Our Hero

Go big, Lizzie, go big!

ONE of the principles that we abide by here at In Play Lose is that if it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing badly. And few people have taken that principle to loftier heights than Californian-turned-Venezuelan-turned Hungarian skeleton-rider-turned-freestyle skier Elizabeth Swaney, who put forth one of the lamest attempts in Olympic history when she went for a casual Sunday ski in the countryside down the halfpipe in PyeongChang. Swaney finished dead last, 24th of the 24 competitors entered, and then afterwards expressed her disappointment that she didn’t make the final (those who interviewed her weren’t sure whether or not she was being sincere), and then uttered some generic boilerplate text about how she aspired to be an inspiration to the Hungarian people – which, I suppose, could be true, in that the Hungarian people could see that it’s possible to do something really, really badly and yet somehow get attention for it.

Swaney was the latest in a long-line of Winter Olympic tourists, the most dubious of which are chronicled in this excellent piece published by The Ringer. The IOC is generally okay with obscure nations fielding sup-optimal athletes for events, and with good reason: the goal is to spread the gospel of the Olympic Games, and encourage participation across the globe. These athletes from weird, obscure nations may seem ridiculous, but over time, it’s possible to find true talent anywhere, and then eventually, you just might wind up finding someone from Surinam or Liechtenstein on the podium. (And it is an unstated goal of In Play Lose to somehow eventually mention every nation on earth within these posts. There, I’ve just named four more in two paragraphs. I can assure you this sort of behavior is nothing odd among journos. Someone at one of the weeklies I worked at ran a story with a Vaduz, Liechtenstein, dateline and I said to him, “you just ran this because you could get a Liechtenstein dateline in the issue” and he said, “well … yeah …”) 

I happen to agree with the idea, in principle, of attempting to expand the playing field, and I can understand completely that this will inevitably create some disparity in aptitude among those who are competing. That disparity becomes a bit more obvious in the Winter Olympics than in the summer, of course, for the simple reason that there are a lot of nations on this earth that don’t have any snow or ice. The Winter Olympics sports are almost all extremely technical in nature. Anyone can go out for a run. Not everyone can go out for a ski. 

And sometimes, the best way to encourage participation is for nations to go out and find willing participants, wherever they may be, which means finding some college kid from Seattle with Peruvian roots and suddenly declaring him to be a Peruvian. In order to field a team for the Winter Olympics, when you don’t have much snow or ice, the best way to go about doing that is to find someone from a place where there is snow or ice and give them a passport. The days of the iron-clad eligibility rules have long since passed in the Olympics – rules which were in place, mainly, because authoritarian nations wielded enormous power in the IOC and attempted to disincentivize their athletes defecting to the West in as many ways as possible. But nowadays, you can pretty much just hand someone a passport and say, “congratulations, you’re a Bulgarian” or what have you, and make up whatever justification you want. As time has passed, many of those shamateuristic Olympics ideals have faded, one of which being that somehow you need to continue to be tied to whatever nation you hailed from – a notion, which, historically, doesn’t hold any water as all, as the athletes from the original Greek games were perfectly happy to sell their services to whichever city-state ponied up the most. 

Nowadays, nations will just out-and-out buy a team, if need be. I’m actually surprised that it doesn’t happen more, in fact, given the inherent disproportion in talent you’re going to find from sport to sport. If one dominant power’s 10th best athlete in a sport – really good at what they do, but not quite good enough –  is better than anything you can put out there, let them come and be on your team, cultural connections be damned. You could field a good enough team of next-level Americans to finish 2nd to the Dream Team in the Olympics, for instance. Were the rules to permit it, I imagine Qatar would go about filling out a soccer team for 2022 World Cup by flying to Brazil and handing out fistsful of dollars along with passports. It wouldn’t be the first time they’ve done that. I went on a trip to L.A. with The Official Spouse of In Play Lose a few years ago, and we found ourselves housed in a hotel which was also playing host to a World Cup rhythmic gymnastics meet, of all things, and seemingly everyone involved seemed to be a Russian, no matter what the name of the country on the back of their tracksuits. The eligibility rules vary by sport, of course, with some more strident than others, but if the rules say you can buy a team, then go out and buy one!

But Elizabeth Swaney, our Hungarian freestyle skier here, didn’t need to be bought and, indeed, never could be because she doesn’t actually know how to do the event. One of the oddities about this case is the fact that the officials at the Hungarian Skiing Federation have admitted that they never actually saw her ski before, which speaks to a curious lack of oversight. Many of these Olympic tourists are one-off novelty acts who serve as something of a side show and comic relief: there is some African cross-country skier who looks as if they’ve never seen snow, or some Caribbean luger or whatnot, and they provide a certain amount of levity to what is a tense and stressful competition, what with them being long on heart and short on any discernible talent. But what sets Elizabeth Swaney apart from the others is her sheer persistence, having swapped passports more than once and tried multiple sports in her single-minded quest to make it to the Winter Olympics, all the while displaying incredible dedication as well as her ability to employ one of the most American of virtues, that of finding the loophole and figuring out how to game the system.

This particular ruse is multifaceted, which I definitely applaud. Almost every sport in the Olympics has, to some extent, some sort of minimum qualifying standard that you have to meet. The IOC has periodically been willing to relax or ignore competitive standards in the interest of encouraging participation – which is noble, I suppose, right up until you see someone like Eric the Eel attempting to swim, at which point you worry that he might, in fact, drown. (And god bless you, Eric, for giving it a go.) High-level competition can, in fact, be extremely dangerous, particularly in the winter events, and the sight of Eddie the Eagle flinging himself off the ski jumping hills of Calgary long ago gave everyone at the IOC offices in Lausanne a case of the heebie jeebies. So there are some standards here to uphold, although they aren’t as air tight as you might think. In order to qualify for the Winter Olympics in freestyle skiing, you need to earn enough points, which you do through achieving Top 30 finishes in World Cup events. 

Which gets us back to the reason the IOC is trying to increase participation, which is that there aren’t enough competitors in a lot of these sports in a national team-based construct, which restricts the number of team members. You could find 30 Americans, Canadians, and French to fill out the field at freestyle skiing events were these open competitions, but at a good number of events, there simply weren’t enough competitors – meaning that Elizabeth Swaney, our Hungarian hero, was earning points simply for showing up. And like I say, this isn’t just a freestyle skiing issue. For example, when women’s hockey was introduced to the Olympics in 1998, there were basically two good teams, the U.S. and Canada, and 20 years later, there are still basically two good teams. There aren’t enough biathletes, there aren’t enough lugers, nor enough bobsledders in all of the right places.

So Swaney spent several years traveling to competitions across the globe – all of which lacked sufficient numbers of competitors, which enabled her to amass points simply for showing up. She was also able to take advantage of one of the peculiarities of freestyle skiing, in that it’s a judged event in which what constitutes a performance is left entirely up to the interpretation of the judges. Judged sports are, of course, also historically some of the most corrupt, easy to rig through the greasing of palms or the swapping of favors. These sorts of sports have attempted to quantify how they are judged or scored over time, and these systems have their pluses and minuses. Some, like gymnastics and figure skating, have emphasized the importance of risk-taking so much as to create a series of perverse incentives where doing something difficult and doing it badly is better than not doing something difficult at all. (And, naturally, the Russian skater who won gold in PyeongChang did so by gaming the system.) Others take the tact of “whatever you do, do it well.” Freestyle skiing falls into that category. If you fall down, you get severely dinged no matter what it is that you’re trying.

And, as you can see from the .gif that fronts this entry, Swaney took the tack of not doing anything at all, which would actually benefit her in the standings at many events. She couldn’t be graded down for missing a jump, because she didn’t even try one, and doing the bare minimum occasionally resulted in finishing higher than competitors who tried stuff and failed. Taking this tack, of course, makes something of a mockery of the event. Freestyle skiing in a halfpipe is truly one of the most insane sports that I have ever seen. The flips and tricks these athletes pull off as they go flying into the air off the 24’ walls are stunning and absolutely terrifying. The jumps are amazing, the crashes are horrifying. And see, those flips and spins and tricks on skis are the whole bloody point of the event! As much as Eddie the Eagle has been mocked and lampooned in Olympic folklore, the guy was still willing to strap some enormous skis onto his feet and fling himself off the side of the mountain. Almost every sport in the Winter Olympics save for curling seems like it’s designed to kill you.

