IT’S SHAPING up to be one of the most exciting playoff races in years out West in the NBA – at least from the perspective of In Play Lose, of course, where we judge everything on the premise of “if it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing badly.” And there is so much bad basketball at the moment out west. Be still my foolish heart.
As you can see from this snapshot of the West standings, a 6½ game crevasse has developed after currently 7th-seeded OKC, with all eight remaining Western clubs having fallen into the abyss. The Blazers are presently on pace to lose 50 games, and they’re currently the best of this lost – and by “best,” I mean “least bad.” And as you can see from the streak column – L1, L3, L5, L3, etc. – it’s not as if anyone is exactly rising to the challenge.
Now, let’s be honest here: being the 8th seed in the NBA playoffs is not going to end well. In the East, you’re going to get beat on by the Cavs, and it will be a swift and ugly exit. But at least in the East, there are a whole bunch of teams for which getting that 8th seed would wind up resembling some progress in the bigger picture. If you’re the Bucks or the Pistons – a couple of young teams still looking to grow – getting that spot and getting out there for four playoff games would be a valuable learning tool. If you’re the Buzzards, who started so badly this year, reviving your season and being #8 at season’s end is something that you can take as a positive. If you’re the Knicks or the Bulls – two storied franchises perpetually awash in tabloidesque media coverage – at least an 8th seed can slightly mollify the fan bases during what appear to be transition years. The fan bases in New York and Chicago are demanding, but they also want to see some progress from last year, and either team making the playoffs, with their strangely constructed short-term rosters, would ultimately constitute as such.
But in the West, meanwhile, everyone is terrible. This group of eight is six kinds of crap, and the Warriors and going to beat into the ground whomever comes out of here. And this, of course, begs the question: who really wants to be the 8th seed? If you’re the 8th seed, you’re out of the lottery, for starters, so that means you’ve got a meh sort of draft pick this coming summer. (If you’ve got a pick at all, I should say. The Kings may finally lose their first round pick to the Bulls this summer as a result of a comically awful trade that happened in 2011.) Clearly, you’re not very good, and being the least bad by season’s end is not really what you want to hang your hat on.
I’m inclined to leave the Dallas Mavericks out of this discussion, a first-rate organization who is just having one of those injury-laden disasters of a season where nothing goes right and you just have to write it off, except that they’re only four games out of a playoff spot at the moment. There is no benefit whatsoever to an older team like Dallas getting the 8th seed, at this point. None whatsoever. You’re better off being lousy and restocking with better draft picks. But apparently Dallas just can’t get bad enough, because as terrible as their season as been, the rest of the pack in the West just keeps coming back to them.
You can probably also write off the Lakers here, since after a bright start, the injuries set in and the realities of such a young and inexperienced team caught up with them. Young teams in the NBA tend to get really jacked up and frisky for games against the big guns in the league. As such, they win a few here and there – particularly because the big guns don’t view them as a long-term threat and, as such, they don’t give a shit about a one-off result. But it’s the teams in the middle of the pack, teams that need to take it seriously, that absolutely kill teams like the Lakers – and the NBA is full of games against teams in the middle of the pack, usually in quick succession and often on long road trips which start out bad and end up worse. So the Lakers have sunk and are now about where we thought they’d be – a fun kind of bad team that’s focusing on the long-term process and looking to win in the 25-30 range – but again, everyone else around them in the West has been so awful that the Lakers are still sniffing around the playoffs. They might at least win a game against the Dubs in the playoffs, simply because all it seems to take to stop Steph Curry from making shots is to lay down the Lakers floor inside the Staples Center, but they’d also be likely to give up about 150 in one of the games, since the defense is awful.
If there’s a common thread among most of these teams trapped in the muck at the bottom of the Western Conference trash heap, it’s that the defenses are dreadful. The Lakers are 29th in the NBA in defensive rating. The Blazers are 30th. We’ve already been over how Minnesota’s best players can’t guard anyone. Denver’s games have turned into track meets here of late, as their defensive-oriented yet entirely pragmatic head coach Mike Malone has come to realize that his team can’t stop anybody, and so he’s better off trying to win games entirely with offense. This ploy has always been a good idea in Denver, actually, given the not insignificant advantage of hosting one-off games against road-weary teams at a mile high altitude. But you have to offer up at least some resistance. NBA guys can run all day, and will enthusiastically fill layup lines if given the opportunity. A recent possible 1-8 playoff preview proves instructive here – the Nuggets put up 119 on the Dubs and made some pretty nifty plays, but at no point in this game were the Dubs ever even remotely threatened. They could score pretty much any time they wanted to. Oh look! Dunks! Layups! Whee!
The two franchises I think would want this spot the most – the Kings and the Pelicans – do so entirely for financial reasons, as they want to get a couple of playoff home games’ worth of revenue out of the deal. The Kings want the spot the most and probably need the spot the least. In another preview of a possible 1-8 playoff matchup last night, Golden State put in about 15 minutes of effort and it was enough to beat the Kings by double digits on the Kings home floor. Oh, the Kings got off to a good start, but then Boogie decided to pick a fight with the furniture and get himself T’d up, and the Warriors, of course, being the savvy bunch that they are, know very well that when Boogie throws a tantrum like that he is never, ever going to get another call from the zeebs, so Zaza just pushed him around the rest of the game while KD would try to slide over and swat every one of Boogie’s shots into the Sierra foothills, and Boogie of course didn’t get any calls and got frustrated and the Kings lost all focus, at which point the Dubs just ran away from them in predictable fashion.
The Kings roster is horrible, littered with useless bigs and laden with wasted high draft picks of yore (former Top 10 picks Willie Cauley-Stein and Ben McLemore were both DNP-CD against the Dubs on Sunday night), and as we just mentioned, they’re likely going to lose that first round pick to the Bulls. But the Kings are desperate to be seen as being relevant again, and also desperate to make some of the revenue they gave away when their cockamamie ownership group made the deal with the devil that is David Stern in order to buy the franchise. And this desire to feast on the crumbs of relevance, of course, will likely prevent the Kings from doing what they should do, which is to try to restart the franchise through trading Boogie and Rudy Gay, both of whom want out already.
The Pelicans, meanwhile, started 0-and-forever but have been about a .500 team since Jrue Holiday came back – which shows just how good Anthony Davis really is, because Holiday’s addition brought the number of actual useful NBA players on this roster up to two, and it’s amazing what two guys can do when one of them knows what they’re doing and the other is Anthony Davis. And I can see the Pelicans trying to make a move here before the trade deadline, because what have you got to lose? The franchise is moribund, Milk Shake Arena is less lively than a New Orleans cemetery, you’ve got a lot of sunk cost in perpetually injured players live Tyreke Evans and Quincy Pondexter, you’ve got more holes in this roster than Swiss cheese, but just getting a third guy out there on the floor who knows what the hell they’re doing might be good enough to get you the 8th seed, get some extra playoff cash and build some positivity going forward.
And, of course, the reason this all is even an issue is the fact that Portland have been terrible. Portland were a 5th seed in the playoffs last year, and played five wildly entertaining playoff games against the Warriors during the second round of the playoffs. It seems somewhat surprising that the Blazers are suddenly this bad, but it probably shouldn’t be, because no one thought the Blazers would be that good a year ago. I mean, if you looked at the Blazers at the start of last year, they didn’t make much sense. The front court is so-so, the center position is a mystery, the defense is bad, and somehow this team is going to win 44 games by having two smallish guards shooting lights out from deep? Yeah, OK, good luck with that – but then they went and did just that, which was pretty awesome to watch. Well, OK, so now we move forward a season, and Dame and C.J. are still great shooters in the backcourt, but the front court is still so-so, the center position is no longer a mystery – instead, it’s just not very good – and the defense is still bad. Regression to the mean is a bitch.
And the Blazers compounded the disaster in the offseason by doling out awful free agent contracts. They signed Evan Turner for too much, who they don’t need and who has been terrible. They then felt forced to match the gaudy offer sheet the Nets threw at third guard Allen Crabbe, who was a restricted free agent. Restricted free agency is one of the great troll jobs in all of sports. If you have money to burn, you throw a whole bunch of it at a guy you think another team can’t afford to lose, and put the onus on them to match and suck up the costs. The Blazers did this very thing a few years ago when they made a huge offer to Enis Kanter, which OKC then had to swallow and match, which is how the normally market-savvy Zombies wound up with a $73m backup center who cannot guard anyone. So the Blazers went and matched the offer sheet to third guard Crabbe, apparently suffering from an immediate buyer’s remorse at signing potential third guard Turner, and then tried to solve their defensive issues by signing Festus Ezeli from the Warriors – who didn’t want him anyway, because he has bad knees, and to the surprise of absolutely no one, Ezeli is now out for the year with knee issues that, unfortunately, may never fully heal. What doesn’t make sense about any of this is that none of these guys, ultimately, make the Blazers that much better. They’ve now capped themselves out and still have the same sorts of issues they had before, having simply papered over the cracks a season ago but not solved any of the problems. In terms of actual difference-making talent, the Blazers seem to have more of it than any of these other teams, and you would think Portland might figure it out and separate from these others, but they cannot get on any kind of a winning run because the defense is so bad that they lose too many games they should win.
Now, bad playoff teams are nothing new in sports, of course. We’ve had two cases, in recent years, of sub-.500 teams winning their division in the NFL and hosting playoff games – and then winning those games, in fact, with one of those games being memorable and the other being probably the worst playoff game in NFL history (see the third buzzard point). The L.A. Kings were a sub-.500 team during the regular season when they first won the Stanley Cup. The indignity of the work stoppage which wiped out the 1994 World Series spared baseball from another indignity, which was that the AL West was so bad that year that the Rangers were leading the division despite being 10 games under .500. And in the NBA, most historians recall MJ going off for 63 against the Celtics in 1986, but most people forget that the Bulls were 30-52 that year. Everything is cyclical in sports, and sometimes this is how the leagues stratify. There’s good and bad. Sometimes, there’s good and really bad with not much in between.
And 8th seeds have won playoff series in the NBA, of course (sigh but also yay), but generally those teams have been decent and simply wound up #8 because of the quality above them. This does not apply to the state of this year’s West. These teams are absolutely awful. It’s comedy gold. The only thing successful here is me getting through this entire blog post without talking about the Phoenix Suns. The less said about the Suns, the better.
WE ARE approaching the halfway point of the NBA season, and we’re starting to see, at least in the West, everyone starting to slot themselves. The gap between the good and the bad in the West is HUGE, with a 5½ game spread between the 7th and 8th place spots in the conference, which is only ½ game smaller than the gap from the LOL Kings, in 8th place, down to the Phoenix Suns, who are dead last. The East, meanwhile, is kind of muddled – only 6 games separate 3rd place from 12th, and the table shakes up completely seemingly every couple of days or so. So basically, pretty much everyone save for the 76ers and the Nets, and maybe the Miami Heat, is only a good 2-week stretch of basketball away from being in the playoff race.
