Fit to be Tied

What a beautiful scene.

More than 105,000 hockey fans – the largest attendance in the history of the sport – braved snow flurries and 13° temperatures to fill up Michigan Stadium in Ann Arbor to watch the Toronto Maple Leafs and the Detroit Red Wings play in The Winter Classic. The annual outdoor game has become one of the coolest traditions in sport, if not the coolest (and certainly one of the coldest). The Winter Classic celebrates the origins of the sport and gives a nod to the game’s lore and nostalgia – the idea of kids playing on the frozen pond or on some makeshift outdoor rink in the dead of winter, ignoring the elements and simply playing for the love of the game. And the since you get is that the players love playing in The Winter Classic, as it’s a unique experience in an otherwise plodding 82-game regular season. Sure, the falling snow made for some difficult conditions to play in, but it’s a 1-off deal and, in the bigger picture, the Winter Classic celebrates all that is good in the game.

And this year’s Winter Classic also showcased one of THE WORST aspects of hockey, which is the shootout: tied at 2-2 after regulation, the Leafs and Wings played 5:00 of sudden death, 4-on-4 OT, then settled matters with a penalty shootout, which was ultimately won by Toronto.

The LOSE absolutely, positively hates shootouts. The lose likes to see winners and losers determined by legitimate means in the flow of the game, and not through artificial means. The shootout in hockey is just as contemptible as the penalty kicks in soccer, if not moreso because it now is a possibility in every single game, whereas in soccer it’s reserved only for knockout matches. The method for settling games in college football – each team possessing the ball at the 25-yd line – is also hokey, but at least there is something akin to real football involved in the proceedings.

Basketball and baseball, of course, have always had traditions of playing OT as long as is necessary to determine a winner. Such games take on a unique character to them. The more OTs a game goes in basketball, the more exciting is tends to get; the more extra innings a game goes in baseball, the weirder it gets. I understand that for a sport of such physicality such as football or hockey, or a sport like soccer in which you’re constantly in motion for 90 minutes, the idea of regularly settling games by playing as many OTs as possible is unrealistic.

The NFL has struck a balance that I think is reasonable. It used to be sudden death – first team to score would win – but teams didn’t like the fact that a team with receive the kickoff, drive down and kick a FG and the game would be over, so now if the first possession of OT results in a field goal, the other team at least gets a possession. (If the first possession of OT results in a TD or, even cooler, a safety, the game is over.) After each team has had the ball, if the score is tied the game becomes sudden death, and in the playoffs you play on and on until someone scores, but in the regular season they call the game after the 5th Quarter is over and declare it a tie – which happens rarely, maybe only once in a season.

The NHL still has play-until-you-drop OT in the playoffs, but regular season games that ended deadlocked went down as a tie in the standings. The league added a 5:00 OT period in the late 1980s, a single period of 5:00 at 5-on-5, and it did reduce the number of ties somewhat, but risk aversion strategy kicks in if you’re a coach at that point – are you better off playing to win in OT when losing gets you nothing, or are you better to go through the motions for 5:00 and get the single point? Long-term, the latter is definitely the smarter thinking.

So in an effort to further revamp a game that really didn’t need revamping to begin with, the league switched to playing 4-on-4 in overtime. And in 2005 the league decided to adopt the shootout to determine the outcome of all regular season games that remained deadlocked after the OT. The standings used to be simple – you get 2 pts. for a win, 1 pt. for a tie, 0 for a loss. Now you get 2 for a win, 1 for a loss in OT or a shootout, and 0 for loss in regulation. And The LOSE thinks this is bullocks. Losing is losing. You shouldn’t be rewarded for failing to do what’s necessary to be declared the ‘winner.’ The NHL’s glass half full argument is that, instead, the game is basically a tie and teams are striving to gain the extra point in OT – which makes sense until you actually see someone do some of this stuff in a shootout. It is just an exhibition, a glorified skilled contest, and the fact that you actually get an extra point in the standings for this is nonsense. The attitude of the players seems to be that a shootout is “meh, whatever.” At least you get a point for showing up.

This also makes an OT game more collectively valuable, since there is 3 pts. total awarded as opposed to only 2 in regulation. The International Ice Hockey Federation has now gone a step further to correct this mathematical quandary away from the North American continent, awarding you 3 pts. if you win in regulation and 2 for winning in OT or a shootout – which makes the standings even more confusing. The IIHF was actually responsible for making this mess to begin with, instituting shootouts as a decider in World Championship and Olympic play back in 1992. This was done as much for logistical reasons as anything else – when you’ve got 4-5 games scheduled for one day in an arena, a game that goes 2OT screws up your schedule pretty badly. The NHL following suit in 2005 marks about the first time in history that the NHL has agreed to follow some guideline from the IIHF, an entity the league makes a point to show the middle finger on a regular basis. The NHL likes to think of itself as being vastly superior to the rest of the world when it comes to the game of hockey, and with good reason – it has the best players, the best salaries, and generates the most revenue. But compared to the other major professional sports leagues in North America, the NHL languishes far behind, not just in terms of popularity but also in terms of competence. Not much of the ways the league operates has ever made much sense, and this instituting of the shootout is simply one of many, many examples.

What’s wrong with a tie? I grew up playing basketball and baseball, which don’t have ties, but I also was a goalkeeper in soccer, where ties were commonplace and considered to be an acceptable result. Honestly, my experience in soccer was that draws were usually filled with enough mistakes by both sides to warrant either one losing, so ending up with the draw was fortuitous, or maybe you were playing a game against a superior side and you fought hard to wind up stalemated. More often than not, a draw felt OK. It’s still better than losing, which is something I know far too much about. There is a reason this blog ain’t called IN PLAY DRAW.

This doesn’t actually happen as often in the NHL as it might seem. In the 2012 season (the last full season), only 12.2% of regular season games ended deadlocked after regulation. That really isn’t that many. I’ve never really understood why the game of hockey felt a need to institute something is part lottery, part dog-and-pony show and pretend that it’s a legitimate way to be deciding games.

Then again, I’m reminded now of a quote I heard once after a particularly lame game around about the turn of the millennium, a 1-1 tie between the Vancouver Canucks and (I think) the Mighty Ducks of Disneyland Anaheim in which the teams combined for something like 29 shots on goal total in the game. It was afterwards that Canucks coach Marc Crawford said something along the lines of “I can’t believe the fans paid $68 a seat to watch this crap.”

This seemingly throwaway quip from a frustrated coach (and in those days, coaching the Canucks was definitely a frustrating endeavour) actually speaks to the NHL’s motivations behind moving to a shootout – the idea that tie games are somehow unsatisfying to the rank-and-file, paying customers. Unlike the other three major sports, all of which have massive national TV deals, the NHL is far more dependent on actual gate receipts to pay the wage bills and keep the lights on. The top brass in the league offices essentially decided that, as a way to keep fans entertained, and thus willing to continue to shell out the cost of high ticket prices, it was always important to have a winner. NHL commissioner Gary Bettman, a disciple of NBA commissioner David Stern, was essentially copying from the NBA business model – if the game seems somehow to be lacking in excitement, then go about trying to manufacture some.

And given the poor financial state of the league about 15 years ago, you can understand why they were thinking along those lines. The league cancelled the entire 1995 season in a nasty labour dispute; franchises from Québec and Winnipeg relocated, as the Canadian dollar was sucking wind at the time. The league has continued to struggle ever since, as the overall accounting numbers are somewhat deceiving. The league collectively posts annual profits, yet most of those black numbers on the balance sheets are the result of only 6-8 or so of the 30 franchises. During the recent economic depression, it was rumoured that as more than half the franchises were in serious financial peril and were for sale on the downlow.

