Greatness

Sorry, Toronto, you are not great. (Comic from https://www.facebook.com/nbapls/)

AS HAS been said many times here before at In Play Lose, you need stuff that sucks to have stuff that’s cool. But the inverse is true as well. You need stuff that’s cool to have stuff that sucks. In order to develop a keen eye for failure, you must also be able to appreciate, and embrace, success. True ability to discern that which is bad comes, first and foremost, from the appreciation of that which is good and even great.

We have a great matchup in the NBA finals this year. We have the ideal matchup. It’s the completion of the trilogy, the third go-round between the Golden State Warriors and the Cleveland Cavaliers, each of whom have won one championship before. It gets no better than this. The Warriors are, quite simply, on one of the greatest runs which has ever been seen in the NBA. Cleveland, meanwhile, possesses LeBron James, who is the greatest player in the history of the sport of basketball.

And I make those two sentences being fully aware of the legacy of Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls from the 1990s. We continue to be inundated with 90s nostalgia about the NBA for a simple reason – most of the former player pundits dominating the airwaves came from the 1990s, which was the point in time when NBA basketball went from being simply a sport in this country to transcendant entertainment. Those guys developed star power and as such, their version of NBA history carries weight in the modern day. But the truth is that the game has been radically altered and shifted in the times between the Michael Jordan Bulls and the Steph Curry Warriors. Players today are so much better. My god, are they ever better. Players are faster, are more athletic, are better shooters and technicians, and the basketball IQ is off the charts.

I’ve pointed this out before but it bears repeating: watch any New York Knicks game where the players are running The Triangle offense. Ignore, for the moment, the fact that the Knicks, as presently constructed, wouldn’t look good running any offense at all, but just think about the philosophy and the ethos and the approach of the Knicks compared to what everyone else is doing in the league. The Knicks look prehistoric. What they’re doing makes no sense at all in the modern game. Okay, well, the Knicks prehistoric offense was cutting edge in the 1990s when the Bulls were running it. It was a schematic advantage on top of a talent advantage which turned the Bulls into 6-time champions. But today? It’s so old school as to be worthy of being condemned to the dustbin of history. Every team in the NBA learned from the Bulls, just as every player learned from Michael Jordan and improved upon it. I find any and all discussions about “MJ vs. LeBron” and “1990s Bulls vs. 2010s Warriors” to be laughable. If they played head to head, the Warriors would sweep the Bulls and wipe the floor with them. And so would the Cavs, for that matter.

It’s too bad that, in order to get to this point, we had to endure almost two months of terrible playoff series. The NBA playoffs have been terrible, mainly because of injuries. The Cavs faced Toronto without Kyle Lowry and Boston without Isaiah Thomas. The Warriors played Portland missing Nurkic, Utah without Hill and without a healthy Gobbert, and San Antonio minus Kawhi and Tony Parker. Attrition was brutal this year. But that happens sometimes. This contributed to the fact that both the Cavs and the Warriors rolled through the playoffs: the Cavs went 12-1 in their three series, while the Warriors went 12-0 and are riding one of the more astonishing streaks imaginable – they last lost a game where their four All-Stars played significant minutes on Feb. 4 against the Sacramento Kings.

So the playoffs were garbage, but the end result is great. It’s absolutely great and I want to see it. On the one side, you have LeBron, who is the best ever, and Kyrie Irving, who is the most creative shot maker in the NBA. On the other, you have four All-Stars and the most fearsome collection of talent in league history. This is what I want to see.

But apparently, this isn’t what a lot of people want to see.

I’ve read countless articles and hot takes claiming that the Cavs and, most especially, the Warriors are “ruining” the NBA. How exactly are they doing that? By being great? In the case of the Cavs, I do think they dogged it a little bit during the regular season. Or, more to the point, the Cavs conserved their energy. The Cavs can only go as far as LeBron can take them, and LeBron plays more minutes per game than just about anyone in the NBA, and has done so for most of the past 14 seasons. LeBron needs to conserve energy, and necessarily does so during the year on the defensive end of the floor – an understandable move on his part. As such, an already not very good defense became a bad one, and the Cavs lost a lot of games during the season. It’s still a bad defense, mind you – one which is going to the Cavs beat in this series – but a locked-in, full throttle LeBron on both ends of the floor can be devastating, and has been in these playoffs. It’s a stars’ league, in the end, and no star is greater than LeBron. His performance in last season’s Finals is enough to make people conveniently forget about the ways in which his opponent this year has upgraded. “Hey! LeBron was down 3-1 last year and won, so obviously he can do it again!”

