9 Out of 10 People Lose

photo by flopturnriver.com

The Lose is retired from cards. I basically stopped playing when I no longer felt like I could afford to lose. Now when I go to Vegas, I just eat a lot and do stupid things like bet on W.S.U. football. But I’ve always enjoyed gambling, and if I ever get my shit together, I’ll finish this novel that I’ve been working that’s partially set in the casinos of Europe around the time of the fall of The Berlin Wall. The story someone told me about playing blackjack with the Stasi just cannot go untold.

Today, we have a post on the subject of poker, as The Lose welcomes back guest columnist Jason Idalski, who previously wrote for this site on the perils of covering Eastern Michigan Football,  a.k.a. “Reasons to Develop a Drinking Problem On the Job.” Jason is also a former Jeopardy! champion, and has participated in the World Scrabble Championships – although his lifetime record in scrabble is 0-1 vs. The Lose, in a game both of us would agree was among the worst we’ve ever played. He’s also a pretty fine poker player – although as you’ll see from this article, maybe not quite good enough, as if it were ever possible to actually be ‘good enough’ in an event where 9 out of 10 people lose.

I HAVE tried to (hopefully) make this post accessible to all, even those who have never played poker before. If you know nothing about hold 'em poker but are still interested for the sake of the post or just to learn the basics, here's a good four-minute primer video. I have used the term poker to refer to Texas hold 'em even though this is technically incorrect. Poker is a game of many variations, including hold 'em. This was done more to be colloquial and because I'm so used to using the terms interchangeably with friends.

“What you have to remember about poker is: in every hand, nine out of 10 people lose. And in most tournaments, nine out of 10 people lose. And that can be tough to deal with.”

– Poker dealer Brian Vock, to me

Brian was one of my favorite dealers at the casino I usually play at and we were shooting the breeze after a tournament I'd cashed in. I feel like he must have put in his two weeks notice by that point and knew it would be our last conversation before he left for parts unknown and wanted to impart his wisdom, such as it were, on a newer player looking to learn.

He was referring to my style of trying to be good-natured, and as simple a concept as it was, it had never occurred to me before. The dynamics of poker (and, by extension, losing at poker) are different than most competitions. Most games are one-on-one: one player vs. one player or one team vs. one team. Even most board games cap out at 4-6 people.

Golf is an exception, where you are in essence competing against the course but in reality you're competing against the rest of the field. But in golf half the people make the cut. (Although, as the saying goes, how would you like to compete against the 100-plus best people at what you do and beat half of them to earn a paycheck each week?)

In poker, you have to beat usually nine other people if you want to win a hand. And unlike one-on-one competition, that means having nine scouting reports, nine people with varying styles of play. Imagine a football team having to defend against the option and the air raid simultaneously. It's a daunting task and makes losing streaks inevitable for even the best players, especially since usually only 10% of tournament entries cash.

“In chess, the properties and powers of a bishop are fixed. In poker, it's wobbled through the prism of personality.” 

– Victoria Coren Mitchell (OK, Coren Mitchell credited the above to Martin Amis, but she's the one who said it on QI.)

This quote sums up one of the things that is beautiful (and simultaneously maddening) about poker. In chess, I can move a bishop diagonally and so can you. In sports, the equipment is roughly the same even in sports like tennis and golf. But in poker, if I start off with a pair of nines and you start off with a pair of nines, in essence the same "playing pieces," we may play them very differently depending on our experience level, aggression level, or sometimes something as random as where we're sitting at the table. Similarly, there are pre-flop holdings such as the 7-6 of diamonds that players like me don't like to play while there are others who love to play it. It's all subjective.

It makes sense that poker was a game common in the Wild West, as sometimes it feels like there are no rules. When facing a better poker player, at times it can feel like playing a golfer who can use his putter to hit a 300-yard drive.

Getting back to losing, it shows that nothing is guaranteed. Poor players can blunder their way into losing with the best hand in any number of ways. They can play too passively and let their opponents catch up. They can be bullied by a bluffing opponent's big bet (say that ten times fast) and lay down the better hand. And even when they "get it in good," sometimes plain old bad luck steps in.

"See, a guy's got to have the gamble in him. ... He's got to be the kind of guy who will go you 50 [thousand] on a flip of a coin. Some guys don't have the gamble in 'em, see? They wouldn't go fifty on a flip of a coin if you gave them 3-to-1 odds." 

– Poker pro Dewey Tomko, as told to Rick Reilly in ‘Who's Your Caddy?’

The weekend before Memorial Day, starting Friday, I played a tournament in Toledo with a couple friends. $85 buy-in, the top 10% advance to Sunday with the stack they had at the finish of their flight. Friday morning's flight had 52 entries, so the top five were in. I got off to a very good start and was in a strong position with about 25 people left. We were playing our last hand before the second break of the day. I had two aces (A-A), the strongest starting hand in hold 'em. I put in a standard pre-flop raise and got two callers.

The flop (first three of five community cards) came K-J-7, nothing that would concern me too much. The cards were of three different suits ("rainbow," in poker lingo) so no flush draws were possible. Both players checked to me and I bet my aces again. The guy to my left (Josh, I would later learn his name was) raised all-in (all of his chips). When I called immediately he said "oops" and turned over king-queen. The turn (fourth community card) came a meaningless card (a "brick"), leaving him only five cards in the deck to stay alive: the two remaining kings and the three remaining queens. The river (fifth and last community card) was one of two said kings, giving Josh three of a kind and the pot. 

And as if I won't be hammering the point home about how fine a line there is between success and failure in poker enough in this post, instead of being out the door Josh had about 40,000 in chips and turned that 40,000 into more than 1,000,000 in chips with 11 players left.

"That's harsh." 

– my two friends, separately, after witnessing the above hand

I had won a couple big hands before that bad beat and ran well enough afterward that I ended up making the final (10-person) table. Half of us were going to qualify, though, and I had a chip stack about half the average, so I still had a lot of work to do. Fortunately that distribution was skewed upward, as it seemed that two or three people were above average and seven or eight were below. Two or three people looked in worse shape than me.

Eight of us were left when I looked down at a hand of 8-6. A lousy hand to be sure, but I was big blind, meaning that I'd already put in the pre-flop bet merely by virtue of being two spots to the left of the designated dealer that hand. Four players had called but none had raised, so I was able to see a flop for free, which came Q-8-6. Two pair, which had to be the best hand. Like against Josh, I bet, was raised all-in, called instantly, and saw I was ahead, as he turned over Q-10. But also like against Josh, the river was one of his (eight) outs, a queen that gave him three of a kind.

Instead of him being out and me being above average (and with just two people to outlast), I was "crippled" and very short on chips. I rolled my chair away from the table, stood up and sighed while the dealer counted out the damage. I sat back down still in a foul mood.

Poor guy tried to make me feel better by giving me a "that's poker"-esque line about how he had gotten unlucky earlier and it evens out and blah blah blah ("that's poker" is essentially the poker equivalent of "shit happens") and for his courtesy he nearly got his head bitten off. "Yeah, and he got me earlier in almost the exact same situation!" I said, pointing at Josh. "You're 1-and-1 in those spots, I'm 0-and-2. When do I get to do it to other people?" No answers were forthcoming. I busted shortly thereafter in eighth place, six hours of play having gone for naught.

"It just goes down as an 'L.' No one will ever know all the anguish and thought and pain that went into it." 

– Chris Cree, as told to Stefan Fatsis in ‘Word Freak’

I fired one more bullet (tried again to qualify) Friday night, which may have been a mistake. I played poorly, drew poorly, was ruled against on an adjudication which cost me 5,000 in chips early (always fun to watch a guy get rewarded for living in an ethical gray area), had to watch idiots get rewarded for doing idiotic things (always fun to watch bad behavior and bad play get rewarded) and still would have had at least double my buy-in except for a run-out of x-x-Q-A-10 when I had 9-9 vs. K-J and 3-3, giving the guy with K-J (who had approximately zero business being in the hand after my all-in) an unlikely straight.

Other than that it went well. One of the least enjoyable two-three hours playing poker that I've ever had. I left the casino Friday night pretty much hating poker and thinking that I needed a bit of a break to decompress.

"They have a name for people who quit. They call them quitters." 

– Rose Nylund, played by Betty White on The Golden Girls

Fast forward to late Saturday afternoon, me driving through a rainstorm to Toledo to fire one last bullet. I don't put any stock into astrology (Irish comic Dara O'Briain helped push me off that fence) but I am a Taurus and I concede that I am nothing if not stubborn. 

If not for the downpours I drove through I would have been at a soccer game. But I was not keen on the idea of getting drenched to watch a friendly when I could give qualifying for Sunday one more try. And with both of my friends qualifying Friday, I didn't want to be the only one of the three of us who couldn't make it. (My team lost 6-2 anyway.)

I pretty much tread water until a hand a couple hours after I started playing. I had K-K, raised pre-flop and got two callers. The flop came the four of spades, five of clubs and seven of spades. My play (going all-in) was pretty standard but I wasn't sure what to make of it when both players called. One had A-6 and needed a 3 or 8 for a straight. Another had A-9 of spades and needed any spade for the nut (best) flush. So, I had to dodge both unseen aces, the eight unseen 3s and 8s, and all the unseen spades. Twice. According to CardPlayer's odds calculator, despite having the best hand at the time I am only 40% to win. But I did dodge all those outs twice and tripled my amount in one hand.

The rest of the night wasn't without its share of drama, but I believed I was going to make it after that. And thanks to continuing to run well, I did. At 2:15 a.m., in the infancy of his wedding anniversary day, a guy busted in 10th place and the nine of us survived to Sunday. (Though technically we had already...)

I mentioned before that I hate watching inferior players get lucky and win. It's the blend of my competitiveness and sense of justice. But I have to admit, both in the micro and the macro, sometimes my bad behavior gets rewarded as well.

“Your problem is your blood was rushing down from your head and settling someplace south of the equator!”

– Adam Schiff (played by Steven Hill) to Jack McCoy (Sam Waterston) on ‘Law & Order’ 

One of my favorite TV quotes. I was also going to lead into the following hand with "long periods of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror" but I couldn't find the origin. Plus, I learned that the quote originally refers to warfare. I'd like to think I'm not one to give into the "X is war" triteness or the "X is a microcosm of life/war" trope but I have to admit it's pretty fitting.

Early on during the Sunday restart I looked at A-7. A-7 is the type of hand that new players overrate. Yes, that ace looks nice, and yes, you're probably ahead before the flop, but even if you hit the ace on the flop, A-8 through A-K has you beat, and beat very badly. Similarly, hitting the 7 rarely puts you in a position you can be confident.

