Loose Balls

In Play Lose World HQ

THE LOSE apologizes for the absence during the month of June, but real life interfered, as it is wont to do. It pleases me to say that In Play Lose has a new world headquarters, but it also pains me to say that, because moving to our new digs has left my back a shambles. But I am now on the road to the recovery with the aid of the Official Chiropractor of In Play Lose. It pains me that everything hurts. It pleases me that some things about me hurt which I’d forgotten exist, so their rediscovery counts as success.

We’ve talked a great deal about the NBA here so far at In Play Lose in 2017, and I wanted to wrap that up now that the Finals are over and the folly that is the NBA draft has taken place. We’ll get into some other subjects here in the coming days. It was a fascinating season to me in that what we all pretty much expected would happen wound up happening – the Golden State Warriors won the NBA championship – and yet I found the road traveled in order to get this point to be endlessly fascinating. There is never any certainty to the outcome, no matter how inevitable the end results may seem.

And you can certainly make a case for the inevitability of the outcome in these NBA Finals because Golden State possesses the most ridiculous assemblage of talent in the history of the NBA. No team that I can ever recall had a roster with four All-Stars under the age of 30. The most comparable collection of talent in any North American sport in my lifetime is the Edmonton Oilers of the 1980s, who won five Stanley Cups and were so deep that they could trade the greatest player in the history of the sport and still win that 5th Cup after he’d left. The Oilers talent level went even beyond the Warriors – they had eight all-stars one season – but even so, Stanley Cup success for The Oil was never assured. They choked away playoff series in 1982 and 1986, and were taken to seven games by the Philadelphia Flyers in the 1987 finals. Wayne Gretzky has spoken in the past of how guys were playing in the playoffs with broken hands, broken wrists, severe shoulder and knee injuries and the like. Just because they were the greatest team ever assembled in the history of the sport, it didn’t mean the others were going to just roll over and give them the titles. They still had to play the games, they still had to go out there and earn it.

And Golden State earned it this season as well, because in the last three games of the NBA Finals, Cleveland was great. They were absolutely great. Their shotmaking was spectacular, and Cleveland got better and better as the series progressed. But the Cavs messed up the series when they messed up the end of Game 3, coughing up a 6-point lead in the final 90 seconds and losing 118:113, which put the Dubs up 3-0 and pretty much ended any realistic chance Cleveland had of winning. But it was precisely the sort of game that you’d expect to happen if you were picking this to be a 5-game series – that close game which could go either way and winds up going to the road team. Again, a sort of understandable script wound up being followed in the NBA Finals: the Warriors win Games 1 and 2 big at home, the Cavs win a game big at home, but Warriors win a close one at The Q to come home with a 3-1 lead and then close it out at home. But the series was nonetheless wildly entertaining, just as the season was wildly entertaining, featuring some of the greatest basketball we have ever seen.

Predictions of Cleveland winning this series always seemed preposterous to me, as they were predicated upon this fantasyland notion that somehow Cleveland’s bad defense would be able to stop what is arguably the greatest offense in NBA history. For all of their truly exquisite shotmaking in the last three games of the series, the Cavs were only able to muster one win. Cleveland’s 2016 title was well-deserved, but then the Warriors responded by making a slight upgrade to their roster. The onus is now on Cleveland to respond. The Warriors got better last summer, and Cleveland has to get better now.

But how?

I would submit that not re-upping GM David Griffin, who only managed to construct a roster around LeBron that won Cleveland an NBA championship, doesn’t count as an auspicious beginning to the summer. Whomever replaces Griffin will be the 5th Cavs GM in the past 12 years, which is a ridiculous amount of turnover for what is one the league’s marquee franchises. Cavs owner Dan Gilbert has never really valued front office positions, but good ol’ Comic Sans Dan just may have laid the groundwork for killing his golden goose. LeBron can be a free agent in 2018, after all, and after the native son came back to Cleveland and brought a title to his hometown club, he has nothing left to prove there. Unlike when he first left in 2010, and they burned his jerseys in the streets, LeBron can walk away from Cleveland having done what he set out to do and brought them the ultimate prize of a championship. If, come next summer, LeBron doesn’t think the Cavs can win anymore, he won’t hesitate to head elsewhere. He’s done it before – twice – and he’ll do it again.

