Let's Make a Meal Out of a Deal

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

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

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

– – –

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

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

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

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

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

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

– – –

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

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

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

You Gotta Lose Your Mind in Detroit ... Lob City?

“Duh, which way did he go? Which way did he go? …”

RIP Lob City. I’ll miss the Clippers. For Warriors fans, for several years running, Kill The Clippers Night has been one of those days on the calendar to circle, to look forward to, and ultimately to cherish. The NBA season can be general drudgery, of course, and teams often have to dig deep to find some motivation over the course of an 82-game season. But the Warriors haven’t lacked for any motivation when it came time to play the Clippers, because they HATED the Clippers.

If the Warriors decide they want to kill you, they’re going to kill you, and the Warriors loved to kill the Clippers, beating them 12 straight times and putting some humiliating beatdowns on them along the way. Last season, it reached its zenith, as Golden State just toyed with the Clippers. They made it a point to beat the Clippers by 50 in a preseason game. They beat them by nearly 50 during the season as well, and also put up a 50-point quarter against the Clips that was statistically near-perfect, posting a 200.00 offensive rating. The Clips finally broke the streak earlier this season, beating the Dubs in December in a game where Lou Williams scored 50 points and the Warriors attempted to play a game without an actual backcourt – Curry was hurt, and Klay Thompson was “resting,” a sure sign that the novelty of grinding the Clippers into dust had worn off. The Warriors no longer care about the Clippers. The Clips have been rendered just another drudge game to slog through.

The acrimony originally boiled over during a 2014 playoff series, when the two teams got into a fight during a prayer chapel session and then later had to hastily erect a unified front and threaten to walk off the court if the NBA didn’t do anything about Clippers owner Donald Sterling. But the animosity had already been brewing, as the ascending Dubs had grown tired of the Clippers’ act:



The Clippers went on to win that contentious 2014 playoff series, only to lose to OKC in the next round – thanks, in part, to one of the worst chokes in NBA history. Seriously, that one defied all logic and sense. But as if to show that blowing a 7-point lead in the final minute of a playoff game wasn’t a fluke, the Clippers pulled off an ever greater choke in 2015 as they blew a 3-1 lead in the Western semifinal, including gagging away a 19-point lead in Game 6 to the Houston Rockets – a Rockets team with James Harden on the bench, no less. Thus was born one of the more peculiar narratives imaginable, one in which a team which won more games, over a 6-year period, than just about any other team still somehow didn’t know how to win.

The Lob City Clippers have always been something of a paradox, a winning team that doesn’t know how to win, a team playing an exciting style that still wasn’t any fun to watch because everyone involved gave off the vibe that they hated each other. They seemed, in hindsight, as if they were artificially assembled to fill a void in the Los Angeles market left by the Lakers descending into chaos and irrelevance. Bring in Doc Rivers, who had a championship pedigree, to coach and run the show; have a lucky ping pong ball bounce their way in the lottery and bring a star talent, Blake Griffin, into the L.A. market; conveniently acquire an élite caliber point guard, Chris Paul, from the New Orleans Pelicans Hornets – who were bankrupt and being run by the NBA at the time – after the league-orchestrated trade of Paul from New Orleans to the Lakers got nixed by the other owners. Even when they were winning all the games, with Paul throwing flashy lobs to Blake and skywalking center DeAndre Jordan, they were still a whiny, grating bunch who got on everyone’s nerves, an arrogant bunch whose opinions of themselves didn’t match their accomplishments on the court.

“You need luck in the West. Look at Golden State. They didn’t have to play us or the Spurs.”
– Doc Rivers, 2015

And even with all of the winning of late, no one in L.A. really cared about the Clippers, or has ever really cared about the Clippers, who probably shouldn’t have ever been there in the first place, but for years the NBA was perfectly happy letting weirdo owners do weirdo things, so allowing some eccentric Santa Monica slum lord to relocate from San Diego, and then operate, a secondary franchise in the glitzy L.A. market was ultimately better than having that franchise go out of business. Prior to the rise of Lob City, being exiled to the Clippers was just about the worst thing that could happen to your NBA career. (Either that, or being exiled to the Warriors, interestingly enough.) Any Clipper success just sort of felt unclean, given the smarmie, sleazy guy who was in charge of the operation.

Actual sworn testimony from Donald Sterling

But hey, it’s Lob City! It’s a new era for the Clippers, right? Let’s get excited! Steve Ballmer certainly got excited enough to pay $2,000,000,000 for the franchise (which gets other NBA owners excited, of course, since that gross overpay artificially inflates the value of everyone else’s franchise). And the Clippers have been, over the course of the past six years, incredibly successful by their meager historical standards. But they’ve also never delivered, in the end, be it through choking horribly in the 2014 and 2015 playoffs to seeming just out-and-out cursed the past couple of years: the Clips lost Blake and CP3 to season ending injuries in the same game in a 2016 playoff loss to the Portland Trail Blazers, and then Blake hurt his foot in a playoff game against the Jazz in 2017, and out the door they went once more. It was really kind of sad and you could almost feel sorry for them.

Almost, but not quite, because during this run of good play from L.A., the Clippers been incredibly unlovable. The have been a lippy, chippy, chirpy, mouthy bunch who annoy basically everybody, including one-another. The chief perpetrator was future Hall of Fame point guard/locker room lawyer/NBA players union president Chris Paul, who used that last position to skillfully negotiate a CBA for the players which would enable him the largest contract possible, and then, to his credit, skillfully negotiated his exit from the Clippers this past summer: given the chance to opt out of his contract and become a free agent, Paul instead told GM Roc Divers (Doc Rivers’ alter ego, as coined by the fabulous Dunc’d On NBA podcast) that he would opt in for his final season, but only if the Clippers traded him to the Rockets, who conveniently had a trade all lined up for CP3. (Tampering? In the NBA? Really?) Paul got his wish and, almost immediately, the Rockets have taken over the mantle as the most annoying team in the NBA, what with pairing CP3’s whine-and-dime routine with the human flopping fish that is James Harden, who somehow continues to fool NBA officials into awarding him 18 free throws a game.

James Harden on every drive to the basket

And I kid about the Rockets, but the fact is that CP3’s Rockets have become what CP3’s Clippers never were, which is a viable threat to the behemoth that is the Golden State Warriors, despite having possessed as good a first four – CP3, Blake, DJ, and deadeye marksman JJ Redick – as anyone in the league. There are over 300,000,000 people in this country, yet somehow the Clippers couldn’t find one of them to play on the wing. The bench was always a perpetual tire fire, thanks to GM Roc Divers’ strange approach to team-building. Apart from the one game out of three where Jamal Crawford would get hot – usually too hot, as he would then not know when to stop shooting and shoot his team into oblivion – the Clippers bench units could scarcely get the ball inbounds, much less string two passes together, much less perform competently long enough to let the starters catch their breaths.