So, A-7 is a mediocre hand, but I only had three people behind me and I figured a raise would take it down. That proved incorrect when the big blind called. The flop came A-4-J and it was checked to me.

I figured I would have heard from any ace (he would've bet instead of checking), so I bet again and was called again. The turn came a queen, the second club. Checked to me again. I had no clubs and figured if my opponent had a holding like A-2 of clubs, I needed to protect my hand and make him pay to see if the next card completed the flush. And given how big the pot was at this point and the size of my stack, the appropriate play to accomplish that was to go all-in.

Back to my opponent, who thought about it longer than I thought he would. Then he asked the dealer how much it was. Then he counted out that amount from his stack to see how much would be left over if he called. For the first time it started to dawn on me: "Shit. I may be behind. And he has more chips than I do."

Since I've rambled on about myself without referencing losing in a while, I do need to touch on the fact that this is unique to poker. When the Warriors have played well the whole game to lead by 10 with a minute left, they can't lose that lead in one possession. When the Patriots lead by 10 with a minute left, even if they give up a touchdown on a mental lapse, they'd still be in a dominant position. In poker, you can flush away hours and hours of stack-building with one blunder, one misstep, one rush of blood down from the head settling someplace south of the equator, as Steven Hill so gruffly (and beautifully) put it. Sometimes it feels like you gain chips by the teaspoonful and lose them by the bucketful.

As he thought for what seemed like an eternity, I tried to stay as motionless as possible while self-flagellating how I could've gotten myself into this mess. The notion of the "poker face" is a bit overrated in my view. Saturday night into Sunday morning I played with a guy who essentially talked non-stop. And at one point the guy sitting next to me (with whom I struck up a fast friendship) confided in me that he had no idea when the guy was bluffing and when he had it. I told him I felt the same way.

That I learned later the guy is a pro and was playing the tournament with a buddy on a lark after dumping $4,400 at a separate tournament in west Michigan earlier in the day made me feel better about being unable to read him, and getting outplayed by him in general. Here I was grinding away investing an unhealthy amount of my self-esteem in getting to Sunday (at that point to twice play six hours and not make it would have been crushing) and this tournament was a rounding error to him. He would have needed to win the whole thing to break even for the weekend.

Back to my terror with what I now believed to be an inferior hand. "Ace-king?" my opponent muttered at one point and I thought: "Yes. Yes, I've played this hand exactly like I'd play ace-king. Believe it. Please fold. Please fold. Please fold." The more he thought, especially given his comment, the more I believed he had A-9 or A-10 and I was going to be in bad shape if he called, one card away from being out of the tournament. Eventually he folded and I tried to make my reflexive sigh of relief as inaudible as possible and took the big pot. Like I said, sometimes at a poker table, both in the micro and macro, my bad behavior gets rewarded.

"A W's a W, and an L's an L." 

– Jim Valvano

I eventually made the final two tables (top 18). I had parlayed the 15,000 in chips I got Saturday night into about 600,000 after busting a guy who got aggressive with 9-9 with only a couple players behind him and had the misfortune of my waking up with K-K, almost doubling my stack. Being unable to stand prosperity, I then doubled through a short stack the very next hand when we got it all in with her K-J beating my A-7 when a king and jack hit the board and gave her two pair (that stupid A-7 again).

So I was sitting on about 500K with an approximate average of 700K during the following sequence. 14 players (two tables of seven) remained at this point.

Hand 1: A short-stack goes all-in for 97K. I had already put in 25K (being the big blind that hand) so it was another 72K to me. I counted the pot and determined that it would cost me 72K to win 227K, a proposition where I only have to win at least 32% of the time to make it profitable/positive expected value (I often joke at the poker table that I majored in math in college and now I use it to count chip stacks and calculate pot odds).

Since 7-2 of separate suits (the worst starting hand in poker given the low card values and the inability to make straights or flushes) is still about 30% vs. A-K of the same suit different than either suit in your hand, I am mathematically obliged to call with any two cards, especially the Q-10 I had. I was delighted to see he had 10-9 of spades and the first four of five cards gave him little help: K-A-A-2. Of the 44 unseen cards, three tie (the three 2s, since we would then each play the A-A-2-2-K on the board) and three win (the three 9s). 38 of the 44 send him packing. The dealer peels off the river card, which is a 9.

"Ooh!" the table says, standard operating procedure for a huge shift in fortune. I cringed, then took a deep breath to calm myself. The table, including my opponent, were full of sympathy. I shrugged it off. It was "only" 97K, putting me at 410K, or about 16.5 big blinds when usually 10 is considered the danger/desperation zone. I only needed to be 32% to win the hand to call and I was way more than that at every point before the end. I "got it in good," as the saying goes. That's all you can do.

Hand 2: The same guy who just beat me and another short stack get it all-in pre-flop. He has K-Q, she has A-10, but he catches up. Left for dead a minute ago, his stack is now roughly equal to mine and she is out in 14th place. Doug, who had started dealing at the table a few minutes before, says to him: "You know, you're making me a lot of enemies around here." I laugh louder and harder than anybody.

"The dealer is not responsible for which card comes off the deck, for winning streaks or losing streaks. There are no lucky or unlucky dealers, although sometimes it seems otherwise. Players should treat dealers with respect..." 

– Rule 16.25 of "Poker: Implementing Rules and Guidelines"

Hand 3: The new short stack, who is first to act this hand, goes all-in for what looks to be about 125K. The player to my right, who has more chips than me, also goes all-in. I am next to act and jokingly stage whisper "aces, aces..." while mock putting a spell over the cards. I expect to see a terrible hand that I can easily fold and move onto the next. Instead I see the two black queens.

I laugh in spite of myself. "OK, I have to nit-roll you here," I announce. I am almost certainly going all-in myself and when they see the queens I don't want them to think I was "Hollywooding" them (feigning weakness when I'm strong to trick an opponent). But at the same time I can't be convinced my queens are ahead. Yes, only two hands beat queens (kings and aces) and yes, only one hand is roughly even with queens (ace-king), but given the strength this guy has shown he could easily have one of those hands. A-K is possible, and do I want to be 50-50 (or less when you consider the original all-in player) to survive? Especially since there's 13 of us left and only one is taking home $335, with everybody else getting at least $435?

In the end, I say "I can't fold this hand" and go all-in to join the party. Everybody else folds and I see the original bettor has 9-8 of diamonds and the second bettor has 10-10. My queens are in better shape than I could have imagined: no "overs" (cards above my pair that will beat me if they hit the board). I clap my hands once and stand up. "Hold!" I bark. "One time!"

Doug deals out three cards face-down for the flop. He turns them over and the top card is the queen of diamonds. I give a little fist-pump. While Card Player's odds calculator doesn't calculate odds based on one flop card, given that I was 66% to win the hand before that card, I figure I'm at least 90% to win now.

“Don't you draw the queen of diamonds, boy / she'll beat you if she's able” 
– Eagles, “Desperado"

Whenever you see a team that was 90+% to win then go on to lose (the two examples that come to mind are Northern Iowa and the Atlanta Falcons), where both teams were 99+% to win before unraveling, it's safe to assume there were layers to that comeback. Multiple mental errors, multiple strategical errors, multiple times where one play could have arrested the negative momentum and yet it wasn't made.

In poker, one of the next best things to having your opponent totally dead (no cards or card combination can save them) is to have them drawing to one card on the river out of the 44 left in the deck. The favorite wins these confrontations about 97.7% of the time. 

All this is to say that in poker you can put yourself in a position to win 97.7% of the time and lose ... all at once and through no fault of your own! Atlanta and Northern Iowa have only themselves to blame for blowing games in which they were 97.7% to win. In poker you can work hard and get lucky and be in that 97.7% position and be powerless to watch the one card that beats you hit the felt. And there are stories about that happening (though fortunately I have not witnessed one).

While my percentage is certainly not in that 97-98% range, my opponents are in the position that Texas A&M and the Patriots were, needing multiple things to happen. The card was a diamond, giving the first guy three diamonds and needing two more for a flush. Or a jack and a ten for a straight, but that's unlikely given that the other guy has two tens. And even if he wins I'm going to make a healthy profit on the hand and be near my prior peak. Meanwhile, the other guy needs both of the other two tens in the deck (not bloody likely) or...

The two cards beneath the queen are revealed: a king and a jack. I notice what that means before the rest of the table and say "Whoaoaoaoa!" Now the guy with 10s has 10-J-Q-K and only needs an ace or nine for a straight. "Don't do this to me, Doug," I plead. "Don't do me like this. Please." The turn is a 9. "NooooOOOO!" I wail in a bit of a crescendo, putting my forehead on the edge of the table. I'm not dead yet, though. One of the two 10s will tie as we will all play the straight on the board. But if the board pairs (one of the two nines, three jacks or three kings) it gives me a winning full house. And the miracle queen of hearts would give me four of a kind. Nine wins and two ties aren't great but they're better than the three wins and three ties that caught up to me two hands ago.

The river is a meaningless 6. I clasp my arms behind my head and lean forward in a sort of sitting fetal position. It's over. Just like that. Six hours Friday afternoon, six hours Saturday night, five hours Sunday afternoon, all to lose with Q-Q v 10-10 and 9-8. I look at the five cards on the table, half in disbelief, half hoping that maybe that 6 is really a 9 and if I stare at it long enough I'll have a full house and win the hand.

"It doesn't cost a dime to be nice to people." 

– Sparky Anderson

Appreciation to the dealer and the rest of the table for letting me sit for a few seconds even after the hand was over and the winner had raked in the pot. (I don't understand how college basketball coaches get into the handshake line right after the buzzer in a close win/loss and I still find Tony Bennett's post-game interview after the UMBC game to be, while hitting all the right notes, somewhat weird and creepy that he could be that composed so soon after what happened.)

Eventually I got up and shook the hands of everybody at the table. The guy with the 9-8 of diamonds who finished in 13th, whose table I was at starting Sunday and was great to talk to during both our stints together. The guy who I played with Saturday night, who needed to hit a flush draw Saturday night just to make it to Sunday and had just told me that the chatterbox we played against last night was a former Lions tight end (and, I would learn later, a poker pro). The guy who had the big chip stack that I thought would be mine. The guy in the Cleveland Indians hat who started the whole thing by spiking the 9, full of apology. (I can't help but think that if I'd won that hand against him the cards would have come out differently off the deck and I wouldn't have had queens two hands later. Although maybe you're a fatalist who believes that the same thing would have happened even if I won the hand.) Even the guy who was maddening me and Josh with his glacial pace of play.