And you can also understand the league’s thinking about upping the entertainment value in the hockey-going experience, since the single-most exciting and entertaining aspect of the sport – scoring goals – seems to have become a lost art form. I first started following the game religiously zealously fiendishly a lot in 1982, a year which marked the start of the game’s great offensive zenith. In the 1982 season, the average number of goals scored in a game was 8.025. In 2012 – the last full season, as the league went through yet another work stoppage a year ago – the league average was 5.320 goals per game, a 51% decline. But you might think that, as the game of hockey has become more defensive in nature, and the scores have decreased, that the number of ties would increase – a game with fewer total goals being more likely to produce an even distribution.

Actually, no. In 1982, when offense was aplenty, 17.6% of the regular season games ended in ties. The number of draws has, in fact, decreased by 5% in the 30 years since, even though the goal count is down. It would seem that, as the game has become more defensive in nature, and defensive strategies have improved, so have the strategies for protecting leads.

And just because the game has become more defensive over time, it doesn’t necessarily mean the game is any better or any worse. It’s simply different. Similar declines in offensive output have occurred in basketball over the past 20 years, both collegiately and on the professional level, and I do think the game is the worse for it, simply because watching guys throw bricks is boring as sin. That Connecticut-Butler game which posed as an NCAA championship in 2011, won by UConn by a score of 54:41, was quite possibly the worst basketball game I have ever seen. At least Butler’s horrid display – they shot 18.8% from the floor – erased another dubious Washington State record from the books, which is worst FG pct. ever in an NCAA championship game. (And speaking of W.S.U. and bad basketball, what the fuck was this shit? Then again, for my study abroad program in college, I technically transferred to Butler for a year, which makes me as much as Butler alum as a W.S.U. guy. I was displeased that Butler lost twice in the NCAA final. Displeased but not surprised – this is IN PLAY LOSE, after all.)

The NHL had the perfect opportunity in 1994 to make some headway against the NBA, their prime competitor for winter sports entertainment dollar, as the Stanley Cup Final between the Canucks and the Rangers was widely regarded as one of the best finals ever, while the NBA final in the first year A.M.J. (after Michael Jordan) featured a cynical Knicks team reaching the final and ultimately losing to Houston in an ugly series which set the game back about 50 years. Hockey was hot and basketball was not, but then the NHL went and screwed it all up with a yearlong work stoppage. The NHL has never had much of an ability to stand prosperity. And the league should look in the mirror if it wants to start figuring out where the offense has gone in the game. For years, too much of the game – both in how it’s been administered and how it’s been played – has been for the benefit of the marginal player at the expense of the skilled player. The league should have cracked down on the clutching, the holding, and the obstruction in the neutral zone far sooner than it did.

But having said that, I don’t think the NHL of 2014 is necessarily better nor worse than it was in the past. It’s just different, but I happen to still enjoy it. I do know the players are bigger, stronger, and quicker than ever before, and the speed of the game is remarkable to watch in and of itself, even if the puck isn’t going in the net all that often – and part of that decline in offense, of course, has to do with the goaltenders being bigger and quicker as well. And for someone like me, adding a shootout just seems like a cheap sideshow. The game is fine as it is, even if the game ends in a tie.

But see, the shootout wasn’t instituted to satisfy people like me, nor was it instituted to satisfy the core constituency of hockey fans, who are the most diehard of fans in any sport. Hockey fans are hard core. They love the sport like none other. And they deride the 1 pt. awarded for OT/shootout losses as a “Bettman Point” for a reason – few decisions that Gary Bettman has made in his tenure as NHL commissioner have had the hard core fans’ interests at heart. He’s spent most of his time attempting to turn what is essentially a regional sport into a national one, be it through gimmicks to try and keep the interest of casual fans, or be it in the location of NHL franchises in places like Miami and Phoenix. A good rule of thumb here is that a game involving ice isn’t likely to flourish in a climate where ice doesn’t naturally form. The NHL’s Southern Strategy has been a flop financially, as most of those franchises are in perpetual financial trouble, and the league offices are simply too stubborn to admit their mistakes. The league would rather let a perpetually inept-performer like the Phoenix Coyotes continue rather than see them moved to a hockey-friendly city Seattle, or to a Canadian locale like Hamilton or Québec City where the Coyotes would be adored. (Never mind, of course, that the strong Canadian dollar has made doing business north of the border, in the hotbed of the sport, better than ever. I said before that 6-8 teams make most of the money in the league, and you can bet that none of those are south of Philadelphia.)

The NHL will tell you, of course, that their market research would indicate that people like the shootout. I would suspect that isn’t the case at all – marketing research is notorious in that you can slant it to pretty much reveal any outcome you want to reveal simply by asking the right sorts of questions. I would further suggest that the sorts of fans who would like a shootout ending are the sorts of fans the NHL has been failing to grasp ahold of for the past decade. The TV contracts for the league have basically gotten worse over that time, and the league continues not to fire on all cylinders. All of the NHL’s efforts to make the game into something it isn’t have, in the end, failed to yield the desired results.

We come to understand the way that a game is played. We come to understand the rules of the game, the tactics of the game, and the culture that surrounds it. Those inherent qualities are still what ultimately appeal the most. Draws are inherently a part of soccer, for example. Last year in the EPL, 28% of the games ended in draws – but given that the EPL is most popular professional sports league in the world, having more than a quarter of the games end in a draw doesn’t seem to affect business all that much. In the 1970s, the NASL top brass believed that Americans didn’t like draws, so they instituted a shootout to end every game. They also thought that Americans wouldn’t like the game because there wasn’t enough offense, so they jerryrigged a point system in the standings based upon how much your team scored. The end result was the most confusing table imaginable. Look at these standings, but scroll down first without looking at the key at the topof the page, and then tell me you can figure out how it actually worked. But people know a gimmick when they see one, and they weren’t impressed for long. Some would say the NASL going defunct was a sign that soccer could not succed in North America. To me, it made no sense to come to that conclusion, since what was being presented on the field wasn’t the game of soccer that anyone knew. The MLS tried a few gimmicks as well when it first started, but then it dawned on the league’s top brass that most of the fans of the game liked the game exactly the way it was. There wasn’t any reason to “Americanize” the game. Doing so meant that you didn’t fundamentally understand what Americans wanted.

And this is an important point to consider. What do you get when you watch a soccer game. You get 45 straight minutes of play that is rarely interrupted. There aren’t even commercials as such, only sponsor’s logos flashed on the top of the screen. Going to a sporting event in the U.S. is an act of sensory overload. I don’t go to see the Giants for the jumbotron or any of the artificial entertainment in between innings. I don’t go to Warriors games for the laser light show introduction and the bells and whistles during timeouts, all of which are basically the same at every single stadium or arena in the country. The game itself is what is ultimately appealing. If the product isn’t any good, then all of that other stuff won’t hold your interest. And if the game does hold your interest, all that other stuff is superfluous.

But even soccer changed when it needed to, and did so for the right reasons. When it was clear that lack of creative play was choking the life out of the game, soccer changed the system from 2 pts. for a win to 3 pts., while keeping the draws worth 1 in the standings. This has, over time, encouraged more teams to be less risk averse and try to win games instead of trying not to lose. It seems like this would be a natural fit in hockey, but that would first require hockey moguls to acknowledge that what they have now is something of a joke. Pride can be a difficult thing to overcome.