And you’d think that, in the years’ time she’s been doing this that maybe, maybe, she would, you know, learn how to do the event – but that clearly wasn’t the point. She already has shown enough self-preservation instincts to give up skeleton, properly concluding that hurling oneself head first down a narrow corridor of ice at 80 mph wasn’t a good idea. Swaney has said in interviews that she can, in fact, do some tricks in training, but just hasn’t incorporated them into her halfpipe routine, which is sort of like saying that you should be able to play for the Warriors because you can dunk on the 9’ rim at the middle school around the corner. (Her instructor in Park City was, well, diplomatic when asked about her technical abilities.) Instead, her 1-speed Land Cruiser of a run amid a field of Ferraris stood out like some bizarre alt-theatre piece. What the hell is this? What am I watching?

So to summarize, she spent several years travelling around the world, backed by a federation who’d never seen her ski, getting points for showing up and occasionally getting even more points for doing literally the bare minimum required to garner a score, doing nothing repeatedly in the halfpipes all around the globe in the hopes of eventually doing nothing in the halfpipe in Korea, which is exactly what she wound up doing. 

This is awesome. This is bloody brilliant. Elizabeth Swaney rules. 

Some would argue this makes a mockery of the Winter Olympics, to which I would reply that there isn’t an event on earth more worth mocking. Over the past 24 years, the Winter Olympics has been veering and skidding and hurtling uncontrollably through artificial and unsustainable growth, having been transformed from this fun February diversion taking place in sleepy alpine hamlets into this colossal event costing untold billions to put on. That this has occurred at all owes entirely to one singular event in 1994, which involved the entourage of one American figure skater conspiring, and then attempting, to bludgeon and break the leg of another. That scandal led to must-see viewing and huge ratings, because we all love crime capers and we all love to chase ambulances. Those enormous and record-breaking TV ratings, in turn, led to huge broadcasting rights fees paid by NBC (who, like usual, have completely misread all of the ratings data over that time and concluded that the main reason the ratings are so good is that we Americans actually care about figure skating), which is the basis for everything that the IOC does. Throw in a little bit of bribery here and there, sprinkle in some petrostate billions, season it all with grotesque senses of largesse and self-importance, and this fun, little February diversion has, over decades, grown to ultimately become so expensive, and so unwieldy, that no sane nation on earth wants to host it any more. I said previously that I felt like these Olympics were going to be something of a dud, a low-watt endeavour lacking starpower which was struggling to find ways to remain relevant. One thing that I noticed across Olympic disciplines this year was this attempt to invent new variations in order to generate interest – team events, new sorts of relays and the like, many of which the best athletes found pointless and skipped altogether. All of it felt forced and artificial. The event never really took off for me this year. It sort of slogged on and petered out for me. It was little more than a good way to kill some time during the weeklong NBA All-Star break, instead of doing much to stand out on its own.

And I say that as someone who has always loved the Olympics, because I love seeing people do incredible things on the grandest of stages. Seeing Elizabeth Swaney go meandering down the halfpipe does, in fact, destroy any sort of ideal that I have about the athletes. I mean, back when I had two functioning feet and I lived in Colorado, I would ski every day. I got to be a very competent skier, a skier who would probably have been better able to execute a freestyle ski routine than Swaney – and that’s not tooting my own horn, either, because no one of my level of skiing ever has any business ever being in the Olympics ever! 

But at the same time, this is one helluva hustle she pulled off. We like the Olympics, of course, precisely because cool athletes do cool things, and she wanted to be a part of that one way or another. And something more that I would say about our beloved Eddie the Eagle is that, when you think about it, save for Katarina Witt and possibly the dueling Brians, Eddie the Eagle is the single-most memorable character from the Calgary Olympics of 1988. Quick, who won the Men’s Alpine Combined in Calgary? Who won the biathlon relay? How many medals did the U.S. win? And no looking it up! You put that internet down right now! … oh wait, that means I don’t have any readers … 

The point is that these narratives fade and are soon forgotten. Part of why you see so many older athletes in the Winter Olympics is that they cling to this moment. It’s why you see 46-year-old speed skaters and 45-year-old ski jumpers. This 2-week period is their one chance to make even the slightest of marks and they yearn for that opportunity. American skier Mikaela Shiffrin, who won two medals in Korea yet somehow wound up being construed as a failure given what was expected of her, spoke of the intense sort of emptiness that these athletes feel once the Olympics are over. Many of them suffer through bouts of severe depression, wondering just what the hell it is that they are doing with their lives and questioning why it is that they keep breaking their bodies as they toil in obscurity. I’ll applaud anyone who finds the will to keeping doing this stuff in order to make it back to the Olympics, even if they have to cheat and game the system in order to do it.

The Lose awards the gold medal of these Olympics to Ester Ledecká, the gold-medal winning Czech snowboarder who also, for the hell of it, went over to run with the 2-plankers, used a pair of borrowed skis and won the women’s Giant Slalom. This reaction is priceless, as she could not believe she won. She just might be the coolest person in the universe:

The silver medal goes to “Team Reject,” the U.S. curling team, four guys who were basically told “you suck, now go away,” by the U.S. federation after the last Olympics but refused to do so, winning a gold medal and making curling cool in the process. Seriously, we need a rags-to-riches curling movie made, possibly directed by Christopher Guest. (The fact a Russian curler was caught doping makes all of this even more ridiculous. Why are you doping in curling? Just drink more beer!) This was some fun and fabulous stuff from Team Reject. I don’t know anything about curling, but I knew this shot was cool when I saw it:

The bronze medal goes to the U.S. women’s hockey team for finally beating those dirty, nasty, evil Canadians in the Olympics after 20 years of trying. This winning goal by Jocelyne Lamoureux in the shootout is filth. Pure filth. It was an incredible game. and, in the process of finally exorcising their Canadian dæmons, the U.S. women’s hockey team have now also carried on that time-honored Olympic tradition of reminding people in this country what a great sport hockey is, which will then be followed by a great number of enthusiastic, hopeful budding hockey fans tuning into NHL games and wondering why the product seems so bad: 

We have to give a shout-out to U.S. Speed Skating, who continue to be terrible and continue to be poorly attired. They win our Worst Dressed award for these Olympics. (French ice dancer Gabriella Papadakis wins our Least Dressed award). You may recall this imbroglio from four years ago about the high-tech suits Under Armour designed which they never properly tested. Well, Under Armour was back again in 2018 with this bizarre design highlighting skater’s privates which, well, make you wonder what the hell anyone involved in this process was thinking. Oh, everyone involved gave some reason why this special design would improve performance and such, but did you, you know, ever stop and look at them?

But Elizabeth Swaney wins the entire Olympics. She wins the whole thing. I award her one Olympics for her tenacity, naïveté, and for bringing some absurdity to a bloated event badly in need of it. She wins all the things. She is the true Lose Olympic hero.

Go big, Lizzie. Go big!

Do you have any questions you’d like to ask? Would you like to commiserate because your team sucks? Drop me a line! You can email me atinplaylose@gmail.com, and when we get enough questions and comments gathered up, I’ll do another Hate Mail edition of In Play Lose.

Quick Misses

Who knew curling was so hazardous?

THE LOSE is not into curling, which is basically shuffleboard while being cold. If I’m going to play shuffleboard, it’s going to be on the deck of a cruise ship with a festive rum drink in my hand. I will admit, however, that I ventured into a curling club near to my home out of curiosity, and the club director game me the hard sell: “We have league night every Saturday, and we have a keg of beer.” Now that’s my kind of sales pitch right there! And I’ll give curling some props because it’s the only sport in the Winter Olympics that a normal person could actually do, which adds a niche sort of watchability of it, and it’s also one of the few sports where being great at it doesn’t require cheating death. That said, were I to curl, with my unsnug 2x4 of a right foot, I’d probably find a way to hurt myself, most likely doing something stupid like falling over the stones, which I’ve now seen two competitors do, the most recent being one of the Russian mixed doubles team.

Oh, wait, that’s the “Olympic Athletes from Russia” mixed doubles team. The fact that you have to use that phrase in these Olympics is one of the dumbest things ever and speaks to how ridiculous that supposed “ban” levied by the IOC against Russia really is – they threw the Russians out of the Olympics, and yet there is 160+ of their athletes competing. The argument put forth is that you shouldn’t punish the athletes who have never tested positive for any sort of performance enhancing drug, and I can see that reasoning, but the whole bloody point of throwing the Russians out of the Winter Olympics in the first place was to say that given there has been systematic doping and total lack of oversight and compliance, it’s impossible to assume that anyone involved in that structure isn’t cheating. They are assumed to be doing so since you’ve gone out of your way to cover it up!

