Stuff That Sucks

Thank god for basketball

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Catch-22

Mad hops

22 POINTS about the state of the NBA. First the failures, and then it’s onto the playoffs after that. I’m going to keep this quick, because I have a short attention span. To the buzzard points!

• Erik Spoelstra is Coach of the Year for his act of sorcery that was somehow taking a Miami team with a garbage roster, that was designed to be terrible, and which started the season 11-30, and getting them to a .500 season and within a game of the playoffs. The Heat were far more fun, and frankly far better at season’s end, than about half the teams that wound up making the playoffs. It’s surreal to even think that the Heat’s season turned for worse with the ankle injury that led to the demise of the Dion Waiters Experience. The Heat are now in a strange place going forward, in that the roster still isn’t very good, but neither is the draft pick they get, and they could resign Waiters, who was brilliant for them, but choice free agents are few and far between this summer, which means Waiters could get really expensive, and I can’t believe I’m talking about Dion Fricking Waiters as being a choice free agent at all.

• “We’re a shit team, but we’re an underrated shit team.”
          
– Dallas Mavericks coach Rick Carlisle, with the quote of the year in the NBA.

• Just because the Cousins trade didn’t result in a playoff spot for the Pelicans, it doesn’t mean that it was the wrong idea. New Orleans wasn’t going anywhere to begin with. Now they have an offseason to come up with an offense for both Boogie and AD, but their more pressing problem is that they probably will have to overpay to resign Jrue Holliday, and you could pretty much replace every other player on the roster and not be the worse for it.

• The Lose is very much opposed to the Coach as Executive model. The main reason for this is that it makes it that much harder, and that much more expensive, to get rid of someone who has dual roles in the organization and doesn’t seem to know what they’re doing in either case. And that’s all I need to say about the Detroit Pistons.

• Along the same lines, I hated literally everything that I saw out of Minnesota this year. Andrew Wiggins wins a box of twinkies for putting up the most empty calorie numbers in the league. He and KAT can stuff the stat sheet, but if you don’t guard anyone, who cares? Having said that, the coach-friendly basketball media wouldn’t dare suggest that the real problem in Minnesota was a bunch of strange lineups and inexplicable offensive sets, but instead it’s about how immature the players are. Fortunately, I’m not in the coach-friendly basketball media. That was the worst coaching job in the NBA this season.

• Two helpful hints for the Denver Nuggets. Firstly, if you want to make the playoffs and you’re vying for the last spot, maybe don’t trade a starting center to your closest competitor. The Nurkic trade to Portland was one of the strangest deadline deals I can recall seeing. Secondly, maybe guard someone. Anyone. Anyone at all.

• Phonerz J. Day, the Official Jeremy Lin Fanboy of In Play Lose, is quick to point out to me that with Lin in the lineup, the Nets were merely bad, as opposed to being reprehensible without him. It speaks to the nature of the NBA now that simply having a safe pair of hands at the point enables you to actually almost function as a competent team. As expected, Brooklyn were a fun bad this season. GM Sean Marks had the right idea last offseason, which was just to throw a lot of money at restricted free agents and force teams to swallow their pride and match the offer sheets. Anyone you might land is an upgrade on the roster, and if you miss, some other team takes a hit because of it. I’d expect the same thing this summer. There is no downside for the Nets, at this point, in trying just about anything to acquire talent.

• We’ve been over the Sacramento Kings already. It would be the most Kings thing ever to a) land the #1 pick in the lottery, which they would then have to flip to the 76ers; and b) have the ping-pong balls bounce in such a way that the Pelicans get either the 2nd or 3rd pick, since the pick NOLA traded for Boogie is Top-3 protected.

• I don’t really have much of anything to say about Charlotte, because they’ve become the least interesting team in the NBA. Kind of a lost season for them in which there were a whole lot of injuries and basically everything else went wrong. But it speaks to the continued mediocrity of the East that this was a #4 seed in the playoffs last season, because I don’t actually look at this team as being all that much worse than they were a year ago.

• You can usually rely upon the NBA’s Chief Exec for one completely inane quote a year, and Adam Silver came up with this peach when asked about teams completely giving up on the season like the Phoenix Suns did: “I would categorize that as a different kind of resting.” (Yes, he really said that.) The Suns were always going to be terrible, but then they made it a point to sit every vet on the roster and lose 13 in a row in order to ensure they’d have the worst record in the West and 2nd-worst overall. The way the NBA could end this charade, of course, would be to eliminate the draft lottery entirely, and also eliminate the ability of teams to protect draft choices in trades. So long as you continue to enable those two things, and continue to perpetuate a system of perverse incentives, teams are rightly going to throw in the towel and give up, because the nonzero chance of landing a top pick exceeds the 0% chance you have of beating the Warriors when you’re the #8 seed in the playoffs, and every loss improves your odds. A season ticket in Phoenix or Philadelphia is a far bigger rip-off for the fans than some one-off Saturday night game where LeBron or Steph Curry doesn’t play. But the NBA won’t do that sort of thing, of course, because it’s a problem it’s created for itself, and you can’t blame the players for it. And yes, this spiel about the league’s wider problem with tanking is my way of getting around saying anything more about the Suns.

• The Lose loves the fact that the Lakers won five in a row at the end of the season, thus slipping to third-worst record in the league. If L.A. misses the Top 3 in the lottery this year, not only do they have to give up their pick to Philly, but they also have to transfer their 2019 draft pack to Orlando – consequences of the bad trades for Steve Nash and Dwight Howard many years ago. The Lakers started 10-10 and then partook in one of the more concerted tanking efforts I’ve ever seen, going 11-45 before they inexplicably started to win at the end of the season. They won games despite trying not to – Luke Walton would yank anyone having a good game out at half and sit them the rest of the game, and then they were doing nonsensical things like running isos for Metta World Peace so he could shoot threes. They won anyway. They won in spite of themselves, and I applaud the players for having pride and playing hard and showing the collective middle finger to the front office who expected them to fail. Meanwhile, the six Buss siblings in charge of the franchise have been battling it out amongst themselves in the boardroom and in the courtroom in a plot line straight out of Game of Thrones. Jeanie Buss’ first action, having wrested control of the club from the others, was to put Magic Johnson in charge, which may be good on the P.R. front but not necessarily good on the basketball front. His hiring of Rob Pelinka as the GM doesn’t exactly fill me with much confidence – Pelinka being noteworthy for being Kobe’s agent, and managing to coax out of previous Lakers’ brass a final contract for Kobe that single-handedly crippled the franchise for about five years. Then again, Pelinka must have known what he was doing as an agent, since none of his other clients have signed in L.A. in recent years.

• The writing was probably on the wall in Orlando for now ex-GM Rob Hennigan before this pic of his literal writing on the wall – his offseason strategizing which included a wish list of players and a suggestion of possible trades of existing players – got tweeted out by an agent of a player signing a late-season contract. I mentioned previously that Orlando was the worst team that I saw all season. It’s not because of their record but because of the fact that it’s the most bizarrely constructed roster imaginable and, whereas you have some hope for the future with players like Booker in Phoenix and KAT in Minnesota and Embiid in Philadelphia to hang your hat on, there isn’t a single player on this roster, after five years of drafting in the Top 10, who you could legitimately say could even start for a competent NBA team, but less be good enough to build a franchise around. And then you had the whole Serge Ibaka axis of trades, where you gave up your best player, Victor Oladipo, and a good draft pick to OKC and wound up getting a bench player, Terrence Ross, and a bad draft pick from Toronto. What on earth was that? I have no idea what team is doing.