In the case of the NHL, maybe there is always going to be a regional appeal. But that’s fine. A lot of sports are. (Think anyone outside the state of California cares a whit about water polo?) The game can be great in and of itself. It doesn’t need tacky, artificial endings. Doing so simply cheapens the traditions that an event like the Winter Classic is supposed to uphold and celebrate. Even that event, as cool as it is, is turning somewhat into overkill this year, as there are no fewer than six outdoor games scheduled this year: two of them are at Yankee Stadium and serve as showcase events that lead up to the Super Bowl in New York, and one of which is in that bastion of winter sports, Los Angeles, which is far more likely to resemble beach hockey than anything else given this ludicrously warm winter we’re having in California. (Gloat gloat.)

I love the game, and one of these days I’ll get around to writing one of the more personally painful Profiles in Lose, which is that of my beloved Canucks. (How beloved? I was at two of those 1994 finals games with the Rangers I referenced earlier.) But the game doesn’t need gimmicks. It doesn’t need lotteries and trickshots. None of that should be part of the game. It was fine the way it was. Since they were making an exception to the norm in having the Maple Leafs and the Red Wings play outdoors in Michigan Stadium, I would’ve liked for them to make an exception and let the game end in a 2-2 tie. I know that you can’t, of course, for logistical reasons. But if you’re harkening back to the days of players’ youths when they were playing on a frozen pond, you should also point out one other wrinkle of playing pond hockey or freeze football or any other game as a kid – if the score was tied and mom said it was time to come home for dinner, the game was over. End of story. Moms make very effective pond hockey commissioners. Maybe the NHL should hire one and fire Gary Bettman.

Leaf Blowers

"I didn't think it was physically possible, but this both sucks and blows."
– Bart Simpson
 
Down three games to one in the best-of-7 series against the heavily-favoured Boston Bruins, the Toronto Maple Leafs had squeaked out 2-1 victories in Games 5 and 6 to level the series. In Game 7, the upstart Leafs had shrugged off an early 1-0 deficit, outplayed the Bruins on the B’s home ice at Boston Garden (and I don't give a shit what bank has their name on the building, it's the Boston Garden), taken a 2-1 lead in the 2nd period and then, early the third, struck for two more goals to stun the home crowd and pretty much everyone watching – which apparently was everyone in Canada, as CBC reported it’s biggest TV ratings in history. Nazem Kadri’s goal at 5:29 of the third period, giving the Leafs a 4-1 lead, seemed to cement and finalize one of the more impressive, and shocking, about-faces in sports in recent years.

All it did was set the stage from which the Leafs could fall off, because the Leafs were just getting started.

The Toronto Maple Leafs are one of the most inexcusably bad franchises in all of professional sports. While they can claim 13 Stanley Cups in their history, they haven’t won a championship since 1967, the year before the so-called ‘modern’ era began in the NHL, when the league expanded from it’s “original six” and doubled it’s membership to 12 franchises. Not only have they not won a Stanley Cup in 46 years, the Leafs haven’t even been that close, not even reaching the finals during that time. More often than not in that time, the Leafs have been afterthoughts. Indeed, this year’s Leafs squad gave Toronto fans a sniff of the playoffs for the first time since 2004, and most experts considered that to be a grand act of overachievement.

And it’s not as if the Leafs can lean on the crutch of “we don’t have any money.” They are awash in loonies and twoonies. The Toronto Maple Leafs are the most valuable franchise in the NHL, estimated by Forbes to be worth $1,000,000,000 in a league otherwise awash in red ink. Toronto is the largest city in Canada, and the 5th largest city in North America. Through sheer demographic pull, the Leafs dominate the hockey media north of the border, which has also spawned a rather fierce and large battalion of Leafs haters – and with good reason, since the Leafs have done pretty much nothing in four decades to be worthy of such attention other than be based in Toronto. The Leafs have failed to succeed in spite of what seems to be almost unfuckable circumstances. Every external force would lead you to believe that the Leafs should be a dominant force in the NHL, not a meek also-ran mired in perpetual failure.

The North American sports model allows for such long stretches of ineptitude. As I’ve pointed out prior here in IN PLAY LOSE, poor enough performance in the Europe gets you banished to the wandering the badlands of Division Two. In North America, however, bad franchises continue to flounder seemingly ad infinitum with seemingly little or no consequences to the club. At the root of almost all spats involving the spectre of franchise relocations are teams which aren’t very good – which the owner can then blame of a lack of local resources, thus justifying their threats to move to greener pastures. But it also has led to some unique narratives in which failure, in fact, is embraced and ultimately celebrated, held up right alongside the stories of fame and glory. The story of the New York Yankees’ 27 World Series titles is inevitably intertwined with the 80+ years of frustration of the Boston Red Sox, who are almost always really good but never quite good enough. If I was the use the term ‘storied history’ of the Philadelphia Phillies, who have lost more games than any franchise in the history of professional sports, I would do so without irony. After enduring more than 10,000 losses over the centuries, you can understand why Philly sports fans would be apt to do things like boo Santa Claus.

Nowhere is failure celebrated quite like Chicago, however. The Cubs haven’t won a World Series since 1908, and every time they seem to be approaching that pinnacle, some sort of colossal failure or absurd debacle ensues, leading to the notion that the franchise is somehow cursed or predisposed to bad luck. This is a convenient sort of excuse, of course. The fewer chances you have to succeed, the more epic the failures seem to be. Indeed, the aforementioned Bruins suffered one of the most epic chokes in history three seasons ago, winning the first three games of a best-of-7 with the Philadelphia Flyers and losing the next four, including blowing a 3-0 lead in Game 7 at home. All the B’s did was go out and win the Stanley Cup the following season, and that collapse was easily forgotten. But to Cubs fans, of course, Steve Bartman and Steve Garvey and the Amazin’ Mets become supporting cast in the constant narrative of victimhood, the act of winning a World Series being a Promethean sort of task with failure seemingly decreed by the baseball gods.

In the excellent book Scorecasting (which is pretty much required reading for all loyal readers of IN PLAY LOSE) authors Jon Wertheim and Tobias Moskowitz dedicate an entire chapter to the Cubs, attempting to use mathematics and principles of economics to try and discern whether the Cubs are, in fact, cursed. It’s a fun exercise put forth by a couple of long-time Cubs fans, but by every metric they can model, the Cubs appear not to be cursed at all. It isn’t because of bad luck or misfortune that they’ve gone 105 years without a World Series title – it’s because the Cubs have been TERRIBLE.

Furthermore, the authors then venture into theorizing why the Cubs have been terrible for so long, and their conclusion shouldn’t be a surprise – they are terrible because there is no incentive to do otherwise. A string of Cubs owners over the years have made it a point to try and market the experience of going to a game at the 'Friendly Confines' of Wrigley Field, what with the day games and the ivy covered walls in the outfield and the shoehorned ballpark in among the trendy residential neighbourhood where enterprising neighbours sells tickets for rooftop bleacher seats. They actually document how the franchise’s attendance and overall value increases when the club is losing on the field.