Now, that’s not the same thing at all as being realistically in the playoff race, of course. The Phoenix Suns can scarcely string together two possessions of good basketball in a row, much less two weeks. But playing a sport successfully – which every NBA player does simply to reach that level – is based on a certain level of optimism and belief. Part of why I always resented Sam Hinkie so much when he was running the 76ers is that, with his actions and his attitudes, he very clearly viewed the guys that he was employing on his roster as crap. He thought they were crap and wanted them to be crap. He set them up to fail. Players always play to win. There are guys on 30 teams in the NBA who firmly believe that they can make the playoffs this year. If you don’t have that killer instinct, you’re not going to be any good at the game. It’s the management that sometimes play to lose, and sometimes this is couched in the nonsense about “taking the long view.” It seems somewhat two-faced and cynical, if you ask me, but I can understand why it is that they do this, even if I don’t like it.
But at the moment, there are a whole bunch of teams on both sides of the continent clamoring to get into the playoffs, which means that all of the machinations going on behind the scenes are even more complicated than is the norm. As we move through the next couple of months here, it’s going to be interesting to see how the trade market shakes out, since there will be an abundance of posturing and positioning going on, but it’s hard to say who is actually going to make any moves. The trade deadline (and for The Lose’s international audience, you can think of this as the transfer window) is one of the more fascinating elements of sports, in that it brings a whole lot of issues to the forefront that can, in one fell swoop, immediately be addressed. Maybe this team needs a point guard, maybe this team over here wants to move a soon-to-be free agent. Questions about economics, public relations, and organizational philosophy come to the forefront. For anyone who studies the management of the game, this is one of the more fascinating elements.
For example, let’s take the Toronto Raptors in the NBA. The Raptors have lost a little ground here in recent weeks, as they’ve been forced on a seemingly endless road trip over the holidays thanks to the inanity that is the World Junior Hockey Championships taking place in their home building. (And yes, my Canadian friends, caring so much about high school kids is stupid. And yes, we care far too much about high school football in this country.) The Raptors have slipped back a little bit on this road trip from hell, but at 23-11, they are in second place in the East, only three games behind the Cavaliers in the standings.
And the Raptors have been terrific this season. They have a historically good offense, posting an offensive rating better than any team in recent memory save for this year’s Warriors. They are a bit of an oddball team in that their two best players – Kyle Lowry and DeMar DeRozan – are ball-dominant guards who play together and go about succeeding in old-school ways. Lowry is slow, can’t jump, and yet he is one of the smartest players in the game, one of the game’s best technicians, and has become an élite level shooter. DeRozan, meanwhile, is all mid-range and driving to the basket, bucking all NBA trends of shooting from deep. The rest of the team is complimentary players, role players who are comfortable without the ball and able to play off of DeRozan and Lowry. The talent on the rest of the roster is both deceptively good and deceptively lacking: they have a lot of glue guys and versatile guys able to fill roles, but not a lot of other shotmakers or playmakers. But as a unit, the Raps function remarkably well.
But not quite well enough. This is a team which had only won one playoff series in 20 years before reaching the Eastern Conference finals last spring, where they were beaten by the Cavs in six games and the series never really felt that close. But Toronto is even better this year, as both Lowry and DeRozan are shooting exceptionally well, but are they good enough to beat the Cavs in the playoffs?
A better question would be to ask if beating the Cavs in the playoffs is even a goal, because the Raptors are selling out their home games in National Airline Center No Spell It the British Way Centre, and Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment Ltd., who owns the Raps, are pretty happy at the moment with their profit margins, and #fearthenorth became a thing last spring as the Toronto sports fans, desperate for anything good after several decades of abject misery, turned out en masse to fill up the fan zones outside the arena during the playoff push last season. The Raptors are good, really good even, but how good is good enough? Does the club want to be champions, or are they happy winning 55 games a season and making reasonable playoff pushes? This is the balancing act we spoke about a little bit in this Lose post from last spring, where we asked the question of would you be happy with your team always being good, or would you prefer they had it all come together in some sort of one-off event to win a title. Further complicating matters is that the 31-year-old Lowry is due to be a free agent this coming summer, and will likely command a 5-year, max contract upwards of $175 million or more. His age is a bit of a red flag, but he’s blossomed into an all-NBA player and an Olympic dream teamer in Toronto and led the Raps to lofty heights they’ve never known, so they probably have to bite the bullet and re-sign him, just as they had to do with DeRozan last year. But as we saw with Kevin Durant this past summer, there are no guarantees you are going to do that. Assuming that they do re-sign Lowry, however, he is still in his prime but his game, while being relatively age-proof since he does not base it on athleticism, is still likely going to start to decline in his 30s. Both he and DeRozan are at their peak of performance right now.
So if you’re Toronto, and you’re three games behind the Cavs in the East, and you have two of the best guys in the NBA in DeRozan and Lowry in their absolute primes of their career. Do you make a move? Do you decide to go for it, try to challenge for the title? And if so, is there a move you can make which can do that? And Toronto has pieces to trade if they want. They have some good players on good contracts, they have young prospects with upside, they have a decent collection of draft picks after some shrewd moves in the past. Do you go for it?
And if you decide to go for it, who do you try to get? The most obvious candidate is Paul Millsap in Atlanta, who will be a free agent this summer and has shown little interest in re-signing with the Hawks, who are one of those teams that bounce between 5th and 9th in the East standings depending upon their mood and the day of the week. Millsap is a stretch four, which fills a need for the Raps, who lack rebounding and could use more shooting and tend not to play much defense, but if you add Millsap, is it going to be enough to challenge the Cavs and LeBron, who has been systematically stealing Millsap’s lunch money in the playoffs the past couple of seasons.
OK, so if you’re the Raps, maybe Millsap won’t get you past the Cavs and the cost in a trade will be steep, so why don’t you think bigger? Hell, you’ve got Drake bumbling about on the sidelines pretending like he’s a part of the organization, so why not put him to use and get his people to call some people and work the back channels, and maybe call up Boogie’s people in Sacramento … not that Sacramento is going to trade him right now, seeing as how they’re the 8th seed in the West at the moment and no franchise would more happily be the 8th seed and get stomped all over by the Warriors than the Kings, but let’s say the Kings do what they usually do this time of year and completely crater and succumb to utter dysfunction over the next couple of weeks. Boogie hates it there, he’s been a malcontent and he’s given no indication he’ll re-sign in Sac in 2018 no matter how many banks they break to sign him. He’s also the best damn center in the NBA. Would he fit in Toronto? Hell, you’d make him fit. When you’re talking about an élite talent like DeMarcus Cousins, you go about finding ways to make him fit. And the Kings are dumb, of course, they’re one of the dumbest franchises in the league, so you might be able to “win” the trade by giving up 2-3 players and a #1 pick, since otherwise Boogie walks in 2018 and the Kings get nothing for him.
If you’re Toronto, do you make that call to the Big Tomato and talk trade? It can’t hurt, can it? When he was the GM of the Sonics in the early 1990s, Bob Whitsitt used to joke about how every time he had some reason to call Chicago, he made it a point to ask if Michael Jordan was available. The responses ran the gamut from, “Bob, you’re crazy,” to “Bob, you’re drunk,” but the point is that he was always willing to ask.
There are lots of trade rumors that float about, along with lots of really bad proposed trades but forth by rosterbators, a lot of whom don’t seem to understand just how complex this stuff really is. You have to have something to trade and, perhaps more importantly, the other side has to have a reason to want to trade with you. The Celtics have seemingly a million assets at their disposal for making a deal, the two juiciest of which are the rights to swap draft positions with the Nets this summer, and the Nets #1 pick in 2018 – by-products of one of the more confounding trades in NBA history. But just because you have those assets, it doesn’t mean you necessary have to, or want to, make a deal. Boston could theoretically dangle those two goodies out there and forge a trade for just about anyone in the league – or they could sit back and see a horrible Nets team flounder the next two years and possibly get a pair of top-3, or even #1 overall, draft picks out of the deal.
The Millsap-to-Toronto idea makes sense – the Raptors could use a guy with Millsap’s skill set, while the Hawks would be better off getting something in return as opposed to letting him walk in the summer – but both teams have a history of being somewhat conservative and risk averse when it comes to trades, particularly during the season. Both want to “win” all the trades, so the deal might not make sense in that regard, and maybe these aren’t an ideal pair of trade partners. It’s hard for Toronto to “win” a Millsap trade, simply because trying to make that trade implies a certain level of necessity. If Atlanta knows Toronto is going all-in and truly trying to compete with the Cavs in the East, the Hawks’ asking price is going to get higher. This is what we mean when we talk about trading from positions of strength and weakness. It’s part of why any sort of honest assessment of Hinkie’s tenure in Philadelphia should never include the line “he won all the trades,” because his fundamental objective for three years was to lose all of the games, and it’s easy to win trades when you’re not actually trying to win any games. Now the 76ers have a mismatched roster and have to make a deal, but everyone knows they have to make a deal, so the asking price for a Nerlens Noel – lost on the bench on Philly, but still young and with some upside – continues to get lower and lower. The 76ers are dealing from a position of weakness, and are unlikely to win that trade.
It’s not just as simple as swap Player A for Player B. Everyone has an agenda and everyone has an objective. Franchises are all at different stages and different places, so what’s best for one team isn’t what’s best for another – and what’s best for a franchise can suddenly shift and swerve. The Kings are a good example of this: Boogie has been uncoachable at times, he’s gotten coaches fired, he’s quarreled with everyone and not exactly been a great teammate, and he’s shown no interest in staying in Sac after his contract expires. They also have Rudy “Welcome to Hell” Gay who is desperate to leave, so much so that he decided to actually start playing well this year in order to turn himself into trade bait and make himself more attractive to other teams. Both these guys should probably be moved in the long-term interests of the franchise, and probably should be moved immediately so as to maximize their value.
But then the Kings start winning a few games here and there, mostly because of Gay being good and Boogie being great, and thanks to the Blazers being awful and unable to guard their own shoes, and thanks to Denver being young and dumb and Minnesota being younger and dumber, the Kings now find themselves in a playoff position, which is a position they haven’t been in forever. So now you cannot possibly justify making those sorts of deals, you can’t justify it to the fans who’ve been filling the arena for the past 10 years and had nothing to show for it. Hell, instead of being sellers at the deadline, the Kings might actually be buyers if they had something to trade which anyone else wanted. Which they don’t, but you get my point. The market has changed simply because the circumstances have changed. Now, if the Kings implode and go something like 9-16 between now and the end of February, it will change again. You’ve got a moving target here, so how the hell are you going to be able to make a deal?