The Warriors, meanwhile, have ruined basketball by constructing a super team. Okay, so, let’s review how that super team was constructed, shall we? And this is an important point in a modern NBA where far too many people are obsessed with the folly that is potential you can obtain through the NBA draft to the extent that teams are tanking for 3-4 years in order to amass draft picks. The Warriors, indeed, drafted three of their All-Stars: Steph Curry was the 7th pick in the draft, Klay Thompson was the 11th pick in the draft, and Draymond Green was the 35th pick in the draft. That, right there are three of the 20 best players in the NBA, and 50 players went before them in the draft. Seriously, go ahead and look up those three NBA drafts and tell me how many of the 50 players selected before Steph, Klay, and Dray, you would actually want. There are some good ones, of course, but nobody, and I mean nobody, could ever foresee Steph morphing into the transcendant, game-altering, geometry-altering talent that he became.

Now, of course, at the beginning Steph contributed to the endless Warriors malaise by being hurt all the time. He was hurt so often that he signed a contract which was the best he could get at the time, one which makes him, without question, the single-most underpaid player in all of professional sports – which, combined with a spike in the NBA salary cap, freed up the Warriors to sign Kevin Durant. The Warriors signed 2015 Finals MVP Andre Iguodala as a free agent only after dealing away multiple first round picks to the Jazz in exchange for the Jazz being willing to take on the terrifyingly bad contracts they had doled out to Andris Bedrins and Richard Jefferson. The bench is full of reclamation projects: Shawn Livingston suffered the worst injury I’ve ever seen (I refuse to link to the video), Javale McGee was nearly laughed out of the league, Ian Clark was a D-Leaguer. And what does it say about the stupidity of the infatuation with the NBA draft that the Golden State Warriors put the 38th pick in the 2016 draft, Patrick McCaw, in the starting lineup for a couple of playoff games and he looked like he actually knew what he was doing, which could scarcely be said of the bulk of the 37 guys picked before him? Yes, that’s right, the Warriors have constructed a super team, alright, and done so in the worst way imaginable, which is by being smarter than everyone else.

But fans will continue at the Warriors and continue to be sore at KD about exercising his collectively bargained right for determining where he wants to work, because fans always seem to be pro-owners when it comes to the player/owner dynamic of labor negotiations, never stopping to consider what it is that they are actually watching when they go to the arena (hint: it ain’t the owner, no matter how vainglorious he is). Me personally? I love great teams and great games. I didn’t care a whit that it was always Celtics-Lakers in the 1980s. They had the best players and were playing the greatest basketball that had ever been seen on the planet. Give me greatness. Give me the best that the game can offer. That’s not ruining the league. That’s enhancing it. That’s why I want to watch the game.

The NBA is not a league where upsets frequently occur. Quite honestly, I’d say last year’s win by the Cavs was one of the greater upsets in history. If you want upsets, go over and watch the NHL playoffs, which are a crap shoot. The NHL is high variance, the NBA is little to no variance. Which is worse? I don’t know. I found it amusing when, on the eve of the Stanley Cup Final between the Pittsburgh Penguins and the Nashville Predators, I came across an article speaking to the “brilliant roster construction” of the Nashville Predators. (His words, not mine.) Now, let’s take a step back from that for a moment. The Nashville Predators regular season record was 41-29-12: 41 wins, 29 losses, and 12 losses in overtime. So, basically, they were a .500 team. 50% of their games ended in losses during the regular season, and they were a bottom seed in the playoffs who got hot. So, basically, the GM in Nashville constructed a mediocre team which happened to get hot at the right time. And how, exactly, is that brilliant? And that’s not a knock on what Nashville has accomplished in the playoffs, which is cool, but anyone who thinks that’s little more than a so-so club riding a hot streak for a few weeks is kidding themselves.

The NHL playoffs are a high-variance format where, oftentimes, lesser teams beat superior ones simply by gumming up the works and making life miserable. I should know this, because I went to two Stanley Cup Finals games in 1994, a series between the Vancouver Canucks and New York Rangers many around the game consider one of the great Stanley Cup Finals series of all time. The Canucks came a crossbar away from winning a Cup that season – a Canucks team that was a game over .500 and was a #7 seed in the playoffs. And given the two previous years, when the Canucks had 100-point, division winning teams which couldn’t get out of the second round of the playoffs, you can see why a seasoned, vet-laden team like that Vancouver one came to not care a whit about the regular season. So long as they got into the playoffs, they knew they could compete in the postseason tournament – a tournament which, ultimately, is the only thing in the sport that matters.

But we all love these sorts of high-variance playoff runs when it happens to benefit our team, of course, just as my beloved Canucks benefitted in 1994. In a more recent past, the San Francisco Giants last World Series win, in 2014, came when they were an 87-win team that was the lowest seed in the playoffs, and I loved every minute of that postseason. On the flip side, however, I started to sour on the entire concept of the NHL playoffs when the L.A. Kings pretty much dogged it through the entire regular season, finished with a sub-.500 record, won a Stanley Cup, and proceeded to win another Stanley Cup while basically following a similar path. Some of this is my long-standing hatred of the Kings, of course, but when you do something like that, then why do the 82 games beforehand even matter? Why would a fan want to go and watch some meaningless game in February? We have this strange infatuation with the playoffs, when in the case of both football and hockey, it’s really just a small sample size indicative of pretty much nothing they did throughout the year. In that light, what the Pittsburgh Penguins are doing is pretty remarkable. Their 4:1 win on Wednesday gives them a 2-0 series lead over Nashville and they appear headed to their second consecutive Stanley Cup. In the NBA, you can become good enough to overcome the variance. In the NHL, you win in spite of it.