But how in the hell is Cleveland going to get better? They have one of the oldest teams in the NBA, and they have the most expensive team in the NBA. Win-now mode netted them the ultimate prize in 2016, of course, which means that ultimately it was worth the cost, but that moment has passed and now the Cavs are stuck. They have no promising young players, they have no draft assets to work with – that trade of a 1st round pick to Atlanta for Kyle Korver looks really awful in hindsight – and the NBA repeater tax is going to kill them this coming season.

Cleveland Cavaliers payroll obligations for the next three seasons

Cleveland’s problem is a problem endemic to the NBA salary cap, in that you wind up paying players on your roster relative to their value to your own team – which has nothing at all to do with their value to anyone else in the league. This is why making trades can be really difficult. A guy worth $15 million on your end probably isn’t valued at that level by anyone else, and in a league that’s constrained by salary caps and floors and luxury taxes and the like, the salary math is almost as important as if they can hit a jump shot, if not more so.Your $15 million player is not necessary my $15 million player. The highest paid player in the league this year was Mike Conley of Memphis – a very good player, mind you, but one who owes that salary not to being the best point guard in the league, but to the fact that he is the best player on his team and, since they had a max contract slot to dole out, they may as well give it to him. It will be interesting this offseason to see what happens in Washington and Detroit, where Otto Porter and Kentavious Caldwell-Pope, respectively, will likely demand max contracts in order to re-sign. Nice players, both of them, but neither of them would even start on the Warriors, much less be paid the max. If I am going to watch a Buzzards game, I am going to see John Wall and Bradley Beal, not Otto Porter. I pretty much never want to see a Detroit game ever, since that team verges on unwatchable.

For the Cavs here, Tristan Thompson is owed $16.4 million this coming season, and $52.4 million over the next three years. Tristan Thompson fills an important role for the Cavs – holding down the center of the floor while the others are bombing away from three. His value to the Cavs, however, is much higher than with anyone else in the league. No one wants $52.4 million worth of a limited offensive center who got played off the floor in the first two games of the NBA finals. The contracts for J.R. Smith and Iman Shumpert are similar – whatever their role on the Cavs, no one else wants to take on those contracts in trade. Those guys fill a need around LeBron in Cleveland, but take LeBron out of it, and they are not nearly as useful as players.

In truth, Cleveland’s only really good trade chip is Kyrie Irving. But you’d be an idiot to trade Kyrie Irving. Kyrie Irving is one of the most creative shotmakers the game of basketball has ever seen. That’s a stupid idea. So then what do you do? The Cavs were already shopping Kevin Love, who is an élite offensive talent, but he’s also 28, is owed $46.7 million over the next two seasons, just had knee surgery this past season, can’t guard anyone in the open floor, and much like Thompson, Love also got played off the floor at times by the Warriors. I’ve been hearing about these trade rumors ever since the finals ended in which the Cavs would make a 3-team deal whereby they would ship Love to Team X, Team X would give a bunch of stuff to either Chicago or Indiana, and the Cavs would land either Paul George or Jimmy Butler. (More on him in a minute.) Those rumors made no sense to me, simply because if I’m Team X, I’d rather have Butler or George than Love, and if it’s going to cost me a bunch of stuff in order to move those guys, I’d rather just deal with Chicago and Indy directly and ignore Cleveland’s phone calls.