But no, instead, the IOC decided to pussyfoot it in deference to political and monetary forces, which is their way when it comes to this sort of thing. As I’ve said previously, I’ll take the IOC seriously about their desire to supposedly stamp out all drug-related cheating from its midst when it goes back and expunges every single medal ever won by an East German, because everyone knows they were doping and there are plenty of records in the archives to prove it. This ridiculous grandstanding on the part of the IOC in the run up to the Olympics in more farcical and hollow than if they’d done nothing at all.

In the meantime, I should ask any number of cyncial figure skating fans among my circle of friends if, instead of using the term “SWR” to explain ridiculously marked up scores for skaters from that part of the world, they’re now using “SWOAR” instead.

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Oh for fucksake

It seems odd to me that the Winter Olympics in Korea have so far been hampered by, well, by winter. I mean, isn’t the whole point of the event that it takes place in snowy and icy conditions? But the cold and the snow and, worst of all, the winds have made a mess of some of the events on the slopes. They’ve already had to restructure the entire Alpine skiing program because of the high winds, rescheduling three races and so severely rejigging a fourth, the men’s Combined, that it pretty much took all of the fun and joy and drama out of the event – the idea being that the speed guys will go super duper fast in the Downhill portion, and then the technicians will try to reel them back in with the Slalom, but then they lopped a huge chunk of the Downhill off and made it pretty much impossible for any of speed dæmons to have any chance of winning the overall title. The high winds severely curtailed the slopestyle snowboarding event, which is one of the most truly beautiful and jawdroppingly awesome events in the entire Games, and when it came for the women’s event, it basically rendered the course unplayable, with competitors falling all over the place. It clearly wasn’t safe for the athletes to be out there and the event never should have happened. But it did happen, and the competitors are fuming over the fact that they felt they’d been put at risk – and rightfully so.

But I have to say that I’ve read a whole bunch of stuff from columnists and journalists decrying how little concern both the IOC and the FIS – skiing’s governing body – had for the women’s snowboarders in deciding to allow this competition to continue, and I find the amount of indignation over this somewhat curious, because this is the Olympics that we’re dealing with here, this is the IOC, and anyone who thinks the IOC truly gives two shits about the concerns of the athletes is fooling themselves. Why would you be surprised by how all of this came about? Athletes come and go, they have short careers and simply pass through history, whereas this nonsense concept of the “Olympic ideal” has been around since the ancient Greeks.

Ultimately, the reason why you should be concerned about the IOC’s handling of a state-supported doping case is not because state-supported dopers have an unfair competitive advantage, but it’s because taking those sorts of drugs can kill people! This is why the message put forth by the IOC in regards to the ‘OAR’ is so troublesome – oh, hey, you just go on ahead and keep on doping over there, and win some medals and such, and if some kid drops dead in one of your training centers pumped full of this junk, well hey, at least they’re out of the public eye when it happens. And that sort of catastrophic event, unfortunately, is what it takes to get someone’s attention. It didn’t occur to anyone that maybe, just maybe, you shouldn’t be designing luge tracks where sliders can go 90 mph until a Georgian crashed off the course at Whistler and 2010 and was killed – but by that point, of course, it’s too late to do anything about it. So a few gals on snowboards got blown around in the wind the other day. Well, you know, no one died, so ultimately it wasn’t so bad, now was it? On with the show! The show must go on!

The Olympics are, first and foremost, a television program. We’d all like to think it’s an athletic competition above all, but it’s not. It’s a TV program. Networks rule the roost, come hell or high water, and the sports have to fit the proper programming windows around the world, which is why you have figure skaters doing routines at 9:30 in the morning and why biathletes are shooting in the dark. Athletes are entertainers, first and foremost, and what history has shown, time and again, is that behind every entertainer is some shyster or scofflaw who benefits far more from the entertainer’s labor than they themselves do.

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The Suns with an interesting variation on moving without the ball

One of my Christmas presents from The Official Spouse of In Play Lose is a pair of tickets to see the Sea Dubs – the Santa Cruz Warriors, the D-League G-League affiliate of the Golden State Warriors. It’ll be a good excuse to get out of town for the weekend and head down to the Monterey Peninsula, and the Sea Dubs are good fun and provide good bang for their buck. And the Sea Dubs’ opponents in this game we’ll be attending in March are the Northern Arizona Suns who, at the moment, quite possibly have more NBA-caliber players on their roster than their parent club in Phoenix. But don’t just take my word for it:

“I’m going to be the first to say it. They’ve got to send the whole Phoenix team to the G League for that. I’m sorry. Except Devin Booker and T.J. Warren. The rest of them have got to go to the G League.”
– Denver Nuggets guard Will Barton

The Phoenix Suns have reached a new level of ineptitude, a depth at which they are no longer simply incompetent but are, in fact, contemptible. Watching the Phoenix Suns will make you hate the game of basketball. A week ago, in the first game of the ESPN doubleheader, Cleveland and Minnesota played one of more exhilarating games we’ve seen in the NBA all season, with the Cavs winning 130:128 in OT on a buzzer-beater by LeBron in a game where the two teams combined to sink 40 3-pointers, which is an NBA record – and whatever good vibes you may have had from seeing the game played at a spectacular level were almost immediately erased in the nightcap, as the Suns proceeded to score all of 9 points in the 1st Quarter, allow the Kawhi-less Spurs to score 41 points in the 2nd Quarter, and trail by as many as 53 before ultimately losing by 48 … at home, no less. Only a last-second alley oop dunk by the Suns prevented them from joining this dubious list of teams who got beat by 50, and it was the worst home loss in franchise history, besting (worsting?) their 47-point loss to Portland in this year’s season opener. It was a hideous and hateful performance by the Suns against San Antonio, one that almost seemed designed to kill your love of the game.

Throw in this past Monday’s 129:83 drubbing here in the Bay Area by the Warriors, and the Suns have now become the first team in 49 years to lose three games by 46 points or more in one season – a laughable result, as the Warriors thought so little of the Suns that Steve Kerr and his coaching staff essentially took the day off, letting the players run the huddles during the timeouts as well as the morning shootaround and film session. And it wasn’t like the Warriors were racing up and down, trying to run up the score. If anything, they went easy on the Suns. The pace wasn’t terribly fast, and the Warriors as much as treated the game like preseason, working on their sets and progressions. Hell, they could’ve won by 60 if they’d wanted to, since the Suns could scarcely string two passes together, routinely had their pockets picked for easy steals, missed open shots, missed contested shots, took bad shots, took even more bad shots and missed all of those as well, messed up their defensive rotations, and played with all the verve of the residents of a morgue. Some people chimed in afterwards and said that the Warriors essentially autopiloting this game was a sign of disrespect to their opponent. Hell yes, it was a sign of disrespect, but the Phoenix Suns disrespect the game of basketball pretty much every time they step on the floor.

The Suns were missing guard Devin Booker in both of these recent 40-point shellackings. Booker is a 24-point a game scorer who is out injured at the moment, and the Suns having 18 wins is a testament to just how good Booker is, since Booker has to basically do everything on his own on the offensive end, seeing as how he has no one competent enough to pass him the ball, nor competent enough to turn his passes into assists. The Suns have the worst defense in the NBA, the second-worst offense, the worst point differential, and the most losses. If anything, their record of 18-40 is an overperformance on their part. To their credit, they get to the foul line more than almost every team in the league, but they also foul more, and thus give up more free throws, than almost every team in the league, which means their games are not only displays of complete incompetence, but are also maddeningly ponderous with all the stops and starts.

The Suns roster is an amalgamation of bad ideas and failed philosophies. They’ve wasted three Top-10 picks on big guys who can’t play, valuing raw upside potential while having no apparatus in place to help those guys actually develop into sound NBA players. Someone asked me after this past draft which of the top prospects I thought would be a bust and I immediately said Suns forward Josh Jackson, who put up a -43 while shooting 4-18 against the Dubs on Monday. I said this not because I think he sucks, but because the Suns are bound to mismanage and misuse him. Their two best players, Booker and T.J. Warren, were taken more towards the middle of the 1st Round in the draft, when the light when on and it suddenly occurred to someone in the Phoenix front office that you should take the best player available. What? Draft a guy that can play? What a concept!