• We already saw the downside of Hinkieism play out in Philadelphia this season, as having amassed so many big men, with no space on the floor for all of them and not enough minutes to go around, that the 76ers had to ship Nerlens Noel to Dallas for about 50¢ on the dollar. Now, The Lose in no way thinks Nerlens Noel is a great player, but he could be a very useful player, particularly in a place like Dallas, where they had a disastrous and injury-laden season but otherwise know what they’re doing. There were no takers for Okafor, and Philly’s going to wind up getting about 20¢ on the dollar for him if/when they ever move him. Sam Hinkie, of course, did wonders at accruing assets, but at some point assets have to actually translate into players who can stay on the court and win some games, which still isn’t happening in Philadelphia, as Simmons missed the whole year and Embiid only played 31 games – albeit delightful games, mind you. And it doesn’t matter if they wind up with three lottery picks if the ping pong balls fall in such a way that the Kings’ and Lakers’ picks wind up in Philly’s possession if they don’t actually get any guards in this offseason. Hinkie apologists, of course, look at all of Philly’s assets and say he “set them up for the future,” which assumes rather foolishly that Hinkie would’ve had any idea what to do with all of this stuff, and also assumes that the NBA’s other GMs would’ve continued to be stupid in dealing with him – an assumption which, when talking about anyone other than Sacramento or Phoenix, is an unwise one.

• Rather than waste ink and air on the New York Knicks, I’ll let the pros handle this one. Even that rather comprehensive analysis sells the dysfunction short, simply because there isn’t enough time in the day to talk about how bad this team is. Seriously, you could probably write an entire book about the train wreck that was the Knicks season, and still wind up leaving out some of the gory details.

To the playoffs!

• Ty Lue hinted during the run in, as the Cavs were gagging up leads and generally proving unable to guard their own shadows, that he was holding back some defensive ploys for the playoffs. Whatever the secret defense is, he might want to share it with his players. The Cavs shot about 70% at times in the first half, but were barely able to eke out a 109:108 win in Game 1 in which they again coughed up a huge lead, ultimately prevailing in part because the Indiana Pacers ran one of the dumbest out-of-bounds plays imaginable down one with 20 seconds left – a play in which they stand around like statues and act as if they’ve never seen a double-team before. Obviously, you take the wins and you move forward, but gadzooks, that team can’t stop anyone at the point and they can’t protect the rim. It’s not like Indiana’s a juggernaut on offense and the Pacers got almost any shot they wanted.

[Late Monday Night Update: The defense is still bad, but Cleveland prevails 117:111 in Game 2, in part because the Pacers fell way behind after going away from what was a successful strategy in the 1st half, which was having Teague repeatedly torch Kyrie, who did little to disprove my contention that he is, in fact, the worst on-ball defender in the NBA.]

• A good adage in the NBA playoffs has always been that the team with the best player on the floor always has a chance to win, and while we’re all right to think Toronto may have the depth and diversity needed to make a deep playoff run (and also probably right to question whether they have the mental fortitude for it), it’s pretty obvious watching Game 1 that the other guys wearing the green have the best player, and he’s the best player by far, and we all may have discounted that. Giannis is probably going to wind up somewhere in the 5th-7th range in the MVP voting for a reason. He may be even better than we think he is, at this point in his career, which is good enough to win a playoff series all by himself. I swear, if that kid ever develops a jump shot, we may all just have to give up.

• The most noticeable thing about the San Antonio-Memphis series is the fact that Kawhi Leonard doesn’t have to actually do anything. The Grizzlies have had this hole in their lineup pretty much forever, always seeming to have one guy on the floor who can’t shoot. The Spurs, somewhat wisely, have Kawhi “guard” that guy, which means he doesn’t have to do any heavy lifting and he can just drift around and play free safety. Oh, if for some reason the Spurs get in trouble, I’m sure they’ll shift Kawhi over and have him go ruin Mike Conley’s day, but in the mean time, Kawhi can just dominate on the offensive end of things. He can’t get away with this in the future against the Rockets, of course, but in the short term, it makes for a nice breather.

[Late Monday Night Update: Memphis coach David Fizdale is my hero of the day. Pass the hat around, because the fine for that rant will be substantial.]

• The Lose was a big advocate of the Celtics using their many Nets draft picks to try and swing a big deal this spring. I mean, think about the situation: the Cavs are vulnerable in the East this year, and while I wouldn’t think the Celtics would stand that much of a chance in the finals, they have shown an ability to beat the Warriors and make things really uncomfortable for them the past two seasons. And sure enough, the guy I would’ve liked to see them go get – Jimmy Butler – was dropping 30 on them yesterday in the Bulls win over the Celtics in Game 1. What a horrible team the Bulls are to watch. Yesterday’s game was a case where their biggest weakness – the fact they can’t shoot a lick – turned out to be their greatest strength, because the Celtics are a terrible rebounding team. The Bulls strategy for that game was basically to throw a brick and chase down the rebound, and it worked. But back to the Celts here for a moment: we love Isaiah Thomas, we absolutely love him and I, like everyone, wish him nothing but the best in the light of the tragedy of his sister being killed over the weekend. He played a great game yesterday in light of that. Isaiah is great, but he’s also about 5’7” and poses a really awkward dilemma for Boston going forward: if you’re the Celtics, do you want to give a big contract extension year after next to a 5’7” guy who will be 30 years old? You don’t feel great about that, of course. The easy solution to that dilemma would be to have the #1 pick in this year’s draft fall in your lap in a year where the two best players in the draft are point guards, at which point you anoint Fultz or Ball as your point guard of the future and Isaiah suddenly becomes expendable. That possibility is why, ultimately, I don’t think Danny Ainge was willing to make a deal this spring which would’ve brought Butler or possibly Paul George over. It’s an attempt to solve a future problem by not addressing a present need. But I’m not sure where the answer is here. I think for the Nets swap rights and a bunch of stuff, getting a Jimmy Butler from the Bulls would’ve been worth it, but I can also see why they didn’t make the deal. But like I said about the Sixers, at some point amassing assets has to translate into good players, and while I think the Celtics are a nice team, I always think all of that wheeling and dealing has also netted them a flawed team.

• The Rockets are uniquely poised to annoy OKC into submission, because they have Patrick Beverley on their team. Beverley, of course, infamously ran into Russell Westbrook in the 2013 playoffs. Westbrook injured his knee and the season was basically over for OKC, and Beverly was Public Enemy #1 in OKC after that – at least up until KD left, anyway. Beverly is a great, tenacious defender and is also a complete pest, and now that he’s healthy, the Rockets can fully embrace a strategy which the Warriors partake in regularly when playing OKC, which is to basically bait and agitate Westbrook to the point where he tries to go all superhero and then completely loses track of any sort of team concept. (Everyone in the NBA media here in the Bay Area know this, of course, which is why no one here is particularly impressed by Westbrook’s season of stat padding.) With a roster of specialists and one-note players, there is never a Plan B in OKC, and that was only a game until Harden found his stroke, at which point it became a laugher. Westbrook was the third-best point guard on the floor last night, as Beverly ate him up before being swallowed whole by Steven Adams:

• If I’m the Blazers, I do not play Jusuf Nurkic in this series. The arrival of Nurkic turned the season around in Portland, as suddenly the Blazers have a skilled, 15-and-10 big to go with their devastating backcourt. He broke his leg two weeks ago, and there have been reports he wants to try to play against the Warriors. Don’t do it. It’s not worth it. You’re not beating the Warriors. CJ and Dame went for 75 yesterday and they still lost by double digits because their front court is a tire fire. Nurkic will help in that regard, of course, and will at least keep Draymond busy and not allow him to play free safety and block everything at the rim, but you need more than one more guy to beat the Warriors. The Blazers guards played about as well as they possibly could on Sunday, but the rest of the roster is no good, they don’t pass the ball well enough, and any time the Warriors want, they can just throw the ball to KD, who scored the quietest 32 points ever. It’s not worth risking the future and rushing a 22 year old with a broken leg back for this series.

• In thinking about the Eastern playoffs, and thinking up crazy possibilities and outcomes, I keep coming back to the same question again and again: who in the East is going to stop John Wall? Certainly not the Hawks.

• Oh, you wacky Clippers. Never stop clippin’ you Clips.

Lose Thyself

How did you fuck this up? YOU’RE STANDING RIGHT THERE!

“I wish I loved anything as much as the Masters loves itself.”
– Scott Pianowski, Yahoo Sports

NOW that the NCAA Tournament has concluded in decidedly unsatisfying action, CBS can pivot and suck up to the bastion of smugness and self-importance that is The Masters. There are no sacred cows here at In Play Lose, and one which deserves to be taken down more than any other is golf. Golf is garbage. Golf is a good walk spoiled and a waste of open space. Golf is the only sport where I actively enjoy watching guys screw up and look forward to it happening. When Jordan Spieth choked away the Masters in 2016, it was the first thing I’ve found about golf worth caring about in decades.