But we’re infatuated with success and championships, of course, so we’re also infatuated with playoff results, even though the entire structure is flawed. It’s nothing like the regular season. There are entirely different dynamics and variables in play. In the NBA, you get to exploit matchups for two weeks in a 7-game series that you would never have much of a chance to do in the regular season. This is why a team like the Toronto Raptors is useless in the playoffs. They are ruthlessly efficient at what they do, which is why they can win a lot of 1-off games during the season, when every team is running their basic sets, but they’re one of the most uncreative offensive teams in the NBA, and in a 7-game series where you have a chance to focus on them and scheme for them, they suddenly become easy to guard. Matchups are everything in the NBA playoffs. The Cavs had more trouble playing against Indiana than they did against Boston and Toronto for a simple reason – Indiana has Paul George, who is 6’9” and a badass and forces LeBron out of his comfortable free safety defensive role, which leaves Kevin Love to look like a defensive doofus and Kyrie Irving to get lit up by Jeff Teague. Neither Boston nor Toronto possessed that sort of player at that position, which meant LeBron could roam around and steal passes and block shots and create mayhem, much as he did against the Warriors in the NBA Finals a year ago – which, above all else, is the reason the Dubs went and got Kevin Durant.

The Cavs would be in the NBA Finals regardless of who they played in the East playoffs, in my opinion, simply because the East was crap – not a single East playoff team had a winning record against the West’s playoff teams during their 16 games in the regular season – but the Bucks and the Buzzards would have been better matchups against the Cavs, possessing the types of players who can give Cleveland problems. As it was, the East was a laughable mess, and Cleveland’s fire power was so superior to who they faced that it could mask the fact they played pretty lazy defense against Boston and could get away with it, as the Celtics couldn’t throw it in the bay and missed an ungodly number of open shots. But there is something to be said of knowing your opposition. As bad as Toronto and Boston played – and both of them played badly, make no mistake – Cleveland has been so spectacular, particularly on the offensive end, that Toronto and Boston playing well might not have made that much of a difference.

And I’m okay with Cleveland being in the Finals, because I appreciated what they did last season in coming back from 3-1 down to win the championship, and because, above all else, I want to see the best. I love great competition. It gets no better than this. There are seven legit NBA All-Stars on the floor in this series. In LeBron, Steph, and KD, you have three guys who will hang up the sneakers and walk straight into the Hall of Fame in Springfield, Mass. You have two of the greatest collections of shooters ever, two teams contributing the most to the very ways in which the game is changing in terms of how its played. What’s not to like about that? You get to see innovation on display in the NBA Finals. You get to see Steph Curry and Klay Thompson stand 30 feet from the basket and actually have to be guarded, which is ridiculous. You get to see the weirdest and wackiest offensive set ever in the league, which is LeBron playing point guard with four snipers stationed 23 feet from the basket, ready to strike a three. This is all great. This is what we should want to see in the finals. Honestly, would the Clippers or the Bucks being at this stage in the playoffs actually be interesting?

The homer in me wants the Warriors to win in four. Hell, I want them to win in three. If they do win in four, however, it’s likely that they do so because they do something great – Steph goes nuts, or Klay drains eight threes, or they decide to play direct and Durant torches everyone. As it is, I think that the Warriors will win the series in five games, simply because Cleveland has at least two terrible defenders on the floor at all times, and I don’t think the Cavs can get enough stops. But I could see the series going longer, simply because LeBron is the greatest player ever and Kyrie makes the most absurdly difficult shots that I’ve ever seen, and because Cleveland is capable of making 20 threes in a game to steal one. I’m not buying any narrative I hear from basketball punditry, all of whom have had far too long to think about this series and have started to try to convince themselves that the Cavs can win, much as football pundits do during the two weeks before the Super Bowl when they conjure up notions like, “oh, yeah, Denver could beat the Seahawks, sure they could.” But I do think the series will be short in terms of games but not in terms of competition. I want it to be great. Even if the Warriors do win in five, it wouldn’t surprise me if many of the wins are close. And in some ways, I want it to go longer. There is so much talent and skill out there on the floor, so much shooting and playmaking. This is, ultimately, what you want to see if you’re a basketball fan. It doesn’t get any better than this.

Let’s ball.

The Rajon Rondo I'll Remember

Today, we are happy to offer a guest column from Evans Clinchy, who is a Friend of The Lose despite the fact that he took a platter of oysters from me in a bet on how many games OKC would win in the first half of the NBA season. I refer to him as “Evans Ainge” because he’s a long time Boston Celtics guy, and I bounce all sorts of weird trade ideas and scenarios for the C’s off of him, to which he usually replies with things like, “Who are you again?” and, “Do I know you?” Evans is a seasoned vet on the NBA beat, both in New England and in the Pacific Northwest, and you can find him online at twitter.com/evansclinchy and also at evansclinchy.tumblr.com.

