World Poetry Day

TODAY has apparently been tagged World Poetry Day, and I approve of whomever declared this (who does this sort of thing?) and it is the sort of thing that I can get behind contributing to. The Lose has been hard at work here on a new novel, which is entitled Queen of Diamonds and will hopefully be done here by the end of 2017. This is the reason why there have been so many crickets in this space lately.

I wrote poetry for years, a collection of which is available here and here or by clicking on the Dream So Real gadget on the right of this page. I mainly stopped doing it because I got frustrated with the fact that, rather than expressing anything new, I found myself just saying the same thing again and again after awhile. I came to hate the form – or, more to the point, I came to hate the poet more than I hated the poetry. I also found myself gravitating towards long form work instead. Either I write something in one page or 400 pages, but nothing in between. Welcome to how my mind works. It is a dark and scary place.

This is probably my favorite poem that I want to share. I wrote this in 1999 while living in Santa Fe, New Mexico. It was previously published in Sycamore Review, the literary journal of Purdue University which, for some unknown and wonderful reason, decided to feature my work prominently in one of its issues. I hope that you like it.

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Why I Don’t Dance

   DANCE TO THE MUSIC THAT
   HELPED WIN WORLD WAR II
    — Showbill on a library bulletin board

   I didn’t know we dropped
   sheet music on Dresden
   — Geoffrey Escandon, guitarist

About once or twice a month, we
would schedule a band to come
down from the city and set up
their equipment beneath the NO

SMOKING museum piece hanging
from a nail at the south end of
the hangar, the old Air Force base
having fallen into a state

of disrepair since the Air Force
was downsized. Peace is hell. The dance
organizers made sure to book
swing bands or jazz bands or even

rock ’n’ roll, disregarding raised
eyebrows from elders in hopes of
attracting the young people, since
dances, like weddings, should showcase

the young, with codgers reduced to
showpieces. We would justify
these dances by tying in a
4-H fundraiser dinner or

charity auction, which always
was poorly attended since the
same ten items were donated,
and, us guys, we would polish our

automobiles and dress in black
suits and shined, underprivileged
shoes and dollop up our hair like
movie stars, and the music would

resonate, rattle off the beams
and our feet would ache, because they
don’t park æroplanes on parquet
dance floors, and the bands we booked would

usually play two sets in
exchange for a few hundred bucks
and all the apple pie they could
stomach, but we stipulated

they return to the makeshift stage
for an encore, at which point in
time us guys would stop being friends,
elbow and trample, skid across

the concrete to grab the last dance
with the prettiest girl. Mothers
would blush for their daughters’ catches,
offer invites for dessert. Tea.

Our proudest citizens met their
wives this way. We’re a small town in
the wheatfields off the highway. We
love the orange of harvest moons.

DNP-Lose

Obligatory Warriors freak-out gif

THE GAME on Saturday night in San Antonio was absolute farce. The Spurs’ 107:85 win over Golden State featured seven of the teams’ 10 starters sitting out, some with legit injuries – Durant, Leonard, and let’s hope Aldredge comes back healthy soon – and the others on account of needing rest – most notably on the part of Golden State, who held out Curry, Thompson, Green, and Iguodala, all of whom were listed in the box score as “DNP-REST.”

This action by the Warriors was met with the usual scorn and outrage from the NBA sock puppets over at ESPN/ABC, who questioned Golden State coach Steve Kerr’s integrity for daring to scratch the entire collection of his healthiest – and also his best – players from what was a nationally televised game. Not only did I approve of this decision on the part of Steve Kerr, but I also appreciated the showing of the middle finger by the Warriors towards the NBA. All involved insist that wasn’t the intention, but given the circumstances, it very clearly seemed that way to me.

The most annoying responses come, of course, from ex-players. There aren’t a pettier, more jealous collection of former athletes than there are in the NBA. The reason for the jealousy is obvious, of course: money. So much money. Mediocre bench players are signing contracts now worth values far greater than what many of the élite talents made in their day. It’s jealousy, that’s all it is, and this is why all of them should shut up about the state of the modern game. But there you had Jalen Rose on Saturday night, whom I generally like, talking during halftime about how the players being held out for Golden State needed to show some pride, as if somehow the decision were up to them. Guess what? It wasn’t up to them. No professional athlete ever wants to ever come out of any game ever. (Was that enough evers in one sentence?) These are the most competitive people on earth. They want to play all the games, and play all the minutes of all the games.

“Back in our day, we played all the games … Michael Jordan always played all the games …”

Aah, yes, the old ‘Michael Jordan did it’ example. That’s right, the greatest player in the history of the game did it, and managed to be great. Never mind the fact that part of what made him great was having the ability to get through the sorts of difficult situations that others couldn’t, like having to play four games in five days in five different cities. Just because “back in your day,” you played all of the games, it doesn’t mean that you actually played very well. In fact, you probably didn’t play very well at all. And how do I know that, besides having sat through quite a few games over the years in Seattle where teams were dead tired on the second night of back-to-backs? Research.

Consider the predictor put forth in this article by the sleep researchers at UCSF, in which they went through and marked games on the NBA schedule in 2015-2016 where certain teams were likely to lose because of insufficient rest, and 78% of the time, those teams did just that. You can play all the games that you like, but if you’re almost 80% to lose in a given situation, you’re clearly not doing it well, at that point.

Quite honestly, I’m surprised it’s that low of a rate, but I suspect the reason it was that low was that a good number of those 22% of wins came from the Warriors, who logged 53,000 miles last season on the road, more than any other team, but were good enough to overcome it much of the time. The Warriors are logging even more miles this season – 54,000 all told – and some of that cannot be avoided because of geography, of course (to no surprise, Portland is second on that list), but some of it also has to do with flying for one-offs in order to accommodate the demands of national TV schedules. This ridiculous game on Saturday night was the Warriors’ fifth in seven days, and was the sixth in nine days for the Spurs. This game never should have been taking place, and neither team cared about anything other than keeping more guys from getting injured.

Not only was it the fifth in seven days for the Warriors, but it was the eighth in 13 days during a ridiculous escapade which saw them start out with a back-to-back in Philadelphia and Washington, a game in Chicago, a back-to-back in New York and Atlanta, a cross-country flight to play a single game against Boston, then a back-to-back in Minnesota and San Antonio. That’s five time zone changes and 11,000 miles, during which time the team had held one practice. That’s nuts. And lest you think I’m just grumpy that they’re losing lately, their schedule in January – in which they played nine of 10 games at home with the only road game being a bus ride to Sacramento – was also nuts. This 8-in-13 stretch was the worst bit of scheduling I’ve ever seen in the modern NBA – which is saying something for a league where the schedule is terrible for everyone. The flip side for the Warriors basically tanking against the Spurs last weekend is the fact that, on countless occasions this season, Golden State opponents have done the exact same thing to them – figuring they aren’t likely to win anyway, so why put players at risk? – and the games are boring. The games are basically over after a quarter and a half. It’s nice the Warriors win without breaking a sweat, but it’s not good basketball, and yet you can understand why teams are doing it. Given those circumstances, where you’re not likely to win anyway given the lack of rest and recovery time, why not just punt the game away?

Greg Popovich certainly isn’t opposed to that. The Spurs famously got fined $250,000 by David Stern the NBA a few years ago because Pop rested all of his starters for a 4th-game-in-five-nights tilt against the Miami Heat. There was no real reason or protocol for the NBA doing that, of course. It was just Little Napoleon getting his dander up over the fact that one of his teams was willing to kick away a game – and not just any game, mind you, but a nationally televised game vs. LeBron and the Heat which should’ve been a showpiece. As was the case with everything about David Stern, image was all that mattered, and he couldn’t stand that fact that a marquee game had instead been reduced to farce.