Lob City really died when CP3 left town – an act which was somewhat mutual, as he was tired of losing and everyone there was tired of him. He did, however, do the Clippers a favor, as the Houston trade allowed the Clips to at least get something in return, as opposed to having him walk. The summer of 2017 looked to be a bad time for the Clippers, as both Paul and Griffin could walk in free agency. So the Clippers went all-in on Blake Griffin, offering him a 5-year, $171 million contract. Blake was, and arguably still is, a star, after all. He was a high-flyer whose spectacular dunks crystalized the myth of Lob City. He was the #1 overall pick who had spent his whole career in L.A., had brought legitimacy to what was a joke of a franchise.

And pretty much from the moment they signed Blake to that new contract this summer, the Clippers brass were rummaging through the desk drawer, looking for the receipts. Blake’s had a string of injuries in his career – some of them fluky, to be sure, but health is still a skill. His game is much more ground bound now, and to his credit, he’s evolved into a guy who can step out and shoot a three, can work at the top of the key as a passer and a playmaker. But at this point, he has the game of a 33-year-old vet in a 28-year-old body, and any of the skill work you’d want him to do down on the low block was made impossible because Jordan is there clogging up space. Was it really a good idea to give him $171 million?

But this is what happens with free agency in the NBA and elsewhere. You wind up paying big dollars for past results to a player who is, if you’re lucky, still in his prime but, what’s more likely, is past his physical peak and actually on the downside of his career. Coming to realize this has led to an entire rethinking of the free agent landscape across all sports. It’s been particularly stark this year in baseball, for example, where scores and scores of serviceable free agents have yet to sign contracts with the start of spring training just around the corner. MLBPA brass want to make the claim that there is some collusion, on the part of ownership, to keep the prices down and market repressed, and while I wouldn’t put it past them, you can’t argue with the fact that so many of the enormous, long-term deals that players have signed in baseball have turned out to be albatrosses. If you knew nothing at all about baseball, and you went with me to a California Los Angeles Angels of West Covina Anaheim game and saw Albert Pujols play, and I told you he was, at the time, the most expensive player in league history, you’d go, “huh?” And see, I could then explain that he was the greatest and most feared hitter of his generation, and you’d look at him again and say, “but what good is he now?”

Of course the Clippers didn’t want to pay $171 million for a 28-year-old high flyer becoming more ground bound every day, but they also need stars. It’s Los Angeles, after all. There are 10 professional sports franchises in L.A. now, there are also two of the most prestigious collegiate athletic programs in the country. You have to clamor to be relevant. Hell, the Clippers have still been playing second fiddle, in the consciousness of the typical Angelino, to a pathetic Lakers organization that has devolved into soap opera and sideshow. One of their stars walked away from them this summer, and the Clippers desperately needed to keep the other in order to stay relevant. And remember, Ballmer wants to build them a new arena, as well. The Clippers aren’t even the second tenant at the Staples Center. They have less priority than the Kings, much less the Lakers – and with good reason, because the Kings have actually won something. You need stars in L.A. to be relevant, and Blake Griffin is certainly that. So the Clippers decided to hold their noses and do it, offering up a maximal contract to Griffin and putting forth the most preposterous free agent sales pitch of all time in the process.

Are you serious?

And here we are, soon after the Clippers raised Blake’s jersey to the banners in a mock number retirement ceremony, declaring him “Clipper for Life” and doing all but promising to build a statue of him outside Pie In The Sky Arena one day, and Blake Griffin is now a Detroit Piston – traded for, basically, a bunch of stuff. This should be a lesson to everyone out there who is still dumb enough to buy into the league-driven notion in sports that players should somehow be loyal to the franchise that drafted them. There sure as hell wasn’t any loyalty in L.A. towards Blake Griffin, now was there?

And see, that narrative pisses me off. Anyone – literally anyone – who still has a problem with the fact that Kevin Durant went to the Warriors puts forth an argument that is dumb. If you put forth an argument that he shouldn’t have done that, your argument is dumb as hell. Plain and simple. Same goes for LeBron taking his talents to South Beach – sure, he went about it in an amateurish way that was tone-deaf and demeaning, but KD and LeBron had earned the right to make those decisions. This is business, plain and simple. “It’s not personal, it’s just business,” as Abe Vigoda says to Al Pacino at the end of The Godfather. If you support the right of players to have that self-determination, then you don't get to bitch if and when one of them makes a choice that you don't like.

I applaud any and all athletes who want to take agency over what are very short professional careers and try to find the best situation for themselves, regardless of the reason. I may think their reasoning is nuts – I thought Kyrie Irving was nuts at the time for wanting out of Cleveland, but he seems to have been proven right – but I applaud them in principle. Sometimes it works out in my team’s favor, like it did with Kevin Durant and the Warriors. Sometimes, it doesn’t: I still remember watching the Seattle Mariners lose three future Hall of Famers in three successive years, as Randy Johnson was traded, and then Ken Griffey Jr. wanted out, and then Alex Rodriguez signed a $252 million contract with the Rangers. Of course it sucked, but you know what? That’s business. That’s life. You go on, and you figure out what to do next.

And “Clipper for life” Blake Griffin knew it was business as well, which is why he leveraged a 5-year, near-max contract out of the Clippers by taking free agent meetings with the Phoenix Suns and others. He was trying to get himself in the best situation possible. He wanted a 5-year max, or close to it – he actually took a slight haircut in the final deal – but then the Clippers used some leverage as well. Blake is an L.A. guy, a guy vested in the entertainment business and, actually, a pretty decent stand-up comedian. He wanted to be in L.A. and the Clippers wanted him in L.A., but not at the 5/175 level Blake was availed to, and so they struck a compromise: a 4-year deal with a player option in Year 5, while Griffin forwent a no-trade clause, a clause which NBA teams are loathe to include. It’s a business arrangement, plain and simple – one which, almost immediately, the Clippers wanted to get out of.

