The 26ers

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“Tell you the truth, I don’t even remember it.”
– Thaddeus Young, when asked about the last time his 76ers won a game

On Jan. 24, in Boston, a tip-in at the buzzer by Evan Turner gave the Philadelphia 76ers a 95-94 win over the Celtics, which raised their record on the season to 15-31. Not a great record by any stretch, but given that the O/U for 76ers wins in Las Vegas at the beginning of the season was 16½, it could definitely be said that the 76ers were exceeding modest expectations.

The 76ers, you might remember, were specifically fingered by a certain blogger at the start of the season as being a team that was tanking. They had traded their one decent player from last season, Jrue Holiday, to the New Orleans Hornets Pelicans in exchange for the rights to Kentucky center Nerlens Noel, who hasn’t played a game all season due to a knee injury. They also got a first round pick in the 2014 draft from NOLA in this deal, which was not particularly smart on the part of the Pelicans, as the draft is looking particularly deep this year and NOLA has sank in the standings. Sorting out all of the contingencies of trading draft picks in the NBA is sort of like trying to understand Middle Eastern politics, but it appears the 76ers potentially got a pretty good deal here.

These moves were clearly made with the future in mind. Philly had shed so much payroll in the offseason that they were actually well below the NBA salary floor at the start of this season. With a healthy Noel (and he has clamored of late that he wants to play a bit in the month of April) and the addition of a couple of high 1st round picks in the upcoming draft, there is some potential for improvement come the fall of 2014.

But for this season? Forget about it.

The 76ers were built to be bad. Built to be terrible, in fact, so as to maximize the possibility of landing a top slot in the NBA draft via the lottery. Just whatever you do, don’t call it tanking. Remember, teams in the NBA don’t tank:

“My understanding of tanking would be losing games on purpose. And there’s absolutely no evidence that any team in the NBA has ever lost a single game, or certainly in any time that I’ve been in the league, on purpose. And, to me, what you’re referring to I think is rebuilding. And I’m not sure it’s just a function of the collective bargaining agreement; I think there’s a balance with any team of the need to look out to the future and at the same time put a competitive product on the floor.” 
– NBA Commissioner Adam Silver

And the players who were so clearly being set up to fail in Philly played with some pride and played hard at the start of the year. They actually beat Miami to start the season and went 3-0 out of the gate, but then they got flat-out murdered by Golden State at home and the reality started to set in. They have a rookie PG, an inefficient offense, and the defense has been a problem all season, as it is among the worst in the NBA. The first few months of their season saw several 4-game losing streaks here and there. The 76ers then had a nice little 4-game, Western winning streak at the turn of the New Year, which raised their record up to 12-21. Again, not great, but not nearly as awful as some people expected. After all, there were thoughts among NBA punditry that this team might not win 10 games all season.

And by the way, even though the Sixers had a record of 15-31, you could still apparently get action in Vegas on that O/U line of 16½ wins. Seems like an easy steal of a bet right there to take the over. All you need is two more wins, right? How hard could that be? It’s only two more wins. Surely any collection of professional athletes can cobble together two more wins, can’t they?

Well, apparently not. How hard can it be? Let me count the ways – 26 of them, in fact, and counting. The LOSE has, of course, taken a keen interest in the Sixers here as they’ve floundered about the past couple of months. Attempting to chronicle the plight of the Sixers just might be the ultimate act of self-torture. Come on along for the ride, but you’d best not scare easily.

Jan. 26
Atlanta comes to Philadelphia two days after the Sixers’ thrilling win in Boston. The Hawks promptly blast the Sixers 125-99 at the Spectrum CoreStates Wachovia Wells Fargo Enormous Banking Conglomerate Center. This sort of result happens when you are a bad team in the NBA. The top dogs might get a little lazy and play down to your level a bit from time to time, allowing you to stay close, but the mid-range playoff teams like the Hawks will beat the shit out of you, slurping up the easy meals when they come since they know those top tier teams pose a far greater challenge down the road.

Feb. 1
Bad teams generally lack depth and, as such, suffer when they are hit by injuries. In their 113-96 loss to the Pistons at Detroit, the Sixers’ generally promising rookie guard Michael Carter-Williams, who has produced some decent numbers despite his erratic shot and despite the fact his club has few legitimate offensive options, is forced to miss the game with an injury. The Sixers are already bad enough with Carter-Williams on the floor. Without him, they have no chance. Injuries have been part of the problem in Philly this year, and their depth wasn’t exactly stellar to begin with. The team has used a total of 21 players over the course of the season. It’s hard to develop any continuity and run a cohesive offense if the players are in need to being introduced on a daily basis. Not only has Nerlens Noel not played a game all year, but neither has Jason Richardson. Richardson used to be a dynamic and exciting player, but he is dead weight at this point in his career. He has a huge contract and the 76ers would’ve loved to move him somehow, but he got hurt before the season even began, which means they’ve basically been stuck with him all season. [EDIT: Make it 22 players, as Casper Ware signed a 10-day contract, wore a makeshift #17 on the back of his emergency jersey and was warmly welcomed by the Sixers in San Antonio: “Nice to meet you. Play defense. And make shots.”]

Feb. 3
Carter-Williams is back in the lineup in Brooklyn against the Nets and scores 21, but also commits 6 turnovers. The Sixers shoot 52.1% from the floor and are +8 on the boards, yet they lose 108-102 mainly because they turn the ball over 26 times. They manage to rally from 19 down late in the 3rd Quarter and cut it to two with under a minute to play ... only to turn the ball over one last time and seal their own fate. A spirited effort by the Sixers undone by sloppiness.

Feb. 5
Defense in Philly apparently means you go outside and build de fence around de field to keep de cows and de sheep in, because there isn’t a whole lot of defense evident in a 114-108 home loss to a Boston Celtics team that’s 27th in the league in offense and has made so many trades this year that the 2nd round pick in 2016 should be starting at the off-guard any day now. I think the Celtics current have four actual players and 17 future draft picks on their roster at the moment. This marks another 4-game losing skid for the Sixers. Growing pains for a young team, I suppose.

Feb. 7
Every single alarm bell about this team should’ve been going off after the Sixers lose 112-98 at home to a dreadful L.A. Lakers team missing stalwarts Kobe Bryant and Pau Gasol and suddenly emergent scorer Nick Young. (I know, I can’t believe that I just said that, either.) The Lakers win with only nine healthy players, as they get 19 points from Steve Nash on his 40th birthday in one of the 11 games he has played all season. Weary Sixers coach Brett Brown explains this sorry performance at home by saying, “it appears we play better on the road.” The Marketing Department might have some trouble building an ad campaign around that one, Brett. I can see the billboard now: SIXERS BASKETBALL – WE’RE BETTER IN CLEVELAND! Oh look, a roadtrip coming up. Just what the club needs. Isn’t that right, Coach Brown?

Feb. 9
For a team that’s struggling (losers of 5 in a row), about the last thing you need right about now is a cross-country trip, followed by playing back-to-back nights against playoff teams. The Sixers show up in L.A. and put out a lame effort on Feb. 9 against the Clippers, trailing 46-15 after one quarter, trailing by 49 at the end of three, going on to lose 123-78, and then …

Feb. 10
Golden State beats them 123-80 the next night in Oakland. Back-to-back 40-pt. losses. But hey, the Sixers lost by 43 after losing by 45 the night before, so this counts as improvement, although the Warriors were so far ahead and went so far down the depth chart in this game that Marreese Speights went off for 32 pts. If Marreese Speights is owning you, your team is in trouble. There was a Sixers team in the early 1990s that came to Seattle not long after losing to the Kings by more than 50 in Sacramento, and promptly lost by more than 50 to the Sonics, as well. You’d be hard-pressed to find another team in the NBA that lost by more than 50 twice in a season. What is it about this franchise that drives it to such extremes? When you think of the Sixers, you think of some of the greatest players in the history of the game – Wilt Chamberlain, Dr. J, Moses Malone, Charles Barkley, Allen Iverson – and some great teams – the 1967-68 team went 68-13, an NBA record at the time, and won a title; the 1982-83 team also won the title and went 12-1 in the playoffs – but they have also had some of the more wretched seasons and results the league has ever seen.

Feb. 12
Here seems like an opportunity to get a win, since the opponent is Utah and the Jazz have been god awful this year. Alas, the Sixers get lit up by Alec Burks in the 4th Quarter, the Jazz prevail 105-100 in Salt Lake City and the Sixers limp into the all-star break on an 8-game losing streak.

Feb. 18
I would think that a 6-day mini-vacation might help the Sixers out. I would also think wrong. The Sixers get blasted 114-85 at home by the Cleveland Cadavers, who are terrible. This was the 5th straight win for the Cavs, and it got them to 21-33 – meaning that, 5 games earlier, the Cavs had essentially the same record as the Sixers, who are now 15-40 and have lost 9 in a row.

Feb. 21
Just in the nick of time to beat the Feb. 20 trade deadline, the Sixers made a couple of deals. Or, as Evan Turner and Spencer Hawes call it, the Sixers grant them parole. Turner, you may remember, tipped in the winning bucket in the Sixers last win some 28 days and about 18 paragraphs ago. The Sixers do Turner, who is basically their best player, a favour by trading him at the deadline to the Indiana Pacers, a team that actually knows what it’s doing. They also trade starting C Hawes to the Cavs. In exchange for two starters, they get two pairs of Converse All-Stars and a ham sandwich. Actually, they get former Pacer ace Danny Granger from Indiana, whom they promptly buy out and whom signs with the Clippers. From the Cavs they get Earl Clark, who they waive, and Henry Sims, who is tall. (That’s about all I can say about him.) Hmm, come to think of it, a ham sandwich might have been a better deal. At least it would taste good, whereas everything the Sixers do these days leaves a bad taste in the mouth. The NBA Trade Deadline is always the sports equivalent of Día de Muertos, as most of the mediocre teams clamor to acquire stiffs they do not want with big expiring contracts they can then cash in for cap room next year. The Sixers celebrate the NBA equivalent of Day of the Dead by going out and playing dead at home and losing 124-112 to the Dallas Mavericks. 10 in a row.

Feb. 24
Keep this up and the Sixers might actually catch the Milwaukee Bucks for the worst record in the league. The Bucks come to town and lay a 130-110 beatdown on the Sixers. Unlike Philly, who have intended to tank from the get-go, and have now all but finished the job with this recent series of trades, the Bucks actually had playoff aspirations at the start of the year. They also have about the most mismatched, ill-conceived roster in the NBA, which would explain why they are only 11-45 even after whoopassing the Sixers. In this game, the Sixers get torched for 25 on 7 treys by O.J. Mayo, the Bucks’ big, expensive off-season signing who has now become the Bucks’ big, expensive DNP, logging 6 straight games with no minutes in the middle of the season. How everyone in Milwaukee hasn’t gotten fired twice over by now is beyond me.