OK, so who else needs to make a deal? OKC, for starters. Russell Westbrook is playing at a level the likes of which we’ve rarely seen, averaging nearly a triple-double a game. And he has to play that well in order for OKC just to be decent, never mind good. Westbrook has 16 triple-doubles and OKC are 13-3 when he registers one. When he doesn’t, they’re 8-12. OKC are 21-15 on the season, with a schedule that’s been home-friendly so far and laden with bad teams, and most of those wins have been close games, games that wind up being close because they manage Westbrook’s minutes in OKC, sacrificing 10-15 of the game in which their back up unit gets killed with the idea in mind that Russ will somehow save them down the stretch. And by “save them,” I mean that he will literally take every single shot in the last 4:00 of the game if he has to. Given that the offense has basically one option, it’s both a testament to Westbrook’s ability and something of a miracle that OKC has that many wins at all.
Russ is winning games on his own, which is unsustainable. OKC needs to get this man some help. They have a roster filled with redundancy, filled with specialists and technicians and one-note players – a roster, in short, built around the idea that they would still have Westbrook and Durant. Above all else, they desperately need some shooting. The defenses are so packed in that there isn’t much room to operate. OKC needs shooting.
Them and about 25 other teams, which means that shooting is expensive. OKC’s ethos is that they want younger players with some cost certainty attached since, you know, they’re a small market and can’t sign free agents and blah blah blah. So where are you going to find a guy who fits that profile? And what do you have to offer in return? OKC’s best trade chip is probably Kanter, a guy with great offensive skill but a guy who can’t guard his own shadow whom they’re paying way too much to be a backup center, but whose contract on a team where he’s a starting center would be a bargain. But what does a guy like that bring you in return? Teams that have shooting, in general, don’t need more offense – they need defense, of which Kanter plays none. The most logical trading partner for OKC might theoretically be Phoenix, partly because the Suns are garbage and going nowhere, partly because the Suns are stupid and eminently fleecable, and partly because they do, in fact, have some shooting on that team that might be for sale, but Kanter doesn’t work in Phoenix because the Suns already have a glut of big men – albeit none who are any good – and they don’t need to add yet another one. And what does adding another shooter ultimately get OKC? Are they that much better in the long run? Maybe you wind up a 5-seed in the playoffs in the best-case scenario, but adding one guy isn’t going to make you good enough to compete with the Dubs and the Spurs and the Rockets, so the price you pay might not be worth it.
OKC would be likely be looking to make a deal like that with next year in mind, which pretty much throws away all of the exceptional work that Westbrook is doing in the here and the now – work which, in the here and the now, still isn’t good enough. And herein lies the dilemma. This is the ultimate juggling act going on, as your team tries to figure out your objectives for now, for next year, and the year after that, and do it all in one moment in time, when you can’t possibly know what the future has in store. No one in the NBA, and I mean no one in the NBA, could have ever foreseen the confluence of events which ultimately led to Kevin Durant becoming a Golden State Warrior. All of this is educated guess work.
Teams in baseball, in general, tend to be a bit more aggressive at the trade deadline, with buyers being willing to take on short-term rentals and sellers being willing to dump salary, but this is due entirely to baseball being an open market where guys move much more freely in free agency from team to team in the offseason. If a short-term guy doesn’t work out, he moves on and you spend in the offseason. In the NBA and NHL, you also have endless complications of the salary cap to think through, and in-season trades of players in the NFL is almost unheard of. Soccer is a bit different, in that’s is a straight buy/sell proposition and contract swaps almost never happen, but the same sorts of complications arise primarily due to the players have even more power and ability to dictate movement internationally than they do in any of the North American-based sports. Two of the bottom-feeders in the EPL this year, Swansea and Hull, wound up in the same really awful situation this past summer where they had no available money to buy players, since the clubs were in the process of being sold, but then some of their current players (and in the case of Swans, their best players) wanted to leave and the clubs felt compelled to sell in order to maximize their value – which has, unsurprisingly, left both clubs short on talent and short on options, and ultimately far short on wins and points in the table. And you don’t get a #1 pick if you finish last in the EPL. They throw your ass out of the league and you get to rebuild with £200 million less of a budget as you wander aimlessly through the malaise of the second division.
But I sort of feel like that in a place like Toronto, the future is now. Maybe a Millsap deal doesn’t give you more than a 20% of beating the Cavs come spring time, but the low-percentage play is still better than the no-percentage play. Maybe you make a bold move like that and make up that 3-game deficit and sneak in for the #1 seed, which would give you that extra home game. Maybe you force the Cavs to work harder than they want to for the next few months, since the Cavs seem perfectly content to coast through the season at the moment, exuding lots of energy only when necessary. Standing pat with the team that you have isn’t going to get you anywhere next year, either – neither the Cavs nor the Warriors are going anywhere, so you’ll have the exact same issues. And you’ve spent years trying to rid the franchise of the moniker of an NBA version of Siberia. Toronto is cool now, it’s become a basketball town and you can lure guys there to play – and one of the best ways to lure guys there to play, as well as keep the guys you have, is show yourself to be a franchise that wants to be a big player come springtime, because ultimately players want to win more than they want almost anything in life. I don’t know what you do here. The Raptors are much like the Clippers, in that they’ve moved from the realm of always being terrible to the realm where they can be disappointing on a higher level. Failure on higher levels is still ultimately failure, and the window for success shuts more swiftly than you may realize.
Welcome to Jacksonville. Good luck. You’re going to need it.
ONE of the biggest days of the year in Lose occurs the day after the NFL regular season ends, when teams cut bait, cut their losses and clean house. We’re up to six head coaching vacancies already, which is almost a third of the league. Three coaches had already gotten axed during the regular season – Gus Bradley in Jacksonville, Jeff Fisher in Los Angeles, and Rex Ryan with the Buffalo Bills, who promptly showed their general enthusiasm for this season by getting waxed by the Jets in a loss that included quite possibly the dumbest play we’ll see all of 2017. You can add San Diego’s Mike McCoy to the list, as well as Chip Kelley in San Francisco, who was fired along with GM Trent Baalke in the classic bumbling 49ers fashion whereby they go about leaking it to the media before ever talking to anyone whose about to lose his job.
The sixth vacancy is in Denver, where Gary Kubiak is stepping away for personal reasons, and there are likely to be more: Sean Payton may be a hotter commodity outside of New Orleans than within, and may try to finagle out of his contract if the Saints don’t can him first; there are rumblings of discontent with Chuck Pagano in Indianapolis; the Potatoes sure look like they have quit on Jay Gruden in Washington, given how poorly they played in a must-win game against a Giants team with nothing to play for and their minds somewhere off the Florida Coast; and who the hell knows what the Jets are going to do?
J-E-T-S MESS MESS MESS!
So if you’re an aspiring NFL head coach, it’s time to get that résumé in order – or, if you’re an ex-coach, it’s time to go into spin control mode and try to position yourself to get another gig. And welcome to the mess, because wherever you go, it’s likely to be one.
Being a head coach in the NFL has to be one of the worst jobs imaginable. Your life’s work is judged in the public eye on a weekly basis in black and in white: a loss is a loss, and the results speak for themselves. You’ve got a huge base of customers – not just fans, mind you, but paying customers who but their asses in seats eight times a season – who will second-guess everything you do, win or lose. You’ve got rich fat cat bosses who can’t help but meddle and interfere with what you’re trying to do. You’ve got GMs and personnel guys over your head whose job it is to provide you with the talent necessary to be successful, and quite possibly have a far different opinion of what constitutes talent than you do, and then you have 53 players that you’re responsible for, all of whom think, to some degree or another, that you’re a tool. It’s perhaps because the job is so bad in the first place that there are so few people who seem to be any good at it.
I mean, let’s be honest here, who out there in the NFL who still has a head coaching job is someone that all of us armchair QBs would actually argue is “good” at his job? I passed this question along to Scott Pianowski, The Official NFL Guru of In Play Lose, since he follows the league a whole lot closer than I do and, from my distant and somewhat detached vantage point, it sure as hell seems like a lot of these guys don’t know what they’re doing.
We tried to compile a list of NFL head coaches that we like and this what we came up with: Mike Tomlin in Pittsburgh and John Harbaugh in Baltimore immediately came to mind. I think Bruce Arians has done pretty well in Arizona while Scott suggested Andy Reid, who gets pilloried every time he mismanages the game clock but has successfully won both with the Iggles and the Chefs. We both think Adam Gase and Dan Quinn have shown some good things in Miami and Atlanta, respectively. And then it gets a little murky. Marvin Lewis? Well, Cincinnati was a joke before he got there, and now they’re merely disappointing. Then there are a whole bunch of guys – Mike McCarthy in Green Bay, Jack Del Rio in Oakland, Ron Rivera in Carolina – where it’s hard to discern if it’s a case of good coaching or simply really good QB play. And the rest? Meh.
But to me, at least, Bill Belichick and Pete Carroll are on an entirely different level – and Belichick and Carroll are interesting test cases for what constitutes great coaching in the NFL.
Belichick is the ultimate shape-shifter, his schemes constantly adapting depending upon personnel and the ways that the NFL is trending. If you look over his tenure at New England, you’ll notice just how frequently he adapts, particularly on the offensive end: they’ll emphasis power running one year, scat back receivers in the slots the next, and then they might go with two big tight ends and a centralized passing game after that. He’s always zigging where people are zagging, coming up with new looks and wrinkles on the offensive end. He is always looking for players with high football IQs who can be versatile, able to transfer over to multiple positions to fill whatever need arises.
Carroll, meanwhile, has built a near dynast in Seattle by emphasizing defense and physicality while imposing the tenor and the tempo of the game upon its opponents. The Seahawks have gone about redefining the sorts of physical specs you want in players. They want big corners, swift linebackers, and linemen who are high-energy players that he can constantly rotate and keep fresh. Carroll’s approach emphasizes having position coaches on his staff who are excellent teachers, believing first and foremost that skills and techniques can be taught. As such, the Seahawks have constantly been able to restock their talent base. It can look a bit ugly on the field at times, as young players are obviously engaged in some intense on-the-job training, but eventually they figure it out and the Seahawks go back to whacking people.
