The Lose of the Year

Geaux Aints!

IT’S BEEN an impressive year of lose. We saw the greatest choke in history in the NCAA tournament. We saw the Oklahoma City Blunder gag away a 3-1 lead to the Warriors, who laughed at them … until the Warriors frittered away a 3-1 lead to the Cavaliers, and the whole city of Cleveland laughed about it all summer … until the Indians blew a 3-1 lead in the World Series to the Cubs. And thanks to the NFL’s changing of the rules to make the conversion into a live play, teams in the NFL have now actually discovered two new ways to lose, beginning with the New Orleans Saints, pictured above, losing 25:23 to the Broncos after scoring the tying TD and having the PAT blocked and run back for two points by the defense, only to have their NFC South rivals, the Atlanta Falcons, take it a step further in a 29:28 loss to Kansas City. The Falcons scored a TD late in the game to go ahead 28:27, went for two as the math dictates in this situation, and then Matt Ryan threw an interception run 100 yards back by the Chefs for two points. In NFL jargon, what the Chefs did is now called the “Pick Two,” what the Broncos did is called the “Kick Two,” and what the Saints and Falcons did is called “Clownshoes.”

Kickers in football have generally had a bad go of things this year. Kicking is one aspect of the sport – of any sport – which had basically been perfected. Kickers were making 99% of their PATs in the NFL, which is incredible. Now that the NFL has moved the kick back 15 yards, and also made it a live play, it’s a tougher kick because of the distance, and also an easier kick to block because of the technique. And this change seems to have spooked the kickers, because bad kicking is all over the place this season. And football, as a whole, seems to have deteriorated in terms of quality of play, which is always most evident on special teams. Even something as basic as the kickoff isn’t working out too well:

Uh ... huh?

Never mind attempting the onside kick:

Well, it went 10 yards sideways, at least

OK, granted, those two gifs I just posted are actually college teams and not professional teams, but it’s pretty obvious that they’ve been learning from the pros:

All hail the Ribona!

If there were a position in sports, as a whole, that should garner consideration for The Lose Of The Year award, it would have to be the placekickers. And we here at In Play Lose make it a point to honor great achievements in failure here at the end of the year with our annual, highly coveted TLOTY award which celebrates incompetence, arrogance, disorganization, poor preparation, poor execution, and just being flat-out terrible.

In general, I’m willing to rule out teams that were absolutely cursed by bad luck on the injury front, even though injuries generally afflict bad teams far worse than good ones because bad ones don’t have the depth to combat it. For example, the New Orleans Pelicans may be an absolutely wretched organization, but they finished up last season with their entire starting lineup on the injured list, so you have to give them some leeway there, and you also have to do the same for the California Los Angels Angels of Seal Beach Anaheim. The fact that they lost basically the entire starting rotation to injury doesn’t change the fact that they signed Albert Pujols has the worst contract in all of sports, but it was physically impossible for them to compete with a MASH unit for a starting staff. The perpetually incompetent don’t particularly impress me, either, because it actually isn’t difficult to be terrible, although there are always some jaw-droopingly awful performances which I simply cannot ignore. The Phoenix Suns are the dumbest team in the NBA east of Sacramento, but that’s been true for five years now. I’m more interested in unique sorts of flame outs and preposterously bad ideas. And even with this most recent foible to add to their storied history of failure, Washington State is still ineligible for the TLOTY, as their number is retired.

To the nominees!

Philadelphia 76ers
A regular here at the TLOTYs, our reigning award winner finally did us all a favor by relieving Sam Hinkie of his tenure as GM and putting an end to “the process.” Hinkie’s legacy: the #1 pick in the draft which he greatly coveted coming to fruition – Ben Simmons, who promptly broke his foot and has been out all season – and a mismatched roster of bigs with no spacing and no shooting with not enough minutes to go around. (The odd man out is Nerlens Noel, who isn’t happy about it.) The good news is that the 76ers are six games better, at this point, than they were last season. The bad news is that they were 1-30 at this point last season, so six games better is 7-24, which is still terrible. But hey, at least Joel Embiid is fun to watch, so there’s that.

 

Hinkie apologists are the worst. Any hack can lose all the time. What’s amazing is that clowns like him actually get handed the keys, run the truck into the ditch, and then claim they know how to get out of it. The crux of “the process” is that your best chance to win is to get a star, your best chance to do that is draft one, and your best chance to draft one is at the top of the draft. And who knows, maybe Embiid will turn out to be that star and maybe Simmons will be that star as well, but you also need to put together a team in order to be successful. You need complimentary players and role players, you need playmakers and shooters and glue guys and so forth. Philly has none of those guys, because instead of actually developing those sorts of players, they’ve had a revolving door of roster churn during Hinkie’s Reign of Error. It’s up to the Colangelos to try and salvage this mess, which means making trades from positions of weakness, or maybe some random ping pong ball will save them in lottery again. In the meantime, the 76ers can look forward to 50 more games of suffering this season – only this time, instead of being deliberately awful, they’re actually trying, which just makes them dull.

Minnesota Timberwolves
The calendar year of 2016 has been something of an disaster for the Wolves, who went 17-32 after the New Year to close out last season, and are 10-22 this season going into their game on Friday night against the Milwaukee Bucks. But amid those seven months of generally bad play came the 5-month offseason, during which everyone became grossly, egregiously overenamored with the Wolves’ potential. Even with all of the losing last spring, when the Wolves were something of a rudderless ship adrift with soon-to-be ex-coach Sam Mitchell going through the motions on the sidelines, there were still signs that the pieces were coming together, including a very impressive road win against the 73-9 Golden State Warriors. Across the board, a great number of NBA pundits and podcasters and beat writers whose work I respect suggested that the Wolves wound take a quantum leap this season and vault into becoming a playoff team. And you can see why, since there is incredible talent there – Karl Anthony Towns, Andrew Wiggins, Zach LaVine. Three terrific players, all of them gifted athletes with diverse skill sets and all of whom are under 22 years of age. What’s not to like about that?

Well, the defense, for starters. A favorite NBA commentator of The Lose’s – Nate Duncan of the Dunc’d On podcast and the Twitter NBA show – pointed this out in rather exasperating detail in the midst of the Wolves’ latest loss, a 105:103 loss in Denver which featured one bad defensive play after another after another after another after another after another after another after another. With such an immature team, and such a horrible defense, it’s no surprise that the Wolves are absolutely terrible in close games and also blow a lot of leads when the game gets tough. Clearly, this calls for some solid leadership on the bench, right?

Oh, right, the Wolves went out and hired Tom Thibodeau in the offseason, who had taken a year off from coaching after his snippy and sour relationship with the front office in Chicago finally reached its breaking point. Thibs was the NBA Coach of the Year with the Bulls in 2011 and, prior to that, he served as an assistant and defensive mastermind for the NBA champion Boston Celtics in 2008. Take a great coach and pair him with great talent. What could possibly go wrong?

Well, kind of everything, actually.

First of all, about that talent. Let’s take those three guys I mentioned before out of the equation here for a moment. Who else is any good? Ricky Rubio can’t shoot, while Gorgui Dieng is there to apparently be tall and nothing else, since about all he does is get in Towns’ way on the offensive end and force the 7’0” Towns to have to guard guys out on the perimeter on the defensive end. They have no idea if Kris Dunn, their #1 pick this past summer, is actually a serviceable NBA point guard, and they have no real impact players or playmakers coming off the bench. Perhaps the talent level, on the whole, isn’t nearly as high in the Twin Cities as we first thought.

As for the coaching, well, Thibs has a pretty impressive résumé, to be sure, but it should be pointed out that Thibs also spent a lot of his coaching career working with vet-heavy clubs who already know their way around the ins and the outs of the NBA game and who simply needed that sort of disciplined, cerebral defensive scheme work that Thibs provides in order to excel as a team. It’s not always a sure thing that a coach like Thibs is going to jibe well with a young team that, above all else, needs some positivity and needs to generally play unburdened. The Wolves are anything but unburdened. To use a hockey term – appropriate given the hockey-mad state in which they play – the Wolves are all grabbing the stick too tightly. They need to relax and just play.

Clearly, the Wolves haven’t taken to his defensive teachings. Meanwhile, Thibs is still doing some of the annoying things he was doing back in Chicago. His offense isn’t particularly creative, he plays his starters too many minutes, and he refuses to ever go small in a league where everyone is now going small – which is how you wound up with Towns trying to guard Kevin Durant 30 feet from the basket in the Wolves’ most recent trip to the Bay Area, which was one of the dumbest defensive ideas I’ve ever seen. To be blunt, this is one of the most poorly coached teams in the NBA.

And this makes the deal they offered Thibs in the offseason look even stupider, one in which Thibs is both coach and the President of Basketball Operations. This coach-as-executive phenomenon is one of the newer, and dumber, ideas in the NBA. The problem with it, of course, is that it makes it incredibly difficult, and also incredibly costly, to get rid of the guy if he doesn’t turn out to be any good. Guys like Greg Popovich, who spend 20+ years coaching one team, are the exception and not the rule. Coaches are hired to be fired.

Not that they should be firing anyone, at this point. It’s too early to be panicking, of course, and the bottom half of the West is so bad – the LOL Kings are currently the 8-seed – that there is still time for the Wolves to get their shit together and even make a playoff run. The potential is there, but potential is just a fancy way of saying that you haven’t done jack shit.

Oklahoma City
They replayed the other night, on NBA TV, Game 6 of the Western Conference finals in which OKC has a 7-point lead with about 6:00 remaining and proceeds to completely choke, enabling the Golden State Warriors to steal Game 6 and go on to win the series. It was weird to watch this again, firstly because Kevin Durant now looks strange to me wearing that daffy OKC color scheme, but mostly because it’s astonishing to see how a really good basketball team, in the most important moment, forgets how to play basketball. 

I mean, you could make a similar case about the Dubs in the finals going ice cold the final 4:00 of Game 7 against the Cavs, but Cleveland didn’t really do much in that time span, either, before Kyrie Irving threw up a miracle prayer of a three that somehow went in. I have never looked at the NBA Finals as the Warriors losing it so much as Cleveland going out and winning it. 

With OKC, however, that was a choke job. Sure, Klay went out of his mind and made some of the most ridiculous shots I’ve ever seen to get the Warriors back in the game, and at the time, I made a point to glow and crow about what a remarkable performance it was by the Warriors to dig themselves out of a hole. But that was only possible thanks to OKC turning the ball over five times and “running” an offense consisting of throwing the ball to Kevin Durant, having the other four guys on the team run as far from him as possible, and letting KD go 1-on-5. Not even he is good enough to do that.

And with this reviewing of the game, I was trying in vain to somehow not to be gleeful, but there is this moment, towards the end of the game, when Steph Curry gets switched onto by Serge Ibaka, drives to his right and kisses a soft floater high off the glass to give the Warriors a 5-point lead where the whole of the Corrupt Energy Shortsellers Arena goes dead silent and you can actually hear, in that glorious silence, the sound of so many little OKC loving hearts breaking. It’s magnificent, and knowing it’s the last time OKC will ever truly be a relevant franchise makes it even more magnificent.

But pretty much from the moment David Stern decided to get in bed with that collection of robber barons and crooks and fuck over the city of Seattle, the OKC franchise has been at the center of how the league winds up conducting business – and it still is with the new CBA between the owners and the players which is striving to make it easier for small market clubs like the Blunder to keep their players by allowing them to offer considerably more money to their free agents than before, thus disincentivizing players from moving. (A fairly selfish and short-sighted move on the part of the players, in my opinion, but when your union is headed by superstars who feel like they’re being underpaid, you shouldn’t expect them to think of the long-term ramifications.) This is happening in direct response to the events this past summer, when Kevin Durant walked out the door on the Thunder and joined “a super team” at Golden State, to which the general response from people in and around OKC has been to whine like the bunch of babies that they are.

Like most “small markets,” OKC picks and chooses when to use that title. They want to pretend to be big players even though they’ve been dipping heavily into NBA revenue sharing from the moment they took to their new OKC home. They’ve been the franchise most heavily involved behind the scenes in lobbying against reforming the preposterous NBA lottery system which has led to the Sam Hinkies of the world blatantly tanking and writing off several seasons – a phenomenon still likely to occur with this new CBA, since now teams have a harder time signing free agents – because, you see, they’re a small market in OKC and they have a hard time vying for players … which is maybe why you shouldn’t have moved the franchise there in the first place! They bitched and they moaned when the last CBA was enacted and they had to pay Kevin Durant more, having jumped the gun and signed him to an extension the terms of which no longer applied, and they almost certainly bitched and moaned again this fall during the negotiations, having jumped the gun again and signed Russell Westbrook to an extension, which has resulted in essentially a Russell Westbrook Exception that will enable them to do that same thing again in the future when they wouldn’t have otherwise been able to do that – two cases which, on the whole, suggest that maybe the problem is an inability on the part of GM Sam Presti to anticipate the changing marketplace, but for some reason the NBA decided to hold this team’s hand once more. For a bunch of tough oil magnates, they sure are weak.

