring about winning. Bullshit. These are the most competitive people on the planet. They want to win no matter what jersey they put on – it’s just that quite a few of them would rather be wearing a different jersey, which I’m perfectly okay with. I personally don’t understand why more players don’t force trades out of bad situations, nor have their agents work behind the scenes to prevent them. Your career is not best served by being traded to the Phoenix Suns or the San Diego Padres. Well, obviously, in the short-term, the reason guys don’t force their way out of places is because they get killed in the press for it, but ultimately, players should have the power and the control over their careers. We’re fans, we’ll get over it and root for whomever dons the jersey next. (Well, maybe those hillbillies in OKC won’t get over Durant. Tough shit. I would love it if Russell Westbrook, when given the opportunity to sign the new übermax $200 million extension, decides not to sign it – and he has all the leverage, so he has no reason to do it right away – and sends that entire garbage franchise into such a panic that they’ll corkscrew themselves straight into the ground, which would be glorious. But I digress.)

And this brings us to Kyrie Irving, who ruined the summer vacation plans of a great many NBA beat writers when it became public knowledge that he’d asked for a trade from the Cleveland Cavaliers. The Cavs have been in full-on meltdown mode ever since the NBA Finals ended. Cavs owner and junk mortgage king Comic Sans Dan Gilbert wouldn’t bring back GM David Griffin, one of whose main jobs in Cleveland involved keeping the peace. He then lowballed his first choice candidate for the job, Chauncey Billups, who turned it down. In the meantime, the Cavs whiffed on trading for either Paul George or Jimmy Butler, the sort of player they needed to add to compete with the Warriors, and no one who covers the NBA is able to deny the bevy of rumors of LeBron James leaving next summer to go to L.A. All of that probably has something to do with Kyrie’s thinking, not to mention the fact that he’s very likely sick of playing with LeBron and wants to be the #1 option on a team – which seems odd to me, in that he’s already somewhat of a #1 option in Cleveland, where he shoots more than anyone, and also seems somewhat delusional to me, seeing how whenever he truly has been the #1 option (i.e., without LeBron), the Cavs have been terrible. Be that as it may, I have no issues with Kyrie wanting to take control of his career and dictate its terms. In that sense, he’s learned from LeBron, who has spent his entire career maximizing his leverage and looking out for his own best interests.

Kyrie wants out of Cleveland and good on him for doing it. He’s something of a complex character, the value of whom is truly hard to discern. On the one hand, he’s an incredible scorer and one of the great shotmakers I’ve ever seen, a trick shot artist with the ball in his hand. On the other, he’s never shown himself to be very good running an offense, he’s not a great playmaker, he is truly one of the worst defenders I’ve ever seen, and I’m not sure he’s ever made a teammate better. Further still, it could be argued that with constant turbulence and instability in the franchise – so many coaches, so many GMs – and having had to play second fiddle to LeBron, he hasn’t truly developed all of his game. Further still, and this one is important, regardless of what the numbers tell you – and the numbers suggest to me that he might be overrated as a player – Kyrie Irving is a superstar. He hit the biggest shot in the history of the franchise, the championship-winning shot in Game 7 of the NBA Finals. He sells shoes, he’ll sell jerseys, and he’ll put asses in seats. And all of that stuff matters. In many ways, it matters even more than what he produces from a pure numbers standpoint. (Which could lead me into a long rant about how I hate all discussions about Halls of Fame in which statheads through numbers at me and disregard the narrative aspects of a player’s career, because Halls of Fame aren’t Halls of Stats, but I’ll get to that line of argument at another time.)

So congratulations, new Cavaliers GM Koby Altman, you now get to figure out how to trade Kyrie Irving and not get screwed over in the process. Have fun with that. Kyrie is only 25 years old, and has two years left on a contract that is, by NBA standards, incredibly team-friendly, as it was signed under the previous CBA. I mentioned previously that he was the Cavs’ best trade chip, precisely for those reasons. I also said they’d be insane to trade him, but everyone involved with the Cavs seems to be insane, so this is not as far off-script as you’d think.