Front row seats at a Bucks-Sixers game make an excellent cure for insomnia

Feb. 26
Losing their 12th in a row, 101-90 to the woful Orlando Magic, means the Sixers have now also gone O-for-February. Yes, that’s 0-11 for the month. March has to be better, yes?

Mar. 1
March begins with a 122-103 loss to the Washington Buzzards. The Sixers close out an 0-5 homestand that included losses to two teams – the Cavs and Magic – who have been going through the motions since about the 15th of November and a third – the Bucks – who have been declared legally dead by the state of Wisconsin. Maybe the coach was right about them playing better on the road. The attendance figures for these games all seem to be about the same, right around 12,000 at Enormous Banking Conglomerate Center, most likely diehards who are now on a first-name basis with the players. Apparently, there has been a surprising amount of patience surrounding this team from the Philly fans, who must be drinking the Kool-Aid and thinking there is a plan for the future. You know, those excuses about rebuilding and about young players and that sort of thing.

Mar. 2
Now I gotta be honest here, getting beat by double digits twice in four days by the Orlando Magic is pretty much inexcusable. The Sixers lose 92-81 at the (Sc)Amway Center in Orlando, shooting 37% and turning the ball over 19 times and getting outscored 26-12 in the final quarter, which meant they actually had a lead going into the 4th period of this game, which is the first time that has happened in weeks. And the Magic shoot 7.7% from 3-pt. range in this game, mind you, so it is not like the Sixers are getting torched or anything. (Sometimes the best defense is an opponent’s inept offense.) Well, that game was awful. Let’s never play that one again. And now, for even worse duty ...

Mar. 4
Oklahoma City. Eek. You just knew this wasn’t going to end well. The Zombi Sonics stomp on the Sixers and then wipe them off the bottom of their shoes. Kevin Durant scores 42 for his future former team while Russell Westbrook records one of the fastest triple-doubles in NBA history: 13 pts., 14 assists, 10 boards in 20:17 of floor time. The 125-92 defeat is Philly’s 15th loss in a row. Their average margin during this stretch is -19.3, with six losses by more than 20 and three by more than 30.

Mar. 8
Philadelphia fans are known for booing Santa Claus, and take pride in their ability to jeer the home side. This almost certainly has something to do with being home to the Philadelphia Phillies, who have lost more games than any team in the history of sports, and they have had abundant opportunities to practice over the years. So you would think they would be booing the Sixers pretty good during a 104-92 loss to the Utah Jazz, whose fortunes the Sixers seem to be single-handedly attempting to resurrect, as the Jazz are on a 6-game death march of a road trip at the time. The Sixers get killed on the boards all night, but rally behind G Tony Wroten’s 30-point career night to tie it at 91-91, only to see the Jazz go on a 13-1 run to close out the game as the Sixers throw some bricks and kick the ball all over the gym. This is now 16 losses in a row and it’s not like they’ve been playing a schedule laden with the NBA élite during this stretch. Yeah, OKC and the Clippers and the Warriors are all pretty good, but there has been an awful lot of chum in the water here. And this is now 13 in a row they’ve dropped at home. Hopelessness is starting to settle in. And since I mentioned bad Philadelphia baseball just now, here is the perfect time to offer up a plug for A’s Bad as It Gets, a new book by Friends of The LOSE Andy Saunders and John G. Robertson, which chronicles the 36-118 Philadelphia Athletics of 1916. Somehow, those two guys have managed to sift through a whole 154-game season of a sport performed about as badly as possible and not lose their minds, whereas sifting through 16 straight Sixers losses is driving me to drugs. But I have already written over 2,800 words about this team, so like hell I am stopping now.

Mar. 10
Quick trip to New York. Lose 123-110 to the Knicks. That’s 17 losses in a row. It’s getting extremely difficult to write about these games. I’m starting to go numb just from watching them. Hitting me with a rock, at this point, would likely have no ill effects. (But please don’t throw rocks. The Sixers are already doing plenty of that on a nightly basis. Ugh.) Just imagine how the players must feel. Well, besides the fact that they’re probably miserable, they probably also feel a bit betrayed. The players are well aware that the front office is basically trotting them out to lose. Imagine what it would be like to go to your job and be told that they think you suck and they want you to fail. For guys like Turner, the season was basically an audition – show you can play worth a damn under the most trying of situations, and you and your big contract will get moved at the deadline. Big picture, of course, there might be a ‘plan’ in place here, but the big picture is composed of lots of small moments – actual basketball games – and in the moment, players want to win. It’s all that matters to them, in fact. A few years ago, the Warriors went into full-on tank mode and started five rookies, the franchise being intent upon losing every single one of their games to close out the year – so the rookies, of course, went out and won a game in spite of their own management, and were damn proud of themselves for doing so, and they were also damn pissed off that they were being thrown under the bus. For guys who wind up stuck on teams as awful as this lot in Philly is, it’s often the end of the line. The Sixers are still playing hard, at least, although I am not sure they are even capable of playing well.

Mar. 12
Really, guys? I’m trying to pump your tires and sing your praises for playing hard and having a lot of pride and all that jazz and then you lose 115-98 at home to the Sacramento Kings? What the hell was that? Oh, that’s right, the Sixers are “rebuilding,” just like the Kings have been rebuilding since about the time they left Cincinnati. There are still 12,000 people going to the games. How can they stand to watch this? Who would actually pay money to go and see this? This is six kinds of crap. The reality is that this is not a rebuilding job at all – other than Carter-Williams, Wroten, and maybe Thaddeus Young, there isn’t anyone else on this active roster, at this point, who is even remotely in the Sixers’ future plans. Forget rebuilding. This is full-on tanking.

Mar. 14
So here is a better effort on the part of the plucky Sixers, a 101-94 home loss to the Indiana Pacers, who have the best record in the NBA’s Eastern Conference. Like I said way back sometime in January, it’s often the top-tier teams that slip up a bit against these sorts of minnows, because these sorts of minnows aren’t any sort of concern as a future playoff matchup, and while that whole ‘play them one game at a time’ cliché holds true, the prime contenders are also thinking two and three moves ahead – which means they sometimes take their eye off the ball, so to speak, when facing the has-beens. The Pacers didn’t play their best game by any stretch. I would say they won despite 25 points from Young, but given that he shot 10-for-31 from the floor, they may have actually won because of it. The Pacers are currently employing Andrew Bynum as a backup center, he having been the supposed backbone of the Philadelphia squad a year ago who ultimately never played a game for the Sixers and wound up being traded to Cleveland, traded to Chicago, released and then signed off the street by the Pacers. If you are a fan of the Sixers, would you trust a front office to build a winner when they came up with a scheme as hare-brained as entrusting Andrew Bynum with the keys to the franchise? Anyway, that’s 19 losses in a row for the Sixers, who are starting to keep some dubious company here as the losing streak mounts.

Mar. 15
The franchise record for consecutive losses was 20, which was set by the Fool’s Gold Standard of bad NBA teams, the 1972-73 Sixers team that went 9-73. With an almost universality, all parties involved in such disastrous seasons come to view the debacle with humour, as such colossal failure takes on an such an air of absurdity that you can find no other way to deal with it. (That, and strong drink. This is a great article about the debut season for the New York Islanders, which closes with a party that lasts a week and involves 700 cases of beer.) That Sixers team which lost 73 games came about due to a string of horrid drafts and a terrible trade with the Lakers after management got in a spat with Wilt. But no one involved was actively trying to be terrible. There has always been rebuilding in sports, and sometimes teams flatline as the season gets going. GMs make bad moves, owners are stingy and stupid and naïve. The thing is, though, is that back in the pre-lottery, pre-salary cap eras of sports, while such failures were rife with incompetence, for the most part, everyone involved had their hearts in the right place. No one was trying to be that bad. The modern NBA model has this inherent cynicism to it. This year has been particularly galling, as so many franchising are making moves which signify that they are actively attempting to be terrible. You still wind up being terrible because you’re incompetent in the NBA, of course, and there are also times where injuries hit or ideas which seemed good at the time run aground, but the idea that you may as well just finish it off and blow the whole thing up and “clear cap space,” sometimes before the season even begins, seems to me to run counter to the whole reason that professional sports exist in the first place. The NBA vehemently denies that teams are tanking, doing so in much the manner commissioner Silver did in the quote above, which is to make a point of explaining that their apples taste good when a question comes up about why their oranges are so bitter and rindy. A number of organizations are clearly tanking, however, and the worst of the offenders are the Sixers, who host the Vancouver Memphis Grizzlies on Mar. 15 and get clobbered, losing to the Grizzlies 103-77 for their franchise record-tying 20th loss in a row. And the Sixers are doing this exact thing, this tanking routine, because the NBA has created a talent distribution system for itself which gives franchises more incentive to worry about next season than to worry about this one.

Mar. 17
Under the original NBA draft lottery rules, every team that didn’t make the playoffs had an equal chance to land the #1 pick. There were 7 teams in the lottery back then (it was only a 23-team league), which meant a 14.3% chance for everyone. The NBA modified this when too many teams that really weren’t all that bad started getting high picks. The draft is now weighted according to how bad you did during the season – the worst team now has a 25% chance, the 2nd worst team a 19.9% chance, etc., and so on down the line through having a 0.5% chance if you finish 14th. This is supposed to give the bad clubs more opportunity to get better through being more likely to get the higher picks. The lottery was first created when it became apparent in the early 1980s that teams like the Clippers and the Houston Rockets were, in fact, tanking to try and get the #1 pick in a particularly lucrative draft year. The lottery was supposed to eliminate this, but in fact, the opposite has occurred and the reason for it is simple: the non-zero chance to strike it rich is better than the zero chance to strike it rich. The Chicago Bulls had only a 1.7% chance of landing the top pick in 2008, while the 1993 Orlando Magic had only a 1.5% chance, and both of them hit the jackpot. Now, in all likelihood, if you have a 1.5% chance you aren’t going anywhere in the draft (which is slotted according to records after the first three picks are drawn out of the hat). Those are long odds, of course, but if you beat the odds you can make your team a whole better a whole lot faster. Furthermore, if you’re one of those teams with the 12th or 13th worst record in the league, you theoretically could’ve made a playoff push, but your chances of winning the NBA championship were, well, about 0% and everyone knows it. Non-zero is better than zero. And since the best way to increase the odds that you get a high pick is to finish with a terrible record, what incentive is there for your team to win? And keep in mind, I’m talking here about moves that the front office makes. I’m not talking about guys going out on the court and deliberately throwing games. The Sixers players aren’t throwing games here, which includes the 99-90 loss in Indianapolis to the Pacers on Saint Patrick’s Day. It’s more about how players are being put in a position to fail. Management can make one-sided trades, can opt to hold guys out who are injured longer than maybe necessary, etc., etc. There are lots of ways to finesse your roster so as to go about losing as many games as you possibly can.