I think at this point it's come across that I put a lot of myself into competitive endeavors (my Scrabble friends would undoubtedly agree). And given the relatively small stakes I probably overreacted with the hand clap, fist pump, etc., which is one reason I went out of my way to shake everybody's hand on the way out. It is a game, after all. Games are supposed to be fun. And class is the one thing it doesn't cost anything to have, even if I sometimes forget that.

"You are what your record says you are." 

– Bill Parcells

I finish in 12th place and earn $435, a $180 profit. The prize pool was very top heavy (first place was more than $8,000), so including tipping the dealers (I jokingly asked that my tip be earmarked so that Doug would get none of it, the Days Inn stay from Sunday early morning to Sunday mid-morning, gas money, buffet dinner on Friday, etc., I barely got above break-even for the weekend. 

At the time I was convinced that last run-out cost me about $1,000 since the average payout of everyone remaining was about $1,700 and I would have been above average. But who knows? I might have finished ninth and gotten the same $435 as for 12th. Regardless, it was a better outcome than if I hadn't driven down Saturday afternoon to fire one more bullet. 572 times people came to the window to buy in. 560 times they busted finishing worse than I was when I did. And 10 more would walk away losers as well, so close and yet so far from the big prize. 572 entries, 571 losers.

And though I got a boost of confidence, it's waned since. My ensuing three tournaments I haven't sniffed the money, twice busting embarrassingly early, reminders that I had to run incredibly well to get to the point where I did in Toledo and that nothing is guaranteed. But, bringing it full circle, the goose egg statistically will happen 80-90% of the time. It's about reducing that 80-90% and, when I cash, cashing for enough to offset the losses.

And I feel like I'm good enough to do that. One of the frustrating things about losing in poker is that there are times you feel like you're getting better but it's not showing in the tangible results. And by you, of course, I mean me.

"So you wanna play poker for a living, huh?" 

– ESPN poker commentator Lon McEachern

That quote comes from this video (specifically, the hand from 2:00-3:30):

When you consider the fact that I was playing an $85 buy-in and these guys were playing a $10,000 buy-in, that makes these at least 117 times worse. Then when you consider the difference in magnitude of the prize increases, the closeness to the title WSOP Main Event Champion ... 1,000 times worse? 10,000? I'm at the point where watching the Affleck-Duhamel hand makes me cry like the end of Bambi. I feel like if that happened to me I would be catatonic for hours.

Remember when my friends thought it was harsh to lose about 20,000 in chips? How does it compare to losing about 40,000 in chips when you're within sniffing distance of your goal, costing you another $170 to get there? How does it compare to losing 100,000 in chips on a river three-outer? How does it compare to losing 400,000 in chips from an approximately 90% position and having 0 instead of about 1,000,000?

It's just a matter of believing it will even out over time, perhaps in one fell swoop. How many $100 coin flips would you lose if you knew you were going to win a $10,000 one? (99, duh.)

And it's important to remember, in my case, I'm not there at all if my 60%-to-lose kings early Saturday night lose. I'm not there if my stupid all-in play Sunday morning gets picked off. Things even out in the macro, but sometimes they even out in the micro too.

Getting back to McEachern's question, which was posed to me by a friend recently, if I ever saw myself in that position some day. My initial response was to laugh. First, my game is nowhere near good enough. Second, and perhaps more importantly, at least when I have a rough day at my office job, I don't come home with less money than I had before because of it. And, as my thousands of words above probably make clear, I don't take losing well internally. I struggle to make sense of the randomness.

And how sick do you have to be to go pro at something with a 90% failure rate, every hand and every tournament?

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.

7-Up

Loris Karius picks the ball from his net, and picks up the pieces of his career

THIS seems to happen at this time every year: there is a whole lot for me to talk about, and yet I’m usually too busy with work to ever have the opportunity to write about it. So, now that I have a few hours here, I’m going to spew out a whole lot of thoughts and probably make all sorts of grammatical mistakes and probably also say a few things that will piss people off in the process. Good. There is so much stuff going on that I almost don’t know where to begin.

Seven thoughts now, as it was my squared-seven birthday last Friday, and I have been watching all of these things take place from the 7 x 7 city:

• As a former goalkeeper, and a lifetime member of the Goalkeepers Union, I absolutely cringed for Loris Karius on Sunday. Karius, the Liverpool goalkeeper, made a pair of unforgivable errors in the Champions League final which gifted Real Madrid a pair of goals in Liverpool’s 3:1 defeat, and it made me feel sick to my stomach. All three of Real’s goals were met with a moment of shock and awe, one of which – a stunning bicycle kick from Gareth Bale – was one of the most beautiful goals you’ll ever see, and was met with a standing ovation from even Liverpool fans, having witnessed a moment of pure greatness, the sort of which transcends which color shirt you’re wearing and is worthy of applause from either side.

But, of course, the other two times Kiev fell silent after Madrid goals, it was due to stunned disbelief. They simply could not believe the display of complete and utter incompetence on the part of the Liverpool keeper which had yielded two goals to the opposition. Not even Real could believe it. They didn’t really even know how they should go about celebrating.

And it made me sick, as a former goalkeeper, because a goalkeeping error is the worst thing that can befall your team. You have to be a little bit off to be a keeper to begin with, given that your idea of a great game is one where you don’t have much of anything to do, and as the last line of defense, you’re expected to bail out all of your dumb defenders in front of you after they go about making dumb plays. Your centre back fails to clear, a shot comes in and you’re quick to react and you push the ball wide. The corner kick winds up looking like a jailbreak, with the offense running rampant, you parry a shot over the bar and bark at everyone who lined up like an idiot and didn’t mark anyone, but it’s all good. You have their backs. But when you’re the goalkeeper, no one has your back. (And if they do, they’re probably out of position, so you should yell at them, anyway.) It’s all on you, there’s nothing but twine behind you and if you mistake, there is nowhere to hide.

The first goalkeeping flub by Karius was one of the dumbest things I’ve ever seen on a soccer pitch: he fields the ball, he goes to roll it out to a fullback to start the play, he tunnel visions it much like a QB throwing an interception into coverage, Real’s Karim Benzema just sort of sticks his leg out and deflects the ball and it rolls oh so slowly and settles in the goal just inside the far post, the luckiest of lucky strikes, a slow roller akin to watching, in slow motion, the vase my cat would knock off the table: it’s falling, disaster is coming, you cannot believe this is happening but here it comes. I’ve been either playing or watching soccer for more than 40 years and I’ve never seen anything like that. It was so weird that everyone just sort of stopped, the crowd went silent, and you’re first instinct was to say, “did that just happen?” It made no sense and no one knew how to react.

WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!?!?!?!?

His second major error was one of those classic mistakes akin to the old mantra in baseball that the center fielder has the hardest time judging the ball hit right at him. It was another strike from Bale, it knuckled a bit, Karius was clearly of two minds about it, not knowing whether to try to catch or try to punch, and he wound up somehow contriving to accomplish neither. His first error was so weird that it was hard to blame anyone – Liverpool players were yelling at assorted officials in the aftermath, since clearly something illegal must have happened in order for a goal that strange to have occurred – but the second gaffe was all on him, an enormous blunder which put Real up by two goals and ended the discussion, for all intents and purposes.

And as I say, as I’m watching this, I’m absolutely cringing. Flashing through my mind are these moments where I did something stupid like let a ball go through my legs, or lost a cross in the sun and spilled it at the feet of an opposing striker. You’re entrusted with keeping order, with keeping things sane, and then you goof up and you concede a goal in a game where a goal is often all the other side needs. It’s a truly horrible feeling. My last year as a keeper, I was also a captain, and we contrived to somehow score three own goals and after each one, I made a point to tell the others on my squad that it was a team game, that it wasn’t one guy’s single error which led to the mistake and the opposing goal. But when you’re the keeper and you fuck up? Oh man. The dirty looks are everywhere. Your teammates are furious with you. They’re so angry and they have a right to be, because it’s your job to be perfect. Nothing less is good enough.

Karius is a young keeper, he improved this season and he is an excellent shot stopper who made several terrific saves during the game to keep Liverpool close. Nevertheless, he and his Belgian back-up have been rather eccentric back there, inducing migraines at Anfield and driving Jürgen Klopp slightly nuts. They’d already been pursuing Alison, the Brazilian #1 who plies his trade for A.S. Roma, but given how comically awful Karius was in Kiev, and given that Liverpool still has some of the £150m or so laying around that they got for selling Coutinho to an overpaying Barcelona, the price to acquire Alison from Roma just got even higher – and it was already thought to be around £60m to begin with, which is an outrageous sum for a keeper, but if you’re Liverpool, and your keeper just cost you the Champions League, you’re probably going to pay it.

Which sucks for Karius, who basically lost his job right before our eyes. He was, of course, despondent afterwards, and he took to twitter to apologize to the Liverpool fans. In the aftermath, Klopp and the club said all the right things about how they would support him and such, but this is a cold business. It wouldn’t surprise me if he never plays for Liverpool again, nor ever plays in a Champions League final again – a pretty cruel death of a dream. The fact is that there are tonnes of small errors here and there which ultimately determine outcomes most of the time. It’s rare it gets decided thanks to some sort of one individual’s calamitous, catastrophic mistake. (Or, in this case, two.) Liverpool’s wonderful anthem is entitled You’ll Never Walk Alone, but I’m not sure many have made a lonelier walk off the pitch than Karius did when it was over.

Jesus, this goal was beautiful

• Real Madrid celebrated winning the Champions League with all of the excitement of someone being told they need to go in for a root canal. In the aftermath, you had Ronaldo and Bale talking about their time in Madrid in past tense, with the latter having been benched this season and having indicated, at least indirectly, that he wanted to leave, and the former, after having perpetually bickered with the club’s top brass over the years, sounding as if he may have finally had enough. The game was so weird to begin with, what with Real having two of their three goals gifted them by the Liverpool keeper, that there was hardly a sense of triumph about the proceedings. Indeed, some of the Real players’ first reaction seemed to be to want to go over and console the despondent Liverpool keeper. They like winning, of course, but they didn’t like winning in that way.

But the whole endeavor was muted from the 30th minute onward, which was the time when the whole game changed and literally every ounce of joy and excitement left the stadium in Kiev, because that was the moment when Sergio Ramos decided to try and break Mo Salah’s arm, and very nearly succeeded. As it was, Salah had to leave the game. Up to that point, Liverpool had the better of the game. They were playing their attacking style, Real was flustered and flummoxed at the back, and the Reds seemed to have the advantage. From that moment on, there was an air of inevitable gloom and doom to the proceedings. Without their star, Liverpool was never the same and neither was the game. Frankly, it didn’t even seem like the Real players were having much fun.