And yeah, if you’re the Cavs, you really should try to trade him. You could be a dick about it and say, “you have two years left on your contract, so tough shit,” but that’s just asking for two years of distractions on a team that’s already rife with them. And you’re also better off if you make a good-faith effort to work out a deal with one of his preferred destinations – San Antonio, Minnesota, New York, Miami – because otherwise, Kyrie’s agent can say, “we ain’t resigning in two years” and likely scare off some suiters, or at least cause them to lower the asking prices. The players really do have more leverage than they realize in these situations. OKC didn’t care about trading for a year of Paul George’s services, because for them it’s a no-lose situation. If he walks, it’s a whole lot of open space on their books. If he stays, it’s a bonus. But most teams will not be willing to do something so ballsy, and be more inclined to play it safe.

Given the circumstances, this is a bad spot for Cleveland to be in. They need to stay relevant, in case LeBron wants to stay, because the only way LeBron will stay is if he thinks they can win. They also need to somehow get younger, because if LeBron leaves in 2018, he leaves behind a whole roster of guys well-suited to play with LeBron but not so good otherwise, all of them with contracts that make them extremely undesirable to anyone else. The chance for a bad outcome here is high, and so I thought I would cook up a few bad outcomes of my own for the fun of it …

Over on ESPN, they have a fun NBA Trade Machine which will allow to propose all sorts of trades and see if they meet the criteria established in the CBA. In the wrong hands, of course, such technology can be a dangerous thing. I decided to set out on a misguided quest to see if I could cook up the worst trades possible for Kyrie Irving, based upon the number of expected wins the trade will cost the Cavs. Behold some of my masterpieces, starting with the Knicks, who are one of the four teams Kyrie had on his wish list:

How’s that for a return? Only -11 wins for Cleveland though. Surely we can do better – or do worse, as it were, especially if we try to move some salary and trade some of the contracts the Cavs would be happy to get rid of.

Orlando has plenty of pieces with which to make an awful deal.

I don’t know if Sacramento would be willing to make this deal, since it would mark a radical departure from Vlade Divac’s usual philosophy, which is to amass as many basketball players from the Balkans as possible and grossly overpay all of them.

Here’s a 3-team deal with the Blazers and Bobcats Hornets. I didn’t have the heart to dump Evan Turner on the Cavs.

Here’s a bad trade with Detroit. You’ll notice some themes developing here, one of which is that a lot of the guys going back to Cleveland in these deals are guys who signed last summer, when NBA ownership got drunk on salary cap space and inked a bunch of not very good players to expensive contracts they now regret. The other theme you will notice is a lot of centers, which is a position no one cares about in the NBA anymore, anyway, and is a position laden these days with a general dearth of talent.

Atlanta has nothing good to offer, which is perfect for this exercise.

Okay, now this is more like it. Team up Kyrie with AD and Boogie in New Orleans in exchange for someone who is always hurt, two not very good centers, and some guy that I’ve never heard of. This is getting better and better.

In terms of number of Hollinger losses, this trade here of Kyrie to the Griz for the rotting corpse that is Chandler Parsons’ contract is the overall champ at -14. But this isn’t my favorite deal.

This is my favorite deal. I think this one is my Sistine Chapel.

And as dumb as those deals are, there have been deals in all sports in North America which were worse than those.

In the NBA, a superstar player rattling the sabres about wanting to be moved is a source of leaguewide upheaval. In soccer, it’s a day ending in Y. The biggest saga of the summer when it comes to superstars possibly changing teams is not Kyrie Irving leaving the Cleveland Cavaliers – but we’ll get to him in a minute – but the possibility of Neymar moving from F.C. Barcelona to Paris St. Germain at a price which is gobsmacking. The reports have suggested a transfer fee for the Brazilian in the realm of €250,000,000, which seems just preposterous, but everything about international transfers in soccer seems preposterous, and there is a good reason for that – most of the reporting turns out to be smoke, with very little fire behind it.