I hate this team. I absolutely hate this team. Whenever I watch this team play, I’m amazed that anyone involved with its construction and operation still has a job. In fact, GM Ryan McDonough actually got a contract extension, though it’s not quite clear what he’s done to deserve it other than have the good fortune of having Booker fall into his lap in the draft. The Suns fired coach Earl Watson three games into the season – two of which were 40-point losses – but interim appointee Jay Triano has done little to distinguish himself apart from drawing up one groovy inbounds play which took advantage of a loophole in the rules no one ever thought of. (There is no goaltending on an inbounds pass because it’s a pass and not a shot.) The Robert Sarver reign of error in Phoenix is reaching pre-Joe Lacob Warriors era levels of despair, having taken over what was a franchise known throughout its history for playing high-level, exciting, sometimes revolutionary basketball and driven it straight into the ground.

NBA Tankamania is about to take off after the All-Star break, a full-on race to the bottom with eight teams having 18-19 wins and 37-40 losses among them – and the Knicks seem hell-bent on making it a 9-team race, having given up on the season after the Porzingis injury. I’d put the Suns as favorites to reach the bottom and I wouldn’t even call it tanking, because the Suns are so bad that the operation’s best efforts wouldn’t look much different than its worst. People in the baseball world have gone back and attempted to portray the Houston Astros as having tanked, forgetting that they were truly that bad to begin with, a 110-loss team which also possessed the worst farm system in baseball and had literally become unwatchable, putting up 0.0 ratings on their local TV broadcasts. Much like those Astros, the Suns don’t have to make any special efforts this year to go about being the worst franchise in the NBA. They’re already there.

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It can be construed as a sign of growth and development in the game of soccer that the U.S. Soccer Federation’s presidential election drew the interest that it did. A lot of people cared about the result. Soccer’s growth in this country is unquestioned. It’s been shown in surveys to have reached the level of being the 4th-most popular sport in the country for a reason. More people are playing the game, and more are watching the game, than ever before – and, given the catastrophic collapse of USA FC last fall, more people are also angrier than ever before. Sports are ultimately a results-oriented business, and it was that disastrous result which finally caused the extremely insular USSF to reach a day of reckoning about what it’s doing.

So there was high palace intigue at the USSF’s meetings in Orlando last weekend, and the final results left quite a few people unsatisfied, and with good reason. After all, if an organization is serious about reform, and then elects the sitting VP to the top position, the optics wind up looking pretty bad. In the end, Carlos Cordeiro proved to have some pretty savvy political chops, having dared to announce his candidacy for the position before outgoing president Sunil Gulati had decided whether or not he was going to seek reelection, which rankled many of soccer’s top brass but also earned him some cred with those within the organization who wanted change. This allowed him to build enough of a base to defeat the establishment’s preferred candidate, Cathy Carter, and then pivot to the rank-and-file and urge them not to go for one of the anti-establishment candidates, most of whom were former players and none of whom possess any proven business sense. It was well played by Cordeiro, a former Goldman Sachs exec who admits he doesn’t understand as much about soccer as he would like.

What Cordeiro will actually do remains to be seen. He said all of the right things and made all of the right promises – most importantly that he intends to be more inclusive and consensus-building when it comes to decision making. Cordeiro says he intends to hire a GM for both the men’s and women’s programs, which is a start, but he comes off as something of a technocrat whose solution to most problems is going to be to form a committee. This approach makes me nervous, given that committees tend to set out to design horses and wind up designing camels, but given the previous approach, in which an autocrat sees fit to do something as dumb as name Jürgen Klinsmann the technical director, I suppose we can hardly do worse. And as I said before, the USSF has been an overly insular organization, one in which assorted entities have entrenched themselves – and sometimes also enriched themselves – and one of the problems with an insular organization is getting those sorts of people to give up what they have for the greater good. Far too many decisions wind up being made for the benefit of far too few. Cordeiro has stated one of the prime objectives is solidifying the joint U.S./Canada/Mexico bit for the 2026 World Cup – which I’m all in favor of, because given how truly terrible we’ve been as a nation when it comes to developing talent, the automatic bid which comes with being host may be the only way that we can qualify.

That was a joke. Sort of.

The fact of the matter is that the talent development wing of U.S. soccer is broken. It’s too expensive for kids to play, it’s too expensive and time-consuming for adults who want to coach. The entire apparatus is exclusionary in nature, far often becoming a question of one’s ability to pay rather than one’s ability to play. That all needs to change. And this doesn’t just speak to our presently inept men’s national team, either. On the women’s side, one of the great effects of Title IX was that it gifted U.S. soccer an enormous talent advantage over the rest of the world, but as big European clubs continue to see a value in investing resources in the women’s game – which they are starting to do, and will continue to do – that edge is going to get smaller and smaller.

But it’s hard to get the sorts of entrenched self-interests in an organization such as the U.S. Soccer Federation to see the forest through the trees. Everyone involved in this election had skin in the game and potential conflicts were everywhere. What’s clear is that final kingmakers in this election were the Athletes Council, who held more than 20% of the vote and who made sure to vote in a block, thus giving themselves the power to swing the election. What’s not clear is whether or not they acted out of greater interest or out of self-interest. Given the propensity for everyone in the game to squabble over salaries and bonuses and whatnot, the former cannot necessarily be assumed. That’s not to be accusatory, either. I’m just inherently skeptical of the entire process.

The big loser in all of this was MLS, who has been painted as one of the bad guys and an impediment to reform. There’s some good reason for this, of course – it’s an entity which still hasn’t figured out its place in the footballing world, and seems far too self-important for its own good. But the frustration with MLS is also misguided, in that the goal of the league is, first and foremost, to be a good league. That MLS and it’s marketing wing, SUM, have wound up heavily funding and financing the USSF can run counter to that goal. Sure, MLS wants to have good American players coming through the pipeline, but first and foremost, they need a product on the field, and they’re going to use guys from anywhere on the globe they can find in order to make that possible, nationality be damned, which is as it should be. This sort of thing is not new, mind you – people in England bitch all the time about there not being enough English players in the EPL – and the point is that you cannot look to MLS to be a vanguard for the American game as a whole. It should reflect the American game, but not define it.

I don’t know where any of this is going, but as I’ve said previously, I don’t care that the federation is now profitable. Not having money was a legit excuse for not putting out a good product in the 1980s, but here we are missing World Cups in 2018, and that excuse no longer holds. One of the themes we touch on repeatedly here at In Play Lose is that the people who create the problems are very rarely the ones capable of finding the solutions. My hope is that U.S. Soccer will remain mindful of the need for serious reforms and reach outside of itself in search of new ideas. But in the past, everyone involved in U.S. Soccer thought they were doing good things instead of actually going about doing them. It’s hard to reach out when you’re too busy patting yourself on the back.

Do you have any questions you’d like to ask? Would you like to commiserate because your team sucks? Drop me a line! You can email me atinplaylose@gmail.com, and when we get enough questions and comments gathered up, I’ll do another Hate Mail edition of In Play Lose.

The City of Brotherly Lose

A photo no one ever thought they’d see

BEFORE he was the greatest QB in the history of football, Tom Brady was Plan B. Brady was the 199th pick in the draft, a guy who had started the 2001 camp as the 4th string QB for the New England Patriots, who already had a franchise QB in Drew Bledsoe.

People forget how good Bledsoe was. I remember his first college game, when he did some mop up duty for Washington State in a loss at U.S.C. Bledsoe was the 3rd string QB as a freshman, then came off the bench and threw two TDs in the 4th Quarter, and could pretty much make all the throws. A week later, he was named the starter. Mike Price, the W.S.U. head coach at the time, told the story of going to the weekly booster club luncheon in Spokane, where he was asked by an alum why he’d elevated Bledsoe to the starting spot ahead of the two pretty good QBs the Cougs already had, and Price looked right at the guy and said, “because he’s going to be the #1 pick in the NFL draft one day.”

Bledsoe was that good, and people also forget just how bad the Patriots had to be in order to land him. The Patriots were 2-14 in 1992, earning the #1 pick in the draft after having been beaten 10-6 by the 2-14 Seattle Seahawks during the regular season in one of the worst games of football that I have ever seen. The Pats were truly a horrible team, at that point, bereft of talent and ideas, frequently owned and operated by guys with big names who didn’t have any actual knowledge of how to run a team. But the #1 pick fell their way in a year a franchise QB was available, which is a gift from the football gods when it happens. Bledsoe would then go on to set some records along the way, and lead the Pats to a Super Bowl appearance in 1997. The Pats were set at QB. They had their guy.

