Nope, Still Suck

I am underwhelmed

USA FC, if nothing else, is good for business. I absolutely eviscerated this team after they lost to Trinidad & Tobago and were knocked out of the World Cup. The U.S. Mens National Team were co-winners, with those chokin’ dirty birds the Atlanta Falcons, of the coveted 2017 Lose of The Year award, and with good reason.

Seeking to put the past behind them, USA FC moved to name Columbus Crew chief Gregg Berhalter in Dec. 2017, just two months after Bruce Arena resigned in disgrace …

Oh, wait, that’s not right.

Berhalter was, in fact, named head coach in Dec. 2018, some 14 months after the debacle in the Caribbean. During that 14-month interlude, the team was coached by, well, no one really. (Although someone probably should have told that to interim coach Dave Sarachan, who sure did coach a lot of the time like he thought he might get the job, basically ignoring large swaths of his young roster during a series of completely meaningless friendlies.)

Yes, it took U.S. Soccer 14 months to hire a head coach, and their super-duper-über wide search produced a guy they could have hired a year ago, which makes the whole thing seem farcical and a waste of time.

Which, frankly, it was. Sigh. Excuse me here for a moment:

Damn you, U.S. Soccer, my liver hates you!

Now, to be fair here, I have no idea how Berhalter will do as the head coach. I don’t watch that much MLS – Sounders games mostly, a few others here and there – but I can’t honestly say that his Columbus Crew teams were even the least bit distinctive or memorable to me, save for the one which blew the MLS Cup final a few years ago against the Portland Timbers. (And as a Sounders fan, I believe that losing to Portland in the MLS Cup final should be Strike One, Strike Two, Strikes Three, Four, and Five against this hire, since Portland are scum. But I digress.) He has a so-so record coaching a so-so team in a so-so league. It is said that his teams will be organized and have an identity, which is the exact same two footballing clichés used to describe every single new hire in every single position. He may turn out to be just what they need. He may be great at the job. I hope that he is. I truly have no idea.

But the process with which Berhalter came to be the head coach of USA FC is so utterly ridiculous that I cannot help but be skeptical. He’s definitely a safe choice, at best. It’s a bland and beige hire. And taking 14 months to make a bland and beige hire who they could have hired a year ago speaks to the state of confusion and dysfunctionality in the organization. I can assure you there were plenty of people out there, some of them really good, who interested in the job. (It pays really well, for starters.) This feels akin to scrolling on your phone through Yelp reviews of 200 really good restaurants and then deciding to eat the grey and grumpy leftovers in the back of the fridge. It doesn’t taste good, and it doesn’t look very appealing.

Now, I can understand why there were some delays in the process. First off, the federation rightly blew itself up in the aftermath of the T&T debacle and needed a new boss. The USSF election was ultimately won by Carlos Cordeiro, who somehow managed to position himself as a champion of reform while being the organization’s Vice President – a skillful act of political positioning that’s usually reserved for Absurdistans and Banana Republics, but one which usually winds up with an authoritarian who is worse than the original. Cordeiro wound up winning the vote when enough of the self-interested people in this most insular of organizations decided that it was in their own self-interest to vote for him. Cordeiro’s first act upon taking over the USSF was to appoint Earnie Stewart as “General Manager” of the Men’s national team. (Probably to the dismay of a few of the “Players Council” members who voted for Cordeiro in the first place, some of whom are now football management types.) A nice guy, Stewart, a smart guy and a decorated American player. But from the moment he took over this position, Stewart’s never exuded any sense that he actually knows what it is that he’s supposed to be doing. He’s not alone in that, mind you. None of us know what it is that he’s supposed to be doing.

And it’s certainly wise, during a World Cup year, to wait until after the tournament is over to make this sort of hires. There is always a great deal of turnover in coaching staffs after a World Cup, coaching USA FC is certainly an appealing job, and so waiting until the French had finished running all over the Croatians in the final would allow Stewart to cast a wide net. So I was down with this, I understood the rationale of waiting until mid-July to make a big hire.

And the obvious candidate, in the aftermath of the World Cup, was Juan-Carlos Osorio, who stepped down from El Tri. Osorio is a Colombian but his roots in the game actually run deep in the U.S. He has coached at a high level all over the world, he knows the region, he knows the dynamics of American footballing culture, and he’s known as a tinkerer who is willing to experiment, which would be ideal for dealing with a young and uncertain talent pool. This was the guy that seemed to make sense, and he was certain to be available after El Tri once again failed to advance past the Round of 16 in Russia – an annoyance to the Mexican fan base, which had never fully forgiven Osorio to begin with for El Tri losing 0:7 to Chile in Santa Clara at the Copa América Centenario in 2016. (And understandably so. I was at that game. El Tri were a disgrace.) And, if you saw El Tri run the Germans off the pitch in the World Cup – and basically provide a blueprint for beating the Germans that every team thereafter copied – it’s clear the guy has some chops.

So Osorio just seemed like the most bloody obvious candidate ever for the U.S. job, and then he left El Tri and I figured it was only a matter of time before he was hired to coach the Stars & Stripes, and then he took the job … in Paraguay. Wait, what? I mean, I know that he’s a South American, and there are good jobs in South America – demanding jobs, but good jobs – but coaching Paraguay ain’t one of them. This is a step-down, which would indicate that, for one reason or another, U.S. Soccer wasn’t interested. Or, more to the point, U.S. Soccer had not even really bothered to start looking at all at the time Osorio was available. As Cordeiro said himself about the Berhalter hire during the introductory press conference: “We anticipated way back in August when the search began that with Gregg being a likely contender ...”

What the actual fuck? What are we doing here? Apparently we are doing nothing, at least not for the entire first half of 2018.

So Osorio rides off to Asuncíon and the American position stays open throughout the summer, and my best guess, at this point, is that the reason the job isn’t being filled is because U.S. Soccer wants an MLS guy to coach the national team, and is waiting to make a hire until after the season is over. An idea which is, quite frankly, stupid.

MLS is fine. It’s fine. I enjoy MLS. There are some good coaches in MLS, to be sure. But we’re looking for a guy here who is capable of preparing an international side to take on the Brazils and the Englands and the Colombias and the Italys of the world. (Which Sarachan wasn’t doing all that well, mind you, since the U.S. got blasted by all four of those nations in friendlies this fall.) As we’ve seen before, there is this annoying and, frankly, disturbing propensity among U.S. soccer types to think far too highly of MLS and its players and think far too little of the American guys playing overseas – guys who are far better players but also whose lives are complicated by the fact that they’re being rather handsomely paid by European clubs and are understandably reticent to want to play in some ridiculous USA FC friendly and risk injuring themselves, since doing so seriously will likely ruin their careers. But there is also the fact that U.S. Soccer is beholden to MLS and SUM, its marketing arm, to bankroll its budget. It’s an organization which has always known which side of the bread is buttered, and constantly winds up kowtowing to MLS even though far too many MLS clubs can’t be bothered to put young American players on the field – which is shouldn’t feel beholden to do, mind you, since those clubs have to look out for themselves, but it speaks to the silly nature of this dynamic. In Berhalter’s introductory press conference, Cordeiro spoke of how USA FC will be “uniquely and fiercely American.” What the hell does that mean? Given that MLS has spent much of its existence patting itself on the back while being a glorified retirement league, one can only guess that this “uniquely and fiercely American” side will puff out its chest and gloat when it manages to scrape out a goalless draw with Honduras.

But, as I say, there are actually some really good coaches in MLS who were capable of taking over this position – but if you’d asked me to name them, I can’t say that the steady eddie skipper of the Columbus Crew would have been one of them. Two come immediately to mind, in fact: Oscar Pereja, who not only coached like hell in Dallas but also produced a lot of the sorts of nice young talented players that USA FC needs, and Tata Martino, an Argentine with an extensive résumé who has now built Atlanta United into a dynamo and one of the most exciting teams the league has ever seen in a matter of a couple of years. Pereja apparently got a final interview but what passed over for Berhalter, and has now taken his talents to Liga MX. Martino, meanwhile, was apparently passed over because of his lack of proficiency in English – which is also dumb. It’s a global game. Talent travels all over the world and it figures out how to communicate. Hell, the Belgians have a Spaniard coaching Flemings and Francophones, and most likely doing so in English. Guys figure it out and get through it. The language of football is universal.

But more to the point, waiting to hire an MLS coach as the head of USA FC means waiting forever, because the season drags out into December. Where is the sense of urgency in all of this? While U.S. Soccer dragged its feet on filling the position, the team was out there playing 10 friendlies in 2018, looking not particularly good in any of them, and looking not the least bit coherent in all of them. Some of this was to be expected, of course, since the player pool was primarily made up of youngsters. Talented youngsters, mind you. There is definitely some talent there, assuming they know where on the field they’re even supposed to be. Young players screw up, they make all sorts of mistakes, but they’re the right kind of mistakes that you want them to make and learn from. But some of that incoherence on the pitch is attributable to the post-Trinidad malaise which has engulfed everyone involved with the program. There is confusion, there is upheaval, no one knows what the hell is going on and, with a lame duck coach whose strategic plan doesn’t matter, the on-field product is a mess. It’s a waste of time, it’s a wasted opportunity to actually start assembling the kind of squad that U.S. soccer wants, and very much needs. It’s no wonder that the players are fed up with the whole process:

That’s a quote from Michael Parkhurst, who plays for Atlanta United and has 25 caps for the national team. That is a really damning statement about the current state of the program.