And somehow, almost impossibly, the Clippers found a trade partner, a team that was willing to take on one of the largest contracts in NBA history. That would be the Detroit Pistons, a storied and one-time gloried franchise whose fortunes started to slip about the time they took Darko Miličić instead of Carmelo Anthony with the 2nd pick in the NBA draft and who’ve dwindled into complete mediocrity ever since. Just as the Clippers have been in the past, Detroit is operated by a dual coach/GM executive in Stan Van Gundy. Just as the Clippers, the coaching ability of Stan Van Gundy on the floor has been hampered by the incompetence of Van Stan Gundy in the front office, as almost nothing he has done as an executive has worked. One of the amazing ironies of that Clippers choke against the Rockets is that one of the Rockets heroes was Josh Smith, a huge Detroit free-agency signing who was a disaster and who the Rockets picked up on the cheap, and who Detroit is still paying to this day. Detroit’s roster is a mess, a comedy of errors resulting from overpays, whiffed draft picks, and simply not understanding the CBA. (The Pistons hilariously hard-capped themselves last summer paying out $21 million for Langston Galloway, whom you may not even remember is in the NBA.) The Pistons reportedly lost $45 million last season, and their move into the new Pizza Pizza! Arena in downtown Detroit has been met with a sea of empty red seats. The Pistons are desperate to make the playoffs, desperate for a superstar to put asses in seats, and SVG is desperate to save his job.

Which, of course, is who you should immediately make a trade with. Rule #1 of NBA operations should be to find the guy desperate to make a trade and deal with him.

Now, Blake could be just fine in Detroit. His game could continue to age gracefully, becoming even more nuanced and cerebral. He could stay healthy and see out the 4+ remaining on his deal. But what’s mind blowing about this is that the Pistons willingly just took on $141 million remaining of his contract (and it will almost certainly be the full $141 million, because that last year’s player option is for $39 million and there is no way in hell you’d opt out of that), and paired it with another enormous contract in center Andre Drummond, and a team which had no flexibility at all to begin with now has even less than before. This is your team, Detroit. This is what you’re going to be. The backcourt is still terrible, the bench is not good, the young players haven’t gotten better. Optimists want to point out that you’re pairing Blake with a center, in Drummond who, unlike DJ in L.A., has a multitude of skills and can pass the ball and do more things. Well, sure, Drummond can pass the ball if there is someone to pass to – the majority of his assists this season having gone to baskets by Avery Bradley and Tobias Harris, the two guys who got traded back to Los Angeles in the Griffin deal. I have no idea how this is going to work.

But I can understand how the Pistons are desperate here. Prior to this trade, they’d lost 8 in a row and slipped three games out of the East playoff picture. The deal surprised me on the Clippers end more, because the Clippers have been surprisingly good this year and – GASP! – surprisingly fun. After suffering a whole tonne of injuries during the season, the Clippers have had to go young and scrappy, and Doc has actually had to go back to coaching again instead of just rolling the ball out for his superstars, and Doc’s done a great job on the bench as the Clippers have been actually competitive. Given that the New Orleans Pelicans are quite likely to sink after the awful Achilles injury to Boogie Cousins, and given that the Denver Nuggets continue to blow games and be one of the five worst-coached teams in the NBA, the Clippers actually still had a good shot to make the playoffs … and yet, they decided that now was the time to set themselves on fire.

And while I think it’s a good idea for the Clips to get off that contract, and try to create some more flexibility in their payroll, what is that flexibility for? This is where that strange and entirely fanciful notion of Clippers exceptionalism, built up over the past six years, comes into play. The Clippers are not a free agent destination. They are still a strange organization with no history of success – and now, with a roster absent Blake and, if they can swing another deal, absent the enormous contract of Jordan, they also have no great talent to build around. Almost immediately in the aftermath of this trade, there is a juxtaposition of the Clippers’ present and future fortunes with that of the Lakers, who are trying somehow to free up enough money this summer to have room for two max players. What’s not clear to me is why a Lakers team devoid of functional talent and awash in melodrama is somehow going to become a marquee destination again. Sure, the mystique and the lure of living in Los Angeles can be a draw, but who really wants to be Lonzo Ball’s babysitter? And as big a mess as the Lakers are, that mystique and past history is still of greater allure than anything that the Clippers can offer. This is where NBA logic often runs its course. “Oh, hey, look, we have cap space!” Yeah, sure, you have cap space, but your team is also garbage.

The best way for the Clippers to have ensured a bright future would’ve been to take full advantage of what was the best period in the franchise’s history, and they didn’t do that. This could have been their time, their era. Given how pathetic the Lakers had become, this was their opportunity to truly make their mark in Los Angeles – and yet they didn’t do that. It’s a hard-sell regardless – not even winning a World Series pushed the Angels past the Dodgers in the hearts of minds of SoCal faithful, even though the Dodgers have now been titleless for 30 years. The Clippers, as had been constructed, constitute a terrible missed opportunity, a fluky confluence of talent which couldn’t get it together when the opportunity presented itself, and who didn’t see the juggernaut coming up behind them from up the coast.

In fairness, no one saw the Warriors coming, but the Clippers, more than anyone else, were the ones who got run over. With Griffin’s departure, Lob City is dead, and I’ll miss Lob City. Lob City was good for the league. They were fun to hate, they were good theatre and good television in a league where the sideshows and the melodramas often make up for the fact that the final results possess little drama and intrigue. I liken the NBA very much to soccer, in that the ultimate results seem almost pre-determined. Take a look at the tables of the big European leagues at the moment: other than Serie A, all of the other top leagues are laughably lopsided, the results having pretty much been determined before the calendar year even turned over. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be fun. I will continue to be amused by the fact that the ascent of the Warriors has caused the entirety of the NBA to lose its collective mind, and it’s sad not to have Kill The Clippers Nights to look forward to anymore. Kill The Trail Blazers just doesn’t have the same ring to it. Oh wait, there are still a few home games with OKC left on the schedule …

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

The Bucks Stopped Here

THIS is probably Jason Kidd’s greatest contribution to the coaching profession: his attempt to get another timeout by having one of his players deliberately run into him and then spilling his soda all over the floor. Kidd was fined $50,000 for this bit of bad acting, having apparently forgotten that there are more cameras in your typical NBA arena than there are in your typical casino, and they cameras caught him gesturing for one of his players to hit him. Points for creativity, however.

Jason Kidd was fired on Monday as head coach of the Milwaukee Bucks. This is, as far as the NBA goes, one of the least surprising developments in a topsy-turvy season. The Bucks have Giannis on their team, one of the five best players on the planet, and after acquiring the disgruntled Eric Bledsoe from Phoenix, the Bucks have enough talent that they should legitimately be challenging for the #2 seed in the East. They have more talent than Toronto, than Washington, and should be soaring. Instead, they went into Monday’s action with a 23-22 record and sitting in 8th place in the East – which would be potentially terrifying were they to finish that way, since God knows that the Celtics, nor anyone else, would want to see Giannis in the first round of the playoffs, but Milwaukee ranks as one of the league’s biggest underachievements so far this season. The Bucks should be better than this. Sure, they’ve had some bad injury luck the past two seasons, losing Jabari Parker and Khris Middleton for extended periods of time, but the fact is that the team has too much talent, the team is too expensive, and the owners are too impatient for them to be muddling around at the .500 mark. Their trademark rangy, pressing defense has been figured out this season, like most gimmicks in the NBA eventually are, so the Bucks aren’t stopping anyone, and the offense consists basically of a play called “Giannis Make Stuff Up,” which actually works a surprising amount of the time. As Warriors blog Golden State of Mind rightly points out, you see a lot of similarities between the Bucks and the pre-Steve Kerr era Warriors: an extremely talented team being held back by a coaching staff’s simpleton, if not downright pre-historic schemes.