I don’t see how Cleveland gets any better. I suppose you could hope that Dwyane Wade and Carmelo Anthony get bought out from the Bulls and the Knicks eventually, but an old team with a bad defense and two ball-dominant players probably doesn’t need two more old, ball-dominant players who play bad defense. That formula didn’t work against the Warriors in 2017, and it isn’t likely to work in 2018, either. Teams that are old and slow don’t magically get younger and faster, and once they go bad, they tend to go really bad, really fast. Cleveland cruised through the Eastern playoffs this season, but I would argue their competition in the East is closer to them than they are to the Warriors, assuming that competition bothers to actually make some moves …

* * *

The aforementioned Jimmy Butler was ultimately dealt during the comedy of errors that was the Chicago Bulls draft night. It’s rare that true stars get traded in the NBA, but now we’ve seen it twice in 2017 and, just as was the case with Boogie Cousins going to New Orleans, the return on the star sale seemed somewhat laughable. Butler is reunited with Thibs now in Minnesota, while the tag team comedy duo running the Bulls referred to as GarPax uttered the obligatory, “this was the best deal we could get” line, which seems dubious seeing as how it’s the exact same trade they apparently nixed a year ago – Butler for Kris Dunn and Zac LeVine – before both Wolves’ dudes were damaged goods. This deal got grades ranging from F to F+ from the assortment of NBA pundits, and the Bulls then compounded the disaster by swapping pick positions with Minnesota – if you’re the one trading the star, you shouldn’t be giving away stuff – using the 7th pick in the draft on Lauri Markkanen, who can shoot but can’t defend and who rebounds about as badly as any 7’0” guy I’ve ever seen, and then selling the 38th pick to the Warriors for $3.5 million, allowing the NBA champs to get the guy they wanted, Jordan Bell, on a cheap deal. This is precisely the same strategy Golden State used a year ago, paying $2.4 million to the Bucks for Patrick McCaw, and all McCaw wound up doing this year was playing 4th Quarter minutes in Game 5 of the NBA Finals and looking far better prepared to play NBA basketball than any of the 37 guys picked ahead of him in the draft. If the Warriors come knocking on your door and throwing money at you to buy their way into the draft, you might want to shut the door in their faces.

And I asked the same question, when I saw this Butler trade, that I did when Cousins got traded back in February: where are the Celtics? Why is Danny Ainge sitting on his ass … ets? Stars are hard to come by in the NBA, but you need them to win. You need them more than ever, now that Golden State has four of them. But instead, the Celtics played it safe once more, although they did make one deal: swapping the 1st overall pick to the 76ers, trading down to the third spot, and taking one of Philly’s picks over the next two years.

I hated this deal. And I hated this deal for two reasons.

Golden State has changed the calculus in the NBA. They have four All-stars under 30, all of them signed or soon to be signed up through at least 2019. They’re not going anywhere, so what are you going to do about it? Clearly, the second-best team in the league is Cleveland, and to get your shot at the Warriors in the East, you have to go through Cleveland first. Boston isn’t good enough to beat either of those teams in a playoff series, as the East final clearly showed. So if you’re Boston, what are you going to do about the Cavs? Are you just going to sit around and wait for LeBron to get old, or are you going to try to push the envelope?

So, okay, let’s take the tact that the Celtics are playing “the long game.” (I’ll get to why I think that is dumb here in a minute.) Okay, so in the post-LeBron world, who looks to be your chief adversaries in the East? I was talking previously about the absence of upside in the first round of this year’s NBA playoffs, talking about how so few of the losing teams showed any real long-term potential. But who does have the long term potential in the East? Milwaukee, to be sure, because one day Giannis will develop a jump shot, basketball will be over as we know it, life will be over as we know it and we’ll all bow down to our Bucks overlord. So who else? Philadelphia, of course. Philadelphia cannot get everyone on the court just yet, and health is a huge concern for them, but if they do ever get all of their guys on the court healthy and knowing where they are supposed to be at any point in time, they have two guys – Simmons and Embiid – with star potential. How many guys among the many redundant, nice-but-not-outstanding members of the Celtics can you say that about? IT? He’s certainly a star at the moment, but he’s still 5’7” and now he has a hip injury. Who else? Some people like Jaylen Brown. Then again, some people also like mayonnaise. I like neither of those things. Who else? Anyone? Didn’t think so.