Keep in mind, both the Pats and the Seahawks are perpetually drafting in the 20s, if not the 30s. Literally every team in the league has a better shot of landing players through the draft, and yet the Pats and Seahawks keep drafting in the 20s and the 30s year after year because they keep winning all of the time. And we should also keep in mind that Belichick and Carroll both got fired from their first head coaching jobs. Carroll got fired twice, in fact – in 1994 after a 6-10 season with the Jets, and then in 1999 after three seasons coaching the Patriots, where he was replaced by … Belichick, who’d failed miserably in Cleveland, winning only a single playoff game and antagonizing the entire Browns fan base in the process with his impromptu cutting of starting QB and local hero Bernie Kosar. I mentioned previously that I attended the first post-Kosar Browns game, which was against the Seahawks at the Giant Concrete Mushroom Fungus in Seattle, and it was one of the worst football games I’ve ever seen. At no point did it seem like either the Browns or Belichick knew what they was doing. So as you can see, this isn’t an exact science by any means. The guys who are clearly the best also screwed up a lot and, after failing at previous jobs, there was naturally a bit of skepticism in Boston and Seattle about being hired to their present job.
But if you go back to that list we put forth above – which, admittedly, we sort of just threw together off the top of our heads – that’s not a lot of guys. That’s far fewer guys then there are jobs. In the NFL, just like any other business, it appears to be hard to get good help these days.
But like I said at the beginning, this is also one of the worst jobs imaginable. Why would you want this job? Sure, being great at coaching requires enormous self-confidence, just like being great at anything else, and that hubris might lead you to think you could take over coaching a franchise like the Jacksonville Jaguars – which has been, and continues to be, one of the worst ideas for a franchise off all time, never mind one that exists – and make them successful. I mean, look at these jobs that are available at the moment. Other than the Denver gig, which is a no-brainer, and maybe the Indianapolis gig if it comes open, the rest of them are really bad jobs! Who wants to work for Jed York in San Francisco after he’s one-and-doned head coaches in consecutive seasons? Who wants to work for Stan Kroenke? Or you can report directly to this guy in Buffalo. But in the end, people take the gigs, simply because there are only 32 of them. A bad job that’s a dead end road to nowhere somehow seems like a better option than not taking a job at all.
Coaches are hired to be fired, in the end. Even good ones can wear out their welcome and grow stale over time, like Tom Coughlin did with the Giants. And while both the Pats and the Hawks have spent quite a while trying to develop an organizational philosophy, from top to bottom, if you take a guy out of that system and plunk him in a head gig elsewhere and he doesn’t necessary flourish: witness the endless number of failed head coaches plucked from Belichick’s staff over the years, and ex-Jag coach Bradley worked under Carroll in Seattle, which has become the en vogue team to raid for coaching talent in recent years. And, of course, the truth is that most of the time, teams are bad because their players are bad. You can make bad players better, but it’s hard to make them good – and it’s often the guys making this very hire, the GMs, who are responsible for the dire state of the talent base and are firing coaches in order to save their own skin. You have to get this hire right, lest you end up showing up in this corner of cyberspace a year or two from now.
IT’S BEEN an impressive year of lose. We saw the greatest choke in history in the NCAA tournament. We saw the Oklahoma City Blunder gag away a 3-1 lead to the Warriors, who laughed at them … until the Warriors frittered away a 3-1 lead to the Cavaliers, and the whole city of Cleveland laughed about it all summer … until the Indians blew a 3-1 lead in the World Series to the Cubs. And thanks to the NFL’s changing of the rules to make the conversion into a live play, teams in the NFL have now actually discovered two new ways to lose, beginning with the New Orleans Saints, pictured above, losing 25:23 to the Broncos after scoring the tying TD and having the PAT blocked and run back for two points by the defense, only to have their NFC South rivals, the Atlanta Falcons, take it a step further in a 29:28 loss to Kansas City. The Falcons scored a TD late in the game to go ahead 28:27, went for two as the math dictates in this situation, and then Matt Ryan threw an interception run 100 yards back by the Chefs for two points. In NFL jargon, what the Chefs did is now called the “Pick Two,” what the Broncos did is called the “Kick Two,” and what the Saints and Falcons did is called “Clownshoes.”
Kickers in football have generally had a bad go of things this year. Kicking is one aspect of the sport – of any sport – which had basically been perfected. Kickers were making 99% of their PATs in the NFL, which is incredible. Now that the NFL has moved the kick back 15 yards, and also made it a live play, it’s a tougher kick because of the distance, and also an easier kick to block because of the technique. And this change seems to have spooked the kickers, because bad kicking is all over the place this season. And football, as a whole, seems to have deteriorated in terms of quality of play, which is always most evident on special teams. Even something as basic as the kickoff isn’t working out too well:
Uh ... huh?
Never mind attempting the onside kick:
Well, it went 10 yards sideways, at least
OK, granted, those two gifs I just posted are actually college teams and not professional teams, but it’s pretty obvious that they’ve been learning from the pros:
All hail the Ribona!
If there were a position in sports, as a whole, that should garner consideration for The Lose Of The Year award, it would have to be the placekickers. And we here at In Play Lose make it a point to honor great achievements in failure here at the end of the year with our annual, highly coveted TLOTY award which celebrates incompetence, arrogance, disorganization, poor preparation, poor execution, and just being flat-out terrible.
In general, I’m willing to rule out teams that were absolutely cursed by bad luck on the injury front, even though injuries generally afflict bad teams far worse than good ones because bad ones don’t have the depth to combat it. For example, the New Orleans Pelicans may be an absolutely wretched organization, but they finished up last season with their entire starting lineup on the injured list, so you have to give them some leeway there, and you also have to do the same for the California Los Angels Angels of Seal Beach Anaheim. The fact that they lost basically the entire starting rotation to injury doesn’t change the fact that they signed Albert Pujols has the worst contract in all of sports, but it was physically impossible for them to compete with a MASH unit for a starting staff. The perpetually incompetent don’t particularly impress me, either, because it actually isn’t difficult to be terrible, although there are always some jaw-droopingly awful performances which I simply cannot ignore. The Phoenix Suns are the dumbest team in the NBA east of Sacramento, but that’s been true for five years now. I’m more interested in unique sorts of flame outs and preposterously bad ideas. And even with this most recent foible to add to their storied history of failure, Washington State is still ineligible for the TLOTY, as their number is retired.
To the nominees!
Philadelphia 76ers
A regular here at the TLOTYs, our reigning award winner finally did us all a favor by relieving Sam Hinkie of his tenure as GM and putting an end to “the process.” Hinkie’s legacy: the #1 pick in the draft which he greatly coveted coming to fruition – Ben Simmons, who promptly broke his foot and has been out all season – and a mismatched roster of bigs with no spacing and no shooting with not enough minutes to go around. (The odd man out is Nerlens Noel, who isn’t happy about it.) The good news is that the 76ers are six games better, at this point, than they were last season. The bad news is that they were 1-30 at this point last season, so six games better is 7-24, which is still terrible. But hey, at least Joel Embiid is fun to watch, so there’s that.
Hinkie apologists are the worst. Any hack can lose all the time. What’s amazing is that clowns like him actually get handed the keys, run the truck into the ditch, and then claim they know how to get out of it. The crux of “the process” is that your best chance to win is to get a star, your best chance to do that is draft one, and your best chance to draft one is at the top of the draft. And who knows, maybe Embiid will turn out to be that star and maybe Simmons will be that star as well, but you also need to put together a team in order to be successful. You need complimentary players and role players, you need playmakers and shooters and glue guys and so forth. Philly has none of those guys, because instead of actually developing those sorts of players, they’ve had a revolving door of roster churn during Hinkie’s Reign of Error. It’s up to the Colangelos to try and salvage this mess, which means making trades from positions of weakness, or maybe some random ping pong ball will save them in lottery again. In the meantime, the 76ers can look forward to 50 more games of suffering this season – only this time, instead of being deliberately awful, they’re actually trying, which just makes them dull.
Minnesota Timberwolves
The calendar year of 2016 has been something of an disaster for the Wolves, who went 17-32 after the New Year to close out last season, and are 10-22 this season going into their game on Friday night against the Milwaukee Bucks. But amid those seven months of generally bad play came the 5-month offseason, during which everyone became grossly, egregiously overenamored with the Wolves’ potential. Even with all of the losing last spring, when the Wolves were something of a rudderless ship adrift with soon-to-be ex-coach Sam Mitchell going through the motions on the sidelines, there were still signs that the pieces were coming together, including a very impressive road win against the 73-9 Golden State Warriors. Across the board, a great number of NBA pundits and podcasters and beat writers whose work I respect suggested that the Wolves wound take a quantum leap this season and vault into becoming a playoff team. And you can see why, since there is incredible talent there – Karl Anthony Towns, Andrew Wiggins, Zach LaVine. Three terrific players, all of them gifted athletes with diverse skill sets and all of whom are under 22 years of age. What’s not to like about that?
Well, the defense, for starters. A favorite NBA commentator of The Lose’s – Nate Duncan of the Dunc’d On podcast and the Twitter NBA show – pointed this out in rather exasperating detail in the midst of the Wolves’ latest loss, a 105:103 loss in Denver which featured one bad defensive play after another after another after another after another after another after another after another. With such an immature team, and such a horrible defense, it’s no surprise that the Wolves are absolutely terrible in close games and also blow a lot of leads when the game gets tough. Clearly, this calls for some solid leadership on the bench, right?
Oh, right, the Wolves went out and hired Tom Thibodeau in the offseason, who had taken a year off from coaching after his snippy and sour relationship with the front office in Chicago finally reached its breaking point. Thibs was the NBA Coach of the Year with the Bulls in 2011 and, prior to that, he served as an assistant and defensive mastermind for the NBA champion Boston Celtics in 2008. Take a great coach and pair him with great talent. What could possibly go wrong?
Well, kind of everything, actually.
First of all, about that talent. Let’s take those three guys I mentioned before out of the equation here for a moment. Who else is any good? Ricky Rubio can’t shoot, while Gorgui Dieng is there to apparently be tall and nothing else, since about all he does is get in Towns’ way on the offensive end and force the 7’0” Towns to have to guard guys out on the perimeter on the defensive end. They have no idea if Kris Dunn, their #1 pick this past summer, is actually a serviceable NBA point guard, and they have no real impact players or playmakers coming off the bench. Perhaps the talent level, on the whole, isn’t nearly as high in the Twin Cities as we first thought.
As for the coaching, well, Thibs has a pretty impressive résumé, to be sure, but it should be pointed out that Thibs also spent a lot of his coaching career working with vet-heavy clubs who already know their way around the ins and the outs of the NBA game and who simply needed that sort of disciplined, cerebral defensive scheme work that Thibs provides in order to excel as a team. It’s not always a sure thing that a coach like Thibs is going to jibe well with a young team that, above all else, needs some positivity and needs to generally play unburdened. The Wolves are anything but unburdened. To use a hockey term – appropriate given the hockey-mad state in which they play – the Wolves are all grabbing the stick too tightly. They need to relax and just play.