And of course, there are the obligatory flag wavers out there whose response to this is full of patriotic jingoism about how you should be proud to put on the red, white and blue and to represent your country and all that bullshit. Hey, guess what? We ran a whole lot of our MLS retreads out there last fall and left our European pros back in their posh European homes, and we got our asses kicked by fuckin’ Trinidad & Tobago. The bigger issue here is that if you are a legit, high-calibre player – even if you’re in MLS, mind you, and have visions of doing better things in your career – why do you want to put up with this mess on your off-time? Why go out there and be put in positions to fail?

If I sound skeptical, it’s because I don’t trust anyone involved in U.S. Soccer to make a smart decision. We’ve reached a point, as it pertains to this organization, where all of the trust and the good faith engendered over the past 30 years has been thrown out the window. You’re going to have to prove me that you know what you’re doing.

And there’s another aspect of this hire of Gregg Berhalter as the coach of the national team which just cannot be overlooked, as much as U.S. Soccer would like us to do so: his brother, Jay Berhalter, is the CCO of the organization. Nepotism, anyone? And that’s not fair to Gregg, of course. It’s not fair at all. U.S. Soccer made a point of outlining (albeit in rather vague generalities) how Earnie Stewart assembled a list of 33 really good candidates for the position, whittled it down to 11, then five, and settled on two final interviews of Berhalter and Pereja. Okay, fine, you can tell us all of that, but it’s also been reported that the brother of the guy who wound up getting the job was one of the people who helped originally assemble the list of criteria necessary for getting the job, even though he is a business and finance guy who has nothing to do with the technical side. That whole thing just reeks of nepotism and conflict of interest. And again, that’s unfair – but it’s also unavoidable. Every time the U.S. loses, people are going to say that Gregg Berhalter sucks as a coach and only got the job because his brother is one of the bigwigs at the top of the food chain. That’s going to rear it’s ugly head every single goddamn time this team doesn’t get a victory, and even if it does win, that belief will never fully go away unless this team wins a damn World Cup, which ain’t gonna happen any time soon. Why would you willingly subject yourself to that scrutiny?

Sigh, I need another drink.

Look, the optics of all of this are bad. They are terrible. Taking 14 months to hire the brother of an exec, who you could have hired a year ago, to be the head coach ultimately looks like a dumb and lazy hire. What the point of any of that? What was the point? And that’s not fair to Gregg Berhalter, and it’s not fair to anyone involved on the actual field. But U.S. Soccer has always been an insular and incestuous sort of organization in its days on the margins, in keeping with the premise of Sayre’s Law that in any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at stake. They were all small-time players who were fighting over scraps.

But this isn’t some marginal sport anymore. We’re talking about a $1b business here. Hell, this organization is still full of clownshoes, and we’re supposed to host a damn World Cup in 2026. (And thank god for that, otherwise we might not be able to qualify.) I truly have no idea whether this is a good hire or not, but my spidy senses tell me that my distrust in U.S. Soccer is not misguided. They’ve done nothing of late to earn my trust. We’ll see where all of this goes in 2019, but until further notice, U.S. Soccer still sucks. Prove me wrong.

Kate

Kate performing in Dhaka, Bangladesh, in 2004.

THIS is a poem that I wrote in 1998, which has been published several times, about Kate's struggles to make it as a musician while living in Santa Fe, New Mexico, which is where we met:

- - -

Kate’s Band Plays the Worst Bar in New Mexico

It’s the kind of gig that drives musicians
to become lawyers. A Gemini convention
at the meeting of the moons: half the patrons
are all about hugs, the other half ready

to rumble. Sixteen people crowd
the four-foot square dance floor, tripping
over darkness and their own bad tempers,
and all of them claim they just want to have

some fun. Tall man throws a chair at a fat
tourist in a rainbow sweater, whose only crimes
were dancing and being in love. As they separate
the combatants and the doorman sweeps up

the glass, the owner takes a bigger percentage
of the gross and threatens the drummer in Greek
or Turkish or Serbo-Croatian, or some other
language where P’s are R’s and the human

tongue moves odd ways. The two bartenders
shrug and chagrin, knowing their boss is
an asshole. Amid the melee, the quartet plays on.
Guitarist solos while the bassist puts his years

of epée training to use, parrying another flying
bottle. Kate thinks to herself why am I here,
remembering all of the days as a girl
when she’d lock herself in a room, eschew

malls and movies and climbing trees to practice
her unsociable saxophone, never thinking
in a million years it would ever come to this.
She could make more money on the Plaza

downtown, or selling velvet renditions of Elvis
in the meeting rooms at the Holiday Inn.
The highway to the Blue Note and Carnegie
Hall is dotted with thousands of sinkholes

and swan dives. They play the dark roadhouse,
the roller skating rink, 2-for-1 night at the tavern
with sawdust on the floor, and parties for which
they’re paid in seafood and cinema seats.

But she’s going to get better, damn it,
she’s going to get out of this place alive,
so she grips her baritone sax a little tighter,
places the mouthpiece to her lips and swings.

- - -

She came a long, long way from those days. She was a wonderful musician who played all over the world, and played at some of the finest venues:



Kate died Sunday, at the age of 49, after a 13-year battle with cancer. She was my hero, and I will miss her very much. My hope is that she would be as proud of me as I was of her.

Kate regularly played in the Bay Area at The Sound Room, which is a nonprofit center for Jazz performance and education that is trying to raise funds to acquire and renovate a new performance space in order to provide opportunities for local musicians. Please, if you have a few dollars to spare, contribute in her honor.

Dysfunction Junction

Cartoon by Nashnal Baskitbel Asosiashin

FOR a purveyor of all things failure, it doesn’t get much better than the tire fire that is the Cleveland Cavaliers organization. The Cadavers rose from the dead to defeat the Atlanta Hawks on Tuesday night for their first win of the season, which came under the watch of interim head coach Larry Drew … except that he’s not the interim head coach, he’s the … uh …

Uh, okay, so, that’s a little weird. But these are the Cavs, where everything has been a little weird even in the best of times. Having LeBron James on your roster will do that. In the end, he wins titles and conference finals and what have you, but he also tends to bring drama, melodrama, and soap opera to the proceedings as well. But now that LeBron has taken his talents and accompanying theatrics to the South Bay, Cleveland has descended into farce.

And it wasn’t hard to see this coming – or, at least, it shouldn’t have been, but everyone involved with the Cavs has been delusional. You can see how something like this occurs, of course – it’s very easy, when you reach the pinnacle, to forget how and why it was that you got there in the first place. It’s easy to overinflate your own accomplishments and contributions, and think you’re better than you are. To that end, the Cavs doubled down this offseason, believing that even with LeBron’s departure, they could compete for the playoffs this season.

They cannot.

Let’s be honest here. The Cavaliers won a championship and reached four straight finals because they had LeBron. At no point, during any of those four years, were they ever any good as a team without LeBron on the floor – not even when they still had Kyrie Irving on their team. Since taking over the helm in Jan. 2016, Ty Lue’s record in games where LeBron didn’t play was 1-12. LeBron is the system – or, at least, he was.

Oh, I should update that stat. Including the first six games of this season, none of which the Cavaliers won, Ty Lue’s record without #23 in the lineup was 1-18. Lue’s firing after six games seemed, at first glance, to be something of a mercy kill. The guy was so miserable on the sidelines last season that he needed to take several weeks off to get his health back. Since it’s impossible to judge anything that took place in Cleveland outside of a LeBron-related context, I honestly have no idea whether or not he’s a good coach. He did, however, succeed at keeping the peace during that time, and man management skills are often far more important than acumen with X’s and O’s when it comes to coaching professional athletes. But it’s hard to know how well Lue would have handled going through a long rebuilding process in Cleveland.

But it would have helped, of course, if Lue’d known he was in for a rebuild from the start, which would have required everyone involved acknowledging, on the 1st of July, that the roster was garbage. Instead, everyone from the top down, starting with owner Comic Sans Dan Gilbert and GM Koby Altman, were insisting that the Cavs were going to try and compete for a playoff spot in the East. Sure, LeBron is gone, but we’ve got winners here! We’re smart! We don’t need LeBron! All for one and one for all …

… which lasted all of two games, as the Cavs got roasted in both, at which point a schism developed between Lue and Altman, with Lue wanting to play the vets who’d won him a title in 2016, while Altman wanted Lue to play the younger guys – “younger” meaning all of the guys who came to the Cavs after Altman took over as GM, a bunch of whom showed up at the trade deadline and none of whom contributed much of anything to the Cavs’ playoff run last spring because, well, because they aren’t very good. No one on this team is any good, save for Kevin Love, on whom Altman tacked a 4/$120m extension ostensibly in the hopes of making him potentially more tradable down the line, which seems risky since Love is constantly hurt. Maybe there’s a market for 30-somethings being paid 30-something million dollars, but I don’t know where that market is. And besides, if you are trying to be good, why is it a good idea to make your best player more marketable to other teams? And if you suck, you probably have to eat that deal. This makes no sense. Then again, nothing Cleveland does makes any sense.

Anyway, after two depressing losses to start the season, when the reality settled in that the Cavs are gonna be awful, all of a sudden Altman wanted to pivot, play the “younger” players and bench all the old vets – which Lue did, with predictable results, because the “younger” players aren’t any good, and while the vets aren’t any good, either, they’re prideful people who have accomplished some stuff alongside LeBron in recent years and getting benched didn’t go over so well. So this experiment went predictably badly, at which point Lue just decided to give his bosses the finger, reversing course yet again and sticking his vets out there on the floor and basically daring Altman to fire him for his insubordination – which Altman promptly did.