So if you’re Boston and you’re playing the long game here, and thinking of the post-LeBron world, you have to think that the Sixers will be your prime rivals. This 2017 draft is a draft filled with good players, but it’s hard to guess who has the potential to be great. My hunch is that there are three potential superstars in this draft, all of whom are point guards with one of whom – Markelle Fultz – being the clear #1. The Celtics had the #1 pick, and their future rivals, the 76ers, wanted Fultz – so why are they giving him to the Sixers? It’s Fultz reaches his potential along with the others, the Sixers now have three stars in their lineup. They have exactly the core that they need to become a championship team. This is reason #1 that I hated this trade: Don’t give something to your closest rivals.

Oh, but they didn’t give Fultz to the 76ers, because they got another draft pick! Here’s the second reason I hated this trade: the Celtics don’t need more picks. They have too many draft assets already. They had eight draft picks in the 2016 draft – yes, that’s right eight – and wound up essentially throwing a lot of them away, which makes them useless. Danny Ainge commented, in the aftermath of the Butler trade to Minnesota, that teams ask for too much stuff from the Celtics because they know how much stuff that the Celtics have. He seems to think that the others in the league are undervaluing his many assets, but if anything, Ainge appears to be overvaluing them.

And here is why I think playing the long game is dumb, and why I thought it was dumb this past season as well. Boston isn’t as good as Cleveland, but Cleveland is old and plays bad defense and there were, and still are, guys out there – not just guys, but actual stars – whom the Celtics have the assets to acquire which could make an East final against the Cavs at least competitive, if not tipped in Boston’s favor outright. Jimmy Butler and Boogie Cousins were each traded basically for a pair of shoes. Boston could easily have beaten those offers and barely made a dent in their asset stashes. Paul George is now on the market as well, as he’s told the Pacers he’s leaving in free agency next summer. Why not rent the guy for a year? Throw two first round picks at the Pacers for him – and Boston can afford to do that, since they have seven first round in the next four years, which is far more than they can ever truly use effectively. Hell, if Kristaps Porziņģis actually is available from the Knicks (good lord), I’m calling up Phil Jackson and saying, “Here Phil, I’ve got seven first round picks in the next four years. Pick any two! Hell, pick any three! You’re giving me a unicorn, a 7-footer who shoots threes and protects the rim and is still on his rookie wage scale! Take any of that stuff that you want!” But instead, you’ve got Danny Ainge hoarding picks and kicking the can down the road, and now would be a good time for me to point out that his judgment in the draft has been, well, meh, and that most of his acumen amid all of his wheelings and dealings has come in finding undervalued players in the league like IT and Crowder and maximizing their value.

But the main reason I want to see the Celtics playing short, bulking up and beating on the Cavs has to do with what I said earlier in the show here, which is that LeBron can be a free agent in 2018. LeBron has some designs on being in L.A., of course, but his decisions are going to come down to whether or not he can win in Cleveland – so go and beat his ass! If the Celtics stock themselves up this offseason and then kick Cleveland’s ass in the playoffs, they also quite possibly kick LeBron all the way to the Western Conference, which means they have the run of the East until Philly gets its shit together, or until Giannis develops a jump shot and life on earth as we know it is over. (But at least our Bucks overlord will be a benevolent sort of overlord, since Giannis seems like a genuinely nice guy.)

All that I can think is happening at the moment, given the favorable hand they hold and given the market conditions, is that Ainge has been standing pat because he is as close to certain as he can possibly be that a big free agent – possibly Gordon Hayward, possibly Blake Griffin – is going to be signing this summer. Otherwise, none of this makes any sense. I don’t believe for a second that they drafted Jason Tatum, a nice shooter from Duke, with the idea in mind that he was the best guy in the draft and worth trading down for. Tatum adds to the Celtics’ glut on the wings – another position of strength of theirs in the trade market, as 3-and-D guys are in demand, but it isn’t a position of strength if your action is to just stock up on even more of them. Remember, Sam Hinkie’s death blow in Philly was drafting a third center, creating needless redundancy and overstocking at a position that is becoming less and less important in the modern NBA. The Celtics have too many wings, too many nice players who aren’t great players and all of whom are going to start getting expensive, and their other roster quandary going forward is what to do with IT, who is great but who is also 5’7” and going to be 29 when his contract ends and now has a dicey sort of hip injury. Boston could have gone a long way towards solving those problems in the future by drafting either Fultz or Ball and then trading some combo of Crowder/Bradley/Smart for either Butler or George, but they didn’t do any of that, and as a long time Celtics admirer, I’m sort of getting tired of continuing to build for some future that never, ever seems to exist. The future could be now, if they want it to be now.