Clearly, the Wolves haven’t taken to his defensive teachings. Meanwhile, Thibs is still doing some of the annoying things he was doing back in Chicago. His offense isn’t particularly creative, he plays his starters too many minutes, and he refuses to ever go small in a league where everyone is now going small – which is how you wound up with Towns trying to guard Kevin Durant 30 feet from the basket in the Wolves’ most recent trip to the Bay Area, which was one of the dumbest defensive ideas I’ve ever seen. To be blunt, this is one of the most poorly coached teams in the NBA.
And this makes the deal they offered Thibs in the offseason look even stupider, one in which Thibs is both coach and the President of Basketball Operations. This coach-as-executive phenomenon is one of the newer, and dumber, ideas in the NBA. The problem with it, of course, is that it makes it incredibly difficult, and also incredibly costly, to get rid of the guy if he doesn’t turn out to be any good. Guys like Greg Popovich, who spend 20+ years coaching one team, are the exception and not the rule. Coaches are hired to be fired.
Not that they should be firing anyone, at this point. It’s too early to be panicking, of course, and the bottom half of the West is so bad – the LOL Kings are currently the 8-seed – that there is still time for the Wolves to get their shit together and even make a playoff run. The potential is there, but potential is just a fancy way of saying that you haven’t done jack shit.
Oklahoma City
They replayed the other night, on NBA TV, Game 6 of the Western Conference finals in which OKC has a 7-point lead with about 6:00 remaining and proceeds to completely choke, enabling the Golden State Warriors to steal Game 6 and go on to win the series. It was weird to watch this again, firstly because Kevin Durant now looks strange to me wearing that daffy OKC color scheme, but mostly because it’s astonishing to see how a really good basketball team, in the most important moment, forgets how to play basketball.
I mean, you could make a similar case about the Dubs in the finals going ice cold the final 4:00 of Game 7 against the Cavs, but Cleveland didn’t really do much in that time span, either, before Kyrie Irving threw up a miracle prayer of a three that somehow went in. I have never looked at the NBA Finals as the Warriors losing it so much as Cleveland going out and winning it.
With OKC, however, that was a choke job. Sure, Klay went out of his mind and made some of the most ridiculous shots I’ve ever seen to get the Warriors back in the game, and at the time, I made a point to glow and crow about what a remarkable performance it was by the Warriors to dig themselves out of a hole. But that was only possible thanks to OKC turning the ball over five times and “running” an offense consisting of throwing the ball to Kevin Durant, having the other four guys on the team run as far from him as possible, and letting KD go 1-on-5. Not even he is good enough to do that.
And with this reviewing of the game, I was trying in vain to somehow not to be gleeful, but there is this moment, towards the end of the game, when Steph Curry gets switched onto by Serge Ibaka, drives to his right and kisses a soft floater high off the glass to give the Warriors a 5-point lead where the whole of the Corrupt Energy Shortsellers Arena goes dead silent and you can actually hear, in that glorious silence, the sound of so many little OKC loving hearts breaking. It’s magnificent, and knowing it’s the last time OKC will ever truly be a relevant franchise makes it even more magnificent.
But pretty much from the moment David Stern decided to get in bed with that collection of robber barons and crooks and fuck over the city of Seattle, the OKC franchise has been at the center of how the league winds up conducting business – and it still is with the new CBA between the owners and the players which is striving to make it easier for small market clubs like the Blunder to keep their players by allowing them to offer considerably more money to their free agents than before, thus disincentivizing players from moving. (A fairly selfish and short-sighted move on the part of the players, in my opinion, but when your union is headed by superstars who feel like they’re being underpaid, you shouldn’t expect them to think of the long-term ramifications.) This is happening in direct response to the events this past summer, when Kevin Durant walked out the door on the Thunder and joined “a super team” at Golden State, to which the general response from people in and around OKC has been to whine like the bunch of babies that they are.
Like most “small markets,” OKC picks and chooses when to use that title. They want to pretend to be big players even though they’ve been dipping heavily into NBA revenue sharing from the moment they took to their new OKC home. They’ve been the franchise most heavily involved behind the scenes in lobbying against reforming the preposterous NBA lottery system which has led to the Sam Hinkies of the world blatantly tanking and writing off several seasons – a phenomenon still likely to occur with this new CBA, since now teams have a harder time signing free agents – because, you see, they’re a small market in OKC and they have a hard time vying for players … which is maybe why you shouldn’t have moved the franchise there in the first place! They bitched and they moaned when the last CBA was enacted and they had to pay Kevin Durant more, having jumped the gun and signed him to an extension the terms of which no longer applied, and they almost certainly bitched and moaned again this fall during the negotiations, having jumped the gun again and signed Russell Westbrook to an extension, which has resulted in essentially a Russell Westbrook Exception that will enable them to do that same thing again in the future when they wouldn’t have otherwise been able to do that – two cases which, on the whole, suggest that maybe the problem is an inability on the part of GM Sam Presti to anticipate the changing marketplace, but for some reason the NBA decided to hold this team’s hand once more. For a bunch of tough oil magnates, they sure are weak.
And it amused to me to no end to read stories about how great a move it was by Russell Westbrook to want to stick it out in OKC and sign a contract extension after Durant had left. Guess what? They gave him about 8.5 million reasons to do so. If someone says they’ll drive a dump truck over to your house and plop $8.5m in your driveway, why would you say no to that? And good on him for doing that. But to frame it as anything other than, first and foremost, a business decision is foolish. So stop it already with inventing this narrative about feuds and personality conflicts between KD and Russ and whatnot. KD took another job, like he’d earned the right to do under the terms of the CBA, which is something that most of us have the opportunity to do every day but NBA players do not. If Russ wants to sign on for three more years in OKC and avail himself of the opportunity to play Don Quixote and single-handedly joust the assortment of NBA windmills tilting his way, that’s fine too. Just stop it with this narrative of “aw, the poor Thunder got screwed.” They’ve stumbled their way into a relevance that lot never deserved, landed some superstars through having a few ping pong balls bounce their way, and then pissed that opportunity away all on their own. Tough shit. Deal with it.
And try running an offense while you are at it.
New York Jets
Uh, yeah ...
Buffalo Bills
This is what happens when The Peter Principle meets nepotism. Rex Ryan and his fraternal twin bother, Rob, are the sons of Buddy Ryan, the mastermind of the defense for arguably the greatest team in NFL history, the 1985 Chicago Bears. The two of them have been using that connection to worm their way into one NFL job after another over the years, most recently with the moribund Buffalo Bills, a franchise that hasn’t been relevant since they were losing four Super Bowls at the turn of the 1990s. They’ve been getting these gigs in spite of the fact that, well, they can’t coach.
After sneaking into the playoffs his first two years while with the Jets, Rex’s fortunes rather rapidly declined thereafter and he was fired after the Jets went 4-12 in 2014. Being stuck in the frozen tundra of western New York, the Bills are always looking for some way to get attention, and hiring Rex as a head coach certainly accomplishes that, as his presence is invariably bombastic and blustery and worth the odd sound bite here and there. Rob joined the staff this year after presiding over the worst defense in the NFL last season in New Orleans. Before that, he oversaw a not-very-good defense in Dallas, a not-very-good defense in Cleveland, and a a not-very-good defense in Oakland. The Bills stumbled out of the gate this season, losing their first two games to the Ravens and then the Jets (yeech), and have been basically stuck in neutral ever since, sitting 7-8 heading into the last week of the season – not terrible, mind you, but far less than what Rex was promising to deliver when he rolled into town.
Big-name coaches don’t win you games. Nothing either of these guys has ever done suggests they are some sort of tactical mastermind. There are plenty of bright coaching minds out there looking for a head job who deserve the opportunity ahead of retreads like the Ryans.
San Diego Chargers
I’ll leave it to The Official Sauerkraut Maker of In Play Lose to sum up the Chargers: “Everyone hates them, wants them to go away, no one wants to host them. The Spanos’ are awful human beings, they run an aggressively losey team that loves to snatch a loss out of the clutches of victory.”
It seemed appropriate that the Chargers would be the Browns’ only win this season – and go about losing by having one tying FG blocked and then missing another at the gun after mismanaging the clock and having to scamper the kicking team onto the field. That sums up the Bolts 2016 season – inept, disorganized, turning success into failure.
The Chargers have an option from the NFL on becoming the second team in L.A. – which seems more and more likely to happen, given that there is no support for a new facility in San Diego to replace the Roman ruins that are Qualcomm.
Los Angeles Rams
Of course, whatever fascination Angelinos may have had with pro football is rapidly being bludgeoned out of them by being subjected to the drudgery that are the Rams, who are 4-11 and possess the league’s worst offense. It took until Jeff Fisher reached the threshold of being the losingest coach in NFL history before he finally got the boot from Rams owner/snake oil salesman/douchebag Stan Kroenke. I always thought Fisher did a pretty good job with the Titans in Tennessee, where he had to do more with less, but his Rams teams were boring, undisciplined, and consisted of nothing but guys who run fast but don’t seem to do any football skill fundamentally well.
It seems sort of appropriate that, given that the league offices and owners have been using the threat of a Los Angeles relocation for decades in order to bleed more public money from municipalities, when one of the owners did finally did get around to following through on that threat, the result turned out to be a dud. And I’m sure L.A. residents are just excited as all heck for another mediocre franchise like the Chargers to move into the city and clamor for attention. No one cared about the football teams in L.A. before, which is why they all moved in the first place. League execs have pointed out for years how good the TV ratings were for the NFL in L.A. after first the Rams, and then the Raiders, vacated the city. This is precisely because neither the Rams nor Raiders were around polluting the airwaves any longer with their mandatory broadcasts, which meant people in L.A. could actually watch a full NFL doubleheader slate every weekend featuring teams that actually knew what they were doing. Better games = better product = better ratings. To be successful in L.A. (and most places, for that matter), you either have to winners or be entertaining, and the Rams and Chargers, as presently constructed and operated, are neither of those things.
San Francisco 49ers
As seen by dozens:
The official attendance for the game referenced in that .gif file above, a loss to the Tampa Bay Bucs that was part of a club record 13-game losing streak, was listed at 71,000, which is about 50,000 more than who were actually present. But the 49ers can claim 71,000 showed because, when they relocated from The Stick to Levi’s Stadium, they sold PSLs for all 71,000 seats – licenses which 49er fans are now trying to dump as quickly as possible. After 50 years of enduring Candlestick, the organization has somehow contrived to make the football-going experience even worse.