And it amused to me to no end to read stories about how great a move it was by Russell Westbrook to want to stick it out in OKC and sign a contract extension after Durant had left. Guess what? They gave him about 8.5 million reasons to do so. If someone says they’ll drive a dump truck over to your house and plop $8.5m in your driveway, why would you say no to that? And good on him for doing that. But to frame it as anything other than, first and foremost, a business decision is foolish. So stop it already with inventing this narrative about feuds and personality conflicts between KD and Russ and whatnot. KD took another job, like he’d earned the right to do under the terms of the CBA, which is something that most of us have the opportunity to do every day but NBA players do not. If Russ wants to sign on for three more years in OKC and avail himself of the opportunity to play Don Quixote and single-handedly joust the assortment of NBA windmills tilting his way, that’s fine too. Just stop it with this narrative of “aw, the poor Thunder got screwed.” They’ve stumbled their way into a relevance that lot never deserved, landed some superstars through having a few ping pong balls bounce their way, and then pissed that opportunity away all on their own. Tough shit. Deal with it.

And try running an offense while you are at it.

New York Jets

 

Uh, yeah ...

Buffalo Bills
This is what happens when The Peter Principle meets nepotism. Rex Ryan and his fraternal twin bother, Rob, are the sons of Buddy Ryan, the mastermind of the defense for arguably the greatest team in NFL history, the 1985 Chicago Bears. The two of them have been using that connection to worm their way into one NFL job after another over the years, most recently with the moribund Buffalo Bills, a franchise that hasn’t been relevant since they were losing four Super Bowls at the turn of the 1990s. They’ve been getting these gigs in spite of the fact that, well, they can’t coach.

After sneaking into the playoffs his first two years while with the Jets, Rex’s fortunes rather rapidly declined thereafter and he was fired after the Jets went 4-12 in 2014. Being stuck in the frozen tundra of western New York, the Bills are always looking for some way to get attention, and hiring Rex as a head coach certainly accomplishes that, as his presence is invariably bombastic and blustery and worth the odd sound bite here and there. Rob joined the staff this year after presiding over the worst defense in the NFL last season in New Orleans. Before that, he oversaw a not-very-good defense in Dallas, a not-very-good defense in Cleveland, and a a not-very-good defense in Oakland. The Bills stumbled out of the gate this season, losing their first two games to the Ravens and then the Jets (yeech), and have been basically stuck in neutral ever since, sitting 7-8 heading into the last week of the season – not terrible, mind you, but far less than what Rex was promising to deliver when he rolled into town.

Big-name coaches don’t win you games. Nothing either of these guys has ever done suggests they are some sort of tactical mastermind. There are plenty of bright coaching minds out there looking for a head job who deserve the opportunity ahead of retreads like the Ryans.

San Diego Chargers
I’ll leave it to The Official Sauerkraut Maker of In Play Lose to sum up the Chargers: “Everyone hates them, wants them to go away, no one wants to host them. The Spanos’ are awful human beings, they run an aggressively losey team that loves to snatch a loss out of the clutches of victory.”

It seemed appropriate that the Chargers would be the Browns’ only win this season – and go about losing by having one tying FG blocked and then missing another at the gun after mismanaging the clock and having to scamper the kicking team onto the field. That sums up the Bolts 2016 season – inept, disorganized, turning success into failure.

The Chargers have an option from the NFL on becoming the second team in L.A. – which seems more and more likely to happen, given that there is no support for a new facility in San Diego to replace the Roman ruins that are Qualcomm.

Los Angeles Rams
Of course, whatever fascination Angelinos may have had with pro football is rapidly being bludgeoned out of them by being subjected to the drudgery that are the Rams, who are 4-11 and possess the league’s worst offense. It took until Jeff Fisher reached the threshold of being the losingest coach in NFL history before he finally got the boot from Rams owner/snake oil salesman/douchebag Stan Kroenke. I always thought Fisher did a pretty good job with the Titans in Tennessee, where he had to do more with less, but his Rams teams were boring, undisciplined, and consisted of nothing but guys who run fast but don’t seem to do any football skill fundamentally well. 

It seems sort of appropriate that, given that the league offices and owners have been using the threat of a Los Angeles relocation for decades in order to bleed more public money from municipalities, when one of the owners did finally did get around to following through on that threat, the result turned out to be a dud. And I’m sure L.A. residents are just excited as all heck for another mediocre franchise like the Chargers to move into the city and clamor for attention. No one cared about the football teams in L.A. before, which is why they all moved in the first place. League execs have pointed out for years how good the TV ratings were for the NFL in L.A. after first the Rams, and then the Raiders, vacated the city. This is precisely because neither the Rams nor Raiders were around polluting the airwaves any longer with their mandatory broadcasts, which meant people in L.A. could actually watch a full NFL doubleheader slate every weekend featuring teams that actually knew what they were doing. Better games = better product = better ratings. To be successful in L.A. (and most places, for that matter), you either have to winners or be entertaining, and the Rams and Chargers, as presently constructed and operated, are neither of those things.

San Francisco 49ers
As seen by dozens:

The official attendance for the game referenced in that .gif file above, a loss to the Tampa Bay Bucs that was part of a club record 13-game losing streak, was listed at 71,000, which is about 50,000 more than who were actually present. But the 49ers can claim 71,000 showed because, when they relocated from The Stick to Levi’s Stadium, they sold PSLs for all 71,000 seats – licenses which 49er fans are now trying to dump as quickly as possible. After 50 years of enduring Candlestick, the organization has somehow contrived to make the football-going experience even worse.

Colin Kaepernick made himself a lightning rod for all sorts of dimwitted commentary thanks to his choosing to protest the national anthem being played by taking a knee. It’s about the only thing of any note that’s happened to this franchise all season and, in fact, Kaepernick is still probably the team’s best player and certainly the most notable. Don’t believe me? Tell me who the leading rusher is? How about the leading receiver? The leading tackler? In the Jim Harbaugh days, you could name those things, because the 49ers had All-Pro players filling those roles. They had talent at every position, they had depth, they had an identity as a team and also a creative approach to winning games when needed (remember, Harbaugh benched Alex Smith in favor of Kaepernick late in a season, saying it was his best chance to win playoff games, and he was proved correct).

Now? They have Chip Kelley, who was a bad coach with a good collection of players in Philadelphia and simply looks worse now; they have a perpetual power struggle behind the scenes between factionalized owners; they have Trent Baalke as a GM, who won the power struggle with Harbaugh and hasn’t made a single good personnel decision since; they have an empty stadium and now they have the city of Santa Clara, who spent $1.5 billion on Levi’s Stadium, asking for the 49ers to turn in their receipts and prove they’re keeping up their end of the bargain on the new building.

And remember, this team was in the Super Bowl just four seasons ago! Just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse, they get worse. The 49ers have mustered only a Rams and 13 record this season, the team is so bereft of talent and ideas that it’s going to take years to rebuild, and in the meantime, they’ve fostered ill will with the local press, the fans, the city of Santa Clara and just about everyone else. It’s appropriate the 49ers play in a place called Levi’s Stadium, because this franchise is absolute pants.

This fake punt earns BYU the TLOTY award for dumbest designed play of the year

Rutgers
The worst major college athletic program picked up this fall right where it had left off. The Scarlet Knights put in arguably the worst single performance by a college football team in years when it managed to get blasted 78:0 by Michigan at home. The stats are appalling: Rutgers has 39 yards of total offense in the game, while Michigan had 600, and the Rutgers didn’t pick up a first down until midway through the 4th Quarter. The biggest winners in this game were all of the hungry people in Ann Arbor who went in to the Ruth’s Chris Ann Arbor to cash in on the game-related promotion. And there was no doubt who the biggest losers were.

As if you needed any further proof of how inept Rutgers was in 2016, they also got beat 58:0 by Ohio State, 49:0 by Michigan State, and 39:0 by Penn State as they staggered to a 2-10 record and a last-place finish in the Big Ten. The Big Ten added Rutgers as part of an expansion plan intended to attract television viewers in the greater New York area, but it’s pretty hard to attract viewers when the regional angle on those broadcasts is a program that is six kinds of crap.

Wake Forest
The Demon Deacons earn a shout out here for a unique sort of scandal. Far and away the most amusing scandal of the year has been recently uncovered and pertains to the Wake Forest football team, whose color commentator on their radio broadcasts – Tommy Elrod, who was a former defensive coordinator that had been “reassigned” to the broadcasts after a head coaching change – had apparently been clandestinely giving away some of the Demon Deacons’ offensive plays to their opposition. The Demon Deacons figured something was up after a game in Louisville, when they found copies of their playbook strewn about the confines of Bad Pizza Stadium.

This nutso radio announcer apparently offered the same information to the coaching staff at Army before their game, who rejected it and said something along the lines of, “we’re West Point and we don’t cheat.” It’s appropriate that it was Louisville who got caught partaking in espionage, since this university is that bastion of ethics and virtue which employs sleazbags like Bobby Petrino and Rick Pitino, sanctioned it’s own basketball program for allegations that recruiting trips included strippers and prostitutes, and somehow feels justified in paying a baseball coach $1 million a year while offering up only about a third as many scholarships as there players to fill out a team. Louisville is precisely the sort of American university which has gone about using athletics to raise its profile while selling its soul in the process. Wake, on the other hand, fell prey to an ex-employee who had an axe to grind, and wound up looking pretty stupid. It didn’t wind up hurting the Deacs too much, as they reached a bowl game for the first team since head coach Jim Grobe left the program in 2013. And speaking of Jim Grobe …

Baylor
I’m not exactly sure why Grobe was willing to sully his reputation – which had generally been considered quite good – by agreeing to be the interim coach for a season at Baylor, which is the ultimate college football cesspool. Grobe hastily took the job when head coach Art Briles was fired amid the endless, constant, and continuously damning allegations at the school: allegations of a culture in which football players repeatedly committed sexual assaults against female Baylor students and the administrators of the football program, the athletics department and, indeed, the entire administration turned and looked the other way.

I talk about fun and games on this blog, but fun and games have their place. At Baylor, that place was at the center of the school’s capital campaigns to raise it’s profile from being a pleasant, backwater baptist university to being a major institution. It was win-at-all-costs at Baylor, morals be damned.

This is disgusting. This is utterly reprehensible. Baylor so far has gotten off easy in all of this. OK, so Briles lost his job, which he should have, and Ken Starr got ousted from the presidency of the university, which he should have been, and the AD got canned as well, but that’s just scratching the surface here. In the aftermath of this scandal, which came to light in the summer, every single person involved in this program should have been fired, and every single person responsible for permitting this sort of rape culture to fester should have been fired. Every single one of them.

“Oh no! You can’t do that! We won’t be able to get a staff together for football season!” 

Exactly. Football season can fuck off. Frankly, they should have had to cancel it and suffer the financial blowback from doing so. I hope everyone drowns in the lawsuits. Baylor needs to get its priorities straight, priorities which include something as basic as ensuring that young people who attend that school do so in a safe environment.

And to all of you Baylor boosters and alumni who still want to support Art Briles, what the hell is wrong with you? I know he made you feel good on Saturday afternoon because you could finally beat Texas and Oklahoma, but big fucking deal. Stop pretending you’re still in college.

And how about everyone involved at that school stop going around in the public eye and touting what good Christian values you have while you’re at it, since it’s been pretty apparent with the way you’ve let the football program run rampant at the expense of everything else that no one involved in that supposed institution of higher Christian learning has a soul.

Arizona Diamondbacks
The Snakes set out last winter to win the offseason. They’re a generally irrelevant franchise which hasn’t done of anything of note since winning the World Series in 2001. About all they’ve been known for of late, in fact, was being the single-most annoying team in all of baseball to watch, thanks to a strategy filled with throws to first, step offs and mound conferences intended to slow to a crawl, and thanks to an unchecked culture of machismo instituted by former skipper Kirk Gibson which meant that every single perceived slight on the diamond resulted in a bean brawl.

But the Snakes wanted to make a splash in 2016, beginning with their flashy new uniforms. They were determined to become relevant again in the NL West and compete with the Giants and the Dodgers, so they went out and signed 30-something starting pitcher Zack Grienke to a $206 million contract, the numbers of which were so absurd that not even the Dodgers would match it, and then they made quite possibly the worst trade in baseball in the past two decades which didn’t involve the Seattle Mariners, giving up a haul that included former #1 overall pick Dansby Swanson to the Atlanta Braves in exchange for Shelby Miller. Miller has been a solid mid-rotation starter in his career, but nothing he’s ever done would indicate that he’s worth a king’s ransom.

And this ended predictably, as the Diamondbacks were not very good. Grienke toiled through an uninteresting, injury-laden season while Miller was one of the worst starting pitchers in all of baseball. Investing in power pitching didn’t really help a whole lot in what is, on balance, one of the worst pitcher’s parks in baseball. You don’t need good pitching to win in Arizona, you need superstar pitching. You need some of the best pitching the game has ever seen. You need Hall of Fame-caliber pitching like Randy Johnson and Mr. Ketchup on the Sock. You don’t need Shelby Miller and, for heaven’s sake, you don’t need to be giving up a mint to get him. Arizona sold off most of it’s best assets to get him, and now also lack payroll flexibility to retool since they’ve attached the anchor that is Grienke’s contract to its budget. Throw in a spate of injuries all over the starting lineup, most notably in the outfield, and 2016 was nothing short of an unmitigated disaster in Arizona.

It’s amazing how many teams that set out to win the offseason wind up looking like buffoons. Arizona went out at the start of this offseason and hired a new GM, Mike Hazen, who is one of the guys that went about building up the impressive young talent base in Boston. The Snakes do have a history of drafting pretty well over the years, so all is not lost. And for god’s sake, please get rid of those uniforms already.