Mar. 19
Victory in the lottery is no guarantee of future success, either. The San Antonio Spurs are the greatest beneficiaries of the NBA lottery of all-time, turning a pair of wretched seasons in which they were ravaged by injuries into two #1 picks, into two starting centers – David Robinson, Tim Duncan – and then into multiple NBA championships. But the Spurs always did have a clue what they were doing. In fact, since the NBA Draft Lottery was instituted in 1985, Robinson and Duncan are the only two #1 draft picks in the Lottery era who wound up winning a championship with the team that drafted them. (Shaq and LeBron were #1 picks but left via free agency to sign with franchises that had a clue.) Far too often, of course, the #1 pick in the draft turns out to be no better than a serviceable NBA player and not the great saviour that clubs were hoping for. The truth is that it is also really, really hard to construct a good team that can continue to stay competitive in one of the most competitive businesses on the planet, even when you do know what you are doing. I certainly understand that teams need to rebuild from time to time. There is an inevitable ebb and flow of talent. Most of the teams mucking around at the bottom of the NBA standings right now, however, are teams which have made a complete mess of things of their own accord. (And remember, this is the same lot that said “In Andrew Bynum We Trust” that are still making decisions in Philadelphia.) [EDIT: I should point out here that Philly does, in fact, have a new GM this year. Sam Hinkie was not responsible for the Bynum mess a year ago. Just the mess this year.] The idea that one guy is going to save them from themselves is extremely naïve. And almost all of those teams which are clamoring to be as bad as possible in a year with a pretty deep draft need far more help than simply one player can provide. And once the culture of losing sets in, it can be extremely hard to get rid of it. Setting yourself up to be as bad as the Sixers are, in fact, makes future success probably even less likely and not more, snappy slogans and wishful thinking to the contrary. In the meantime, victory is still hard to come by for the Sixers:

"Oh for fucksake. Why am I here again?"

The new offensive sets do not seem to be working out so well. The Sixers drop game #22 in a row on the 19th of March, a 102-94 loss at home to the Chicago Bulls.

Mar. 21
Well would you look at this! The Sixers have a chance to win a game! Against the Knicks, who have been hot of late, no less. The Sixers have the ball late in the game, down 2 with a chance to win, or at least tie and get the game into OT ...

D’oh! NO!! D’ohnt do that! Sixers lose 92-91. Oh, the agony ...

23 losses and counting, tying them for the third-longest losing streak of all team with three of the more notably awful teams of recent memory, the Vancouver Memphis no, they were still in Vancouver Grizzlies of 1996 who went 15-67, the Denver Nuggets of 1997-98 that went 11-71, and those wacky Charlotte Hornets Bobcats of the strike-shortened 2012 season who are, statistically, the worst team in NBA history at 7-59.

Mar. 22
‘XP must be a masochist.’ I know that’s what you’re thinking, and you may not be wrong in that. Seriously, chronicling this many losses verges on insufferable. It is hard on the psyche. C’mon guys! WIN A DAMN GAME! PLEASE?!?!?!? Off to Chicago the Sixers go, where they lose 91-81. 24 in a row, tying them for the second-longest losing streak of all time with the Cavs, of course. It could only be Cleveland. The 1982 Toronto Towers Cleveland Cavaliers from the inglourious Ted Stepien reign of (t)error lost 24 in a row. Come on Sixers, stop this nonsense. I really want these guys to win a game. Watching this team is killing my will to live. But I’m looking at the schedule and, well, the easy part of it is over. Oh boy ...

Mar. 24
You knew this one was not going to go well, a 113-91 loss in San Antonio in which the Spurs romp even though they give Tony Parker and two other starters the night off. The Spurs do this sort of thing during the season, of course, and do so regardless of their opponents. Last year, they caught some shit from the league offices for daring to rest a bunch of starters for a game in Miami at the end of a long road trip, since the game was on national TV. Somewhat understandably, the league doesn’t much care for a club not putting forth its best efforts for a game like that – the irony being, of course, that the Sixers and about 10 other franchises have made no effort to put forth their best effort for the better part of this entire season. There was no reënactment of the Alamo on this night (if you remember, the home team didn’t fare so well in that contest), and now the Sixers take their 25-game losing streak and roll on to Houston for a game with the Rockets at the Summit, or whatever the arena is now called, and now that I think about it, the Rockets have some newish arena and I think the Summit has been converted into some megachurch. Clearly, the current state of Houston sports facilities is of more interest to me than watching that Sixers game in San Antonio was, since it was basically over about midway through the 2nd Quarter.

Mar. 27
Zero wins in 26 games, tying them with the Cavs from 2011-2012. Houston wins 120-98. Sigh. What is it about the number 26? The Sixers just tied the Cleveland Cavaliers record, of course, but the record for futility in MLB is also 26 games, set by the Louisville Colonels of 1889. The Colonels did all of us a favour and went out of business after the 1899 season. The record in the NFL is also 26, held by the Tangerine Dream itself, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers who lost the first 26 games of their existence in 1976-77. Lest you think this is merely a North American phenomenon, consider the worst team in the history of the EPL, the 11-pt. Derby County side of 2007-2008. The Rams did what most flailing, floundering clubs do – sack the manager midseason – and new manager Paul Jewell promptly endured 26 games without a win, stretching long past the Rams being relegated and into the following season when Derby was ensconced in the second division. And to give the number 26 some love here, 26 is also the record for the longest winning streak of all time in MLB by the New York Giants of 1916. That Giants team also had a 17-game winning streak yet somehow finished 4th in the National League that year. (Take out 43 games of win streaks in that 86-win season and that would be a pretty bad team.) Speaking of 17, the longest losing streak in the NHL is only 17 games, which is somewhat understandable because you could get a tie every now and then before the league went and bastardized Bettmanized the standings for no good reason. The two teams tied for that mark in the NHL are Geoff’s beloved Washington Capitals of 1974-1975 and the infamous 2nd year San Jose Sharks squad of 1992-1993 which dropped 17 in a row on their way to an 11-71-2 record, the most losses an NHL team has ever recorded.

Well done, Philadelphia 26ers. You have earned yourself a new nickname. You have brought the game to rarely seen levels of disrepute this season. And even having just lost 26 games in a row, Philadelphia still has a better record than the Milwaukee Bucks.

But why stop there! There are still 10 games left on the schedule, beginning with a game this Saturday against Detroit. That game with the Pistons, and the two against the Celtics, constitute winnable games in my mind. The rest? At Atlanta, Charlotte, Brooklyn, at Toronto, at Memphis, at Charlotte, at Miami ... not looking so good. If they don’t get Detroit on Saturday, they could very easily wind up losing the rest and becoming the Philadelphia 36ers.

The advanced stats paint an even grimmer picture of this team. They are among the worst in every statistic across the board on both sides of the ball. I have not even gotten into advanced statistical analysis in this post, in part because math is hard, but also because I do not need any more evidence than what I have seen with my own two eyes. In no phase nor aspect of the game does this team perform well. The Philadelphia 26ers, as currently constructed, are the worst team I have ever seen in over 35 years of watching professional sport.

Statistical models show the 26ers as being about a 3-79 team as constructed at the moment. No argument here. The over on that 16½ in Las Vegas is looking like a sucker bet in favour of the house. From Tom Ziller of SB Nation:

If the Sixers are really right now a .039 team, I mean, my God. This actually breaks Bill James’ Log5 method for estimating single-game win probabilities in some cases. It’s too low. For example, plugging in the Sixers as a .039 team gives them a -3.6 percent probability of beating the Pacers in Indiana. I mean, that actually sounds right, but ... you know, you can’t have a negative probability of winning a game. The worst you can have is a 0 percent probability of winning a game. So I went through and set any games in which the .039 Sixers had a negative win probability to zero, and ran Log5 for the rest of the season. The results: the Sixers are expected to win one more game, with a 29 percent probability of losing them all.  

What is this madness? Yes, the 26ers are so bad that they actually broke mathematics! That, right there, is an achievement of which they can truly be proud.

Not only have the 26ers broken math, but they may have broken me. I can’t take this any longer. I suspect I am not alone in this. The 26ers are going to lead the league in therapy bills for years to come, because everyone involved in this mess is going to be suffering from PTSD. The Lose spent the better part of a week combing through as much game tape and reading as many write-ups and recaps of Philadelphia 26ers games as possible in order to write this. I want my week back.

Stranger than Fiction

As I have said before, the NCAA Tournament is great drama, but isn't always great basketball. In fact, sometimes it's truly terrible basketball. This Kentucky-Kansas State I have on the TV has been one of the worst games I've seen in years. These two are the sorts of teams which you see a lot of in contemporary college basketball, teams that have a lot of athleticism but really don't do any phase of the game particularly well. Mercifully, it's about to end.

From a drama standpoint, meanwhile, this has been a pretty awesome tourney through the first week, with six games going to OT and upsets all over the place. My $1,000,000,000 Bracket went by the wayside for me right about the time Aaron Craft decided to shout “Olé!” and step aside while the Dayton point guard bulled his way to the hoop for the winning bucket. And that was the first game of the tourney, so at least the suspense ended quickly. 

The appeal of the NCAA tourney comes from the contrasts. In the NBA, teams are constructed in basically the same way, and the difference makers are often players who are anomalies who do things at their size that other people simply cannot do. And in the NBA, of course, you get to pick your players, whereas in college hoops, the players pick you, and coaches have to adjust yearly to what they have to work with. So in the NCAA's, you wind up seeing all sorts of weird teams with weird rosters playing all kinds of different styles. You'll have a team with a 6'8" center and four guards, or a team that shoots nothing but 3s, or some team like Princeton used to do that would run the clock down every possession. There will be games in the tourney between teams that want to score 100 and teams that want to score 50, and most every style and strategy is on display.

Now, if you're one of the minnows, just getting the chance to swim with the big fish is the prize in and of itself. The result of the game itself doesn't much matter. Most underdogs play nervous, shoot badly, and lose by double digits. That they made it to the tourney at all is what matters. Some will play well and put a scare in an opponent with a greater pedigree. And if the little guys do manage to spring the upset, win their first game and keep dancing a little longer, like Harvard and North Dakota State and Mercer (LOL Duke) did this year, they're playing with house money at that point.