What’s farcical about it, of course, is that professional sports leagues continually, consistently go about using scheduling which all but guarantees subpar performance. The Thursday night games in the NFL are just atrocious from a quality standpoint, and you can understand why – the players involved simply haven’t recovered from the Sunday beforehand. In the NBA and the NHL, there are too many games in too few days, and the quality of play suffers, the risk of injury rises, and when there are injuries, the quality of play suffers even more. This is obvious. It’s a no-brainer. People complain about the fact that fans pay for tickets, in part, because they want to see the biggest stars in action, and so going to see a game and coming to discover that Steph or LeBron isn’t playing is a rip-off. I definitely understand that argument, particularly when it comes to cross-conference match-ups. Games are often dynamically and premium priced based upon match-ups by the clubs themselves (to say nothing of values on secondary ticket markets), and LeBron and the Cavs coming to town are naturally a bigger draw than some random mediocre team like the Denver Nuggets. (Folks in Memphis, in particular, were annoyed that LeBron sat out, since it was Cleveland’s only visit of the season.) But guess what? I don’t want to see bad basketball, either. That cheapens the product just as much as superstars being no-shows.

This is a problem in all sports, both here and also abroad. Seriously, watch any coverage of a non-major tennis tournament, and you’ll see guys and gals tanking all over the place. And why wouldn’t you? If you’re not on your game, and you’re a bit injured, and you’re playing in some irrelevant, secondary or tertiary tournament, what the hell is the benefit of trying to play through it? There’s a reason why domestic cup competitions in Europe have basically become a joke ever since the advent of the Champions and Europa Leagues. There are too many games on the schedule now and something’s got to give. Top clubs in Europe are sometimes playing upwards of 60 games in a season now, which is just preposterous, and one of the reasons why the quality of play in competitions like the World Cup, the Euros and last summer’s Copa América Centenario suffered somewhat is that guys are exhausted! Guys like Ronaldo and Messi want to play every minute of every game. You practically have to lock them in a closet to keep them out of the lineup. Well, gosh, that domestic cup match against some third division team seems like the right time to rest everyone, now doesn’t it?

Players need to fight for this stuff. They’ve done so in baseball, where the union has been adamant about making sure that mandatory days off for the players are built into the schedule. For example, you cannot make up a rainout on a date that causes the players to have to play more than 20 days in a row. The superstar players who call the shots in the players union in the NBA seemed to have been far more concerned about figuring out how to get themselves paid more than they were about the fact that the schedule is appalling in the most recent contract negotiations. Even so, word is the league is looking to lengthen the season 7-10 days, as it would lessen the fixture congestion and cut down on the dreaded back-to-back games, the success rate during which is greatly minimized. I mean, hell, I want as few of those as possible if I’m an owner, since those games tend heavily to result in loses, and I hate losing under any circumstance. I would rather you just get rid of the NBA, NHL, and NFL preseasons entirely, since the players don’t want to be there, the fans don’t want to be there, and no one wants to be there. (I do understand it’s somewhat different in baseball, where the unique motions and mechanics of the game do require a certain amount of pre-season preparation for a long regular season.) Doing so would be a money loser for the owners, of course, as would shortening the seasons, since both of those mean losses in gate receipts, but it’s always seemed to me that better quality of play = higher demand for your product, which means you can actually charge more for it. Having spent all of $9 to go to an NBA game in January 2016 in New Orleans, I can tell you that the demand for the product isn’t anywhere near as great as the league owners would like to think.

The Warriors were fed up on Saturday. They’d hollered in the ear of Adam Silver about this 8-in-13 stretch the moment they saw the schedule this past summer. Word was that they were thinking about sitting everyone of use for the Spurs game even before Kevin Durant got hurt and Steph Curry forgot how to shoot. They were pissed off about the schedule, and deliberately tanking a showcase game might actually get someone’s attention in the league office about going back and reëvaluating the scheduling procedures. Good on them for doing it.

The Warriors clinched a playoff spot with 25 games to go and don’t really care about playoff seeding. Quite honestly, neither do the Spurs or the Cavs, which is why I suspect you’ll see even more DNP-RESTs popping up in their box scores between now and Apr. 15 and I have no problem with that, as all of those teams are playing the long game here. So much depends, come playoff time, on the health of your players. We’ve been shortchanged the past two seasons in the Golden State-Cleveland match-ups by the fact that one team has so clearly been so much healthier than the other. I want to see good basketball. No, I want to see great basketball. Given the costs involved – the money at stake, the costs to the consumers – having a great product doesn’t seem like that much to ask.

Check Mate

I WAS going to update by NBA Losability ratings, seeing as how we are at the ‘halfway’ point of the season with the NBA All-Star game happening this past weekend in New Orleans. Sure enough, as we were nearing the break, there were a few teams establishing themselves as prime candidates for some Lose pontification. For starters, you had Miami go on a 12-game winning streak and pretty much wreck every plan the front office had to tank, which I think is awesome. As a professional athlete, I can’t think of a worse situation to be in than that in which you are expected, by your bosses, to fail. No one gets to be that good at a sport without anything other than supreme confidence in your ability to be successful. The Heat were 11-30 and had ‘tank job’ written all over them, but then the players sucked it up and pulled it together and went on a 12-game streak, and good for them for doing that, because I would be pissed off if I was one of those guys. I’ve mentioned previous in this blog how the Warriors went so far in their desperately attempts to tank and protect a draft pick they might lose that they started five rookies – and the rookies then went out and won a game and almost messed up the plan. Being deliberately bad has no place in sports, so I commend the Heat for this incomprehensible run, and I must admit that the Dion Waiters Experience is a long, strange trip.

And then there are the Heat’s in-state brethren, the Orlando Magic, who haven’t done anything right and have managed to construct the league's least appealing roster outside of Brooklyn despite having five straight picks in the Top 10 of the NBA draft. The Magic just atoned for a bad trade this past summer – giving up Victor Oladipo and their 1st round pick to OKC for Serge Ibaka – by making an even worse trade – flipping Ibaka to Toronto for Terrence Ross and a 1st round pick likely to fall at the end of the draft – thus managing to trade something good for something bad. I have no idea what the hell Orlando is doing, and haven’t had any idea for years.

Oklahoma City, of course, always finds a way to clamor for The Lose’s attention, and that game last Saturday against the Warriors pretty much summed up every single thing wrong about this entire organization – starting with the hillbilly fans who were so fired up to boo and heckle Kevin Durant the whole game, the novelty of which wore off by the time the Warriors were up 26 in the 2nd Quarter, and continuing on with Russell Westbrook, the “hero” of OKC who chose to “stay at home,” in part because OKC gave him about $8,000,000 more, and in part because being in this situation allows Russ to continue to do what he does best, which is play Don Quixote and take on all-comers and be the most selfish player in the league. Want to know a big reason why Kevin Durant left OKC? Because who wants to play with a guy like that, particularly in what would’ve been his contract year? Go back and watch that game over again and see how the Warriors basically sucker Westbrook by switching KD on him, at which point Russ goes full-on windmill tilt and abandons the OKC game plan completely, which is precisely what the Dubs wanted him to do. Most of his 47 points were essentially in garbage time – complete with him woofing “I’m coming” at KD, to which KD replied, “so what?” – and the Warriors scored nearly as many points off Westbrook’s turnovers as his teammates scored off his assists.

