Quick Misses

Today’s Quick Misses installment pays tribute to Sean Barber, an International League umpire getting a chance to take a turn in the majors this first week of the season. The Lose knows that umpiring is a thankless task and that the men in blue generally do a excellent job. The Lose appreciates that MLB gives up-and-coming talent behind the plate a chance to work in the bigs and get a feel for it just as the players get. And the Lose also knows that umpires can have an off night. Sean Barber, however, had maybe the worst night I’ve seen behind the plate since Game 5 of the 1997 NLCS, when Eric Gregg had a strike zone wider than the state of Delaware. In the A’s 3-2 win over Seattle in 12 innings in Oakland on Thursday night, there were 363 pitches thrown, 136 of which were either balls in play or swinging strikes. Of the remaining 227 pitches thrown, Pitch F/X data reveals that Barber missed the call on anywhere from 32-50 of them (depending on which method you use to count them – yes, there are more than one). For a top calibre umpire at the game’s highest level, missing 14-22% of the calls is ABSOLUTELY TERRIBLE. And given that the home teams get the lion’s share of the breaks from the officials, it’s no surprise which team wasn’t particularly happy about how this went:

The Mariners had reason to gripe, since one particularly bad call in the bottom of the 5th let the A’s off the hook, after which a 2-out rally ensued and a run scored:

Everyone in the building knew that was Strike 3. The pitcher, the catcher, the hitter, the fans in the expensive seats. The poor guy was just lost back there in his MLB debut behind the plate. We’ve all had bad days on the job, of course, and most of us aren’t judged moment to moment in our workplaces by many thousands of people (or many hundreds, in the case of Oakland), but this was inexcusably bad. Many other sports have become considerably more difficult to officiate over time, as the players have gotten so much bigger and faster and the officials naturally struggle to keep up. But baseball hasn’t changed that much over the centuries. The fundamental mechanics of the game are still very much the same and still move at similar speeds as they did 100 years ago. MLB is trying to implement a replay system this year, which I am in favour of in principle although the system they ginned up is somewhat murky (more on that in a moment), but I’ve always felt the game would be best served if the umpires just CALLED A DAMN STRIKE A STRIKE. I hope for Sean Barber’s sake here that he learns from his mistakes and improves, because if this is the best and the brightest of the up and coming umpires, baseball’s in big trouble. His performance definitely deserves highlighting here as we chronicle What Was Weak This Weak in Quick Misses.

To the Buzzard Points!

• It took all of two days for one of what will likely be many worst-case scenarios turned up in the MLB replay experiment. The Giants thought they had picked off an Arizona Diamondbacks runner at 1st base on Tuesday night, the umpire ruled otherwise and Giants manager Bruce Bochy challenged the play. Replays proved inconclusive – it was one of those plays which was so close that that, had the original call gone the other way and Snakes manager Kirk Gibson been doing the challenging, it still would have been difficult to overturn. You could argue it either way and not be wrong. Only a handful of pitches later, however, there was a close play at the plate but the Snakes runner was clearly out and the home plate umpire blew the call – but since the Giants had used their challenge and lost it on the pick-off play at first, they couldn’t challenge the play. This is not how the system is supposed to work. The goal is to get the calls correct. But the system constructed in the offseason was rigged to suit the needs of a number of special interests – umpires, managers, and the like, all of whom are territorial and touchy and somewhat clannish in their behaviours – and likely will wind up serving no one particularly well. For example, it seems like a no-brainer to me that a scoring play and/or a play at the plate should be subjected to the same sort of overarching review as a home run – runs count the same no matter how they are scored, after all, and scoring plays are the most important plays in the game. The system is in flux and there is bound to be a slice of Swiss cheese’s worth of holes discovered in it as the season progresses, but I do think it will improve here over time. A large part of MLB’s movement into the high-tech world involves hand-holding the umpires, who don’t like their authority being so scrutinized. C’mon blue, it’s not personal. The more resources at your disposal to get the calls right, the more you will get right and the less scrutiny you’ll ultimately be subjected to.