Everyone like the underdogs and everyone loves the upsets. When there are few upsets, the tourney is, well, rather boring. Just a lot of bad basketball. And with a lot of crazy matchups and unknowns, the games get pretty intriguing. If the Final Four is a gourmet meal, then the first weekend is a food fight. The 5-12 line in the brackets is the usual upset hotspot, since #12 seeds are almost always good teams that are underrated who you've never heard of, and #5 teams are often overrated or on their way down, having played their way out of being a top 4 in the late stages of the season. Sure enough, the 12s went 3-1, and probably should've been 4-0 except N.C. State pulled off the biggest choke of the tourney yesterday by gagging a 14-pt. lead in the last 5:00 or so and losing to Saint Louis.

Biggest choke of the tourney up until the biggest choke of the tourney, which was tonight, when VCU did this:

Behold the 4-pt. play by Stephen F. Austin guard Desmond Haymon, with the Lumberjacks trailing by 4 and their amazing season almost certainly coming to an end. Hayman hits the 3, draws the foul, then went to the line and sank the free throw. Tie game and the 'Jacks go on to win 77:75 in OT.

Now, Stephen F. Austin winning isn't that much of a surprise. Stephen F. Austin is the classic NCAA #12 seed: they are a really good team from a school you've never heard of from a town you've never heard of and they play in a league you've never heard of. They've won 29 games in a row but haven't played anyone. They won 27 games last year, so they can obviously play, but this is the sort of team no big school wants to schedule because, even though they're good, the perception is that they're nobody, so they'll make you look really bad if they beat you on your home court, and they can't get any team of note to travel to Nacogdoches, Texas, to play them at their home court, so scheduling is almost impossible. And the 'Jacks are not only a really good team, but they also have some of that loosey goosey fun vibe that makes underdogs so appealing.

But the way they won is definitely a surprise, because this just might be the most preposterous ending of a basketball game I've seen in years. That ending was straight out of a rejected Hollywood script. You couldn't make this shit up.

First of all, notice how I said Desmond Haymon drew a foul. I didn't actually say that the VCU player, JeQuan Lewis, actually committed a foul. From the angle on the gif here, it looks like something of a snow job. Haymon definitely sells it and the referee doesn't have the best angle on the play. I say 'looks' because this angle isn't conclusive, either. When I saw it at full speed, the contact seemed a bit more legit.

That being said, it's a truly terrible play by Lewis, because selling the foul is precisely what you do in this situation if you're down 4 pts. I remember a guy trying this in a game once that I played in where we were up 4 and he took a 3-pointer and crashed in a heap – and since this was in an opposing gym, the home fans actually got upset, because he miraculously made the trey and the collective audience then sees him rolling around on the floor acting like he'd been shot and started booing that there was no foul. Nevermind that there wasn't one of our guys within 4 feet of him. The ref didn't fall for it and we won by a point.

But even though it's a terrible play by Lewis, the Rams from VCU were in full meltdown mode at that point in the game, as they missed four free throws in the last 30 seconds of the game. In both the case of VCU in this game and the N.C. State game I mentioned before, they played themselves into come from ahead losses. The foul-to-stop-the-clock-and-hope-they-miss strategy drives some people crazy, since it slows the game down so much – I happen to think the constant string of timeouts in the NBA to advance the ball to halfcourt is worse, myself – but teams wouldn't do it if it didn't work. Does it work often? Not really, but the low percentage play is still better than the zero percentage play.

The most astonishing finish in NCAA championship history, from 1983, happened in part because Houston was a lousy free throw shooting team. They bricked some free throws down the stretch, which allowed N.C. State to stay close and have a chance to win at the end. And N.C. State shouldn't have been there in the first place. They were dead to rights in a first round game vs. Pepperdine in that tourney, but the Waves' best free throw shooter, of all people, missed two free throws in the closing seconds and N.C. State was able to rally and win in 2OT. If the Pepperdine guy had just done what he'd done right 80% over the course of that season, that Cinderella story of a run by N.C. State never would've been written. (In this famous upset from 1981, the guy who misses the fatal free throw, Skip Dillard, was actually nicknamed 'Money' because he was almost automatic at the free throw line.)

Anyway, the VCU kid who committed the foul made the last bad play, but it was one in a series of errors, and VCU still had another 5 minutes of OT to rectify the error and win the game. That being said ... damn, that was a doozy. That one is going to be tough to live down. It is going to get replayed again and again and again. And again and again. And again.

And every year, the TV networks like to trot out March Madness miracles from years past like this and this and this (LOL Washington Huskies). If I was someone on the losing team, the last thing I'd want is to be reminded of it every single year. Those are the most heartbreaking moments in their lives as athletes. I've always believed that it's better to get blown out in a one-and-done game than to lose it at the end in a shocking fashion. If they're better than you and they kick your ass, fine.

Losing games you could've won, and maybe even should've won, just leaves a sense of unfinished business – you want to go back and redo it, do it right, but your don't have time. My senior season in high school ended with a loss in OT at the buzzer. I've probably run that finish back 1000 times in my head since then, and each time it's a little different – the shot spins out and its on to the next OT; or the shot is blocked and the horn sounds and its onto the next OT – but then you realize that it's surreal and you're just daydreaming. It's only a piece of fiction in your head.

And as was proven tonight by VCU, losing can sometimes be stranger than fiction.

Lose Tunes Track 06

The reason for the crickets here in this corner of the internet is that I've been busy as hell with several work projects. And when I'm not slaving away at the salt mines, I'm hard at work on the novel. I've vowed that I'm going to get this novel done by the end of March, no matter what.

I've always been a terrible procrastinator, a person who has never functioned well without deadlines. It's part of why journalism was a suitable career, in fact. Most journalists I know only function well several minutes before they have to turn something in. Procrastination is not inherently a bad thing, mind you – for some, it takes that pressure to actually focus. Give me two hours and it will be done and near perfect. Give me two weeks and I'll make some token effort at first, lose interest, promptly blow it off for 13 days and 22 hours and do it in two hours, anyway. Juste un peu d'amour has dragged on since July, which is when I first started writing it, and if I don't give myself a target date to aspire to, the thing won't get written. Once I get this done, I have some other ideas that I am promptly ready to unleash.

Anyway, I'm also drinking some scotch right now and I think I could use some music. Track 06 on the Lose Tunes is a song called Aurora Gone from the Texas band Midlake, a cerebral sextet who write beautifully lush and thought-provoking songs. Their newest record was an interesting (mis)adventure in the creative process – they spent two years working on a record and found themselves going nowhere, at which point the lead singer/songwriter left the band, and the rest of the members then junked what they were working on and started anew, writing and recording a new record in six months. This reminds me of my own processes – I spent 10 YEARS developing the ideas and characters for a novel and then junked it and started writing this one instead. After 10 years, I was sick of the characters. And the story was too heavy – it was sort of like going to dinner and ordering a 5-course prix fixe when all you really wanted was a caesar salad and an iced tea.

This is a nice version, scaled back and recorded live at KEXP in Seattle. And yeah, this bit of indie prog rock is a bit of a change-up from the funked out Track 05. But I like contrasts and conflicts. Without contrast and conflict, nothing is fundamentally interesting to me. It's why I am so interested in losing, after all – the emotions when one fails are much more complicated than when one succeeds.

Read an Ebook Week

Buy an ebook this coming week! Preferably this one!

 The LOSE wholeheartedly supports Read an Ebook Week, which starts this Sunday, mainly because there are a lot of good scribes out there who are choosing to go the self-publishing route, and they deserve an audience. Find a book you like, buy it and give it a read. Don't be afraid. They'll make more, trust me.

This is a convenient excuse for me to fail at self promotion yet again. You can go here to purchase my novel, A Beautiful Cup, which I wrote in 2003. It's only $9.99 $7.99. (That's right, I've lowered the pricetag.) It's also available from Barnes & Noble. But if, for some reason, your taste is so poor that this act of high literature doesn't suit you, find another you like and enjoy!

Just for your information, I am gonna bust my ass in March and try to get the new novel, which is entitled Juste un peu d'amour, finished and ready for publication. And now that I've declared this to be my goal before a worldwide audience, I need to finish the goddamn thing.

Also, the crack Marketing Dept. here at IPL World HQ are currently in the process of developing Lose Gear, all sorts of great swag for the loyal readers of The LOSE. Stay tuned for more details. In the meantime, get out and lose! There is always more time for lose.

Cleveland

“To tell the truth, I’m not excited to go to Cleveland, but we have to. If I ever saw myself saying I’m excited going to Cleveland, I’d punch myself in the face, because I’m lying.”
– Ichiro

Three weeks removed from the Super Bowl, I still have a palpable sense of disbelief. Wait, what? The Seahawks won? These guys? Are you kidding me? This really happened?

Well if I have a .gif of it, it must be true.

My first inclination, upon the completion of Seattle's 43:8 manhandling of the Denver Broncos in the Super Bowl, was to start writing a long essay about just how much joy this victory would bring to the people of Seattle, and gush with pride and delirium and speak to what it would be like when 750,000 or however many people would line the streets of downtown Seattle to celebrate.

But I know exactly how my readers would respond to something like that: "The LOSE has gone soft! What the fuck is this shit?"

I think it was columnist Jerry Brewer of the Seattle Times who spoke best to the nature of the relationship of the Seahawks to Seattle when he said that the cocky, brash football team was a representation of the city's collective id. Seattle has a well-deserved reputation for being mellow, sophisticated and occasionally a bit too passive-aggressive for its own good – qualities that don't seem to jibe with the gathering on a Sunday afternoon at Large Telephone Company Field to root for their football team, at which point the mellow masses literally shake the earth. Seahawks fans are overexcited, overcaffeinated, overstimulated, loud, loud, loud, and also loud. And annoyed. Very annoyed. That annoyance has fueled the frenzy over the years. The Seahawks, as a team, play with a collective chip on their shoulders, and the fans have been bringing that chip to the stands for years. It will actually be interesting to see what home games at the CLink will be like in 2014. They will still be impossibly loud, of course. The decibel level has become a matter of civic pride. (When Kansas City Chiefs fans snatched the Guinness World Record for stadium noise, the Seahawks fans made it a point to snatch the record back.) But I suspect there will be a different atmosphere, one less fueled by frustration. Which is notable in itself, because when you grow up in the Pacific Northwest, sports and frustration are one and the same.