Right up until they didn’t in September 2001, when Bledsoe got crushed by the Jets’ Mo Lewis, leaving Brady – who’d impressed enough to earn the back-up spot during the summer – as the Patriots starter. There were modest expectations, to say the least. The Patriots had what looked to be a nice team that season – solid defense, balanced offense – but losing Bledsoe was a huge blow. Optimism regarding the backup QB was, well, not high:

“Most NFL fans have little knowledge or confidence in what Tom Brady can do.”
– Alan Greenberg, Hartford Courant, Sep. 27, 2001

Teams in the NFL pretty much deserve a mulligan when their starting QB gets hurt. A long-term injury at the QB position pretty much ruins your season. The general role of the backup QB, when pressed into service, is to do what they call “game management.” Basically, don’t screw it up. Make smart decisions, don’t turn the ball over, etc. But Bledsoe was going to be out of the lineup for a long time, and the novelty of “game management” only works for so long. If you’re trying simply to manage the game and simply hoping to get by, you’re eliminating large swaths of the playbook. This means defenses have less to worry about and it becomes easier for them to key in. Over time, it gets harder and harder to win.

So what you have to do, then, is not simply turn to Plan B but, more importantly, to embrace Plan B. In New England, head coach Bill Belichick has always been the master of Plan B. He’s never gotten near the credit for this, in fact. If something doesn’t work, he’ll try something else. He’ll shape shift on the fly. The Patriots offense has radically changed from season to season, depending on the personnel available. Some of his more impressive coaching jobs have come in years where the Patriots were injury-riddled and he was forced to get creative. He’d have receivers playing corner, linebackers running pass routes. What Belichick had figured out was that of the 53 guys on your roster, probably 52 of them were going to be necessary during the course of the season – pretty much everyone except the 3rd QB, and who knows, maybe he can return punts or something. Not only do you need depth, but you need versatility and, more importantly, you need to embrace the uncertainty and be prepared for it.

So Bledsoe goes down in Sep. 2001 and is going to be out of the lineup for a long time. Okay, now what? Well, you have this Brady kid and he’s your QB, so figure out what he does well and go with it. Buy into it: “okay, guys, this is how we’re going to win games,” which is precisely what his team did. And, of course, it turned out pretty well for the Pats that season.

You have to embrace risk. This notion is so, so hard for so, so many people to grasp. As someone who runs a scrabble club, I wind up being a de facto coach for new players, whose propensity when playing a superior opponent is to play very defensively. This is the wrong strategy. In playing very defensively, you’re actually limiting your options in a situation where your options are limited to begin with. The superior player probably has a better idea of what to do in a tight, defensive game than you do. The solution, then, is to play more openly and aggressively, take risks and increase volatility and uncertainty. When I point this out, the immediate response is almost always the same: “but they’ll kill me if I do that, they’ll play flashy bingos and I’ll lose by 200,” to which I say, “yes, they might do that, and quite possibly will do that, but what if they don’t? What if you get the good tiles instead of them? How are you going to use the good tiles to win on a closed board where you can’t make any plays? The low-percentage play is always better than the no-percentage play.” It’s usually at this point that the light goes on, although it can take quite a while to convince yourself this is true. Risk can be your friend.

That doesn’t mean be stupid about it, of course. Don’t be reckless. You have to know the situation. Don’t be like the Atlanta Falcons and stupidly keep throwing the ball downfield when all you need to do is run the ball three times and kick a field goal. Be smart about it. But if something isn’t working, or if you’re matched against a superior opponent, you have to be willing to try something else and, more to the point, you have to be committed to trying something else. Go all-in on it. Losing is the default, after all: you can do everything according to plan and have it still not work out. You’re better off trying something different.

We saw that already once this year, in the NCAA Championship Game. Alabama was toast. Georgia was killing them. So out of nowhere, Alabama turns to the big Hawaiian kid at QB in the 2nd half and basically threw their entire playbook out the window. It’s desperation, of course, but these are desperate times. You’re down two TDs in the 3rd Quarter of a championship game, you can’t move the ball, you can’t score. And then, all of a sudden, you’ve got this kid coming in and flinging the ball all over the place and Georgia has no earthly idea how to stop him, because Alabama are suddenly doing stuff they haven’t done all year, and not only are Alabama moving the ball but, more importantly, the belief in winning returns to an Alabama sideline where guys had previously been arguing and fighting with each other.

Alabama went all-in on Plan B and wound up winning in OT. It may not have worked. It could have been a disaster. But the game was already a disaster, because Georgia was kicking their ass. I’m reminded of a quote by Alabama coach Nick Saban after a game where his usually defensively stout Crimson Tide won 55:44 over Auburn but got absolutely shredded by the Auburn QB: “you have to be able to win these types of games.” Yes, in a perfect world, your defense would stuff the other side, you’d control the clock and move the ball and win handily. But it doesn’t work that way. This is why we say it’s complicated by the presence of the opponent. The other side is trying to do stuff, too, and sometimes, they do it really well. Games aren’t a perfect world. Sometimes, you have to make stuff up on the fly.

Embracing risk and unpredictibility can be a wonderful thing. Several weeks before the Royals were 90 feet from tying Game 7 of the 2014 World Series, they were getting worked by the Oakland A’s in the Wild Card game – a game which they then turned around by running all over the A’s to the tune of seven stolen bases. Conventional wisdom was that the Royals shouldn’t be doing this, of course, as outs are precious when you’re losing and you don’t want to risk getting thrown out on the bases. But the Royals needed runs and, more importantly, they needed to make chaos – to which Oakland’s relievers responded by coming completely unhinged. Louisville won an NCAA basketball title by essentially making a decoy out of their best player, as Russ Smith basically stood 25’ from the basket for the entire second half, but Michigan had their best defender on him, and he had to go out and guard him, which then opened up the floor for the Cardinals to take advantage of. But if someone had suggested beforehand that Louisville would win a national title by having their leading scorer not shoot, you’d have thought they were nuts.

And see, I’ve never bought into this ridiculous idea of playing like you have “nothing to lose” as it pertains to something like the Super Bowl. You have lots to lose. You have the chance to lose the game that you’ve pointed towards for the entirety of your career, with no guarantee that you’ll ever get there again. What you do have to do, however, is figure out how to win, and figuring out how to win sometimes means doing things differently, rerigging and rejigging and shifting things up.

Which is certainly what the Patriots have done in reaching eight Super Bowls since 2002. Yes, they’ve had the Plan-B-turned-franchise-QB in Tom Brady, who I do believe is, in fact, the greatest QB in history, but that fact alone doesn’t guarantee success. I’ve referred to the Patriots as The Fragile Dynasty in the past, not as a means of deriding their success but as a means of praising it. The NFL is a league which has made it a point of attempting to institutionalize parity – which, for a long time, was really hard to do, and you can run through the litany of awful Super Bowl blowouts in the 1980s and 1990s as proof of that. We don’t get those sorts of awful blowouts in the Super Bowl too often any more. Oh, sure, you had the Seahawks beat the stuffing out of the Broncos a few years ago, both otherwise, we’ve had two decades of good, often great, and usually exciting Super Bowls. The operations in the NFL have become more sophisticated than ever, they are more data-driven and more savvy than ever before. The margins are narrower, the differences between one team and another are getting smaller and smaller. In that light, New England simply getting to eight Super Bowls in 17 years is the great achievement.

I call the Patriots the Fragile Destiny because they’ve won five of those eight Super Bowls and could easily have lost seven of them. The most “one sided” of those games still involved recovering an onside kick in the final moments after the Eagles had cut the lead to three points. (The first Pats-Eagles game. We’ll get to the second in a moment.) Can you imagine all of the ridiculous narratives that would have been spun over the years if the Pats had, in fact, lost seven Super Bowls? “Brady can’t win the big one!” “Belichick is a choker!” Blah blah blah. Even if they were 3-5 in those games – let’s say that the Seahawks run the damn ball, and let’s say that the Falcons don’t go and throw up all over themselves in the last 9:00 of the game – they’d be viewed negatively. Instead, of course, we hate them because they’re successful, and because they’ve always seemed to find a way to wriggle off the hook – which isn’t really true at all, as the best team they ever had, in terms of talent and record, got beat by the New York Giants in the Super Bowl, partly something miraculous and ridiculous took place. Managing to win five of these eight games – all of which came to the end, and some of which required great escapes that Houdini would be proud of – is, in fact, dynastic. No, they don’t just roll over the opposition like the 1986 Bears or the Montana/Young Niners or the Jimmy Johnson Cowboys. Those sorts of games just aren’t going to happen very much any more in the modern NFL.