Colin Kaepernick made himself a lightning rod for all sorts of dimwitted commentary thanks to his choosing to protest the national anthem being played by taking a knee. It’s about the only thing of any note that’s happened to this franchise all season and, in fact, Kaepernick is still probably the team’s best player and certainly the most notable. Don’t believe me? Tell me who the leading rusher is? How about the leading receiver? The leading tackler? In the Jim Harbaugh days, you could name those things, because the 49ers had All-Pro players filling those roles. They had talent at every position, they had depth, they had an identity as a team and also a creative approach to winning games when needed (remember, Harbaugh benched Alex Smith in favor of Kaepernick late in a season, saying it was his best chance to win playoff games, and he was proved correct).
Now? They have Chip Kelley, who was a bad coach with a good collection of players in Philadelphia and simply looks worse now; they have a perpetual power struggle behind the scenes between factionalized owners; they have Trent Baalke as a GM, who won the power struggle with Harbaugh and hasn’t made a single good personnel decision since; they have an empty stadium and now they have the city of Santa Clara, who spent $1.5 billion on Levi’s Stadium, asking for the 49ers to turn in their receipts and prove they’re keeping up their end of the bargain on the new building.
And remember, this team was in the Super Bowl just four seasons ago! Just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse, they get worse. The 49ers have mustered only a Rams and 13 record this season, the team is so bereft of talent and ideas that it’s going to take years to rebuild, and in the meantime, they’ve fostered ill will with the local press, the fans, the city of Santa Clara and just about everyone else. It’s appropriate the 49ers play in a place called Levi’s Stadium, because this franchise is absolute pants.
This fake punt earns BYU the TLOTY award for dumbest designed play of the year
Rutgers
The worst major college athletic program picked up this fall right where it had left off. The Scarlet Knights put in arguably the worst single performance by a college football team in years when it managed to get blasted 78:0 by Michigan at home. The stats are appalling: Rutgers has 39 yards of total offense in the game, while Michigan had 600, and the Rutgers didn’t pick up a first down until midway through the 4th Quarter. The biggest winners in this game were all of the hungry people in Ann Arbor who went in to the Ruth’s Chris Ann Arbor to cash in on the game-related promotion. And there was no doubt who the biggest losers were.
As if you needed any further proof of how inept Rutgers was in 2016, they also got beat 58:0 by Ohio State, 49:0 by Michigan State, and 39:0 by Penn State as they staggered to a 2-10 record and a last-place finish in the Big Ten. The Big Ten added Rutgers as part of an expansion plan intended to attract television viewers in the greater New York area, but it’s pretty hard to attract viewers when the regional angle on those broadcasts is a program that is six kinds of crap.
Wake Forest
The Demon Deacons earn a shout out here for a unique sort of scandal. Far and away the most amusing scandal of the year has been recently uncovered and pertains to the Wake Forest football team, whose color commentator on their radio broadcasts – Tommy Elrod, who was a former defensive coordinator that had been “reassigned” to the broadcasts after a head coaching change – had apparently been clandestinely giving away some of the Demon Deacons’ offensive plays to their opposition. The Demon Deacons figured something was up after a game in Louisville, when they found copies of their playbook strewn about the confines of Bad Pizza Stadium.
This nutso radio announcer apparently offered the same information to the coaching staff at Army before their game, who rejected it and said something along the lines of, “we’re West Point and we don’t cheat.” It’s appropriate that it was Louisville who got caught partaking in espionage, since this university is that bastion of ethics and virtue which employs sleazbags like Bobby Petrino and Rick Pitino, sanctioned it’s own basketball program for allegations that recruiting trips included strippers and prostitutes, and somehow feels justified in paying a baseball coach $1 million a year while offering up only about a third as many scholarships as there players to fill out a team. Louisville is precisely the sort of American university which has gone about using athletics to raise its profile while selling its soul in the process. Wake, on the other hand, fell prey to an ex-employee who had an axe to grind, and wound up looking pretty stupid. It didn’t wind up hurting the Deacs too much, as they reached a bowl game for the first team since head coach Jim Grobe left the program in 2013. And speaking of Jim Grobe …
Baylor
I’m not exactly sure why Grobe was willing to sully his reputation – which had generally been considered quite good – by agreeing to be the interim coach for a season at Baylor, which is the ultimate college football cesspool. Grobe hastily took the job when head coach Art Briles was fired amid the endless, constant, and continuously damning allegations at the school: allegations of a culture in which football players repeatedly committed sexual assaults against female Baylor students and the administrators of the football program, the athletics department and, indeed, the entire administration turned and looked the other way.
I talk about fun and games on this blog, but fun and games have their place. At Baylor, that place was at the center of the school’s capital campaigns to raise it’s profile from being a pleasant, backwater baptist university to being a major institution. It was win-at-all-costs at Baylor, morals be damned.
This is disgusting. This is utterly reprehensible. Baylor so far has gotten off easy in all of this. OK, so Briles lost his job, which he should have, and Ken Starr got ousted from the presidency of the university, which he should have been, and the AD got canned as well, but that’s just scratching the surface here. In the aftermath of this scandal, which came to light in the summer, every single person involved in this program should have been fired, and every single person responsible for permitting this sort of rape culture to fester should have been fired. Every single one of them.
“Oh no! You can’t do that! We won’t be able to get a staff together for football season!”
Exactly. Football season can fuck off. Frankly, they should have had to cancel it and suffer the financial blowback from doing so. I hope everyone drowns in the lawsuits. Baylor needs to get its priorities straight, priorities which include something as basic as ensuring that young people who attend that school do so in a safe environment.
And to all of you Baylor boosters and alumni who still want to support Art Briles, what the hell is wrong with you? I know he made you feel good on Saturday afternoon because you could finally beat Texas and Oklahoma, but big fucking deal. Stop pretending you’re still in college.
And how about everyone involved at that school stop going around in the public eye and touting what good Christian values you have while you’re at it, since it’s been pretty apparent with the way you’ve let the football program run rampant at the expense of everything else that no one involved in that supposed institution of higher Christian learning has a soul.
Arizona Diamondbacks
The Snakes set out last winter to win the offseason. They’re a generally irrelevant franchise which hasn’t done of anything of note since winning the World Series in 2001. About all they’ve been known for of late, in fact, was being the single-most annoying team in all of baseball to watch, thanks to a strategy filled with throws to first, step offs and mound conferences intended to slow to a crawl, and thanks to an unchecked culture of machismo instituted by former skipper Kirk Gibson which meant that every single perceived slight on the diamond resulted in a bean brawl.
But the Snakes wanted to make a splash in 2016, beginning with their flashy new uniforms. They were determined to become relevant again in the NL West and compete with the Giants and the Dodgers, so they went out and signed 30-something starting pitcher Zack Grienke to a $206 million contract, the numbers of which were so absurd that not even the Dodgers would match it, and then they made quite possibly the worst trade in baseball in the past two decades which didn’t involve the Seattle Mariners, giving up a haul that included former #1 overall pick Dansby Swanson to the Atlanta Braves in exchange for Shelby Miller. Miller has been a solid mid-rotation starter in his career, but nothing he’s ever done would indicate that he’s worth a king’s ransom.
And this ended predictably, as the Diamondbacks were not very good. Grienke toiled through an uninteresting, injury-laden season while Miller was one of the worst starting pitchers in all of baseball. Investing in power pitching didn’t really help a whole lot in what is, on balance, one of the worst pitcher’s parks in baseball. You don’t need good pitching to win in Arizona, you need superstar pitching. You need some of the best pitching the game has ever seen. You need Hall of Fame-caliber pitching like Randy Johnson and Mr. Ketchup on the Sock. You don’t need Shelby Miller and, for heaven’s sake, you don’t need to be giving up a mint to get him. Arizona sold off most of it’s best assets to get him, and now also lack payroll flexibility to retool since they’ve attached the anchor that is Grienke’s contract to its budget. Throw in a spate of injuries all over the starting lineup, most notably in the outfield, and 2016 was nothing short of an unmitigated disaster in Arizona.
It’s amazing how many teams that set out to win the offseason wind up looking like buffoons. Arizona went out at the start of this offseason and hired a new GM, Mike Hazen, who is one of the guys that went about building up the impressive young talent base in Boston. The Snakes do have a history of drafting pretty well over the years, so all is not lost. And for god’s sake, please get rid of those uniforms already.
San Diego Padres
Word on the street is that the San Diego Padres are going to be tanking in 2017. Which begs the question: how is this different than any other season?
The Padres are still trying to dig out from ‘winning the offseason’ in 2015, and Padres GM A.J. Preller continues to confound all of us by still having a job after he got fleeced left and right in 2015 and then got suspended after failing to provide medical information about players to other teams involved in trade talks. Highlights form the Padres free fall to the bottom of the NL West in 2016 also included the owner ripping the team on talk radio and the Padres losing the single-most absurd baseball game of the season, blowing a 10-run lead against the Mariners including giving up 9 runs in an inning after there were two outs. The Padres have now gone about cost-cutting and shedding vets, which means they’re likely to be even more dreadful in 2017, with the lovely Dog Food Park continuing to serve as the ideal baseball getaway for opposing fans. Now that the Chargers seem set to leave, the Padres will rule the roost in San Diego and likely have the market all to themselves – a market so disinterested that the club’s only really good draws at the gate involve the Giants and the Dodgers coming to town and filling the stands with their own faithful. This can’t get much worse, can it? I probably shouldn’t ask.
And now for a special compare and contrast segment of this Lose post. Which is worse?
England v. U.S.A., Politics Edition
The Lose doesn’t normally talk about politics, even though politics may be the ultimate of bloodsports. It’s hard to ignore in 2016, however, given the two votes which took place, one on either side of the pond, which were eerily similar. In both cases, a charismatic and orangey con artist from New York managed to persuade just enough people to buy into his vision of a nation which can’t exist, probably won’t exist, and probably never did exist in the first place.
Polling data from Britain shows that the Leave vote skewed older, meaning the older folk basically screwed over the young’uns and fanciful notions of Britain’s glorious place in World Orders of old were still dancing through people’s heads. The anti-immigrant tone of the campaign, meanwhile, struck me as misguided, seeing as how immigrants do two types of jobs in Britain: the kind of job that’s beneath you and you don’t want to do, and the kinds of jobs so far over your head that you can’t possibly get. On this side of the pond, meanwhile, I was intrigued by several political studies which suggested that, for a good number of people residing on the political right of the spectrum, the 1950s is viewed as a “great” time in America, possibly the “greatest.” In attempting to turn back the clock and party like it’s 1959, I suspect we’ve more likely landed somewhere in the 1960s, meaning we’ll have to do things like fight the whole civil rights movement all over again.