This was well played by Lue. He’s got a championship ring and three straight trips to the Finals on his résumé – a résumé which will now also be absent the 55-60 losses his now former team is going to amass this season. While I still don’t know just how good of a coach Lue actually is, those credentials are shiny enough that he’ll probably get another gig. And after stepping in back in Jan. 2016 as the interim head coach and guiding Cleveland to a championship, Lue parlayed this success into a 5/$35m contract, which means that Comic Sans Dan is still on the hook for $15-$20m to Lue, who can take some time and get his health back and be choosy about his next job, resting easy while sleeping on a pile of Dan Gilbert’s dollars. This also adds to a rather astonishingly large graveyard of dead money on the Cavaliers books:

from Joe Vardon, The Athletic Cleveland

Now, to give Comic Sans Dan some credit here for a moment, he has been willing to spend to win, unlike some other stints around the league. The Cavs have carried some of the highest payrolls in NBA history in recent years, contracts which were doled out to the likes of JR Smith and Tristan Thompson and so forth who filled legit, specific needs on a LeBron-led team – which is what you should do, because the chance to win is so fleeting. But one way or another, the bill winds up coming due. Part of the problem now for the Cavs is that all of those one-time useful role players are now, post-23, little more than big-numbered bad contracts.

But Comic Sans Dan has now also churned through 7 coaches and 5 GMs during the time he’s owned this team, and that sort of constant tumult and turmoil makes for some damn near impossible working conditions. Even when things have gone well, behind the scenes, everyone is mad at each other all the time. Bad ownership is an incredible competitive disadvantage. The only way to overcome that is if a miracle occurs – which is precisely what once happened in Cleveland. The Cavaliers ultimately won a championship because it just so happened they won the draft lottery and the greatest player of his generation happened to be born in neighboring Akron and feel an affinity for the place. (Actually, two of the greatest players were born in Akron, but I digress.) It has nothing to do with Comic Sans Dan’s acumen as an entrepreneur. They won championships and won all of those games in spite of him.

Everyone involved in this mess is fooling themselves. Top 5 Reasons why the Cavs won an NBA title: 1. LeBron, 2. LeBron, 3. LeBron, 4. Kyrie made a great shot in Game 7 of the finals, 5. LeBron. Every single thing about this organization sans LeBron is sub-replacement level, at best.

And now they’ve turned it over to interim coach … uh, “voice” Larry Drew, who doesn’t want to be leading this death march through the rest of the season unless he’s paid more, and is letting everyone know it. That said, he says he won’t step down from his assistant coach job, which means he’s basically doing the job anyway, so I’m not exactly sure how much leverage he has – if someone’s doing the job by proxy and not getting paid for it, why pay them? So you now have a coach who isn’t the coach, coaching a team that isn’t much of a team given the rancor and the discord. JR wants to be traded – hell, everyone wants to be traded – but there are no realistic trades that do not involve the Cavs taking on bad money in return, Kevin Love is out for at least a month, the Cavs got destroyed by Denver last night and are 1-7 despite a friendly, home-heavy schedule, and about the best they can hope for is being so bad that their Top-10 protected first round pick doesn’t wind up conveying to the Atlanta Hawks next summer. And sure, there is always some bad luck in this kind of thing, but at the same time, once LeBron left this team, the pivot to a rebuild should have been immediate, but that would have required everyone to actually have some self-awareness.

(Oh, look, now we have an age discrimination lawsuit. The hits just keep on coming.)

And this is hard to watch, because when they weren’t all bickering behind the scenes and actually took to the floor, the LeBron-led Cavs played some incredible basketball. When they were dialed in, they could be truly great. But now the Cleveland Cavaliers are such a mess that they’ve somehow rendered the hapless Browns – who have finally decided that Hue Jackson, he of the 3-36-1 record as head coach, didn’t know what he was doing – not even the most incompetent franchise in the city. This might be, at the moment, the single-most dysfunctional franchise in all of professional sports – although the Minnesota Timberwolves still might have something to say about that, and LeBron is well on his way to getting another coach fired in one of the least-surprising developments of this still-young NBA season, but I’m waiting for the next plot twists in those soap operas. Tune in next week for another episode of As The Stomach Turns …

I Wish I Never Wrote This

PERHAPS the best way to sum up my experience inside a psychiatric institute is that it taught me how to take control of my own life. The whole point of practicing “mindfulness” and discover its power was to regulate and moderate one’s response to stress. I’ve been doing this for 12 years now. I modulate my emotions. I have this weird sort of multitasking brain, one which revs and redlines and thousands of RPMs and permits me to be able to do some wonderful and remarkable things when I’m in control, and leads me to spiral hopelessly into abysses when I’m not. I am the ultimate multitasker, able to juggle and triage and slot a dozen different things at once. I can focus on a task at work while my brain is juggling a math problem or a scrabble anagram. It’s a gift and a curse, one which, through mindfulness and through the act of making a point of experiencing what it is that I am feeling – be it physical, mental, spiritual, what have you – and then rendering it simply a data point. If my shoulder hurts, I relax my shoulder. If I feel deep pangs of regret or anxiety, I start to breathe. The mind revs and redlines 24/7, but I control my emotions and maintain focus, keeping in the present, all the while being fully aware of how perilous this life can be.

Perhaps the greatest expression of this sensation that I’ve seen in a film is in the phenomenal 1992 film The Waterdance, which is about paraplegics in a rehab institute. In a key scene in the film, during which a black man and racist biker get drunk and bond over being reduced to cripples in wheelchairs, Wesley Snipes tells a story of how he dreams that not only can he walk again, but that he is dancing on the water, he is dancing on the surface of the lake and if he stops dancing, he drowns, so he just keeps dancing. He dances on and on upon the surface of the water. It’s a beautiful image and also a terrifying one – the idea that life is so fragile and perilous, so short, and that you must struggle to summon the strength to survive when it seems impossible. This is my life, every single day. I’m constantly cycling through images, through metaphors. I’m constantly picking up my feet and doing that slide step against the waves lapping up against my ankles. It’s exhausting as fuck, but goddamn it, were I to step on dry land again, I would cut one helluva a rug.

But recently, I find the waves washing over me, threatening to drown me. The steps I’ve learned can no longer stem the tide. I feel as if I’m sinking, as if I’m drowning. It’s not because of any particular thing happening to me – I’m relatively healthy, save for the numbness in my left arm and stiffness in my right leg and deafness in my right ear. All of that has become normal to me and I play through it. I’m used to it by now. I’m relatively secure, if those bastards who pay me bother to pay me on time. I have a reasonable life in San Francisco, a city where achieving a reasonable life is becoming harder and harder by the day. It’s not that bad, really. I get by.

But I have no control over what afflicts those who are close to me. My father will be 78 years old and now suffers from dementia. My dad taught me the jump hook, which was my most devastating weapon on the basketball court. My dad played ball well into his 60s and was so healthy that he had 7,000 hours of sick leave at Washington State when he cashed it in on his Fulbright to Belgium. My dad had such an impeccable memory that he walked into my office one day in Seattle in 1992, shook my boss’ hand, and said to her, “yes I remember you from my Poli Sci 222 class in 1967. You got an A.” He remembered her maiden name, for fucksake. He remembered her fucking maiden name from 25 years earlier! And now that memory is eroding, that mind which made him a go-to expert on international affairs, sought after by everyone from the Pentagon to film producers in L.A. My dad taught me inclusiveness, tolerance, and open-mindedness, since he was a professor of International Studies and introduced me to so many people with different experiences and points of view. He is languishing, and I can’t fucking do anything about it. I cannot make it better for him. I talk to him on the phone, I am encouraging and positive, but I cannot make it stop. I cannot stop it. He is sinking into an abyss, one which also has a terrible effect upon my mother, who is dealing with this day by day, and there is nothing I can say or do or act upon which makes a shit’s worth of difference.

And I cannot stop the cancer ravaging my ex-girlfriend’s body. Kate has fought it for 13 years now. She is the strongest person I’ve ever known. She is my hero. I wish that I were a tenth as strong as she. And there is nothing that I can do about it. It’s cruel, it’s unfair: she’s spent all of her late 30s and her 40s fighting this most goddamnest of diseases, and winning a lot of the time, and yet she suffers. It’s an inevitable sort of suffering which, a decade ago, you would have accepted – “a decade from now, you will have all kinds of trouble, but until then, you might be okay.” Eventually, the bill comes due. I wish that I could make it better for Kate. I wish that I could take it all away. I feel an incredible guilt and shame – it was right after we broke up, an awful point in both of our lives, that she found out she had cancer, and because I was so mad at her at the time, I didn’t help her even though I could have and should have, like any fucking decent human being should have done. I wish that there was something – anything – that I could do to make it better for her. She’s one of the most remarkable persons I’ve ever known. She doesn’t deserve to be dying at 48 when there are so many goddamn fucking awful human beings running unabated across this globe at much older ages. Seriously, fuck this world.

I can’t do anything about this. All of my mindfulness routines which I’ve carefully curated after my mental institute experiences are about handling what it is that you can possibly control. But what about what you cannot control? There are simply some things that you will never accept, that you will never get over, the deaths and demises of loved ones being at the top of the list. I’ve reached what Laura, my therapist and my friend, calls “the end of language.” I’ve lost the ability to express and explicate the helplessness and the grief. The grief. Jesus bastard christ, the fucking grief.