The point is that the margins here are really, really thin, and while we look to craft and construct narratives based upon final outcomes, Super Bowls are still one-off contests and small sample sizes. All games are, in fact, with the difference being that for this particular game, you have extra time to prepare and don’t have to focus on the long-term. This is the long-term. This is the end. You’d better have a Plan B in mind if things aren’t going well and, more importantly, not only be prepared to take risks but be committed to take risks.

Which is exactly what the Philadelphia Eagles did against New England in the Super Bowl on Sunday. Your first thought, when you see the Eagles going for it on 4th Down, and you see them pulling out a crazy razzle-dazzle trick play for a TD, is to say, “wow, the Eagles are being really aggressive in this game!” Your second thought, right after that, is to say, “why don’t teams always play like this?” Football is chess on grass. There are so many things that you can do, there are so many choices. Why play it safe? Why do what is expected? The Eagles didn’t just stash that crazy trick play away on page 600 of the playbook, either – they actually walked through it the night before the game in a hotel ballroom. They were going to run if they needed to. They were the underdog, after all, against the 5-time champion Patriots. They were going to take all the risks.

Which is actually a weird thing to say, because the risks they took on Sunday were, in retrospect, smart. This trick play – reverse and throwback from a backup tight end to QB Nick Foles – came late in the first half, with the Eagles up 15-12 on the Pats. You could kick the field goal here on 4th down to make it 18-12, but you’re then giving the ball back to the Patriots, most likely around the 25-yard line, ahead by only one score with time remaining on the clock, and Tom Brady has already shredded your defense for 250 yards. You could easily go into the locker room only up three, or maybe even behind 19-18. (Although, given how pathetic New England’s kicking game was on Sunday, you might have liked your chances.) You’re on the 1-yard line, so if you go for it and don’t make it, the Patriots have 99 yards of field in front of them and are likely to just run the clock out and be glad they’re down three points. So the bold play here – going for it – is also the right play. Go for it, score and you’re up 10 and the pressure is back on the other side. Brady may have been amassing zillions of yards, but so long as they have to chase the game, the Eagles have the advantage. So go for it, damn it! And going for it on 4th down in the 4th Quarter was the only right choice: the Eagles are down a point, they might not get the ball back if they punt, and if they turn it over on downs on their own 35-yard line or something, and New England goes in and scores, at least you get the ball back again.

But this is “radical” thinking in a league where far too many coaches can’t do the math and far too many of them fail to realize that you need to stop trying to establish the run and start trying to actually win the game. The reason for conservative play-calling, of course, is that if it doesn’t work, you look bad. But so what? LOSING LOOKS BAD! Had the situations been flipped, I think the Pats would have gone for it in both of those instances, because Belichick gives ZERO FUCKS about looking bad. He cares about winning football games, and amid all of the second-guessing afterwards, had it not worked out, he would have said, “we thought it was our best chance to win.”

Doug Pederson gave zero fucks as well. The Eagles were one of the most aggressive teams in the league during the season when it came to going for it on 4th down. And the Philadelphia Eagles had already embraced uncertainty and risk, because they’d been forced to turn to Plan B when QB Carson Wentz, who was likely to be the MVP, went down with a knee injury, and the Eagles had to turn to backup Nick Foles. The first few games after Wentz went down were, well, a mess. Even though they were the #1 seed in the NFC playoffs, the Eagles were still underdogs at home in their first two playoff games.

But there is stuff Nick Foles does well. Nick Foles went to the Pro Bowl when he was the Eagles QB the first time around. No one gets to a Pro Bowl in their career who doesn’t do stuff well. So during the bye week, which the Eagles earned for being the best team in the NFC, Doug Pederson and his staff went back and looked at the film and figured out what it was does Foles did well and adjusted the offense on the fly, adapting the passing game to create more play action and what they call run-pass options or “RPOs.” It was sort of murky in the first go-round, as the Eagles stumbled past the Falcons, but then the new offense kicked in against Minnesota, a 38:7 rout in which the Vikings – who had the best defense in the NFL – looked completely flummoxed. The Eagles were the best team in the NFL before Wentz got hurt, not just because of Wentz but because they have good players all over the field, and now, all of a sudden, here they are running all of these weird plays Chip Kelly drew up back when he was at Oregon – plays designed entirely to take advantage of speed mismatches in space – and now you’ve got big strong receivers running free all over the place, and more room for the backs to run, and they’re throwing it out in the flat to scat backs who can beat you to the corner. Foles can make all of those plays. Whereas the tendency is to play it safe and game manage with a backup QB, the Eagles went the other way: turn the disadvantage into the advantage, use the element of surprise, be hyper aggressive and, above all else, trust Foles to make the plays he’s capable of making.

And if Foles is making plays he’s capable of making, and doing what he can to cancel out – even a little – the enormous Brady advantage at QB, then guess what? The Eagles have better players than the Pats at almost every other position on the field. They have a great offensive line, they have more speed on defense and in the skill positions. I had taken the Eagles +4½ bet offered me by my Pats-lovin’ columnist buddy Piano because across the board, save the QB position, the Eagles were a better team. In the end, I wasn’t that surprised that the Eagles won.

I was, however, surprised at how they won. I would have expected the Eagles to win by making some big plays on the defensive side. Instead, they made exactly one of those, but one was enough, because the Patriots made none.

(Streeter Lecka/Getty Images)

It was a crazy game, an astonishing game with more total yards than any game in league history. It looked like some college game from the Big 12, some Oklahoma-Texas Tech game where they run up oodles of yards and “good defense” constitutes holding the other side to a field goal. Brady threw for 505 yards, often in massive chunks, but Foles threw for 373. I would never have thought that Foles would be going toe to toe, shot for shot against Brady and matching him. If anything, the Pats scored too quickly – it’s sort of hard not to if you’re moving in 30-yard bursts – because their defense couldn’t get off the field. The Pats defense was terrible: the Eagles scored eight times, including several long drives lasting more than seven minutes. In that sense, it reminded me of the Giants-Bills Super Bowl of 1991, where the Giants managed to hold the ball for 40 minutes – which is what they had to do, because the Buffalo offense were gaining 20 yards a minute, but the Bills just simply ran out of time. And on Sunday, there were the Pats launching the unsuccessful Hail Mary into the end zone with :09 left, out of time. The Eagles had done just enough to win.

But just enough is good enough, and I’m happy for my many, many good friends from the City of Brotherly Lose … I mean, uh, Brotherly Love … because Philadelphia has been an underratedly terrible sports town over the years. Philly has seen it all, when it comes to losing. The Phillies have lost more games than any team in the history of sports. The 76ers have managed to post the 2nd- and 3rd-worst seasons in NBA history. But then it goes the other way as well: since the Broad St. Bullies won a couple of Stanley Cups in the mid-1970s, the Flyers have lost in the Stanley Cup finals six straight times. In the heyday of 76ers basketball, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, they managed only one title. Those Sixers teams were great. They really were truly great teams – but the 1980s Celtics and Lakers were simply better, and I have no idea how they managed to lose to the Blazers in 1977. That ’77 Sixers team was one of the weirdest, zaniest, funnest teams ever, and also one of the best. It sort of sucks they didn’t win a title.

And the Eagles, of course, had never won a Super Bowl before this past Sunday. In fact, there is no question that, prior to Sunday, they were the best franchise in the sport that hadn’t won one. It’s cyclical, of course, with ups and downs along the way,  and they’ve had a few down years like most everyone, but the Eagles have generally played at a high level for the past 40 years, losing several Super Bowls and a gaggle of NFC Championship games along the way. And that sort of consistency matters in the end. All you have to do is compare them with the 76ers, who tanked and lost on purpose for three years and less resembled a basketball team than an interpretive dance troupe. Sure, maybe all of that losing will result in enough talent to win an NBA title, but there is no guarantee of that, and in the meantime, 76ers fans had to put up with a shitty-ass product. Seriously, fuck the process. I take issue with any pundit in sports who is an advocate of tanking, because they usually are media people who don’t have to actually buy tickets to the games. Who wants to watch that crap? Anyone who thought Sam Hinkie’s Process wasn’t bullshit obviously didn’t have to pay to see it.

We’ve come to overvalue losing in creating this sports culture of “RINGZ.” Being good all the time matters. Being consistent matters. The Eagles have usually been pretty good, and what’s wrong with that, exactly? Winning is hard. It’s really, really hard. Anyone can lose. Losing doesn’t impress me. It’s good job security, but it doesn’t impress me.

Being good matters, in the end. The idea that being terrible is somehow what’s necessary in order to some day be good is complete folly, and always has been. I’ve always admired teams like the Patriots for being so good for so long. Being consistently good is impressive. And it’s cool that, for once, the Eagles finally figured out how to be great.