San Diego Padres
Word on the street is that the San Diego Padres are going to be tanking in 2017. Which begs the question: how is this different than any other season?

The Padres are still trying to dig out from ‘winning the offseason’ in 2015, and Padres GM A.J. Preller continues to confound all of us by still having a job after he got fleeced left and right in 2015 and then got suspended after failing to provide medical information about players to other teams involved in trade talks. Highlights form the Padres free fall to the bottom of the NL West in 2016 also included the owner ripping the team on talk radio and the Padres losing the single-most absurd baseball game of the season, blowing a 10-run lead against the Mariners including giving up 9 runs in an inning after there were two outs. The Padres have now gone about cost-cutting and shedding vets, which means they’re likely to be even more dreadful in 2017, with the lovely Dog Food Park continuing to serve as the ideal baseball getaway for opposing fans. Now that the Chargers seem set to leave, the Padres will rule the roost in San Diego and likely have the market all to themselves – a market so disinterested that the club’s only really good draws at the gate involve the Giants and the Dodgers coming to town and filling the stands with their own faithful. This can’t get much worse, can it? I probably shouldn’t ask.

And now for a special compare and contrast segment of this Lose post. Which is worse?

England v. U.S.A., Politics Edition
The Lose doesn’t normally talk about politics, even though politics may be the ultimate of bloodsports. It’s hard to ignore in 2016, however, given the two votes which took place, one on either side of the pond, which were eerily similar. In both cases, a charismatic and orangey con artist from New York managed to persuade just enough people to buy into his vision of a nation which can’t exist, probably won’t exist, and probably never did exist in the first place.

Polling data from Britain shows that the Leave vote skewed older, meaning the older folk basically screwed over the young’uns and fanciful notions of Britain’s glorious place in World Orders of old were still dancing through people’s heads. The anti-immigrant tone of the campaign, meanwhile, struck me as misguided, seeing as how immigrants do two types of jobs in Britain: the kind of job that’s beneath you and you don’t want to do, and the kinds of jobs so far over your head that you can’t possibly get. On this side of the pond, meanwhile, I was intrigued by several political studies which suggested that, for a good number of people residing on the political right of the spectrum, the 1950s is viewed as a “great” time in America, possibly the “greatest.” In attempting to turn back the clock and party like it’s 1959, I suspect we’ve more likely landed somewhere in the 1960s, meaning we’ll have to do things like fight the whole civil rights movement all over again.

Now, the Brits seemed to think that they could have their cake and eat it too, dropping out of the E.U. but still having a right to the sorts of economic benefits that come from being a member. Unsurprisingly, the rest of the continent is showing them two fingers and telling them to get the fuck out and fuck right off while they are at it. Meanwhile, over here, I have no idea what’s going to happen, since I have no idea what his policies are going to be. The most apt comparison I can find historically is Berlusconi in Italy, who wasn’t necessarily abjectly terrible in office, but the biggest problem with Berlusconi was that he spent far too much of his time as the Italian prime minister going about attempting to write and rewrite laws which would enrich and benefit himself personally and also shield himself from all of the assortment of pending legal issues. People have asked me if I’m worried about Trump having his finger on the button, and I’ve replied by saying I’m more worried about him constantly having his hand in the cookie jar.

We live in strange times. I don’t really know what to make of any of this. As an absurdist my nature, I suspect it’s going to be a mess, but I’m not sure to what extent. As someone who has always been a keen observer of elections simply from a game theory and policy perspective, these two elections really boggled my mind.

Now, you can probably guess from my place of residence what my political perspective is. (According to election returns released by the California Secretary of State’s office, Trump got 13 votes in my precinct.) Having said that, I should also point out that I’ve voted for Republican elected officials in the past, and that I understand, first and foremost, that politics is elections + governance, and I happen to value the latter far more. And one of the things I’ve already come to terms with is the fact that there are people who I know, and know well, and consider to be friends and colleagues, who voted for Trump – and unlike some of my Democratic friends, who I had to talk off ledges, these people do not consider Trump winning just enough votes in just enough places to become the president to be the worst thing ever. I do suspect, however, that there is a very good possibility that they will wind up being disappointed by him, just as there were quite a few Democrats out there who were disappointed in their party’s nominee and chose not to vote at all. Clearly, there seems to be a sense of disconnect and discontent prevalent in the electorate of the U.S., of Britain, and of quite a few other places in the world. Politics is a drag and authoritarianism has suddenly become hip and trendy. One of the reasons why the far right does so well in elections is because they’re the only ones bringing a whole lot of energy to the cause.

And I really wasn’t going to say all of what follows in this next paragraph, but I can’t hold it in any longer, and it’s going to be completely opinionated and full of perceptions and not sourced or fact-checked or anything so fucking deal with it and we regret the errors: can the largest political party in America, the one I happen to vote for most of the time, actually start acting like it? Jesus fucking christ. I’m now going to piss off a lot of people and I don’t give a shit. The Democratic Party fucking gagged. Goddamnit, you idiots. You just lost a presidential election to a guy who checked all the boxes of everything you shouldn’t ever do if you want to be elected president and still got elected. Hillary Clinton was a lousy candidate. Sorry, she was. Go back to 2008, an election the Democrats couldn’t have lost if they’d taken a cheese sandwich and stuck a pin in it with a donkey on it and called it a nominee. Bush was SO BAD that members of his own party were begging him not to show up and campaign for them. And what happened in 2008? Hillary – the anointed one, the chosen one ever since Bill had left office and she’d become a senator – couldn’t beat a guy in the primary who hadn’t even been in the Senate for two years. Just think about that. She couldn’t win the presidency in the most slam dunk, no-brainer of elections, so how was she going to do it now? And sure, there were lots of trumped up charges and accusations and the like over 24 years she was in the public eye, and a lot of false news and fixed noise and everything else, but she wound up underperforming in every single significant segment of the Democratic party’s electorate. You can argue that the reasons people didn’t like her were bogus or not or whatnot, but the fact of the matter is that they didn’t, and not just on the other side of the aisle, either. And it doesn’t really matter to me how qualified she was for the office. For starters, being qualified doesn’t mean you’re going to be any good. (See Richard Nixon.) Secondly, you have to get the job in order to be good at it. And since I’m on a rant here and I’m letting it out, how fucking stupid was that campaign? How did you not know you might lose Michigan and Wisconsin? It’s your campaign’s goddamn job to know that! That no one in Brooklyn ever stopped patting themselves on the back long enough to actually take the goddamn temperature in those states and figure this shit out and try to keep it from happening is so goddamn arrogant as to leave me incredulous.

I feel better now. Well no, not really. Wait for it … yeah, now I’m better. Do I sound a little annoyed? Just remember that before he was making the Democrats look like idiots in the fall by winning the presidency, Trump was making Republicans look like idiots in the spring and the summer by getting the nomination in the first place. Everyone wound up looking like a fool, and because of it, everyone probably wound up getting the president they deserved.

England v. U.S.A., Soccer Edition
Quick point here: I labelled the previous section “England v. U.S.A.” while being fully aware that Brexit was a vote across all of Britain – but that the English were the ones who most fervently drove the Leave vote. I am labeling this next bit “England v. U.S.A.” while being fully aware that among the things I’m going to mention are the actions of a Welsh club, since that club adheres to the rules of Premiere League and the English FA. I used to live in Great Britain and I understand the divides, so don’t you get all nitpicky with me. And something else that England and the U.S. have in common at the moment, and another realm where you can see some parallels, is that both countries are bad at soccer. At least when it comes to the men, anyway. Both nation’s women’s teams? Kinda badass. But the men? Trash. Absolute trash, or shall we be all British about it and say rubbish instead?

I am not much of a betting man (as I have previously explained this year) but if I were, I would have been quite a bit richer in June, because had I been at a Las Vegas casino in June with a chance to wager on the England v. Iceland Quarter Final at Euro 2016, I would’ve bet on Iceland. And I’d be richer because Iceland won 2:1 in Nice in a match that was hailed in some camps and corners as one of the game’s greatest upsets. Hmmm, let’s do the math here … Iceland were 13/2 to win going into this game, so if I’d plunked down $100 at +650, minus the vig, of course, that would be … oh god, my Washington State math skills are failing me here … something like $638 in my pocket, which would’ve been well spent at that new José Andrés restaurant that looked so enticing the last time I was there. And I would’ve been quite confident about that wager, much more so than I would’ve been wagering on the Italy-Spain game which also went off that morning (although had I done so, I’d be even richer, since I would have tapped the Italians to upset that, old, slow, disinterested team dressed like a spilled plate of nachos.) I would have been confident in an Iceland win for a very, very simple reason: Iceland are a better team than England.

Indeed, what was most surprising about this result to me is that it wasn’t a surprise at all. What I find fascinating, in fact, is the reaction in the overwhelmingly UK-centric world of football media who want to speak to what a shocking upset this is. Not long after England began exporting the game of football all over the world, it also began exporting the way it talks about the game of football. English media and pundits dominate the conversation worldwide, particularly here in the U.S., where networks have imported a slough of English commentators to narrate the game for us, and to teach it to us uneducated Americans. The whole of English soccer is full of itself, and has been full of itself for decades, despite the fact that England haven’t won anything for 50 years, and have done little more since 1966 than master the art of losing in the most disparaging and heartbreaking of manners.

And we here in America have been importing bad English ideas about soccer – how to play it, how to watch it, and how to talk about it – for years now, and that includes importing washed-up, overrated has-beens like Frank Lampard and Steven Gerrard and giving them millions to take up space in MLS and be utterly useless. We’ve started to return the favor, however, as this year Bob Bradley became the first American manager in the EPL – and lasted all of 11 games with Swansea City before being rather unceremoniously dumped. And this has led to an assortment of dimwitted British footballing journalists writing up this sort of dumb drivel, talking about how an American guy who managed in probably the most difficult situation imaginable – the Egyptians during a coup – is somehow unqualified to manage in the EPL but Ryan Giggs is, even though the only think Giggs has done as an assistant at Man U is stand there and look clueless and watch United go about pouring $600 million down a rathole. But England is a place where don’t have to actually have any good ideas about how to play the sport in order to get a managerial position, you just have to look like you do and probably also have the words Manchester United somewhere on your résumé to somehow be considered legit, even if all you did was steal a piece of the company stationery.

The game is certainly in a strange place here in the U.S., what with Klinsy finally getting canned in a move that was several years in the making, what with World Cup qualifying now by no means assured, and what with MLS still searching for an identity after two decades in the wilderness. MLS seems to have started finally figuring out that spending money on washed up dopes like Gerrard and Lampard isn’t a good idea, and that it’s a much better idea to do what this year’s two finalists – Toronto and Seattle – went out and did in signing Sebastian Giovinco and Nicolás Lodeiro, respectively: younger players, in the prime of their career, with great talent and great vision who, for a number of reasons, can’t get a gig at a bigger club elsewhere. These types of guys are all over the place, particularly in South America, which is where the league should strive to make more inroads, instead of continuing to fawn over EPL retreads who aren’t any good any more, and probably weren’t all that good to begin with.

But England has it much worse than us on the football pitch at the moment, because Americans at least have modest expectations when it comes to soccer and aren’t a bunch of delusional weirdos about it. And at the moment, English football is trash. Well, the EPL has some of the greatest players in the world – the best Brazilians and Argentines and Chileans and Spaniards and French and Belgians and Germans, but few actual English players who are worth a damn. Assemble the “great young talent” that England has into a national side and they go about doing things like stumbling about the Euros and then getting played off the pitch by Iceland in a game which should have surprised absolutely nobody. About the only thing England are good at involving football seems to involve gaming the system just well enough to keep getting high seeds through lucking into easy qualifying groups, which enable them to win lots of games against bad European teams (of which there are a lot) and make themselves look better than they really are.

Coaching England is a poison chalice, a high-paying gig with a fan base demanding success but without any actual good players to make that success possible. They hired Sam Allardyce for the job after this Iceland debacle, mostly because no one worth their salt wanted the job, and his tenure lasted all of one game before he got fired after spouting off to undercover reporters masquerading as agents about the ways in which you go about circumventing rules for signing underage players. The overwhelmed, deer-in-the-headlights Gareth Southgate has now been promoted from coaching the U-21s to the top national job – once again owing to the fact that no one would touch this job with a 10’ pole at the moment.

England wins this head-to-head, although the Americans made a fine effort by losing to Guatemala, getting embarrassed by Costa Rica, and yielding a goal in the Copa América semifinal to Argentina in about 3 minutes after fielding an ultra defensive lineup utterly incapable of even getting off a shot, much less scoring. But England wins, and by “wins” I mean “loses.”

OK, this exercise was fun. Now let’s never speak of any of it again. Neither of you two win any awards. Now back to the TLOTYs …

The Rio Olympics

Boy oh boy, where do we begin?

First of all, let me state that I am pro-Brazil. One of the most admirable traits of the Seleção is that, through their brilliance and imagination and success on the pitch, they have become the people’s champion, the natural choice for neutrals. That footballing admiration carries over to the rest of the nation as well. I want this great nation to succeed.