Transfers are a shady and shadowy business, and the international market is deliberately rife with gossip and innuendo. This is because clubs cannot directly speak to players who are under contract with other clubs. That’s against the rules. Transfers are the ultimate act of “have your people call my people.” Recruitment operations at club will employ fleets of middlemen whose job it is to go out and contact player’s agents and attempt to gauge interest in a player being willing to be moved – and the agents, of course, are perfectly happy to let it slip out that such-and-such a club would be interested in a player’s services if it results in said player getting a better contract out of the deal.

A result of the landmark Bosman ruling in 1995 has been that players have tremendous power when it comes to dictating where they play. When a player is out of contract, the club gets nothing if a player changes teams. As such, players hold the ultimate leverage: all it takes to squash a potential move is for an agent to tell a club there is zero chance in hell his client will sign a new contract, meaning the club has shelled out X amount of euros to acquire him and will wind up getting nothing in return. If you run a club, and you have a guy you want to keep, and he wants a new deal, his agent will go contacting middlemen working for other clubs, and then some strange transfer offer will materialize seemingly out of thin air from some other club saying “hey, we’ll give you X for such-and-such player,” at which point you have to go back to the agent, who will say “gosh, I have no idea why that club is so interested since my client loves playing for your club, and he would love to play for your club going forward for another €100,000 a week.” The only real leverage a club has is through playing time. If you want to get rid of someone, bench him and tell him he’s not in the future plans. Guys want to get paid, but guys also want to play football. If you tell him he’s not in the plans, he’ll want to go someplace else.

And when you’re a fan of a soccer club, you get used to it. My beloved Canaries of Norwich City make for a good reference point here. Norwich City are, for all intents and purposes, a Division 1.5 club. Every nation has in Europe has these sorts of clubs to one degree or another. The Canaries are one of the yo-yos, bouncing up and down between the EPL and the Championship on a regular basis. They’re a midsized club and, as such, they’re likely to look for younger talent at more reasonable prices and, at the first sign of trouble, they’re also likely to sell. When they were relegated from the EPL in 2016, I took stock of the roster and noted which guys were most likely to be sold to bigger clubs. Now, little more than a year later, the first five guys on that list of mine are all gone.

But this is how it goes. You accept it as part of the game and you move on. You’d love to keep your players for as long as possible, but if a bigger club comes calling and willing to buy, you’d be stupid to sell. Nobody in Leicester bitched too much when, the summer after winning the EPL title, the Foxes sold their best player, N’Golo Kanté, to Chelsea for £32 million. Kanté being sold to the Blues, a year after he arrived in Leicester, meant first and foremost that Kanté wanted to go to Chelsea. And why wouldn’t he want to go to Chelsea? He can make more money, first and foremost, and given Chelsea’s resources, he’s likely to win a lot more football games over the course of his career. Can you blame him?

Of course you can. Here in the states, we still have hillbillies decrying Kevin Durant’s lack of loyalty to an organization he had no choice in joining, and hooters who will burn LeBron’s jersey when he decides to take his talents to South Beach. That’s just dumb. If you’re going to root for the name on the front of the jersey, then root for the guys presently wearing those jerseys, instead of the guys who have moved on. Stop buying that stupid narrative about loyalty. There isn’t any loyalty the other way. Teams will dump players in a heartbeat if it serves their needs. Why do we, as fans, continue to grant license for ownership to do that, yet balk at the idea of players looking out for their own best interests?

Being a sports fan, ultimately, means allowing yourself to be conned into thinking that the ownership of your favorite club actually gives a shit about what you think. They want you to buy season tickets, of course, since that lump sum payment in the offseason is a nice influx of cash with which they frontload their budget. But there is plenty of evidence to suggest that many of those either don’t care about winning, or are far too incompetent to go about doing it. I have never begrudged any player who wanted to leave a favorite team of mine. They move on, the club resets and you go from there. It’s fun to think about the mechanics of making trades, like I did with the trade machine earlier, but if your team sucks, a trade isn’t likely to make them all that much better by themselves. If your team sucks, the rot likely begins at the top with ownership and then filters down into management. About the only thing they aren’t willing to trade, unfortunately, is themselves.