I’d still try to rent Paul George, just so Cleveland doesn’t get him. Maybe he decides in the summer of 2018 that he wants to go to L.A., but maybe with him in tow, Boston could knock Cleveland off and make a good showing against the Warriors in the finals, and maybe PG13 sticks around at that point, because he comes to discover that he actually likes winning, which is ultimately the point of all of this.

In order to win in the NBA, you need stars. The best way to get stars is to draft them, but an even better way to get them is to trade for them when you have the means to do so, which is clearly where the Celtics are at this point in time. Failing to do so constitutes missed opportunities, and when you have a behemoth on the other side of the continent that you’re up against, you just can’t let those opportunities slip past.

* * *

* * *

And as I’m writing this blog, I’m now reading about how there is a possible 3-team trade in the works involving Cleveland, Indiana, and Denver. Denver? Sure, because Kevin Love is precisely what a team who couldn’t guard their own shadows last season needs to add to the roster. I get that Denver is desperate to be relevant, but they finished 9th in the West last season and everyone who finished 4-8 has huge question marks this offseason: the Clippers have a new front office head honcho in Jerry West, Paul and Griffin need to be re-signed, etc.; the Jazz don’t know if they’ll have Hayward and George Hill around; the Grizzlies are old and slow, capped out and have no draft assets; OKC has to upgrade their horrible roster and aren’t likely to be so lucky in close games; Portland is in salary cap hell. Hell, if Denver does nothing except stay the course, they could be relevant again simply through attrition. Trading for Kevin Love seems completely unnecessary to me. But as we’ve seen with the trades of Boogie and then Jimmy Butler, you cannot expect actors to act rationally in these situations.

The NBA is drunk this offseason. The Warriors broke the league. They went out and signed KD, stomped on everyone, and now every other team seems to be losing its mind in one way or another. What’s strange to me about the PG13-to-Cleveland rumor is that I still don’t think it makes the Cavs good enough to beat the Warriors, but I guess you can’t blame them for trying. I’ve heard more bizarre rumors in the past two weeks than I can wrap my head around. It’s hard for me to keep up:

* * *

Apart from the weird 1-for-3 Boston-Philly exchange, and Chicago going insane, the NBA draft was basically chalk. Lest you get too excited about the players in the 2017 NBA draft – a draft which is supposedly one of the deepest in ages – I invite to look back at the 2015 NBA draft, which people thought was going to be pretty good, and see what’s come of it in two short years: #1 was Karl Anthony Towns to Minnesota, which was a no-brainer and is still a no-brainer; #2 was DeAngelo Russell, who was so bad in two years in L.A. that the Lakers threw him into a Mozgov salary dump trade with Brooklyn (and while I’m at it, I should give the Swamp Dragons some props here for making that deal, because Russell still has considerable upside and Brooklyn has nothing to lose giving him the keys and trying to develop him); #3 in that draft was Okafor to the 76ers, who will probably get traded at some point this season for about 25¢ on the dollar; #4 was Porziņģis, who shouldn’t be traded but just might be because Phil Jackson is the worst GM in the NBA; and #5 was Mario Hezonja to Orlando, who has basically been a bust. Outside of Towns and Porziņģis, you’d probably have to say the best player to come out of that draft was Devin Booker, who was picked 13th by Phoenix. But otherwise, there are a lot of iffy guys in that draft who, just two years ago, looked as if they might possibly be useful NBA players.