But it’s also an incredibly complicated place, and Rio is one of the most complicated cities on earth. Showing off Rio to the rest of the world through the hosting of the 2016 Olympics seemed like quite an interesting idea when the games were first awarded. And the Olympics ultimately tend to take on the qualities of the host city, be it the showy top-down glossiness of Beijing or the quirky, let’s-pull-together-and-ignore-the-shit-weather of London. And the Rio games took on a unique characteristic as well, but not the one many people were thinking about at the start.

Because we’d all heard the stories in the run-up to the games about construction delays and cost overruns, about trying to hold boating events in a toxic lagoon, about heists and hold-ups and high crime rates and the threat of Zika virus and what not. And in the end, the Olympics went off about as well as you could have hoped for. Rio did OK as a host city. But what was the most striking feature of these games to me, one which spoke to the true nature of it, was the tens of thousands of empty seats.

Oh, sure, some of the venues were full along the way. Anything involving Brazilians drew a crowd, of course. The Botafogo football grounds serving as the track venue were full any time Usain Bolt took the track, of course, and also the U.S. swimmers and gymnasts and men’s basketball teams had full houses behind them. But those are all international stars we’re talking about here – the key being the word “international,” meaning that they were attractive both to the locals and, more importantly, to guests from abroad. Watch any session of track and field that didn’t involve Bolt and you’d see 10,000 people in a 58,000-seat stadium. Venues across the spectrum of sports were often mostly deserted.

The reason for this is pretty obvious: ticket prices for events, as set by organizers, were outrageous. They were outrageous by even American or European standards, but at least there are enough Americans and Europeans willing to afford them. Organizers spewed out the standard line of how “ticket sales are in line with what we were expecting,” which is bullshit. And it didn’t occur to anyone involved in organizing these games that maybe, just maybe, you’d be better off for appearance’s sake if you gave away some of those tickets to those people in your community who couldn’t afford to attend because, you know, this gathering of sport is supposed to be a community endeavor. But that would involve actually giving a damn about the community.

As I say, Rio de Janeiro is one of the most complicated cities on earth, a city of extremes with some of the richest neighborhoods in the world pressed up against some of the poorest and most dangerous. It’s a city on undrawn but assumed boundaries and assorted self-governing communes. But what was pretty clear from the get-go with the Rio Olympics was that, for the millions and millions of cariocas who aren’t a part of the higher classes, these games were not for you. They were fenced off and sheltered from the rest of Rio, they were for the rich, for the jet set, and for the tourists – a good number of whom didn’t actually attend, given that the city was essentially bankrupt and unable to supply actual services like policing by the time the games rolled around. The tourists stayed away and the stands remained empty, one venue after another scarcely populated.

And Brazilians stayed away as well, because know a con job when they see one. There is a reason why Brazilian football domestically draws scant crowds, crowds even smaller than MLS: the game has been heisted and corrupted over time, and Brazilians aren’t interesting in turning over their hard earned money. Those who organized the Olympics were cut from the same cloth as those who have poisoned Brazilian football: frauds, shysters, crooks. There are plenty of those in Brazil. Hell, the whole government appears to be filled with them. Much like the World Cup in 2014, the Olympics were a perfect way for a select few to go about enriching themselves by sticking their hands in the public coffers. It was business as usual in a country which, upon landing the Games, assured the world that it would not be business as usual.

And Brazilians took to the streets in 2013 during the Confed Cup, protesting the largesse and excess and general indifference coming from the government in preparation for these two massive sporting events on the horizon. They knew better. As I say, they know a con job when they see one. And when it came time for the Olympics, they did what most people will do when told they don’t matter, which is go about doing something else.

And this is a waste, of course. If I’d been the organizers, I’d have run up and down through the streets of Rio and given away every single unsold ticket, because the Olympics Games, at a base, are a triumph of human potential being realized.

I mean seriously here, how long have he feared water as a species? We’ve feared it ever since we were fish who developed legs and walked out of the sea. We as humans fear water almost instinctively, some forgotten home for our species, and for millennia we’ve tried to conquer water, we’ve tried to figure out how best to deal with it. So think about that when you watch Katie Ledecky or Michael Phelps swim, carving up with perfect strokes a hostile and inhospitable landscape for humans, making it seem as if it had been conquered. That right there is a million years of human potential reaching an apex. We, as a species, have actually figured out how to conquer water.

And that sort of stuff is remarkable, it’s inspirational and it’s on display every four years. You watch Simon Biles flying through the air doing twists and turns as easily as you or I scratch our noses, doing things in flight most humans in history couldn’t have even conceived of – and she even makes it look easy. Watch Usain Bolt when he gets up to full speed. Have you ever seen a human body ever do anything so beautiful?

And that needs to be passed on to people, the idea that we gather together every few years to celebrate and wow ourselves over what we are capable to doing. And hey, you kids from the favela, you should come and watch this! All of you should see, with your own eyes, what’s possible and what’s doable. You might not do that yourself, in the end, but maybe, just maybe, you’ll find a way to fulfill your own potential instead of being told, based upon your race or your class or income level, that you’re second-rate.

But to the assortment of undesirables at the IOC, the Olympics are ultimately a way to enrich themselves for doing nothing, and to steal from the common man instead of inspiring them to do more. No one involved cared about that. They just wanted to throw a party for a closed subset of people who could afford to attend. Instead of celebrating what’s best about humanity, the Olympics served, yet again, to bring out what’s worst about it.

Ryan Lochte
And speaking of the worst, it gets no worse than Ryan Lochte, who has all of the personality traits of a dumb frat boy but has managed to skate through life because of his God-given talents in the pool. Lochte created quite the international incident in Rio when, after boozing it up on the town, he wrecked a service station bathroom and wound up in a confrontation with the armed security guards at the station. Lochte’s response to this was to invent a cockamamie story in which he said he’d been held up and robbed at gunpoint, thus playing upon some of the worst stereotypes of Rio in an effort to cover up for the fact that he’d been a drunkass. And his defense for this was basically to say that he acted like a drunkass, as if that wasn’t somehow obvious to everyone. Congratulations Ryan, you’ve shown yourself to be a true Ugly American, the likes of which should never wear the U.S. colors again.

So many good candidates this year, but our TLOTY simply must go to an organization which has been a constant embarrassment for the entirety of its existence, and who has even managed to kill some of the good vibes permeating a city which has had almost no good vibes over the past 50 years.

Because in Cleveland, you see, you can never have it too good. The Cavaliers breaking through and winning an NBA title was something of a city-wide catharsis, a release of half of century of frustrations. And it looked as if the winning ways were going to continue this fall, as the Cleveland Indians surged to a 3-1 World Series lead over the heavily favored Cubs, standing on the precipice of breaking a 60-year World Series drought … and then the Indians lost to the Cubs in Game 5 … and Game 6 … and Game 7 as well, but my goodness what a game it was, one of the greatest and most memorable games in baseball history, and if you’re going to flame out like this, at least do so in a remarkable game like that. But as we say, you can never have it too good when in Cleveland. You need to yang the yin, you need to balance it back out again. With so much success this year, Cleveland was definitely feeling proud of itself, and deservedly so, but maybe this national bastion of failure got a little bit too big for itself and needed to be humbled. Fortunately, I have just the ticket …

Cleveland Browns
 

Whatever hope the Browns had this season pretty much went out the window on Opening Day, when reclamation project Robert Griffin III suffered a season-ending injury in a 29:10 pasting by the Iggles – RG3 being the first of six different QBs to start for the Browns, who’ve had a revolving door at the position dating back through the entire history of the franchise. They followed this up by blowing a 20-2 lead in their home opener and losing to the Ravens the following week, and the hits (misses?) just kept on coming from there. Save for a miraculous near comeback falling short in a 28:26 loss to the Titans, and a 31:28 loss to the Jets in which they blew a 13-point lead, the Browns hadn’t been close to winning another game, losing their first 14 and threatening to join Dancing Dan Orlovsky’s Detroit Lions as the only 0-16 teams in NFL history.

Still the dumbest play in NFL history

Alas, they were blessed with an opponent as incompetent and indifferent as the Chargers showing up for the 15th game of the season, and Cleveland managed to eke out a win to cheer up the members of the GPODAWUND for the holidays:

Quite simply, there is no worse franchise in all of American professional sports than the Cleveland Browns. (Not even the Sacramento Kings, who somehow avoided a nomination this year.) Ever since Browns 2.0 was birthed in the aftermath of the ugly move by Art Modell of the original franchise to Baltimore, the Browns have gone about stumbling through the dark in search of success to no avail. They’ve changed coaches, changed GMs, changed QBs, changed owners. Nothing has worked. (And in a another wonderful trans-Atlantic connection, former terrible Browns owner Randy Lerner also managed to be a terrible owner in the EPL, as the Aston Villa team he owned was relegated from the EPL for the first time in its history.) The Browns have drafted poorly, developed talent poorly, made bad deals galore and presently have a roster with maybe one guy – consummate pro LT Joe Thomas - out of 53 that any other team in the league would actually want, seeing as how the only other guy on the roster who knows what he’s doing – WR Josh Gordon – rightly stepped away from the game to enter an in-patient rehab facility and concentrate on getting sober.

The Browns haven’t made the postseason since 2002, haven’t had a winning season since 2007, and have lost 105 games in the past 9 years. It doesn’t really matter where they pick in the coming draft, since they’ve had the #1 overall pick several times and screwed it up. I’m not even sure where you begin to try and rebuild this team, since no one who can get a job anyplace would ever want to play there.

For their colossal incompetence, for their unimpressive historical body of work, and for single-handedly attempting to bring down the entire city of Cleveland from their Cavs-induced euphoria, I present the Cleveland Browns with The Lose Of The Year award.

And on a personal note, I would like to dedicate this entry to two big fans of The Lose. First off, my frequent creative conspirator and partner in crime Geoff lost his teenage son in an auto accident earlier this year. Geoff, I don’t know what to say, as there are no words, but I hope I can at least make you laugh from time to time. I’ve grieved for this loss in ways I never thought possible. I am so sorry for your loss and which I didn’t feel so goddamn helpless and speechless in the aftermath. Also, I would like to dedicate this entry to Derek Martinez, a good friend from scrabble who recently passed away at age 37. Derek was a big fan of Lose, he loved to talk basketball with me and we always yukked it up at whatever bit of incompetence was out there – even if it was our own incompetence over the board. Derek, you are and will continue to be greatly missed.

So we close out 2016 and it’s on 2017, and quite honestly, 2016 can go fuck itself. This year completely sucked. I thought I would usher it out with a beautiful piece of music which has resonated with me and filtered into some of the creative work I’m presently doing, as I’ve begun to write yet another novel. It’s a soft and lovely song, and as Sun Tzu once suggested in The Ancient Art of War, you must hit that which is hard with something that is soft.

Full Cylinder

I’VE MENTIONED this before, but it bears repeating for the newer members of the readership of this blog. The genesis of In Play Lose came from two primary sources. The first was How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart, David Foster Wallace’s review of the Austin’s autobiography, in which he espouses frustration at being unable to glean any sort of insight into what made Austin such a successful tennis player. The second is a piece written for Grantland by Bill Simmons from 2012 in which he chronicles 35 years of incompetence by the Golden State Warriors. (And for a daily dose of this, and a reminder of just how comically awful the Warriors were, I highly recommend all Lose disciples follow the excellent This Day in Suck twitter account.) Simmons wrote the piece in the aftermath of one of the rock bottom, lowest points in the franchise’s history – a number retirement ceremony for Chris Mullin in 2012, during which the fans started mercilessly booing new Warriors owner Joe “Light Years” Lacob.

The reason this ceremony had become the boiling point for the fans was a recently completed trade with the Milwaukee Bucks. The Dubs had acquired Andrew Bogut, who was injured and out for the season. In exchange, the Dubs had traded away Monta Ellis, their best player and pretty much the only player worth watching in yet another lost season. The trade was a signal that a full-on tank job was imminent, with the Warriors intent upon sinking to the bottom of the standings in order to save themselves from yielding a Top-7 protected draft pick, a pick they’d stupidly promised to the Utah Jazz as part of another terrible trade for Marcus Williams. (“Who is he?” you ask. Exactly.) I hated that Ellis trade at the time as well, and had I been at Oracle Arena that night, I would’ve booed Buzz Light Years, too. Sure, the new Warriors ownership had been dealt a pretty terrible hand by previous owner Chris Cohan, an owner who made Vivek and Robert Sarver look comparatively competent, but this was just more of the same. More bad moves, more bad decisions, with more losses to follow and more frustration for the fans.

But there was also a pseudo-legitimate basketballing reason for making this deal. The Warriors moved Ellis, in part, because they wanted to free up more minutes for a rookie on the roster that they liked quite a bit, a 6’7” shooting guard from Washington State named Klay Thompson. Thompson took over Ellis’ spot in the starting lineup after Ellis was moved, and has held the spot ever since.

Ellis has gone on to a decent, if erratic, career since that trade, mostly with the Dallas Mavericks and now with the Indiana Pacers. Defense, however, has never been his forte. The Pacers were in town Monday night to play the Dubs at Oracle Arena, and Ellis attempted to guard Klay Thompson, the guy he was moved to make room for back in 2012. Suffice to say, it didn’t go so well for the Pacers, as Thompson put on one of the most ridiculous performances in NBA history. That trade has come full circle, as Ellis got a birdseye view of Klay filling up the cylinder.