Stuff That Sucks

Thank god for basketball

OKAY, we’re going to cover a whole bunch of stuff that sucks today, stuff which I haven’t been writing about mostly because the teams that I follow are terrible. You need stuff that sucks to have stuff that’s cool.

I mean, it’s pretty easy to focus on the NBA when you have the Golden State Warriors in your backyard. Last night, the Warriors decided to put the Blazers out of their misery in this first quarter of Game 4, going scorched earth on Portland in the first quarter and reminding everyone that when they play to their potential, they threaten the sport of basketball with extinction. They’ve done this sort of thing a couple of times this season – I mentioned the Indiana game previously where Klay scored 60, and there was also the game against the Clippers where they scored 50 points in the third quarter and had a 200.0 offensive rating for the third quarter, which is the equivalent of getting a dunk every single time you touch the ball over a 12-minute period. It’s ridiculous what this team can do when they truly hit their stride.

But that’s enough of that stuff that’s cool for now. Let’s get to some stuff that sucks, and we’ll wander off on some tangents while we’re at it.

• My soccer team sucks.
When we last left Norwich City, I was performing an autopsy on the corpse that was their Premier League membership. Coming into this season in Div 2 – and yeah, it’s Div 2, so calling it the Championship is bullshit – the Canaries were among the betting favorites to win the league and return to the EPL in short order. They got off to a great start, and were in first place in last September when they travelled to Newcastle, at which point they blew a 2-goal lead and lost 4:3 to the Magpies, giving up the tying goal in the 95th minute and the winning goal in the 96th.
Pretty much from that moment on, the season has completely gone off the rails. The offense has never been the issue, but the defense is a complete disaster, ranking as the third-worst in the league. They’ve lost 5:0 at Brighton, 5:1 at Sheffield Wednesday, contrived to lose 3:1 to a 10-man Fulham side, turned wins into draws, turned draws into losses, turned close losses into bad losses, and generally turtled at the first sign of trouble. The manager got fired, their three best players got sold during the January transfer window, the season has dwindled to a miserable end, and here the Canaries are stuck in 8th place and out of the playoffs with two games remaining, making for Div 2 misery to come in the coming season.
When the Canaries were last relegated in 2014, having spent three years in the EPL, they took the calculated risk of keeping the core of the team together. They had enough of a cushion financially to do this, and it sort of makes sense to do that: if you have a core of players who’ve been at that highest level, you’d think they’d be able to figure it out against lesser competition. But it’s actually a pretty risky strategy, because if it doesn’t work, you’re left with a bloated wage bill the following season without the means to pay for it. And the fact of the matter is that if you got relegated from Div 1, you’re probably not as good as you think you are, and there are plenty of teams in the second division that could play just as poorly at the first division level as you did. Look at Middlesborough, for instance, whom the Canaries beat in “the richest game in football” in 2015, who were promoted finally in 2016, and who have been absolutely appalling in this year’s EPL. Norwich tried basically the same strategy this season as they did two years ago, keeping the core together after a relegation, but that means you’ve had the same core group together for four seasons now, which means not only are they not very good, but they’re also older and slower.
The second division in England is an incredibly tough league, a 46-game season where most everyone is in a bad mood and everyone has a point to prove. It can be really hard to get out of there. The team needs a drastic rebuild, starting with finding a new manager. The club’s finances are in good shape, but there has been a churn in the front office and I’m not very optimistic about any of this.