“If they’re looking for a guy to push the button when they blow the place up, I’ll do it ... Chicago’s one of the worst places in baseball … really for anything … I read where they got approval for some more upgrades. Count me in the group of people extremely happy to see that. I guess I'm just spoiled. There is a tremendous history associated with it and there is something special about playing on the same field that guys like Babe Ruth did. But really, what kind of history is there? It's not like there has been one championship after another. It's mainly been a place for people to go and drink beer."
– Texas Rangers 1B/OF/DH Lance Berkman

Berkman is a rather outspoken player who is also somewhat of a goof, but he was definitely onto something when he said that. The ticket prices in Chicago are among the highest in the game, yet the beer prices are among the lowest. 100-year-old Wrigley Field may be quirky and charming for a fan, but the players generally dislike it. The place has become a spot for the Windy City’s hip and trendy to see and be seen, a frat party booze cruise where the game itself doesn’t really matter – and, in fact, where losing has taken on a bizarro aura of civic pride. But don’t take my word for it, just ask former Cubs manager Lee Elia. In case you couldn’t make that out on the audio:

“Fuck those fuckin' fans who come out here and say they're Cub fans that are supposed to be behind you rippin' every fuckin' thing you do. I'll tell you one fuckin' thing, I hope we get fuckin' hotter than shit, just to stuff it up them 3,000 fuckin' people that show up every fuckin' day, because if they're the real Chicago fuckin' fans, they can kiss my fuckin' ass right downtown and PRINT IT. They're really, really behind you around here... my fuckin' ass. What the fuck am I supposed to do, go out there and let my fuckin' players get destroyed every day and be quiet about it? For the fuckin' nickel-dime people who turn up? The motherfuckers don't even work. That's why they're out at the fuckin' game. They oughta go out and get a fuckin' job and find out what it's like to go out and earn a fuckin' living. Eighty-five percent of the fuckin' world is working. The other fifteen percent come out here. A fuckin' playground for the cocksuckers. Rip them motherfuckers. Rip them fuckin' cocksuckers like the fuckin' players. we got guys bustin' their fuckin' ass, and them fuckin' people boo. And that's the Cubs? My players get around here. I haven't seen it this fuckin' year. Everybody associated with this organization have been winners their whole fuckin' life. Everybody. And the credit is not given in that respect. Alright, they don't show because we're 5 and 14... and unfortunately, that's the criteria of them dumb 15 motherfuckin' percent that come out to day baseball. The other 85 percent are earning a living. I tell you, it'll take more than a 5 and 12 or 5 and 14 to destroy the makeup of this club. I guarantee you that. There's some fuckin' pros out there that wanna win. But you're stuck in a fuckin' stigma of the fuckin' Dodgers and the Phillies and the Cardinals and all that cheap shit. It's unbelievable. It really is. It's a disheartening fuckin' situation that we're in right now. Anybody who was associated with the Cub organization four or five years ago that came back and sees the multitude of progress that's been made will understand that if they're baseball people, that 5 and 14 doesn't negate all that work. We got 143 fuckin' games left. What I'm tryin' to say is don't rip them fuckin' guys out there. Rip me. If you wanna rip somebody, rip my fuckin' ass. But don't rip them fuckin' guys 'cause they're givin' everything they can give. And right now they're tryin' to do more than God gave 'em, and that's why we make the simple mistakes. That's exactly why.”

Greatest rant in the history of sports. Apparently the Bleacher Bums at Wrigley Field can recite this verbatim, considering this tirade by their frustrated manager at the time to be some sort of badge of honour. I, for one, find the Cubs’ fans lifelong celebrations of failure to be rather baffling. I also find it impossible to sympathize – the club’s owners have pretty much banked on the notion that the fans are sheep for a century, and made few efforts over that time to legitimately field a competitive product. If that incentive isn’t there, why bother?

This sort of perverse fascination with failure also seems to run rampant when it comes to the original subject of this post, those wacky Toronto Maple Leafs. 46 years of high-profile failure will do that. There is an odd sort of acceptance of failure at play, one which, paradoxically, in tinged with the angst of high expectations. Their fans expect the Leafs to lose, but hope and pray and wonder if this is the year the losing will finally stop. The Leafs particular brand of ineptitude can largely be attributed to the dubious ways of owner Harold Ballard, who did pretty much all he could to run the franchise into the ground. Ballard was a cheapskate, among other dubious traits, and did all he could to maximize his profit margin while knowing full well the margin was always going to be there. Whatever poor product he put out on the ice was going to be a financial success regardless of the outcome.

The new ownership groups since Ballard’s death has done little to change the fortunes of the franchise around. Freed up from decades of cheapskate ways, the Leafs now spend freely and spend badly, whiffing repeatedly in free agency and doing a poor job in the areas of scouting and player development. They hire big name GMs and big name coaches, all of whom manage to do less with more, as big money simply breeds impatience. And while there are a few hockey players who can excel and even thrive living and playing in the fishbowl that is Toronto, quite a few more don’t like the constant, minute scrutiny. (This is akin to the theorizing which comes up every time the Yankees make a trade as to whether the player can cut it in New York.) The misfortunes of the Leafs, much like the Cubs, are ultimately their own making. The fact that simply making the playoffs should constitute an achievement in Toronto speaks to the overwhelming state of disrepair.

And Leafs fans had no real expectations of success in this postseason. Few people expected the Leafs to even give the Bruins a competitive series, much less find themselves playing Game 7. The Leafs were playing with house money. But it’s easy to forget that when, 3¾ games into a playoff series, Nazem Kadri scores to give the Leafs a 4-1 lead and they stand on the verge of a terrific upset.

And then this happened:

Yes, that happened. A collapse the likes of which the NHL has never seen.

It fits in rather nicely with the Leafs’ narrative of failure, even though what happens in the moment has nothing to do with what happened 20 or 30 or 40 years ago. And with such a colossal flop will come even more unrealistic expectations for next season, as the Maple Leafs go about attempting to live this one down. And while a good number of my Canadian friends (of which I have many, since I speak fluent Canadian) have gleefully engaged in some schadenfreude this past week, reveling in the failures of the hated Leafs, I cannot help but feel a bit for them. The reputation for being a choker is one of the hardest to live down. If anything, they overachieved this year simply to reach a point where they failed. But unfortunately, the Peter Principle is often strictly enforced in sports – you rise to the level of your own incompetence. In Toronto’s case, it’s a level which, until Monday, no one in hockey had ever seen before.

Capital Crimes

Today the LOSE presents the first of what I hope to become a regular series of guest posts from fellow long-suffering fans either intrigued or morbidly curious about the act of losing, or maybe just in need of an act of literary exorcism so as to purge some frustration. Tonight’s post comes from world-class scrabbler, perennial Austin Adult Spelling Bee winner, multi-instrumentalist, and long-suffering Washington Capitals fan Geoff Thevenot, author of the outstanding Scrambled and Unscrambled blog, which you should all read when you’re not reading IN PLAY LOSE. Take it away Geoff …

Hi, I'm Geoff. I grew up near Washington, D.C., and I have been a Washington Capitals fan since January 26, 1977, when my father took me, age 6, and my little brother Brian, age 4, to a Capitals game against the Detroit Red Wings at the old Capital Centre down the road. The Capitals won the game, 4-1; the goal sirens and loud cheering enthralled me, as did the entire contents of the game program and the next day's standings and boxscore because I was that kind of kid, and I was hooked for life. The starting goalies in the game were Roger Crozier for the Caps and Ed Giacomin for the Red Wings - my dad taught me how to pronounce Giacomin's surname, which I thought was really cool. No, I'm not old.