Kidd’s response to being fired was to do what he has done countless times before, which is to burn all of his bridges in an attempt to make himself look favorable. He promptly did an interview with ESPN and spun a sob story in which he portrayed himself as a victim. This is what Jason Kidd does. No matter when he changes/leaves schools, he changes teams, he changes head coaching jobs, he always makes it a point to go scorched earth and destroy whatever good will he may have had with the previous organization. Everyone was quick to point out how “upset” Giannis was with Kidd’s firing, and I have no doubt that was true, but guess what? Giannis will get over it. This is the NBA, and the NBA is a business. Giannis will get over it about the time they are winning all of the games – which will happen, in part, because whomever replaces Kidd will know actually what he is doing.

Coaches are hired to be fired. January always features the annual NFL bloodletting, where as much as a quarter of the league’s head coaches get canned. And if you think it’s bad here in the States, look at some of the soccer leagues in Europe. We’re up to eight managerial changes in the 20-team Premier League already – the 8th coming on Monday at Watford – and there are still three months of the season left. It can be hard to differentiate, of course, between a coach being bad and his team being bad. If you don’t have any talent, firing guys on the sidelines seems more like a mercy kill than anything else. Amazingly, the NBA went through the entire 2016-2017 season without a single coaching change. Every team seemed like they kind of had an idea of where they were – if you were in the lottery, or the playoffs, it was because of what was on the floor and not on the sidelines. Owners of bad teams, or underachieving teams, showed remarkable patience and restraint.

No longer. Kidd is the third NBA coach fired this season, after Earl Watson in Phoenix and David Fizdale in Memphis – the former being inarguable, the latter being outrageous. I suspect that Kidd won’t be the last. Monday night NBA League Pass is must-see viewing these days, and some serious tactical incompetence was on display all over the place. On the same day that Jason Kidd was being fired by the underachieving Bucks, the underachieving Buzzards from the nation’s capital were getting blown out by Dallas, the Pelicans were contriving to somehow almost get beat at home by the Chicago Bulls, and the Denver Nuggets were actually trying to play ace center Nicola Jokic at the four beside Miles Plumlee – and literally any NBA lineup that involves playing your best player out of position for the benefit of a Plumlee brother is a terrible idea and, quite possibly, a fireable offense. Not surprisingly, the Wiz, Pelicans, and Nuggets are all underachieving. Also not surprisingly, their coaches – Scott Brooks, Alvin Gentry, and Mike Malone – should probably feel their seats getting a little bit warm. All three of those teams should be better. New Orleans has, arguably, two of the 15 best players in the NBA in Boogie and AD. Washington has, inarguably, the second-best backcourt in the league in Wall and Beal. Denver seems to have about 27 guys who you think, “you know, they aren’t that bad.” But every time I watch those teams, I see a muddled mess. (Though to be fair here, the Pelicans have been playing somewhat better of late. They did just beat Boston on the road not to long ago ... oh, wait, then they lost to the Hawks. Never mind ...)

But a good question to ask here is this: how much does a good coach actually add? The NBA is a players’ league. All pro sports are players’ leagues. You’d think a coach’s job in the NBA, or the NFL or Premier League or whatnot, is mostly to play the role of psychologist and “man manager,” as the Brits say. I don’t think Ty Lue is a particularly great Xs-and-Os guy in Cleveland, but he has always done a pretty good job of keeping the peace amid the Cavs’ multitude of egos, which counts for a lot. But does a good coach or manager really make that much of a difference in the grand scheme of things? I know that in the overly sabermetrically obsessed world of baseball, they’ve attempted to quantify the effect a manager has on a baseball team, and concluded that a good manager nets about 1.0 wins during a 162-game season – so, in other words, not much of a difference.

And I’m not saying that I dispute those numbers, but in the case of the NBA, I’m watching teams like the Bucks and the Wizards and the Nuggets, all of whom have plenty of talent, flail about and lose a whole shittonne of games that they should win – most galling being the Wiz, who have been flirting with a seemingly impossible stat all year of having a winning record versus teams over .500 and a losing record against teams below .500 – and then I flip over to NBA TV and I watch the Miami Heat, who are presently 4th in the East, playing the Houston Rockets.

Every time I watch the Heat, I am amazed they win any games at all. I see them play and I think, “this team stinks.” But here we were on Monday night, with the Heat missing its best player, Goran Dragic, going down to the wire in Houston in a game they had no business being in at all. I love me some Spo. Erik Spoelstra is a true witch doctor and, in my opinion, the best day-to-day coach in the NBA for continuing to get the most out of what is a roster with 30-win talent. I love me some Spo anyway, knowing that he was there at the Gersten Pavilion in Los Angeles in 1990 on what was the worst day in the history of college basketball and wanting everyone involved in that event to succeed forever. But Jesus, that team overachieves. They play their asses off, they are disciplined and stick to a game plan, they play as a team and they are now winning. A lot. The Miami Heat are currently in 4th place in the East, ahead of bumbling bozos like Washington and Milwaukee, and doing so with a roster of guys who – other than maybe Dragic – no one in the NBA would actually want. And that, right there, is good coaching. That is great coaching, in fact. Unlike a lot of the lesser franchises in the NBA, who don’t seem to care much whether or not they win any games, the edict in Miami is clear: win games, damn it, and no one cares how you do it. The Heat win games. Spo puts his guys in the best positions to win, and quite often, they do so.

Spo does more with less in Miami. That’s good coaching to me, but there is no real metric or stat to quantify it. Miami does more with less, Boston’s done more with less in recent years, Portland and Memphis have done more with less – which is why Fiz being fired in Memphis was outrageous. But this is all eye-test stuff. If we had some better way to gauge it, we’d probably have fewer bad hires.

And hiring a bad coach winds up being an albatross, since you’re on the hook for the guy’s contract if and when it doesn’t pan out. We recently saw one of the most preposterous hirings in the history of sports when Jon Gruden was coaxed out of the ESPN broadcast booth by a 10-year, $100 million contract to coach the moribund Oakland Raiders. Do we want to take any bets on how much dead money is going to be left on Oakland’s books? Sure, Gruden won a Super Bowl in Tampa (and all these years later, saying the “Super Bowl Champion Tampa Bay Buccaneers” sounds weird to me), but how many coaches last 10 years in a job? Only the best of the best stay in a position for that long. Ultimately, coaches are hired to be fired. You hope it doesn’t go that way, but it usually does. Some teams have wound up owing back salary to two and even three ex-coaches, which is a needless drain on your resources. You have to get this hire right, and do it at the right price.