Piece of shit

And it’s hard to have fun in a game when you have a guy who goes out and deliberately injures opponents. One of my favorite stories of all time involved an NHL team whom I happen to like, who had a player with a bad habit of deliberately injuring opponents, and while supporting him in public, their response in practice was to stand back and watch the guy get pummeled in a fight after getting into a scrap. The message was clear: you don’t do that. You put your teammates on the line when you do something like that, not to mention yourself, because guys on the other side are going to be more than willing to try and settle the score. Although I never advocate violence, it wouldn’t have surprised me if, down two goals in the closing minutes, a Liverpool player had gone up to Ramos and clocked him one.

It was a dirty and disgusting play and it ruined the Champions League final. Don’t believe me? Here’s a pretty good analysis. It’s a dirty play by a guy whose been thrown out of more games in La Liga than any other player in history for a reason. Your reputation preceeds you. It ain’t an accident or a coincidence when it happens more than once. I’m perfectly happy to see a guy like Christiano Ronaldo win literally everything, because he’s one of the best players in history, but the problem is that whenever Ronaldo wins a trophy at Real Madrid, it also means that a piece of shit like Sergio Ramos wins one as well. 

And it really bothered me that the collection of dimwits and hare brains employed by FOX Sports to do commentary here in the U.S. didn’t see that for what it was, which is an incredibly dirty play by a guy who is a well-documented shithouse. (Given that these clowns are calling the World Cup, we are in for a long month of June.) WHAT ARE YOU WATCHING? There was nothing accidental about that. Nothing. If you can’t call an obvious act of the game’s dark arts what it is, then you have no business calling a game.
Injuries suck. They suck and we have to begrudgingly accept them as a part of the game – any and every game – and in doing so, we also try to downplay their impact on the final result. This particular injury pretty much ruined the game. And it also might potentially ruin one of the better stories of the World Cup. Salah didn’t break an arm or dislocate a shoulder, which he very much could have done, but now it’s a race against time to get him healthy enough to play in Russia this summer for Egypt – a side that you should root for, because it’s a team whose fans are positively desperate for a little of the joy at the moment, given the political mess that has ensnarled the nation and even filtered over into the football grounds – the one place many Egyptians had come to regard as a place of free expression which is now rapidly being taken away. Salah has become a true hero in leading them to the World Cup, in scoring 40+ goals for Liverpool and putting himself in discussion for the Ballon d’Or. Him going down in Kiev was such a downer. Him having been taken down by a cheap shot made it all the more worse.
 

Thou shalt not score!

• When the Washington Capitals won Game 2 of the Stanley Cup Finals by a 3:2 score over the Vegas Golden Knights on Wednesday, it marked the first time a Washington, D.C., sports team won a game in a final round of any sport in decades. Little did I know, as I was hanging out in the pouring rain with my new Honduran friends while doing a conga line with a Samba band as D.C. United won the MLS Cup in 1997, that I was partaking in pretty much the last moment in time that any professional sports team from Washington, D.C. would ever have any joy ever. If the Hall of Lose is ever to open, it’s quite possibly going to be in Washington, because D.C. sports are the worst. 
But now the Capitals, after years of failing to reach the lofty heights befitting their talent – the result of perpetually being unable to play good hockey while having their hands around their own throats – have somehow managed to slay the dragon that is the Pittsburgh Penguins, and they now find themselves three games away from winning an NHL title. And this is Caps-friendly household, mind you, as The Official Spouse of In Play Lose hails from that area, and I happened to be living there for a spell during the 1997-1998 season, which was the one and only time the Caps made the Stanley Cup Finals, at which point they were promptly swept by Detroit. I’ve got a soft spot for the Caps, and even went to a couple of their home games at the old Capital Centre in Landover before they moved into their new arena later that year in downtown Washington. My rooting interest here is clear.

That they’re playing Vegas is absolutely ridiculous, because Vegas is an expansion team, but in the absurd amalgamation of bad ideas and weird franchises that is the NHL, the fact that an expansion team is now playing for a title seems almost appropriate. I mean, this is a league that as much as gave franchises away to Disney and Blockbuster Video for the fuck of it. It got held hostage by two guys who wanted to create a team in the Bay Area and permitted them to gut the franchise they already owned in Minnesota in order to do it. They keep pouring money by the millions down ratholes in Miami and Phoenix, thinking that it’s somehow a good idea. So why not Vegas? I’m down with Vegas. Fuck yeah! A Washington-Vegas final has got to be more appealing to the league brass than the potential Tampa Bay-Winnipeg final, which would have drawn tens of tens of American viewers.

What’s funny about this match-up is that you have what is, without a doubt, one of the most successful expansion franchises in the history of sports against a Capitals franchise whose expansion season was, as guest columnist Geoff Thevenot pointed out, quite possibly the worst team in the history of the game of hockey – and, as pointed out in this column from future Seattle NHL beat writer Geoff Baker, the NHL learning from the mistakes made in that disastrous original Caps’ season led to an evolution in league-wide thinking about how to handle expansion, an evolution which ultimately made it possible for Vegas to have the opportunity to be this good, this fast. (An opportunity which, to their credit, they didn’t screw up.)
And I’ve been sort of laughing about the Vegas Golden Knights success from afar all season. It was about the time I came across the story of how the Ducks had flown in to play the day of the game rather than the night before (and I don’t think they were the first team to do this) that one on the NBA’s greatest truisms – “L.A. nightlife is undefeated” – had come to fully roost in the NHL. Because L.A. nightlife ain’t got nothing on Vegas, not when you can go and patronize the private bar or the high-energy nightclub or the high rollers casino without leaving your team hotel and then stagger down The Strip to the arena in the morning.

The Last Sonics meet again

• First off, a history lesson here. When I was playing high school basketball, the state of Washington didn’t have a 3-point line. However, the state of Idaho did, and we’d play a few games over there every year. The 3-point shot was something of a novelty at that point, and since, of course, guys on our team were excited about shooting threes, the first time we played a game in Idaho with 3-point line, our power forward, who played at the top of the key, and our shooting guard, who liked playing on the baseline, were both so excited about the prospect of shooting threes, because threes were cool, that our team basically went improv in our regular offense, with those two guys taking a couple steps from their usual places and winding up on the other side of the 3-point line. Both of them started shooting them, and both of them started making them, which wasn’t that much of a surprise, because we had good shooters, and the shot wasn’t so markedly different from the usual 2’s we were tossing up. It was at the point, however, that our guys were making threes that the big center then started to beast underneath and the small forward easily slashed to the basket. This was because the defense had to crawl out further to guard the shooters, and we’d thus created more space on the floor in which to work. There was no conscious plan for this, mind you. It came out of the flow of the game. What seemed obvious to even my teenage mind, at that point, was that shooting threes made a helluva lot more sense than shooting twos. You got more points, and you created more space on the floor.

So you don’t have to tell me the value of shooting threes. I’ve been down with this idea for 30 years. Three is worth more than two. It’s simple math. But one of the things that people make a mistake about, in thinking about basketball, is thinking that it’s a math problem when it is, in fact, a logic problem, in that the whole game comes down to figuring out what works. I’ve used this notion to try and explain to people the phenomenon of the so-called “hot hand.” Often times, the hot hand is not simply a result of one guy “being in the zone” but is, in fact, the result of a team discovering a match-up advantage and then going, time and again, to what is working in the game. You have to figure out what is working on the floor and, even more importantly, when something isn’t working, you have to stop doing it!

And in Game 7 of both the Eastern and Western Conference Finals, we witnessed both the Boston Celtics and Houston Rockets literally shoot themselves out of the NBA Finals. On Monday night, in their 87:79 loss to the Cleveland Cavaliers, the Celtics shot 7/39 from three in one of the most wretched displays of shooting that I have ever seen … up until Tuesday, that is, when the Rockets shot 7/44 from three, and contrived to somehow miss 27 threes in a row, as they coughed up a huge 1st-half lead and wound up losing 101:92 to the Golden State Warriors. It was an absolute brick barrage. It was some of the worst, ugliest basketball that I have ever seen, and what boggled my mind about it was how both teams seemed to have no other plan for what else to do. They were going to launch threes, by God, because three is worth more than two, never mind the fact that two from a drive to the basket, or even one from a free throw getting hacked on the way to the basket and making one of two, was better than making zero when you throw another brick from behind the line.
Now, in the case of the Rockets, it was pretty obvious what was going on: fatigue was setting in. The Rockets got off to hot starts in both Game 6 and Game 7, jumping out to double-digit leads in both, only to fizzle and fade. The Rockets were an old team to begin with – five of their rotation regulars were over 30 – they had an extremely small rotation, and that rotation got even smaller thanks to the unfortunate hamstring injury Chris Paul suffered in Game 5. And the Rockets had to work so hard in these games on both ends of the floor, not only on the defensive end, where they were terrific, but also on offense. For all of their well-orchestrated attempts at generating mismatches, the Rockets got held under 100 points in five straight games. It was a slog and you could see the legs going in those last two games, the shots from three were getting flatter, and the shot quality getting progressively worse.
And shot quality is something that is hard to judge. A lot of commentators have said that, while missing 27 straight in Game 7, so many of those shots were “good looks,” but given that they were clearly laboring, how good were those actual looks, in fact? And in both of these games, the Rockets fell prey to the curse of irrational confidence. The Rockets throw up a tonne of threes, going for the sheer volume approach in lieu of having great shooters. They have got some guys who can make some threes, pretty good shooters but not great ones who’ve been empowered by Mike D’Antoni to shoot, shoot, and shoot some more. And one of the perils and pitfalls which can befall you is that guys who aren’t great shooters take some not very good shots early in the game which happen to go in, and are emboldened to keep taking not very good shots from then on, and don’t know enough to stop taking not very good shots. This is what happened to the 76ers in Game 2 of their series with the Celtics. They bombed away from three, a lot of them being bad shots which happened to go in, and then kept taking the same bad shots long after they’d stopped going in. In both Games 6 and 7, Houston was hot from three early, and then the shooting went off a cliff. And it’s a vicious cycle – with each one you miss, the pressing need to make one grows, which leads to taking progressively worse and worse shots.
And if you’re the Celtics, and the three guys in your backcourt are going 8 of 42 from the floor and, furthermore, you have Jayson Tatum getting to the basket at will and dunking on LeBron, a pretty good idea down the stretch is, you know, maybe putting the ball more in Tatum’s hands, and maybe not to be having your guards chucking up bad, contested shots from three. Is was a mixed mess going on in the backcourt: Jaylen Brown (3-12 from three, 5-18 overall) had shown himself to be reliable from that distance in the playoffs and was just having an off-night all-around on the offensive end; Terry Rozier (0-10, 2-14), meanwhile, picked a bad time to turn back into a pumpkin and seemed like he was pressing when the ball wouldn’t go in the basket, and he took some really bad shots down the stretch in the 4th Quarter; Marcus Smart (0-4, 1-10), meanwhile, is the worst of all worlds in that he can’t actually shoot but is so irrationally confident that he’ll never know when to stop, and as much as I love his heart and desire and defensive tenacity, the fact of the matter is that a guy shooting 23% from three in the playoffs, who refuses to stop taking them, is not ultimately helping you win games.
It was madness watching this stuff. I wanted to bash my head against a brick wall – an opportunity that was present in both arenas, given the number of bricks being tossed. For godsake, would you try something else! In Boston, it meant put the ball in Tatum’s hands and let him run the offense down the stretch. It also meant, oh, I don’t know, maybe try running and pushing the tempo, seeing as how Cleveland’s transition defense is six kinds of crap, and maybe take the ball to the basket, since Cleveland’s rim protection is also crap, and maybe not get into an 86-possession game and turn into statues against an older, slower team who wants to play a slow game and can, in fact, guard statues. In Houston, the Rockets are getting beat down the stretch and need Harden to make a play, and there he is standing 40 feet from the basket while Eric Gordon’s trying to go 1-on-1 and jacking up a 30-footer, the sort of irrational confidence shot which stopped going in hours before. TRY SOMETHING ELSE!
But this has long been a criticism of Mike D’Antoni-coached teams. They’re basically one-trick ponies and, once you figure them out in the playoffs, they don’t have any sort of a Plan B. Now, to be fair here, Chris Paul was the Plan B. The whole point of Houston getting Chris Paul was to give him the ball when the primary action of a play blows up and let him carve out a good shoot in the mid-range – a shot which literally no other guy on the Rockets seemingly ever takes. But without Paul, the Rockets seemed both out of gas and out of ideas. They just kept doing what didn’t work, with tired legs, to boot, and all they could say afterwards is “well, we didn’t make them and they did.” It’s a strange style of play in that it’s based on empirical data and, yet, is also seemingly intended to make the game more random, given the wild sorts of variances which when you shoot from so deep. Jeez, it was tough to watch, but given the tendency of both D’Antoni and also Brad Stevens to keep giving green lights to guys who take bad shots and do not know when to stop, I am not sure just how much either of the losing sides in the conference finals actually learned.