• The Oakland A’s had a rainout Tuesday for the first time in something like 16 years. We should be in the dry season here in California, but the weather is all over the place this year. Last night, however, they had a dumbout. For some inexplicable reason, the grounds crew at the O.co Mausoleum Coliseum didn’t tarp the field after Thursday night’s game, and then it promptly rained overnight, and all morning, and into the afternoon, turning the field into something of a bog. This rain was listed in the Bay Area weather forecast as being a good possibility, mind you, but the folks in Oakland apparently weren’t paying attention. Fans were not amused, of course, and players from both sides were furious. This is hugely embarrassing for the A’s, of course, but everything about that venue is embarrassing. Now that the 49ers have moved down the peninsula and Candlestick will soon be mothballed, the O.co Coliseum is, without question, the worst facility in all of professional sports. (We will all get to have the misery that is the ’Stick inflicted upon one last time when the U.S. soccer team plays Azerbaijan there in May, and I have warned my friends that it will be a uniquely awful San Francisco experience.) The tug-of-war over a move of the A’s to San Jose carries on, as MLB moves at glacial speed on the issue. MLB is a multi-bazillion dollar business, and there is no excuse to let one of their franchises continue to wither in a dreadful facility where shit like this happens. (Literally shit like this. Blech.) Make a damn ruling already and move on. It seems clear to me that the Giants, the city of Oakland, and MLB don’t want that San Jose move to happen and are going to do whatever it takes to prevent it. Just say it already and stop stalling.

• The A’s, of course, have managed to parlay their woes into a certain amount of hipster indie cred, thanks to Moneyball and such, but I find that act has worn pretty thin by now. While I find it impressive that they do more with less when it comes to talent and resources, the fact is that they have ultimately accomplished not much of anything. They came a lot closer to winning an Oscar for Best Picture than they have come to winning a World Series. Take their same systematic and statistical approach and add in an actual budget, and you have the 3-time World Series winning Boston Red Sox. It is still a big money game. Quite frankly, I think the A’s success of the past few years has come in spite of their own ownership, which was hell-bent on stripping the payroll down and making them look like the ultimate charity case so as to force MLB to act on their San Jose plans. I do not find that quaint nor charming in the slightest, although I commend the players for playing through it and excelling.

• I am happy baseball is back. So much lose! 2,430 losses per season, minus a few games which will be rained out in places like Minnesota and at Wrigley Field which will not be made up. The Lose is inclined to think that the Washington Nationals will have a big season. The Nationals were sentenced by the baseball gods to 1 year of bad Karma after their idiotic decision in 2012 to shut down Stephen Strasburg late in the season with a team that was the best in baseball and clearly the favourite to win the World Series, but I would like to think the franchise has now learned from that enormous mistake. I have no idea who will win in the AL, so I will throw my support behind the Indians, since I think they are going to be pretty good and Cleveland can always use some love.

• I am pleased with the fast starts by my favourite sides – as of this writing, the Giants are 4-1, the Mariners 3-1 – but some caution must be exercised because the early opposition was substandard, at best. The Giants beat up on Arizona, who are 1-6 now, decimated with pitching injuries, and have the look of being truly awful. The Mariners mauled the California Los Angeles Angels of Calabasas Anaheim, who simply can’t pitch or catch the ball, and haven’t pitched or caught the ball in about three years. I do suspect the Giants and West Coast Evil will have a nice battle in the NL West this year, and my hope is that the Mariners at least stop embarrassing themselves. Modest goals.

• And, of course, a new baseball season means the clownshoes that are the Houston Astros are at it again. Never change, Astros. You are the gift that keeps on giving.

• A part of why I made a point to write about the Philadelphia 26ers when I did is because I really didn’t think the streak would reach 27, simply because the 26ers were playing Detroit in that 27th game, and the Pistons are involved in an even more contemptible sort of tanking here at the end of the season: that in which you tank to protect a draft pick. Detroit dumbly traded away their first round pick in the 2014 draft. The Pistons gave up their pick along with Ben Gordon to Charlotte in exchange for Corey Magette’s expiring contract back in 2012, but the pick is protected. The NBA allows teams to include provisions in trades where they don’t have to surrender a pick if it is high enough in the draft – in this case, if the pick lands in the Top 8. And once it became apparent that the Pistons season was a lost cause, they started going about doing everything they can to preserve that pick, losing 18 out of their last 23, because what incentive do they have otherwise? The Warriors did this exact same thing three years ago, going so far as to start five rookies in the hopes they would lose out and hold onto a pick they’d stupidly given up in a bad trade. Clearly, the solution to all your problems is to just be deliberately terrible rather than own up to your own mistakes. The NBA has implemented a number of these sorts of mechanisms over the years so as to somewhat insulate clubs from their own incompetence (the Amnesty Clause being another one), which is a notion I find problematic. It’s tough to see such a franchise like the Detroit Pistons completely disintegrate, as it was really a model franchise in its professionalism and the way it conducted itself – a fact which masqued some of the deficiencies when it comes to talent evaluation in the front office, where GM Joe Dumars has been hit-and-miss over the years. (Taking Darko Milicic over Carmelo Anthony? Really?) Dumars is almost certainly done in Detroit, as they will finish cleaning house and start all over again.