But then the Knicks simply can’t accept not being in the limelight for 10 minutes, even if they have to do something completely utterly stupid like have Charles Oakley – a former Knick, a loyal Knick, and a longtime fan favorite at the Garden – be ejected from the Garden for talking shit to owner Jim Dolan, who is one of those idiot owners with more dollars than sense. And the NBA has some of the worst sorts of these types in comparison to other sports, because unlike in other sports, where owners sit in boxes, the owners like to sit court side in the NBA – a good number of them foolishly believing that the fans in attendance are actually there to see them instead of what’s on the floor. The Knicks are a total disaster this season, of course, having doled out the single worst contract of the offseason when they signed Joachim Noah at 4/72, and having traded for Derrick Rose, who is a shell of himself and a walking distraction on a team full of distractions, most notably the distraction of Phil Jackson constantly going about bad-mouthing Carmelo Anthony and seemingly just trying to annoy Melo to the point where he’ll agree to wave his no-trade clause – which is something Phil gave to him in the first place, and did so for no apparent reason other than Melo asked for it. There were rumors of a trade with the Clippers – Melo for a bunch of stuff – and then came the rumors of Melo for Kevin Love, which is a deal the Cavs wouldn’t make anyway, but now they really won’t make with Love out injured for two months. The rumors in New York are always much more interesting than the truth – the truth being that the team on the floor is trash.

But the Zen Master himself, who has proven now to be so bad as an administrator in New York that you start wondering if his incredible résumé-filler of nine championships as a coach had anything whatsoever to do with anything other than having great players, is now free and clear to opt out of his deal and go back to L.A. and start fucking up the Lakers, with news today that Jeannie Buss has fired her brother Jim and also GM Mitch Kupchak – of course “Special Advisor” Magic Johnson might have something to say about that as well, even though Magic should probably be doing something like trying to find a way to get the blackout lifted on the games for that baseball team for which he’s a minority owner/face of the franchise. The Lakers’ season has gone from being fun to fun bad to just bad, and they’re presently on a crash course with the bottom, trying to lose as many games as possible to avoid giving away their draft pick to Philly this summer. Oh, wait, Magic is now the President of Operations for the Lakers. Come Thursday, he might be the starting point guard. Apparently the front runner for the GM job is Rob Pelinka, who was Kobe Bryant’s agent. Pelinka did a nice job scoring Kobe the biggest contract in NBA history at the time, of course – and the Lakers went 84-220 during the length of that contract. And I’ve seen this agent-to-GM route in the NHL before – in Vancouver, where Mike Gillis turned one of the most powerful franchises in the sport into a joke during his tenure. This sort of thinking doesn’t bode well for the Lakers. I find it amazing that I’m now reading reports where the Lakers wanted Bob Myers, the GM of the Warriors, to do the same gig in L.A., which speaks to just how delusional the Lakers are at the moment. Why would Bob Myers take that job? That’s a BAD job! Magic’s biggest task is going to be trying to convince people the franchise is still relevant. Good luck with that.

So there is a whole lot of lose fodder going right now, but the Kings had to go and flex their muscles over the All-Star weekend and reassert that they are, without a question, the masters of Losability, and remind all of us yet again that they are the worst-run, most disorganized, and single most incompetent franchise in all of North American professional sports, as they went out and traded Boogie Cousins, their one decent player, to the New Orleans Pelicans for what amounts to about 30¢ on the dollar.

Now, The Lose was speculating back in January about the availability of Boogie, suggesting Toronto might be an interesting destination if the Raptors wanted to make that kind of a bold move. But I said that based upon the idea that the Raptors were one of the few teams which could make a deal like that, given that they sort of assets to do it – which was obviously wrong on my part, when you see the return the Kings got from the Pelicans: Buddy Hield, a mediocre rookie shooting guard who has actually made fewer 3-pointers this season than Boogie; Langston Galloway and Tyreke Evans, who are both salary filler and the latter of which will probably ask to be bought out so he can go sign with someone like the Cavs; a first round pick in this year’s draft, which likely won’t be worth much since the Pelicans will possibly make the playoffs now and thus be out of the lottery; and a second round pick. That’s it? That’s the best you could do?

And some of that is on Boogie, of course, who has a pretty solid reputation, at this point, of being a clubhouse cancer. There has always been a question in Sacramento of whether the problem there is the organization or the problem there is Boogie, seeing as how it’s almost incomprehensible that an NBA team with such a good player can be so bad for so long. I’m inclined to think the former, but pretty much no one who has been around this team on a regular basis seems to have a whole lot of good to say about him. (For the play-to-play man, Grant Napear, to fire off a tweet storm like this in the aftermath of the trade speaks to the sort of day-to-day misery he, and everyone else in this organization, have had to put up with.) Boogie has clearly been a problem here, and the Kings were in a bad spot owing, in part, to the unintended consequences of the new CBA. Thanks to all of the knee-jerk reactions to Kevin Durant signing with the Warriors, the new CBA has provisions to allow clubs to offer massive sums in order to keep their All-NBA players, and the Kings were going to have to decide this coming summer if they really wanted to invest $210 million in a guy who was clearly a pain in the ass. Given that there are so many stories circulating about what a bad locker room guy Cousins was, you can understand them being hesitant to do so, since you’d be stuck with him for years. And given how bad Boogie’s rep has become, and how poor his behaviour has been on the court as well – he’s accrued so many technicals this season that every time he gets another, he’ll be suspended for a game – his rep is so low that the offers started getting lower, and lower, and lower. The offer New Orleans made was something of a fly-by. That offer wasn’t good enough to get them Jalil Okafor from the Sixers a couple of weeks ago.

This is an incredibly bad trade for the Kings. It may be the best they could get, at this point, but that doesn’t make it a good one but the Kings got themselves into this mess and are now, apparently, forced to choose between a bad deal and no deal. They could’ve traded Boogie last summer and scored a big haul. They could’ve waited until June and surveyed the lay of the lottery land. Hell, they could’ve just waited three more days to see if they could somehow get a better offer than what New Orleans gave them. And GM Vlade Divac put forth a brave face in trying to explain himself in the aftermath of this seemingly hasty All-Star weekend trade, but most of what he said made no sense when you consider that he and coach Dave Joerger were singing Boogie’s praises in the media a week ago and saying there were interested in re-signing him. None of the justifications make sense. Vlade mentioned that “character matters,” which seems pretty hollow when you consider that their point guard, Darren Collison, was suspended for domestic violence and their backup point guard, Ty Lawson, has been arrested four times and last year’s point guard, Rajon Rondo, outed a gay official on the court, not to mention the fact that any team willing to employ Matt Barnes doesn’t get to play the character card. There have also been comments about how high they are on Hield, going so far as to say that owner Vivek saw his pre-draft workout and thinks Hield has “Steph Curry potential.” Buddy Hield may not even Seth Curry potential. His only Curry potential is to go pick up some Thai food. And the Kings are spinning this as a chance to rebuild through the draft, which doesn’t make any sense, because you just made a lottery team in New Orleans a possible non-lottery team, so the pick is likely to get worse, and the Kings can’t really rebuild through the draft anyway, since their pick goes to the Bulls if it falls out of the Top 10 – unlikely at this point – and goes to the Sixers if the Kings wind up picking higher in the draft.

And the Kings got themselves into this mess because, for the last few years, they’ve been attempting to mollify Boogie, essentially letting him play coach and GM even though his teams have never even come close to sniffing the playoffs. They let Isaiah Thomas walk because Boogie didn’t like playing with him. They made short-sighted, win-now moves – like the awful trade with Philly which is now going to come back and bite them – thinking they were going to be good, but no one with a basketball IQ higher than that of a garden variety tomato would have looked at those moves, and those constructed rosters, and conclude that. The USA Today correspondent Sam Amick, a Sacramento resident, put forth the idea that the Kings were suddenly willing to part with Boogie because the team beat the Celtics in a game where Boogie was suspended, which typifies the sort of knee-jerk, small-sample thinking that has just killed this team: thinking which starts at the top with Vivek, who clearly knows nothing about operating an NBA basketball team, and doesn’t understand that a good owner doesn’t meddle in the affairs of the club but instead shuts up and signs the cheques and otherwise stays out of the way.