Now, the Brits seemed to think that they could have their cake and eat it too, dropping out of the E.U. but still having a right to the sorts of economic benefits that come from being a member. Unsurprisingly, the rest of the continent is showing them two fingers and telling them to get the fuck out and fuck right off while they are at it. Meanwhile, over here, I have no idea what’s going to happen, since I have no idea what his policies are going to be. The most apt comparison I can find historically is Berlusconi in Italy, who wasn’t necessarily abjectly terrible in office, but the biggest problem with Berlusconi was that he spent far too much of his time as the Italian prime minister going about attempting to write and rewrite laws which would enrich and benefit himself personally and also shield himself from all of the assortment of pending legal issues. People have asked me if I’m worried about Trump having his finger on the button, and I’ve replied by saying I’m more worried about him constantly having his hand in the cookie jar.
We live in strange times. I don’t really know what to make of any of this. As an absurdist my nature, I suspect it’s going to be a mess, but I’m not sure to what extent. As someone who has always been a keen observer of elections simply from a game theory and policy perspective, these two elections really boggled my mind.
Now, you can probably guess from my place of residence what my political perspective is. (According to election returns released by the California Secretary of State’s office, Trump got 13 votes in my precinct.) Having said that, I should also point out that I’ve voted for Republican elected officials in the past, and that I understand, first and foremost, that politics is elections + governance, and I happen to value the latter far more. And one of the things I’ve already come to terms with is the fact that there are people who I know, and know well, and consider to be friends and colleagues, who voted for Trump – and unlike some of my Democratic friends, who I had to talk off ledges, these people do not consider Trump winning just enough votes in just enough places to become the president to be the worst thing ever. I do suspect, however, that there is a very good possibility that they will wind up being disappointed by him, just as there were quite a few Democrats out there who were disappointed in their party’s nominee and chose not to vote at all. Clearly, there seems to be a sense of disconnect and discontent prevalent in the electorate of the U.S., of Britain, and of quite a few other places in the world. Politics is a drag and authoritarianism has suddenly become hip and trendy. One of the reasons why the far right does so well in elections is because they’re the only ones bringing a whole lot of energy to the cause.
And I really wasn’t going to say all of what follows in this next paragraph, but I can’t hold it in any longer, and it’s going to be completely opinionated and full of perceptions and not sourced or fact-checked or anything so fucking deal with it and we regret the errors: can the largest political party in America, the one I happen to vote for most of the time, actually start acting like it? Jesus fucking christ. I’m now going to piss off a lot of people and I don’t give a shit. The Democratic Party fucking gagged. Goddamnit, you idiots. You just lost a presidential election to a guy who checked all the boxes of everything you shouldn’t ever do if you want to be elected president and still got elected. Hillary Clinton was a lousy candidate. Sorry, she was. Go back to 2008, an election the Democrats couldn’t have lost if they’d taken a cheese sandwich and stuck a pin in it with a donkey on it and called it a nominee. Bush was SO BAD that members of his own party were begging him not to show up and campaign for them. And what happened in 2008? Hillary – the anointed one, the chosen one ever since Bill had left office and she’d become a senator – couldn’t beat a guy in the primary who hadn’t even been in the Senate for two years. Just think about that. She couldn’t win the presidency in the most slam dunk, no-brainer of elections, so how was she going to do it now? And sure, there were lots of trumped up charges and accusations and the like over 24 years she was in the public eye, and a lot of false news and fixed noise and everything else, but she wound up underperforming in every single significant segment of the Democratic party’s electorate. You can argue that the reasons people didn’t like her were bogus or not or whatnot, but the fact of the matter is that they didn’t, and not just on the other side of the aisle, either. And it doesn’t really matter to me how qualified she was for the office. For starters, being qualified doesn’t mean you’re going to be any good. (See Richard Nixon.) Secondly, you have to get the job in order to be good at it. And since I’m on a rant here and I’m letting it out, how fucking stupid was that campaign? How did you not know you might lose Michigan and Wisconsin? It’s your campaign’s goddamn job to know that! That no one in Brooklyn ever stopped patting themselves on the back long enough to actually take the goddamn temperature in those states and figure this shit out and try to keep it from happening is so goddamn arrogant as to leave me incredulous.
I feel better now. Well no, not really. Wait for it … yeah, now I’m better. Do I sound a little annoyed? Just remember that before he was making the Democrats look like idiots in the fall by winning the presidency, Trump was making Republicans look like idiots in the spring and the summer by getting the nomination in the first place. Everyone wound up looking like a fool, and because of it, everyone probably wound up getting the president they deserved.
England v. U.S.A., Soccer Edition
Quick point here: I labelled the previous section “England v. U.S.A.” while being fully aware that Brexit was a vote across all of Britain – but that the English were the ones who most fervently drove the Leave vote. I am labeling this next bit “England v. U.S.A.” while being fully aware that among the things I’m going to mention are the actions of a Welsh club, since that club adheres to the rules of Premiere League and the English FA. I used to live in Great Britain and I understand the divides, so don’t you get all nitpicky with me. And something else that England and the U.S. have in common at the moment, and another realm where you can see some parallels, is that both countries are bad at soccer. At least when it comes to the men, anyway. Both nation’s women’s teams? Kinda badass. But the men? Trash. Absolute trash, or shall we be all British about it and say rubbish instead?
I am not much of a betting man (as I have previously explained this year)
but if I were, I would have been quite a bit richer in June, because had I been at a
Las Vegas casino in June with a chance to wager on the England v. Iceland
Quarter Final at Euro 2016, I would’ve bet on Iceland. And I’d be
richer because Iceland won 2:1 in Nice in a match that was
hailed in some camps and corners as one of the game’s greatest upsets.
Hmmm, let’s do the math here … Iceland were 13/2 to win going into this
game, so if I’d plunked down $100 at +650, minus the vig, of course,
that would be … oh god, my Washington State math skills are failing me
here … something like $638 in my pocket, which would’ve been well spent
at that new José Andrés restaurant
that looked so enticing the last time I was there. And I would’ve been
quite confident about that wager, much more so than I would’ve been
wagering on the Italy-Spain game which also went off that morning (although had I done so, I’d be even richer, since I would have tapped
the Italians to upset that, old, slow, disinterested team dressed like a
spilled plate of nachos.) I would have been confident in an Iceland win
for a very, very simple reason: Iceland are a better team than England.
Indeed,
what was most surprising about this result to me is that it wasn’t a
surprise at all. What I find fascinating, in fact, is the reaction in
the overwhelmingly UK-centric world of football media who want to speak
to what a shocking upset this is. Not long after England began exporting
the game of football all over the world, it also began exporting the
way it talks about the game of football. English media and pundits
dominate the conversation worldwide, particularly here in the U.S.,
where networks have imported a slough of English commentators to narrate
the game for us, and to teach it to us uneducated Americans. The whole
of English soccer is full of itself, and has been full of itself for
decades, despite the fact that England haven’t won anything for 50
years, and have done little more since 1966 than master the art of
losing in the most disparaging and heartbreaking of manners.
And we here in America have been importing bad English ideas about soccer – how to play it, how to watch it, and how to talk about it – for years now, and that includes importing washed-up, overrated has-beens like Frank Lampard and Steven Gerrard and giving them millions to take up space in MLS and be utterly useless. We’ve started to return the favor, however, as this year Bob Bradley became the first American manager in the EPL – and lasted all of 11 games with Swansea City before being rather unceremoniously dumped. And this has led to an assortment of dimwitted British footballing journalists writing up this sort of dumb drivel, talking about how an American guy who managed in probably the most difficult situation imaginable – the Egyptians during a coup – is somehow unqualified to manage in the EPL but Ryan Giggs is, even though the only think Giggs has done as an assistant at Man U is stand there and look clueless and watch United go about pouring $600 million down a rathole. But England is a place where don’t have to actually have any good ideas about how to play the sport in order to get a managerial position, you just have to look like you do and probably also have the words Manchester United somewhere on your résumé to somehow be considered legit, even if all you did was steal a piece of the company stationery.
The game is certainly in a strange place here in the U.S., what with Klinsy finally getting canned in a move that was several years in the making, what with World Cup qualifying now by no means assured, and what with MLS still searching for an identity after two decades in the wilderness. MLS seems to have started finally figuring out that spending money on washed up dopes like Gerrard and Lampard isn’t a good idea, and that it’s a much better idea to do what this year’s two finalists – Toronto and Seattle – went out and did in signing Sebastian Giovinco and Nicolás Lodeiro, respectively: younger players, in the prime of their career, with great talent and great vision who, for a number of reasons, can’t get a gig at a bigger club elsewhere. These types of guys are all over the place, particularly in South America, which is where the league should strive to make more inroads, instead of continuing to fawn over EPL retreads who aren’t any good any more, and probably weren’t all that good to begin with.
But England has it much worse than us on the football pitch at the moment, because Americans at least have modest expectations when it comes to soccer and aren’t a bunch of delusional weirdos about it. And at the moment, English football is trash. Well, the EPL has some of the greatest players in the world – the best Brazilians and Argentines and Chileans and Spaniards and French and Belgians and Germans, but few actual English players who are worth a damn. Assemble the “great young talent” that England has into a national side and they go about doing things like stumbling about the Euros and then getting played off the pitch by Iceland in a game which should have surprised absolutely nobody. About the only thing England are good at involving football seems to involve gaming the system just well enough to keep getting high seeds through lucking into easy qualifying groups, which enable them to win lots of games against bad European teams (of which there are a lot) and make themselves look better than they really are.
Coaching England is a poison chalice, a high-paying gig with a fan base demanding success but without any actual good players to make that success possible. They hired Sam Allardyce for the job after this Iceland debacle, mostly because no one worth their salt wanted the job, and his tenure lasted all of one game before he got fired after spouting off to undercover reporters masquerading as agents about the ways in which you go about circumventing rules for signing underage players. The overwhelmed, deer-in-the-headlights Gareth Southgate has now been promoted from coaching the U-21s to the top national job – once again owing to the fact that no one would touch this job with a 10’ pole at the moment.
England wins this head-to-head, although the Americans made a fine effort by losing to Guatemala, getting embarrassed by Costa Rica, and yielding a goal in the Copa América semifinal to Argentina in about 3 minutes after fielding an ultra defensive lineup utterly incapable of even getting off a shot, much less scoring. But England wins, and by “wins” I mean “loses.”
OK, this exercise was fun. Now let’s never speak of any of it again. Neither of you two win any awards. Now back to the TLOTYs …
The Rio Olympics
Boy oh boy, where do we begin?
First of all, let me state that I am pro-Brazil. One of the most admirable traits of the Seleção is that, through their brilliance and imagination and success on the pitch, they have become the people’s champion, the natural choice for neutrals. That footballing admiration carries over to the rest of the nation as well. I want this great nation to succeed.