What I could not have known at the time was how rare an event I had witnessed. The Caps were a third-year expansion team at the time and would finish with just 24 wins in 80 games. My father had the good sense to take us to a game the Caps might win, against a strip-mined Red Wings team that hadn't done anything right since Gordie Howe left a few years before.

And what I *really* couldn't have known was the legacy I was heir to. The underpowered 24-42-14 team we watched that night, believe it or not, had made a quantum leap forward from where they were two years before. Coaches have won Jack Adams Trophies for less.

***

The Capitals began play in the fall of 1974, handicapped in a multiplicity of ways. The NHL contained just the Original Six teams of ancient legend as late as 1967, owing to the extraordinary stubbornness of its owners, but finally realized the opportunity before them and expanded to 12 teams in one go, and further to 16 by 1972. This thinned out the talent, but there was enough to go around - too few teams before meant that lots of deserving players weren't getting the chance to prove themselves, and the initial rounds of expansion helped fix that. But then a rival league, the WHA, started playing in the fall of 1972, and while not as powerful as the NHL, they had some money to throw around. They notably signed Gordie Howe and Bobby Hull, but they also competed for lesser talents - a second- or third-line player in the NHL might well be a star in the early WHA, and lots of less famous players made the leap as well...also, the talent pool itself was much thinner in the early 70s than it would be later, because the Europeans had yet to arrive. Into the late 70s, over 90 percent of NHL players were Canadian-born; by the mid-90s, only about 60 percent of them were.

But the NHL was still committed to expand once more, and so the Capitals and Kansas City Scouts would start playing in the 1974-75 season. (And they had reason to, if for nothing other than outracing the WHA to those cities.) There was an expansion draft, but it was most uncharitable: each existing NHL team got to protect 16 skaters and two goalies, so the best the Caps and Scouts could do was pick players that the existing teams viewed as no better than their 17th best skater or third-string goalie. And many of the class of players somewhat better than that, guys who could have helped here, were under contract to one of the 14 teams in the WHA. After the season, many observers thought that the 1974 NHL expansions had been a mistake. Can't blame them, though both teams do still exist - the Scouts moved to Colorado in 1976 and then New Jersey in 1981, becoming the New Jersey Devils we know today.

The Capitals, endowed with that foundation of sinking sand, proceeded to weaken themselves even further at the 1974 amateur draft. Look at it and you will cry. The three-year-old New York Islanders, picking fourth in each round but having the key advantage of knowing what the hell they were doing, came away with Clark Gillies and Bryan Trottier. The Capitals, picking first in each round, came away with Greg Joly and Mike Marson. (Their 1975 draft was even worse.)

And then there's this. Yes, that's right, white pants. That happened. Not for nothing are "diapers" and "despair" anagrams of each other.

As bad as you would expect a team forged in all these fires at once to be, the expansion Caps were even more fecal than that. The first thing you notice is the record. They won 8 games and tied 5 on the year, which means they lost the other 67. And away from home, they were far worse: they lost their first 37 road games outright before eking out a 3-2 win against the horrible-but-not-quite-as-horrible California Golden Seals (doesn't that name just tell you they're bad? Good sports teams don't have names like that). But the win-loss record is just the beginning.

Here is one of the coolest bits of symmetry in the sports record book. The record for goals scored by a team in one season is 446, by the 1983-84 Edmonton Oilers. Did you see this team? You wouldn't believe it. The Wayne Gretzky Oilers, at their peak. They lit people up every damn night. Too many weapons, including the ultimate one, Wayne himself. This was before the invention of the devilish (sorry) neutral-zone trap and other defensive strategies; this is what happens when one team has vastly superior talent and game planning at the exact moment in history when no one else has an answer for it, as happened with the 16-0 New England Patriots up until the Super Bowl that year. Video game numbers. Wayne Gretzky put up 205 points (87 goals, 118 assists) - the next best non-Oiler total was 121. They damn near broke hockey. Their like will never be seen again.

The record for goals allowed is exactly the same - 446. That's our expansion Capitals. Yes, you heard that right: when facing those Caps, a league-average NHL offensive team turned into the Wayne Gretzky Oilers at their peak. So what happened when a really good team faced them? We have your evidence: the first-year Capitals were placed, cruelly, in a division with the Montreal Canadiens, the powerhouse of the mid-to-late 70s. In their six matches, the Canadiens outscored the Capitals 49-9. (The Caps couldn't score either - they netted a sad 181 goals on the year, far below the league average of 273.)

There are just so many beautiful indices of the first-year Caps' ineptitude, I can hardly decide what to present first. The expansion Capitals are to hockey what Pedro Carolino's "English As She Is Spoke" was to English pedagogy:

- Since the '67-68 expansion that marks the modern era of NHL hockey, by my count, 16 players have achieved a plus-minus rating of negative 50 or worse; a plus-minus that wretched is a singular achievement. The expansion Capitals had EIGHT such players on the roster, including one (Jack Lynch) who managed to rack up a -54 in just 20 games; Bill Mikkelson, who played 54 games for the team that year, set the all-time record for worst plus-minus at -82.

- The Capitals had a 17-game losing streak, a 10-game losing streak, a 9-game losing streak and two 7-game losing streaks. All in the same season.

- There is a formula, commonly referred to as the Pythagorean formula, that predicts wins and losses from runs/goals/points scored and allowed in various sports, and it's usually pretty close to its target. When it's not, we can surmise that a team may have been unusually good or bad in clutch situations, or unusually lucky or unlucky. Almost every historically awful team also shows up as unlucky by this analysis, which makes intuitive sense - the worst teams ever should be those that were both bad *and* unlucky, right? Not these Caps, though: this formula suggests they should have ended up with something like 11 standings points, even less than the record-low 21 they actually had. There's a good reason they exceeded expectations: they got to play their expansion brethren, the Kansas City Scouts, who would have been the league's worst in almost any other year, and a few other troubled franchises. The league was unusually stratified at the time. In an NHL with a more normal competitive ecology, these Caps might have struggled to win even five games. Their record overrates them. (The 92-93 Ottawa Senators and San Jose Sharks, with win-loss records nearly as bad, would have blown the 74-75 Caps off the ice, no doubt in my mind. It was a different league by then.)

- To illustrate this further, there is a stat on hockey-reference.com called Point Shares, which attempts to mine the data and figure out how much each player contributed to his team's standings points for the year. In most cases, the point shares for all the individual players on a team add up roughly to the team's point total: for example, the 2009-10 Penguins add up to 100.15, and the team actually had 101 standings points. For normal teams, the average difference is about 4-5 points. The first-year Caps break this model: they had 21 standings points, but the sum total of their players' contributions is estimated to be...2.7. Yes, two point seven. As a team. In 1988-89, Mario Lemieux had 19.56 point shares by himself.

- Who was the 74-75 Caps' best player? Tommy Williams was a 34-year-old right winger who had spent the previous two seasons as a mid-line player for the New England Whalers of the WHA, after a largely undistinguished run of seasons in the NHL in the sixties. Williams would have had to hustle to make the third line on most NHL teams, but on these Caps, he was the man. He led the team with 58 points, tying him for 70th place in the NHL; Denis Dupere was a distant second on the team with 35.