And this is what you get, Sacramento, for making the deal with the devil that is David Stern, who so desperately want to keep the NBA out of Seattle in Sacramento that he cobbled together a phony ownership group, with Vivek investing pennies on the dollar of what he should have in order to become majority partner, and the rest of whom know little to nothing about how to run a franchise. This is what you get. You can still have the NBA, so long as you’re okay with Kevin Johnson shoving $700 million or so down your throat in new taxes to pay for your new arena, but so long as you have clowns like Vivek in charge, you will never, ever have good basketball. Quite honestly, this is what the NBA deserves for the dumb way in which that all shook out.
 
Oh, and by the way, the fact that Sam Hinkie managed to figure out that the Lakers and the Kings were dumb and make long-term deals which benefit the Sixers does not make him a genius of a GM. I’m reading lots of revivalist shit about his tenure in Philly all of a sudden. Stop it. It’s a whole lot easier to make those sorts of moves when you’re not actually trying to be any good, and it doesn’t change the fact that the roster he left behind in Philly is still a clusterfuck, and that no one in the NBA is all that interested in dealing for the guys – Okafor and Nerlens Noel – that the Sixers have to deal in order to make any significant progress. I read on one of the Kings message boards that they should fire Vlade and hire Hinkie as a GM. Well, you’re going to have a lot of losing anyway, given that Vlade now has the roster of a 20-win team, and will more likely be the roster of a 15-win team by the time the spring fire sale in Sacramento has conclude, and given the fact have been so bungled in the misguided attempts to win in the present. Hinkie could scarcely do worse in Sacramento, were the Kings fans willing to endure three 10-win seasons in a row. Then again, Kings fans are so used to colossal failure by now that they’d probably handle it better than most other fan bases.

Now, for the Pelicans, of course, this move was a no-brainer, as the price was so low, how could they resist? Boogie’s signed through 2018, you now have a second star caliber player in Boogie to pair with Anthony Davis, and you basically had to give up nothing to get him. Grand predictions of Pelican success may be a big hasty of course – neither Boogie nor AD is a classic back-to-the-basket center, as both have pick-and-pop mid-range games, and it’s not really clear how they’ll mesh as Alvin Gentry has to rejig his pace-and-space offense on the fly. The guard position is still a trash pile, there is not enough shooting and not very much depth. Having said all of that, we saw how simply adding Jrue Holliday back to a team consisting of AD and a bunch of muppets suddenly made the Pelicans into almost a competent team. Having three quality players on the court should assure a nice haul of wins here at the end of the season even if they do little more than ignore the offense and just make stuff up on the fly. The Pelicans are 2½ games behind Denver for the 8th Seed, and making a push to get that #8 spot would bring some positivity to a franchise desperately in need of it. There really is no downside for the Pelicans on this deal. If it doesn’t work out, Boogie walks in 2018 and you still have AD to build around. If it does work, you’ve got a fascinating counterweight to all of the trends in the NBA, going big where others are going small, which makes the game a whole lot more interesting as a whole. There is really no downside here for New Orleans.

But there is no underestimating the intelligence of the brain trust behind the Sacramento Kings. Just when you thought they couldn’t do anything stupider, they do something stupider. There really isn’t any point to me doing any more Losability ratings, because there is only one true master of Losability in the NBA and it’s the Sacramento Kings. Check and mate.

Super Blow

Dear Falcons, this gentleman carrying the football here and scoring is called a running back. Please give him the ball.

PERHAPS what’s most remarkable, and most telling, about the New England Patriots winning five Super Bowls is how utterly dominant they haven’t been. Consider that the total margin of victory in those five games is 19 points. The most “one sided” of those games, if you will, was a 3-point win over the Eagles which was 14-14 going into the 4th Quarter, after which the Pats scored 10 points, the Eagles got a late TD and New England recovered an onside kick. The first two wins were decided by field goals at the gun, the last on a TD in OT, and in between you had a goal line stand in the last 30 seconds. Bill Belichick has won five Super Bowls in New England, but he very easily could have lost six.

And this is in no way a criticism of the Patriots. In fact, it speaks to their excellence. The Patriots have had some incredible good fortune in those games. But you would do well not to fall into the fallacy that The Lose cautions of frequently, which is to think that luck and skill are mutually exclusive. You have to be good enough to be able to take advantage of good fortune. What it also speaks to is something that I’ve felt for years about Belichick, which is that he is the master of situational football. The weird little bit of game theory he employed at the end of the Super Bowl two seasons ago against the Seahawks can be, and has been, debated, but at least he had some sort of an idea to try in a situation where all of the options are bad. And Belichick was definitely on the ball yesterday in terms of situational awareness – made most apparent, in fact, in a play that didn't work, which was the onside kick down 28-9 in the 3rd Quarter. The Pats don’t have a quick strike offense and needed three more scores. As such, the situation called for the onside kick. It didn’t work, which it often doesn’t, but it was the right play.

And this speaks to an idea I’ve often tried to express when teaching scrabble to new players. One of the things which I often say is that what separates good players from great ones is not how much they win by, but how much they lose by. Because when you’re losing, and it’s all going bad, you have to try crazy stuff in order to win the game, and most of the time it doesn’t work, so you end up losing by even more than might otherwise have. But in trying crazy stuff in order to win the game, you also steal a few games here and there which you wouldn’t otherwise win – and it’s those wins which mark the difference between good and great. The objective is to win the game, and ultimately the low percentage play is still better than the no percentage play.

And sometimes, in scrabble, and in other competitive endeavors, you’re left in a truly terrible predicament, one in which the only hope to win is to make your best play and then hope that your opponent screws up. It isn’t that much to go on, but again, it’s still better than the no percentage play. Who knows? Maybe they will screw it up.

Just like the Seahawks screwed it up in the Super Bowl two years ago when, for some god knows why reason, the Seahawks wouldn’t just line up and RUN THE DAMN BALL from the 1-yard line.

And just like the Atlanta Falcons screwed it up yesterday, when they contrived to commit what was probably the greatest choke in NFL history.

To put this in some context here, when the Falcons scored to go up by 28-3 midway through the 3rd Quarter, 538.com had the Falcons listed as 99.63% to win the game. To put that in some perspective in comparison to some memorable NFL gaffes in recent years, when the Seahawks were on the 1-yard line in the closing seconds against the Pats, they were only at 87.4% to win in that situation. A better comparison would be two weeks prior to that Pats-Seahawks Super Bowl, which was the NFC Championship game, where the Green Bay Packers were 96.2% favorites to beat the Seahawks with 5:13 left in the game and still managed to lose – but this scenario in Super Bowl LI was even more unlikely than that one. It’s basically impossible to lose a game when you’re 99.63% to win if you just go through the motions and let the clock run itself out over time. You almost have to try to lose in that circumstance. You have to screw up, and screw up royally.

The gold standard of NFL chokes has long been the Houston Oilers, on Jan. 3, 1993, blowing a 35-3 lead in the second half and losing 41-38 in OT to the Buffalo Bills. That game was a little bit weird though, in that the comeback was basically an explosion by the combustible Bills offense, which scored four touchdowns in six minutes in the 3rd Quarter. The Oilers still had time to actually rally in that game, kicking a FG in the final seconds to tie the score at 38-38 and force OT. That one was bad, but given all that was on the line yesterday, and given was a calamitous collapse that occurred, this one takes the cake.