All hail the gooey cheese of bliss!

 And we’re the big winners in this household, because we had cheesesteaks for lunch on Sunday. I like to regionalize the cuisine on Super Bowl Sunday. I did po’boys for the Saints, salmon for the Seahawks, I even did clam chowder for the Pats back when they played the Packers in the mid-1990s. (No small feat, mind you. Try finding good clams in the mountains of New Mexico in the middle of winter.) But cheesesteaks? Oh, be still my foolish heart. Cheap beef, gooey cheese, a mountain of onions. One of life’s great guilty pleasures. So wrong, yet it feels so right.

Do you have any questions you’d like to ask? Would you like to commiserate because your team sucks? Drop me a line! You can email me at inplaylose@gmail.com, and when we get enough questions and comments gathered up, I’ll do another Hate Mail edition of In Play Lose.

Let's Make a Meal Out of a Deal

Non-Pelican Nikola Mirotić drives on not future teammate Boogie Cousins

 THE PHONE rings at Chicago Bulls headquarters on Tuesday morning ...

Chicago: Bulls here.
New Orleans: Pelicans here.
Chicago: Whassup Pels?
New Orleans: Well, things sort of suck here at the moment, to be honest.
Chicago: Yeah, I saw the game last Friday. Sorry about the Boogie injury, man. That was a tough one.
New Orleans: I know it. We were playing some really good ball too. Great ball. We’d won 7 of 8 and we had our sights on those dipshits from OKC. We were a ½-game behind them in the standings.
Chicago: Ah, yeah, those OKC dipshits. [laughs nervously.]
New Orleans: What did you give up for Cam Payne again?
Chicago: Let’s not talk about that, okay?
New Orleans: Fair enough. Live and learn, buddy. Live and learn.
Chicago: So why are you calling, Pels? You only call me up when you have some stiff that you want to get rid of.
New Orleans: No stiffs today. I have a great proposal for you.
Chicago: Go on …
New Orleans: What do you think of Omer Asik?
Chicago: I think you just said ‘no stiffs today’ a moment ago …
New Orleans: We’re looking to move him.
Chicago: Alert the media.
New Orleans: He could seriously help your team.
Chicago: And how, exactly, would he do that?
New Orleans: He’s tall, and he looks great sitting on the bench.
Chicago: I’m hanging up the phone now …
New Orleans: No, wait. We’d throw in a 1st as well. We gotta get him outta here. He’s dead salary. He’s dead weight. Good looking dead weight on the bench, mind you.
Chicago: He is a handsome man, I’ll give you that.
New Orleans: But we’d like to move on from him.
Chicago: Yeah, I saw him out there trying to guard DeAndre Jordan from the Clippers the other night, and playing alongside AD. That ended badly.
New Orleans: We would like to move Asik.
Chicago: And why, exactly, would you like to move him to Chicago?
New Orleans: We thought he’d be a good fit for you.
Chicago: Don’t bullshit me, Birds.
New Orleans: Oh, okay, fine. [deep sigh.] Look, we’re trying to make the playoffs this year. We have to make the playoffs. We’re drowning in red ink, we’ve got 10,000 empty seats every game at Milk Shake Arena, AD is getting antsy, we’ve got vultures from Boston and Golden State circling around us looking to pick AD from our rotting corpse. We need to win. But we’re stuck, because some of the moves that we’ve made didn’t turn out the way that we hoped.
Chicago: Don’t even try to dump Ajinça on me.
New Orleans: No no no, hear me out Bulls. We’ve got to clear some space here, and you’ve been a good friend to us in the past.
Chicago: By ‘good friend,’ you mean we took Quincy Pondexter off your hands?
New Orleans: Exactly. So we need to make some kind of a move here. We’re inflexible, we’re capped out, but we have to make the playoffs. Ownership demands it, or I’m out on the streets and likely assistant GM’ing for the Maine Red Claws in the D-League or some shit.
Chicago: That’s the G-League now.
New Orleans: Whatever.
Chicago: Well jeez, Birds, it sounds like y’all have got yourselves in a hell of a mess.
New Orleans: Nice mock Southern drawl there.
Chicago: Thank you, I try. So tell me Pels, what is it that you are looking for?
New Orleans: Where are you at in your rebuild?
Chicago: We’re in a good place. We started 3-20, mostly because our two best players got in a fight in practice and Bobby Portis broke Nikola Mirotić’s face, but once Mirotić came back, it started to come together for us. We won quite a lot of games there for a spell, and doing so brought back the warm and fuzzies to the Windy City for a few weeks.
New Orleans: Yeah, I saw that you were playing well.
Chicago: We have some nice pieces. Markkanen is beast.
New Orleans: How do you say ‘beast’ in Finnish?
Chicago: Peto. I looked it up on the internet. He’s a beast and we’ve got LeVine coming back from the ACL, which was a steal for us – suck it Thibs! – and Dunn was playing really well for us until he broke his face against Golden State.
New Orleans: What is it with your guys breaking faces? Stop doing that.
Chicago: I know it. To be honest, that run of good play probably bought us enough cred here locally that we can go on being terrible and angling for the first pick in the draft without getting so much heat that Fred and I lose our jobs.
New Orleans: So you’re looking to tank?
Chicago: There is no tanking in the NBA.
New Orleans: Of course not. But I heard a rumor that Mirotić might be available.
Chicago: Who told you that?
New Orleans: Literally every single beat writer who covers the NBA.
Chicago: Well, let’s put it this way … we like our young core, and we don’t see Mirotić in our future plans.
New Orleans: So you are tanking, then.
Chicago: Well, yeah. And we’ve been winning far too many games since Mirotić came back. He’s playing like we always thought he would play. He’s having a career year for us and costing us odds in the lottery next summer. If we’d had Mirotić all season, I think there was a chance we’d get the 8 seed. Him coming on 23 games in though? No chance.
New Orleans: Mirotić has been great for you guys this season … hold on here … [pulls up basketball-reference.com] 17 points a game, 43% from three, effective field goal percentage of 59% …
Chicago: Now I know you’re trying to dick me, since you’re pulling up all of those nerd wimp advanced stats.
New Orleans: The guy’s rippin’ for you guys!
Chicago: Yeah, he’s played well.
New Orleans: Can we get Mirotić from you in this deal? He’d pair great with AD. He and AD could run some sick two-man post shit. And we need shooting on the wings. He’d fit in nicely with J’Rue and with Darius Miller and E’Twan Moore. We’ve got lots of shooting that way.
Chicago: And Rondo?
New Orleans: Grrr …
Chicago: How’s Rondo working out for you? [Giggles.]
New Orleans: How’s Cam Payne working out for you?
Chicago: Touché.
New Orleans: So what do you say? Sound like a good deal?
Chicago: Mirotić for Asik? This sounds like a horrible deal. That sounds like one of the worst deals ever. You get a skilled stretch four and we get a piece of furniture. How much do you owe Asik, anyway?
New Orleans: Only about $11 million for next year, and then he has a $3 million buyout after that. Mirotić is only about $12.5 million, so the money basically works.
Chicago: So that’s 14. We’re out 1½ mil in this deal.
New Orleans: Why quibble over 1½ mil? What’s 1½ mil among friends? Does your ownership really care that much about 1½ mil?
Chicago: We sold a second for 3½ mil last summer, so, uh, yeah, they do.
New Orleans: But you don’t have to buyout Wade this year. You have plenty of cap space, and no one is signing with you this offseason, because your team is crap. No offense, Bulls, but it’s crap. No one is signing with you.
Chicago: Hey, they might!
New Orleans: They’re not.
Chicago: Sigh.
New Orleans: We’ll give you an extra first. Not like you need it, because Adam Silver will rig the lottery so you guys get the 1st pick again, since he can’t stand to have such a basket case franchise in a big market like Chicago.
Chicago: Yeah, the Rose thing was sweet. Thanks David Stern!
New Orleans: So we’ll give you a first to take Asik off our hands, and you give us Mirotić in return.
Chicago: Hmmm … so if the Warriors were willing to give us $3.5 million for a second in last year’s draft, I wonder how much they’ll be willing to give us for a first?
New Orleans: The sky’s the limit, man. Aim high.
Chicago: Yeah, you know, in spite of all of my instincts telling me that this is a truly awful deal for us, I think we’ll do it.
New Orleans: Sweet! Give me a few minutes while my guys draw up the paperwork. It will give me time to leak the deal to everyone on Twitter and in the NBA media.
Chicago: Okay, but there is a catch.
New Orleans: What’s that?
Chicago: You have to pick up his option.
New Orleans: I do?
Chicago: Yeah, he’s got a team option for next season.
New Orleans: But I don’t want him for next season. I need him out there now, draining threes and winning games and helping put asses in seats in Milk Shake Arena as we track down those OKC pukes for the 5 seed in the West.
Chicago: But he’s got Bird rights, man. He doesn’t lose the Bird rights if he gets traded.
New Orleans: Goddamn CBA.
Chicago: I know. It ruins everything.
New Orleans: And how the fuck does he have a team option for next year in the first place? Did you completely ass up that negotiation, too?
Chicago: Well, you know, negotiations are complicated.
New Orleans: But we need cap space next season. We probably have to max out Boogie and re-sign him, even though his Achilles is presently spaghetti. We don’t know what he’s going to get on the open market, but if he leaves, AD’s not going to be happy, and if AD wants out, and we have to deal him, we may as well trade the whole entire franchise to Seattle, because there is no frickin’ way anyone is going to come to Pels games if AD is wearing Warriors digs or the green in Boston.
Chicago: But wait a minute here, Pels. We just agreed to take an $11 million bad asset off your books in exchange for a $12.5 million guy who can actually play. The money’s the same either way. If you keep Asik, it’s dead money. If it’s Mirotić, it’s a guy who knows what he is doing.
New Orleans: But it’ll be too expensive next season. We can’t have a $12.5 million guy on our books and try to re-sign Boogie. We’ll be in luxury tax hell, and we need to stay out of the tax so we can continue to shamelessly mooch off of all of the revenue sharing money that the NBA provides in order to keep our team afloat in a small market.
Chicago: Well first off, you have no idea what a 7’0” dude with an Achilles injury will get on the market.
New Orleans: What if Cuban floats him a max in Dallas?
Chicago: Yeah, Cuban would do that just to fuck with you, wouldn’t he? But think about it, man. What if you had a weirdass frontcourt next season of AD, Mirotić, and a recovering Boogie? It’d be something weird, something different, it’s be out there. Those guys could interchange, play multiple spots, do all sorts of crazy things.  You’ve got two bigs who could shoot while Boogie rehabs. Fuck man, Boogie’s already bringing the ball up for you, since Jrue’s at the two and your one is a frickin’ zombi corpse of an NBA player. You could do all sorts of crazy shit with that lineup. It’d be the sort of unorthodox shit which would mess with everyone.
New Orleans: Yeah but the tax thing, man.
Chicago: The tax thing? Oh come on Pels, your owner is senile and 90 years old, the franchise is one foot out the door, destination Seattle, if AD leaves. You guys need to win now! And I can’t believe I’m trying to pitch this deal to you, since you’re the one who brought it to us, and since this deal SUCKS ASS for us!
New Orleans: I don’t know, man. Money is tight. Have your people call Mirotić’s people, and see if we can re-work that contract somehow.
Chicago: My ‘people’ is me, and Mirotić’s ‘people’ will say ‘you’re an idiot. No deal.’
New Orleans: How do you say that in whatever language he speaks?
Chicago: ти си идиот. I looked that up on the internet as well.
New Orleans: I can’t justify to ownership us being a heavy luxury tax payer next season. We need to get off money for 2018-19.
Chicago: But you’re stuck with Asik if you nix this. How is that getting off money?
New Orleans: Don’t pressure me! I’m feeling sort of sensitive right now.
Chicago: Look, I’m willing to bury the rotting corpse that is Asik’s contract on the end of our bench until the summer of 2019 and give you a guy who can actually play in return. Do we have a deal?
New Orleans: You know, I don’t know. I don’t think so.
Chicago: Fine. Whatever.
New Orleans: How are the kids?
Chicago: Great. You?
New Orleans: Super.
Chicago: Geaux Saints!
New Orleans: Shut up. Expletive, expletive, expletive ...