Great coaching is definitely a plus, but where do you find it? The Boston Celtics hit a home run when they hired Brad Stevens, who is fantastic. I was utterly shocked, earlier this year, when the Celtics beat the Houston Rockets because Stevens flat-out coached them to a win: down three late in the game, he designed an in-bounds play to get Jayson Tatum a lay-up, but designed it in such a way that he’d screened and switched all of his guys on his floor onto their best defensive assignments and into positions where they could best defend the inbounds pass, at which point they did so and drew an offensive foul and went on to win a game. It was pure genius, the likes of which you scarcely see in high-level competition. Stevens has proven to be one of the best in the business – and before he was in the NBA, he was coaching at Butler – a nice university gig, a place he built into a national power, but not necessary where you would think to go looking for the next basketball mastermind. It was an inspired hire by Danny Ainge, but not a sure thing by any means.

But a lot of the greats seem to come from nowhere. Gregg Popovich was coaching at Division III Pomona-Pitzer before he jumped to the Spurs. Steve Kerr was a TV analyst, and a great number of people here in Bay Area hated the fact that he had been hired. It’s mysterious and shrouded in intrigue, the coaching search. You have no idea at all who is going to be any good. Maybe you can take a guess and say that a head guy who has his shit together must have underlings who have their shit together as well, and you should hire off his staff. It pleases me to say that three current NBA coaches were on staff with George Karl for the Seattle SuperSonics in the 1990s – Terry Stotts in Portland, Duane Casey in Portland, and Thibs in Minnesota. But then you look at the NFL, where Bill Belichick and Pete Carroll have had their staffs raided for years now, and none of those guys succeed in the top job. (Not that this stops folks from trying, as the Pats are primed to lose both their offensive and defensive coordinators this offseason to Indianapolis and Detroit, respectively.) Great coaching is really hard to find. It’s hard to quantify and it’s even harder to identify. It’s one of those things that you know you need, but don’t necessarily know why you need it, much less know where to get it.

The tendency in this situation, of course, is to be risk averse and go for the proverbial “safe pair of hands,” some retread who has coached before and been around the league. It may be a safe choice, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good one. Most guys end out of coaching for one reason, and one reason only: they don’t win enough. And speaking of retreads, and speaking of the broadcast booth, almost immediately the two lead analysts on the ABC/ESPN broadcast team – Marc Jackson and Jeff Van Gundy – have been floated as possible candidates for the job in Milwaukee. As for the former, well, I already mentioned how the Bucks mirrors what it was like in the pre-Kerr Warrior days … back when they were coached by Jackson, who also did a whole lot of behind-the-scenes shit at Golden State the likes of which will possibly keep him from ever landed a head job again. As for the latter, well, after his 5-minute rant about the lack of respect for officials by the players during the Golden State-Houston game on Saturday, I’m in favor of him getting a new job so that I never have to listen to him again. (Jeez, Jeff, if you were a coach and your team was getting outshot 16-4 at the foul line and their starting center was averaging 4.7 steps every time he caught the ball, something tells me you wouldn’t be so gracious to the officials, either.) Van Gundy is well-regarded by Milwaukee’s owners, who are New York guys who remember when JVG coached the Knicks, but that was, like, forever ago. Seriously, can’t we have a little more imagination here?

The Bucks have said they’ll interim the gig for the rest of the season and then do a full search this summer – which is smart, because it’s likely to be the best job on the market and they should be diligent in a search. Who wouldn’t want to coach this roster? Who wouldn’t want this job? Fizdale seems like a no-brainer, if he wants it, but the Bucks brass need to get out and look around. You have a great young core, a new arena opening, and this should be the salad days. Fear the Deer. But it’s also an expensive roster, they have very little flexibility, and they also have a history of in-house dysfunctionality. They have to get this one right. The Deer have reason to fear.

Get Help

photo by James Snook/USA Today

IT’S ALL fun and games here at In Play Lose – at least, we want it to be that way. We laugh at losing. We laugh at loss. You can come back from a loss. You can recover and regroup. But sometimes, we are reminded of the sorts of losses that cannot be overcome.

Myself and everyone in the extended W.S.U. family were shocked to hear the news from Pullman that 21-year-old Tyler Hilinski, the heir apparent to the starting QB position with the Cougars next season, had taken his own life on Wednesday night. Hilinski was a terrific talent who, in his limited opportunities this past season, had shown incredible promise – leading a rally to a 3OT win over Boise State in one game, throwing for over 500 yards vs. Arizona in another. By all accounts, he was also extremely popular with his teammates and with the media members who cover the W.S.U. program. No one – literally no one – saw this coming. There were no warning signs, there were no red flags about depression or mental illness. Seemingly out of the blue, out of nowhere, a young man with a bright future before him is gone.

This doesn’t have to happen. Ever.

And sure, it may only be when someone elevated in status to something of a celebrity – and being a backup QB on a college football counts as such – that we feel compelled to make this sort of proclamation, but it’s when the afflictions of mental illness and depression come to drastically affect those who seemingly have it all – and thus seemingly have the most to lose – that we actually stop and think about the true extent of the problem. Just last year, two of the talismen of modern music – Chris Cornell and Chester Bennington – committed suicide as well: two people with storied careers, with families, with literally millions of people, all over the planet, who loved them for what they did. If people who seemingly have so much can succumb to the peril of mental illness, then no one is truly immune.

I am a tireless advocate for mental health services, although one of the things I’ve come to realize in the past decade is that I’m not doing enough. I can do more, and I should do more, even if it’s simple as saying, again and again, to anyone who is listening and anyone who can hear, that what happened to Tyler Hilinski doesn’t have to happen to you, or to anyone else. Get help. Don’t be afraid. Get help.

My story is here and I don’t need to recap it, other than to point out that the stigma of mental illness, the shame of mental illness, is far, far greater than most people realize. It takes incredible courage, grace, and humility to come to accept that you have a problem with depression, or some other form of mental illness, and you need to get help. It is seriously the hardest thing you’ll probably ever do. In that moment, all of your past mistakes and failings seemingly magnify, exponentially expanding in importance. You feel like a piece of shit. And all of the sudden, in that moment, the future is completely muddled and confusing, it’s daunting and overwhelming. You don’t know what to do. You don’t know where to go from here.