- The first-year Capitals had three coaches. Teams with three coaches in a single season tend not to have the good records, as a rule. Jimmy Anderson was let go after his 4-45-5 start, but apparently he was not the problem, as Red Sullivan (these names sound like they're from the 1940s; surely fedoras and whiskey are involved in here somewhere) guided the hometown heroes to a 2-16-0 mark. Milt Schmidt, who I think was also the GM but am too lazy to check at the moment, finished out the year behind the bench with a rousing 2-6-0 record.

- A week in the life: During the week of February 18-25, 1975, when I was busy attending pre-K, the Capitals lost consecutive games 6-1, 9-4, 10-3, 7-2 and 6-2. You'd think they'd have gotten tired of that, but no, they went on to lose twelve more games in a row, including losses of 8-0, 12-1, 7-2 and 8-2. Ten of these seventeen games were at home.

- My father attended a second-year Caps versus Canadiens game. He has reported since that the entire game was played at one end of the ice, and that the Capitals appeared to be in slow motion like on the TV. The game ended 11-0 or something.

- The Caps surrendered eight or more goals 16 times. Yes, one fifth of the time.

- The Caps were shut out in 12 games and scored just one goal in 17 others.

- The Caps scored about 13% of the time on the power play, while giving up power play goals 29% of the time. And those don't even count toward plus-minus ratings.

- The Caps gave up 255 goals - on the road. Their *average* road game in 1974-75 was a 7-2 loss.

- Starting goalie Ron Low played 48 games and racked up a GAA of 5.45, and he was clearly the best goalie on the roster. The backup goalie, Michel Belhumeur (great name), was in net for 27 decisions and did not win any of them.

- As you'd expect, almost no one on the roster lasted more than a couple of years longer in the league after the year ended. Defenseman Yvon Labre (whose #7 was eventually retired by the Capitals, the equivalent of a Purple Heart), a castoff from the Penguins, lasted the longest.

- Their final game was an 8-4 win over those Penguins, who had already made the playoffs and thus started their drinking at 11 am instead of 11 pm. In music, this is called a Picardy third - a hopeful major triad at the end of a mournful minor-key piece.

The Worst Team Money Can Buy, May Edition

As a shiny new feature at the LOSE, it seems like a good time to offer up a monthly award for The Worst Team Money Can Buy, where we look back and try to figure how it is that a team with money to burn can be so awful. This also gives me a chance to be a smartass. I try very hard to be compassionate, since I know how much losing sucks, but there are times where compassion is most definitely unwarranted.

There is a conventional way of thinking, most prevalent in baseball but not reserved for it, that success will correlate to the size of a team’s payroll. I happen to think this notion is extremely simplistic, and that having more dollars at your disposal can also provide more opportunities to screw everything up. And with spending big comes big(ger) expectations – the bigger you spend, the harder you fall.

We have quite an assortment of nominees for this month’s WTMCB. Honorable mention needs to go to the Minnesota Wild, who spent a truckload to sign the two best available free agents – Parise and Suter – to matching long-term deals and then could do no better than muddling their way to an #8 seed in the playoffs and 2nd place in a lousy division well behind the old, slow Vancouver Canucks. They get dinged here for needlessly raising expectations – signing two players gave the club a grand total of two players that anyone would actually want. We all should have known better, but it's the NHL playoffs so anything is possible. They might redeem themselves with a good showing vs. the Black Hawks.

I would also give the L.A. Dodgers a wag of the finger here, since it boggles the mind that a team with a $200m+ payroll is fielding a team with a 3B hitting .098, but the Dodgers have also had terrible luck on the injury front. Couldn’t happen to a better bunch, in my opinion, and there is still plenty of opportunity to the Dodgers to claim this soon-to-be coveted award. They’ll find a way to win it, I can assure you of that. They're well on their way, but have been outdone so far this baseball season by a couple of brass-in-pocket, rocks-in-the-head franchises.

Finalist #1 for this month’s award has to be the Toronto Blue Jays, who are in about the 13th year of their 5-year rebuilding plan. Impatience has understandably started to settle in north of the border, and GM Alex Anthopoulos decided to go big in the offseason – signing NL Cy Young R.A. Dickey from the Mets, signing would-be NL batting champ Melky Cabrera, and then making the most monstrous one-sided deal imaginable, taking full advantage of the fire sale in Miami by acquiring pretty much every player on the Marlins you’d want not named Giancarlo Stanton. And while I have no reason to trust anything that Marlins owner Jeffrey Loria says about his franchise’s rather atrocious off-season behaviour, his summation of his franchise’s actions were “we weren’t any good with these guys, so we can be bad without them.” And judging by the performance of Marlins North so far, he may have a point. The Jays had some bad luck here with injury woes for Jose Reyes and Josh Johnson, but Dickey’s been lousy, the offense stinks, and the Jays always seem to have a roster full of headcases and problem children that don’t seem to play well together and ultimately underachieve. At 11-21 and in last place in the AL East, with four competent teams above them in the standings, it’s looking like a lost season in Toronto. I suspect there might be job openings.

Also with an 11-21 record here in early May is Finalist #2, the California Los Angeles Angels of Studio City Anaheim, who made a big splash in free agency last year with Albert Pujols et. al, but started terribly and underachieved last season because they couldn’t pitch, the response to which was to go out and sign Josh Hamilton, another outfielder, which doesn't help much unless Hamilton has developed a curveball all of a sudden, and they didn’t really need him because whiz kid wünderkind Mike Trout can pretty much play the entire outfield by himself. Managing to find a sucker convince the Yankees to take Vernon Wells’ rotting corpse of a contract off their hands was good, but then they lowballed Trout, which was stupid, and they’ve got so many zombie dollars strewn about their future payrolls now that signing Trout and Mike Trumbo (their two best players, pretty much, and also two of the youngest) is probably going to be impossible. Hamilton has been awful, Pujols can barely move, and THEY STILL CAN’T PITCH. The problem with both the Jays and the Halos is that they’re already too far behind at this point in the season, and the Angels are in 4th place in the AL West with two teams above them who actually know what they’re doing. (Notice I said two. The Mariners are in 3rd.)

But there can really be only one winner of a loser here, and I’m going to give this award out for their entire body of work over the course of a recently completed 86-game season. This year’s Los Angeles Lakers were, without doubt, the worst team money can buy, as they went about assembling a starting lineup that would’ve been a good fantasy basketball team in 2008. I hate fantasy sports in general, and fantasy basketball is particularly stupid in that the whole would never be the sum of the parts simply because there wouldn’t be enough basketballs. This team sure did look good on paper at the start of the season, as the Lakers got every past-their-prime big name available to them and expected the team would be spectacular, but they were a complete flop. They did Mike Brown a favour by firing him after five games, then Mike D’Antoni came in with his Phoenix Suns offense from the mid 2000s, which works when you have a bunch of guys who can actually move. But Steve Nash was hurt all the time, and Dwight Howard was hurt all the time, and Kobe was taking bad shots all the time and then had that terrible Achilles injury, and Meta World Peace was weird and Pau Gasol was getting blamed for everything even though he was about the only guy who showed up every night. The chemistry was worse than my high school science experiment in which I grew fungi on moldy cheese in the basement for two months. Somehow the league made sure the Lakers snuck into the playoffs, but that 4-0 sweep at the hands of the Spurs in the first round was the most dismal playoff performance imaginable, as a rash of injuries finished off whatever backcourt depth they had and reduced the Lakers to playing with some D-League signees as their starting guards. And Dwight Howard did what he could to get himself thrown out midway through Game 4. Even he had seen enough, and one would think the Lakers have seen enough of him.