What do you say about this kind of thing? What the actual fuck do you say? I understand that this is the nature of our short and fragile lives – we will have to come to terms with the mortality of everyone around us and then, more importantly, ourselves. But for fucksake, I’ve been making my reputation, if not my living, on my ability to explicate most everything, and I’ve got now fucking idea what to say or what to do about loved ones who are dying and who are disintegrating before my eyes. I don’t know what to say or do. I feel helpless.

And I’m drowning. I’ve been dancing on the surface of the water for a dozen years now. Because see, in attempting to learn how to modulate and regulate my own behavior so as to deal with the wildly undulating nature of my mind, I never learned the language of grief. I don’t know what to do or what to say. I’ve reached the end of language.

And I cope with this by drinking myself into a stupor, but that doesn’t fucking work, because I just wake up hungover and headachy and achy and I have to make a fucking 2+ hour commute to Palo Alto and GODDAMNIT I HATE EVERYTHING on a daily basis. Sure, this is the human condition. We have to come to terms with the inevitability of time, come of accept that which we cannot control. But fucking goddamnit, I don’t know what to do. None of us do. If we did, we’d all be fucking ascetics capable of escaping suffering through achieving enlightenment or whatever the goddamn hell you want to call it. Ultimately, I feel powerless to impact the lives of loved ones around me, and in that state of complete existential dread, all that I do to respond is drink myself into a stupor.

If any of you have any suggestions, I’m all ears.

We are fragile and frail. I write often about the greatest of warriors, those seemingly impervious to pain. Bullshit. It’s all bullshit. We all must come to accept our frailties and our failings, our own shortcomings. As strong as we may be, we cannot defeat those. Nor can we ultimately change the fate of others, as much as we would like to think so. There is nothing that I can say or do to take away some goddamn gene or chromosome which renders people in my family prone to dementia, What do you do? You be there, I guess. You consider it all “time well spent,” and be grateful for that time, even as you watch persons become a shell of the persons that you knew. You live in the past, remember them for who they were even though you know that they cannot ever be that person again.

I hate that way of thinking. I hate it. I hate all of it.

And I’m saying this now because I keep saying to myself, “THIS is the weekend that you’re going to make change and stop being a drunk and drinking yourself into a stupor,” but it’s not the weekend that someone who I know and love and care about stops dying, nor is it the weekend that I stop grieving the inevitable loss. And yeah, fuck, I understand that you should make the most of the time in the here and now and love to your greatest ability, but jesus fucking goddamn christ what is the fucking point? And like I say, I’ve reached the end of language here. This is all me just ranting and raving like a goddamn lunatic, pissing and howling into the wind. It’s as if saying nothing was just as valuable as saying everything, since whatever you say will be the wrong thing.

And what’s the bloody point? What value is there in an empty gesture of spending two years of your life working on the next novel when the people who inspired and motivated you will either be dead or incapable or remembering what it is that you did? What’s the fucking goddamn point of any of it? I feel no motivation to finish anything, even though I’ve got about 1,000,000 words’ worth of text stored up on my hard drive, great stories with great characters in need of being explicated. What’s the goddamn point in any of it? It’s all a tree falling in the forest. Who the fuck is there to hear it?

Obviously, I don’t know what the answer is to any of this. If I had some sort of insight, I wouldn’t be screaming into the wind at 1:00 a.m. after I’ve had too many whiskeys if I did. Being gript by joint senses of helplessness and hopelessness doesn’t really suit me, as I’m an optimist by nature who wants to believe in the goodness of people and the ability of people to make the lives of others around them better.  But all that I’ve done to make others’ lives better hasn’t amounted to shit. It made no difference. I’m just a tourist and a traveller, I’m simply passing through.

Jesus fuck, I am such a pathetic fucking sop.

Seriously, people, love those around you. Love them so much that they resent how much you love them, and then love them even more than that. I cannot tell you how grateful I am that I have this incredible spouse who loves and adores me. I’m the luckiest goddamn motherfucker in the world. I’m absolutely blessed for that. Love those people and tell them that you love them all the time, even if you think they’re getting sick of hearing how much you love them. If nothing else, just opening your goddamn mouth and saying “I love you,” will come to be cherished. It’s the most precious goddamn thing on this earth, to be honest. It transcends everything. It is everything that matters in this lifetime. I don’t give a shit about your stats. I don’t care how much you’ve made or what you’ve achieved. Have you cared about other people? Have you given love in this life? Have you made it known to someone going to their grave that you will always cherish their memory? That’s all that matters.

I grieve for Kate. I grieve for my dad. I feel crushed. I feel heartbroken. I wish that I knew what to do. I wish that I knew what to say. And I wish that I never wrote this. I wish that this feeling never came to be.

Losability: Your Short-Attention Span NBA Preview

Who hasn’t wanted to do this at the office?

WE love all sorts of failure here at In Play Lose. We love epic chokes, we love season-long death marches through the abyss. Losing takes many forms, many shapes and varying degrees of significance, and I’m interested in all of it. Obviously, we love the epic fails, those comedic bursts of idiocy, those gifable moments where a player does something jaw-droppingly incompetent. This is because losing is, ultimately, funny. This series of articles from The Athletic, about the worst teams that many excellent reporters had to endure, is far more funny – and ultimately far more revealing – than any series about the supposed ‘best’ teams they ever covered could be. Winning is boring. It’s what you’re supposed to do. It’s when it all goes wrong, and you are scrambling to come up with answers as to why that failure happened, that truly reveals your nature.

I mention this on the eve of another NBA season because the fact of the matter is that for 29 teams in the NBA – most likely everyone who isn’t the Golden State Warriors, although that is by no means a certainty – the season is going to prove to be unsuccessful. And that’s okay, really. It’s okay and it’s essential. You need winners and losers. Losing is essential. But even more importantly, you need a variety of losers. Because the fact of the matter is that while all 30 teams in the NBA would love to win the title, it isn’t realistic to expact that to be happening. Every team in a professional league has a ceiling, they have a level that they could realistically hope to attain and, in the big picture, reaching that level actually constitutes success.

I mentioned this idea this past summer while talking about the World Cup: if, in 2016, I’d said that  two years hence, the Croatians would finish 2nd in the World Cup, the Belgians would finish 3rd and the English 4th, both players and fans from those nations would say that, in the bigger picture, that’s a pretty good outcome. But in the moment, of course, in the here and the now of 2018, finishing third for the Belgians means, “god damn it, why are Fellaini and Chaddli still in this game and why can’t we break down the fucking French defense?” For the Croatians, it’s “jesus christ, we’re dominating this final and we should be beating this goddamn team.” The loss, in the immediate, feels painful and agonizing and frustrating. The immediate result runs contrary to the process. Finishing second or third is terrific, but finishing second or third also means that, at a critical moment, you failed.

I mention soccer even though this is an NBA blog, since there are an incredible number of similarities between the two – not the least of which being that players in each have come to have something of a mutual admiration society for each other. Both sports are star-driven, games in which the players have incredible agency over their careers. In both sports, players have taken agency over their careers to a much greater extent and come to realize their full stardom and earning potentials. With stardom potential, of course, comes petty drama and paparazzi – both sports are full of gossip, full of glamour, full of hangers-on and shady characters on the fringe.

And both games are great, even if the end product can come to feel like a foregone conclusion. It doesn’t matter, ultimately, that one team is a prohibitive favorite in the NBA, just as it doesn’t matter that Bayern or Barca or Juve or Man City is a prohibitive favorite in some European soccer league. As a whole, the NBA is better than it’s ever been. The players are more skilled, better drilled, and in better condition than they have ever been. They are also more “woke,” more aware, and more connected to fans than they have ever been. These are exquisite athletes, and the level of play in the NBA is the highest the sport of basketball has ever known. It’s worth following if, for no other reason, you’ll see something terrific and artistic and almost balletic on a nightly basis.

And, of course, you’ll also see the Sacramento Kings.

And like I say, within a given league, every team has a ceiling. If you break through that ceiling, your season is a success. The Sacramento Kings are going to play hard, they’re going to play with incredible enthusiasm and energy in lieu of having any talent, and if they, say, finish with a 33-49 record then, damn, that’s a decent season right there. It means the kids played their asses off and they beat a few teams along the way who took the night off or didn’t care or whatnot, it means their young players finally stopped making the sorts of game-ending, soul-killing sorts of mistakes that bad young teams make, and maybe they learned a few things along the way. (And this is about as nice as I’m ever going to talk about the Sacramento Kings, so you should roll with it.) As much as we all want to win, we do have to grade on something of a curve when the season is over.