That it’s such a stupid game takes away from some things about it that are laudable. For instance, I love the idea of the cut. If you suck the first two rounds, they throw your ass out of the tournament and you get no money. Good. You played terrible, you deserve nothing. Likewise, if you’re not in the Top 125 for the season, they throw your ass off the PGA Tour and you have to go to Q School to get back. I appreciate that players police themselves and that they report their own infractions. All of that is good stuff. But then you have something as dumb as what happened on the LPGA Tour last weekend, when Lexi Thompson, who was well on her way to winning the tournament, was suddenly assessed a four-stroke penalty in the middle of the final round on account of a rules violation from the previous day – a violation which no one involved in the tournament had noticed and was imposed after it had been pointed out by a television viewer in an email, and you see just how stupid the rules of this game actually are. That the rules of a game can permit a viewer at home to directly affect the outcome like this is the single-most most ridiculous thing that I have ever heard of in sports.

When you are a spectator, you are there to watch and nothing more. You should never have a direct hand in the outcome. Players make mistakes, like Lexi Thompson did in that case, and officials make mistakes as well, some of which seem outrageous – in the NCAA Final, it seems impossible that the zeeb standing right there missed North Carolina’s Kennedy Meeks being out of bounds with :50 left in the game and the Tar Heels clinging to a 1-point lead. (We’ll get into that mess in a minute). But missed calls are a part of the game, ultimately, and we shouldn’t be altering results from afar – afar being, in Lexi Thompson’s case, as far away as someone’s livingroom.

• Speaking of undo outside influence on sports, one of the most awkward and preposterous of scenarios is going to come into play here in the next few weeks when the media members vote on the All-NBA teams. This is because the NBA, in their knee-jerk reaction to Durant going to the Warriors, and the superstar-driven Players Union, in their desire to get paid above all else, created one of the worst systems imaginable for determining compensation, which is to create a tier of players eligible for enormous extensions from their existing clubs based upon being named to All-NBA teams.
The consequences of this are fairly enormous. For a player, it could mean up upwards of a $70,000,000 difference in the value of their future contract. For the team, meanwhile, it also can create an enormous dilemma: do you really want to invest that much for that long in one player? One of the reasons why the Sacramento Kings were desperate to unload Boogie Cousins was the fact that they couldn’t justify to themselves doling out a $200,000,000 contract to a guy who is a complete head case and a complete pain in the ass. There are two players in particular – Paul George in Indiana and Gordon Hayward in Utah – who have had tremendous seasons, who are in the discussion among the media set for receiving votes for all-NBA, and whose future contract situations for their employers are likely going to be determined by whether or not they get enough votes from reporters and broadcasters to be named all-NBA.
And if I’m part of the NBA media – a lot of whom I follow online, and a lot of whom take this seriously – I want absolutely no part of this vote. It’s not up to me to make the news. It shouldn’t be up to me to have a hand in determining the fates of the Pacers and the Jazz and the Kings and anyone else. But the NBA has proven remarkably good over the years at creating its own absurdity. Whatever CBA the two sides come to ratify every few years is always full of loopholes and absurdities and unintended consequences. You can understand why the image-conscious set in the league’s New York offices get so upset when LeBron and Steph and the sort are sitting out games, however – their brilliance on the floor does well to mask all of the lunacy that takes place off of it.

• The Lose is down with women’s sports, and has always been down with women’s sports, and one of the things which I find curious is the fact that we here in the U.S. laud and praise and fawn all over our women’s national soccer team, who are great but who also act like a bunch of drama queens a lot of the time, and yet we pay pretty much no attention at all our women’s national basketball team, who are arguably one of the greatest teams in the history of sports. The U.S. women have won six Olympic gold medals in a row and have lost one game in that past 18 years. They’re so dominant that whomever they pulverize in the Olympics or the World Championships are basically just happy to be there. We’re a nation that loves winners and loves excellence, but the U.S. women’s basketball team may, in fact, be too good for their own good, because if all someone ever does is win, there really is no drama and no competition and, thus, there is no reason to watch it after a while.
Thus you have the dilemma of the University of Connecticut women’s basketball team, who only seem to make national headlines now when they lose – which doesn’t happen often it at all. The Huskies had their 111-game winning streak snapped last Friday in Dallas, losing 64:62 in OT to Mississippi State and it was national news, because it had been so long since UConn had lost a game that losing no longer seemed possible.
And in an instant, the sport of women’s college basketball became interesting.
The two teams played a year ago in the Sweet 16, and UConn won by 60 points. Mississippi State were listed as a 21-point underdog for the game last Friday, were +2000 straight up in Las Vegas, and a Huskies win was considered such a given that you could still get +400 betting on the Bulldogs straight up at halftime of the game, even though Mississippi State had an 8-point lead. And this was for a national semifinal, mind you. Mississippi State were a #2 seed in their regional, meaning they were considered to be one of the eight best teams in the country going into the tournament. Any #1 vs. #2 matchup on the men’s side would likely produce one of the tourney’s best games. On the women’s side, when the #1 is UConn, it’s just another blowout.
Being one who is a purveyor of everything that is done badly is only truly possible if you appreciate excellence first, and Connecticut certainly are that. But there is a sense of self-perpetuation about the Huskies at this point – if you’re the female equivalent of a 5-star recruit, there is nowhere else you’d ever even think to go to school, and unlike on the men’s side, where the best players are gone after one or two years, the women play four years of college, meaning not only does Connecticut have all of the best talent but they get to keep them all for four years time and actually develop cohesive squads. But other than the odd blip here and there, when a freak athlete like Brittney Griner winds up at Baylor, the game consists basically of UConn and everyone else.
And ultimately, that isn’t good for the game as a whole. You can certainly appreciate that sort of greatness for what it is, but when it feels as if all that UConn has to do it show up and roll the ball out and they’ll win, it almost trivializes the efforts that it took to be that good in the first place. Soccer fans will understand this feeling, to be sure – why would a casual fan even bother to follow Serie A or the Bundesliga after a while, when it’s obvious from the get-go that Juventus and Bayern Munich are going to win the league? If a team goes 111 games without a loss, it feels about as close to inevitable as it can get, but we don’t like inevitable and we only like dynasties to a point. The great upset, like Mississippi State pulled last Friday, is inevitably a triumph of the imagination and a reminder of what is possible. And it’s only when you tap into those possibilities that you can truly grow.

• Having felled the Soviet Union on the sport, the gals from Mississippi State then promptly messed up their own personal Miracle of Ice by losing to Finland. Mississippi State got beat by South Carolina 67:55 in the NCAA Final, and it might have helped their cause if their head coach, Vic Schaefer, hadn’t made one of the more moronic coaching moves I’ve seen in a long time, which was to have point guard Morgan William – who hit the game winning shot against UConn, and who scored 41 in MSU’s regional final win over Baylor – sitting next to him on the bench during the entire 4th Quarter, when South Carolina went on a 12-0 run to put the game away.
We’ve created this bastion of largesse that is the cult of the college coach in America and, as such, we have a tendency to absolve them of blame when they screw up. College coaches, being a selfish and self-preservationist lot, have of course figured this out and always do a nice job of subtly shifting the blame to their players when they lose. And since the sports media in this country that covers college sports is predominantly composed of former coaches and guys who seem to aspire to be coaches, it’s easy for them to gloss over the fact that coaches do, in fact, screw up.
They do it a lot, in fact, and sometimes on the highest stage. (An associate of Dean Smith’s once said the only two things he wouldn’t talk about were his divorce and “the Marquette game,” the 1977 NCAA Final where his strategic ploys backfired, he got outcoached by Al McGuire,  and Marquette wound up an upset winner.) Some in the media attempted to ascribe ulterior motives to Schaefer’s ploy against South Carolina – he was “trying to send a message” to his player, who was, in fact, having a pretty bad game – but I’m dubious of attaching any motivation other than that he played a hunch and it blew up in his face. The aphorism Hanlon’s razor is applicable here: never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