• One of the perils of young, ascending teams accelerating their timeline is that of the lofty expectations which follow. The Boston Celtics just came within a game of reaching the finals while missing the two guys we all thought would be their two best players this season, Gordon Hayward and Kyrie Irving. The immediate thought which springs to mind in the aftermath of their loss to the Cavs is to say, “wow, just think of how good they’re going to be next year! They weren’t even supposed to be in this place in 2018! They were playing with house money!”
I would anticipate that, come next fall, Boston will put forth a great team. All signs are pointing to it. I think they have the potential to be great. Having said that, we would do well to look at 2018 as being a missed opportunity. Any time you get into the conference finals, and you take a 3-2 lead, you have to make the most of that chance. There are plenty of cases in history where teams who looked like they were on the verge of greatness did not, in fact, reach that pinnacle again.
I thought Boston could win the series. In terms of rosters, I thought they had a better team than Cleveland. Obviously, the Cavs have LeBron, who is a cyborg, and his mere presence legitimately narrows the talent gap between the Cavs and pretty much every team in the East, but this series was right there for the taking and the Celtics clanged it away off the back iron.
Boston’s got an easier time of things in terms of decision making going forward in the East, but I’m not sure what Houston does. Four of the five over-30 guys in their rotation are now free agents, including Chris Paul, who is eligible for a 5-year, $219m contract. I have no doubt that there was some nudzh-nudzh wink-wink agreements going on last summer when Paul orchestrated his exit from L.A. to Houston last summer (but don’t call it tampering, whatever you do), but if I’m the Rockets, having just watched my best chance to beat the Warriors go up in smoke when my oft-injured, 33-year-old point guard injured his hamstring in Game 5, how excited am I to be paying him $46m when he’s 38 years old? YIKES! And if you want to just run in back, you’re not going to get the likes of Trevor Ariza & Co. to take 1-year deals. It’s hard to be running it back for a year when three years from now it’s likely to be really sticky.
They have to also re-sign Clint Capela, the only real young and athletic player on the roster, an RFA who a bad team with cap space might be inclined to throw $80m or more at just to fuck with the Rockets and see if they’ll hold their nose and match it, thus putting themselves into further salary cap purgatory. Oh yeah, and James Harden is about to start his DP super max extension. The Rockets want to win, but I am not sure that the new ownership wants to pay $60m or more in luxury taxes in order to do it. We shall see.
It would be easier for Houston, of course, if they could somehow dump the $42m remaining on Ryan Anderson’s contract, seeing how Anderson has become so unplayable that the eight minutes he was on the floor in Game 7 did wonders to cost them their season. (That 4/$80m albatross of a deal being proof that even great GMs like Daryl Morey screw up from time to time.) There are lots of far-fetched scenarios of somehow landing LeBron in the summer time, and while I’m sure Daryl Morey’s come up with several thousand of those in his head, all of them are dependent upon gutting the team he has now and convincing other teams to take stuff from Houston that they really don’t want. This is the nature of a salary-capped league. At some point, the costs of doing business catch up to you. I’m not sure if Houston will wind up being more than a one-off team, but that doesn’t mean it was the wrong idea. I commend the Rockets for going for it in a time when so many other teams are willing to just mail it in and build for 4-5 years from now, a mentality which often proves to be a losing one.

• This next one is probably going to annoy some people and I don’t really care if it does. One of the mantras we live by here at In Play Lose is a quote by Kingsley Amis: “if you can’t annoy someone, there is little point to writing.” I’ve been meaning to write this for pretty much the entirety of the 99 games that the Houston Rockets played this year, of which I wound up seeing quite a lot of, but the response which I’ve seen and heard from fans in the aftermath of their 99th and last game of the year gives me the impetus to finally write it, as opposed to anything specific which took place in the previous 98 – that impetus being what I read and heard from a whole bunch of people who started whining about the “biased” officiating in Game 7.
Seriously, stop it already. Just stop. If you truly believe that, then why are you even watching? 
You want to get a better sense of what “biased” officiating could actually look like? Go back and watch Lakers-Kings. Go back and listen to Mark Cuban yell “your game is fucking rigged” at David Stern after Wade got awarded a free throw seemingly every time a Dallas Maverick breathed on him. Go back to 1993 and watch Phoenix shoot 64 free throws in a Game 7 against the Sonics mere days after the NBA prematurely leaked their Finals promos on NBC showing Jordan and Charles Barkley. I’ve known countless people who were in and around that Sonics team in 1993, and I’m not sure a single one of them, deep down, doesn’t think it wasn’t rigged – but they don’t want to believe that, either, because if that’s true, then what’s the point of it all?
But I don’t think any of those were rigged. I just thought the officials were TERRIBLE, which can happen sometimes. Always keep Hanlon’s razor in mind at times like this: never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. And I get on officials at times as well. Personally, I think some of them have rabbit ears, glass jaws, and seem to think that people paid an enormous amount of money to come and watch them officiate. And there are bad officials, to be sure. I wish they were better, and there was a lot of frustration all about the NBA this season stemming from the fact that they aren’t better – but then again, who’d want to do that job in the first place?
Players and teams do get rough whistles sometimes. That’s naturally going to happen. I would say that the Warriors probably got the better of it on that front in Game 7 – not because of any bias, but because of the fact that over the course of a playoff series in the NBA, the officiating tends to favor the defense, insofar as that they’re less apt to reward offensive players with bail out fouls when they make bad plays. If you play bad offense – which the Rockets did in droves in Game 7 – you can’t be expecting the officials to save your ass.
And I’ve seen, time and again, that officials tend to be more favorable towards the defenses in the playoffs. It annoyed the hell out of me in 2016, of course, because the Cavs decided that the best way to defend the Warriors was to grab Klay Thompson and Steph Curry on every screen and dare the officials to call it – which is exactly what they should have done! That’s smart defense! You put the onus on the refs, and if the refs let it go, you keep doing it. This isn’t a complaint on my part about 2016. This is me commending Cleveland for coming up with a strategy that enabled them to win a title. It was the right way for them to play. And I’ve seen that happen now time and again in the playoffs. The defenses are going to be given a little more leeway here and there, and once you get the sense that’s how it going to be called, your team had better adjust to the way the game is being called.
And to be perfectly blunt, after watching the Rockets fairly closely for most of this past season, I can go back in my memory of watching the NBA – which goes all the way back to the Celtics playing the Suns in the 1976 Finals – and in those 42 years’ of time, I cannot think of a single team that has less of a right to bitch and whine and complain about the officials than this year’s Houston Rockets, who employ two of the biggest foul hunters that the game has ever seen in Chris Paul and James Harden, and whose frequently being rewarded for said behavior makes them the single-most annoying team to watch in the league. And it pisses me off to say that, because Paul and Harden are great players and I want to see them do great things.
And Harden is great. I say this with complete admiration for the sort of dedication that Harden has exhibited over the years not only to improving his game, but also to mastering the ability to fool the referees. He’s mastered his stepback, and does it with such precision, that he can frequently travel while making that move and the officials will give him the benefit of the doubt. He throws himself into defenders on his way to the hole, or grabs a defender and tugs the guy into him, and he still has the strength and the skill to be able to get up a quality shot. His mastery of this sort of stuff is truly admirable.
Like I say, this is just good strategy. Fooling officials, or pushing the rules to the brink and putting the onus upon officials to make calls, is a part of every game. That football team I used to root for when I cared about football, the Seattle Seahawks, won a Super Bowl through playing overly aggressive defense and daring officials to throw a flag on every play. Alabama does this in college football as well – and, in fact, they lost the NCAA title to Clemson two years ago after the Clemson receivers figured out they could shove the Alabama defenders back. Soccer players dive because they know the gravity of being awared a penalty or a free kick – huge scoring opportunities in a game where scoring is impossible. Hell, now sabermatricians are even trying to statistically quantify it in baseball when they talk about pitch framing – which is, at it’s root, a ploy by catchers to fool umpires into calling balls as strikes. All of this sort of stuff is fair game, in my opinion. You play to win, and you do whatever that takes. Some people think this is cheating. I happen to think that it is good strategy.
I acknowledge the value of that sort of stuff, but it doesn’t mean that I like it. And if you’re going to do this sort of stuff, and the refs are not going to reward you for it, then you don’t get to bitch, because you’ve been crying wolf the whole time.
Twice early in Game 7, I saw James Harden get legitimately fouled and not get the call because he flopped. He flopped like a fish and he embellished the play. And it’s not okay for officials to be missing calls – those were fouls, so get the calls right – but the message at that point should have been loud and clear to Harden, and to everyone else on the Rockets: the officials weren’t interested in rewarding any of those sorts of ploys, and went so far to let the annoyance of Harden flopping trump the actual play. They weren’t having it, so stop doing it. Another key play during the 3rd Quarter of the game which made the Rockets apoplectic was properly explained by the NBA referees: if James Harden doesn’t grab the screener, it might be an offensive foul, but there he goes grabbing Jordan Bell and dragging him. He was trying to game the system again, and the officials weren’t having it.
The Rockets were called for fewer fouls, shot more free throws, and the entire course of the first half was dictated by Klay Thompson drawing three fouls in the first six minutes of the game. Literally none of that is in keeping with the notion that the officials were “biased” against the Rockets. The Rockets lost the game because they got tired, missed 27 threes, and because they put Ryan Anderson out there to be turned into BBQ chicken by Steph Curry during the key stretch of the 3rd Quarter. They’re a team that was wholly dependent all season on Harden’s ability to manufacture free throws for himself. Maybe instead of complaining about “biased” officiating, people should wonder just how wise it is for a team to be so dependent one guy to constantly hunt fouls – and pull fast ones – on opponents and officials alike in order to be successful. At some point, they catch on, and the joke might wind up being on you.