We love the draft because we’re intoxicated by the great opiate that is potential, but the truth is that a lot of good talents will have their careers negatively affected by being drafted by organizations which are completely incompetent. It was pointed out during the coverage of the NBA draft that more All-Stars have been drafted 10th than have been drafted 2nd, which says far less about the players being picked and more about who is doing the picking. To that end, if I had a guess who’d ultimately be the best player in this draft, my guess is that it would be Dennis Smith, who was the 9th pick in the draft and went to the Dallas Mavericks, simply because the Mavericks generally know what they are doing and will put the kid in the most positions to succeed. A lot of those guys we just pointed out in that 2015 draft were put into positions where failure was inevitable. In Russell’s case, his rookie season coincided with the bombast and bluster of the Kobe Bryant victory lap around the NBA and he was subjected to the indifference of Byron Scott on the bench. In Okafor’s case, he was on a team that was designed to be terrible and made no secret of its wishes to be terrible. Guys get hurt, guys blossom late and whatnot. This is all an inexact science we’re talking about here.

Which is why, when you have great young talent, you need to do everything possible to keep it, which makes what’s going on with Porziņģis in New York even dumber. In terms of the most valuable young assets in the game, I’d submit that only Towns, Giannis, and maybe Anthony Davis surpass Porziņģis. He’s that unique, and his upside is that great. It’s not a big deal that Jackson’s fielding offers for him, because everyone is always fielding offers for everyone – former Sonic/Blazer GM Bob Whitsitt always liked to point out that he’d ask about Michael Jordan trades every time he spoke with the brass in Chicago on the phone – but what’s a big deal is that Jackson is perpetually talking about it. By doing so, he’s letting it be known that Porziņģis is available when, by all rights, he shouldn’t be. But this is how it goes with Phil, who is completely tone deaf and out-of-step with the modern game, and whose incompetence as an exec has called into question whether his success as a coach really was little more than rolling the ball out for his superstars, since his intelligence and judgment seem to have been greatly overstated. Jackson got himself into a huff when Porziņģis skipped his exit meeting at the end of the vortex that was the Knicks 2016-2017 season – an act which Porziņģis did because he didn’t care for the way that Jackson was running the team, of course, and particularly in response to the ways in which Phil has constantly devalued his team’s best player, Carmelo Anthony, whom he’d like to trade but cannot because of the no-trade clause which Phil foolishly handed him during their last negotiation. It’s all a mess.

The problem with letting it be known that Porziņģis is available is that, because of his rookie scale contract, literally every team in the league can afford him including those over the cap and the tax lines, meaning Phil is going to field 100 offers, probably 98 of which will be bad and, quite possibly, one of which he’ll foolishly accept. In response to the current state of affairs, most of the Knick fans that I know have either developed even more damaging drinking problems than they already possessed, or have simply thrown up their hands and given up on watching basketball entirely. Come back, Knicks fans! Come back! It’s not that bad! There are brighter days ahead in … well, it’ll happen at some point, I’m sure of it …

And to all of my faithful readers out there who may have lost faith in the NBA here of late, as the Warriors have stomped on everyone’s faces and gone 16-1 to win an NBA title with a roster that appears set to dominate the league for the next 3-5 years, I say this: all of this is cyclical and nothing is forever. I’m reminded on the fabulous This Day in Suck twitter account that it was on this day back in 2009 that the Golden State Warriors drafted Steph Curry. Things improved after that, suffice to say. The franchise was SO DIRE back then. Seriously, you have no idea how hopeless this team was. You really have no idea. And here we are, eight years later, with the Warriors being arguably the single-most dominant and most marketable franchise in all of sports, an entity which is going to be worth about $4.5 billion when their new arena opens in downtown San Francisco and whose Q rating is so high that any sort of fanciful notions from the past of taking away the Golden State moniker have been thrown out the window. None of this was ever expected, none of it could have ever been anticipated.

There is zero guarantee that will happen to your team, of course, but the point is that it could, in fact, happen. So stick with it and stay the course. And in the meantime, enjoy the game of basketball being played as skilfully and as beautifully as it’s ever been played. What’s not to like about that?

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.