This was a poorly constructed team that was ill-thought out, and the shock of just how bad the Lakers were wore off eventually, giving way to acceptance of what a disaster this team had turned out to be and an ambulance chaser's sort of fascination with seeing just how low they could go. And, as an eternal Laker hater, I gleefully award them this month's award for the Worst Team Money Can Buy.

Edmonton Disease

It would figure that my favourite hockey team is one that has never won anything.  I became a Canucks fan for life in 1982. I was living in Seattle at the time and the cable system included BCTV and CBC British Columbia, which meant a steady diet of Canucks games on Wednesday and Saturday nights. The Canucks were a maddening, underachieving team that year who got insanely hot at the end of the season and benefited from some of the most improbable upsets in NHL history to make a run all the way to the Stanley Cup finals, where they got waxed 4-0 by the juggernaut, 4-time champion New York Islanders. But they fought the Isles pretty good and were unlucky to win the first game of the series. They showed themselves well and I was hooked for good.

Which means I’ve now waited 30 years for them to hoist the cup and it still hasn’t happened. Sigh. Why do I do this to myself?

When I moved back to the eastside of the state of Washington, I kept my Canuck allegiance through the 1980s even though the state’s drysiders were much more inclined to follow the two teams in Alberta. And understandably so for several reasons – the Spokane TV stations went up into Alberta; the city had much more of a connection to the Canadian cities on the plains than the stylish, cosmopolitan metropolis on the B.C. coast; and the surprisingly sophisticated Eastern Washington fan base (Spokane has always been a great minor league hockey town) knew a good product when they saw it and unlike the Canucks, the two teams in Alberta were actually good.

Which is a gross understatement – the Edmonton Oilers of the 1980s were probably the greatest assemblage of hockey talent in history, winning 5 Stanley Cups, and about the only team in the league who could keep up with them and play them even was the Calgary Flames. If I had to pick one to begrudgingly support come playoff time, it was the Flames because I hated the Edmonton Oilers, mainly because Gretzky toyed with the Canucks for the entirety of his career, racking up more points vs. Vancouver than against every other team. The Canucks were completely hapless in those days, in the midst of 17 consecutive losing seasons, more known for their zany mustard-coloured jerseys than anything they did on the ice, and Gretzky would skate circles around them and make them all look like buffoons.

I mention all of this because tomorrow night the Canucks are playing the Edmonton Oilers and I will likely tune in. My my, how the tables have turned over time. The Canucks still can’t win the big prize, but they’re consistently one of the top clubs in the sport and they are also a moneymaking machine, routinely listed at or near the top of the financial table among a sport with some persistently-struggling franchises. Their insanely loyal, cheesehead-style fan base not only sells out every home game but often travels en masse, filling up thousands of otherwise empty seats in arenas in the NHL’s Sun Belt climes like Anaheim and Phoenix. The Edmonton Oilers, meanwhile, are showing some improvement this year, having assembled a good collection of talent through one of North America sport’s time-testing strategies for doing so – being terrible for half a decade, and simply having so many high draft picks that you can’t help but amass some good players after a while. Other than 2006, when the Oilers reached the Stanley Cup finals after one of those fluky sort of runs you see in the NHL playoffs, the franchise has withered and dried up over 20+ years. Gretzky took his game to the bright lights of L.A. in 1988, but the team still had enough talent to win a Cup in 1990. Since then, however, it’s been pretty destitute up on the prairie, and the franchise has given birth to a very important concept that we must explore here in IN PLAY LOSE, a concept that an astute Canadian sportswriter whom I cannot recall the name of labeled “Edmonton disease.”

It was much, much easier back in the 1980s to maintain a powerhouse franchise in the NHL, and in a lot of the other sports as well, as player movement was still tightly controlled by the clubs. But with new collective bargaining agreements and the growth of free agency in sports, it’s become far more difficult to do so. In three of the major professional sports in North America, there are salary caps in place which set minimum and maximum amounts franchises can spend on players. The leagues like to spin this as a way to promote competitive balance in the league, holding up Major League Baseball and the big European soccer clubs as an example, wherein the Yankees and Man United and Réal Madrid can supposedly just spend their way to winning championships. This argument is, of course, nonsense. It is a smokescreen. The fact is that salary caps are put in place to make sports franchises more profitable, and to protect owners from themselves. These are a bunch of bazillionaire egomaniacs we’re talking about here who own professional sports franchises, and given the chance to plunk down $100 million on a player, they would do so in a heartbeat if they thought it would give them a chance to win.

Now players can benefit from salary caps as well – if a CBA states the players are entitled to 55% of the gross revenues of the league, for example, and the gross revenues of the sport’s franchises goes up, then their salaries go up as well. Indeed, the average salaries have skyrocketed across professional sports in the past three decades. And free agency allows for greater player movement after a certain number of years, thus eliminating team control and creating some interesting challenges for clubs – after your club has spent 5 years accruing talent to be competitive and win, you some how have to figure out how to pay for it and keep a team together.

And yet with salary caps come limitations on how much clubs can spend on players. Caps are there to hem in ownership. Over time, the net result of this is that the offers for available free agent players are basically the same across the board. Clubs may have finagled some extra $$$ here and there which they can throw at a player, but basically a free agent in the NFL or the NBA or the NHL is going to get similar sized offers. If dollars aren’t the only issue, then other factors can come into play, such as quality of life. Hence Edmonton disease, which is a principle based on a very simple question: if you, an NHL player, has a choice between playing in New York or L.A. or Edmonton, then why would you stay in Edmonton?

Edmonton disease actually runs most rampant in the NBA, an entity in which glitz and promotion has long been forth by the league as being far more important than the actual product on the court. The NBA is a marketing machine, selling their superstars and the most glamorous of franchises. The list of glamour boys shifts a bit here and there from time, but the NBA’s love list includes the Knicks, Celtics, 76ers, Bulls, Lakers, Suns, the Heat and Magic down in Florida, and these days you can toss in a couple more franchises – the Brooklyn Nets and the L.A. Clippers – who’ve done little more to deserve it than be located in Brooklyn and L.A., a pair of franchises which have been so utterly incompetently run over the years that, had they not been located in big markets, they almost certainly would’ve been relocated. (It should be pointed out, in fact, that sheer incompetence can negate inherent quality-of-life advantages. As an example, I give you the Golden State Warriors. But after defying the laws of averages, probability, and quite possibly the laws of physics in being so bad for so long, they now have some terrific young players and grand future plans, so maybe there is hope for the W’s after all.)

So, OK, budding NBA superstar. You’ve plied your trade for 6 years with ... let’s just pick a franchise here for sake of argument ... with the Indiana Pacers, who would love to keep you and can offer you $75,000,000 over the next 5 years. But so can the Brooklyn Nets, and wouldn’t you love to sell your own personal brand in a big media market like New York City. And the Phoenix Suns can offer you $75,000,000 as well, and you’ve been going to every year in the dead of winter and it’s 80° and you can get out on the golf course on your day off in Arizona. You’d love to live there in the sun, wouldn’t you? Jeez, you have it pretty good there in Indianapolis, to be sure, but it’s awfully cold and you’re a young guy and there’s a lot more to do in a place like New York or Phoenix.