I was not surprised at all to see the Falcons winning this game. I’ve been saying for two weeks that I’d thought they would win. The defense isn’t élite, but you could see that they were extremely well prepared, which was always one of Dan Quinn’s hallmarks when he was in charge of the defense in Seattle. When you’re well prepared, you can keep the game simple: keep the ball in front of you and react, make the tackle, make New England exert a lot of energy on the offensive end. And the Pats had to try to keep the ball and chew up time, even when losing, because the Falcons offense is explosive and capable of gashing anyone. The Falcons were averaging upwards of 9 yards per play in the first half on offense, and it was the Pats and not the Falcons who were making all of the mistakes. This is a good team in Atlanta. They were quicker than the Patriots, and they absolutely blitzed them on both sides of the ball in that first half. They have a lot of talent there, but what they don’t have, above all else, is experience – and that includes Quinn, who is only in his second year as an NFL head coach, having taken over for the perpetually underachieving Mike Smith, a guy whose rap included, among other things, poor attention to detail when the game bogged down and required situational awareness.

Up 28-9, the Falcons are still okay. Even up 28-12 in the 4th Quarter, the Falcons are okay. They take over the ball again after a New England field goal with 9:44 left in the game – and proceed to put forth 9¾ minutes of the most astonishingly bad football imaginable. And keep in mind as I’m recounting this, that for New England to win this game, pretty much all of these things have to occur. That’s how much of a long shot we’re talking here. Let’s take it from the top, with some proper buzzard points for emphasis, because the buzzards were circling when all of this was over:

• I think I said to The Official Spouse of In Play Lose at some point during this mess of an ending – the two of us enjoying some bar food and whiskeys at The Official BBQ Joint of In Play Lose – that if the Falcons lost this game on one play, it was this one: 3rd-and-1, with just over 8:00 to go in the game. What do we do here, Falcons? Here’s an idea: RUN THE DAMN BALL! Atlanta is averaging almost six yards per carry in this game. Furthermore, the Falcons pass protection hasn’t been very good. Further still, the Falcons defense has been the field forever, thanks to a combination of quick strikes by the Falcons offense plus the return of a pick six shoehorned in between a pair of long New England drives. By the end of the 3rd Quarter, the Pats had run 62 plays and the Falcons had run 33. And even more important than anything else, the Falcons need to kill the clock. The clock is the enemy at this point, not the Patriots. If the Falcons run the ball and don’t make it and punt, New England’s starting 60 yards away from the goal line, if not more. If the Falcons do make the first down, they’re going to kill another 2:00-3:00 on the next series of downs.
But the Falcons love the passing game. It’s their bread and butter. Okay, so here’s an idea: throw it short, or throw it out to the scat back in the flat and tell him to beat the linebackers to corner – which is something the Falcon backs had been doing all day. Just get rid of it. They don’t want to take a sack here.
And I have no earthly idea what play the Falcons were trying to run – and I’m not even sure the Falcons knew, either, but there goes Ryan taking a 7-step drop and no one’s open and the play design is a mess, and the back who should have the ball in his hands instead doesn’t know where he’s going and he whiffs on a block, and Matt Ryan seems to be moving in slow motion back there with his big, long, slow windup to his delivery. Strip sack, fumble recovered by the Pats on Atlanta’s 25 yard line and suddenly the Pats have life.
This is absolutely, positively the worst possible thing Atlanta could’ve done, because the tired defense goes back on the field and the Pats have finally figured out how to move the ball, and now all of the momentum and belief is over on the New England sideline. In some ways, the Falcons would have been better off if the Pats had somehow managed to run the fumble back for a score, because at least they keep your defense off the field and out of a high leverage situation. This just can’t happen in this situation. New England was only going to win this game is the Falcons gave them easy opportunities. Well, they just did.

• So the Patriots score and now it’s 28-20 and the Falcons mess-up the kick return, are stuck back on their own 10-yard-line and full panic is starting to set in. But they bust a big play for 39 yards by … hey, look, it’s a short pass to the scat back in the flat, gee whiz, where was that play a couple of minutes ago? At this point, the clock is running again, the Falcons line up for their next play and then snap the ball with about :25 left on the play clock.
And at this point, it’s pretty obvious to me that no one out there for the Falcons is thinking, because running the play clock down to :01 or :02 before snapping it is just basic football here. If I’m Kyle Shanahan, the Falcons Offensive Coordinator, I’m screaming this into the radio in Matt Ryan’s helmet. You would think that, when you’ve played as much football in your lives as these guys, that this sort of tactic would be common knowledge and almost come instinctively. And apparently, you would have thought wrong.

• So the Falcons get themselves stuck again after running a couple more plays which make no sense, only to then be bailed out by Julio Jones making one of the sickest catches that I have ever seen, and now they’re at the New England 21 yard line with about 4:45 to go. What to do now? How about this one: RUN THE DAMN BALL. You’re in field goal range here, you have a solid kicker, and three running plays will also force New England to take their three timeouts. Even if you just ran three straight times up the middle and then kick it, you’re up 31-20 with about four minutes left, the Pats have to score twice and have no timeouts.
So, of course, Atlanta goes empty backfield and tries to throw it.
I give up.

• Hey look, Matt Ryan just took another 7-step drop and took a sack for a loss of 13 yards. Throw in a holding penalty on the next play, and the Falcons are going backwards. They’ve lost 23 yards and taken themselves out of field goal range, when all they needed to do was just RUN THE DAMN BALL and this game is as good as over. Instead, they have to punt, Brady has two timeouts left plus the 2:00 warning to work with, and the Atlanta defense is gassed.
And if you’re the York family down at The Pants in Santa Clara, you might start wondering, at this point, what you’re getting with Kyle Shanahan as a head coach for the 49ers. Shanahan is one of those guys I generally don’t like in the NFL who has used nepotism to get himself into some plum gigs, a la the Ryans and the Grudens of the world. I was talking online to a rueful 49er fan after the game, and I said to them, “so, you realize this guy calling these awful plays is your head coach next year, right? Good luck with that.”

• So the defense is just basically dead on their feet out there for the Falcons, at this point. In the game, overall, New England ran 93 plays and Atlanta ran 46. It’s not really a surprise that the Patriots chew them up here, as Brady thrives in this situation, but there is still time for another awful coaching move, which occurs with 2:03 left in the game when Edelman makes a circus reception of a ball that seemed to bounce off about six guys. The Falcons kept getting hands on Brady’s passes, but they could never corral the sucker, and this one boings off hands and feet and everything else and Edelman comes down with the ball – and for some inexplicable reason, Dan Quinn decides to challenge the call.
Now, here’s the thing. The obvious reason to challenge it is if you think it hit the ground, but you have an official out there adamantly gesturing that it didn’t, you have a giant replay board up there where every person in the stadium can see that it didn’t, and you almost certainly have someone looking at that replay in your booth who can see that it didn’t. Furthermore, the Patriots are likely to scramble up to the line of scrimmage to get a play off, as teams are coached to do when a potentially challengable call occurs that is in your advantage, but they’re probably not going to beat the 2:00 warning, which is an opportunity lost. So DON’T STOP THE CLOCK FOR THEM!
But Quinn uses his last timeout here for this foolish challenge – the Falcons having wasted the other two previously, including having to burn one earlier in the 3rd Quarter on a play where their defense only had 10 guys on the field. Do not do this, Dan Quinn! You just gave the Pats a stoppage of the clock. You gave them extra time and extra plays at a moment where those things are absolutely precious.
And when the Pats do score to tie the game, Atlanta only has :57 left and has no more timeouts, and all of the options are terrible at that point. Atlanta has to try running the kickoff back even if it goes in the end zone, which they then make a hash off, and now they don’t have any good options. Even just having one timeout in that situation would have afforded them a chance to throw the ball 20-30 yards down the middle of the field, stop the clock, and give them the opportunity to get into field goal range.