That trade, and the reasons for it, have come to look pretty smart in the rearview mirror. Thompson has developed into the ultimate catch-and-shoot guy, and quite possibly the greatest catch-and-shoot guy the league has ever seen with his mix of off-ball movement, great footwork, impeccable technique and a lightning-quick release. Thompson scored 60 points in only 29 minutes last night, while only taking 33 shots from the floor and only touching the ball 52 times. He had the ball in his hands for a total of 88.4 seconds and only took 11 dribbles on his 21 made field goals. No one in the NBA is as combustible as Klay, the guy who scored 37 points in a quarter and single-handedly shot the Warriors back into the playoffs last year in Game 6 against Oklahoma City.

The ‘hot hand’ notion has been debated by stat gurus for a while now, but I believe it exists – in part because the ‘hot hand’ is a product of great team play, as a team finds a matchup that is working and then goes about continuing to exploit it. The Pacers chose to have Ellis chase Klay around and not bother to switch, which was an incredibly dumb idea, and Klay promptly ran Ellis off one screen after another and found himself open for threes, for mid-rangers, and also for a whole bunch of layups, while the other Dubs made a point of constantly getting Klay the ball and fanning the flames. The Warriors assisted on 20 of Klay’s 21 field goals, and neither Steph Curry nor Draymond Green really had much interest in shooting after a while, the both of them content to continually feed the ball to Klay, who put on one of the more amazing offensive displays I’ve ever seen.

Oh, and by the way, Klay is arguably the fourth-best player on this team, with the top three being the guys combining to do this:

The Warriors are just ridiculous. It’s not a stretch of suggest that this is the greatest offense in the history of the NBA. In Monday night’s merciless 142:106 beatdown of the Indiana Pacers, the Warriors notched 45 assists – a total few teams ever reach, but it’s the second time they’ve reached that number of assists in the last two weeks. They had 35 assists by the end of the third quarter and had only committed four turnovers. They also decided to play some defense just for the fun of it, limiting the Pacers to a small number of threes while blocking 24% of the Pacers’ twos in the first half as they ran out to a 30-point halftime lead. The first three quarters of this game were a master class.

And it seems hard to believe, when you’re talking about a team whose offense is off the charts – they are presently scoring 2.7 points per 100 possessions more than any team in NBA history – but the Warriors still haven’t reached their full potential. The endgame sets are still something of a mess, in part because they’ve had so few scenarios in which to practice them. The offense went stagnant at the end of their most recent loss, a 132:127 2OT defeat to the Houston Rockets, whose win was much deserved. But it should be noted that the Warriors’ three worst shooting performances of the season coincided with their three defeats, suggesting that the only real chance anyone has to beat them is to hope that they miss. And losing just seems to piss them off, which doesn’t bode well for the next opponent. Steph goes 0-for-10 from three in a loss to Lakers, then comes back the next game and hits 13 threes against New Orleans, breaking the NBA record. It’s absolutely preposterous what they are doing. They scored 138 on Saturday against the Suns and seemed almost bored while doing it.

And speaking of being bored …

Earth to J.R., come in J.R.

The Cleveland Cavaliers have also been spectacular to watch so far this season as well, using their open post offensive sets consisting of LeBron and four other shooters spacing the floor – but unlike the Warriors, who’ve been attempting to integrate Durant and a bunch of new faces into the mix, continuity and familiarity have been the order of the day in Cleveland. Without a whole lot to work on, and with no legitimate challengers in the East, the Cavs have quickly gotten bored. Really bored, as symbolized by J.R. Smith meandering off the court in the middle of the play during last week’s 20-point hammering of the Cavs by the Milwaukee Bucks, the first in a 3-game losing streak which saw them then get walloped by the Clippers at home and then get outplayed by the Bulls. Lack of focus and intensity was on display in all three games, as the Cavs missed assignments and threw the ball all over the gym. It’s almost like they had to go out and invent a 3-game losing streak for themselves in order to invent some urgency.

The Cavs righted the ship on Monday night in Toronto, a 116:112 win over the Raptors in which LeBron scored 35 and had his best game of the season – a fact which flew under the radar in the light of Klay going for 60. Monday’s NBA slate was remarkable, with buzzer beaters and OT games and 2OT games, with LeBron going for 35 and Lou Williams going for 38 points on only 55 touches, with Marc Gasol putting up a triple-double and Russell Westbrook putting up a triple-double for the sixth straight game – and pretty much all of that got shoved aside because Klay scored 60 points in 29 minutes.

NBA punditry is filled with ex-players from the 1990s who insist that the game was better back when they were still playing – which is natural, I suppose, but which is also completely, utterly wrong. The NBA game is better than it’s ever been. The SSOL Phoenix Suns were considered radical in their day for their frenzied pace of play; so far this season, half of the teams in the league are playing that fast or faster. But along with that pace has also come complexity on both ends of the floor. Not only is the game bigger, faster, and more agile, but it’s also more cerebral and geometric. Not only do you have to move fast and react fast, but you also have to think fast.

And somewhat paradoxically, you need to be able to think fast so that you don’t have to think fast. Steve Kerr has said that early in the season, he had to actually call plays for the Warriors while they were going about getting acclimated, in contrast to the free-flowing, organic sort of basketball they’ve played for the past couple of seasons. The game is less rigid and structured, so the complex pattern recognition needs to become instinctive and almost second nature. And whatever you do out there on the floor, do it fast!

OK, maybe not you, Dwight Howard. Slow it down there, big fella.

The league is blessed right now with extraordinary young talents, huge guys whose range is no longer limited to in and around the basket, guys like Towns and Davis and Porzingis who feel comfortable playing all over the floor and can also stroke it from deep. But there is one player whom I am absolutely loving right now who truly has the potential to be transcendent with his size, agility, and versatility – and, as we saw last week against the Cavs, also with his competitiveness. I don’t remember the last time I saw a guy look at a matchup with LeBron, decide he didn’t give a goddamn who LeBron is and just take it right at him quite like I saw from Milwaukee’s Giannis Antetokuonmpo, aka Greek Freak. (At some point, I’ll figure out how to spell his surname right, so for now we’ll just use his first name.) Giannis torched LeBron and whomever else tried to guard him, scoring 34 points as the Bucks trampled Cleveland. He is a 6’11” point guard, crazy long and lean and limber. He is probably the single-most terrifying transition player in the NBA.

He still doesn’t have much of an outside shot, and for the sake of the rest of the league, they’d better hope he doesn’t develop one, because if he does he’ll wind up making Kevin Durant look comparatively guardable. At 22 years of age, having only played the game since 2007, Giannis is still only scratching the surface of his potential. The Bucks are still a work in progress, currently on the fringe of being a playoff team, but Giannis with the ball in his hands is must-see viewing.

Giannis was the 15th pick in the 2013 NBA draft, and I can say without any hesitation that I would have him on my team sooner than any of the 14 guys picked ahead of him. There are some good players there, to be sure: I love me some Steven Adams (#12), of course, and I love me some C.J. McCollum (#10). But otherwise? Well …

The top pick in the 2013 draft was Anthony Bennett, who is presently playing for the Nets: the Long Island Nets of the D-League, that is, having bombed out and ate himself out of the NBA. The second pick, Victor Oladipo, was meh in Orlando and is slightly less meh running alongside Russell Westbrook in OKC. #3 pick Otto Porter has been one of the few bright spots in the appalling mess that is the Buzzards early this season, so that one isn’t all that terrible. But the rest of this crew of guys picked before Giannis are players who are, at best, role players and who are, at worst, useless: Cody Zeller, Alex Len, Nerlens Noel, Ben McLemore, Kentavious Caldwell-Pope, Trey Burke, Michael Carter-Williams, Kelly Olynyk, and Shabazz Muhammad.

Hindsight is always 20/20, of course, and you really never know just what you’re going to get when you draft a player – maybe they get injured or whatnot – so you can’t say for sure that, had any of the 14 teams picking before the Bucks in 2013 drafted Giannis that he would have become the play that he is today (and threatening to become in the future). But at the same time, it shouldn’t be a surprise that some of the usual bottom-dwellers in the NBA were passing up Giannis and wound up looking   like dunces: Orlando, Phoenix, New Orleans, Sacramento, Minnesota and also Philadelphia, who were just entering the Sam Hinkie reign of error and making a splash by drafting Michael Carter-Williams, a point guard who can’t shoot, and also trading with the Pelicans to acquire Noel, who was hurt and missed the whole season. All of the franchises that I just mentioned are some degree of perpetually terrible, and this draft is an example of why: they draft poorly, and then develop what they draft even worse.

Like I mentioned earlier, the Dubs scored 138 on Phoenix last Saturday without having to work particularly hard to do it. The Phoenix Suns are a mess. The Suns have three recent Top 10 draft picks on their team who are all about 7’0” tall and none of whom seem to have any idea how to play NBA basketball, and the Suns would trot one or sometimes two of those guys out on the court and none of them looked like they even knew where they were supposed to be. Oh, they are “raw” and they are “green” or what have you, but the Suns don't need “raw” and “green.” They need guys that can actually play.

That is three really bad misses in the draft by a team who seems to whiff all the time. If you’re perpetually in the lottery, year after year, either you have no eye for talent whatsoever or your coaching staff sucks. Part of why the Kings are in such dire shape is that they’ve whiffed so badly in the draft time and again. This list verges on criminal negligence. Thomas Robinson? Quincy Doubey? McLemore? Sauce Castillo? Huh?

Giannis was the 15th pick in the NBA draft, and think about some of the game’s other great performers at the moment and where they were selected. Klay Thompson was the 11th pick in 2011, drafted after the likes of Jan Veselý and Jimmer Ferdette. Also going in that 2011 draft were Kawhi Leonard at #22, Jimmy Butler at #30, and Isaiah Thomas at #60. Draymond Green was a 2nd round pick, as was Paul Millsap. You can find great players in a lot of places. There are guys who can fit a need, guys who you can develop, guys who can fit your system and excel. The principle tenet of Hinkieism was that the best chance to be successful is to have a superstar player, and the best way to acquire a superstar player is through the draft. But there is an intellectual dishonesty and laziness to that, in that you can be terrible and maybe a magic NBA lottery ping pong ball will bounce your way, but it doesn’t mean that you know anything about how to use that pick in the right way, it doesn’t say anything about your ability to develop that player, and it says nothing about your ability to put in place a functioning set of complimentary pieces around that player. Of course picking Anthony Davis was a no-brainer for the Pelicans, but what is he now surrounded with? You don’t just draft a guy and, suddenly, everything is copacetic. It’s not that simple.

This is why I’m not one of these people who obsesses about the draft. It’s an exciting moment, of course, a day sort of like Christmas in all American sports with the promise of potential wrapped up nicely in a package dressed in a bow tie and a nice suit, but the draft is an activity in which far too many of the usual actors go about making the usual mistakes. If you’re bad enough to be picking in the lottery in the first place, it’s likely that the guy(s) who drove you into the ditch aren’t likely to be the guy(s) capable of hoisting you out of it. And sure, everyone whiffs on a pick from time to time, or takes a flyer on a guy who doesn’t pan out, but making the same mistakes, again and again, is an unforgivable sin.

The Warriors have committed many unforgivable sins over the years when it comes to player acquisition, but I came to forgive Light Years Lacob and the Warriors for trading Monta Ellis long ago. Yeah, in hindsight, that was a pretty good deal for the Warriors. But under no circumstances could I have ever foreseen the heights to which this franchise has gone ever since that point. Part of what makes the Warriors so enticing, so engaging, is that their success seemingly came out of nowhere. Cleveland’s success is a bit more understandable, seeing as how landed LeBron and they managed to win the draft lottery four times, but even they whiffed pretty badly – they drafted Anthony Bennett, after all. The Warriors have cobbled it together from a host of unlikely sources – free agents, trades, drafts, 2nd round picks – with some shrewd moves, some good luck, and some great timing (and maybe just a little bit of sneaky stuff when it came to Andre Iguodola, although George Karl is probably just frothing a bit in that article, as he is wont to do). The Warriors ascent to the summit seems somewhat magical, in part because it makes no sense. But wherever it all came from, it’s magical to watch, and when guys are doing stuff like Klay was doing the other night, you just don’t ever want it to see it end.

When do we get to play the Pacers again? Can we play them again? Please? Pretty please?

Cruelty

“The secret to poetry is cruelty.”
– Jon Anderson

IT’S EARLY on Saturday morning and I’m up to watch El Classico, which is nothing short of the single-greatest regularly scheduled sporting event in the world. (If the NFL could contrive some way for the Seahawks and the Patriots to play every season, I’d be all for that.) F.C. Barcelona and Real Madrid possess between them the most dazzling array of soccer talent that you could assemble, and the game is worth watching simply to watch the artists at work, even if their work ultimately doesn’t result in the ball going in the back of the net. Soccer is nuance and subtlety, it’s chess on grass, with the beauty of the game displayed through quick moments and snippets here and there. I watch simply to enjoy these small moments of brilliance here and there, which were frequently on display at the Nou Camp this morning in what was, by El Classico standards, a generally disappointing affair: a moment of ingenious hold-up play from Suárez where he posts up a larger defender and traps a downward flying ball with his left thigh and drops it to his right foot, knowing exactly where his next pass is going to go before the ball has even hit the ground; a deft turn and spin from Busquets just above the 18, clearing the danger in the Barca defense and starting the play the other way; Iniesta, the world’s greatest passer, firing a laser beam of a pass through three defenders onto the foot of Messi and creating a chance; all of these crosses from the Real wings weighted perfectly, seemingly destined to find a teammate’s head that just hang there, drifting into the box and striking more fear into the Nou Camp faithful with every passing moment. All of these moments are beautiful, elegant and graceful while, at the same time, taking place within an activity which is feisty and tense, combative and fiercely competitive. There is no greater rivalry than El Classico given the history and national identity connected to the sides and given the talent at both sides’ disposal. I sit back and soak in all of these little moments in the game and enjoy them for what they are regardless of the outcome. It really is a beautiful game, an elegant game. The game is poetry in motion.