And here at In Play Lose, where we are connoisseurs of failure, I love all of it. I love the 60-loss season just as much as the Game 7 choke job. There are plenty of layers and levels to losing. Love it. Bring it on. Let’s revel in the failure and have a good laugh, since laughter is always the best medicine. And just as there are different strata and levels of expectation that wind up being contained in any particular league, The Lose has different strata and levels of failure as well, some of which are more interesting to me than others. I have determined there to be nine different levels of Lose within the NBA, all of which provide different challenges to explicate for a purveyor of failure such as myself. Perhaps the best way to preview what is one of my favorite sports leagues in the world, on the eve of its new season, is to express it using those different levels of Lose:

1. Falling Short
These are teams who are striving to win the NBA title and have realistic expectations of doing so. Only one of them can do so, of course, so for the others, this constitutes the highest level of losing. But being in this category also speaks to general excellence of your franchise. These are the élite, after all – so it doesn’t make for great Lose blogging, at least not until the month of May.
I begrudgingly admired the Houston Rockets last season. At one point last spring, I think I said that the Rockets were the NBA’s equivalent of Three True Outcomes baseball, and that it wasn’t a compliment. Just because they attempt to play in the most efficient way possible – shooting only 3s and layups and free throws after Harden holds the ball for most of the shot clock – it doesn’t mean that I want to watch it. That said, they’re commitment to that style was admirable, and their ruthless efficiency was commendable. They were so committed to it that they willingly missed 27 threes in a row against the Warriors in Game 7 of the Western Conference finals, chucking up one brick after another from deep as their double-digit lead evaporated and the series slipped away. I say that it’s begrudging admiration because I hate Harden’s flailing on his way to the hoop and his vague, near-travelling on stepback treys, and any team with Chris Paul is inherently going to be the most annoying team in the NBA, but goddamn it, this team is good, and I appreciate that in this era of whining about “the Warriors ruined the sport,” the Rockets said, “fuck it, let’s beat those guys,” and damn near did. That said, I hate their offseason. They lost role players and replaced them with Michael Carter-Williams, who can’t shoot, Carmelo Anthony, who can’t defend, and Marquese Chriss, who can’t do anything. Their window may close pretty quickly, but at the same time, it wouldn’t surprise me if Daryl Morey goes out and makes a deal for the malcontented Jimmy Butler. (More on him later.)
I love me some Boston Celtics and I’ll be curious to see how they fit all of these great pieces together. It may be a little murky at first, since Gordon Hayward is almost a newish quantity after missing the whole previous season, since Kyrie’s troublesome knee is probably always going to be a concern, the shooting tended to come and go last year and the offense occasionally verged on being impotent, and I wonder if there will be some strange sort of internal tension stemming from the fact that this may become less of Kyrie Irving’s team and more of Jayson Tatum’s team – as it probably should be. But they’re deep and incredibly well-coached, defend like hell, can play all sorts of different styles, and I think anything short of an NBA Finals appearance will feel like a failure.
Of course, the Toronto Raptors might get in the Celtics’ way, because they now have Kawhi Leonard on their team, who is the ultimate series wrecker, a guy who can just wipe most of the opposition’s best scoring threats off the map while also getting you 25 points a game. Toronto had a weird offseason after their obligatory playoff meltdown, entrusting their fate to an unproven head coach in Nick Nurse, then trading franchise icon DeRozan for Kawhi and creating a team that you’d probably not normally entrust a rookie head coach with. And the Raptors will be bothered all year, of course, with distractions created by media and fans pertaining to what Kawhi does next summer when he’s a free agent, but this season, they’ve got about 10,000 guys who can play the wing – when most teams have one or two – they’ve got one of the five best badass motherfucking players on the planet when healthy (which he appears to be), and the defense is going to be filthy. Obviously, trading a franchise icon and stalwart like DeRozan is a shock to the system, but Kawhi is such a ridiculous upgrade that this team has a potential to be terrifying.
But let’s be honest here, barring a catastrophic injury (which I don’t wish upon anyone, friend or foe), the Golden State Warriors are prohibitive favorites here. Anything other than winning a 4th title in five years will be construed as a failure. And I’m sure that I’ll write too much about the Warriors over the course of the season, as I’ll put my objectivity slant aside and devolve into being a fanboy. Much like with Kawhi in Toronto, I genuinely don’t care about all of the non-stories about how KD and/or Klay might be somewhere else next season that the media will create in order to have something to talk about. If that happens, sobeit. I don’t care. They’ve earned the right to make those decisions. The Warriors were only 58-24 last season, and lots of the narrative about them being lazy and unfocused conveniently omits that their four all-stars only played 41 games together over what was, in fact, an injury-plagued season. But the Dubs were admittedly dragging last year, and I actually think they’ll will be more engaged this year, finding the idea of incorporating the recovering Boogie Cousins into their lineups to be a fun sort of challenge. (Oh yeah, they added a 5th All-Star. Have fun with guarding them.) The focus here in the Bay Area seems to be on joy, celebrating the successes of late and honoring the last year in Oakland before moving into the new arena in downtown San Francisco next season, and when the Dubs are playing with energy, with joy and with love, you have no chance.

2. Knocking on the Door
This group of teams doesn’t make for great Lose blogging, either. They’re really good teams who are on the rise. They’ll most likely get some mention here on this blog if they somehow gag away a playoff series, but otherwise, keep doing what you’re doing.
Were I in Vegas (which I won’t be until early November), I would put money on Giannis being the MVP, because the Milwaukee Bucks have a coach in Mike Budenholzer who actually knows what he is doing, and with the spacing and movement on offense they’ve shown here in the preseason, Giannis could be absolutely unstoppable and we’ll finally have to bow down to our Bucks overlord.
The Indiana Pacers simply have a lot of guys who know what they are doing – a novel concept in the raw-talent obsessed NBA – they can play lots of different ways and their best players have taken the cue from their leader, Victor Oladipo, in that their secondary threats – Sabonis and Turner – also appear to be in great shape after significant off-season regimens. The Pacers are going to be good. I like this team a lot.
I also like the Utah Jazz a lot in the West, as their first five play so well together and they defend the hell out of the ball. They’ll go as far as Donovan Mitchell ultimately takes them, but fortunately, his potential verges on limitless. It’s a weird team to watch, in that we’ve been used to Ricky Rubio disappointing us and Joe Ingles looks like a high school gym teacher, but they’re impeccably coached by Quin Snyder and they always seem to know the right play to make. If I were the Houston Rockets, I might be looking over my shoulder, since I think the Jazz are in the rearview mirror and gaining rapidly.

3. Precarious Positions
Okay, now this is more interesting to me from a Losability standpoint. Here we go. These are teams which could, or even should, be pretty good, maybe even good enough to belong in the previous category, and yet there are questions and concerns. All of these teams may bottom out and be a lot worse than we first thought, and we’ll look back and see that the preseason concerns were warranted.
I want to trust the process, but I’m wary of the process. This whole idea that the Philadelphia 76ers are going to start Fultz instead of J.J, Redick – thus breaking up what was the best lineup in the NBA last year – seems weird to me. It seems like the sort of move that a thin-skinned organization would make that didn’t want to admit they made a mistake – which is what history may judge it as, given that they traded the pick which landed Tatum, as well as what may be a plum Kings draft pick, to the Celtics in order to land Fultz. And this team really took off late last season after the buyout pickups of Belinelli and Ilyasova gave them lethal shooters off the bench – neither of whom are with this team any more. The Sixers rid themselves of their GM, Bryan Colangelo, after the embarrassing burner account scandal, which hindered their ability to make deals in the offseason, and I can’t look at this team and say that they improved the roster. They’re counting a lot on their internal development, but the externals aren’t positive.
The New Orleans Pelicans, of course, are the ultimate one-note franchise. I consider it to be simple math, Y = X + 2, where Y equals when Seattle gets an NBA franchise and X equals when Anthony Davis leaves New Orleans. That is how dependent upon AD this franchise is.  If Anthony Davis leaves, this franchise is dead. Of course, a good way to keep him, though not a guarantee, would be to keep winning, which New Orleans did a lot of last year. The Pelicans were great at the end of last season, as AD played at an MVP level and Jrue Holliday was beast and their frenzied approach simply ran opponents into the ground, and they need to play at that level again this season. If healthy, the Pelicans are a 4-seed in the West. Given that health is always an issue in New Orleans, who knows? I find the hand-ringing over losing Rondo curious – he was last season, and is now, a terrible defender who gets by on reputation – but he’s been replaced by Elfred Payton, who has never done anything in his NBA career. The Pelicans need him to do something, anything at all. The margin for error is small in New Orleans, the roster is thin and has a history of being brittle.
It’s easy to put your faith in Pop and say that it’s no big deal that they lost Kawhi, since the San Antonio Spurs were sans Kawhi and still won 47 games a season ago, but the Spurs are now sans Kawhi and sans Danny Greene, Slo-Mo Anderson, Tony Parker and Ginobili. That’s an enormous brain drain as well as a talent drain. Oh yeah, and they have now lost a starting point guard to an ACL and a backup for two months with a foot injury. It just gets worse and worse. They do have DeRozan now to go with LMA, and they’ll likely play a style of basketball straight out of the 90s absent the 3-point shot, but as much as I believe in Pop, this team has feasted on bad teams for years in order to prop up their regular season record, and I just don’t think there are enough downtrodden teams in the West any more which will enable them to do that. I know they’ve got a playoff streak dating to the 1990s, but this roster just isn’t very good, and repeating last season’s result of being an 8-seed in the West would probably constitute an achievement.
I’ll put the Denver Nuggets in this category, because the Nuggets simply have to be in the playoffs this year or everyone’s getting fired. They get something of a mulligan after losing out to Minnesota in Game 82 a season ago, given that first Paul Milsap, and then Gary Harris, suffered serious injuries which ultimately cost them last year. This team should be dynamite on offense with Jokic, Harris, Milsap, and Jamal Murray, but goddamn it, play some goddamn defense. They’re a 5-seed in the West, or better, if they play some defense. Given that Jokic can’t guard his own shoes, and they look like a bunch of toreadors on a regular basis, this is no sure thing.