What. A. Mess.

And there was zero doubt in my mind that, having won the toss to start the OT, the Patriots were going to win that game. Zero. None. Goose egg. It was the only thing predictable about this game.

So the Patriots have now wriggled off the hook twice in a row in the Super Bowl, owing entirely to the fact that their opponents have messed it up. But you know what? The Patriots ultimately didn’t mess it up and that counts for something. It counts for a lot, actually. It counts for two more Super Bowl rings. And I don’t even know where the Falcons go from here. Yes, they’re a young team with good talent that seems to be on the rise, but you don’t blow a Super Bowl and instantly snap it all back into shape. You don’t just get over this kind of thing. You just don’t. The game of football is too hard and too demanding, and just getting to the Super Bowl in the first place usually involves a confluence of events going your way: maybe you have a decent injury run, maybe your biggest adversaries have injury problems of their own like the Panthers and the Seahawks did, or maybe you catch a break when an opponent who you were wary of trips and stumbles all over themselves like the Cowboys did against the Packers in the playoffs. A lot of times, in order to be successful, things have to break your way which you have no control over. So for godsake, when you do have that control, you just can’t go about giving it away.

That, and RUN THE DAMN BALL FALCONS! Sheesh.

I feel bad for the long-suffering fans in Atlanta, which is a stunningly-awful sports city. The Falcons have never won a Super Bowl, the Braves only won a single World Series despite making the playoffs 15 years in a row, the Hawks are the epitome of mediocre, the city has lost two hockey teams, and Atlanta is also the only place on earth to host two enormous events – the Super Bowl and the Olympics – and have no one coming away with anything good to say about either experience. Cool city, though. It might make a good location for the future Hall of Lose, since losing seems to be what they know and do best.

I’m Going to Say This Once

I’M GOING to say this once, and once only, and then we will get back to the fun and the games. I posted this last night on my Facebook wall, but I feel as if it needs to be said here, in this personal space and corner of cyberspace of mine and I am going to modify it to fit this forum. And if you do not like that, then tough shit.

“What America does best is create Americans.”
– Bernard-Henri Lévy

I post pictures of these tacos all the time across social media, which are made by David. David makes his own sauces, his owns mixes and marinades. These are the best tacos in the world.

David is an immigrant. He has a wife and 2-year-old daughter. He does all of this, by hand, every day, and he makes $3.50 a taco, which isn’t a helluva lot. He works his ass off, like pretty much all of the immigrants who live in my neighborhood. They work construction, they work in restaurants, they take shit jobs that are beneath cushy white people like me.

David was originally working selling tacos outside of his building down the street, which is where a really popular local Salvadoreño restaurant was located, but it closed in order for the building to be seismically upgraded. It will come back, but for the mean time, some people are out of work. People just like David who work their asses off.

David now sets up his taco stand in a new location, having been welcome to do so outside the corner store – a store which is owned by a Yemeni national. He and his partner work really hard, work from 7 am to 2 am, just the two of them. They’ve managed to get some help recently, as the owner has finally managed to bring his family over to the U.S. after about a decade of trying and his two teenage sons also work in the store. And they had to get out, because Yemen is in chaos. With as much vile venom being spewed forth about “those kind of people” in this country, being in this country is still, without a doubt, better than being over there.

And the Yemenis who run the corner store are our friends. They are friends to everyone in this neighborhood – the whites and the blacks and the Latinos, the rich and the poor, even the police, some of whom I’ve noticed have taken to eating at David’s taco stand out front. They want a better life for themselves and their families, which is exactly what your ancestors and mine wanted when they came to this country.

These people are not my enemies, nor will they ever be. Where they may have come from does not make them my enemy. We make far too many enemies out of the people who are not, worrying about people from far away lands when it has been shown, time and again, that the real enemies often lie within.

But when you decide to cast people as enemies, based upon from where they come, it’s amazing just how many enemies you ultimately wind up creating. If you do that, they then come to see you as the enemy, and they are quite right to do that.

And if anyone who is reading this cannot comprehend this fact, then they should probably just unfriend me now, because as much as I appreciate speaking to a wide range of people with a wide range of views about a wide range of topics, and value that, and as much as I appreciate strenuous debate, someone who cannot understand this is clearly a fucking idiot, and is not worth one more goddamn ounce of my time.

And do not argue with me on this point. If you cannot see just how counterproductive, pointless, and fundamentally un-American this behavior has been which has come out of Washington, D.C. these past few weeks, then just leave this corner of cyberspace and carry on someplace else. Sorry to see you go – and I mean that will all sincerity – but I have nothing more to say to you. We have nothing left to say.

Of Laughter and Forgetting

REGULAR readers of this blog have probably wondered where I’ve been for the past few weeks. I did say, in an entry near to the beginning of the month, and the new year, that In Play Lose was going to be more active here in 2017 – but when I speak of In Play Lose, I am primarily speaking of myself, of course, since as I previously posted, even nonfiction is dependent upon a fundamentally strong central character, be they a historical figure or some other subject of the work, or even if it’s simply the author themselves.

I have always been a huge fan on gonzo journalism, be it of the original or the spaghetti sense of form, because inserting oneself into the center of a work of nonfiction does not take away the impact nor make it any less true; to the contrary, the effect can be heightened, since the author not only wants to tell the facts, but create an experience using those facts. If you read the work of Hunter S. Thompson and say, “wow, that story is fucked up and weird,” then he has done his job, because the people he was tailing and trailing and chronicling at the time were, in fact, as fucked up and weird as he said they were, and history has shown them to be that fucked up and weird, but history as also shown us, time and again, that we don’t learn a goddamn thing from it.

“This may be the year when we finally come face to face with ourselves; finally just lay back and say it – that we are really just a nation of 220 million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns, and no qualms at all about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable. The tragedy of all this is that George McGovern, for all his mistakes ... understands what a fantastic monument to all the best instincts of the human race this country might have been, if we could have kept it out of the hands of greedy little hustlers like Richard Nixon. McGovern made some stupid mistakes, but in context they seem almost frivolous compared to the things Richard Nixon does every day of his life, on purpose ... Jesus! Where will it end? How low do you have to stoop in this country to be President?”
– Hunter S. Thompson, 1972

And this blog, of course, is fundamentally about me, the weirdo author, the guy who has spent most of his 47 years on the planet pretty much failing miserably at most everything and as a result, over the course of time, has come to develop a heightened sense of the absurd, the appreciation for the high art of failure, and the ability to laugh off most of life’s most intense and immense disappointments. Most, but not all. There are still some doozies in the closet which I’m not going to break out any time soon. So don’t ask. It’s not happening. You might be able to get it out of me if I’m in a seriously good mood – “seriously good” as in both serious and good, and opposed to exceptionally good mood, which isn’t the correct usage of the word seriously but I don’t give a goddamn right now – and if you buy me a few extremely expensive whiskeys at the bar. But no promises.

And every now and then, I’ll tell some stories here at In Play Lose which are personal in nature – such as this wonderful jaunt through the past that I recalled last summer about the greatest booze cruise in history, a story which many people had told me, both in person and online, really resonated with them,  and about which my buddy Puneet recently said, “I felt like I was there on the boat with you. I wish I could have been there.” That sort of compliment resonates with me, it says more to me than any readership data or book sales numbers ever will. If I tell a story, and it resonates and creates the experience for another reader, then I have done my job.