THEY say a picture is worth a thousand words, which means simple arithmetic dictates I shouldn’t even bother writing this piece. The animated GIF you see above basically constitutes a mammoth essay – tens of thousands of words – about how I want to remember Rajon Rondo.

That play took place seven years ago today. It was May 9, 2010, and the Celtics were down 2-1 in their second-round playoff series against the Cavaliers. Game 4 was a big nationally televised showdown on a Sunday afternoon. It was Mother’s Day. It was a must-win game for the Celtics, and a chance for the Cavs to move one step closer to that elusive first championship.

It was a game Rondo would absolutely own.

For that one afternoon, it felt like the best basketball player in the universe was in the building and LeBron James was too. LeBron in 2010 was just about at his peak. He’d just won the second of his four MVPs. He was everything to those Cavaliers – their emotional leader, their leading scorer, playmaker, defensive Swiss Army knife. He was the clear best all-around player in the game. But for one day, Rondo out-LeBronned LeBron. He stole the show. He finished that afternoon with 29 points, 18 rebounds and 13 assists, carrying the Celtics to a season-saving win. Those numbers – only Oscar Robertson (32-19-13) and Wilt Chamberlain (29-36-13) had ever matched all three in a playoff game. Not even King James was that good.

That win swung the series. The Celtics had been down 2-1; first they evened the score, then they blew the Cavs’ doors off in a shocking Game 5 blowout in Cleveland, then they ended it in Game 6 at home. At series’ end, LeBron famously ripped his Cavaliers jersey off in the hallway heading to the TD Garden visitors’ locker room. That summer, he left for Miami. The NBA’s monarch had been chased out of town by a 24-year-old point guard who couldn’t shoot.

That’s the thing about peak Rajon Rondo. He wasn’t just disgustingly good at basketball (although he certainly was that) – more than that, he was historically significant. That Mother’s Day in 2010 propelled the Celtics to the NBA Finals, where they came within one ridiculous Ron Artest 3-pointer of winning their 18th championship. It also brought the 2000s Cavaliers, once a true NBA powerhouse, to their knees.

A lot can change in seven years. I’ve witnessed this phenomenon up close. In 2010, I was a Celtics beat reporter, following the team around and chronicling their Cinderella playoff run. I was in the front row for Doc Rivers’ postgame news conference on May 9 when he sat and gushed for minutes on end about how he’d never seen a point guard like Rondo before. In 2017, I sat alone in a musty dive bar in Washington, D.C. and sipped a DC Brau Public Pale Ale as the Chicago Bulls, with Rondo watching from the bench, blew a 2-0 series lead and were eliminated in the first round by the Celtics. The series swung when Rondo fractured his right thumb and sat out Games 3 through 6. In 2010, his presence was enough to slay giants; in ‘17, his absence paved the way for the mercy killing of a shitty pseudo-playoff team that all of America was praying would go home anyway.

It was a slow burn that brought us to this point. Rondo stayed in peak form for another couple of years after that magical 2010 run; he was an All-Star and the best player on a strong East contender in 2011 and 2012, taking the Celtics as far as he could each spring before being eliminated by LeBron’s Heat both years. The downfall began in 2013. On January 25, he drove to the basket late in a Friday night game against the Atlanta Hawks and tweaked his knee; he played 12 more minutes on the bad leg before the night was done. That weekend, he discovered he’d been playing on a torn ACL. He would miss almost a full 12 months before returning the following January. He wasn’t the same after that; he’d lost a step athletically, and he also wasn’t flanked by multiple Hall of Fame teammates. The Celtics had begun a rebuild in his absence.

Eventually, that rebuilding effort grew to include shipping Rondo away. He went to Dallas, where he fit so poorly that coach Rick Carlisle basically told him to stay home from a playoff game in April 2015. From there, he signed a make-good contract for one year in Sacramento. It turned out to be a make-mediocre; he averaged 12 points and 12 assists a game, but also alienated teammates and coaches and got in a heap of trouble for outing a gay referee by directing ugly homophobic slurs his way during a game. Through it all, Rondo remained just barely employable enough to get another gig, signing with the Bulls last summer.

This year was odd. The Bulls got off to a hellacious start, going 8-4 in their first 12 games and boasting the top offense in the NBA. Rondo was a key part of it. Then the losing started, and so did the pouting. Rondo and Fred Hoiberg soured on one another fast; Hoiberg benched his starting point guard by New Year’s. By late January, Rondo was taking to Instagram to publicly vent about the Bulls’ veteran leadership, stating in no uncertain terms that Jimmy Butler and Dwyane Wade couldn’t lead a team like his old pals in Boston, Kevin Garnett and Paul Pierce. The Bulls were in disarray. They were just barely treading water in the East playoff race, and even when they won, it was the ugliest show on hardwood.