• The men’s NCAA final followed a fairly typical script in which the team that, to my eye, seems to be the better team – in this case Gonzaga – plays poorly and loses, while the team that isn’t as good – North Carolina – wins by doing whatever it can to make the game into a mediocre mess. Both teams were basically dreadful, and the officials contributed to the morass by calling 44 fouls and killing the flow of the game. Some of my more conspiratorial of friends have suggested this game followed another familiar pattern, whereby the lesser-pedigreed team ultimately got screwed over by the officials, but what more seemed the case to me was that Gonzaga blew the game in the first half, when North Carolina was terrible and the Zags had numerous chances to build a big lead, only to miss open shots and let the Heels back in the game. I had no real dog in this hunt: I would have liked to see Gonzaga win since I’m from that part of the country, but I also have always appreciated the fact that Roy Williams is one of the few coaches who wants his teams to attack and play fast and be creative in an era where most supposedly “great” coaches take the easy way out and just play defense all the time. I just wanted to see a good game, which I didn’t get.
I cared very little about the NCAA tournament this year. For the first time in over 30 years, I didn’t fill out a bracket. The Midwest Regional final between Oregon and Kansas was the first full game of college basketball I had watched all year. I used to be able to excuse the generally nervy and poor play you’d see in the NCAA tourney simply because the event was a great theatre piece. But while it’s improved somewhat with the new rule changes, the game still basically sucks. I’ve never had any delusions that college basketball was anywhere near the NBA in terms of caliber, but the margin seems greater to me than ever. You can understand why it is that the NBA is disinclined to want to draft any kid who has spent four years playing college basketball, since it’s likely the kid didn’t improve, and likely didn’t learn anything about playing the game while they were there.
And this is unfortunate, because basketball, as a whole, has benefitted greatly over the years from the lab experiment nature of the college game – coaches, when facing talent gaps, have always had to come up with different and unique approaches. Most everything that is good about today’s NBA – the pace, the spacing, the geometry – finds its origins in the lunacy that was Loyola Marymount in the late 1980s. There hasn’t been anything remotely innovative on a college floor in years. What shortening the shot clock in the NCAA has primarily achieved is cutting down the amount of time teams waste running some meaningless offensive pattern that’s been drilled into them by their head coach. They all still go into panic mode with :10 on the shot clock, having gone about making themselves eminently guardable, but at least it happens sooner.
And the whole business of college sports is so rotten that I can’t get too enthused about it – along with the fact that we basically pay lip service to the rot, like the Monday night telecast did when glossing over the perpetual academic fraud case at North Carolina. Keep in mind that Roy Williams earned a $250,000 bonus for winning the national title, while his players all got groovy T-shirts and hats.
And if you didn’t need reminding of just how fucked up the world of big-time college sports is, I recommend that you watch the recent Showtime documentary Disgraced about Patrick Dennehy, a Baylor basketball player who was murdered by a teammate in 2003, at which point Baylor head coach Dave Bliss attempted to cover his ass and got caught, on tape, telling staffers they should lie to the authorities and portray the deceased as being a drug dealer, among other things. This has always been a case of interest for me simply because I was living in Santa Fe and working in the media when Bliss was the head coach at New Mexico, before he took the Baylor job, and where Dennehy played for one season before transferring. Bliss had come to New Mexico from SMU, where his best player has since admitted he was paid amid other allegations, and while there were never any formal allegations of impropriety at New Mexico there were always rumors and innuendo floating about. One of the problems with big-time college sports is that there are always rumors and innuendo flying about, and officials turn a blind eye to the fire that accompanies that smoke. But we do turn that blind eye to it, going so far as to try and gloss over behavior that turns from unethical to criminal, much as what has happened at Penn State and, now on two occasions, at Baylor. Amazingly enough, Bliss got another coaching gig eventually, which he just resigned in light of this documentary and after running his mouth again, whereas the assistant who turned him in has never gotten another job and is now doing educational work with the Texas prison system.
Bliss was toiling away at Southwestern Christian University, lest you think the rot and sleaze of college sports only affects the big time programs. My favorite recent example of this was an article in Sports Illustrated documenting a spate of graduate transfers in college basketball. The graduate transfer rule has been around for a decade, and states that if you graduate from your university but still have eligibility to play, you can enroll at a different school in a graduate program and play immediately. No one ever gave this much thought until Russell Wilson did it and went from being the starting QB at N.C. State to leading the Wisconsin Badgers to a Rose Bowl. More and more players are doing this, particularly in college basketball, and among the great comments in this college sports suck-up piece bemoaning the scourge of graduate transfers from smaller programs to larger ones is the idea that some coaches are, in fact, attempting to slow their kids’ academic progress. Are you serious? What in the hell is wrong with these people?
As time goes on, I further and further distance myself from the corrupt, unjust, and disgusting industrial complex that is the NCAA. I just want nothing more to do with it. That means caring less and less about things like the NCAA tournament – an event that I used to love. I just can’t make myself care any more. I’m better off for not caring. Watching the NCAA Final is proof, in fact, that I probably still care too much. If I’m going to point the finger at others for perpetrating the hoax of college sports, I should also point it at myself for watching it all this time.

Around the Rim and Out

The Clips gonna Clip ...

FIRST up, we have to give it up for the Clippers, who pulled off one of the more remarkable choke jobs that we’ve seen in the NBA regular season in quite a while on Sunday night. “The Clips gonna Clip,” as they say on ESPN, but this sorry failure of a franchise outdid even their own legacy of failure on Sunday, losing 98-97 to Sacramento that night in a game in which the Clippers held a 94-75 lead with 4:59 remaining, only to see the Kings go on a 23-3 run to close out the game. To put this in proper perspective, over the past 20 years in the NBA, teams leading by 18+ points with less than 5:00 to go were 6746-0.

I would say that I’ve never seen anything like this in the NBA, but friend of the blog Quinn, the official Furman Paladin of In Play Lose, managed to comb through the NBA archives and locate this wacko playoff game from 1986 in which the Washington Buzzards Wizards Bullets were down 17 against the 76ers and scored 18 straight points to win the game. I sort of vaguely remember that game. And in the annals of Clippers history, of course, this choke actually pales in comparison to the one two seasons ago in the playoffs, when they were leading by 19 late in the 3rd Quarter of Game 6 against the Houston Rockets, leading the series 3-2 and just a quarter away from the Western Conference Finals, and they proceeded to blow the lead against the Rockets bench, no less, as James Harden was sitting next to Kevin McHale over there while Josh Steph and Curry Brewer – I mean, uh, Josh Smith and Corey Brewer – started draining treys and the Clippers starting kicking the ball all over the gym.

The talent on the Clippers is not only good, but unique: one of the premier catch-and-shooters in J.J. Redick, a sky walking rim runner in DeAndre Jordan, a four with great playmaking ability in Blake Griffin, one of the best all-around point guards the game has known in Chris Paul, and off the bench there is Jamal Crawford, one of the best bad shot makers in NBA history. All of these guys are, by NBA standards, somewhat unusual and unorthodox players, and trying to fit all of these sorts of players together has never quite worked. The Clippers are a team that always seems in need of a group therapy session. They’re easily the most neurotic team in the NBA, and the result of attempting to blend together all of these somewhat unorthodox roundball artists over the years has been a case study in NBA schizophrenia. Apart from Paul and Jordan goofing around in the State Farm commercials on TV, you never get the sense that anyone on this team actually likes each other or, more importantly, likes playing with each other.

The Clippers’ promising looking season has completely fizzled owing to a mix of continued injuries and periodic incompetence. They’re presently the #5 seed in the West, a place which would give them a strangely positive first round matchup against the Utah Jazz, whom they’ve beaten something like 17 out of the last 19 times, and then a nightmarish 2nd round matchup against the Warriors, whom they’ve not beaten in three years, and who toy with the Clippers much like a cat toys with a trapped mouse. The Dubs dropped 50 on the Clippers in a quarter in one game this year, beat them by 48 in another, and beat them by 50 in the preseason just for shits and giggles.