4. Fun Bad
These teams aren’t great from a blogging standpoint, because they aren’t very good and everyone knows it. All of these teams are focused more on talent development, to some extent, and young players generally do a lot of stupid things along the way. They’ll all play like hell and will be extremely watchable, while periodically doing some jaw-droppingly dimwitted things which cost them wins. Now, it should be noted that all of these fun bad teams could, in fact, turn out to be better than we all thought, and if they figure out how to avoid the ‘bad’ part of fun bad, those timetables may be accelerated.
There may be a light at the end of the tunnel for the Dallas Mavericks, who wound up landing Luca Doncic in last year’s draft after all of the machinations were finished. Doncic is a young player years ahead of other rookies, in that he’s been playing in the Euroleague – the 2nd-highest level of the game – for years now instead of laboring in college and posterizing the Vanderbilts and the the Wisconsins and Washington States of the world. His game is way more savvy and nuanced than your typical teenager. Pair him and Dennis Smith Jr. and there is so much to like about the Mavericks, but young players still screw up a lot and this roster isn’t good enough to overcome it.
I was impressed with Doc Rivers’ coaching job for the L.A. Clippers a season ago. The Clippers competed and played like hell. They’re the epitome of fun bad, in that they’ve got enough talent in Lou Williams and Tobias Harris and their spate of wings to be competitive on a nightly basis, but lack that killer superstar who put them over the top and will probably lose a lot of the close games they could hope to win.
It’s probably a stretch to put the Swamp Dragons, aka the Brooklyn Nets, in this category, but the Nets will be fun as hell as well and play crazy games, shoot a tonne of threes and be willing to lose 120-118 in this, their first season where they have control of their first round pick since god-knows-when. The Nets are also in a nice position to land some free agents in the summer of 2019, when a lot of awful contracts come off the books and everyone in the league will have some money to spend. Being loose and fun and well-coached and playing like hell in New York City makes for a decent sort of selling point to prospective free agents. The results aren’t there yet, but all the signs indicate that the Nets are moving in the right direction.

5. Need To Be Better Than They Are
All of these teams need something good to happen to them. There is a sense of urgency among this group. The problem is that, well, they aren’t that good.
Both the Detroit Pistons and the Charlotte Hornets are desperate to make the playoffs, which is doable in the East, whereas there are probably 12-13 teams in the West who are better than they are. I can’t find a single reason to care about either of these teams. Detroit has, at least, been freed from the Reign of Error that was the tenure of coach/exec Stan Van Gundy, who walked away from this mess after assembling an unwinnable roster locked in salary cap hell. Having the freshly fired Dwane Casey on the bench should help, and they’ve got more tangible talent than the Hornets in the quest for the #8 seed in the East. But in the meantime, the Pistons will continue covering up those red seats in Bad Pizza Arena with black tarps to mask their lackluster attendance, while the Hornets try to figure out whether or not to hit the reset button by unloading Kemba Walker – their best player, who is something like the 5th-best paid player on their mismatched roster – or fully engage in a shamfest of a battle for the #8 seed in the East.
I bet you didn’t know that the Miami Heat have the highest payroll in the NBA. I bet you cannot believe what you just read. For all of his championship rings and his successes, the fact of the matter is that the roster Pat Riley has assembled in Miami is, well, underwhelming and he’s not gotten near enough stick for that. Their hopes to land Jimmy Butler from the Wolves is an effort to turn a 7-seed in the East into a 6-seed in the East. What’s the point? Spo will coach them up, of course, because he’s a voodoo witch doctor, but a team saddled with the dead weight that is Hassan Whiteside and Tyler Johnson’s ballooning bombast of a contract and the contract of the seriously injured Dion Waiters is a waste of time.
And then there are the Portland Trail Blazers, whose 2nd-best player, C.J. McCollum, got into a long series of arguments this offseason online in which he said he’d rather get swept in the playoffs than go to a “super team,” and who seems to be getting quite good at that, given that the Blazers got absolutely embarrassed last spring in getting whomped 4-0 by the Pelicans in the first round of the playoffs, and haven’t won a playoff game since 2016. The Blazers punch above their weight during the regular season, are exquisitely coached by Terry Stotts and climbed to the 3-seed in the West last year, but this is always a turkey waiting to be carved. People keep saying the Dame/C.J. backcourt isn’t a winning formula, which is dumb, since the problem is the mediocre frontcourt that never gets addressed, but this team is still suffering from the hangover after the gin bender that was GM Neil Olshey investing $347 million in the summer of 2016 in contracts to the likes of Evan Turner and Myles Leonard, who is 7’1” and managed not to block a single shot last season. Stotts routinely saves his GM’s head with his coaching jobs, but the Blazers, despite being a 3-seed last season, were three games out of missing the playoffs entirely. The frontcourt still sucks, and the margin is so thin with this team that you could see them being a tangibly better team in 2018-19 and still missing the playoffs. My money is still on Stotts, however, to get this team into the playoffs, as he is quite accustomed to doing more with less. Which is an excellent segue into my next category …

Kings fans are delighted with their offseason.

6. Doing Less With Less
All of these teams are terrible, and scarcely worth my time.
The Clueless: Last season basically ended after 13 games for the Memphis Grizzlies when Mike Conley got hurt. That they were so dependent on one guy speaks to how pathetic this roster is. Conley is the last Grizzlies draft pick to get a second contract, and he was drafted more than a decade ago. The roster is so thin that if the oft-injured Conley, the grumpy Marc Gasol, and the waste-of-money that is $92m free agent Chandler Parsons get injured – which they seem likely to do – this team is DOA. I have zero faith in this team to stay healthy, and they are also saddled with J.B. Bickerstaff, a not particularly good coach who got the job primarily because he was cheap and available. They’re far more likely to lose 50 games than win 40. I’m amazed that GM Chris Wallace still has a job, given how terribly he’s gone about assembling a roster, and given that they’ve been losing about $40m a season, I worry for the future of the Grizzlies, who may very well wind up being Sonics 2.0 in Seattle if the Pelicans and, yes, the Clippers don’t see Seattle as a possible cash cow when the new arena opens two years from now.
The Hapless: The Atlanta Hawks are trying to be bad, and will succeed at that, likely to be the worst team in the league. But this past summer’s draft, in which they traded prodigy Luca Doncic to the Mavericks for Trae Young, is the sort of trade that ultimately gets GMs fired. Young is going to be bad for the Hawks, and that sucks. I read a ludicrous story this summer from Vegas Summer League from a Hawks fanboy talking about his “breakout game.” There are no breakout games in Summer League. Don’t kid yourselves. Young has condierable upside, of course, but is also going to be a target, having been foolishly laden with expectations after what was, ultimately, a marginal trade by his team at best. The Hawks will be awful.
The Hopeless: The Sacramento Kings are the dumbest franchise in the NBA, if not all of Nortb American professional sports. They can’t really tank this season, since they gave away their #1 draft pick in the dreaded Sauce Castillo trade with the 76ers. But even if they try, what difference does it make? They pulled a Sam Bowie sort of move in drafting Marvin Bagley with the #2 pick instead of Doncic, tabbing a guy who has no real discernible NBA skill to fit in with their endless run of non-impactful bigs. The Kings will play their asses off and probably play well enough late in the season against downtrodden teams to win some games and cost the Boston Celtics, who own their pick in next year’s draft, but at what point does anyone – and I mean anyone – in this organization realize that Vlade Divac is truly terrible at his GM job and that the small-change, mollify-the-quaint-fan-base-with-Kings-legends approach to running this team just isn’t conducive to being successful? If the Sacramento Kings didn’t exist, In Play Lose would have to invent them:

Sacramento Kings twitter is a wonderful and strange place

The Useless: The Phoenix Suns fired their GM, Ryan McDonough, a week before the season. This after firing coach Earl Watson three games into last season. Good God. Now, this is not to say that McDonough was good at his job. He wasn’t. He ran the franchise into the ground, he went from having too many point guards to having none, he turned three top-10 picks in the draft into Alex Len, Marquese Chriss, and Dragan Bender, who were three of the worst players in the NBA last season. He needlessly signed Devin Booker to a $133 million extension a year before he needed to, and when Booker turned up injured and needed surgery on his hand this summer, the Suns essentially had to write off this coming season before it started, even though they made a bunch of moves to indicate they were actually going to try to win. [Update: Booker is apparently going to be ready for the season opener, which is good news.] He’s been a terrible GM at the helm of a terrible franchise. But that last bit is the biggest point here. This is a terrible franchise, one which guys flee from at the first chance. Owner Robert Sarver is apparently more hands-on than ever, which is the kiss of death, as literally no one who leaves this franchise has anything good to say about how Sarver operates it. I hate this team. I hate everything about this team. They are everything wrong about North American sports, a team cynically exploited by a megalomaniac who suffers no real repercussions for putting out a terrible product year after year. Send this garbage franchise to the G-League. Or better yet, shoot it into the sun.