Rondo randomly had a late-season renaissance in March; he dropped 24 on the Raptors one night (including four 3-pointers!) and had 15 assists in a surprising win over the Cavaliers. He led the Bulls back from the brink of playoff death, and they snuck into the playoffs as a No. 8. He then averaged a double-double in Chicago’s first two playoff games against Boston, his former team; then, of course, came the thumb injury. The Bulls are now outside the playoffs looking in, and a summer of uncertainty awaits. The team has an option to bring Rondo back. They probably will, but they’re not exactly thrilled about it. Rondo is past his prime, and the Bulls don’t have any viable path to being truly competitive again, with or without him.

It’s weird to think about how we got here. Rondo’s star has fallen so far, so fast. He’s still only 31 years old today. He could still be a great player! Why isn’t he?

This question has been asked and answered to death over the last three years. The debate has raged on since 2014, when Rondo returned post-ACL to a young, rebuilding Celtics team that was in the tank. They had a 15-game stretch late that spring when they went 1-14, and questions about Rondo’s decline began seeping into the national discourse. Some speculated that it was the injury – he just wasn’t the same player without two healthy knees. Others cited his surroundings – without Garnett, Pierce and Ray Allen to pass to, what’s a pass-first point guard to do? Still others theorized that the game had passed Rondo by. He was a non-shooting perimeter player in a fast-modernizing NBA that valued shooting at all five positions. The game was no longer holding a place for him.

Me, I’m tired of the debate. I think it’s clear at this point that the correct answer is some combination of all three, and I don’t have much interest in quibbling over precisely how much of each thing it is. I do think that there’s also a fascinating psychological component there – Rondo was used to being an important NBA player from a young age, and it became difficult to cope when he was forced to transition into being “just another guy.” Rondo was the starting point guard for a championship team at 22. He outplayed LeBron in a playoff series at 24. When you start your career off with such unmitigated success, it’s hard to grapple with the fact that life won’t always be that way.

I can relate. In a lot of ways, my life has mirrored Rondo’s. He was born in 1986, grew up in the South and came to the Celtics when drafted in 2006; I was also born in 1986, grew up in the South and came to Boston for college. In 2006, I got started writing about the Celtics in a column for my college paper. In 2008, Rondo won a title; my first professional journalism gig was covering the team’s victory parade. In 2010, Rondo was briefly on top of the basketball world, at least in terms of individual stardom; I had a job right out of college covering him, which pretty much felt like the pinnacle of life for me, too.

Rondo had his flaws and so did I. He was a basketball player who didn’t particularly like taking jump shots; I was a journalist who didn’t particularly like reporting. We both could be a little prickly when authority figures rubbed us the wrong way. We both also fell victim to timing and circumstance and luck. Long story short, he’s now a fringe starter on a relatively crappy team and I now have a relatively boring desk job.

I try to avoid thinking of either Rondo or myself as someone who peaked at 24, though. Human beings don’t necessarily have “peaks,” anyway. Time isn’t a flat circle, or however the hell that cliché goes. Life brings all sorts of ups and downs and sidewayses.

Rondo, warts and all, will kinda always be my favorite player. He’s talented and misunderstood and enigmatic and flawed and stubborn and maddening and endlessly compelling. There’s so much there to unpack. I’ll probably never be truly done unpacking it.

I continue to hope for the best for Rondo, even though I know nothing he does now can ever live up to the old days. I’m still a sucker for the little mini-redemption stories, like the one he spun for us in March and April this year. And no matter how far he declines, I still try to remember the good times.

Seven years ago today, Rajon Rondo gave the second-best performance I’ve ever seen in person. (The best was Game 6 of the East finals in 2012, when LeBron dropped 45 in an elimination game and singlehandedly saved Miami’s season on the road in Boston.) I’m still thinking about that Mother’s Day today. I think it’s part of the human condition that we go through life doing our best to conjure up the good memories and suppress the bad ones. The ACL tear, the Dallas fiasco, the Bill Kennedy incident, the Instagram post – I do my best to forget those things ever happened. I try to remember Rondo my way – putting up triple-doubles on national television, faking the King out of his shoes and just generally being a badass. That’s the Rondo I’ll remember.

Upside Down

Giannis gives zero fucks about your wimpy shot attempt

WHAT was most striking about the first round of the playoffs to me was the absence of upside, which goes a long way towards explaining why there were virtually no upsets or any real surprises. There were some great games, to be sure, but one of the reasons that surprises come about in the NBA playoffs is that a young team finally puts it all together and raises their game to a new level. You could argue this is the case with the Utah Jazz, the only lower-seeded team to win a series, a former doormat who have slowly, steadily built themselves into a 50-win team. But I wouldn’t really think of this as being that much of an upset. The Jazz were a #5 seed, but they had the exact same 51-31 record as the Clippers during the regular season. I could see the Jazz winning this series beforehand, even before the assortment of in-series injuries, simply because the Clippers are the Clippers and are prone to throwing up on themselves at the most inopportune of moments.