•    … aaaand, we’ve save the dumbest for last.
Step 1: read this article by Ben Detrick of The Ringer.
Step 2: commence facepalming repeatedly.
What the actual fuck are you doing, Bryan Colangelo? If not you, then whomever it is in your family, or whomever it is who is close to you. WHAT ARE YOU DOING? And I suppose it could be a set-up, a long con, someone who has a vendetta against Colangelo and has it out for him … except, whomever it is who would have that vendetta would seem far more likely to be the source of this information to The Ringer, as opposed to just being some random dude who is tech savvy and who thinks all of those burner accounts are “weird.” I mean, that could also be true, I suppose – there are enough Hinkie cultists out there in 76ers fandom who still consider it an affront that The Process got short-circuited by the NBA and handed over to Jerry Colangelo and his kid that one might go looking for this sort of thing. What’s far more likely, of course, given the circumstance, is that someone who has an axe to grind with Bryan Colangelo, and who knows about this weird and creepy burner account behavior, decided to spill the beans. And while this outstanding article by The Ringer makes no direct claim that all of these accounts are, in fact, being operated by Bryan Colangelo, there are far, far too many coincidences going on here.
And it’s one thing to have an account that amounts to a listening post – which is what the @phila1234567 account, that Colangelo admits to maintaining, clearly is. I’m sure that every team has one of those. It’s a gabby, gossipy league, and it never hurts to do some reconnaissance. But it’s another thing entirely to start trashing your predecessor, to start trashing your predecessor in a completely different job, to start trashing your own players, and then to leak confidential medical information to reporters – the last of which is most definitely a fireable offense, and the second to last of which probably should be.
But Colangelo is fairly notoriously thin-skinned, and this is the sort of thing you resort to do, in this day and age, when you’re that sort of person. You feel as if you have some blanket of anonymity online, but the bottom line is that you can, and will, get found out. It’s completely reckless of him – or, of whomever might be doing this in his behalf. And if you haven’t guessed already, I doubt it isn’t him. The coincidence of The Ringer calling up the 76ers, informing them of this story, and then having three of those burner accounts immediately going private and going dark is just far too rich. If I’m wrong, well, I’ll gladly admit as such. But something is rotten in Denmark, Pennsylvania.
And Bryan Colangelo has to go here. He’s compromised, one way or another. The 76ers can’t afford this in a summer where they are one player away from being a legit Eastern Conference champion. The draft is in three weeks, for heaven’s sake. You can’t have your GM even remotely implied in this sort of stuff if you want to woo PG13 or LeBron or convince Kawhi it’s worth it to be traded here. This is a complete disaster for the Sixers. Owner Josh Harris needs to cut bait here, needs to tell Bryan Colangelo that he needs to resign and fall on this sword. I would suggest Harris then reach out to former Cavs GM David Griffin about the job because, if nothing else, his time in Cleveland has served him well when it comes to dealing with drama and putting out fires.
What a mess. What a complete sham. And how 2018 is this scandal? This is the most 2018 scandal imaginable. The more that I read about this, the more dumbstruck that I am. Seriously, how naïve do you have to be to think that, given your position as a less-than-popular GM of an NBA team, this isn’t going to somehow be figured out eventually? Everything gets figured out eventually in this day and age. There are far fewer secrets than ever before. I’m just confounded that this even occurred, and that an exec of a professional sports franchise (or someone who is really close to him) was dumb enough to think this could be gotten away with. It is absolutely mind-boggling.
And also funny, I should add. It is downright hilarious that people in such a position of authority could be so reckless and so naïve.

• Bonus 8th buzzard point, which occurred on Thursday night: what the hell did J.R. Smith just do? Did he really just forget the score? My god. Time and score, J.R. Time and score. Good lord. What the hell just happened?

Sometimes The Lose Wins

This worked out pretty well

ONE year ago, I was on the verge of losing something vital to my existence: my home. We had until the 10th of June to move out of our house. It had nothing to do with us. It had to do with a marital breakup among the owners and the fact that the house was worth about $4,000,000 on the open market, and we were being Ellis Acted into oblivion here in San Francisco.

The entirety of the Bay Area has suffered from a continual housing crisis since I first moved here in 2000, in that there is far too much demand, not nearly enough supply, and no real political or even societal will to do anything to resolve this issue. Having lived in the Mission District for 13 years, and had experiences that run the gamut from watching the tenement slum next door burn to the ground and kill people – there were probably 75 people living in that 11-unit building at a time, none of whom knew enough English to know to call 9-1-1 and alert the fire station two blocks away – to then seeing that building be rebuilt and its units rented out to techies and yuppies for $4,000. This actually simplifies most of my feelings about silly arguments related to gentrification and urban planning and most every other issue in San Francisco – in both the case of the deathtrap slum and the $4k a month reclamation project, it boiled down to the fact that the landlords are money grubbing scum, which is pretty much what most of the landlords are, and they are going to wind up benefitting either way, be the tenants rich and white or be they poor and Spanish speaking. Predators, either way. And clearly I made a mistake from renting a place from someone I thought was a friend for 13 years. That was naïve of me. Landlords are not your friends, not when the house that you live in can sell for $4,000,000. It’s always borrowed time. Amid this mess, which began in early April, my friend Amanda said to me, “I wish that I owned a place, so that I could rent it to you,” to which I responded, “but at that point, we couldn’t be friends any more.”

And let me tell you, having two months to move, with no idea where to go, in a market this tight, is a truly awful life experience that I don’t wish upon any of you. Every single minute of your day is stressful. You cannot enjoy anything. You feel guilty for taking the time to have fun and enjoy yourself for a few hours and do something like go to dinner, or go to a movie or a Giants game. “Shouldn’t I be looking for a house right now?” You chase leads, you look at terrible units and try to convince yourself that they would somehow be alright. You see random numbers in windows as you walk past and hurriedly call them, only to never hear back. Lots of that. Lots of unreturned messages. Lots of vague, evasive emails in response to your query. You set up appointments to look at places and the realtors never show. There were three of us on the search – we had decided to form a unified front, as all of us were needing a place by mid-June and we figured we’d have more luck looking for larger spaces than simply 1-bedroom units, which were and are so in demand – and between the three of us, we probably had 1/3 of our inquiries actually result in a response. Not being shown an apartment, mind you. That rate was even lower. I’m talking about just getting someone to pick up the damn phone and call me back. When it’s this sort of a market, and you’re looking for a place, and doing so from a place of urgency, to the majority of money grubbing scum landlords and their collection of mouthpieces and whores handling their business, you’re basically shit, and you’re reminded of it regularly. Seriously, kids, don’t try this at home.

And by the way, this is why I’m an active member of the Tenants Union here in San Francisco, and why I recommend that other people get similarly involved. Housing is not a privilege. It is a necessity. It is essential. But I’ve always likened the housing problem in a city such as this to the parking problem – there are way more cars than available places to put them here, but the city likes it that way, because of the many, many ways in which they can capitalize on it financially, be it through parking meters or the insufferable $500 worth of parking tickets you’re going to accrue in the course of the year no matter how much you try to avoid it. It’s that way with housing issues as well. Why would a zoning board composed of realtors want to drive down their future commissions from housing sales by making more of it available? So long as you’re making a shittonne on your investment (that $4,000,000 house that I was living in was originally purchased for $188,000) why would you give two shits about a goddamn renter? These people are trash, they’re money grubbing scum and need to be held in check.

Anyway, so a year ago today – May 25, 2017 – was probably the lowest point in the housing search. It was a foggy and cloudy and dismal morning and I was doing something that I’d always hoped I’d be spending my birthday doing: apartment hunting. Because god forbid that I enjoy anything, at this point. My boss was really helpful actually – “take the week off, get the hell out of the office and find a place to live” – and so The Official Spouse of In Play Lose and I were planning on spending my birthday doing more apartment hunting.

Oh joy. Seriously, this was the worst birthday ever.

We did have one solid lead, a place Doug had found in Alameda that we’d put an application in on sight unseen. We’d asked Doug what he thought of it and he said, “well, it’s a place,” which is something, I guess. Honestly, the three of us were growing pretty desperate. ANYTHING was looking like it was worth making the effort to land, including some places we'd seen which were godfuckingterrible. We had not even seen this place in Alameda, but we called over there on Friday morning to follow up on the application and also inquire about seeing the place, and the manager said she'd be happy to show it to us that day.

Getting from San Francisco to Alameda is something of a pain in the ass on public transportation. It took forever and we finally got there around 11:00 a.m. or so. It was at that point that the manager then said to us, “you didn’t get the apartment, but I'll be happy to show it to you if you like.”

What the actual fuck?