But life will get better if you get help. I promise you, it will get better. It may take a while, it may take years and you may have to be patient, trusting in a process of living that feels foreign to you, that feels impossible at times. But at the same time, you also take control. You learn about how your mind works and learn how to reshape it. Knowledge is power! And at the time, admitting that you have a problem with depression, with mental illness, with some sort of substance abuse or other addiction, feels like the lowest point in your life and the worst moment in your life, but in fact, you come to realize that the worst moment was the moment right before that, when you weren’t doing anything about it, and that coming to accept that you needed help was, in fact, the best thing you’ve ever done.

I was institutionalized in 2006, and it was the best thing that ever happened to me. I’ve been blessed the past 11 years. Has it all been great? Of course not. A lot of it’s been truly terrible, in fact, but all of it was time that wouldn’t have existed otherwise. Time is precious in this life. It’s everything, really. Life is always about the process, which continues onward and changes. The great landmarks in your life – good or bad – are not ends in themselves. You still go on. I still talk with someone who I met while attending the psychiatric institute 11 years ago. We’ve both had challenges, traumas, and disappointments along the way. But in the end, we are blessed to still be here, to have families and friends and loved ones, to still be able to aspire and dream, to still be able to experience everything life offers. It reminds me, whenever I talk to her, that I should talk more about mental illness – both the terrible ways in which it can effect you and the ways in which you can overcome it. After all, you can’t tell people not to be afraid and talk about it if you’re afraid to talk about it yourself, now can you?

But I’m not afraid to talk about it. I was for my first 37 years on the planet, but not any more. It’s not a shame or a disgrace to be suffering from a mental illness. I’m proud of the fact that so many people in my extended communities have reached out to me in their times of need. People have confided in me, asked me for help, trusted me to be an advocate and a source of both knowledge and wisdom. I take this stuff very seriously. This isn’t fun and games.

Get help. If you’re struggling with depression, get help. Call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: (800) 273-8255. Call a mental health professional in your area. They are problem solvers, they will work with you and try to find a solution. It can be difficult and trying at times, because solving mental illness issues is not a catch-all, one-size-fits-all kind of thing, and I know that it’s hard to be patient when you feel like you need help right away. But no one needs to die alone in their apartment with a gunshot wound to the head. This doesn’t have to happen. Ever.

And if someone does reach out to you, saying they need help, listen to them. Practice empathy. Listen and learn from them, love them in any way that you can. Fuck knows, there isn’t enough love and empathy in this world. Give it out, and give it freely. It can truly make a difference in another person’s life.

Job Security

I have no idea what Marcus Williams was doing here

THE LOSE is in New Orleans for MLK weekend, like I am at this time every year, and it was fun to be out and about, walking in the city on Sunday afternoon during the hometown side’s NFC playoff game against the Minnesota Vikings. People love the Saints here. They love them far more than they do the Pelicans, that’s for sure: we braved the unseasonably frosty conditions here in the Crescent City on Friday night and went over to Milk Shake Arena to watch the Birds play the Portland Trail Blazers – two pretty good teams, two playoff teams – and the building was basically half-empty. So there is indifference on the basketball front, but New Orleans was locked in and tuned in for the Saints. They were watching in the bars, in the fancy restaurants, even in the Jimmy John’s and the Domino’s Pizza franchises. You could tell what was going on in the game simply by hearing the collective cheers and groans filling the air periodically. I didn’t need to be watching the game. I could tell what was happening simply by listening.

So what was the reaction on the final play? I think the Times-Picayune summed it up quite nicely with their headline in the Monday morning edition:

But actually, I think the expletives were the secondary reaction, the first having been a state of stunned silence. I’d made my way back to the hotel, and the dining area was filled with both hotel guests and staffers alike – including one frenzied parking attendant who’d run in, hoot and holler with delight at the Saints’ growing fortune, run back outside and hurriedly park another SUV. The Saints were :10 away from completing an incredible comeback, rallying from down 17-0 to lead 24-23. The Vikings were out of timeouts, were on their own 39-yard line, and were pretty much out of options. They basically needed a miracle.

Which is what happened.

And as this play was unfolding, I kept thinking that there has to be a flag on the play. There has to be a penalty, an infraction, because this can’t possibly be happening! Nope, no flags. A 61-yard pass from Case Keenum to Stefon Diggs, on the final play of the game, and the Vikings win 29-24 to advance to the NFC Championship in Philadelphia. 29-24 to advance to the NFC Championship against the Iggles in Philadelphia. The Vikings may have gotten that miracle they needed, but one team’s miracle is another team’s mistake. And to call it a mistake by the Saints would be an understatement. Quite simply, it’s one of the worst plays by a defense in the history of the NFL.

Or, as we like to say here at In Play Lose, this game was job security.

Nope, still don’t know what Marcus Williams is doing. (photo by Hannah Foslien/Getty Images)

But before we kill the Saints for this, we need to show some love for the Vikings, who are a tortured franchise in a generally tortured sports city. The Vikings were losing all the Super Bowls long before the Buffalo Bills made it cool. They’ve not been to a Super Bowl in over 40 years – during which time, the most noteworthy thing they’ve done is make the Herschel Walker trade with the Cowboys, which is the worst trade in the history of the NFL. They are never all that bad, but rarely all that good, and when they have been good, they’ve found a way to screw all of it up, often in cataclysmic fashion. The 1998 Vikings were arguably one of the best teams in NFL history, going 15-1 and setting an NFL record for points scored, only to lose to the Falcons in OT in the playoffs, thanks in part to kicker Gary Anderson, who hadnt missed a kick all season, flubbing a field goal. Bad kicking is a long-running theme in Minnesota: more recently, they were the subject of a horror film called The Blair Walsh Project.

So the Vikings have a well-earned reputation for being chokers, and what will be lost in the aftermath of Sunday’s miraculous ending is just how hard they tried to choke this game away as well. What do you do when you have a 17-point halftime lead? Maybe not be throwing interceptions, or having punts blocked, or allowing Drew Brees to shred your defense. The Vikings were terrible in the second half in all phases of the game, and the Saints were primed to steal one. It was all set up for yet another colossal Minnesota failure, and you can understand why it is that the Vikings fans might feel like they are cursed.

Which is sort of how the New Orleans Saints felt, in fact, before they won the Super Bowl in 2010, before which they were a joke of a franchise whose most memorable contribution to NFL lore was its fans donning “New Orleans Aints” paper bags over their heads during a 1-15 season. The Saints’ path that year went through the Vikings, in fact – who blew their chance to win the NFC Championship by getting penalized for having 12 men on the field with :19 left and getting pushed out of FG range, and the Saints went on to win in OT. When you feel like you’re cursed, a lot of time what breaks the curse is a break here and there, a fortunate bounce here and there. All sports are games of inches – for example, it was the length of Richard Sherman’s fingers which finally broke the Seahawks jinx – and when you come out the other side with a win and a breakthrough, after so much frustration, you can understand taking on the mindset that you are a “team of destiny.” And now it’s all lined up for the Vikings, of course: they play the Eagles this coming weekend, who are missing their starting QB, and if they win that, they’ll become the first team in history to play the Super Bowl on their home field. Team of destiny, anyone?