Which they did, of course, because the Clips are gonna Clip.

But otherwise, the seeds held to form. There were some scary moments for a couple members of the NBA élite here and there – most notably in the Boston-Chicago series, which was one of the strangest playoff series I’ve ever seen – but ultimately the bluebloods prevailed. And I was mentioning before about how you want to see teams progress and take strides and raise their game, what was interesting to me, as a disciple of failure, was just how little game any of the eight losing teams had to raise. There was an absence of upside on display. The vanquished all seem to be asking the same questions here in the offseason: where are we going from here? What are we doing from this point onward?

With one big exception, of course: the Milwaukee Bucks. The Lose loves me some Bucks. Milwaukee got a #6 seed this year despite the fact that their 2nd- and 3rd-best players, Jabari Parker and Khris Middleton, each basically missed half the season. Giannis is likely to be in the 5th-7th range of MVP voting, and with good reason: he was the first player in league history to lead his team in scoring, rebounding, assists, blocks, and steals – an accomplishment which got swept under the rug thanks to TRIPLE DOUBLES! BRIGHT SHINY ROUND NUMBER OBJECTS! Anyway, where was I … oh right, Giannis. He’s a beast. He’s going to win an MVP one day. The Bucks need more shooting and their lack of experience showed in their first-round loss to Toronto in six games, squandering a 2-1 lead and then also squandering a last-minute lead in Game 6 after one of the most inspired runs imaginable, a 34-7 run to erase a 25-point Raps lead. Giannis was dead on his feet and the Bucks were exhausted, so they couldn’t close the deal in Game 6, and I’m annoyed because now we get the usual unwatchable Raptors garbage on offense here in the second round instead of the Bucks against Cleveland, who would have been much more fun. Whereas Cleveland is clearly in Toronto’s heads, the Bucks would have given zero fucks about Cleveland mystique. Giannis gives zero fucks about LeBron. He would have just taken it right at him, hell bent on dunking on him and daring LeBron to actually play some position defense for a change. It would’ve been fun to watch, even if the Bucks were certain to go down in flames.

So we love Milwaukee and everyone in the East should fear the deer going forward. But these other seven first-round losers? Yuck. They’re either going in circles or they’re taking on water. I have no idea what any of them do going forward.

At some point during the bloodbath that was Game 4 in Portland, TNT pointed out that the Blazers have every single player on their roster under contract for next season. If you watched the Blazers at all this season, you wouldn’t think that was a good thing. Portland had the second-largest payroll in the NBA this year, believe it or not, having gone mad last summer and doled out enormous contracts to backup guys who contributed little to nothing this season. It’s not all bad, of course – the Nurkic trade was genius, and Denver also gave them a first round pick in that deal, meaning they have three of those in the upcoming draft. Add Nurkic to Lillard and McCollum and you’ve got something good there going forward, but the rest of the front court is a mess and the backup centers are all sub-zero. There has been talk in NBA media circles about how a model based upon two short guards who can’t defend anyone isn’t sustainable, suggesting that Portland make a deal for either C.J. or Dame. This seems nuts to me, since the drop off from the two of them to the rest of the guys on the roster is so vast, but what do you do going forward?

Memphis is in even worse shape. Pluses are you’ve got coach Fiz, who we love, and Mike Conley is great and so is Marc Gasol. But both those guys are now on the bad side of 30, and those two combined with the albatross that is Chandler Parsons’ contract add up to about $85 million on the books for next season. Parsons had micro fracture surgery on his knee, which is a brutal, last-ditch sort of procedure that rarely leads to positive results. The core of this team is ancient – Vince Carter is 40, Zac Randolph 36, Tony Allen 35 – all three of those guys are free agents, but Memphis has no flexibility. Their young players aren’t very good, and they’ve traded away two of their next three draft picks. Grit & Grind might wind up being ground into dust.

What are the Atlanta Hawks? Did you know they’ve made the playoffs 11 straight years? There isn’t a more vanilla franchise in the NBA than the Hawks, who probably have to re-sign, and overpay, Paul Millsap since he’s the only guy on the roster who is in the top half of the league at his position. The Hawks win with defense, and maybe Schröder’s first round performance against the Buzzards foretells something good going forward at the point, but running out Crazy Legs Bazemore and the ghost of Dwight Howard isn’t getting you anywhere. The Hawks were schizophrenic this season, going on long losing skids followed by long upswings. That they got a #5 seed owed more to continued Eastern mediocrity than anything they did on the court, since nothing about this team makes sense.