But for all of that maneuvering of the pieces around the chess board during the course of 90 minutes, for all of those individual moments of brilliance, you still need to get a result – and god damn it, it’s hard to do that.

And, naturally, this game turned on a mistake, as a 90th minute set piece from Real Madrid turned into something more resembling a jail break. Barca’s defense got it all wrong and Sergio Ramos equalized with a header – and if he hadn’t gotten to it, someone else would have, as there were five Real players open in the center of the box to meet the cross. It was a piece of abject and amateurish defending at the worst possible time from Barca which wound up costing them, as Real snuck out of the Nou Camp with a 1:1 draw. For all of the individual moments of brilliance, for all of the great build up play and link up play from Barca through the center of pitch, the second goal Barca needed to put the game away didn’t come, and then that one moment occurs and you shut it off upstairs and you don’t communicate and the ball is in the back of your net, the points Barca needing in the table to stay in contention for the title being wasted and going awry. Barca were the better team, but the better team didn’t win.

But this is what always happens in soccer. Barca were six points adrift of Real Madrid in La Liga when, if there was anything just about this stupid game, they would have been seven after last week, as they had traveled to San Sebastián and got positively bossed by Real Sociedad. The Txuriurdin were all over Barca, but they somehow managed to miss the target time and again (seriously how did they not score more?), and then Messi does one of his Messi things and Sociedad hit the woodwork twice and have a goal strangely called back and it ends a 1:1 draw, earning a point for Barca they most certainly did not deserve. And for Real Sociedad, a small club with a proud tradition that has often gone toe-to-toe with the Madrids and Barcelonas and more than held their own, this draw is a bitter disappointment. They deserved to win the match.

But soccer has little to nothing to do with what you deserve, in the end. Over the course of the season, the teams that finish at the top of the table steal these points here and there which often come to make the difference. They get draws when they deserve to lose, they get wins when they deserve to draw. The margins in the game are so thin that the difference is often one single moment of brilliance, one moment of defensive lapse, or even some ridiculous own goal. The bigger clubs with the deeper pockets will wind up necessarily moving towards the top of the table by the end, using those resources to stock up on players capable of creating those moments of brilliance and competent enough to lessen the potential for disastrous errors, thus tilting the balance of power in their favor, enabling them to steal points in those 50-50 situations. And you can understand how, over time, this apparatus works. You can see how, during the course of a 40-game season, this will play out, but in the moment, of course, when one single match comes undone and the result winds up feeling unjust, the beautiful game feels incredibly cruel. Soccer is a game that, one way or another, always seems to find a way to break your heart.

* * *

So the results can be unjust, but we can deduce that the best teams win out, at season’s end, partially through the amassing of many unjust results in their favor. But at the same time, the unjust results can seemingly go against even the bigger clubs: witness Saturday’s El Classico where, in my opinion, mighty Barca were the better team and the better team didn’t win. I’m always amused by the idea that the bigger clubs in Europe float from time to time of forming some sort of Super League in Europe where the best clubs would play each other all of the time? Wouldn’t that be great?

Well, sure, it would, at first, but then the novelty would wear off really quickly for a number of those clubs and their supporters, and would do so for a very good reason: they would start to lose. Sports are a zero-sum game, after all. Someone would necessarily lose, and necessarily finish last. The structure of the game is fundamentally unfair, a self-perpetuating cycle in which winning begets you bigger prizes and purses, which you can then turn around and spend on better players and better coaches and the like. With those spoils, over time, have come a galling sense of entitlement among the game’s élite, a level of condescension implying that simply by the name on your jersey, you should just be able to show up and garner the spoils.

UEFA has constantly kissed the big club’s asses in the rejigging of the Champions League, a cash-cow of a cup competition which, to put it bluntly, isn’t really all that good, as it’s a bunch of extra games stuffed into midweeks during a season that’s already long and draining. For all of the pomp and ceremony and self-importance of the competition, the games are often dreadful. We’ve been told we’re supposed to care about it, but none of the Champions League Finals that I’ve watched have been particularly memorable. Most of the time, in fact, the better team doesn’t seem to win. Indeed, the ‘winner’ of today’s 1:1 El Classico draw – Real Madrid – have won two of the past three Champions League Finals, winning both times against sworn enemy and crosstown rival Atletico Madrid while managing, over the course of the 90 minutes, to look second-best on both occasions, only to push the game into extra time on both occasions and then carve out a victory.

And we hate it when Real Madrid wins. The next best thing to seeing your team win is seeing your fiercest rival lose, and Real Madrid is a fierce rival to everyone, owing to their phenomenal success, their Franco-fascist roots, and their constant back room and board room drama. Of course, most of the discreet, ineffectual, leftist bourgeoisie who root for Barcelona choose to conveniently overlook their own team’s warts, be it getting nabbed for signing underage players or the fact that there have been a seemingly endless string of tax evasion charges dogging the club’s players. We cherry pick and choose the facts in order to suit our narratives. Most of it just comes down to jealousy, of course – the act of wishing that a team you support could be better than another who always seems to win all the time at your expense. And while there were plenty of blue and red stripes on display in my footballing-mad neighborhood this morning, while nary a white jersey could be seen, Real Madrid wouldn’t be the biggest club in the world if nobody liked them. Just as there are shy Tories, there are shy Madrileños out there as well, people who don’t want to admit it because liking Real isn’t cool.

But we love it when Real fails. (Though it doesn’t happen often.) We love it those bloated bombasts who always buy their way to the top of the table stumble and bumble and fall. There is seemingly no end to the schadenfreude in Britain right now for the comedic stylings of Manchester United, a club which has gone through three coaches and spent over $600 million on players in the past four seasons but who, at this moment, is currently looking up in the table at West Brom. A particular venom is reserved for the ‘new money’ clubs – clubs like Chelsea and Paris St. Germain and Manchester City who weren’t any good until they got infused with massive amounts of petrostate financing, and who are now élite powers of the game, or a club like RB Leipzig, who currently reside at the top of the Bundesliga and who didn’t even exist until seven years ago, when Red Bull up and decided to dump a tonne of euros into the act of inventing a championship-caliber German football club. The idea of coming in and winning at the game simply by throwing a whole bunch of money flies in the face of the traditional/stereotypical narrative of the game, which is that these great clubs were of small and modest means when they were founded and grew to become giants over time entirely owing to their brilliance on the pitch. The truth is, of course, much more complicated than that. Chelsea and Man City have been around for over a century: they just weren’t very good for long periods of time. The backstory of they came to be good doesn’t really matter that much, in the end, if they didn’t get the results between the lines. You can have all of the resources at your disposal that you wish, but if you don’t know what you’re doing, you wind up like Man U and go about pouring $600m down a rathole. And most of the football supporters who want to tout their club’s humble, modest roots only do so when it’s convenient, but their clubs time and again act out of their own self-interest when wider issues crop up, and do so at the expense of clubs whose roots are just as humble and modest and who are still humble and modest to this day. It’s an unfair game, one between the haves and have-nots in which the haves want to do everything to keep it that way.

But knowing all of that, I still root for Barcelona. I admit it. Like most fans, my footballing rooting interests are tiered and complicated and sometimes run in conflict: big teams that we like, but also smaller clubs as well. I like Barcelona because I’ve always liked the way they play. Among the large British clubs, my life ethos seems to align more with Liverpool than any of the others. My love of Norwich City is well-documented, of course, and it excites me that the latest incarnation of the team which first got me interested in soccer decades ago, the Seattle Sounders, will be playing for their first MLS Cup a week from now. With each club comes a different set of expectations, a different definition of success. But in each case, that sense of being wronged by the unjust result feels the same. You curse the stupid fucking game and wish that it didn’t hold your attention. How can you like something in which seemingly so often, you feel as if fate or the moon or the stars or the forces of evil or the goddamn refs or those moving goalposts all conspired to deny your team the result that it deserved? There is no justice in this game. The bad guys always win.

Except, of course, when they don’t.

* * *

We watch the biggest clubs because we want to see the game’s greatest stars. I thought I would get the chance in person to do that this past summer, during the Copa América Centenario, as some good fortune in the draws had brought those of us here in the Bay Area a really great slate of games to take place down in Santa Clara at The Pants. Alas, it turned out to be something of a disappointment on the star front: neither Lionel Messi not Luis Suárez played, as both of them were still injured; James scored and ran the game for Colombia and generally made Klinsmann’s USA FC look stupid for an hour, but then he injured a shoulder and had to leave the game.

The one great star turn that I did get to see, however, was that of Alexis Sánchez, when Chile took on Mexico in the Quarterfinals. The Chileans moved Alexis to the left side, in order to attack a weak right flank of the Mexican defense, and after Alexis roasted the Mexican right back on his very first touch, making him look like he was standing in cement, the Chileans then took to running the entirety of their offense through Alexis. Every attack begin with a ball to Alexis down the left. And Alexis was brilliant. He was absolutely brilliant. I don’t think I’ve ever seen, in person, someone play a better game of soccer. His touches, his movement, his passes were all elegant and effortless and perfect. His name doesn’t appear on the scoresheet enough to suggest how dominant he really was. Alexis essentially set up five goals all by himself while his grateful teammates went about divvying up the spoils.

The final score of the game was ridiculous, in the end – Chile 7:0 Mexico. The mass of El Tri fans assembled at The Pants went, over the course of 90 minutes, from loving their team to hating their team to a sense of something akin to begrudging gratitude, coming to realize that they were present for a master class in the game because Chile were so good that nothing the Mexicans wanted to do would have even made a dent.

And part of what made it so surprising, of course, is that it was Chile doing this. Chile are now the 2-time defending champions of the Copa America after this summer, despite the fact that, in comparison to other South American sides, they have considerably less talent at their disposal. Not no talent, mind you. I was explaining to one of my friends, at the start, who their best players were and saying stuff like “that guy plays for Arsenal, and that guy plays for Bayern Munich, and that guy plays for Barcelona,” and the name-dropping of such clubs certainly resonated with a soccer-viewing neophyte. It’s just that their roster pales in comparison to that of Argentina and Brazil and even Colombia. But the Chileans are a case of the whole being greater than the sum of the parts – something born through experience, as the core of their team have been playing together in national team settings for more than a decade. 

And long before Alexis was living in London and playing for Arsenal and winning a pair of Copa Americas, he and some of his future Chilean national teammates were plying their trade in a place about as far removed from the bright lights as you can possibly get – at Club de Deportes Cobreloa in the city of Calama, a mining town in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile. Cobreloa are a small club but also a proud one, having won five Chilean titles, and its also a club with a propensity for developing surprisingly good players over the years. But when you’re a small club, whatever successes you achieve can be difficult to sustain, if not impossible. Bigger clubs come calling when they know you have great players, curious if you’d like to sell – and how can you not sell, seeing how a big transfer fee can prop up your budget for the entire year?

And the other reason you should sell is that the player will most likely want to go. In the case of Alexis Sánchez, he was sold from Cobreloa to the Italian club Udinese – another modest club known to have a keen eye for talent. Udinese loaned him out twice, first to Colo Colo, the biggest club in Chile, and then to River Plate in Buenos Aires, who are one of the biggest clubs in South America. He then played three years with Udinese in Italy, was sold to Barcelona after three seasons, and sold to Arsenal after that. This sort of meandering journey isn’t uncommon among even great players. In fact, it’s pretty normal. You bounce around, you move from club to club, there are ups and there are downs – and sometimes the downs can seem like down-and-outs. Jamie Vardy was playing in England’s 5th Division and working in a factory. Dmitri Payet was selling shoes. How on earth is it possible that someone who can do stuff like this was selling shoes?

Just stop it already, Dmitri

OK, now you are just showing off

Payet now plays for London’s West Ham United, a club with bigger aspirations than they are presently capable of pulling off. In the endless strata of soccer, which stretches from the glitzy and glamorous clubs at the top of the pyramid down through endless divisions and state leagues and regional leagues, clubs of all sizes eventually sort themselves out and find their own comfort level. And the fans of the club come to adjust over time, of course. The fans at every level of the game come to understand the limits of their favorite club’s exploits. It doesn’t mean they’ll necessarily like it, of course – most every conversation I have with Norwich City faithful inevitably harkens back to the club’s golden age, which stretched from the mid-1980s until they were relegated from the EPL in 1995, during which time they were one of England’s best clubs. But we members of the Yellow Army all have come to understand that such a terrific run, in this big-money day and age, is nearly impossible. Norwich doesn’t have the means to compete. It’s not a big club. You come to measure success in different ways: maybe it’s in the 1-off match against a bigger club where you get the better of them; maybe it comes from seeing a former player go on to do great things, knowing that your club contributed to the advancement of his career.