And it’s hard to figure out where the Clippers go from here if they bomb out early in the playoffs once again. The core four of Paul, Griffin, Jordan and Redick have managed to elevate the Clippers out of the muck and into the malaise, as they’ve clearly reached their peak and grown stale. This is where that insane playoff loss to the Rockets comes back to haunt them, as it was clearly their best chance to possibly win a championship. I think the Warriors would have beaten them anyway, but this occurred before the Warriors climbed completely into their heads, when a GS-LA series seemed plausibly competitive. In the present, another fizzle probably means big changes for the Clips, as they’ll almost certainly break that core up and it wouldn’t surprise me if Doc Rivers winds up being ousted from his dual roles of coach and GM.

There are three distinct levels in The Lose’s Paradigm of Purgatory. There are teams that are just perpetually terrible – a realm in which the Clippers (and, indeed, the Warriors) toiled for decades. There are teams that are just mediocre year after year – the Atlanta Hawks of the world. And then there are the teams which are good but not good enough, and wind up failing to meet expectations. That would be the level the Clippers have reached now. That one can be particularly bedeviling because it takes so long to get to be any good, and you finally get there and it’s not good enough, and then you have to worry about trying to maintain that level, and that’s difficult because in attempting to win now, and become good enough, you’ve likely gone about mortgaging your future.

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Like most memos, this one deserved to be filed in the trash

NBA Commissioner Adam Silver sent out a memo to the owners a week ago Monday about an issue which, yet again, sprung into the limelight during one of the league’s supposedly marquee Saturday night national telecast. First, the Warriors punted one against San Antonio and then, a week later, Cleveland did the exact same thing against the Clippers. The Cavs got into the league office’s crosshairs because they had the audacity to decide it was unwise to play Kevin Love – who is coming off knee surgery –and Kyrie Irving – who has had a knee issue troubling him all of this year and the year before and pretty much ever since he hurt himself in the 2015 NBA Finals – on the front end of a back-to-back Clippers/Lakers stint in L.A. And since neither Love nor Kyrie was playing, and the Cavs were likely to get beat by the Clippers, it wasn’t really worth it either for them to send out LeBron James – who leads the league in minutes played per game, and who has been a warhorse in playing the equivalent of about 16 seasons in the 14 years he’s been in the league when you factor in the playoffs. (To put it in perspective, LeBron has now played as many total games in the NBA, at age 32, as Michael Jordan had by the time that he was 40.) The result of Cleveland sitting their big three, of course, was a 30-point gift win for the floundering Clippers in a bad game watched by almost nobody. Needless to say, ABC/ESPN wasn’t amused about this.

And if ABC/ESPN aren’t amused, then the NBA isn’t amused. The NBA doesn’t care if, say, the Indiana Pacers or the Dallas Mavericks pick some meaningless mid-week game to sit all of their best players and allow themselves to get killed by the Warriors. (Which happened in both cases.) They don’t seem to care that the Phoenix Suns just decided to give Eric Bledsoe the entire rest of the season off. They don’t even seem to care that their franchises just write off entire seasons. But god help you if you show them up on a Saturday night on ABC. This is the sort of style-over-substance bullshit that Little Napoleon was all about when he was running the NBA. Don’t speak to how you’re concerned about the fans who paid for a ticket at the Staples Center, hoping to see LeBron play against the Clips and now you’re out a couple hundred bucks. Which one if getting ripped off more in L.A. right now, the jilted Clips fan who missed out on one game against LeBron or the Lakers fan who bought season tickets to watch a team that has lost 44 of their past 55 games and are purposefully, deliberately putting themselves in positions to fail in order to save a potentially lost draft pick? When Kevin Durant said today, in an interview with ESPN, that this was nothing more than the league caring about the fact that a handful of players take a day off here and there, he was absolutely right.

And, of course, during the All-Star break in New Orleans, Adam Silver was saying this to reporters about the issue of resting players:

“I do recognize, though, that there isn’t an easy solution to that problem, and I’m sympathetic to fans who turn out – whether they buy tickets to games or watching games on television and don’t see their favorite player on the floor. But we also have to be realistic that the science has gotten to the point where there is that direct correlation that we’re aware of between fatigue and injuries. And as tough as it is on our fans to miss one of their favorite players for a game, it’s far better than having them get injured and be out for long periods of time. So, we’re always still looking to strike that right balance. The league takes scheduling and health of players seriously. Over the past two seasons, it has reduced the number of back-to-backs and four-game-in-five-days scenarios and plans to start the season a week earlier in 2017-18 in an effort to cut back on those situations.”

So, in other words, yes they acknowledge the problem, and they’re going to pay it lip service, but if the TV execs bitch, they’ll make a big deal about it. The NBA wants to have their cake and eat it, too. These sorts of things could be pretty easily avoided, actually – when you go to make the schedule, and you pick the dates on which you want these marquee ABC/ESPN games to be, you just say “no back to backs” for the teams that will be playing in those games. It’s 10 games out of 1230 in the course of a season. If you can’t figure out how to set that up, you probably need a new line of work. (Of course, given how bad NBA League Pass is, it’s clear the league is in need of some help on the logistical front at the moment.)

I don’t blame the Cavs at all. The league didn’t like the fact that all of this was done on short notice, on the day of the game by Cleveland – whereas the Warriors had made it known the day before that they were holding guys out – but the fact of the matter is that decisions about player health happen at game time. It doesn’t matter how you felt 24 hours earlier. As for the boo-hoo fans who didn’t get to see LeBron in L.A., buying a ticket is never a guarantee that anyone is going to play, because injuries happen and situations change. You take that risk when you plunk down your money for a ticket.

What I found humorous about this is the sentence, "With so much at stake, it is simply not acceptable for Governors to be uninvolved or defer decision-making authority on these matters to others in their organizations.” So, in other words, owners should be telling GMs and coaches that guys should be playing. This flies in the face of the #1 rule of sports ownership, which is that a good owner should hire good people, sign the cheques, shut the hell up and stay out of the way.

And one other thing about this which really annoys me: when players rest and sit out games, it’s almost never the players making that decision but is, in fact, the coaching staff, which is management. I have always found it disconcerting that any sort of dispute, real or perceived, between players and management in a sport winds up being construed as being that “the players did this.” Time and again, when issues arise in sports that lead to some sort of work stoppage, the narrative is put forth about how it is somehow the players fault, that they’re greedy and overpaid and all of that sort of nonsense. This gets back to one rule of thumb here at In Play Lose: in any sort of dispute between players and management, the players are always right. And I mean ALWAYS. So when guys are sitting out games in the NBA, it’s usually because the coaching staff decides it’s a good idea, which means it has little to nothing to do with what players want. So people need to stop portraying it as some movement among NBA players. It isn’t. It’s pretty irresponsible of the NBA sock puppets turning up on networks to portray it that way.

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Speaking of the Cavs, they’ve seen their once sizable lead in the East disappear, and they are now a ½-game back of Boston after losing 99:93 to the Bulls in Chicago tonight. San Antonio destroyed Cleveland 103:74 on Monday night, which was only the latest in a litany of noncompetitive games. Not only is Cleveland losing – they’re a sub-.500 team for the month of March – but they’re also getting pounded on a regular basis. The Cavs started 25-7 but are only 22-20 since. They’ve been beset by injuries, what with J.R. Smith breaking a hand and Kevin Love needing knee surgery, and not having all of their sharpshooters in the lineup has ultimately caught up to them, as the Cavs have needed to outgun all of their opponents this season because the defense stinks.

We’ve all just sort of assumed that the regular season didn’t matter, since this is LeBron and the Cavs and the record won’t matter and they’ll just flip the switch and turn it on come playoff time. And to be sure, there was some lackadaisical play at times from Cleveland this season. They were pretty bored there in the first couple of months. But here we are, two weeks away from the playoffs and with Cleveland getting blown out by the Spurs, and getting run out of the building by the Buzzards at home, and getting pounded by Denver and the like, I’m starting to wonder if the Cavs even have a switch to flip.