The Sonics won an NBA title in the tape-delayed Finals days of 1979, never won again and are now no more. *sniff* The Mariners have never even been to a World Series, had 10 winning seasons since their inception in 1977, and are, by most metrics, among the worst franchises in the history of not only baseball, but all of professional sports. Seattle is gaga over its soccer team, as the average attendance for Sounders home games is larger than for all but a select few soccer clubs in the world, but the Sounders have fallen into the proper Seattle patterns of constantly underachieving, squandering opportunities, and failing to live up to expectations. The Sounders, I am sure, are aware of what's happened across the street at Insurance Company Field: the Mariners' attendance has declined by over 50% during a decade's worth of incompetence. Seattle fans will be patient with you, but only for so long. With the bearing of the northwest colours – the greens and the blues – also seems to come an aptitude for falling short and a propensity for maddening failure. (And I will get to those blue-and-green wearing guys on the skates up in Vancouver in a future post.) The 12s, as Seattle Seahawk fans are known (the #12 has been retired by the team to honour the fans), have always brought with them 30+ years worth of civic frustration when they pack the CLink – a frustration which a Super Bowl victory has dissipated, if not quite eliminated. Now, constant Mariner shortcomings and intriguing Sounders rumours can be viewed on their own terms, instead of in as part of a collective narrative. For now, that angst has been quelled.

Seattle is no longer in the running for the title of Most Tormented Sports City in America, a short list on which Seattle has featured prominently. Let us turn our attention to the frontrunner for that dubious honour now that Seattle has been absolved of some of its collective burden. OK, Cleveland, you’re on the clock:

photo by Yves Marchand and Roman Meffre

Oh boy.

Little did the 79,544 who gathered at Cleveland Municipal Stadium on December 27, 1964, know that they were witnessing the end of the salad days in Cleveland sports. The Browns defeated the Colts 27:0 to win the NFL championship that day, and the Browns haven't won a championship since. The Browns have never been to a Super Bowl. The Indians, meanwhile, were something of a disaster from the get-go, as they rose from the ashes of the worst team in MLB history, the 1899 Cleveland Spiders who went 20-134 and drew 145 fans per home game. The Tribe have not won a World Series since they defeated the Boston Braves in 1948, and often would play before about 5,000,000 empty seats over the course of a season during their days at ‘The Mistake by the Lake’ that was Municipal Stadium. (That isn't much of an exaggeration – the place was huge and the team was awful.) The only thing the Cavaliers have won in their history is the NBA draft lottery on three occasions, and they have reached the NBA Finals only once. They also own the two longest losing streaks in the history of the NBA: 26 games in the first post-Lebron season of 2011-2012, and 24 games back in 1982. The city's attempt at fielding an NHL team, the Cleveland Barons, was the last franchise in any of the four major professional sports to fold in the middle of the season. The Barons merged with the Minnesota North Stars, and it is this collective of North Star sleazebags who then essentially extorted an NHL expansion franchise for San Jose. (One of many reasons for me to hate Team Teal. I can go into more detail on that subject some other time.) If misery loves company, then Cleveland is a city with open arms.

It is bad enough to put up with bad franchises. Cleveland’s misery is always compounded by repeated symbolic stabbings through the city’s collective heart. Owner Art Modell ripped the Browns out of the city and relocated them to Baltimore after the 1995 seasons, where the newly-christened Ravens have since gone on to win two Super Bowls. This act was so audacious and brazen by Modell that even the other NFL owners blushed, which is no small feat. A new Cleveland Browns franchise was quickly cobbled together and took the field in 1999. Browns v. 2.0 has been awful, making the playoffs only once and usually amassing double-digit numbers of losses. The franchise has suffered through constant turnover at the management level, going through multiple owners and GMs and coaches and showing itself to be about the most dysfunctional operation in all of professional sports. 2013 was a terrible year for the Browns, who have now cleaned out the front office yet again recently, and now we have these bizarre rumours about Jim Harbaugh running about, which is making people crazy here in San Francisco, but this comes after the Browns got stiffed by just about every viable coaching candidate they tried to interview. Folks in Cleveland are not amused by any of this.

Any success the Browns have had in the post-merger era has inevitably come crashing down in memorable fashion – and by 'memorable,' I mean that Cleveland fans can only wish they could forget. There was Red Right 88 in 1981, and back-to-back collapses in AFC Championship Games against the Broncos now known simply as The Drive and The Fumble. Any time your failures are given a title, it isn't a good thing. On top of this, some of the game's brightest minds couldn't figure out how to win in Cleveland. Long before he was a genius, Bill Belichick was a flop as Cleveland's head coach. Ravens GM Ozzie Newsome, a lifelong Brown first as a player and then as a GM, suddenly was able to turn water into wine once the club relocated to Baltimore. Packers/Seahawks architect Mike Holmgren and the former front office staffers from the 49ers dynasty of the early 1990s all got to Cleveland and suddenly had no idea what they were doing. It's baffling and confounding at every turn.

infinite facepalm

The Indians lost two World Series in the 1990s, and in the process gave legitimacy to a couple of completely lame franchises – the-good-and-even-great-but-never-good-enough-and-usually-choking Atlanta Braves in 1995, and Wayne Huizenga's one-off band of mercenaries that were the Florida Marlins in 1997. The latter was particularly galling, since Jose "Joe Table" Mesa blew the save in the bottom of the 9th of Game 7, the Tribe being just three outs away from winning it. And look at this starting lineup from the 1995 team, a team that went 100-44 in the post-strike season:

C Tony Peña/Sandy Alomar Jr. (.300)
1B Paul Sorrento (25 HR in 2005)
2B Carlos Baerga (.314 that season)
SS Omar Vizquel (best defensive shortstop ever)
3B Jim Thome (612 career home runs)
LF Albert Belle (.317, 50 HR, MVP runner-up that year)
CF Kenny Lofton (.310 that year)
RF Manny Ramirez (.308, 31 HR that year)
DH Eddie Murray (Hall of Famer)

I mean, look at that team! That team is ridiculous.

But the Indians just happened to run into a pitching staff with Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine, and John Smoltz in the rotation – two of them in the HoF, the third likely to join them, and all of them rising to the occasion this time around on the game's biggest stage.

For once.

The Braves went to the playoffs 14 consecutive seasons and managed only one World Series title. Of course is had to come against Cleveland. Timing is everything. Cleveland always seems to bring out the best in their opponents, be it John Elway or Michael Jordan or a young Willie Mays. That 1954 Indians team done in by The Say-Hey Kid and swept by the Giants in the World Series won 111 games. They were one of the best teams in history and it still wasn't enough. The Indians' rise to prominence in the early 1950s coincided, of course, with arguably the greatest team in the history of the sport, the New York Yankees who won five consecutive World Series from 1949-1953.

And then there are the Cavs.

*shudder*

Ted Stepien did more to damage this franchise in three years of ownership than you would think possible. He made all sorts of boneheaded free agency signings and traded every first round pick the Cavaliers had in NBA drafts in the 1980s – including one which the Lakers turned into James Worthy, a key member of their championship teams throughout the decade. The NBA had to step in and award some supplemental picks to the Cavs after Stepien was gone, realizing that the franchise was doomed otherwise. (Hell, it probably was doomed, anyway, since it’s Cleveland we’re talking about here.) They also had to change the rules so that teams couldn’t trade 1st round picks in consecutive seasons. This is known as the “Stepien Rule.” Stepien also marvelously declared one day that the Cavaliers were relocating to Toronto and being renamed the Toronto Towers – much to the surprise of both the NBA and the people of Toronto. The Cavs were drawing about 3,900 fans a game when Stepien finally sold. A particular shrewd draft day in 1986 brought them first overall pick Brad Daugherty, Ron Harper and Mark Price (they also avoided the carnage of a draft that is still a black eye to the league), a core around which they built a playoff team. Unfortunately, the Cavs came to be Michael Jordan’s favourite puppet, whose strings he routinely pulled and twisted into knots. (Now would be a good time to point out that the guy Jordan usually tormented, Craig Ehlo, went to school here.)

But then the Cavs fans had something truly special to cheer about when, in one of those ever conveniently random twists of the NBA lottery, the dismal franchise landed the #1 pick in 2003 and landed local hero LeBron James, one of the greatest talents the game has ever seen, who would then pretty much single-handedly take the Cavs to the verge of an NBA championship in 2010.

And then he did this.

Now, I don’t think LeBron quite realized at the time what he jerk he made himself out to be with The Decision at the time. Taking his talents to South Beach made sense from a basketball standpoint – like every other player, LeBron wants to win NBA titles, and all of the pieces came together in Miami to do so. But in the process, he publicly dissed his hometown and made himself look completely selfish, selb-absorbed, and oblivious. He made a city that’s already been the butt of 1,000 jokes into even more of a laughingstock.

Suffice to say, the fortunes of the Cavs have dwindled since. The Cavs reached the NBA Finals in LeBron’s last year, but without King James around, all involved with the organization have been revealed to be impostors. The Cavs recently fired GM Chris Grant, as he has squandered all sorts of high draft picks and made a mess of things.

And there has always been this hopeful narrative that LeBron would decide, after winning however many championships he wins in Miami, to come home again and make amends for the way he humiliated the city. Given how disheveled this franchise is at the moment, the chances of that seem remote. But as Raymond Carver put it, "when all hope appears lost, the sanest thing to do is grasp at straws."

It wasn’t always this bad, of course. Cleveland’s glory days were in the late 1940s and into the 1950s, with the Browns winning three NFL championships and the Indians’ fair amount of success. Cleveland sports were ahead of the curve when it came to integration, quickly coming to benefit from access to a greater talent pool. (Not surprising this sort of thing happened in Cleveland – after all, the original Rock 'n' Roll concert was an integrated event.) The Indians signed the AL’s first black player, Larry Doby, in 1947. They didn’t hesitate to sign up Negro League legend Satchel Paige during the 1948 season to aid them on their way to a championship. The Browns, meanwhile, had some of the great black stars of the era, such as Marion Motley and Jim Brown – a fact which didn’t go unnoticed in places like Washington, where the Redskin Potatoes were still openly practicing discrimination and Washington Post columnist Shirley Povich used Cleveland's routine domination of the 'Skins to take the franchise to task:

“Jim Brown, born ineligible to play for the Redskins, integrated their end zone three times yesterday.”

"For 18 minutes the Redskins were enjoying equal rights with the Cleveland Browns yesterday, in the sense that there was no score in the contest. Then it suddenly became unequal in favor of the Browns, who brought along Jim Brown, their rugged colored fullback from Syracuse. From 25 yards out, Brown was served the ball by Milt Plum on a pitch-out and he integrated the Redskins' goal line with more than deliberate speed, perhaps exceeding the famous Supreme Court decree. Brown fled the 25 yards like a man in an uncommon hurry and the Redskins' goal line, at least, became interracial."