But it’s also an incredibly complicated place, and Rio is one of the most complicated cities on earth. Showing off Rio to the rest of the world through the hosting of the 2016 Olympics seemed like quite an interesting idea when the games were first awarded. And the Olympics ultimately tend to take on the qualities of the host city, be it the showy top-down glossiness of Beijing or the quirky, let’s-pull-together-and-ignore-the-shit-weather of London. And the Rio games took on a unique characteristic as well, but not the one many people were thinking about at the start.
Because we’d all heard the stories in the run-up to the games about construction delays and cost overruns, about trying to hold boating events in a toxic lagoon, about heists and hold-ups and high crime rates and the threat of Zika virus and what not. And in the end, the Olympics went off about as well as you could have hoped for. Rio did OK as a host city. But what was the most striking feature of these games to me, one which spoke to the true nature of it, was the tens of thousands of empty seats.
Oh, sure, some of the venues were full along the way. Anything involving Brazilians drew a crowd, of course. The Botafogo football grounds serving as the track venue were full any time Usain Bolt took the track, of course, and also the U.S. swimmers and gymnasts and men’s basketball teams had full houses behind them. But those are all international stars we’re talking about here – the key being the word “international,” meaning that they were attractive both to the locals and, more importantly, to guests from abroad. Watch any session of track and field that didn’t involve Bolt and you’d see 10,000 people in a 58,000-seat stadium. Venues across the spectrum of sports were often mostly deserted.
The reason for this is pretty obvious: ticket prices for events, as set by organizers, were outrageous. They were outrageous by even American or European standards, but at least there are enough Americans and Europeans willing to afford them. Organizers spewed out the standard line of how “ticket sales are in line with what we were expecting,” which is bullshit. And it didn’t occur to anyone involved in organizing these games that maybe, just maybe, you’d be better off for appearance’s sake if you gave away some of those tickets to those people in your community who couldn’t afford to attend because, you know, this gathering of sport is supposed to be a community endeavor. But that would involve actually giving a damn about the community.
As I say, Rio de Janeiro is one of the most complicated cities on earth, a city of extremes with some of the richest neighborhoods in the world pressed up against some of the poorest and most dangerous. It’s a city on undrawn but assumed boundaries and assorted self-governing communes. But what was pretty clear from the get-go with the Rio Olympics was that, for the millions and millions of cariocas who aren’t a part of the higher classes, these games were not for you. They were fenced off and sheltered from the rest of Rio, they were for the rich, for the jet set, and for the tourists – a good number of whom didn’t actually attend, given that the city was essentially bankrupt and unable to supply actual services like policing by the time the games rolled around. The tourists stayed away and the stands remained empty, one venue after another scarcely populated.
And Brazilians stayed away as well, because know a con job when they see one. There is a reason why Brazilian football domestically draws scant crowds, crowds even smaller than MLS: the game has been heisted and corrupted over time, and Brazilians aren’t interesting in turning over their hard earned money. Those who organized the Olympics were cut from the same cloth as those who have poisoned Brazilian football: frauds, shysters, crooks. There are plenty of those in Brazil. Hell, the whole government appears to be filled with them. Much like the World Cup in 2014, the Olympics were a perfect way for a select few to go about enriching themselves by sticking their hands in the public coffers. It was business as usual in a country which, upon landing the Games, assured the world that it would not be business as usual.
And Brazilians took to the streets in 2013 during the Confed Cup, protesting the largesse and excess and general indifference coming from the government in preparation for these two massive sporting events on the horizon. They knew better. As I say, they know a con job when they see one. And when it came time for the Olympics, they did what most people will do when told they don’t matter, which is go about doing something else.
And this is a waste, of course. If I’d been the organizers, I’d have run up and down through the streets of Rio and given away every single unsold ticket, because the Olympics Games, at a base, are a triumph of human potential being realized.
I mean seriously here, how long have he feared water as a species? We’ve feared it ever since we were fish who developed legs and walked out of the sea. We as humans fear water almost instinctively, some forgotten home for our species, and for millennia we’ve tried to conquer water, we’ve tried to figure out how best to deal with it. So think about that when you watch Katie Ledecky or Michael Phelps swim, carving up with perfect strokes a hostile and inhospitable landscape for humans, making it seem as if it had been conquered. That right there is a million years of human potential reaching an apex. We, as a species, have actually figured out how to conquer water.
And that sort of stuff is remarkable, it’s inspirational and it’s on display every four years. You watch Simon Biles flying through the air doing twists and turns as easily as you or I scratch our noses, doing things in flight most humans in history couldn’t have even conceived of – and she even makes it look easy. Watch Usain Bolt when he gets up to full speed. Have you ever seen a human body ever do anything so beautiful?
And that needs to be passed on to people, the idea that we gather together every few years to celebrate and wow ourselves over what we are capable to doing. And hey, you kids from the favela, you should come and watch this! All of you should see, with your own eyes, what’s possible and what’s doable. You might not do that yourself, in the end, but maybe, just maybe, you’ll find a way to fulfill your own potential instead of being told, based upon your race or your class or income level, that you’re second-rate.
But to the assortment of undesirables at the IOC, the Olympics are ultimately a way to enrich themselves for doing nothing, and to steal from the common man instead of inspiring them to do more. No one involved cared about that. They just wanted to throw a party for a closed subset of people who could afford to attend. Instead of celebrating what’s best about humanity, the Olympics served, yet again, to bring out what’s worst about it.
Ryan Lochte
And speaking of the worst, it gets no worse than Ryan Lochte, who has all of the personality traits of a dumb frat boy but has managed to skate through life because of his God-given talents in the pool. Lochte created quite the international incident in Rio when, after boozing it up on the town, he wrecked a service station bathroom and wound up in a confrontation with the armed security guards at the station. Lochte’s response to this was to invent a cockamamie story in which he said he’d been held up and robbed at gunpoint, thus playing upon some of the worst stereotypes of Rio in an effort to cover up for the fact that he’d been a drunkass. And his defense for this was basically to say that he acted like a drunkass, as if that wasn’t somehow obvious to everyone. Congratulations Ryan, you’ve shown yourself to be a true Ugly American, the likes of which should never wear the U.S. colors again.
So many good candidates this year, but our TLOTY simply must go to an organization which has been a constant embarrassment for the entirety of its existence, and who has even managed to kill some of the good vibes permeating a city which has had almost no good vibes over the past 50 years.
Because in Cleveland, you see, you can never have it too good. The Cavaliers breaking through and winning an NBA title was something of a city-wide catharsis, a release of half of century of frustrations. And it looked as if the winning ways were going to continue this fall, as the Cleveland Indians surged to a 3-1 World Series lead over the heavily favored Cubs, standing on the precipice of breaking a 60-year World Series drought … and then the Indians lost to the Cubs in Game 5 … and Game 6 … and Game 7 as well, but my goodness what a game it was, one of the greatest and most memorable games in baseball history, and if you’re going to flame out like this, at least do so in a remarkable game like that. But as we say, you can never have it too good when in Cleveland. You need to yang the yin, you need to balance it back out again. With so much success this year, Cleveland was definitely feeling proud of itself, and deservedly so, but maybe this national bastion of failure got a little bit too big for itself and needed to be humbled. Fortunately, I have just the ticket …
Cleveland Browns
Whatever hope the Browns had this season pretty much went out the window on Opening Day, when reclamation project Robert Griffin III suffered a season-ending injury in a 29:10 pasting by the Iggles – RG3 being the first of six different QBs to start for the Browns, who’ve had a revolving door at the position dating back through the entire history of the franchise. They followed this up by blowing a 20-2 lead in their home opener and losing to the Ravens the following week, and the hits (misses?) just kept on coming from there. Save for a miraculous near comeback falling short in a 28:26 loss to the Titans, and a 31:28 loss to the Jets in which they blew a 13-point lead, the Browns hadn’t been close to winning another game, losing their first 14 and threatening to join Dancing Dan Orlovsky’s Detroit Lions as the only 0-16 teams in NFL history.
Still the dumbest play in NFL history
Alas, they were blessed with an opponent as incompetent and indifferent as the Chargers showing up for the 15th game of the season, and Cleveland managed to eke out a win to cheer up the members of the GPODAWUND for the holidays:
Quite simply, there is no worse franchise in all of American professional sports than the Cleveland Browns. (Not even the Sacramento Kings, who somehow avoided a nomination this year.) Ever since Browns 2.0 was birthed in the aftermath of the ugly move by Art Modell of the original franchise to Baltimore, the Browns have gone about stumbling through the dark in search of success to no avail. They’ve changed coaches, changed GMs, changed QBs, changed owners. Nothing has worked. (And in a another wonderful trans-Atlantic connection, former terrible Browns owner Randy Lerner also managed to be a terrible owner in the EPL, as the Aston Villa team he owned was relegated from the EPL for the first time in its history.) The Browns have drafted poorly, developed talent poorly, made bad deals galore and presently have a roster with maybe one guy – consummate pro LT Joe Thomas - out of 53 that any other team in the league would actually want, seeing as how the only other guy on the roster who knows what he’s doing – WR Josh Gordon – rightly stepped away from the game to enter an in-patient rehab facility and concentrate on getting sober.
The Browns haven’t made the postseason since 2002, haven’t had a winning season since 2007, and have lost 105 games in the past 9 years. It doesn’t really matter where they pick in the coming draft, since they’ve had the #1 overall pick several times and screwed it up. I’m not even sure where you begin to try and rebuild this team, since no one who can get a job anyplace would ever want to play there.
For their colossal incompetence, for their unimpressive historical body of work, and for single-handedly attempting to bring down the entire city of Cleveland from their Cavs-induced euphoria, I present the Cleveland Browns with The Lose Of The Year award.
And on a personal note, I would like to dedicate this entry to two big fans of The Lose. First off, my frequent creative conspirator and partner in crime Geoff lost his teenage son in an auto accident earlier this year. Geoff, I don’t know what to say, as there are no words, but I hope I can at least make you laugh from time to time. I’ve grieved for this loss in ways I never thought possible. I am so sorry for your loss and which I didn’t feel so goddamn helpless and speechless in the aftermath. Also, I would like to dedicate this entry to Derek Martinez, a good friend from scrabble who recently passed away at age 37. Derek was a big fan of Lose, he loved to talk basketball with me and we always yukked it up at whatever bit of incompetence was out there – even if it was our own incompetence over the board. Derek, you are and will continue to be greatly missed.
So we close out 2016 and it’s on 2017, and quite honestly, 2016 can go fuck itself. This year completely sucked. I thought I would usher it out with a beautiful piece of music which has resonated with me and filtered into some of the creative work I’m presently doing, as I’ve begun to write yet another novel. It’s a soft and lovely song, and as Sun Tzu once suggested in The Ancient Art of War, you must hit that which is hard with something that is soft.