• Norwich took about a £200m hit when they got relegated. The drop-off is that enormous. The Lose household’s other favourite club, Swansea City, are also verging on sinking down to Div. 2 as well. This is why you saw Leicester City, for example, take the extreme step of firing their EPL-championship winning manager Claudio Rainieri when the Foxes were verging on slipping below the line earlier this season. Desperate times call for desperate measures. Leicester had a nice Champions League run all the way to the quarterfinals, but they’re still not out of the woods in the EPL.
The Leicester fairy tale seems to have come to an end, but it’s ultimately done so for the reason that most good things in soccer come to an end: namely, the fact that Leicester’s best player last season, N’Golo Kanté, was bought by Chelsea for £32 million. It’s not a coincidence that Chelsea are now in first and Leicester are near the bottom of the table. Kanté was just named the PFA Player of the Year for a reason.
This is the aspect of soccer that you should hate. Big money wins out in the end, and it will always do so. The divide deepens each season thanks to the aforementioned Champions League, which is essentially an ATM machine for big clubs to make a withdrawal from that will permit them to perpetually dominate their domestic leagues. I’ve not quite figured out why it is that other people don’t see that glorified Cup competition for the garbage that it really is. We’ve been told that it’s great because it says that it’s great, even though the product on the field generally fails the eye test. Oh, occasionally you’ll get a great game here and there like that Bayern-Real Madrid match from last week, but most of the time it’s crummy midweek football.
And it’s weird the way that the footballing media has so quickly fallen for this crap. Earlier this season, Tottenham Hotspur manager Mauricio Pochettino was absolutely savaged in the press for having the audacity to sit a bunch of his best players for a Champions League game in preparation for a big EPL match the following weekend. Pochettino’s reasoning was pretty simple: Spurs want to win the EPL – they’re four points behind Chelsea at the moment – and the Champions League was an annoying sideshow. How dare that Spurs concentrate on winning their domestic league. Never mind the fact that Arsenal have been perfectly content to be mediocre for a decade and just keep cashing those Champions League cheques which come with finishing the top four.
As I’ve said before, the Champions League was something of a copout created by UEFA when big European clubs rattled sabres about threatening to go and form a league all of their own. The novelty of such a league, however, would last for about a season, because all of the clubs involved are used to getting their own way, but someone would necessarily have to finish last, at which point it wouldn’t be such a great idea anymore. There is a brutal sort of staleness to domestic leagues at this point outside of the EPL, a sameness and an inevitability to the outcome that makes you wonder why anyone wants to watch.

•  My hockey team sucks.
I’ve been through every imaginable sort of failure in 35 years of following the Vancouver Canucks. I’ve seen them lose Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Finals twice. I’ve seen them grow into the most dominant team in the league and fail to win a title. I’ve seen them be plucky underdogs writing fairy tales. I’ve also seen them be hopeless, hapless, and incompetent for years. I’ve seen them lose to an 8th seed in the first round of the playoffs. I’ve seen them go from being really good to old and slow. They’ve achieved every sort of failure imaginable over that time.
But this was the first year where I ever saw them tank.
This team wasn’t any good to begin with. They got off to an insane start, winning their first four games without the benefit of ever being ahead in regulation time in any of them, but then the 8-game losing streak came along. Even so, the Flyin’ Whales managed to get themselves into a playoff position 50 games into the season, at which point they fell off yet another cliff. It was at this point in the season where they basically gave up, and a 7-game losing streak to close out the year left them with the 2nd-worst record in the league. Not only are they bad, but they’re also boring. The offense is horrible. They were 29th in scoring and 29th on the power play. In half a decade’s time, they’ve gone from being the most exciting team in the sport to being a handy remedy for my persistent and lifelong case of insomnia.
Oh, but I shouldn’t say they were tanking. They were “playing the kids,” as they shipped out some old guard vets from the glory days at the trade deadline, and what was probably the most discouraging about them “playing the kids” is the fact that the kids aren’t very good. Some teams that play the kids have some talent in the pipeline that simply needs experience. This is absolutely, positively not the case with the Canucks. The front office has been grossly incompetent now for years, and there is just a flat-out lack of talent all around. It was easy for them just to give up on the season and lose, and there isn’t a whole lot to be hopeful about.
And I feel bad for the Sedin twins, who are two of the greatest players of their generation and aren’t going to have a Stanley Cup title to show for it. This happens, of course. It happens to a lot of great players. I’d love to see them get one more go with a team that knows what it’s doing, even if just for a playoff run. The team in Vancouver, as constructed at present, is basically unwatchable, and probably about three years away from being any good again.