And the Browns were innovators on the field as well, as head coach Paul Brown brought a higher eye for strategy, preparation, and organization to the game than had ever been seen in the NFL. His teams were not only talented but extremely well-prepared. He set a standard which coaches have drawn on ever since. Brown, of course, got into a rift with owner Art Modell and eventually got fired in 1963, having won 7 league titles during his tenure. The Browns have won once since. I guess you can never have too much of a good thing in Cleveland.

Jeez, and I thought Seattle had it bad all these years.

Cleveland needs some love. These are great fans in Cleveland. Great fans. Browns fans who piled into the 'Dog Pound' were (in)famous for their rabid enthusiasm:

"Will the next person that sees ANYBODY throw anything onto this field, point 'em out...and get 'em out of here - you don't live in Cleveland, you live in Cincinnati!"
– Sam Wyche

The good people of Cleveland have endured half a century of misery, and live in a city which has struggled mightily through the recent recession. The Indians fell into disrepair after the great run in the mid-1990s, the Browns are terrible and the Cavaliers verge on hopelessness. The Indians hemorrhaged attendance so badly that they sit near the bottom of MLB now, their still lovely downtown ballpark looking sadly desolate most nights. Cleveland can be a tough sell to free agents, given that the teams suck and the weather can be pretty terrible. But a spirited push by the revamped Indians last September landed them a playoff spot. Given the bizarro offseason moves by Detroit, the Tribe might have some hope in the AL Central.

The LOSE is down with Cleveland, and not just because Cleveland is good for business. This town has truly been tormented. Give Cleveland some love.

There, I went soft. Don't get used to it.

Lose Tunes Track 05

Today's edition of Lose Tunes is brought to you by Martin's V.V.O. scotch. I would link to the distillery's website if the distillery actually still existed. It's been out of business for decades. The Official Liquor Distributor of IN PLAY LOSE found a case of this stuff in his basement – I'm serious, he did – and this usquebae is actually pretty nice. It does wonders to ease my screwed up neck and back, which I am going to have my chiropractor declare war on here in 30 minutes or so. Christ, it hurts. All I have to say to everyone reading this is DON'T GET OLD, because getting old sucks.

Lose Tunes are not all morose and miserable songs by any stretch. Sometimes you just need a good beat that you can dance to. And it's good that I am drinking scotch, because Track 05 on the Lose Tunes is from Scottish DJ Lex Blackmore, aka Blue Boy. This song vamps on samples from a 1969 song called Woman in a Ghetto by Marlena Shaw, the chorus being a line referring to black nannies raising white children during the era of American segregation. A fair amount of American music has been based on the idea of taking shitty subject matter and making it sound groovy nonetheless, the idea being that art and expression can trump one's troubles and defeat oppressors in their own small ways. I think this DJ track is in keeping with that spirit.

This song is funky as hell.

Fool’s Gold

“I had a mile of ice to think about what just happened, and now I have four more years to wait.”

This quote came from American skeleton rider John Daly, who was in line for a medal until his final run, when this rather basic error happened at the start and his medal chances were shot. I was looking for a quote which would best sum up the Winter Olympics from the perspective of IN PLAY LOSE. There is your winner right there.

That was a shocking mistake in a sledding sliding (apparently they are to be called sliders and not sledders) sport – all three of which, while being interesting for the speed and the sheer insanity of the competitors, are usually surprisingly absent of drama. When the Canadian women rallied in the 4th run of the bobsled to win, it was something that had not happened in at least a decade. The Canadians kept getting in the way of American success in the Olympics this year, either by being better than them or occasionally through being worse:

Darn you Canadians! We are supposed to be friends!

The best way to think of the Winter Olympics is to start with Sayre’s Law, and extrapolate from there. Sayre’s Law states, in essence, that so much is made by so few over so little. There may be little to fight over, but what there is worth fighting over wildly increases in magnitude. In the case of every single sport that’s been played out in Sochi over the past couple of weeks, the Winter Olympic Games are the only event that matters. Seriously, no one cares if you win your 4th consecutive World Luge Championship in Igls, Austria, or prevail in a World Cup speed skating event in Almaty, Kazakhstan. No one cares. And everyone in the competition knows that, of course. The Olympics is what athletes dream of winning and what they prepare for, and the result comes to define their career.

And for those of us on the sidelines, looking at the Winter Olympics in total and seeing bombast and largesse, it’s easy to forget that. Most Winter Olympians toil in obscurity and do it primarily because they love what they do so much. The Olympics offer a stage they never get otherwise. And this giant spectacle is composed of a great many small sports. Very small sports, in the grand scheme of things. The Sochi Olympics saw several 6- and 7-time Olympians in their 40s winning medals. Their dedication is quite impressive and commendable, but the fact is that 40-somethings winning medals in their 7th Olympics does speak, to some extent, to a lack of a deep talent pool. The sports are generally desperate for growth in all areas: competitors, spectators, opportunities, facilities and finances.

When so much gets made of so little, the one event that can legitimately be labeled as SO MUCH will often bring out the worst in people. Part of why acts of class and sportsmanship such as this and this are heralded whey they occur in the Olympics is that they do not happen nearly as often as they should. You usually see a lot of bad behaviour associated with the Olympics. Sochi was surprisingly absent of antics, however. There were only a handful of doping cases, most of which were minor infractions and one of which, involving Swedish hockey player Nicklas Backstrom, seemed a bit strange and definitely came at a particularly bad time. I also heard a lot less whining than is the norm. This was a fairly well-behaved Olympics, which is something of a disappointment. There was, however, some juicy snippets of infighting and the periodic bursts of incompetence to keep things interesting, and the conditions were often unideal, leading to some additional challenges for the competitors. (The alpine skiing courses all looked brutally hard to begin with, and the icky snow made it worse, but it’s not like skiers are unused to wild and weird weather swings.) And mercifully, there were none of the sorts of large political distractions which seemed possible, and even likely, at times during the run-up to the Games. Putin et. al pulled it off, in the end. But at what cost? Well, we will get to that in a bit ...

The best way to sum up these Olympics from a North American point of view is that the Americans like going down hills in the snow and the Canadians like going across ice. As has been the case since the Winter Olympics started ‘modernizing,’ the North Americans were the big beneficiaries of all of the so-called ‘extreme’ sports – crazy stuff you do on skis and snowboards that is stunning to watch done well and terrifying to watch done badly. There was probably more whining in the snowboard events than in any others, which was very unbecoming of a supposedly mellow group that likes to hang out and shred and preach camaraderie. Yes, the halfpipe sucked, but it sucked for everyone equally, and conditions for the entire snow portion of the games were a little problematic. (This is what happens when you try to have winter sports in what’s basically a Mediterranean climate.) And there was a wee bit too much schadenfreude going on when Shaun White failed to medal. He has set himself up for that, of course, as he has always been entirely driven and focused upon winning this event, and also promoting himself in process – notions which supposedly clash with the ‘ethos’ of snowboarding. But as soon as you set up a pinnacle like the Olympics, guys and gals are going to be singly-minded to win it. It was inevitable a Shaun White would come to exist. And yeah, White made something of a dick move by pulling out of the slopestyle at the last minute – in taking a spot on the team in an event his competitors say he had no intention of doing, he had cost a spot on the Olympic team for another athlete – but the resentment of White seemed based upon jealousy more than anything else, since he makes $15m a year and everyone else is scrambling for table scraps. Bottom line is the guy has done more to make the sport relevant than any other person, but killing your idols has always been somewhat necessary, I suppose.

I still think the ‘extremists’ are out of their minds, but damn, some of the stuff they do is just phenomenal. The slopestyle event became a favourite of mine almost immediately, because the tricks and the twists and the flips were so jawdroppingly awesome to watch. At first, I thought it was weird that the slopestyle events had no actual criteria for judging – the judges simply awarded a score from 1-100 based upon the impression they got from the competitor’s run. But in hindsight, there is something refreshing about a sport whose judges just say, “we make stuff up.” At least they are honest about it. Judged sports have always bothered me in that the results are so easily manipulated. From a layman’s perspective, I watch the athletes and see the scores and it is impossible to understand why they are being given the scores they are given. It seems somewhat superfluous to have judges in ski jumping, since it pretty much follows form that if you fly the farthest, you get the most style points from the judges. (And by the way, who gets the ‘babes’ or the ‘dudes’ more than the ski jumpers? I mean, seriously here, THESE PEOPLE ARE FLYING! I saw people doing this in person while I lived in Steamboat Springs, where they have a so-called ‘normal’ hill, as opposed to a ‘complete lunatic’ hill. It is AMAZING.)

And it wouldn’t be an Olympics without a figure skating judging controversy, of course. I don’t know that much about the sport, but most of the people I know who do know something about the sport seemed to think the Russians were getting a few too many breaks from the judges. Far too many American sports media members that I read sort of missed the point in making arguments that it is natural for the home team to get the breaks. For one, this is not some home-and-home in the NBA. It’s not like there is another Olympics next week in which the breaks and the calls will even out. Since the event happens so infrequently, you can understand why athletes feel more cheated than the norm. And secondly, as I mentioned in my previous Olympic blog, cheating in the Olympics involved a lot of bureaucractic maneuvering over the years, nations getting judges and officials and administrators in positions to affect outcomes, which they would then do at the expense of home nations. Eastern Bloc judges were going with their guy whether the games were in Moscow or Munich or Montréal, Sapporo or Squaw Valley or Sarajevo. (And vice versa, I should add, but the Western judges were often simply outnumbered, having failed to play this particular political game well.) I have heard the term SWR bandied about to explain some curious figure skating results in Sochi. That term didn’t come from nowhere. (I’ll let you figure out what it means.) I think it is too simplistic to look at a judging panel, see their nationalities and assume who is ‘voting’ for whom – people were quick to assume judges from Estonia and Slovakia were tabbing Russians, and I feel pretty comfortable in saying Russians aren’t on the Best Dressed lists in either of those two countries. But we’ve been conditioned, after watching years of bogus results in the sport, to immediately go looking for conspiracies. The French sport daily L'Equipe made some news by breaking a story early on that the Americans and Russians had some sort of secret deal in place to help each other’s nations at the judging podium at the expense of those darn Canadians, a notion that seems ludicrous given the long history of mistrust and animosity between the two nations in the Olympic arena (nevermind in far larger and more important arenas). If anything, it was most likely a planted story intended to try to knock some skaters off their games, a curious sort of tact playing upon the worst that the sport has to offer.