7. Blowhards
I have to admit, I love to kill these teams. You’ll note how many of these teams are in major media markets. All of them are self-important blowhards burdened with unreasonable expectations from zealous fan bases, and their tires generally get pumped by lapdog media.
Man, I’m going to love watching the L.A. Lakers be not very good this year. Okay, so they signed LeBron James in the offseason, and good for them for doing that. They also signed the biggest collection of misfits and jokers I’ve ever seen. The Lakers are, in keeping with their status of being the most-important story in the NBA, going to get lots of ink in spite of the fact that they have a 45-win roster. Lonzo Ball still can’t shoot, Brandon Ingram is a story only because he plays in L.A. – honestly, if he played for the Charlotte Hornets, would you care how good he is? They’ve signed a collection of clownshoes including Rondo, Lance Stephenson (on this roster only so LeBron doens’t have to be annoyed with him as an opponent), and JaVale McGee, who instantly sets this team as about the 13th-best team in the NBA’s Western Conference in terms of big men, which the Western Conference happens to be laden with – LMA, Jokic, AD, Gasol, Towns, Adams, Nurkic, DJ, Gobert, Ayton, and Draymond if the Warriors bother to play that way are all way better at center, and that’s off the top of my head. This is a very flawed roster. But this is also an era when NBA media is basically Pravda for the Lakers and we’re going to have to put up with every grade-on-the-curve story about how L.A. is somehow relevant, when they’re probably a 6-seed, at best. It’s only preseason and I’m already annoyed.
The New York Knicks are garbage, and this season, we’re going to hear nothing but how they’re going to sign KD and Kawhi and Jimmy Butler and every available free agent in the summer, in lieu of being any good in the present, especially because Porzingis is hurt. But why would anyone play for a team owned by Jim Dolan? Answer me that. Where is the upside in signing for this team? And Knicks fans deserve better than this. They do. But spending a season watching Tim Hardaway Jr. going 1-on-1 while Enis Kanter fails to guard his own shadow is going to kill the will to live of even the most diehard of Knicks fateful. I wouldn’t be shocked if this was the 2nd-worst team in the league.
The Chicago Bulls won’t stop anyone. God, this defense is absolutely horrible. Whatever improvement is seen on the offensive end, a team full of guys like Zac LaVine and Jabari Parker and Lauri Markkanen, none of whom can guard a chair, isn’t going anywhere. The Bulls are almost worthy of belonging in the fun bad category, as the games should be wildly entertaining, but the grand rebuild may not be as far along as everyone had hopes.
And, of course, there is no bigger blowhard in the NBA than OKC, who will, of course, promise big things with Russell Westbrook scowling a lot and going hall-bent-for-leather and putting up fluffy and puffy triple-doubles, but Russ had offseason “minor knee surgery” as did Paul George, and there is no such thing as “minor knee surgery,” and Andre Roberson, who keys their defense, suffered a patella tear last season, an injury the likes of which almost no NBA players ever recover. I’d be nervous about all of those injuries. On their day, the Thunder can compete with any team in the league. Off their day, they can’t beat the Phoenix Suns. The Thunder always make lots of noise and clamor to be relevant when, at best, they’re a 5-seed with a flawed roster that can’t make enough shots to advance past the first round of the playoffs. The delayed return of Roberson is huge, as he keys their defense – but if you’re team is so dependent on a guy who can’t shoot and scores little, you’ve got a problem. OKC are the ultimate much-ado-about-nothing group of blowhards in the NBA. At some point, the media who follows the NBA will hopefully stop pumping Russ’ tires and fawning over empty calorie statistics and acknowledge that a team constructed like this can never be all that good.

8. Putting the Fun in Dysfunctional
I love these teams. This is easy money for The Lose. This is all kinds of bad ideas played out on an NBA court, teams blessed with talent but zero awareness.
Well, the Cleveland Cavaliers used to be blessed with talent, but the circus has left town with LeBron taking his talents to the South Bay. LeBron’s presence always made for high drama, and the Cavs were constantly engaged in soap operas and chaos off the court, and sometimes on it, while he was there. I’ll miss all of the melodrama, because it was amusing. What LeBron’s left behind is, well, not a very good team. They had the point differential last season of a .500 team, only to be saved repeatedly by LeBron’s late game heroics in the clutch. Any time he’s been off the floor in recent years, the Cavs have been terrible. I don’t, for the life of me, understand why it is they felt a need to give Kevin Love an enormous extension, since he’s probably their only good trade piece among the guys on their bloated books. A roster tailor-made to compliment LeBron does not offer much without him. I’ve enjoyed the Cavs and it’s gonna be a bummer to see them floundering and flailing all season.
After being a tire fire last season, with players openly acting like they hate each other, the solution in Washington was, apparently, to throw more gasoline on the fire by adding Austin Rivers and Dwight Howard to the mix. Howard has had such a strange career, he was a sure-fire Hall of Famer who has morphed into this guy that teams just cannot wait to get rid of. Hopefully, some good health will come John Wall’s way this year, which would help matters quite a bit in Washington, but the Buzzards were an unfocused, disorganized mess most of last season, squandering what appeared to be a golden opportunity to gain some traction in the East.
And then there are the Minnesota Timberwolves. Be still my foolish heart. This team is actually going to attempt to play the season while there is a state of open warfare between its best players, Jimmy Butler and Karl-Anthony Towns, who clearly cannot coexist. There were all sorts of rumblings and rumors to that effect a season ago, a season which was a case study in how good you can be in spite of yourselves, as the Wolves possess so many guys who can create their own shot that it makes up for not having a single guy on the roster who can pass. And from what I can discern from the reporting, Butler’s discontent this summer, leading to his demanding a trade, stemmed from wanting a contract extension that the Timberwolves weren’t actually in a position to give him unless they dumped a tonne of money, which is weird. Why would you ask for something when you know you can’t get it, and then make a scene about not getting it? Also, for someone who keeps saying he’s “all about winning,” asking to be traded to the Knicks, Clippers, or Swamp Dragons doesn’t seem to jibe with that idea. Frankly, most everything Butler said in the conveniently-timed tell-all interview on ESPN after his practice escapade sounded like nonsense. It all feels contrived and insincere. And Thibs, of course, doesn’t want to trade him, since Thibs wants to win and, more importantly, has to win to keep his job, but then you have the meddlesome owner going around saying Butler is available in trade and undermining his top exec. What a zoo. Look, the fact is that if I’m an NBA coach or GM not named Thibs, I’m looking at this situation, where player A is 22 and a skilled big capable of going 50/40/90 and putting up 28 and 12, and player B is 29, has an injury history, and has developed a questionable rep as a locker room guy (remember, the Bulls were a disaster in Butler’s last year in Chicago), and I’m tying my fortunes to the former. I don’t care if he’s not assertive enough or what have you. He’s 22! He can get better! But there isn’t a less process-based person in all of the NBA than Thibs, which is why it probably wasn’t the best idea to give him an exec role alongside the head coaching gig. The Wolves have spun themselves into this impossible tangle, and sure there is a lot of natural talent on this roster – enough so that they might win 50 games without ever declaring détente – but you could also see them just completely disintegrating and losing 50 games as well. Seeing the Bucks put up 84 in the first half against them in their last preseason game was pretty disheartening. Everything about this mess is pointing towards it all going over a cliff.

9. Irrelevant
Seriously, what’s the point of the Orlando Magic?

Quick Misses

Graphic by @effinbirds. Always good to be back after a long break ...

THE LOSE is back, there are a few things on my mind and I have a short attention span, so quick, let’s get to the buzzard points!

• It’s hard to imagine someone having a worse start to their NFL career than Nathan Peterman has had. You may recall that, last year, he was thrust into the starting QB role midseason for the Buffalo Bills in a game against the San Diego Los Angeles Chargers and was woefully unprepared, throwing five interceptions in the first half. He then reprised the role of the woefully unprepared QB during the Bills’ playoff game with Jacksonville. (And simply typing the words ‘Bills’ and ‘playoff’ together made me do a double take.) Forced into the game in a key situation late in the 4th Quarter after Bills QB Tyrod Taylor was knocked out of the game, Peterman promptly threw a pick that essentially ended the Bills season. But Taylor’s off to Cleveland now and Bills head coach Sean McDermott entrusted Peterman at the helm to christen the new season against the Ravens, and with Peterman at the helm, he promptly ran the ship aground:

Putting up a 0.0 QB rating is impressively terrible. The last person to do that was in 2014, and it was Geno Smith for the Jets who, strangely enough, also managed to put up a perfect 158.3 QB rating later in the same season – which may be a sign of hope for Peterman and the Bills, because if Geno Smith can do that, then anyone surely can. (Though I suspect there was some some indifferent Miami defending going on that day.) Peterman’s day against the Ravens was so bad that, at one point, he threw an incompletion and his in-game QB rating actually increased. I have not encountered such absurd sports math since the time the time the Pacers were 103% favorites against the Sam Hinkie Sixers. It was 40-0 Ravens two minutes into the 3rd Quarter when Peterman was finally pulled by McDermott, who said afterwards that he would have to “look at the film” before determining the starting QB for this week’s game, as if there was going to be some sort of magical insight discerned besides that the QB is not very good. Bad QB play is nearly impossible to overcome in the NFL, and it’s the QB play which makes Buffalo one of the front runners for being the worst team in the league a season after a playoff berth which, in hindsight, feels almost like it was accident.

• There were two wholly predicable disasters in NFL Week 1, with the Bills being one of them and the second one taking place at Ford Field in Detroit, where the Lions got blasted by the Jets in an error-strewn mess of a game, after which the Jets players said they’d figured out the Lions play calls and hand signals before the game, which speaks to a lack of preparation and organization. Now, disorganization is nothing new to the Detroit Lions, of course, but they decided to take dysfunction to yet another level this past off-season when, after a few decent-but-unsuccessful seasons (which is about the best the Lions can hope for), they fired Jim Caldwell and promptly hired Matt Patricia who, when we last saw his handiwork, was the defensive coordinator for a New England Patriots team that allowed the Philadelphia Eagles to score eight times in the Super Bowl. Literally no one I know who follows the Pats was sad to seem him go, and no one I follows the Pats thinks he’s any good as a coach, as whatever defensive success has happened in New England in recent years owes to the fact that the best defense is a good offense – the Pats hold the ball a long time, gain a lot of yards and score a lot of points, so the defense doesn’t have to rise to any level above mediocrity in order for the team to be successful. And this is yet another one of those bizarre “coaching tree” hires where a team assumes that everyone on that other team that wins all the time must really know what they’re doing. Quick, name me a Bill Belichick protege who has ever had any success whatsoever outside of Foxboro. This was a classic dumb hire by a dumb organization, one that seems hell-bent on wasting the prime years of their franchise QB’s career. The Lions do not appear to have any idea what they are doing, which is something we have all come to count on over the years.