• But I have to be honest here, I kind of don’t care about the NHL playoffs any more.
I think I stopped caring about the time the L.A. Kings started dogging the entire regular season, doing just enough to get enough into the playoffs and then winning the Stanley Cup. Most everything bad in hockey over the years can be blamed on the L.A. Kings in one way or another. The whole tournament just seems like a crap shoot, at this point, even more so than baseball. I find the results feel rather random and unsatisfying, and thus it makes me even further disinclined to watch the regular season at all.
I’m not sure where the balance is here. I was just mentioning before how there is a staleness and sameness to the results in soccer, where the results often seem inevitable from the get-go. As much as I like watching the Warriors, I’ll freely admit that the prospect of them dominating the NBA for the next five years (which could very possibly happen) may not make for the most exciting viewing in a broader context. And c’mon, admit it: you’re sick of the New England Patriots on some level. Yes, they are a testament to true excellence, but then they win another Super Bowl and it’s annoying. But at the same time, I do want the regular season to actually mean something. I’m not sure where that balance lies.

• I meant to rail on this a couple of weeks ago when talking about how stupid the NCAA is. At Washington State, the basketball team sucks. College basketball is a terrible endeavor. The Cougars suck. They’re horrible and have been pretty much from the moment Klay went off to score 60 in the NBA.
But as bad as the Cougars were this year, the Husky scum from the University of Washington were even worse, contriving to go 9-22 despite the fact that their best player, Markelle Fultz, is going to be either the #1 or #2 pick in the NBA draft, which is a rather level of ineptitude. Well done Huskies. Be still my foolish heart.
After going 9-22, the Huskies fired head coach Lorenzo Romar, whose ability to recruit good talent over the years was seemingly matched by his inability to coach it. In firing Romar and his staff, the University of Washington also managed to throw away what had shaped up to be a top recruiting class for the coming season headlined by Michael Porter Jr., who was the national high school player of the year. Porter had committed to Washington and now has opted to do his obligatory one year of NCAA forced servitude at the University of Missouri. The reason he chose Mizzou? His dad is now an assistant coach there, having served this past season as an assistant coach at … Washington, of course.
This is one of the sleaziest things that college basketball coaches do. If there is a kid out there who is a great talent, and whose dad happens to be a coach, you go and hire the dad to be on your staff in the hopes that the son will follow along. You can call this the Danny Manning approach to recruiting, as it was famously perpetrated by Larry Brown when he coached at Kansas in the 1980s. In the case of Michael Porter Jr., his dad was previously an assistant coach with the Missouri women’s team before he somehow miraculously made the jump in status all the way up to being a lead assistant at a men’s program at a major Div 1 university. Now, to be fair here, I have no idea how good of a coach he really is, and he may be quite good at what he does. But to think that he would have had even a sniff at the U.W. gig were it not for the fact that his kid is considered a can’t miss prospect is, well, far-fetched. I’m sure there would have been plenty of capable candidates out there for that job who are far more accomplished, but who didn’t happen to have such a plum pedigree.
And see, this is the sort of shit that goes on in college sports in America. This whole way of doing business is complete garbage. Why do we enable this crap? Why do we watch? Remind me to ask those questions of myself next year when the Final Four comes back around.

• Oh yeah, and my baseball team sucks, too.
Some clownshoes baserunning by the Dodgers last night led to a rare SF victory, but the Giants are mired in last place after having just been swept by the Rockies at Coors for the first time in about 15 years. The offense is asleep, the left field position is a tire fire – Giants LFs started the year 0-for-19 – there are injuries all over the place, the 5th starter, Matt Cain, presently has the best ERA (good for him, but no so good for everyone else), the bullpen picked up right where it left off in 2016 and blew the save on opening night, and now Madison Bumgarner, their ace and icon, is out for at least two months after crashing a dirt bike on his day off. Egads.

Lots of stuff appears to suck right now. So much lose, so little time. I guess you could call it job security and I should embrace the suck, analyze and explicate it … so, uh, when’s the next Warriors game, anyway?