But in the case of figure skating, the politics are both the best and the worst the sport has to offer. We expect it to be corrupt and sleazy and shambolic by now. The drama is one of the most compelling acts within the sport. The ISU has attempted, since the judging scandal of Salt Lake City in 2002, to change the judging system by doing such things as making the judges votes a secret. How a sport supposedly becomes more transparent by becoming more opaque is beyond me, but this is the same governing body that allowed the wife of the Russian skating federation president to be a judge during the Sochi Olympics. (No, there is no potential for conflict of interest there or anything. None whatsoever.) They’ve attempted to create a scoring system in figure skating much like that in an equally politically motivated sport, gymnastics, which is based upon start values and rewarding skaters for elements. The problem with this is that the benefits of attempting a trick far outweigh the penalties for not doing it very well. Diving has degree of difficulty as a multiplier, but you still have to do the dive right. 0 x 3.2 is a whole lot of zero. Instead, figure skating has start values – basically, one routine is worth more than another before it even begins. It just seems weird to me that the field is not all beginning at the same starting line. (The only sport I know of where you start with a handicap is polo, but at least there the better team starts with the deficit and has to play catch up.) It seems to me that if you are going to try and do something on the ice, no matter the value, you had damn well better do it right. But in figure skating, it’s almost as if you’re getting points for falling down.

It certainly seemed that way watching the men skate, which produced more carnage than short track speed skating. Guys were falling down everywhere. Yuzuru Hanyu of Japan fell twice during his long programme, and this is the guy that won the event. And I have no doubt that what he was doing was damn near impossibly hard for 99.999999% of humanity, but guys winning gold medals in the Olympics shouldn’t be falling on their asses twice. That cheapens the sport, which is intended, in part, to be a presentation of both skill and grace. (The failure of Patrick Chan to capitalize on his Japanese rival making so many errors produced the greatest tweet of the Olympics from Canadian figure skater Joannie Rochette. For our English speaking audience: “He had the gold on a silver platter. He took the platter.”) The judging system creates a fundamental disconnect – no one knows what they are watching, so no one really knows who is actually winning. Hell, the athletes do not even understand the system. The sport would probably be better served with a scoring system that was genuinely transparent and made some sense, but I am not sure the governing body of the sport wants it that way, to be honest. Without all the controversy, there wouldn’t be nearly as much interest. Trust me, they’re well aware of that fact.

[EDIT: speaking of figure skating, a watchful reader has pointed me to a jewel of an online rant posted by American skater Jeremy Abbott in the wake of his Sochi performance, which was notable for his terrible, and somewhat frightening, fall in the short programme, which is something he has done before in big competitions. He does not much care for the ‘choker’ label he has been saddled with:

“I just want to put my middle finger in the air and say a big ‘F-you’ to everyone who has ever said that to me because they’ve never stood in my shoes and they’ve never had to do what I’ve had to do. Nobody has to stand center ice in front of a million people and put an entire career on the line for eight minutes of their life when they’ve been doing it for 20-some years. And if you think that that’s not hard, then you’re a damn idiot.”

Well, it is true that I have never stood in his shoes (or skates, for that matter). I have never had to face that pressure. I think what he attempted to do is incredibly hard. And I also think that quite a few of the other competitors put in the same time and efforts, faced the same pressures, and DID NOT wind up faceplanting repeatedly on the biggest stage. But I appreciate the defiance. If you are going to go down, you might as well do it swinging.]

I cannot say that I thought the Russians were getting that many breaks from the judges (some others sure thought so, and in more than one instance), but Russia experienced the usual home bounce on their way to capturing a total of 33 medals. The Russians had a terrible go of it in Vancouver in 2010, but they were certain to rebound. Along with some natural home field advantages came a few built-in ones – the Russian sledders sliders, for example, all trained on the course extensively, whereas their opponents were not nearly as familiar with it, and familiarity makes a big difference when flying at 85 mph down a sheet of ice that is trying to kill you. The Russians also used one of the time-tested methods of finding top talent so as to improve their national performance at the Olympics, one which dates all the way back to the city-state days in Ancient Greece: they went out and bought it. Among the 13 gold medals awarded in Sochi and accompanied by the Russian national anthem were three won by a Korean speed skater and two more in Alpine snowboarding won by Vic Wild, who hails from White Salmon, Washington.

In the case of Wild, it was a coming together of interesting circumstances. He married a Russian, and even though he was near the top of his game, it was a game no one at the U.S. Ski Federation cared about any more, as they eliminated his program – which, in hindsight, looks kind of dumb, now doesn’t it? (And this aptly-titled article does well to express what it’s like when you lose your aegis.) The lack of greater outside financing structures, combined with the hierarchical structure of the Olympics – basically one giant collection of sports federations – makes it such that the federations essentially control the purse strings, which means they have all the power to make or break the career of an athlete. And being this good at anything does not come cheaply. Wild really had no other choice if he wanted to continue to hone his craft than to seek another nation, and the Russians were more than happy to oblige. Wild will reportedly earn $250,000 from the Russian government for each of his gold medals, a windfall impossible to achieve in the sport in any other way. Choosing to pursue success in one of these sports is rarely rewarding, and often maddeningly disappointing. It is part of what makes the event so appealing to me, being someone who truly appreciates the efforts of the athletes and someone who also sympathizes with the failures (and the crushing consequences of failure.)

As for the Korean speed skater I mentioned above, Victor Ahn – formerly known as Ahn Hyun-Soo – he won three gold medals in Turin in 2006, got hurt, missed the 2010 games, got into a spat with the Korean Skating Union, was told he was no longer in their national team plans, and went out and actively offered his services to another country, including the U.S. (Ahn was also a part of this melee in Salt Lake City, which is probably the signature moment in the history of short track speed skating and also the greatest tortoise-and-hare moment in all of sports. Apparently Aussies have made gold medalist Steven Bradbury part of the language as a result of that, which is definitely a badge of honour.) Come 2014, Ahn turns up wearing Russian colours, as does a promising Ukrainian skater as well, and suddenly the nation becomes a short track speed skating power – although some of Ahn’s competitors at the European Championships in Dresden were not too happy to see him there:

The LOSE sees nothing wrong with this sort of recruitment, by the way, believing that sport mirrors life and that, in life, all people should have the freedom to move wherever they wish for whatever reason they wish. To the people in Korea, Ahn turning into a speed skating mercenary was more a condemnation of the Korean skating federation than it was of him. It just seemed a little odd that Ahn actually signed a contract to be a Russian, complete with an apartment in Moscow and a coaching job when he retires. Sort of a strange deal, but we live in strange times.

As for the angry Dutchman in the photo above, Sjinkie Knegt, he also medaled in Sochi in short track, and that is about the last angry picture of a Dutchman on skates you are going to see for years, because the Dutch dominated the ice the way the Dream Team opens a can of whoopass on Angola. The Dutch won 23 of the 36 medals doled out in speed skating on the long oval. It was a surprise but it probably shouldn’t be, given the rabid interest in the sport in the Netherlands (which is backed up by an infrastructure to match no other). The real surprise may be that full-fledged Dutch dominance of speed skating hadn’t happened sooner. The supposedly second-best team of speed skaters on the planet, meanwhile, were another story entirely. In fact, the U.S. speed skaters pretty much showed everything that is wrong about the Winter Olympics over the course of two weeks. So, of course, this was far more interesting to me than anything else going on in Sochi.

The U.S. won zero medals in a sport where it has won more than any other in Olympic history. Not only did they win zero medals, but they were never even close. The defending Olympic champions and World Record holders composing the American team all looked like they were skating through wet cement. What the hell was going on? And with the bad results, of course, comes a pipeline of sludge spewing forth and spilling everywhere, most of which centered on the racing suits they wore, which is a vital piece of equipment in the sport.

The Americans showed up in Sochi wearing shiny new suits from Under Armour, the American federation’s major corporate backer. Under Armour set forth with Lockheed in 2011 to create the sickest, slickest racing suit in history, which they presented to the American skating team six weeks before the Olympics, claiming they were state-of-the-art threads. The problem being, of course, that they had not tested the suits in any sort of competition, and this report from the Associated Press pretty much shows where everyone’s head was. It would appear that secrecy was far more important than anything else, fearing that some other nation (read: the Dutch) would get their hands on this secret technology and exploit it for themselves.

Read this graf from that AP story again:

For the men’s 1,000 on Wednesday, one U.S. skater — Haley wouldn’t say who — skated in a slightly different version of the new suit, essentially for testing purposes. There was no significant improvement in the time. Davis finished eighth, ending his bid to become the first male speedskater to win the same event three straight times.

Wait a minute. Why are you testing the suit at the Olympics? Don’t you think you should’ve done this, like, at one of those World Cup races the Americans kicked ass in all year, or maybe at some domestic dog-and-pony show of a competition you just throw together in Salt Lake City or Milwaukee ostensibly to give the suits a go? If Under Armour is going to put this much time and money into developing a suit, they could certainly put up a little more scratch for such an enterprise. You can test all you want on a mannequin in a wind tunnel, but mannequins don’t skate. Humans do! And humans have to like the feel and performance and respond positively. Why was this such a difficult concept to grasp? This sort of hubris seems akin to a Hollywood production company that thinks all along they are making a great film, instead of actually going about making one.

Indeed, some of the design ideas Under Armour came up with were apparently thought of, tried, and deemed to be bad ideas by Dutch designers in the past. The other athletes were baffled that the Americans would show up with new outfits that had no proven ability to help the skaters. And while blaming the racing suits may seem like a ready-made excuse for failure, there is probably something to it if an entire team of world-class skaters suddenly, collectively seems to forget how to skate.

U.S. head coach Ryan Shimabukuro then offered up this gem of a defense when asked about the racing suit controversy: “I’m not going to criticize them (Under Armour), even if I was allowed to. They’re a great partner. And it’d be stupid to criticize a company that has backed us completely.” Aah, so let me if I have this straight: the company who signs your paycheques apparently has carte blanche to fuck everything up for your skaters in the most importance races of their lives. OK, got it. When guys like this have your back, the worst is behind you.

Seriously, if you are an American speed skater, how do you not feel like you got sold out here? This is the biggest event of your life, and you are done in, in part, by a bunch of empty suits of the pinstripe variety who clearly didn’t have your best interests at heart? (Apparently, some of the skaters do feel that way.) The team quickly shifted to different racing suits, but by that point the distractions were immense and morale was non-existent. Good luck trying to compete at that point. And then came some finger pointing about training regimens – why is a team prepping on a rock-hard outdoor surface in the Italian Alps for a competition indoors at sea level, where the ice will be soft? – and other administrative bickering, and the whole thing was revealed to be a big clusterfuck.