Now, The Lose doesn’t believe in destiny – but The Lose suggests you not poo-poo the notion of belief. Confidence is everything, and so much of excelled performance comes from the simple notion of believing that you can, in fact, succeed. This is why so many guys will wildly outperform expectations, often for prolonged periods of time. It may be a one-off or a fluke, and come the following season, they’re not as good any more, but in the moment, the Vikings probably believe they have fate on their side. Fate won’t win the game for you – that comes down to preparation and execution – but fate, and faith in fate, can sometimes seemingly will you to wins.

But as I said before, one team’s miracle is another team’s mess, and the Saints made one of the most preposterous messes I’ve ever seen on a football field on Sunday night. Let’s keep in mind the situation here: there are :10 left, the Vikings have no timeouts, and they are on their own 39-yard-line, and they can’t stop the clock if they are tackled in bounds. If you’re the Vikings, you have some options here, all of them bad. You can fling up a Hail Mary and hope for either a lucky bounce of the ball or maybe a pass interference call. You can try some sort of a hook-and-ladder play, or try to lateral it and rugby style your way down the field. About the best bad option is a throw to the sideline and having the receiver somehow get out of bounds, as the Vikings need about 25 yards in order to get into reasonable field goal range.

But the Saints are ready for that, as they’ve got defensive backs stacked two-deep along the sidelines, intent on funneling the Vikings to the middle of the field. Indeed, Keenum’s throw to Diggs achieves basically none of the necessary objectives for Minnesota. It’s a deep throw, which takes too much time. It’s not close enough to the sidelines for Diggs to get out of bounds. There is another Vikings receiver in the area, which you rarely see, and which makes me wonder if they had some sort of a miracle lateral idea in mind. As far as last-ditch, last-second plays go, it’s not even a good one from the Vikings, and all Saints safety Marcus Williams has to do is grab Diggs and tackle him and the game is over.

And he didn’t tackle him. What the actual fuck just happened?

It seemed as if Williams was of two minds on this play. He could have tried to make a play on the ball, but was wary of the possibility of a pass interference penalty. Instead, he tried to go low and completely whiffed on hitting Diggs, instead taking out one of his own guys in the process. The simple play here was the answer: let Diggs catch the ball and just grab him, hold onto him and the game is over. He went for a big hit instead and he got it all wrong.

It’s a truly terrible play, as bad a defensive play as I’ve ever seen in the NFL. The Mile High Miracle of 2012 immediately sprang to mind, of course, when the Broncos somehow contrived to allow a 70-yd TD pass in the final minute against the Ravens. But even in that case, the long bomb over the top is one of any number of possible outcomes. Part of why the Ravens were successful is that, given the circumstance, the Broncos still couldn’t expect the long bomb, as the Ravens had other things they could run. But in this case, the Vikings have no good options at all, the Saints can easily account for whatever the Vikings may try, and it all goes according to plan … except for the fact that the plan involved actually tackling the guy.

And I feel bad for Williams, a rookie who had a great season and whose interception in the 3rd Quarter had a lot to do with the Saints being ahead in the first place. These sorts of  fatal, individual errors can come to define your career. (Mention the name Kyle Williams to any 49ers fan and they will start to seethe before your eyes.) When you commit such a dramatic, colossal gaffe, with little or no recourse, it magnifies the mistake, of course, even though it shouldn’t. Every play leads to the next one, and in a game of several hundred plays there are hundreds and hundreds of mistakes. The Saints were in this position to win because Minnesota had messed up all over the place in the second half – but the Saints were forced to rally because, in the first half, they were terrible on both sides of the ball and got completely dominated. But even so, the last mistake is always the worst mistake.

2018 has been a good year for The Lose so far. Georgia coughed up a 2-TD lead in the BCS championship, the Chefs somehow blew an 18-point halftime lead against a meh Tennessee Titans team, and now the Saints safety goes full-on Toro! Toro! Ole! in the dying seconds in Minneapolis. I suspect I’m going to be busy this year.

The Lose of the Year

WHAT better way to kick off our recap of the bad, the worse, and the ugly for 2017 than with the worst play of the season: Louisiana Tech contriving to lose 87 yards on a single play against Mississippi State. Suffice to say, there aren’t too many plays for 3rd-and-93 drawn up in the playbook. Mad props to the Tech wide receiver who went out on a pass pattern into the end zone, turned around to discover the mayhem, and then sprinted 100 yards to recover the fumble. That’s the kind of grit and determination which … well, which will get you 3rd-and-93, in this case. I’ll spare you the coach speak. That was just inept.

This was an outstanding year in Lose, with failures running the gamut from incompetent to contemptible. The year in Lose kicked off spectacularly on the first day of 2017, when the Buffalo Bills completely forgot the rules of football:

Um, that’s a live ball, guys

 
It’s simply carried on from there. I wasn’t sure I’d see a dumber play than that for the rest of the year – but then the Techsters from Ruston, Louisiana managed to pull off an 87-yard loss on 2nd and goal. Kudos should also go to the supposed smart kids from Vanderbilt, who lost their first round game in the NCAA tournament against other supposedly smart kids from Northwestern by forgetting the score and fouling the ’Cats best foul shooter deliberately with :16 left while holding a 1-point lead. That was a dumbass play as well, but don’t just take my word for it. Ask the guy who did it:

But claiming the coveted TLOTY award requires more than simply a single moment of madness. We have a diverse collection of candidates this year, all of whom failed and did so rather spectacularly – the definition of “failure” being somewhat fluid, of course. Some of our candidates fell short at the worst possible time, some failed to meet expectations, while some had no expectations to begin with and managed to still be even worse than that. Sometimes it comes down to poor execution, and sometimes it’s a situation where success is impossible, because the ideas behind it are so bad to begin with.

The Lose is particularly disdainful of bluster and bombast which is then not backed up on the court or the field. The current worst offender along these lines is that basketball team in the nation’s capital. Every time somebody on the Buzzards opens their mouth, they say something stupid and wind up looking stupid when they get blown out by some lame team like the Atlanta Hawks. Seriously, guys, just stop talking.