And I’ve been pretty bad at doing my job for most of the past 25 years – my job fundamentally being that of someone who should be telling stories, be it of the fictional or the nonfictional nature. I do it well, but simply do not do it enough. Which is something that I’m trying to fix here in 2017. In fact, I think it’s something that I need to be doing in a big, big way. I feel a certain sense of moral obligation to do it at the moment, in fact, because if there is one thing that comes with developing a heightened sense of the absurd and learning to appreciate for the high art of failure, it is the ability to laugh.

And this blog is primarily centered on sports because the result in sports is always black and white. There are winners and there are losers. And yet within those absolutes, there is endless nuance, instances where that black and white dissolve and mix and create endless shades of grey. I took a break on Saturday night from what I’m working on, at present, to watch the basketball game, watch the Golden State Warriors completely obliterate the L.A. Clippers by a score of 144:98. And it was ridiculous. Steph was doing Steph things, sinking 50-footers and scoring 25 points in a quarter. The Warriors scored 86 points in the second and third quarters alone and played probably the most beautiful 24 minutes of basketball that will be seen on this earth in 2017. On the halftime show, Magic Johnson compared it to the Showtime Lakers of the 1980s – an apt comparison, although he qualified it by saying, “we were getting layups and dunks, while the Warriors are shooting threes.” I hated the Lakers because they were so damn good, but damn they were so damn good.

But this is In Play Lose and what does this say of the Clippers? This is a good team, a really good team, one of probably the 5-6 best teams in the NBA when they are healthy – which they aren’t at the moment, as Chris Paul is out for two months and Blake Griffin has been in and out of the lineup and still doesn’t look like he’s 100%. (He was a matador out there when he tried to guard Durant, and Doc did him no favors by basically giving him no help.) And the Clippers were absolutely embarrassed by the Warriors. They were run into the ground once again by a Warriors team that likes doing nothing quite as much as it likes embarrassing the Clippers, and have done so repeatedly for the past three years. And the Clippers are fascinating to The Lose, of course, because they were so bad for so long, then got really good, but still haven’t won anything and pretty much never will since they’re stuck on the same side of the country as the Warriors, who own them and know it and love rubbing their faces in it. The Clippers have risen from being an abject failure to being a respectable one, a worthy adversary who still nonetheless succumbs. Theirs is a higher level of failure.

And it’s this which is interests me the most about Lose: the idea that a team like the Clippers does, in fact, create something verging on being great and yet they’re ultimately, in the bigger picture, no better off than some terrible team like the Phoenix Suns. Because let’s be honest here, if the Suns are 10,000,000 miles away from being an NBA champion, the Clippers are about 6,000,000 miles away as they are presently constructed, seeing as how the Warriors beat them by about 6,000,000 points tonight. Being close and not good enough is really not much different than being awful, and is, in many ways, worse than being awful. because being good but not good enough breeds false hope. I’ve been threatening for a while to write my definitive personal history of my devotion to the Vancouver Canucks, a 35-year escapade during which I’ve seen them achieve literally every single sort of failure imaginable, from just being flat terrible to being completely incompetent to seeing them stumble their way to Stanley Cup Final to seeing them be a hit crossbar away from winning a Stanley Cup and being arguably the best team that never won a Stanley Cup, because you don’t 187 division titles in a row unless you're badass, but all it takes is a hot goaltender or some key injuries at the wrong time and you’re sunk. And watching them fail at the highest level is worse than watching them be awful, in a lot of ways. It hurts a lot more. You get used to bad teams being bad, and you can laugh at the general displays of incompetence every couple of days. It’s harder to laugh when the stakes are higher.

But we need to figure out how to laugh when the stakes are higher. We need to laugh all of the time. Laughter is life’s greatest antidote. And in the strange times in which we find ourselves, we need to laugh. We need to laugh all of the time. We need to laugh, perhaps, more than we ever have before.

And these are strange times in which we live. Quite honestly, I have no fucking idea what the hell is going on any more. Reading the news, I feel as if I’ve bought a ticket for a night at the O’Farrell St. Theatre of the Absurd and come to discover that I’m actually a member of cast, except that no one has given me a script, because I have no earthly idea what I’m supposed to do. But I was buoyed by my recent trip to New Orleans, where I served as director of the annual Crescent City Open scrabble tournament, a fun but often thankless task that involves being an administrator, an organizer, a public relations person, a computer programmer, a computer troubleshooter, a psychotherapist and, probably worst of all, a referee, because we all know that referees are dumb and as blind as bats. But it was also during the long morning walk in the fog and in and around the top end of the French Quarter – a proud and elegant and proud and timeless area of the city a few blocks removed from the slop and the sludge of Bourbon St. – that I actually stopped acting like a tourist and felt, innately, as if I were actually living in New Orleans and, thus, experiencing it differently. It no longer felt like a filmset, the assortment of locals feeling no longer feeling like extras on that set, and it truly felt real to me – so much so that four wayward Alabamans approached me as I strode down rue des Ursulines and asked me for directions, prefacing it as they approached by saying, “let’s ask this guy. He lives here,” and I was able to give them directions, tell them the café was closed, and suggest the café where I got that really nice large chicory coffee that was in my left hand.

And feeling like you’re “living” in a city, even if you are only visiting, means that you come to feel the rhythms and the biorhythms and the tempos of the place. What I’ve always taken away from New Orleans is that it just might be the single-most creative city in which I have ever set foot. Even the throwaway street buskers are phenomenal musicians. There is music and there is art and there is a verse of poetry waiting to be written around every street corner. And this is not me speaking with blinders on, ignoring the troubles that the city of New Orleans endures seemingly far away from it’s quaint and charming and enticing central corridors. New Orleans is fundamentally a city of heartbreak – and when it comes to acts of creativity, a city of heartbreak is fertile ground for fine flowers. Only in New Orleans does the approach to the saddest moment of life – the end of life – call for the striking up the brass band and the throwing of a parade.

“There is no substitute for madness,” is the last line of a story called Winning by Ron Jones, which can be found in Take it to the Hoop, a collection of short stories, essays and poems about the game of basketball which is long since out of print and which I lost long ago – lost along with my remarkable and diverse collection of books that I’d gathered through college, stolen from a storage shed where they were stored since my stupid ex-wife, may she rot in the hell of her own making, made me keep them there because there was “no room for your books,” and there is no way using bold or italic or all caps to express the level of disdain she espoused in her stressing of the word “your.” I have now righted this one small error, one among many, after scouring the internets and acquiring a used copy of Take it to the Hoop from a group in a Kansas community raising money to build a new library, simply because I want to be able to read Winning again, and also read one of my favorite and also favoritely titled poems of all time: The NCAA Mideast Regionals and Other Existential Setbacks. Those of you who read this blog may remember that I offered up a piece of Christmas fiction a few years ago entitled Winning. I admit it, I stole the name. Bad artists copy, good artists steal, and wannabes like me should opt to go with the good.

And Winning, this story by Ron Jones I want to reread, is not about winning, in the traditional sense. Indeed, the last line of the story speaks to a placard places over the locker room door that reads “there is no substitute for winning,” where the word ‘winning’ has been crossed out and replaced with ‘madness.’ The story is about a guy trying to coach high school basketball at the poor and grubby high school on the other side of the tracks in a well-to-do town during a racially divisive era and it’s a hilarious and wondrous and resourceful and ultimately heartbreaking endeavor in which some semblance of salvation ultimately comes through coming to redefine what it means to win and to lose – which is basically what I need to be doing or, more importantly, remembering that I should be doing, because the greatest single moment of my lifetime, the single most-important moment which changed which realtered the entire course of mine, came when I was sitting on the carpeted floor of a meeting room at a psychiatric institute, laughing so hard that the tears were streaming down my face, and we all were doing that, and someone actually said they felt bad because being insane wasn’t supposed to be so much fun. And I felt bad for all of those suckers out there who were going to their stupid jobs and going through the day-to-day machinations of their lives, enduring the drudgery because they were the sane ones. We’re the crazy people, we’re the chosen ones and the lucky ones. There is no substitute for madness.