No team has ever won an NBA title with a defense as bad as the Cavs presently possess. Since the start of the New Year, the only team worse than they on that end of the floor are the Lakers, a team which is deliberately trying to lose as many games as possible and, thus, as much as escorting guys to the basket. Not only are the Cavs the 2nd-oldest team in the NBA, but according to the advanced UV data, they are also the slowest team in the NBA. So the Cavs are old and slow, and teams that are old and slow have a tendency to get older and slower. Even worse than that, they tend to get really bad, really fast. Critical mass takes over and then, seemingly overnight, they aren’t any good any more.

And I’m starting to wonder if this is what we’re seeing in Cleveland. 22-20 over the span of half a season is no longer a small sample size. The Cavs had a good February, but in March they’ve been terrible, and they won fewer games in January than the Sixers did. Cavs apologists that I read in the cyberworld have been trotting out tired clichés about never underestimating the heart of a champion, and combing the annals of NBA history trying to find examples where defending champions dogged it during the followed season, only to then rise up and defend their title. But guess what? That hardly ever happens. Most of the time, if you’re old and slow, come playoff time, you get run out of the building.

I do think the defense will improve for the Cavs in the playoffs, simply because LeBron will give a damn about playing defense in the playoffs, but other than he and Tristan Thompson, there isn’t another guy on this roster who seems physically capable of stopping anyone. They were so desperate for some rim protection that they went out and signed Andrew Bogut, who every team thinks is great until he actually plays for their team, and he wound up getting hurt 2:00 into his first game. The mystique and swagger of the Cavs can spook a lot of opponents in the playoffs – *cough cough Atlanta Hawks cough cough* – but the East is improved this season. I still have my doubts about those nervous northern nellies from Toronto, but every time Cleveland plays Washington, John Wall and Bradley Beal get basically any shot they want to, which doesn’t bode well. The Cavs have two weeks to figure it out, and unlike the Dubs and Spurs over on the other side of the Mississippi River, both of whom have ample time to rest and experiment, Cleveland shouldn’t be resting anyone over the next two weeks simply because they’re so out of sorts. I love to see the Cavs playing at their peak. It’s great basketball, which is what I want to see in the NBA Finals come June. But it seems hard for me to believe that LeBron can carry this team on his back yet again. At some point, LeBron’s run of consecutive trips to the NBA Finals will end. As it stands, I’d be more surprised if that continued than if it didn’t.

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I thought it was cool that Devin Booker scored 70 points in a game last week, and I wasn’t all that bothered by the fact that the Suns were doing whatever they could to get him to 70 points, because the Phoenix Suns have been terrible this year, and if they find just one thing that brings them some joy during what’s been a dreadful season, that’s okay. You have to win these small battles sometimes, even if you’re constantly losing the war.

I don’t think I’ve seen a team that looks less prepared to play NBA basketball than the Suns. Booker and the aforementioned Eric Bledsoe make up a nice backcourt, but the front court is a mess and the center position is a dumpster fire. At any given point in a game, the Suns seem to have at least two guys on the floor who don’t seem to know where they’re supposed to be. The offense is generally a jumble and the defense stinks. The Suns were late to the tanking party, having picked up a few wins here in the second half of the season, as the Suns have kept playing hard and kept the pace up against a whole lot of teams who couldn’t otherwise give a shit.

It would be very Sunsesque for them to win the NBA draft lottery in a year where the two best players are point guards, which is what they don’t need. That would require their front office to actually make some sound personnel decisions, whereas they’ve been taking the volume discount approach to team building over the years, which involves having so many bad teams that you accrue enough high picks and eventually you stumble your way into a decent team.

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I’ve not said much about this team, and with good reason, but win-loss records aside, having watched a decent amount of all 30 teams this year, I feel fairly comfortable in saying that the worst team I’ve seen all year is the Orlando Magic. How does anyone involved in assembling that team still have a job?

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And finally, your regular reminder that the Knicks are garbage:

Phil Jackson paid $72,000,000 for that. How does that man still have a job as well?

The Dream is Still Alive

Toa Aito!

MY ULTIMATE footballing dream pertaining to the 2018 World Cup is very much alive at the moment, thanks to some poor record keeping on one side of the Pacific, and a poor choice of words by Lionel Messi on the other.

When we last checked in on The Ultimate Good Guys, the Iron Warriors of Tahiti, it was in preparation for the 2013 Confederations Cup in Brazil – a tournament in which they were hopelessly outmatched, of course, getting whomped 1:6 by Nigeria, 0:10 by Spain, and 0:8 by Uruguay. But the Iron Warriors won a lot of fans at that tournament because they understood, in the end, that the experience of playing in such a prestigious tournament and being able to take to a stage as grand as the Maracanã in Rio was far more important, in the long run, than the results. Of course they were going to lose. That was never in doubt. If they played Spain 100 times, they’d lose 101 of them. But not only did the Tahitians have fun in that tournament, they also played the way they wanted to play, results be damned. They didn’t park the bus and try to play for 0:0 draws. Screw that! They played high lines and tried to attack. A good number of those 24 goals they conceded came towards the end of matches, which speaks to where the real difference between amateur and professional players lies, which is conditioning. (This is part of why you should never, ever take seriously any notion put forth about a really good college team in the U.S., in any sport, being able to compete at a serious level with pro teams, even bad ones.) Nothing is more annoying in soccer than a bad team that tries to not lose for 90 minutes. That’s just lame and it’s not fun to watch. To their credit, Tahiti didn’t do that in 2013.

Tahitians love football. When myself and The Official Spouse of In Play Lose were in Tahiti in 2015, football was everywhere. Kids were playing football on almost every single beach – and that last word is the key, because when it comes to playing the beach game, the Tahitians are world powerhouses. They finished second in the last Beach World Cup, and they finished third in the tourney before that, for which they were the hosts. As a result, all of the cool kids in Tahiti are now playing the beach game. But the beach game has a very different skill set to it. You’re not playing on 100 metres of grass, nor are you playing with 10 other teammates. So while the beach guys are thriving, it’s not been so good for the 11-a-side guys. Tahiti were unable to defend their OFC championship, suffering one of the most annoying sorts of exits from the tourney possible where they were eliminated on goal difference despite never losing a game, and about the only other notable thing we’ve heard from them during that time was this horrible act of goalkeeping which went viral.

Fast forward four years from that Confed Cup in Brazil, however, and The Ultimate Good Guys are at it again. They have a huge OFC qualifier tonight at their home grounds, the Pater Te Hono Nui in Parae, against Papua New Guinea. The OFC set-up is a bad one, with groups of three and three rounds of home-and-homes. Groups of three is a terrible set-up because the final games of any qualifying group are always tethered to the results which are needed, and thus the strategy is tailored to the situation, but in a group of three, one team is already done playing and was thus subject to different sorts of playing situations during their campaign. FIFA last tried groups of three in the 1982 World Cup in Spain, and they were pretty awful, with a lot of 0:0 matches and uncreative play, since different teams were at different stages and knew that 0:0 would suit them. The other problem is dead rubbers – in the other OFC group of three, the All-Whites took 10 points from four games and have advanced, leaving Fiji and New Caledonia to play two utterly meaningless games.

Anyway, so Tahiti are in this group of three right now with the PNG and also the Solomon Islands. The Ultimate Good Guys split a pair of matches with the Solomon Islands, winning 1:0 at home on Nov. 7, 2016, and then dropping the away game on Nov. 13, 2016, by a score of 0:1 on a stoppage time goal. The problem befalling them is that, after two games with PNG, they’ll have to sit back and watch and wait to see what happens when PNG plays the Solomons. Even if they were to win both games against the PNG, the Solomons would know the target they were chasing in terms of points and goal difference, and be doing so against a PNG team that, having lost two games, would already be eliminated. This is why the format is stupid. So with three points and zero goal difference, it wasn’t looking so promising for The Ultimate Good Guys.

Aah, but as we mentioned in this post about some more Friends of Lose, the Blue Sharks of Cape Verde (who are having a bad go of things at the moment), nothing changes your fortune faster in international football than the 3:0 forfeit win (and, in the case of the Blue Sharks, a 3:0 forfeit loss). It turns out that, in that Nov. 7 match, the Solomons fielded a player who should have been serving a suspension, so the 1:0 win becomes a 3:0 win, and those extra two gift goals can make a huge difference in a 4-game group.