Honestly, she goddamn said that. That is one of the stupidest goddamn things that anyone has said to me in a long time. Seriously, you couldn't have just told us this ahead of time, and not wasted our time? How fucking callous do you have to be to not even show some courtesy? How fucking indifferent are you? Seriously, get bent, you fuck.

So at that point, I’m pissed. I’m really angry and I do well not to bite the property manager’s head off. At least it’s easy to sour grape in this situation and say “I didn’t want that place, anyway,” but quite honestly, I didn’t want that place, anyway, nor would I want someone as discourteous as that being an overlord for the place that I live.

I mean, seriously here, does real estate just turn you into a douchebag? My first apartment in San Francisco was in a building that was bought by a slumlord who was ultimately sued into bankruptcy and oblivion by the city, and they employed a whole bunch of lunkheads who doubled as security agents, wearing black fatigues and acting as if they were some paramilitary unit. One of them came up to me one night as I was smoking outside the building:

Andrew: Do you have any identification?
Lose: Aren’t you a little overdressed, Andrew?
Andrew: Have we met?
Lose: I was just in your office four days ago and you tried to pawn off a home loan on me, you dumb fuck.

Seriously, what the fuck is wrong with these people? But I digress.

Where was I? Oh, right, I was standing there with my spouse for about 20 minutes on a street corner in Alameda, waiting for a fucking AC Transit, positively stewing. It took forever but we finally found a coughing, wheezing AC Transit and lumbered our way back to Oakland in order to catch the BART.

And by that point the sun was breaking through and it was actually starting to turn into a warm and bright day. And it was at that point that I said to KC, “you know what? Fuck these bitches. Fuck all of them. This is my birthday, goddamn it. They don’t get to ruin my birthday for me. Only I get to ruin my birthday for me! They can go on ruining my days again beginning on the 26th of May. So fuck it, let’s go to Swan’s.”

Eat here

And KC liked the idea of going to Swan’s Oyster Depot for lunch, which is quite possibly my favorite place to eat in San Francisco, if not the world, and previously we'd gone to Swan's the day after I got laid off from my job at UC Berkeley in 2010, and doing so proved to be an act of both self-preservation and defiance, an act of "fuck it, life doesn't suck," which did wonders for my sanity, and we were there for like 2½ hours that day, during which time we ate approximately 1,000,000,000 oysters, and for 2½ hours, I didn't care that I no longer had a job.

This seemed like an act which was worth repeating, nearly 7 years later. We needed another reminder that life doesn’t suck.

I’ll take all the things, please. Yes, all of them.

And as we were departing from Oakland's 12th St. station on the BART, intent upon feeding our faces with another 1,000,000,000 oysters in the afternoon and flipping the bird to our landlords, to the attorney threatening to sue us on the 10th of June and to every goddamn phony we’d dealt with in the previous couple of months, KC was scrolling through craigslist and perusing some apartment listings on her phone.

“Here’s a place we might want to go and have a look at,” she said to me. “A new listing, brand new, just a few minutes ago. The apartment is located in the Outer Richmond, out by the beach. It says here that they are showing the apartment at 5:00 p.m. tonight …”

We were the first people to see the place. The tenant himself was showing it, owing to the hasty nature of it all: his wife had just landed a new job in L.A., beginning mid-June, and they had to get out of town as soon as possible. He told us that the building is owned by a family trust, whose primary requirement for tenants is that they don’t burn the building down. They had zero interest in all of the nonsense you get involved in when you’re looking for a place to live in this city – no ridiculous jumping through hoops, no outrageous demands. The place was a flat located way out in the old Russian neighborhood of the western part of the city, and it was just a 10-minute walk from the beach:

Not bad for a backyard, eh? I like my backyard

So, as I was saying before, May 25, 2017, was the high point of the housing search. Seriously, this was the best birthday ever.

I’m still sort of amazed how that came together, because we were truly growing desperate, and growing despondent, with mere days before we were going to find ourselves embroiled in what would likely be a long, ugly fight against being evicted, involving lawyers and courtrooms and judges saying to get the hell out of their courtroom and arbitrators and mediators, during which time we would still be living in the place, living in a situation where the owners wanted us gone and we would all hate each other so, really, who wants to be there at that point anyway?

But none of that came to pass because, out of nowhere, it just sort of worked out. I have no idea how. I’m not going to question it. Luck and timing is everything in this life. Sometimes, stuff actually works out.

I’m not sure yet how the birthday will go this year, but it will probably be less life-altering than the last one. And that’s a good thing. I would do well to avoid that level of stress again at any point in time in the next 10,000 years.

And I should probably also take this opportunity to wish my sister Kimberly a happy birthday as well. We’re not twins. I’m a year older but we share the same birthday – one of those oddities in life that ultimately comes to make you unique. Happy birthday, sis. I hope your birthday is, well, less dramatic.

Get Better

James Harden gets beat for a dunk while coming to realize that he’s lost his keys

HOUSTON winning Game 2 of the Western Conference Finals was a relief. Now, as a Warriors fan, it annoyed me, in the moment, but in the bigger picture, the Rockets winning Game 2 127:105 did us all a service, in that it quelled, for the moment at least, the enormous existential angst about the league that’s been running rampant. It’s pretty much been around since July 4, 2016, of course, which was the day that the Warriors signed Kevin Durant, but after Game 1 of this year’s Western Conference Finals, in which the Rockets – the team whose GM admits to being obsessed about beating the Warriors, the team that’s been heralded as being “built” to beat them – got whooped 119-106 at home and made to look bad in doing so, then all of a sudden, there are not only the usual assortment of tweets, but also regular columnists talking along the lines of how the Golden State Warriors have somehow “ruined” the NBA. (He’s not alone in this, by the way. From Sunday night, I give you a ridiculous tweet by a Jazz beat writer I admire. They’re everywhere, these sorts of takes.)

The Rockets winning Game 2 of the series put a stop to this hand-wringing, at least for the moment, but it’s all flowing back in after the Warriors destroyed Houston 126:85 in Game 3. And if I didn’t find these knee-jerk reactions annoying, I’d probably find them amusing. Aah, yes, let’s long for the glory days of yesteryear when no one was dominating the NBA, when no one was winning six titles in eight years or going to the NBA finals eight times in a decade.

Oh, wait, both of those happened.

Trust me, NBA twittersphere, the league survived the Bulls winning six titles in eight years, and survived the Lakers going to the finals eight times in the 1980s, and you’ll survive the Warriors winning a few titles in a cluster in the 2010s and 2020s. Seriously, you’ll live.

Look, folks, this stuff is cyclical. Nothing is permanent, and nothing lasts forever. But here’s a suggestion, to all of you out there lamenting the fact that your team is fodder against the mighty Warriors, here’s a suggestion that I offer up, both as a fan of said Warriors and also as someone who got so annoyed watching the Sonics get their brains beat in the Lakers for years on end: get better.

Seriously, it’s that simple. Get better. Draft better, scout better, develop players better. Coach better. Be shrewder and more savvy in the front office. Sick of the Warriors winning everything? Fair enough. Get better.

And since I referenced, in the link above, a column by Toronto columnist Bruce Arthur (whose work I generally admire), let’s use the basketball team in his backyard as a reference point here. The Toronto Raptors got blasted 4-0 by the Cavs last year in the 2nd round of the Eastern Conference playoffs. They weren’t good enough. Quite simply, they lacked the sort of personnel on their roster capable of defeating LeBron & Co. in the playoffs. So what did they do in the offseason? Did they get better?

The Raptors lost 4-0 to the Cavs this year in the 2nd round of the playoffs, so apparently not. Oh, I know, there was a lot of talk about how the Raptors “changed the culture” this year, on their way to winning 59 games and taking the top seed in the Eastern playoffs. These are the new Raptors! They shoot more threes! They pass the ball! They run actual coherent plays! And sure, they did do all of that in the regular season, but the fact of the matter is that, when it came to face up against the baddest dude on the block in LeBron, the Raptors had the same problems that they had a season ago – mostly because, for all of their commendable efforts to develop young players to counteract picking low in the draft, when it came down to crunch time, the Raptors were doing the same old things they’ve done every year, and relying upon the same old players, whom they’ve now invested a fucktonne of money in.

If you’re the Raptors, and you get trucked by the Cavs a season ago, you might want to actually take a look at why it is that you have no chance to beat Cleveland: you have one-dimensional bigs who struggle to defend in open space, and you have no scoring on the wing, which means LeBron doesn’t have to guard anyone. The Raptors solution to this was to re-up thirty-something point guard Kyle Lowry to a thirty-something-million a year contract, and also re-up Serge Ibaka, whom LeBron is perfectly content to lay off of and not guard because nine times out of eight, he won’t make the right play with the ball in his hand. That’s not getting better!

But see, according to our Toronto scribe I linked to above, the Golden State Warriors are, essentially, ruining the NBA and making it less fun, which is complete nonsense. What ruins teams in the NBA is terrible decision making. The Warriors had absolutely, positively nothing to do with Toronto deciding, over the course of the last two summers, to invest well over $200 million in Lowry, Ibaka, and also DeMar DeRozan, who was so bad in Game 3 that he got benched and then got himself thrown out of Game 4. The Raptors brass willingly did this, and willingly tied one of their hands behind their back in the process, because none of those guys are tradable, it’s pretty clear they’ve hit the ceiling, and it’s also pretty clear that playing the way they play is not a winning strategy so long as LeBron lives in a zip code east of the Mississippi River. You, Toronto, you didn’t get better, so as far as I’m concerned, you don’t get to bitch.

And see, the Raptors are in the same spot now that almost every other team in the NBA is in, which is that they got greedy and overspent and have left themselves inflexible. I’m wondering if we’ll see some sort of sideways trades this summer, in which one team trades a guy with a contract they don’t like and have to take another guy with a contract they won’t like, either, with the hopes that the new guy will somehow make them better. Every team has got those guys, most of whom signed new deals in the last couple of years and have since proved to everyone in their organization that it was money poorly spent. And it’s not just the bad teams that have those guys, although the bad teams seem to have more of them. Houston would love to get better this coming off-season, but god knows how they’ll do it, seeing as how they have to re-sign Clint Capela, a young center who is great, and are presently paying $20 million a season to Ryan Anderson, who cannot get off the bench against the Warriors.

Then again, Rockets GM Daryl Morey went about engineering the trade last summer for Chris Paul (whom they have to also re-sign this summer by the way) in an effort to try and build a team that could compete with Golden State. Houston “raised its risk profile,” in Morey’s words. Houston got better, and will probably – hopefully – find a way to get better once again, because that’s what they do instead of whining about how Golden State wins all the things.