Now, you can understand the need to partner up with big corporate dollars. Speed skating in the U.S. is a minor sport. The American success at it over the history of the Olympics has been somewhat remarkable, in fact, given that the sport has almost entirely been a rugged and determined individualistic pursuit with little financial support or windfall. (Especially considering the spawn of state sports systems American athletes found themselves facing for decades.) But clearly, some people at US Speedskating need to get their priorities straight. Then again, they promptly reupped with Under Armour, so one wonders if they really get it. Under Armour is now promising to underwrite US Speedskating for another 8 years, which is about how long it is likely to take to undo all the damage from this debacle. It is unfortunate, since it is a sport which has never been appreciated in this country to the extent it should. The rewards have not been in keeping with the results. It is a powerful and beautiful sport to see done well, even if the actual competitions seem a bit dull to me, as they are going 2-by-2 and just racing the clock instead of each other. Perhaps my Dutch relatives can explain to me the appeal from the live spectator standpoint. I assume there is beer involved. Actually, given that the Dutch are famous for throwing the best parties at the Olympics, I am certain there is beer involved, and probably a lot of vodka this year as well, since this was going on in Russia.

And nothing drove the Russians to drink more than their hockey team. The Russians had a big Olympics, but since they lost in hockey, they probably do not care very much. That really was the only medal that country, as a whole, cared about. But I looked at that roster full of a few too many KHLers and wondered what was going on. The shootout loss to the U.S. in the prelims was a great game and a memorable one, but my thought when I watched it was, “you know what? The U.S. is better than they are. They should win this game. They have better players and they play together better as a team. There is no way that Russian team is winning a gold.”

And the U.S., of course, wound up on the bitter end of defeats to those damn Canadians on both the men’s and women’s sides. The women’s gold medal game was excruciating, frustrating, fluky and somewhat incomprehensible. Blowing a 2-goal lead in the last 3½ minutes seems like it should be classified as a choke, but it did not really look or feel like a choke. And it did not surprise me too much that the U.S. men phoned it in during the bronze medal game after their 1-0 loss to the Canadians in the semis. For all intents and purposes, that semifinal with Canada was their gold medal game. After losing it, the players found no collective value in coming in third. And I can certainly understand that. I have played in consolation games at tournaments before. They suck. You lost the game that really mattered. You do not care. Nobody cares. Whomever cares the least in the consolation game winds up losing. Winning a medal of any sort mattered a lot more to the Finns than it did to the Americans, which I think is actually in keeping with the nature of the tournament. For the North American players, participating in the Olympics is a big deal, but it is an even bigger deal to the Europeans.

The NHL periodically threatens to pull its players out of the Winter Olympics, but the players always block it in the CBA. NHL owners do not like the Olympics, basically, because they do not make any money off of it. Whatever other reasons they offer up are bullshit:

• Other leagues don’t take two weeks off in the middle of season.
Well, actually, pretty much every soccer league other than the EPL does that in the dead of winter, and it has no ill effect. It’s not like they cancel the games – they just get shuffled around a bit.
• There’s the greater risk of injury.
Well, there is always the risk of injury every time you step on the ice, but the risk is no different whether you are playing at the Olympics in Sochi or playing some pre-season slugfest in Saskatoon. (Honestly, injury is probably more likely in the latter.) Furthermore, having two weeks off during the season likely does wonders for healing injuries to the rank and file players who aren’t playing in the Olympics.

Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. The Olympics should be free P.R. for the NHL, because any Olympic game involving two of the élite national teams in the sport showcases the game being played at the highest level, but the NHL screws it up, of course. The NHL has always had this curious bent to it, this strange notion that the needs of the marginal outweigh the needs of the skilled. The league ultimately doesn’t like the fact that so many new Olympic-made hockey fans then tune in for some mid-season drudgery between Columbus and Phoenix and are disappointed by the sorry product they see. The league wants to trot out some World Cup of Hockey concept again, so we can watch a guys who aren’t in game shape skating around in September. I hope the players continue to push back on this, because the Olympics really do matter to them. 1980 ultimately taught everyone who plays the game of hockey, on both sides of the Atlantic, just how magical and important the game can be. So long as memories of 1980 in Lake Placid and 2010 in Vancouver are still in players’ psyches, I suspect the NHL will be sending reps to Winter Olympics. I hope so, anyway. It would be a shame if that were discontinued. What would all of my Canadian friends fixate upon and obsess over at that point?

I kid, but I must also give props. The LOSE is a friend to all Canadians – I speak excellent Canadian, I have been to Tim Hortons more than once, I love poutine, and I have engaged in a uniquely British Columbia form of self-torture for 30+ years by permitting the Vancouver Canucks to get my hopes up. I must now give it up to my many good friends living in this continent’s cool upstairs apartment for their national team’s two victories in hockey in Sochi. Well done. But I have to say though, I cannot for the life of me understand their national fascination with curling. They say it is ‘chess on ice.’ I say it is shuffleboard on ice, and my interest in shuffleboard will only ever materialize if I am on board a cruise to the Caribbean. But being a dutiful correspondent, I made it a point to watch a little of every sport offered in the Winter Olympics. I tried to watch curling with an open mind and was completely baffled at what I was watching, as baffled as I have ever been watching any sport. Apparently this is bad if you are the yellow team:

 
The Americans were the yellows and they gave up a 7 here, which is really bad. I asked my assorted Canadian correspondents about this and they said it was the result of extremely bad curling. We apparently suck at curling in this country. I must be honest here, I am not that concerned about our lack of curling prowess.

Americans won 28 medals in Sochi, down from 37 in Vancouver, which really wasn’t that bad. It’s just that some of the name athletes people knew of – the Shaun Whites and the Shani Davises and the whole concept of the U.S. women’s figure skater – didn’t manage to win. Those names and/or concepts are somewhat familiar to people who watched four years earlier. We collectively do not know anything about skeletons and bobsleds and slopestyle skiers. The American media coverage necessarily gravitates towards that which is familiar, but every athlete reaches a point where they are past their prime. Given the spots in their respective careers, skiers Bode Miller and Julia Mancuso achieved quite a bit in winning medals, but the alpine ski team was perceived as somehow struggling early on, simply because the medals won in Sochi did not match the colours of medals won in Olympics past. The real stars of contemporary American skiing, Ted Ligety and Mikaela Shiffrin, sort of got pushed to the back burner, even though they both completely dominated their events. In the case of the 18-year-old Shiffrin, she will almost certainly be the #1 American Olympic poster child four years from now, but considering she came out and said her goal was to win five gold medals in Pyeongchang, she is not exactly shying away from the limelight.

And anyone who thinks American media is overly jingoistic and American-centric should get out of the bubble and watch some feeds from other nations. It is just as jingoistic and nationalistic, and sometimes even moreso. And people who complain about nationalistic coverage of the event miss the point. The connection a viewer has to an athlete from the same nation is far more likely to be based on being from the same place than it is from sharing interest or ability in the same sport. If we were all truly interested in biathlon as an event, we would have better biathletes in this country. Amazingly, we are not any good at that sport, given that two components of the sport – snow and guns – are things we have in abundance. Whenever you miss a shot in biathlon, you have to go over to a penalty course and essentially ski a lap of shame. It seems like you could liven up the event by having a gallery that boos and heckles the competitors when this occurs ... but then again, the competitors have guns are are not in a good mood at that point, so maybe that is not a good ideal after all ...

The LOSE was impressed with the Sochi games, in the end. The organizers somehow pulled it off. It does not change the fact, however, that I am staggered by the costs. $51,000,000,000 for all of that, a large amount of it almost certain ended up being poured down ratholes of corruption and inefficiency. Now, I can see some of the bigger picture issues at play here, some of which get lost from time to time. Putin wanted to present a showcase for the reimagined Russia, make the case that it is back as a global player. Putin also wanted to take this opportunity to transform Sochi into a major resort destination. And a good way to raise your mid-sized city profile is through sport. This has been shown to be successful in places like Indianapolis. Sochi already has a Formula 1 race planned for 2014, and the Olympic Stadium will be used during the 2018 World Cup, as well as serve as the sort of year-round football grounds and training facility the Russian national team has always desperately needed. All of those sorts of efforts will prove to be useful in the long run. Sochi does seem primed to reap some longer-term benefits.

That being said ... $51,000,000,000 for all of that? That figure is absolutely staggering. And while a good number of those sports facilities will be salvagable and serviceable from hereon, not all of them will be much use. (Speed skating ovals are particularly large white elephants – the buildings are cavernous, and the participants have very little long-term use for a facility such as the Sochi oval for training, as it is a low-altitude venue where the ice can easily turn into a slurpee.) And gussying up the city for a couple of weeks doesn’t make all of the other problems go away, of course. The Olympics are often rather naïvely viewed by activists as an opportunity to bring awareness to their particular issues and/or grievances, but once the Olympic flame is extinguished, the world turns it’s collective interests elsewhere. All which became familiar to us for a couple weeks disappears again into the woodworks.

And for a great number of the athletes, of course, a great deal of soul-searching goes on when the games are over. Is it worth it to carry on? Is it worth it to still be broke, to be perpetually injured, to be constantly at the whims of dumb politicos, to be spending too much time looking for funding and not enough time working on their game? One of the more interesting phenomena I noticed throughout the 1990s and into the 2000s was the number of leftover East German athletes who were still participating in the Olympics for a unified German team long after the country which had produced them had ceased to exist. A lot of them seemed to be continuing on (and doing so quite successfully) in part because they had no idea what else they would do. Sport was what they knew. They were, in a sense, bred to do it. I certainly admire their dedication, as I have never been dedicated enough to accomplish anything, but it also seemed to be tinged with an unintended hint of pathos. Winning the gold medal may be the crowning achievement, but what is ultimately the true value of spending a lifetime pursuing a sport and never achieving it, that dream having turned out to be made of fool’s gold? I suspect it is a stunningly empty feeling, one which would take quite a long time – maybe even a lifetime – to overcome.

I am not really sure, and it is easy not even to think about that kind of thing once the spectacle is over and the games go away and the bulk of the athletes disappear again into obscurity. But every time the Olympics come around, I am certainly going to watch. It is the most compelling, exciting, crushing, and occasionally tragic theatre piece we have ever invented on this planet. It’s irritating that a group as smug and selfish as the IOC knows this, of course, but for all the excess and the swindling and politics and bad behaviour and cronyism in the run-up to the games, those who participate in the games continue to save the IOC from themselves, and make the event impossible to ignore.

Lose Tunes Track 04

This edition of the Lose Tunes is brought to you by the bottle of Ridge 2006 Grenache that we had at the office on Friday afternoon. Yes, we drink wine in the office on Fridays and you do not. Sucks to be you.

Today we are featuring the best thing from Cincinnati since Ken Griffey Jr. and Skyline Chili. Away from the stage, the members of The National are some of the funniest, most engaging, most congenial musicians out there. But this song pretty much wrecked me the first time I heard it, both because of the innate beauty of the song and the greater, pervasive sense of sadness and loss. It is a crusher. And it would not crush so much if it were not such a beautiful song.