The Ultimate Good Guys then traveled to PNG on Mar. 23 and captured a 3:1 away win, coming from behind to score thrice after PNG had been reduced to 10 men. This means they are now up three points and +6 on the Solomons. A big win tonight against the PNG at home would put them in good shape to advance to the OFC Final against New Zealand.

And I would love a Tahiti-New Zealand OFC final, as the former is my favorite place in the world and a place I intend to be living one day, and the latter is home to some relatives of mine, all of whom are good enough to stop into San Francisco every now and them but, for some reason, I’ve yet to return the favor. The All-Whites would be the favorites, of course, but this would be a good match-up. And the winner of that two-legged OFC Final gets a playoff with the 5th-place team from South America with a full birth in Russia 2018 on the line. And make no mistake, the Tahitians ain’t winning a playoff against a South American team. That’s not happening. They know it, everyone knows it, but winning really isn’t the point. Simply getting to that point would raise the profile much like it did in 2013. Simply having the opportunity to compete, at that level, regardless of result, will count as a victory.

Meanwhile, across the Pacific, let’s take a look here at what’s going in CONMEBOL. Brazil has got their shit together and are running away with the competition. It’s a big jumble after that, and there are CONMEBOL qualifying matches taking place this afternoon, so the situation might change. As of this writing, Brazil are on 30 pts., Uruguay 23, Argentina 22, Colombia 21, with Ecuador and Chile on 20 – the 2-time Copa América winners Chile having been awful in qualifying, but also having been thrown a lifeline as they were gifted a 3:0 forfeit win when the Bolivians were found to be using a player who was actually a Paraguayan. Whoops.

And now this group has been completely thrown up in the air with the announcement that Lionel Messi has been given a 4-game suspension for verbally abusing a referee. As I said in that post about the Blue Sharks, I have no idea what the magic words are that get you reprimanded by officials in soccer. It’s been motherfucker in basketball for ever. That gets you T’d up worldwide. Every sport is different, of course – one of the best things you can ever watch is miked up, uncensored NHL highlight reels, where you actually hear the referees coming in to break up a scrum and saying stuff like “fuck you guys, fuck both of you and get the fuck off the fucking ice.” I have no idea what the magic words are in soccer, but Messi apparently said all of them.

And the reason this throws it all into chaos is that, while Argentina possesses about £500m worth of talent on their roster, they don’t play like it. Without Messi there playing the maestro and running the show, they’ve been garbage in recent years. He’s going to miss the next four qualifiers, including today’s game in Bolivia, which is a tricky match to begin with. Bolivia are terrible, but they play their home matches at 12,000 feet of altitude, which makes for a miserable outing for the visitors. It is not inconceivable that Argentina will struggle here in the next few months to maintain their place in the World Cup qualifying. They could very easily finish 5th, in fact, which would slot them in that playoff I was mentioning before.

[Update: Bolivia 2:0 Argentina. Argentina may be in even more trouble than I thought.]

And so we have the dream scenario: Messi in Tahiti. Because let’s be honest here, if you’re Argentina, and you’re playing a two-legged playoff to get into the World Cup, you can’t assume anything at that point. Yes, we all know Tahiti ain’t beating Argentina, but the reason we know that is that Argentina would have to show up and give an honest effort. You can’t mess around when it’s a 2-game season. So Argentina wouldn’t want to rest guys in this circumstance, particularly if Tahiti were to host the opening game. They’d likely bring all their stars, and their stars would likely play.

And were this sequence to occur, with Tahiti making its way through the OFC and Argentina stumbling and finishing fifth, thus forcing a Tahiti-Argentina playoff, I will go to this game. I will buy a ticket immediately when it goes on sale and I will take another vacation to the South Pacific. This would be one of the greatest sporting moments in my favorite island’s history – Messi in Tahiti, with a World Cup place on the line. I envisioned this possibility back when I first saw the draw, and it’s getting closer and closer to coming to fruition. I really, really hope this happens.

Update: Tahiti 1:2 Papua New Guinea. The dream is not dead, but it is certainly on life support.

World Poetry Day

TODAY has apparently been tagged World Poetry Day, and I approve of whomever declared this (who does this sort of thing?) and it is the sort of thing that I can get behind contributing to. The Lose has been hard at work here on a new novel, which is entitled Queen of Diamonds and will hopefully be done here by the end of 2017. This is the reason why there have been so many crickets in this space lately.

I wrote poetry for years, a collection of which is available here and here or by clicking on the Dream So Real gadget on the right of this page. I mainly stopped doing it because I got frustrated with the fact that, rather than expressing anything new, I found myself just saying the same thing again and again after awhile. I came to hate the form – or, more to the point, I came to hate the poet more than I hated the poetry. I also found myself gravitating towards long form work instead. Either I write something in one page or 400 pages, but nothing in between. Welcome to how my mind works. It is a dark and scary place.

This is probably my favorite poem that I want to share. I wrote this in 1999 while living in Santa Fe, New Mexico. It was previously published in Sycamore Review, the literary journal of Purdue University which, for some unknown and wonderful reason, decided to feature my work prominently in one of its issues. I hope that you like it.

- - -

Why I Don’t Dance

   DANCE TO THE MUSIC THAT
   HELPED WIN WORLD WAR II
    — Showbill on a library bulletin board

   I didn’t know we dropped
   sheet music on Dresden
   — Geoffrey Escandon, guitarist

About once or twice a month, we
would schedule a band to come
down from the city and set up
their equipment beneath the NO

SMOKING museum piece hanging
from a nail at the south end of
the hangar, the old Air Force base
having fallen into a state

of disrepair since the Air Force
was downsized. Peace is hell. The dance
organizers made sure to book
swing bands or jazz bands or even

rock ’n’ roll, disregarding raised
eyebrows from elders in hopes of
attracting the young people, since
dances, like weddings, should showcase

the young, with codgers reduced to
showpieces. We would justify
these dances by tying in a
4-H fundraiser dinner or

charity auction, which always
was poorly attended since the
same ten items were donated,
and, us guys, we would polish our

automobiles and dress in black
suits and shined, underprivileged
shoes and dollop up our hair like
movie stars, and the music would

resonate, rattle off the beams
and our feet would ache, because they
don’t park æroplanes on parquet
dance floors, and the bands we booked would

usually play two sets in
exchange for a few hundred bucks
and all the apple pie they could
stomach, but we stipulated

they return to the makeshift stage
for an encore, at which point in
time us guys would stop being friends,
elbow and trample, skid across

the concrete to grab the last dance
with the prettiest girl. Mothers
would blush for their daughters’ catches,
offer invites for dessert. Tea.

Our proudest citizens met their
wives this way. We’re a small town in
the wheatfields off the highway. We
love the orange of harvest moons.

DNP-Lose

Obligatory Warriors freak-out gif

THE GAME on Saturday night in San Antonio was absolute farce. The Spurs’ 107:85 win over Golden State featured seven of the teams’ 10 starters sitting out, some with legit injuries – Durant, Leonard, and let’s hope Aldredge comes back healthy soon – and the others on account of needing rest – most notably on the part of Golden State, who held out Curry, Thompson, Green, and Iguodala, all of whom were listed in the box score as “DNP-REST.”

This action by the Warriors was met with the usual scorn and outrage from the NBA sock puppets over at ESPN/ABC, who questioned Golden State coach Steve Kerr’s integrity for daring to scratch the entire collection of his healthiest – and also his best – players from what was a nationally televised game. Not only did I approve of this decision on the part of Steve Kerr, but I also appreciated the showing of the middle finger by the Warriors towards the NBA. All involved insist that wasn’t the intention, but given the circumstances, it very clearly seemed that way to me.

The most annoying responses come, of course, from ex-players. There aren’t a pettier, more jealous collection of former athletes than there are in the NBA. The reason for the jealousy is obvious, of course: money. So much money. Mediocre bench players are signing contracts now worth values far greater than what many of the élite talents made in their day. It’s jealousy, that’s all it is, and this is why all of them should shut up about the state of the modern game. But there you had Jalen Rose on Saturday night, whom I generally like, talking during halftime about how the players being held out for Golden State needed to show some pride, as if somehow the decision were up to them. Guess what? It wasn’t up to them. No professional athlete ever wants to ever come out of any game ever. (Was that enough evers in one sentence?) These are the most competitive people on earth. They want to play all the games, and play all the minutes of all the games.