• We can no longer speak of the Cleveland Browns losing streak after their 21-21 tie with Pittsburgh. Now we must speak of their winless streak. In Cleveland, this constitutes progress.

• I generally don’t care about tennis, in part because, in my experience dealing with athletes over the years, tennis players and their people were probably some of the least pleasant and most difficult to deal with. That, and the game is a bore to watch. But disciples of The Lose have specifically requested that I comment on the incident which took place in the Women’s final of the U.S. Open, which I did not watch but have now done so, during which Serena Williams was penalized three times – first for “receiving coaching” from the stands, which was iffy and is a dumb rule, then a second time for smashing her racket, and then a third time late in the match for continuing to argue with the umpire about what happened when she was penalized the first time.
Oh boy.
Now, admittedly here, I don’t know much about tennis – but I do know that Serena is boss. She’s probably the best women’s tennis player of all time, given her résumé. Of this, I think I know. But I’ve found the backlash to this incident rather curious, since people seem to want to pick-and-choose in going about spinning whatever narrative suits them. There is sexism, there is racism, there is a double standard because so-and-so did such-and-such in a such-and-such a match and didn’t get penalized to the extent Serena did. Now, sexism and racism and double standards may well exist and probably do. That would not surprise me, but that’s not for me to say. But there is a basic principle here about officiating which applies to literally every sport and game on the planet, one which people would do well to remember.
Officiating is necessarily the subjective application by human beings of objective criteria. It is inherently interpretive, because human beings are doing it, and human beings are inherently affected by biases, whims, past histories, what time they woke up that morning and so on and so on and so on. And every single individual game or match is, ultimately, a self-contained affair. It is in the present and in the moment, and officials react in real time to what they see taking place before them. This is why comparing what Serena did in the U.S. Open Final to what “so-and-so did such-and-such in a such-and-such a match” is, ultimately, irrelevant. We heard this same sort of line time and again during the World Cup this summer: “that shouldn’t have been a penalty because it wasn’t in this other game,” and so forth. Well, officials aren’t watching that other game. They’re watching the game unfold in front of them right now and reacting to what they see.
Another good footballing analogy here is a serious foul where the official has to determine if it’s worthy of a yellow or a red card. Footballing fans everywhere have seen fouls where guys, or gals, should have been sent off and weren’t, or vice versa. It’s ultimately a judgment call by the official – but, in the case of something like the issuing of a yellow or a red, there is little doubt that the player is in some hot water.
And see, Serena got herself in hot water. I think the coaching thing is dumb. It’s dumb and pointless – but it is a rule. All three times that Serena was penalized, she was deemed, in my less-than-expert opinion, to be in violation of rules, no matter how dumb or inane those rules may be. And when you do that, you put yourself at the mercy of the officials. Whether or not they choose to enforce those codes is not up to you. By the letter of the law, the officials in that match acted in a manner afforded them in the rules of the game. If you get yourself into that situation it is, first and foremost, your own damn fault. This is a basic, universal principle of sport here: if you don’t want to have a foul called against you, the best way to go about doing so is not to commit a foul.
And think about this for a moment here: what if the officials in that match don’t penalize Serena? I can guarangoddamnty you that there would be a rumbling of “Serena gets all the breaks” in the aftermath, because we do that sort of thing all the time. It’s mostly sour grapes, of course, to whine about “stars get all the calls” and such. The rookie pitcher doesn’t get the pitch on the black, LeBron and Harden always travel, blah blah blah. Given the petty nature of this sort of thing, I can say with almost 100% certainty that there are women’s tennis players who are annoyed with what they perceive Serena can get away with, simply because she’s a star. And she is a star. She is arguably the biggest star the sport has ever known. She’s such a star that her losing this match in such a manner rendered her victorious opponent’s triumph irrelevant in the public consciousness. Quick, how many of you knew Naomi Osaka’s name without having to go and google it?
Now, in the greater context, if this incident does, in fact, point out issues pertaining to sexism and double standards in tennis officiating and those issues get addressed, some good may come of it. But on a fundamental level, I can’t really have much sympathy for Serena here. Ultimately, you don’t get to behave in a manner that runs afoul of the rules and then complain when those rules are enforced, even if you think there are shitty or dubious motives involved in that enforcement.

• The WNBA is badass, people. Watch that sport. Given the women’s basketball players in this country some love. They’re among the most dominant of athletes we’ll ever see in our lifetime. The U.S. women’s national team has won six straight Olympic golds and lost one game in the last 19 years. It is the pinnacle of performance in the sport of women’s basketball. The WNBA season which just concluded with the Seattle Storm winning their third championship was great, interest was up, and I appreciate that ESPN dedicated more attention and more resources to the league. Now we need to get more money in the league, so these players aren’t breaking their bodies playing year-round all across the globe in order to make a living. And I’m happy that in Seattle, they’ll get to close out the era (error?) of Key Arena with a championship. I’ve sent many, many, many, many, many days in that building, which is due to be razed here this fall as a new arena is going to be built.

• I’ve spent the whole goddamn summer drafting blog after blog after blog about how bored I am with the game of baseball. In short: Three True Outcomes baseball sucks. But I was so bored watching it that I also got bored writing about it, and there’d be a very good possibility that all of you would be bored reading about it.

• When you’re football team is condemned to the swirling, sucking eddy of despair that is life in the second division, you’d best find ways to have fun with it. Norwich are, well, not very good, owing mostly to the fact that, after not being very last year while nonetheless being blessed with several élite young talents, the club promptly sold those élite young talents for large numbers of quid – one of whom, James Maddison, has looked mighty fine so far for Leicester City – while maintaining the same roster full of mediocre players who were mediocre a season ago. It does bring me joy that Ipswich Town are garbage, and that the 1:1 with Norwich two weeks ago means those clowns still haven’t beaten us since 2009, but that’s about all to be happy about so far. Bleah, Div. 2 sucks. We do, however, have the Taco League going amongst myself, The Official Spouse of In Play Lose – a loyal Swansea City fan – and local Stoke City fan Mike “Words With” Frentz. Fan of the losingest team buys the tacos at the end of the season. If your team gets relegated, you buy twice. If your team gets promoted, you eat twice. Spouse is currently four points ahead of me after seven games, while Words With is two points in back of me. The first full-on, no-holds-barred, double-or-nothing grudge match occurs this Tuesday when Stoke host the Swans. If all our teams get relegated – not impossible, since all of our teams are varying degrees of trash – then we’ll, well, I don’t know what the others will be doing but I’ll be pouring some stiff ones:

 • It’s good to be back. Drop me a line at inplaylose@gmail.com if you have comments or suggestions. At some point we will do another mailbag edition here soon. And even though I’m still very down on American football, I’m sure there is some bad football happening somewhere on one of the many dozens of sports channels at the moment so I’d better get busy. (Go, Rutgers, go.) I already know there will be bad baseball today, since I’m going to the Giants game, although the Giants are undefeated in my trips to Phone Co. Park this season. We’ll see is the winning streak is sturdy enough to withstand the collective ennui and malaise.

It Will Get Better

THERE is no need for me to rehash the story of what the 11th of September means to me. The story is here. But I feel a need to speak today, during what has been deemed to be National Suicide Prevention Week. What I will continue to say, and do so to anyone who is listening in any corner of cyberspace is this: if you are suffering from depression, addiction, or other forms of mental illness, get help. Seriously, it will be the day that your life starts to get better. I promise you, it will get better. Take it from me, who survived. Take it from the countless people who have confided in me over the past 12 years, have come looking to me for advice and assistance, and who have managed to make it. It is hard, it takes patience, it can be really frustrating, but it will get better. I promise you, it will get better.

I have a whole bunch of things to recap and rehash here on the blog from the past few days, but for right now, I just feel like playing some beautiful music. I love this guy's work. Peace and love.

Programming Note

HONORING the French winning the World Cup, The Lose decided to make like all right-minded Frenchmen – seeing as how I aspire to be one someday – and take the month of August off. There is not a whole lot to write about during the month of August, anyway, save for baseball, except that I found baseball so boring these days that all I want to write about is how boring it is in intricate detail.

I did make a trip to the Eastern bureau of In Play Lose, which was worthwhile:

The In Play Lose Eastern bureau

Anyway, I thought I would respond to several inquiries I have had recently about the lack of Lose of late. I have been busy working on novels, graphic design projects and an assortment of other things during this hiatus, but rest assured, the Lose will be back swinging soon. As always, you can drop me a line at inplaylose@gmail.com, and we should probably have another mail bag edition here at some point this fall. And I will always consider guest columns from Friends of the Lose, of course. (One of whom has promised me a column about his beloved Washington Capitols finally winning it all, although I suspect he may have made like Ovechkin and swan-dived into a fountain of beer in response and may no longer be with us.)

I hope you have had a good summer filled with productive outs and moral victories.