Nor is there substitute for laughter, and I’m going to laugh like hell for the next four years. I’m going to laugh my ass off. I’m going to laugh in the face of the people who do things that disgust me, because you’re not going to take away my ability to laugh. I was just chatting recently, in fact, with a person who was there rolling on the floor with me in uncontrollable laughter at the psychiatric institute and, thus, shares the single most-important moment in my life, and she spoke of how her 2016 was a personal dumpster file, to which we concurred than the world can pretty much go fuck itself after what it did to itself in 2016, and that laughter and madness are going to win the day in 2017.

And that means I need to write, and need to write a lot. And one of the reasons why I spoke so much of how I was impacted in New Orleans is that, in a place which feels real to me all of a sudden, a place in which I suddenly feel fueled and infused with the creativity and imagination of the city, it suddenly occurred to me that this other novel I am working on, which I have started and stopped and started and stopped off and on since the fall of 2003, was going nowhere because I had completely gotten the ending wrong. You can’t get to the end if you don’t know where you’re going. I’ve had an ending in mind ever since I started crafting this novel – a novel for which I’m going to put aside my usual propensity for downplaying my abilities by stating that it will be the greatest novel I ever write in my lifetime in I can ever write the fucking thing, but I’ve not done so because I’ve feared that doing so might actually kill me. I’m dead serious when I say that. But there in New Orleans, I realized that the ending I’d had in mind for over a decade was completely, utterly the wrong one, which means the whole goddamn thing – towards which I’d written about 23,000 words here in the first few weeks of 2016 – needs to be redone.

Crap. Now what?

Well now what is we do what we usually do when dilemmas about writing spring up, which is to put whatever it is that’s not working aside and do something else and do something completely different. And I mean completely different. As in, bearing absolutely no resemblance whatsoever to that monstrous magnum opus of mine which continues to do nothing but grow moss. And while I’m at it, make it funny, and make it absurd.

And so I’ve spent most every free moment I’ve had since returning from New Orleans working on a new novel, one which is pure slapstick and farce, and I’m 50,000 words into it and still seem to like it, which is generally an encouraging sign. And in choosing to do this, I also chose to set it during a rather remarkable point in time, which is Europe in late 1989 and early 1990, a time where I happened to be in Europe and got the experience the whole of the world changing in a few fell swoops. There I was in a Paris café sipping a 1664 and not watching football on the television overhead, but watching live coverage of the Romanian Revolution, as the intrepid reporters were ducking and taking cover amid the sniper fire, and return fire, in the streets of Bucharest. I remember sitting in the room across from mine at the university smoking hand rolled drums with a German grad student who had permitted himself the luxury of a fine bottle of cognac or brandy or whatever it was – I don’t recall, since I was most likely already drunk, since I was drunk all the time back then – and it was the day before the Berlin Wall fell and he spoke of the enormous senses of both uncertainty and optimism he felt for his homeland, with the latter ultimately trumping the former. It was a remarkable period of time where we every single thing we thought that we knew about how the world was organized completely collapsed.

And here we are, 27 or so years later, wondering how in the hell the world ever got so screwed up. No one who felt the rush and surge of optimism and hope in Europe at that time would have ever believe that the world would one day wind up like this. But go back 27 years from then, and you have 1962 and the Cuban Missile Crisis. No one in 1962 would ever have foreseen what came to pass in 1989. Go back 27 years before that and you’re in 1935 amid the Great Depression and run-up to the Second World War. Who would foresee the world nearly ending in 1962? Would you have among the Dust Bowl and the urban blight of the mid-30s that 27 years later, the U.S. would be the most powerful nation on the earth and the richest nation the earth has ever known? Most likely not. The point is that things change, and do so far more frequently, and more rapidly, than we may realize. There is always the potential for the world to radically shift and for civilization to chart a new course, and if you find yourself in a world in which you feel hopeless, you should remember that there are times in the not-to-distant past when optimism seemed to flourish in abundance.

And in order to best figure out how to cope with a world which I find has gone off the deep end, I find myself reading, and re-reading, a great number of my favorite authors from the 20th century, great numbers of whom hail from countries like Czechoslovakia and the military junta dominated eras in Latin America. Authors who figured out how to cope with the worst sorts of oppressions through their own creative expression – expressions which are rife with madness and, yes, with humor. Laughter. The oppressor doesn’t want you to laugh, after all. They don’t want you to find the humor because, of course, the funniest thing is the oppressor himself. The wonderful Czech poet Miroslav Holub did a reading in England when I was there in 1990, fully basking in the glow of the Communists having been swept aside, and he prefaced a poem by saying that in the “old” days, old being several months ago, if you wanted to write about the buffoons running the country, you simply spoke in allegories and set your pieces in mythical German principalities or duchies or kingdoms, because you could get around the censors that way, since mocking the Germans was acceptable and even encouraged after WWII, but everyone in the know would know exactly whom you were referring to. He then read a poem that started with some long and self-important title of a German prince or duke or king and the whole room burst into laughter. So I’ll go back and reread Holub, and reread Milan Kundera, who is still Czech in my mind even though he wants to think of himself as French, and I’ll reread Josef Škvorecký’s wonderful books in which his jazz loving and jazz playing hero cares far more about jazz and girls than he does about politics, but politics always seem to get in the way of his pursuits of both hot sex and hot sax. And I’m going to read and learn from these people once again, because while living in strange times under strange circumstances, they sure did find a way to be both witty and brilliant and found a way to make both themselves and their readers laugh.

Laugh, god damn it. Laugh.

And this is all a roundabout way of explaining that the reason why I’ve not been venturing lately into this absurd corner of cyberspace which I have created is because I’ve been venturing lately into an even more absurd space, which is my own mind, and I apologize for that, because there is always time for Lose, and I am chortling at the train wreck that is the Cleveland Cavaliers at the moment, and loving me some Sixers as they win as many games in January as they did all of last season, and give me the Falcons and the points this coming Sunday. And is there a bigger douchebag in all of sports right now than Grayson Allen? Every Duke loss is still one loss too few. And I should give a shout out to tennis player Mischa Zverev, who really espoused the essence of Lose in his run-up to his Australian Open against Roger Federer when asked about a previous meeting in Halle, Germany, in which Zverev lost 6-0, 6-0.

“I'd rather lose 6-0, 6-0 to Roger in a quarterfinal than to a qualifier in the second round. At least there is something to talk about later.”
– Mischa Zverev

Fuck yeah. If you’re gonna lose, make it memorable.

So anyway, I apologize for being away from The Lose here for a little while, but rest assured that the spirit of Lose runs pretty much through everything that I do.

And I’m not really losing much all that moment, and I’m not going to be losing all that much here in this society, as it’s presently being constructed, since the people presently doing the construction seem to want to bend it back in such a way to benefit aging, lower middle-class white guys such as myself. But the ways in which this is coming about leave me aghast and absolutely appalled. I want nothing to do with any of this. But what can I do? I’m just one person among many. I can do what I do best, which is to make people laugh, which is to tell stories and tell jokes and point out the ridiculousness of everything around me here in my own personal Belgium. Some of those will be short form, some will be blogs, and some will be ludicrous novels that I throw myself into full bore at the expense of everyone else. We need laughter, we need comedy, we need to remember what makes us human. So let’s laugh a lot, here and elsewhere. Comedy = tragedy + time, so let’s laugh as time passes and strictly adhere to that principle.

How the Worst Was Won

All of these teams are awful

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.

Deal or No Deal?

Get this man some help!

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.