But that’s all big picture shit. In the moment, the fact is that I dragged my ass out of bed 38 times during the 2015-2016 EPL season for kickoffs at 4:45 a.m. and 7:30 a.m. and fuck-its-early-a.m. and had to keep myself from cursing aloud, lest I wake up the Official Swansea Fan of In Play Lose, who was wisely sleeping in while I was seething at 38 games of general Norwich City incompetence. “Jesus christ, could you mark the damn center back on the corner!” “How could you miss that? It was a sitter, god damn it!” *grumble grumble bitch moan seethe* 

Small club? Modest means? Fuck that. I want to win, damn it.

Sure, it’s nice to see Norwich City guys excelling at other clubs, or see two of them teaming up for a great goal in the Euros, and I suspect the could will sort out their current problems and find their way out of Div. 2 and back into the EPL eventually. But at that point, they’ll probably get smacked back down again, because this is how it goes. There isn’t really any point in having expectations of success, of having delusions of grandeur, since those sorts of fairy tales never come true ...

* * *

After El Classico ends, I flip through some highlights of Saturday’s games in the EPL, one of which is taking place at the wonderfully majestically named Stadium of Light in Sunderland. Sunderland won today, which for them is sort of amazing. They’ve been abjectly terrible for the past few seasons, pulling off a Houdini act each successive spring to avoid being relegated. The club is now for sale, yours for the taking for a cool £170 million. A deceptively low figure for a Premier League club, since one of the things you’ll be assuming, should you decide to buy, is the club’s £140 million in debts: a consequence of trying to compete at the game’s highest level for years, and failing rather miserably at it.

There are basically three tiers-within-the-tier that is the top flite of English football. There are five clubs on top owing to pedigree and bank balance: Man U, Man City, Chelsea, Arsenal, and Liverpool. There is a second tier full of hopefuls from the big cities striving to compete with their rivals across town: Tottenham, Everton, West Ham, Crystal Palace. And then there is everyone else, whose best hope is to break into the Top 10 and maybe land a Europa league spot. Sunderland are most definitely in the ‘everyone else’ category, as were their opponents today, a modest club from a smaller city doing what they usually do, which is hover right around the drop zone at the bottom of the table.

Except unlike the usual assortment of modest clubs from smaller cities hovering right around the drop zone, this particular opponent’s struggles of late – including losing 2:1 today at Sunderland – are worth noting, because the losing club today at the Stadium of Light was Leicester City.

What’s happened to Leicester? Quite simply, after beating the 5,000-to-1 odds to win the EPL title a season ago, the Foxes have regressed to the mean. When you win the Premier League, all of your tactics and technique get dissected and scrutinized over the summer and, as such, the Foxes tactics no longer hold the element of surprise. Factory-worker-turned-England-striker Vardy, after scoring goals for fun a year ago, has suddenly lost his Midas touch and seemingly can’t hit the ocean from a boat. And then N’Golo Kanté, the Foxes’ most important defensive player, was promptly sold to Chelsea for £32 million. A shrewd business move, of course – they’d paid €8 million to pry Kanté away from his French club – but one which reinforced a hard truth about the Premier League, which is that in spite of the big infusion of cash that comes from winning the EPL and doing well so far in the Champions League, clubs like Chelsea will always have more of it. Leicester still is, for all intents and purposes, just another small club from a small city.

And bless them for that, along with Norwich City and Udinese and Real Sociedad and Club de Deportes Cobreloa and all of the others, because it’s the small clubs which are the heart and the soul of the game of soccer. The small clubs don’t have the luxury of throwing away hundreds of millions of dollars or euros or sterling or any other currency. The small clubs beat the bushes and comb the back roads for players, they buy low and sell high, they develop and promote from within. You cut your teeth at the small clubs, you learn the realities of the game there. Small clubs develop young players and grant second chances to those who fall from grace. The small club’s fans are patient, supportive, and passionate about the club – a far cry from the assortment of bandwagon jumpers flocking to the flavors of the month at the tops of the table. Small clubs are ingenious, imaginative, resourceful and tenacious, doing more with less and, every now and then, getting a good result here and there.

Or, in the case of Leicester City, you pull off the impossible. Dreams can, in fact, come true. Leicester’s EPL title this past spring was a triumph for the game as a whole. It brought back the romance, it decreased the cynicism, it shook things up and shook out some of the cobwebs, bringing some freshness to a game which had ultimately become rather predictable and stale with the same small group of clubs winning everything all the time and constantly going about remaking the rules in their favor. Leicester has captured the imagination of fans across the globe.

How are Leicester doing this season? Who cares? Everything they might accomplish this season is an extra helping of gravy. Leicester carved out a place for themselves in the history of the game like none other. They don’t have to win 20 titles to be remembered. All they had to do was win one, in this era, under these circumstances, to remind people that it’s possible for a small club to do. It is unlikely? Absolutely.  Is it hard to do? Absolutely.

And if we’re being honest here, the same sort of critique I offered previously about Real Madrid applies to Leicester as well. If winning titles in soccer is ultimately determined by stealing a good number of points that you don’t necessarily deserve, then a title winner with Leicester written on the jersey is just as likely to benefit as one with Bayern or Barca or Real. I can think of two such unjust results in their favor off the top of my head – both the games with Norwich. The Foxes took all six points from those two games, which was about five points more than they deserved. After taking the league by storm in the first half of the season with a wild, open, attacking style, the Foxes had a seemingly endless string of 1:0 wins and come-from-behind draws after Christmas. Now, when you’re a bunch of nobodies, it’s easy to call this ‘riding your luck,’ but it’s no different than what Real and Barca and Bayern and the like do with regularity. What we see on the fronts of the jerseys changes our opinions of the performance when, in fact, what Leicester did, day to day, was no different than what any other league winner does from day to day. It’s still a cruel game, and Leicester knows plenty about the cruelty of it (most notably this madcap ending to a Div. 2 playoff against Watford in 2013) but for a season, at least, cruelty felt fit to rear its ugly head in some other city.

And it’s interesting to see how quickly this has changed the consciousness of the footballing fan. Instead of looking at a small club punching above it’s weight as a fly by night, you start to think, “could this be the next Leicester?” On Saturday in Italy’s Serie A, perpetual champion Juventus defeated Atalanta 3:1, but the fact that Juventus had to actually take Atalanta seriously was actually the story of the day. Who the hell is Atalanta? They’re a smaller club from Bergamo that have been rampaging along in Serie A of late, moving within striking distance of the European places with a roster composed mostly of young players that appears to be coming good. But how good? Good enough that you can’t help but wonder if Atalanta is … dare we say it … the Italian Leicester in the making?

And now small clubs everywhere want to think of themselves as the next Leicester, and you know what? Good for them. If Leicester can make some history, then why can’t they do it? Leicester have set the bar impossibly high, of course, accomplishing what seemed to be unthinkable, but for the next club that reaches those heights – a question of when, in my mind, rather than if – it will have been a most remarkable and exhilarating of journeys.

***

I hadn’t given Atalanta Bergamo any thought at all until I noticed, not too long ago, that they were high in the Serie A standings. When you follow the international game, you will occasionally take a glance at the tables in the other leagues, curious as to who is doing well (or, in my case, who is doing really badly, since this is In Play Lose, after all). I’ll look at the table in all the big European leagues, and maybe also in some of the lesser ones as well, just so I can get a sense of what is going on. When you do that, of course, you usually see an assortment of familiar names at the top of the table. It’s a lot of the same old same sold. Sporting or Benfica or Porto are winning in Portugal, Ajax or PSV or Feyenoord are winning in Holland, blah blah blah and there’s nothing much to see here. What occasionally piques my interest is the name of some weird team that I’ve never heard of, but usually there’s a reason that I’ve never heard of the weird teams: they aren’t very good, and usually they’re trawling about the dregs and on the verge of disappearing once again into Division 2 oblivion.

And I was looking through the table a week ago for Brazil’s Serie A, a league I only casually pay attention to, and I came across a name of a team which I’d never heard of: Chapecoense AF. Who on earth are these guys? Whomever they are, they appear to be having a nice season: 52 points, in 9th place in the table, slotted high above quite a number of the Brazilian teams that I do actually know something about, but Chapecoense were a club I knew nothing about at all.

Well now I do, and given the way that knowledge came to pass, I’m wishing very much that I didn’t, because on Monday, the plane which was carrying the members of the team, the team’s staffers and executives, and a number of Brazilian football journalists to the first leg of Chapecoense's Copa Sudamerica final against Atletico Nacional, crashed in the mountains outside Medellin, Colombia, killing 71 persons.

And it was after the crash that the story of Associaçáo Chapecoense de Futebol came to be known to the footballing and sporting public outside of South America: Chapecoense were, in many ways, the Leicester City of Brazil.  It’s a small club from a small city, Chapéco, a blue-collar city of meat packing and prospecting with 200,000 residents located near to the Argentine border in the south of the country. As recently as 2009, Chapecoense found themselves in Brazil’s Fourth Division, but they’d made a steady and stunning rise into the top flite of Brazilian football, being promoted to Serie A in 2014 and continuing their climb ever since, making their way into the top half of the table while battling it out with some of Brazil’s most legendary clubs. And as they were doing that, they were also competing in the Copa Sudamerica, CONMEBOL’s equivalent to the Europa League, and continuing to progress through the tournament, beating two Argentine clubs in the quarters and the semis to reach the Cup final. It’s a remarkable run, a fairy tale run from a club that no one could see coming.

And in the cesspool that is Brazilian domestic football – the game so awash in corruption and rot that the fans have stopped going to games and the players all flee to other parts of the world as soon as possible – the rise of Chapecoense was a breath of fresh air. Like many small clubs thrust onto big stages, they make friends wherever they go. Chapecoense were admired for their tenacity and resourcefulness, for doing more with less whereas so much of the game’s resources have been squandered within the nation over the years. Their rise piqued the imagination, proving that even the little guy could have their day in the sun and get their just deserts. And with a small town club comes a small town atmosphere. Instead of the typical sort of big city disconnect, where players keep to themselves and disappear behind fences and walls, all accounts seem to indicate that Chapecoense’s players felt a comfort in the city of Chapéco, whose residents weren’t just fans of the club, but had come to be seen as friends.

And now, it’s all gone.

#forcachape

You’ve really done it this time, footballing gods. Yours is a cruel, cruel sport, one to which many people dutifully enslave themselves regardless, but this is your cruelest trick of all. Damn you.

I’ve struggled to come to terms with this tragedy, not wanting to write yet another obituary in a year that seems particularly cursed, one in which so many of the people who’ve made an impact in my life have passed away. And yet, I felt compelled to say something, say anything, even though what I’m saying might make no sense at all. Football lost some of its greatest friends on Monday. Sport lost some of its greatest friends. Indeed, life itself lost some of its greatest friends.

We want to think of sport as being separate from life. We want it to be a diversion and a distraction, a chance to lose ourselves for a little while. But sport is not separate from real life. It is a part of real life. No game ever created more mirrors real life than soccer, a game in which the results are often unjust and sometimes the best that you can hope for is to scrape out a draw and come out even. It is a simple game which is complex and nuanced, laden with gray areas. The games if financed by, and profited from, capitalists with enormous wealth and little connection to the common man, while its labor pool are culled mostly from the poor and the immigrants and the working classes – commoners, ultimately, much like the commoners who follow the game with fervor. Soccer is life, in fact, and much like the rest of life, you want to see the good guys get ahead and win a little bit from time to time.

The investigation will take months, but early indications are that the aircraft, stretched to the outer reaches of its range, ran out of fuel. If so, it makes it all the more senseless and needless, bringing an outrageous negligence into play. This didn’t have to happen. This didn’t need to occur.

And I don’t know what to say about this. I’m at a loss for words. The words I know are useless, they know they are useless and they just give up and wander away.

The most heartbreaking image of all was that of the remaining Chapacoense players – those who were injured and couldn’t travel – sitting in the locker room at their home grounds where, a week earlier, there were scenes of wild jubilation after the club had qualified for the Cup final. Three players in total, looking lost in an empty room, having just been told that their teammates, their coaches, their bosses and everyone associated with the club were now gone in an instant.

And what’s struck me the most personally about this is the loss of those journalists traveling to cover the game. I get very upset when journalists are killed while during the course of during their jobs, because I’ve been a journalist for most of my professional life. These are my brothers in arms who have fallen. I take their loss personally. It’s been incredible to listen to numerous reports about the tragedy presented to the world by Brazilian sports journalists, all of whom have lost a friend or a colleague, yet all of whom are doing their jobs and their duty of reporting the news in a situation where most anyone else would want to run away and hide and not talk to anyone. It crushes me to hear their voices. It breaks my heart.

What do you say about this? What are the right words? I ask this because, in the ensuing few paragraphs, I will speak to the future of the club. This in no way is intended to be cold or dismissive of the suffering of the families who lost loved ones. We must control that which we can control, and there is no controlling what has just occurred. I’m not sure how to speak to the grief, the suffering of those affected. I really can’t find the words.