– – –

We kid because we care. Having went, for the second time, to a New Orleans Pelicans game a few weeks ago, I love me some Pels. They have a fun team, a competitive team, and before Boogie Cousins got hurt, a team that was playing some really, really good basketball.

But Boogie is hurt, quite possibly irretrievably so. The case files on Achilles injuries are not good at all. There is very little precedent for anyone – literally anyone at all – returning to peak ability as an NBA player after suffering this injury. And this completely sucks for Boogie, who was deservedly in line for an enormous pay day this summer. He was playing great, the Pelicans were winning, and it looked like it might actually work out for this tormented franchise.

But now Boogie is out indefinitely, so what do you do next? What you DON’T do is COMPLETELY MESS UP A SLAM DUNK TRADE which will help keep you at an NBA playoff level, while also ridding yourself of a toxic asset.

This is what happens when two of the dumbest franchises in all of professional sports attempt to make a deal. This deal, which nearly came about on Tuesday for the Pelicans, and then fell apart, is an example of why both of these teams aren’t any good. It’s a horrible deal for the Bulls, who get a middling draft pick in exchange for forking over $14 million for a guy who can’t play, thus wasting useful cap space. Not pulling the trigger is even worse for the Pelicans, who are DESPERATE to make the playoffs, and whose very survival as a franchise depends upon convincing Anthony Davis that it’s worth it for him to stick around and see the process through. Davis is so good that he’ll be eligible for one of the NBA’s super max extensions, and will forgo about $75 million if he leaves. But the Pelicans are so messed up that he just might be willing to do that.

Now, the deal isn’t necessarily dead – although, given how all sides have been mocked and pilloried and ridiculed in the aftermath, it likely is – but this sort of stuff is exactly what you don’t want to do if you hope to convince your star player that it’s worth it for him to stick around and be a part of your clownshoes organization. It’s a players game, a star’s game, and anything you do to get crosswise with the star is a really, really bad idea, especially when you’re in a market where stars are hard to come by. It’s why everyone in Milwaukee is treading on egg shells around Giannis after they fired a coach he really respected. It’s why the Kings were so willing so suck up to Boogie for all of those years. Do not make the superstar angry! You can’t screw this stuff up.  Your margin for error is too small.

I fear for the Pelicans. I think that franchise is doomed if they lose Anthony Davis. As much as I want an NBA team in Seattle, I don’t like the idea of one being shipped over from New Orleans. But the Pelicans are DUMB. They’re one of the dumbest franchises in all of sports. They’ve made mistake after mistake in terms of coaching, drafting, free agency, and trades. It’s been a complete mess, and it’s gonna cost them big time, in the end. There are plenty of franchises in sports whom I despise and would be willing to put aside my objectivity in order to chortle over their failures. But the New Orleans Pelicans aren’t one of those. I did not enjoy this exercise as much as it may seem. (Though I did have some fun writing this, mostly at the expense of the clueless Bulls.) Now come on Pelicans, stop doing stupid shit, goddamnit!

– – –

 
UPDATE [1 Feb 2018, 1:00 p.m.]
At some point since I first wrote this, everyone in New Orleans came to their senses and figured out that picking up the option on Mirotić, who can actually play, was a far better outcome than being stuck with Asik, who can't play, for basically the same amount of money next year, and so this trade has now happened. Incredibly, the Birds have also managed to move along Tony Allen, who has been hurt all season, and Jameer Nelson, who looked like he was about 58 years old when I saw New Orleans play Portland a couple of weeks ago. The Bulls agreed to this, and also agreed to give the Pelicans back a 2nd round pick from a previous trade, when the Pels shipped out Quincy Pondexter to Chicago.

Which is dumb by the Bulls. STOP GIVING AWAY EXTRA STUFF! That is the same dumb thing Chicago did last year in the awful Cam Payne trade, when they threw in 2nd round picks for no reason. Knowing their propensity for doing this, this is why Minnesota insisted on the 1st round pick swap in the Butler trade. And we all know, by now, about the dumb selling of a 2nd to Golden State. And here they go solving New Orleans' problems, as the Pelicans just threw in a bunch of stuff neither side wanted, and the Bulls are not getting anything more than one pick out of the deal, and actually giving a pick back. STOP DOING THAT! Chicago needs guys that can actually play. A good way to get them is to, you know, draft them.

I continue to be amused and amazed by all of this. I still do not see how this a good deal for the Bulls. You have the best asset in the deal, you want to get GOOD STUFF in a return, not just stuff. The 1st is good stuff. Asik is not good stuff. Vet minimums you now have to waive is not good stuff. Giving away a 2nd is not good stuff. I don't get it.