“Back in our day, we played all the games … Michael Jordan always played all the games …”

Aah, yes, the old ‘Michael Jordan did it’ example. That’s right, the greatest player in the history of the game did it, and managed to be great. Never mind the fact that part of what made him great was having the ability to get through the sorts of difficult situations that others couldn’t, like having to play four games in five days in five different cities. Just because “back in your day,” you played all of the games, it doesn’t mean that you actually played very well. In fact, you probably didn’t play very well at all. And how do I know that, besides having sat through quite a few games over the years in Seattle where teams were dead tired on the second night of back-to-backs? Research.

Consider the predictor put forth in this article by the sleep researchers at UCSF, in which they went through and marked games on the NBA schedule in 2015-2016 where certain teams were likely to lose because of insufficient rest, and 78% of the time, those teams did just that. You can play all the games that you like, but if you’re almost 80% to lose in a given situation, you’re clearly not doing it well, at that point.

Quite honestly, I’m surprised it’s that low of a rate, but I suspect the reason it was that low was that a good number of those 22% of wins came from the Warriors, who logged 53,000 miles last season on the road, more than any other team, but were good enough to overcome it much of the time. The Warriors are logging even more miles this season – 54,000 all told – and some of that cannot be avoided because of geography, of course (to no surprise, Portland is second on that list), but some of it also has to do with flying for one-offs in order to accommodate the demands of national TV schedules. This ridiculous game on Saturday night was the Warriors’ fifth in seven days, and was the sixth in nine days for the Spurs. This game never should have been taking place, and neither team cared about anything other than keeping more guys from getting injured.

Not only was it the fifth in seven days for the Warriors, but it was the eighth in 13 days during a ridiculous escapade which saw them start out with a back-to-back in Philadelphia and Washington, a game in Chicago, a back-to-back in New York and Atlanta, a cross-country flight to play a single game against Boston, then a back-to-back in Minnesota and San Antonio. That’s five time zone changes and 11,000 miles, during which time the team had held one practice. That’s nuts. And lest you think I’m just grumpy that they’re losing lately, their schedule in January – in which they played nine of 10 games at home with the only road game being a bus ride to Sacramento – was also nuts. This 8-in-13 stretch was the worst bit of scheduling I’ve ever seen in the modern NBA – which is saying something for a league where the schedule is terrible for everyone. The flip side for the Warriors basically tanking against the Spurs last weekend is the fact that, on countless occasions this season, Golden State opponents have done the exact same thing to them – figuring they aren’t likely to win anyway, so why put players at risk? – and the games are boring. The games are basically over after a quarter and a half. It’s nice the Warriors win without breaking a sweat, but it’s not good basketball, and yet you can understand why teams are doing it. Given those circumstances, where you’re not likely to win anyway given the lack of rest and recovery time, why not just punt the game away?

Greg Popovich certainly isn’t opposed to that. The Spurs famously got fined $250,000 by David Stern the NBA a few years ago because Pop rested all of his starters for a 4th-game-in-five-nights tilt against the Miami Heat. There was no real reason or protocol for the NBA doing that, of course. It was just Little Napoleon getting his dander up over the fact that one of his teams was willing to kick away a game – and not just any game, mind you, but a nationally televised game vs. LeBron and the Heat which should’ve been a showpiece. As was the case with everything about David Stern, image was all that mattered, and he couldn’t stand that fact that a marquee game had instead been reduced to farce.

What’s farcical about it, of course, is that professional sports leagues continually, consistently go about using scheduling which all but guarantees subpar performance. The Thursday night games in the NFL are just atrocious from a quality standpoint, and you can understand why – the players involved simply haven’t recovered from the Sunday beforehand. In the NBA and the NHL, there are too many games in too few days, and the quality of play suffers, the risk of injury rises, and when there are injuries, the quality of play suffers even more. This is obvious. It’s a no-brainer. People complain about the fact that fans pay for tickets, in part, because they want to see the biggest stars in action, and so going to see a game and coming to discover that Steph or LeBron isn’t playing is a rip-off. I definitely understand that argument, particularly when it comes to cross-conference match-ups. Games are often dynamically and premium priced based upon match-ups by the clubs themselves (to say nothing of values on secondary ticket markets), and LeBron and the Cavs coming to town are naturally a bigger draw than some random mediocre team like the Denver Nuggets. (Folks in Memphis, in particular, were annoyed that LeBron sat out, since it was Cleveland’s only visit of the season.) But guess what? I don’t want to see bad basketball, either. That cheapens the product just as much as superstars being no-shows.

This is a problem in all sports, both here and also abroad. Seriously, watch any coverage of a non-major tennis tournament, and you’ll see guys and gals tanking all over the place. And why wouldn’t you? If you’re not on your game, and you’re a bit injured, and you’re playing in some irrelevant, secondary or tertiary tournament, what the hell is the benefit of trying to play through it? There’s a reason why domestic cup competitions in Europe have basically become a joke ever since the advent of the Champions and Europa Leagues. There are too many games on the schedule now and something’s got to give. Top clubs in Europe are sometimes playing upwards of 60 games in a season now, which is just preposterous, and one of the reasons why the quality of play in competitions like the World Cup, the Euros and last summer’s Copa América Centenario suffered somewhat is that guys are exhausted! Guys like Ronaldo and Messi want to play every minute of every game. You practically have to lock them in a closet to keep them out of the lineup. Well, gosh, that domestic cup match against some third division team seems like the right time to rest everyone, now doesn’t it?

Players need to fight for this stuff. They’ve done so in baseball, where the union has been adamant about making sure that mandatory days off for the players are built into the schedule. For example, you cannot make up a rainout on a date that causes the players to have to play more than 20 days in a row. The superstar players who call the shots in the players union in the NBA seemed to have been far more concerned about figuring out how to get themselves paid more than they were about the fact that the schedule is appalling in the most recent contract negotiations. Even so, word is the league is looking to lengthen the season 7-10 days, as it would lessen the fixture congestion and cut down on the dreaded back-to-back games, the success rate during which is greatly minimized. I mean, hell, I want as few of those as possible if I’m an owner, since those games tend heavily to result in loses, and I hate losing under any circumstance. I would rather you just get rid of the NBA, NHL, and NFL preseasons entirely, since the players don’t want to be there, the fans don’t want to be there, and no one wants to be there. (I do understand it’s somewhat different in baseball, where the unique motions and mechanics of the game do require a certain amount of pre-season preparation for a long regular season.) Doing so would be a money loser for the owners, of course, as would shortening the seasons, since both of those mean losses in gate receipts, but it’s always seemed to me that better quality of play = higher demand for your product, which means you can actually charge more for it. Having spent all of $9 to go to an NBA game in January 2016 in New Orleans, I can tell you that the demand for the product isn’t anywhere near as great as the league owners would like to think.

The Warriors were fed up on Saturday. They’d hollered in the ear of Adam Silver about this 8-in-13 stretch the moment they saw the schedule this past summer. Word was that they were thinking about sitting everyone of use for the Spurs game even before Kevin Durant got hurt and Steph Curry forgot how to shoot. They were pissed off about the schedule, and deliberately tanking a showcase game might actually get someone’s attention in the league office about going back and reëvaluating the scheduling procedures. Good on them for doing it.

The Warriors clinched a playoff spot with 25 games to go and don’t really care about playoff seeding. Quite honestly, neither do the Spurs or the Cavs, which is why I suspect you’ll see even more DNP-RESTs popping up in their box scores between now and Apr. 15 and I have no problem with that, as all of those teams are playing the long game here. So much depends, come playoff time, on the health of your players. We’ve been shortchanged the past two seasons in the Golden State-Cleveland match-ups by the fact that one team has so clearly been so much healthier than the other. I want to see good basketball. No, I want to see great basketball. Given the costs involved – the money at stake, the costs to the consumers – having a great product doesn’t seem like that much to ask.