• I have no real interest in the Final Four, which takes place 3 hours from now. None of the teams appeal to me very much, though I should mention that the Kentucky-Wichita State game two weeks ago was a great game and far more worthy of being an NCAA final than what we are likely to see. (Which should also tell you who I am inclined to think will win out here over the weekend.) I do have to say that I possess a curious opinion about Kentucky coach John Calipari, a Cheshire Cat who managed to slip away from two programs – Massachusetts and Memphis – just before they were hammered by the NCAA. Both were forced to vacate trips to the Final Four, which occurred on Calipari’s watch, yet he somehow emerged unscathed. Now, it could argued that the NCAA and its rules are dumb. I will gladly make that argument. But the rules are the rules, whether you like them or not. College basketball coaches are sort of like congress, in that you know the institution is corrupt and contemptible yet think your local guy is swell. The fact is that a great number of college basketball coaches – not all, mind you – care pretty much only about themselves and could not give a shit about the supposed mission of the universities that they work for. It does not matter at all whether or not the kids actually, you know, go to class or anything – and now that the NBA has instituted the rules mandating kids go to college for a year, there is less incentive than ever for the likes of Calipari to care, since the NBA has essentially stated what we all should have stated years ago, which is that the whole notion of the collegiate student-athlete in this country is basically a joke. Calipari has simply gone about recruiting every one-and-done player he can find to come and spend a year at Kentucky and then get out of here and play in the pros. He no longer has to even make a pretense of caring about the rules, since the team turns over every year. As such, he has gone from seeming dishonest to being about the most honest guy in the whole profession, which is quite a turnaround.

• The Lose could not help but giggle at news of this hire.

• College sports in America is about to start getting more honest, I suspect. Earlier this week, an arbiter from the National Labor Relations Board in Chicago upheld the right of Northwestern University football players to unionize. It is a very, very narrow ruling and one which is going to be subject to a zillion appeals from the school and the NCAA, but the arbiter stated, in a nutshell, that the football team at Northwestern were not ‘student athletes’ so much as unpaid workers. As such, the players should be entitled to form a union and engage in various collective bargaining acts with the school – not just over possibly being paid, but also lengths of work weeks and insurance and all of that other stuff. This is only one isolated case of many pending against the NCAA, a sham of an organization which is eventually going to get its just desserts, but this one is potentially quite a game changer – although maybe not in the way some experts are thinking of. For example, this ruling applies only to a private institution in suburban Chicago, but not to a state institution like the University of Illinois in Champaign. OK, so, what happens if Northwestern players unionize and have to hammer out a deal with the school? Well, it may be a little bit awkward at first, but if the school and the players reach some sort of an agreement, the players at Northwestern will be much better off, overall, than they would be at another school – which, of course, a savvy coach would then use as a pretty good recruiting tool. It has been suggested many that universities fully embraced integration in the 1960s only when some powerhouses came to realize they were no longer going to be able to compete on the playing field unless they started recruiting black players. Texas Western (which is now UTEP) and Sam “Bam” Cunningham affected the most change, in the end, simply by playing the games better than all-white opponents could do. It may not have been the right reason for integration, and may have been entirely self-serving, but the right result was nevertheless achieved. It seems to me that if the big private institutions in the NCAA – Notre Dame, Duke, Northwestern, Stanford, USC and such – were forced to comply with orders to collectively bargain with their student athletes, those programs would eventually become extremely appealing to prospective athletes – even more than they already are – and other institutions could possibly be forced to offer the same sorts of benefits simply out of the need to compete. I could be wrong on this, but it is an intriguing notion to ponder. I have been waiting for years for someone to find the right needle which will pop the bloated balloon that is the NCAA. It is nothing if not an opportunistic entity however, and I am curious to see how it will go about attempting to change its spots, especially since I am of the opinion that, when the O’Bannon v. NCAA case finally sees the light of day, the NCAA is going to lose and lose big. I am not a lawyer, of course, nor do I play one on TV. The players at Northwestern are apparently going to have a secret ballot vote on April 25, and their coach, Pat Fitzgerald, has come out against this move for reasons which sound decidedly self-serving and lame. My hope is that they vote to do so and push the envelope.

• God, my soccer team sucks. At least the players had the class to make this gesture to the Yellow Army faithful after last weekend’s 0:3 shit show in Swansea. It is not looking good for The Good Guys. If they avoid relegation, it will be a damn miracle. On the Ball City! Oh, fuck it, just win a damn game already.

The 26ers

2013-2014 commemorative logo

“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.