The Pacers make even less sense. What was this team was attempting to do this season? They have a superstar, Paul George, who clearly doesn’t want to be there. George is a free agent in 2018, and if he makes all-NBA this season, the Pacers will have the opportunity to offer him the enormous DP extension newly negotiated into the CBA. This is supposed to be a way for teams to keep the stars they’ve developed, but it creates a couple of enormous unintended consequences. Indiana would have the peace of mind of knowing they can basically drive a few armored cars up to George’s house and dump the contents in the driveway, but do they want to spend over $200m on a guy who doesn’t want to be there? And George would be insane to turn that down, of course, but does he want to spend his entire career in Indianapolis? What seems likely to wind up happening with these new DP contracts is that guys are going to sign them and then start demanding to be traded later if/when it doesn’t go well, which just makes the process uglier in the long run. And it’s not going well in Indiana, where the Pacers did no phase of the game particularly well this season and have an assortment of miscast pieces. They actually shoot the ball pretty well from three, but their offense doesn’t play to that strength. Larry Bird said before the season he wanted his team to be up-tempo, but then he hired a coach, Nate McMillan, whose teams have always walked the ball up. The Pacers wound up pushing the pace somewhat out of necessity, playing catchup because the defense wasn’t very good. Bird’s now fired himself, leaving GM Kevin Pritchard to clean up the mess and figure out what to do. Best guess is he tries to move George this summer and start all over, but no one is going to give up the sort of assets Pritchard will be looking for simply to rent George for a season.

The extension George might be eligible for in Indy is the same one that Russell Westbrook will be eligible to receive in OKC, a one-time exemption the league has granted and probably shouldn’t have granted. Lost amid all of the small-town loyalty narrative was the fact that it made good business sense for Russ to sign his previous extension last summer. Given that the entire narrative in OKC this year was about what a loyal servant Westbrook was, were he to now say he doesn’t want to sign up for 5/220 or thereabouts, he winds up looking like the biggest phony that there is. He sort of has to take it, at this point, and OKC has to offer it.

But what are you signing on for if you do this? Westbrook got to be the big dog and stuff stats to his heart’s content, but that’s not a winning strategy in the long term, and anyone who thinks that’s miraculously going to change is fooling themselves. This roster outside of Russ is, well, not very good. Their offensive players can’t defend, their defensive-minded players can’t shoot. I have no idea if anyone on this team is actually any good – Oladipo, Adams, you name it – since it’s impossible to view anything that they did this season outside of a Westbrook-dominated context. And that was by design, mind you – Steven Adams played more than 90% of his minutes with Russ on the floor. It only took 86 games before Billy Donovan decided that maybe he should try putting Oladipo on the point for the second unit to attempt to shore up a bench that hemorrhaged points at every turn. What was most remarkable about Westbrook’s season was the fact that he was able to pull so many close games out of his ass, usually against not very good teams, after his teammates had contrived to get themselves into a world of trouble. That’s unsustainable going forward. Nothing about this model is sustainable. You just can’t continue to win, in the modern game, with one guy who is so ball dominant.

And while I hate the way that Westbrook plays, rip Westbrook all the time for being selfish and padding his stats, and think that the most underrated aspect of KD leaving OKC was the fact that he was sick of playing with Westbrook, this team is so poorly constructed at the moment that Russ going all gonzo was, in fact, the only real way this team could compete. But what the hell do you do now? It made sense to sign Oladipo and Adams to extensions, even though you’re still not entirely sure what you’re getting going forward, but now you have no space and no real flexibility to tinker with the roster, especially since you’ve got a monstrous amount of money invested in Enis ‘Can’t Play’ Kanter. Kanter’s probably your best trade asset, if you can find someone dumb enough to take on a guy who can’t guard a chair. Then again, they did manage to get two rotation players in a trade for Cam Payne from the Bulls, so there are dumb guys out there capable of making terrible deals.

Oh, and speaking of the Bulls …

No argument here

It’s hard to imagine a more colossal failure of an organization, top-to-bottom, than the Chicago Bulls. Literally everyone involved in this team whose name isn’t Jimmy Butler ought to just go away. Their gutless, soulless performance in Game 6 – a 105:83 loss to Boston – capped off a gutless, soulless, clueless season. It’s not just that this franchise clearly has no plan going forward, as they’ve thrown one idea at the wall after another looking for something that sticks, but all of those ideas are, in and of themselves, bad ideas.

The single-worst thing that could have happened to this team would have been if they’d managed to somehow win that first round series with the Celtics, because it would have given the impression that the tag-team, slapstick duo of Gar Forman and John Paxson actually knew what they were doing this season. Instead, the second-worst thing happened, which is they won two games, and now they’re talking about bringing back Rondo to run the point even though he spent a large chunk of the season being persona non grata. Rondo’s still a better option at the point than the half-dozen assorted stiffs Fred Holberg trotted out in his stead, the most egregious of which being Michael Carter-Williams, who has devolved into one of the worst offensive players in the game, and the aforementioned Cameron Payne, whom wound up in the D-League and was inactive for the playoffs after GarPax traded two rotation players – Taj Gibson and Doug McDermott – as well as a draft pick in order to acquire him. The entire axis of weasel that was the GarPax machinations surrounding Dougie McBuckets – first trading five draft assets to get him, then giving him away for a used pair of shoes – should be a fireable offense in and of itself. GarPax have certainly not done any favors for supposed offensive genius coach Hoiberg, giving him a claustrophobic roster of misfit toys to work with, but there was Hoiberg trotting out units in the last two games against the Celtics which had never even played together before, and doing dumb things like benching Robin Lopez for the entire 4th Quarter when Lopez pounding the glass and stealing Al Horford’s lunch money was the primary reason the Bulls won two games in the first place. Any resemblance to a clue in this organization is purely coincidental.