It takes decades to recover from something like this, if you ever really recover at all. Torino F.C. were the greatest team in Italy, if not Europe, in the late 1940s, winning five consecutive league titles and employing the bulk of the Italian national team. The entire team was killed in a plane crash in 1949, an incident which so shook Italian football that the national team chose to take a boat to the 1950 World Cup in Brazil, and Torino F.C. have never been quite the same since, winning on a single Serie A title in the 67 years since. More recently, in 1993, a plane carrying the Zambian National Team crashed off the coast of Libreville, Gabon, on its way to a World Cup qualifier in Dakar. The Chipolopolo were a rising force in African football at the time, having called attention to themselves by crushing Italy 4:0 during the Olympic games, but the national side vanished into obscurity for the next 19 years before pulling off a stunning win in the final of the CAF African Cup of Nations in 2012 – a game which took place in Libreville, Gabon, mere yards from where their compatriots’ plane had crashed 19 years earlier. Chapacoense will regroup and will go on from here. Whether they have any success at all is hard to say – but then again, success is never a guarantee regardless of circumstances.

And in times of tragedy, you often find that you have more friends than you may have realized. The outpouring of support from around the game worldwide continues. It’s a huge game that spans the globe, and yet its still inherently a small and tight-knit community. Most every Brazilian playing abroad speaks with a heavy heart, knowing of someone who was lost in the tragedy. In South America itself, Atletico Nacional, who were favored to beat Chapacoense in the Copa Sudamericana, have said they want no part of it, urging CONMEBOL to award the trophy to their fallen Brazilian opponents as a way to honor their legacy. Whether this will be done or not remains to be seen, but it feels like the right thing to do. (Update: Chapacoense will apparently receive the title.) Other Brazilian clubs have offered to loan players to Chapacoense, and there is talk of exempting the club from possibly being relegated for the next three years as it attempts to put itself back together. And amid all of this, Chapacoense still have one game left to play in the Brazilian season, a home match against Atletico Miniero of Belo Horizonte, even though the club has nothing left save for a handful of grieving players left behind. It doesn’t have a coach, it doesn’t have much of a training staff, there is nothing left.

But they should play. They should play, and they should give the fans in their grieving city a chance to gather, to honor the fallen, and to celebrate their memories. No player would ever want a game to be cancelled on their accord. The game should go on. In order to play the match, Chapacoense will have to cobble together a side, fielding youth team players and loanees along with those who were left behind, but who really cares who plays and what the final score will be? The result itself won’t matter.

They should play the game because it is still a beautiful game, one filled with beautiful moments here and there which, when stitched together, can be magical and memorable. It’s football which had brought all of these people together in the first place, and football will be what brings them together again. And for 90 minutes against Atletico Miniero, those gathered in the stands who have been grieving can instead focus their attention on what’s going on in between the lines, bemoaning a missed defensive assignment leading to a goal or a squandered opportunity on the offensive end – all of those little things which mean nothing in life’s broader context but, during those 90 minutes, come to mean absolutely everything. And when Chapacoense rebuilds, the club’s future will undoubtedly include quite a few matches in which they outplay the opposition, only to have to settle for a draw or maybe even be saddled with a loss. Unjust results in a cruel, cruel game? Perhaps you might come to see it that way. Or perhaps you’ll come to see the results as inconsequential, with the fact that the games are taking place at all, and coming to mean so much again to the players and the people, representing something more akin to an unbreakable winning streak.

#forcachape!

Your NBA Losability Update

A FIFTH of the way into the NBA season seems like a good time to revisit the In Play Lose Losability rankings. Remember, the point of Losability rankings is what is interesting to me at the moment, not necessarily whether or not anyone is good or bad. You’ll notice the bad teams moving up in the rankings, of course, as the inevitable post-New Year tankathon shall soon commence and some of these bad teams will suddenly get really bad. But I’ve got some NBA story lines brewing and percolating in my head at the moment, and so I’m keeping a close eye on a few different things. So here’s what’s interesting me about the NBA at the moment:

30. Charlotte (-2): because you are doing just fine, Buzz City, so carry on.
29. San Antonio (-9): because nothing to see here, just move along (and, oh yeah, Pop is god and you should not forget it.)
28. Utah (-6): because I am reserving all judgment about this team until they finally get healthy.
27. Cleveland (-17): because a supersoft opening schedule with a heavy amount of home cooking hasn’t given them a whole lot of challenges yet, which means they can go out and show off and have some fun here at the start of the season – which is something that they’ve certainly earned the right to do.
26. Brooklyn (-13): because the Nets are just bad. They’ve been a fun bad so far, but still bad.
25. Detroit (0): because this offense is a cure for insomnia; because SVG would fit in well with any sort of political commentary that I do after his post-election rant in Phoenix.
24. Toronto (+2): because I should write a post about how I think instant replay in sports, as presently constructed, is nonsense, and use this ridiculous Raps game in Sacramento as one of many examples; because this team desperately needs a stretch four, but may not have the guts to pull the trigger on a deal; because I love DeRozen and his old school game; because otherwise, all is well in the North so carry on.
23. Atlanta (-8): because in spite of a couple of klunkers here recently, this team has been pretty good; because it’s amazing what happens when you have a coach who understands, first and foremost, that you have to adjust the scheme to the personnel like Mike Budenholzer has done with Dwight Howard, who has suddenly looked quite useful in the center of the Atlanta defense.
22. Memphis (-4): because this team is actually pretty good when everyone is healthy; because how long will the run of good health last?
21. Dallas (+2): because the Mavericks are having that sort of lost season which can happen to a mid-level veteran team where the injuries pile up and nothing goes right and everyone suddenly looks old and slow; because after 16 straight winning seasons, this is one team which has certainly earned a mulligan and a disastrous season like this one won’t count against anyone; because holy shit, Harrison Barnes has actually been good; because Andrew Bogut has been mediocre, just as he was in Golden State, but everyone around here talks about how much they miss Bogut’s rim protection, which is weird to me, as it would appear Bogut is the type of player who is really good in everyone’s minds when he isn’t actually playing.
20. Miami (-6): because this team is the most prime candidate for a full-on tank job and a rebuild; because until that happens, they are simply unwatchable.
19. Milwaukee (+8): because Greek Freak and Jabari Parker and Co. have a few really good moments and a few really bad quarters of an hour; because you can see the potential there, especially with Greek Freak at the point, but there’s just not enough focus nor consistency, and they still can’t shoot; because they’re probably not good enough to make the playoffs, but not bad enough to get a good pick in the draft, and that’s not really an ideal place to be.
18. L.A. Lakers (-6): because as expected, this team is bringing back the fun and Luke Walton is doing a great job with his young players; because at some point, teams will start to figure them out and all of that youthful enthusiasm stops working, and you have to actually act like you know what you’re doing out there on the court; because this team will probably keep getting super amped up for big games against big teams, but it’s all of the games against the league’s middle class – playoff level teams who don’t take the night off – that will be ugly.
17. Denver (+12): because this is a weird team; because you’d think that, if you’re going to turn over the keys to one guy and expect him to run the show, you’d do it with someone unlike Emmanuel Mudiay – i.e., someone who actually knows how to play NBA basketball.
16. Orlando (+8): because this is one of the ugliest offensive teams I’ve seen in the NBA in a long time; because their offseason moves would indicate they had aspirations of being a playoff team; because that’s about the only thing their offseason moves indicate, since the roster is so misfitting that I have no idea what they honestly thought they would accomplish.
15. Indiana (+6): because this is one of the many Prometheus Bound NBA franchises at the moment, a nightly act of Greek Tragedy in which the hero is chained to a bad roster and forced to move boulders all by himself in order to be successful – in this case Paul George, who has to do everything on both ends on the floor; because George’s burden is especially large on the defensive end, given that the rest of the Pacers can’t guard the floor they are standing on.
14. Houston (-6): because this is Prometheus Bound, Act II, with James Harden putting up some ridiculous numbers far and beyond anything else his teammates are doing; because unlike the others franchises of this type, the Rockets are actually halfway decent; because the offense hasn’t been as good as I hoped, and the defense hasn’t been as bad as I hoped, which means they’re sort of meh at the moment.
13. Philadelphia (-8): because I love me some Sixers, of course, and I have felt their pain, and the Sixers have been frisky and feisty here of late and I always appreciate them playing hard; because I enjoy watching Embiid and think he is a special talent, but I still don’t think I’ve ever seen him throw a pass; because the offense is still a claustrophobic mess and, even with the unforeseen quasi-revival of Sauce Castillo’s career, this team still needs to improve its guard play; because now that they’re not tanking and simply bad, they’re not nearly as interesting.
12. L.A. Clippers (-5): because they’ve been impressive at both ends of the floor so far this season and have been refreshingly drama free; because there is something to be said for continuity in an ADD league where the tendency is to gravitate towards fads and shiny objects; because having said that, they still need a three, and Mbah a Moute making a bunch of unmissable shots because he’s so wide open doesn’t change that; because I’ll be curious to see how they handle this first game coming up against the Dubs next week, since the Dubs have had their number and that was even before KD arrives, whom the Clips don’t really have an answer for. Speaking of which …
11. Golden State (-10): because welcome to the fish bowl, where every single thing that ever even slightly goes wrong gets magnified and blown out of proportion; because this is what’s bound to happen when you sign KD; because jesus, KD is even better than I thought, which is saying something, because I already thought he was one of the 5 players in the league; because nothing else matters between now and April, anyway, so just sit back and enjoy some beautiful basketball.
10. Chicago (-6): because maybe this team is better than we thought they would be; because I suppose it makes sense they would get off to a good start, given that we’ve got here some seasoned vets and old pros and title winners on this team who do, in fact, know what they’re doing; because I’m still somewhat skeptical, seeing as how D-Wade is suddenly nailing threes off the dribble; because I’m not at all skeptical about Jimmy Butler.
9. Phoenix (+2): because I have no idea what this team is trying to do; because while it may make sense to draft a raw talent like Dragan Bender and bring him along slowly, or draft a raw talent like Marquese Chriss and bring him along slowly, it doesn’t make sense to have two of those guys on your roster at the same time and playing the same position; because the guard rotation doesn’t make much sense, either; because this team would be smart to move Bledsoe and Knight at the deadline, build around Booker and TJ Warren and give up on this season completely, but the words “smart” and “Suns” are rarely uttered in the same sentence.
8. New York (-2): because in a shocking development, the Knicks have more or less junked the Zen Master’s triangle offense and started running more stuff through Porzingis and, lo and behold, they actually look like a competent basketball team; because that terrible contract they gave to Joachim Noah looks worse every time he steps on the floor; because so long as you have Phil Jackson around to pop off and say something stupid, there is always high potential for needless drama.
7. Boston (+2): because I wouldn’t read much of anything into their so-so start to the season, given the injury problems at the outset; because at 9-7 as of this writing, they’re in pretty good shape and should get better; because this is still the most interesting team in the league by far in terms of their possibility to make a move and add players, and how likely they are to make a big move may depend as much as what they see taking place in Brooklyn as anything they’re doing, since every Nets win makes that #1 pick the Celtics hold in the 2017 draft potentially less valuable, and so it is something of a tricky balancing act trying to figure out if/when to buy/sell.
6. Washington (+24): because this is our big mover in these rankings, all the way up from 30th, which is where I had them because I figured they’d be a boring .500 team that went nowhere; because instead they are a mess, and their two best players don’t like each other, one of whom – John Wall – feels he’s underpaid now and the other of whom – Bradley Beal – got a max contract despite being made of glass; because oh yeah, the bench sucks; because the Buzzards sunk $35 million into Scotty Brooks as a coach, when it seemed to me that the entirety of Brooks’ success in OKC was predicated on having KD and Russ and James Harden on his team.
5. Portland (+14): because I hated their offseason moves, and this is one of the perils of the NBA, whereby having money to spend one season translates into sunk costs the next, and it’s impossible to look at Evan Turner and Alan Crabbe and Festus Ezeli as anything other than sunk costs at this point; because the defense sucks, which makes for wildly entertaining games but doesn’t translate into wins; because regressing to the mean is a bitch, and because another peril of the NBA is overachieving, as the expectations rise further upward than you may be able to deliver.
4. Minnesota (+12): because I hate the way this team is being coached, as you’ve already got Thibs overplaying his starters and refusing to go small and saddling his lineup with a point guard in Rubio who can’t shoot and a four-man in Dieng who just seems to get in everyone else’s way; because Thibs is also the president of the club, and I don’t think anyone should have both of those jobs; because all of those moments of individual brilliance don’t add up to anything remotely resembling a cohesive unit.
3. Oklahoma City (0): because Prometheus Bound, Act III; because for all of his hellfire and fury, Russell Westbrook alone cannot possibly win enough games through reckless abandon and sheer determination; because it’s amusing to watch him try, since what else is he going to do?; because can anyone on this team make a shot?; because with so few shooting options on this team, defenses are just packed in, which means that Adams and Kanter, OKC’s two excellent bigs, have no room to operate on the glass and turn the ball over too much when they do actually get the ball; because are we sure that Billy Donovan can actually coach an NBA team?
2. Sacramento (0): because Prometheus Bound, Act IV; because the NBA’s most delusional franchise will likely not do what they should, which is to trade Boogie Cousins before the deadline, because they still think a) he’ll re-sign with them, and b) they can still make the playoffs; because Rudy Gay has looked decent so far this season in a “hey, he’s a decent player and maybe we should trade for him” sort of way; because how bad did the in-fighting within the Memphis organization have to be in order to make Dave Joerger think that taking the Kings coaching job was an upgrade?
1. New Orleans (+16): because Prometheus Bound, Act V; because the idea that Anthony Davis is going to spend the prime of his career with this abject and utterly hopeless franchise is depressing.