At the crux of the angst and anxiety in the NBA is the fact that the Warriors – a 2015 champion, 73-game winner and near champion in 2016 – then went out and signed Kevin Durant after that. It completely astonishes me that this is still such a big deal to so many people, but here I was, the other day, after saying something on twitter along the lines of “quit whining and get better,” arguing about the fact that KD signed with the Warriors with some guy on my twitter DM:

some guy: KD going to the Warriors was the ultimate in bandwagoning.
LOSE: Okay, then, where should he have gone?
some guy: back to OKC
LOSE: If he wanted to go back to OKC, he would have. The fact that he didn’t says that he didn’t want to, which is his right.
some guy: He shouldn’t go to the team that just beat him in the playoffs.
LOSE: Okay, so let me get this straight. Because his team lost to GS, he shouldn’t be able to go there. So does that mean he should only go to situations where the team is worse? If you lose in the first round of the playoffs, you can’t sign with any team that advanced further than that? You have to sign with Phoenix or the Kings? Or would it have been OK for KD to sign with GS if OKC had lost to the Spurs in the playoffs that year, since GS wouldn’t have beaten them? Or could he have signed with Cleveland, since they won the whole thing that year but didn’t beat OKC? Explain these ground rules to me here.
(silence)

I’ve said this before but it bears repeating: every single argument put forth as to why Kevin Durant shouldn’t have signed with the Warriors is dumb as hell, and if you, the person who is reading this blog, espouses that nonsense, than you’re also dumb as hell and you shouldn’t be reading this blog. Seriously, get a clue. Guys reach a point in their careers where they have a choice of where to sign, and if you accept that right of players to have that agency over the careers – one which has been meticulously collectively bargained in all sports over the years – then you don’t get to bitch if/when a guy makes a decision that you don’t like.

I fully embrace that concept, even if it doesn’t happen to benefit the team that I root for. Which it doesn’t, sometimes. That’s how it goes. And I’m not saying this because I’m a Warriors homer. It’s gone the other way for me as well. I’ve watched the Mariners trade lose future Hall of Famers multiple years running. I’ve watched the most exciting hockey player I’ve ever seen in person, Pavel Bure, demand a trade and skate away from Vancouver forever. God knows I know never to ever get invested in any player who plays for my favorite soccer club. Norwich City had two truly gifted young players on their roster this past season – one of whom was among the Championship’s Best XI and the other of whom already has had a call-up to England’s senior national team – and I suspect there’s no way in hell I’ll ever see them wearing Norwich’s yellow and green again. This is how it goes. Guys take agency, and guys move on. Who cares what the reason is? Get over it already.

But not even the NBA got over it, which is why, in the last CBA negotiations and in the aftermath of Durant going to Golden State, the league concocted what is one of the stupidest ideas ever, the DP extension, which was intended to enable teams to try and keep their superstars but is, in fact, an incredibly daunting proposition for a club. Do you really want to give one guy $200 million over five years and tether such an enormous portion of your payroll to one guy? It’s a no-brainer for Houston to give that to James Harden, and for the Warriors to give it to Steph Curry, but we’ve already seen the Kings trade Boogie Cousins and the Bulls trade Jimmy Butler ahead of possibly being faced with having to offer that contract. And make no mistake: if a guy is eligible for that extension, he’ll want nothing less than that. Offer less, and he’s gone. The flip side to that, of course, is that if you offer it to a player, it’s so much money that they almost have to take it. But what are you really getting? The Buzzards are almost certainly having buyer’s remorse at the moment, having dropped $200 mil on John Wall, who has a history of knee issues and who was at the center of the constant bickering which plagued the Wiz this past season. It’s not looking like a particularly sound investment there on the part of the Wiz. Oh, wait, it’s the Warriors fault that Washington did that, because clearly, they are ruining the NBA, insofar as being as good as they are leads to a whole lot of other people completely losing their minds.

And KD’s been salty all year, which I don’t really blame him for, since he was only doing what anyone in that position should do, which is to go out and take a better job, and he gets vilified for going to Golden State at the expense of poor old OKC, when maybe, just maybe, someone should actually focus on why it is he would want to leave OKC in the first place. But somehow, we’ve spun the narrative of poor little OKC and their small town folk hero Russell Westbrook, enabling him to go off and play Don Quixote on the court as the basketball media ooh and aah over him padding his stats and chasing round numbers with all the aplomb of a selfish blowhard. Gosh, how could KD ever leave OKC? Gosh, why would anyone ever stay?

This actually speaks to one of my broader notions when it comes to labor relations in the NBA and every other sport, which is that we, as fans and also as media, don’t actually like the fact that players have that power. We pay lip service to the idea that they should have the rights to do that, but only when they make decisions that we personally like. You don’t get to make that choice. It’s not your career. It’s not your job. You’re a fan, and your job is to buy tickets and go to the games.

All of this stuff annoys me, if that wasn’t already apparent.

I didn’t care a whit about LeBron going to Miami. He handled it dumbly, but he did what he thought was best for his career. Oh, so he created a ‘superteam’ with Wade and Bosh? Well, so what? Oh golly gee whiz, he actually wanted to play on a good team with good players. What a novel concept that is. Just because you do that, no one hands you a title. You still have to go out and earn it, and the Heat only did that twice in four tries, with their second loss coming to the Spurs who, if you really stop and think about it, had only one guaranteed, sure-fire superstar on their roster: Tim Duncan, a #1 pick in the draft. The Spurs drafted internationals who were something of an unknown quantity. They traded for Kawhi Leonard, who was the 16th pick in the draft. They built that system and that team over years, often making the most of lower picks in the draft. The Spurs didn’t bitch and moan about Miami forming a super team. They went out and figured out how to beat it.

And to that end, I admire the Rockets for freely admitting that they want to beat the Warriors and that everything they’ve done has been for that purpose. I admire the fact that Boston just keeps making moves to improve, often subtle moves that fly under the radar like trading Avery Bradley, a guy they didn’t want to pay, to Detroit for Marcus Morris, a guy who just might help them because he’s a pretty good match-up against LeBron, and whose defense on LeBron has a lot to do with why the Celtics are up 2-1 over the Cavaliers in the Eastern Conference finals even without their two best players. The system is what it is, so use the system to your advantage in order to keep improving and get better.

Which is what the Warriors did after losing the 2016 finals. They got better. They signed Kevin Durant. They got better. This is what you should do, no matter what position you finish in. This came up recently on a favorite podcast of mine about soccer, when one of the panelists asked if Manchester City could repeat as champions next season, given that everyone else in the EPL élite would strive to improve, at which point it was pointed out that Man City had shown ambition enough to spend £500 million on talent, striving to ultimately put together a team capable of amassing 100 points and winning the league at a trot, so why would we automatically assume such an ambitious club would suddenly become satisfied and not want to continue to improve? You don’t just reach the apex and stop. That’s not how it works. Getting better is the aim (at least it should be, NBA Tankamania aside). The Warriors lost in the 2016 NBA Finals, which they didn’t care too much for, and so they went out and got better. It truly amazes me that people have a problem with that.

Oh, and by the way, the beat reporters here in the Bay Area had been saying as far back as 2014 that the Warriors had designs on one day luring Durant to Golden State. They were going to make that pitch in the Hamptons in 2016 regardless of whether they won the title or not. They’d positioned themselves to do so, owing to some good luck – the spike in the cap, the cheap contract Curry’d signed when he was still an oft-injured mystery – and also some sound planning – more money was available thanks to the 5/75 and 5/87 contracts signed by Klay Thompson and Draymond Green, still excellent deals for the players involving massive amounts of money but which, comparative to their on-court value, seem absolutely ludicrously cheap today. And again, those three All-Stars on the 2016 Dubs roster pre-KD were all drafted by the Warriors – and a total of 50 guys went before them in those drafts, meaning that a whole bunch of teams screwed up on the scouting end. Pretty much all of them, in fact. But somehow, by being smarter than everyone else, the Warriors are ruining the NBA.

Seriously, get over it already. The Warriors have come, and eventually they will go. And I’m not kidding when I say that no one in the Bay Area takes this success for granted, because we all know how fickle and fleeting success can be. This team was god awful for years. This city waited 52 years for its baseball team to win a World Series. It’s been two decades since the 49ers won a Super Bowl, with their last loss being a completely disheartening one: they were the better team, but made enough mistakes to give the Ravens a chance to win the game, and the Ravens did. Failure is the default. Ultimate success is never assured.

And in the meantime, enjoy it. Enjoy great basketball. When the Warriors come to town, boo them accordingly, cheer on your team and hope you can win a game here and there. As a Sonics fan in the 1980s, beating the Lakers a game here and there was a source of joy and satisfaction. It was great to kick their ass and lord over them for a day, even though, come playoff time, you just knew that if you played the Lakers, you were going to get worked. So hope that your team improves, enjoy your occasional success when you beat the Warriors and, above all, appreciate greatness. When it’s gone, you’ll miss it. I hated watching the shell of a team that the San Antonio Spurs had become this past season, as a run of 20 consecutive seasons of more than 50 wins came to an end. It was sad to see, because I’ve come to count on the Spurs over the years and taken it as a given that they would be great.

And it’s a shock to us, when the dynasts and no longer dynastic. Lots of people just sort of assumed that the Patriots would win the Super Bowl because it’s the Patriots, by god, and winning Super Bowls is what they do. We’re willing to choose the conventional wisdom – “the Patriots win Super Bowls” – over the empirical evidence – “the Eagles are better at almost every position on the field” – and we wind up surprised when the Eagles actually win. After going to seven straight NBA Finals, no one would dare pick against LeBron in the East, even though he’s dragging along a roster that couldn’t win 30 games in an NBA season without him. Should they fall to the Celtics in the Eastern finals – which I’ve been saying for weeks now could, and maybe even would, happen – it will nonetheless be a surprise. Five years from now, when 35-year-old Steph and 35-year-old KD find themselves locked in some playoff struggle with Sonics 2.0, there will be lots of pundits talking about how these vets from Golden State have savvy and moxie and the heart of the champions and it’ll see them through, but maybe, just maybe, they’ll lose. And it’ll be okay when that happens, just as it’s okay, in the present, if they don’t.

So stop whining. The NBA is fine. It’s better than it’s ever been, it’s great players doing the greatest things ever seen on a basketball court. If you’re a fan, and the Warriors are stomping all over your team, maybe your team should get better. Seriously, get better. It makes the game better as a whole if that occurs. It is not the fault of the Warriors that your team sucks. Get better already, would you?