And then there are the Clippers. Aah, be still my foolish heart.

The Clippers achieved an inglorious milestone with their Game 7 flop against Utah, as they became the first team in NBA history to lose a playoff series where they held the lead in five consecutive seasons. Now, obviously, you can’t help it when, in 2016, Blake Griffin and Chris Paul both get hurt in the same game. That’s just bad luck, and it was bad luck that Griffin injured his foot against the Jazz. But the Clippers flat out choked against OKC in 2014, and then they choked again against Houston in 2015 – the two seasons which really were their best chances to reach the NBA Finals, but seasons in which they didn’t even manage to reach the conference finals. One way or another, they always come up short.

The core of this team has been together for six years now and not even got past the second round. Paul, Griffin, and J.J. Redick are all free agents. It would cost around $190m or so to bring everyone back. They’ve got no young players to speak of, they’ve traded away picks, they’ve never developed a decent backup point guard, the success of the bench unit is still dependent upon the one game in four in which Jamal Crawford makes shots. The team is stale, don’t seem to like each playing with each other much, and going nowhere.

But at this point, can the Clippers really afford to blow it up? Given the nature of the crowded landscape of sports in Los Angeles, you need stars to be relevant. Paul’s not going anywhere – in his role as president of the players union, he as much as drew up his next contract while writing up the CBA – and if you’re the Clippers, you probably have to re-sign Blake if he wants to come back, because what the else are you going to do? And sure, the roster is stale, but as it is, it’s a roster worth 50-55 wins every season. It isn’t, however, a roster which is winning an NBA title.

But therein lies the problem for all of these teams. None of them are winning a title any time soon, because the Golden State Warriors aren’t going anywhere, and neither are the Cleveland Cavaliers. The latter may be a little more vulnerable simply because of age, but LeBron is still there and he’s an indestructible cyborg. What any of these teams do going forward is ultimately going to be determined by how they can manage their expectations. As much as I glossed over the bland Atlanta Hawks before, it is impressive that they’ve reached the playoffs 11 straight times. The question going forward for all involved here is what is it they can realistically accomplish?

And this goes back to what we’ve asked time and again here at In Play Lose: how is it that we determine what is failure and what is success? Obviously, everyone wants to be winning championships, but there aren’t a whole lot of those to go around. What’s particularly perplexing about building championship winning teams at the NBA level is how the process is, ultimately, somewhat accidental. Remember, the Cavs won the draft lottery four times, and were able to parlay two of those picks into the trade for Kevin Love to put alongside former #1 overall picks LeBron and Kyrie Irving. The Warriors were able to sign Durant because Steph Curry has the single-most team-friendly contract in all of professional sports due to his constant injury problems early in his career. At no point in the rebuilding of the Boston Celtics did Danny Ainge think, “you know, what this team really needs at its core is a 5’9” folk hero of a point guard.” It’s a baffling and befuddling sort of process. And the salary structure of the NBA sort of necessitates that the best teams – which these eight are, by nature of being in the playoffs – ultimately wind up being punished for their success. Successful talent costs more than unsuccessful talent, of course, and with every win, the value of your players rises, complicated by the fact that your dumbest competitors will likely overpay and force you to overpay as well. The most successful counter to this has been the Spurs, of course, with their steady, relentless, and systematic approach over the past 20 years, but lauding them for that also conveniently ignores the fact that the Spurs struck it rich twice in the lottery, first with David Robinson and then with Tim Duncan. You need great players above all else, and great players are damn hard to come by.

And now I’m trying to figure out where the next wave is going to come from. Remember, no one foresaw what’s come about in Cleveland or the Bay Area five years ago. What’s the next wave? It’s fun to think about but impossible to gauge, simply because the game is changing so quickly. As much as the Cavs’ indifference to defense has been decried this season, there is something to be said for the idea that the NBA is such an offense-driven entity now that defense no longer matters. The league’s collective offensive rating this past season was the highest in the 44 years where such data is discernible. Maybe you can, in fact, win a championship without being able to guard the floor on which you are standing.

What most of the first round exiters seem to share, however, is a collective inability at the moment to take advantage of whatever trend is out there. Reboot, rebuild, reset: whatever you want to call it. Whatever you do in the modern NBA, you’d better do it quickly, because the league rapidly reinvents itself and turns itself upside down, so you’d better not find yourself left behind in the dust.

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.