And if you’re the Indiana Pacers, of course, you’re realizing that it’s going to be very, very difficult to keep your budding NBA superstar. You may, in fact, be able to offer him more money than anyone else (a caveat in the NBA which can have some drastic long-term consequences, of course, since overspending to keep your free agents will eventually mean having to pay less to the rank-and-file), but there are other factors at play which you cannot hope to compete with. And this is not to slag on Indianapolis or Edmonton, both of which I’m sure are nice cities. But where your franchise is located becomes a prime selling point, and a place like Edmonton can never, ever hope to compete.

And when you look at the NBA, for example, there are a number of franchises which seem completely, utterly hopeless. The NBA used to like the idea of being the only game in town, and enjoyed setting up shop in places like Sacramento and Charlotte where they could control the entertainment market place. But those are the exact franchises which, ultimately, struggle to compete. A pecking order is established and player movement invariably follows that order. If you’re at the bottom of that order, you’d best enjoy whatever success your team may have, because it isn’t likely to last very long.

(Some would go so far as to suggest that in the NBA, the league offices actively root for some franchises to succeed at the expense of others, and go so far as to rig the game in the favour of those franchises and their superstar players. One particular owner, Mark Cuban of the Dallas Mavericks, went so far as to yell something like “YOUR GAME IS FUCKING RIGGED!” at NBA Commissioner David Stern during the first Miami-Dallas NBA final and amass a pretty substantial fine for during so. I wish to believe that isn’t the case, but we will touch on those conspiracy theories at another time, when we delve deeper into the plights of the Seattle SuperSonics and the Sacramento Kings.)

You can vaccinate your franchise against Edmonton disease to a certain extent, but you need some help. Perhaps the greatest example of this in pro sports is the San Antonio Spurs. A large reason for their success is dumb luck, of course – the Spurs happened to be terrible and have the first pick in the draft twice when David Robinson and Tim Duncan were available. Not only did they dumb luck their way into two great big men, but they were two quality individuals with team-first professionalism and a far greater interest in winning than personal spoils. The Utah Jazz, Detroit Pistons and Houston Rockets have done much the same thing, putting together long track records of success and generally being lauded for their professionalism. After all, players want to make money, but players also want to win championships, and they’ll gravitate to places where that latter aim can be realized. The Spurs have also been light years ahead of the rest of the NBA in the use of so-called Moneyball concepts – savvy spending on players deemed suitable for their system through advanced statistical analysis. Their former assistant GM, Sam Presti, has taken his laptop with him to his job as GM in Oklahoma City, where he appears to have also lucked himself into getting to build a franchise around Kevin Durant, who is the exact sort of loyal, committed superstar you need to build around if you’re running a franchise far from the bright lights of New York and Hollywood and your club is going to stay competitive.

In all sports, the single most important thing your franchise can do is hire a competent GM, because the GM’s job, first and foremost, is to procure talent, and do so at times when your franchise may face some inherent disadvantages. The teams which are successful, year after year, are usually the best run and smartest run. This is especially true in the NFL, which for years has used tools like the schedule to actually attempt to foster competitive balance, and yet the Patriots and Steelers and Packers are always vying for the super bowl while the Arizona Cardinals are always 5-11 and the Detroit Lions are doing things like this:

Worst play in NFL history, committed by the worst team in NFL history.

The point here is that some sports franchises will find themselves at severe disadvantages when it comes to the acquisition of talent – and, perhaps more importantly, the act of keeping that talent around. Now, the patterns for how Edmonton disease strikes are not the same in every sport. Vancouver was infamously labeled ‘Siberia’ during the woebegone days of the NBA’s Grizzlies, yet it’s a choice destination for hockey players – loyal fan base, the team is always good, it’s a chance to come home to Canada and yet not need a snow blower to get out of your driveway in the morning. Guys will gladly sign on to play for the Pittsburgh Steelers or the Penguins, two perennial powerhouses, yet no one in their right mind would be crazy enough to sign on to play for the Pirates. Yes, the Pirates are a baseball team, and baseball has no salary cap, which means that teams can spend as much as they want on wage bills. But the same rules apply, and a franchise such as the Pittsburgh Pirates, which hasn’t had a winning season in over 20 years, is always going to be picking from the leftovers.

This was made painfully obvious this offseason in baseball for one particular franchise, the Seattle Mariners. (And after watching that unwatchable club for most of my childhood, you can damn well bet there will be more on them in the future.) The Mariners are, by any definition, one of the worst franchises in the history of professional sports. They play in a northern, cold-weather city, and play in a ballpark that is a hitters’ graveyard. They are desperately in need of an infusion of offense into a franchise whose offense has been historically bad in recent years, and offered up 4 years and $100,000,000 to Josh Hamilton – who then received 5 years and $125,000,000 from the California Los Angeles Angels of Yorba Linda Anaheim. Now, the Mariners could’ve come back and offered 5/$125m as well, but Hamilton’s agent would’ve likely just dialed up the Angels and said “give us 130 and we have a deal.” The Mariners were simply there to drive up the price tag, but were never a serious threat to sign the best available player on the market.

The Mariners then reached a deal with Arizona to swap for the Snakes’ outfielder Justin Upton, who then promptly vetoed the trade – turns out he has a no-trade clause in his contract that specifically lists he cannot be traded to the Mariners! This is done by his agent, in part, to up his trade value – the Mariners very clearly being a team which would want to trade for him – and after finding out what the M’s were willing to deal to get him (which was A LOT – 4 players including some of the gems from their farm system), Upton had a better sense of his market value.

But this does nothing to help the Mariners, a franchise desperately stricken by a grave case of Edmonton disease. They still need hitters and cannot seem to land one. But when you’re an awful team in an awful ballpark where hitters go to die, you’re going to have this happen. In recent years, there has been clamoring among the Seattle press and the fan base for the owners to “spend more money” as if that’s a foolproof way to success. But in order to buy, you also need someone who is willing to sell. To anyone who wants to argue the Mariners have been unsuccessful because they’ve been cheap, I would ask the question, “why do you think anybody would ever want to play for the Mariners?”

Now these patterns can change over time, of course, but the notion that there is a level playing field is ludicrous. Sports is fundamentally a marketplace, and some buyers and sellers are at inherent disadvantages. This is true in all agorae, in fact, be it cities vying for pro sport glory or convention biz or tourism dollars or what have you. Some cities are at a disadvantage, simply because of their size or location. Others have a stigma attached to them over time – witness poor Cleveland, who couldn’t even keep native son LeBron James from taking his talents to South Beach. And after almost every dimwitted trade in the NFL, NBA or NHL, the GM who got bamboozled will say “this frees up salary cap space,” which is the limpest excuse of them all, because what good is it when there is nothing to spend it on?

And in the case of the Edmonton Oilers, you’re left with a once-proud franchise with permanently limited resources, an inability to keep talent intact and attract willing new talent. They’re perpetually rumoured to be picking up stakes and moving elsewhere, which is a travesty for the fans, who love the game but don’t want to put up with forking over a whole lot of money for a terrible product. (Owners can only get away with that particular dynamic in Chicago.) Now, since I grew up hating the Oilers, I would like to say that I enjoy seeing them suffer. But the franchise is a shell of what it used to be, so the days of Gretzky and Messier and Kurri and Fuhr are just old stories at this point, ghosts from the past. They’ll inevitably show, during the course of the game with the Canucks on Monday night, all of those championship banners from the 1980s fluttering in the rafters of the whatever-the-hell-it-is-now-named-but-was-once-called Northlands Coliseum. Banners which, 2+ decades on, are starting to look a bit tattered and frayed.