John Wall goes undercover for the post-game interview

Many thanks to the readers and the disciples of Lose, from whom I solicited nominations for 2017’s The Lose Of The Year Award. I’ve considered a wide range of candidates across a range of sports and, indeed, across the globe. I regret to inform the Official Spouse of In Play Lose that her beloved Swansea City – whose collection of American investors masquerading as an ownership group have run through three coaches in a calendar year, managed to antagonize their wonderful Welsh fan base, and generally shown no idea in hell what they’re doing – have failed to capture the award despite their best efforts. And a quick reminder here that another household favorite of ours, the Cougars of Washington State University, have had their number retired and are ineligible for the award – although The Lose should probably earn a nomination for foolishly continuing to bet on W.S.U., which cost me in Las Vegas and has now cost me again, as I wagered on the Holiday Bowl with Lose disciple and Michigan State alum Steve Grob, which ended predictably badly:

At least this dumb bet only cost me an autographed copy of a novel

With no further ado, let’s get to this year’s excellent crop of nominees for The Lose Of The Year. On with the circus! Send in the clowns!

Cleveland Browns

“I don’t think anybody else could have done this job.”
– Cleveland Browns head coach Hue Jackson

This is the opposite of true. Literally anyone on earth could coach a football team to zero wins. A potted plant could coach a team to zero wins. But Hue Jackson had to throw in what just might be the line of the year, and do so on Dec. 31, right before we turn over the calendar.
 
Last year’s winners went out and proved that earning the TLOTY in 2016 was no fluke by managing to have a season that’s even worse. Today’s 28-24 loss to the Pittsburgh Steelers means that the Browns join the 2008 Detroit Lions as the only 0-16 teams in NFL history. The 1-31 run over two years is even worse than the gold standard of NFL failure, the 1976-77 Tampa Bay Buccaneers, who were 2-26, but at least the Tangerine Dreamers had the excuse of being an expansion team playing their first two seasons. The Browns’ run of failure is mind-numbing: not only has Cleveland lost 31 of their past 32 and 41 of their past 43, but if you go back to 2014, when a five-game skid to close the season cost a 7-4 team a chance at a playoff spot, the Browns have now lost 49 of their past 53 games.

It isn’t hard to see where the problem lies: the quarterback position, which is an industrial slag heap. Can this team please get a QB? Seriously. Get a QB already. You’ve seen here, at the end of the season, with the sudden ascension of the 49ers thanks to new Bay Area heartthrob Jimmy Garoppolo, that if you have a QB who knows what he’s doing, you can win a bunch of games in the NFL simply by playing hard and letting your QB make plays. The Browns have had 28 starting quarterbacks since Browns 2.0 was launched in 1999. To the surprise of absolutely no one, the rudderless ship that is the Cleveland offense is the worst in football. About the only thing the Browns do well is turn the ball over in the red zone, which they did a record number of times in 2017. At no point in any Browns game this year did you have the slightest belief that they would win, even on the handful of occasions where they had the lead.

Those ’08 Lions were still worse than this year’s Browns team, in that they combined a punchless offense with an aversion to tackling, whereas Cleveland’s defense can occasionally be decent. As bad as those Lions were, they actually improved pretty quickly after taking a bagel in 2008. Curiously, this began when they drafted a competent QB, Matthew Stafford,  and moved on from the likes of Dancin’ Dan Orlovksy. Hint hint.

I’ll take any opportunity to relive the single dumbest play in the history of football

Los Angeles Chargers
The last team the Browns beat was the San Diego Chargers, who no longer exist. Instead, we now have the Los Angeles Chargers. The Spanos family decided to go all-in on the La-La-Land fantasy and relocate two hours up the freeway, but don’t worry folks, they’re still the same old choking Chargers who screw up at least three winnable games a season. NFL action, it’s FAN-tastic … except that the Chargers don’t really have any fans, because they did such a shitty job of outreach and burned all the bridges with their former home.

As they wait for that asswipe who owns the Rams to build the magical, fantasyland stadium atop the old remains of Hollywood Park, the Chargers are playing their home games at the 27,000-seat Stub Hub Center, which is a soccer stadium, and it seemed like a cool idea – and it has been a cool idea for fans of their opponents, who’ve outnumbered Charger faithful 2-1 or even 3-1.

I find it absolutely comical that the NFL spent two decades dangling L.A. as they went about holding cities hostage for sweetheart stadium deals, and then the league completely assed it up and came to discover that no one in L.A. cares a whit about the league’s assortment of bad franchises.

Baltimore Ravens

It is also quite fitting that the final game of the NFL season still taking place, after the other 255 had been completed, wound up also being a big-time choke by a team that was, at the start of the day, listed as a 96.4% favorite to make the playoffs. Well done Ravens! You slipped in under the deadline! And hey, for the Bills, 2017 obviously ended a whole lot better than it started.

New York Giants
We will let Dave Koenig, a loyal and frustrated Jints fan, do the talking regarding the dismal 3-13 season for the New York football team: “Even if you’re not a Giants fan or hater, Ben McAdoo’s table-turning performance is the kind of stuff legends are made of. He went from leading an 11-5 playoff team in his inaugural head coaching season, while still under the age of 40, to lasting only three quarters of the next season and still ending up with a career head coaching record of 13-15, and in the process benching experienced veteran leaders like Dominique Rodgers-Cromartie for multiple games for alleged insubordination and ending the streak of the NFL’s ironman Eli Manning, allegedly to start planning for the future, even though he put Geno Smith in for Eli and had a newly drafted rookie QB in Davis Webb WHOM HE NEVER EVEN PUT ON THE ACTIVE ROSTER.” Whoa, all you had to say was “Geno Smith” and it made me start to cringe.

San Francisco Giants
Giants were felled on both coasts in 2017. The baseball variety completely cratered, going from a playoff team in 2016 to 98 losses and the second-worst record in baseball. A season this bad usually has to do with injuries, of course, and the Giants had plenty of those: over the course of the season, their entire opening day lineup, their #1 and #2 starters, their closer, and the top two prospects called up from the minors all wound up on the DL, some more than once. So you can chalk it up to injuries, and also some aging players from the glory days of yesteryear who are past their prime, but the bigger issue for the 3-time World Series champs going forward is that the game has drastically changed, and they simply don’t have the right type of personnel to compete.

As much as I hate Three True Outcomes baseball and think that it’s about the most boring way imaginable to play and watch the sport, the fact is that it’s the way the game is played now, and if you don’t have power in the lineup, or lack power pitching which can strike everybody out, it’s hard to keep up. And the Giants can’t keep up, as they lack both of those things at the moment.

There isn’t much reason for panic, however, since the Giants generally know what they’re doing, and their perpetually poorly-rated farm system always seems to produce guys who know how to play. They also made a nice trade here in the offseason for Evan Longoria from America’s favorite farm team, the Tampa Bay Rays, having struck out on their attempt to land Giancarlo Stanton from …

Miami Marlins
What are you thinking, Derek Jeter? You had a storied career with the Yankees, you kicked off retirement by founding the respectable Players Tribune, you married a Sports Illustrated cover model. Life is good here, Derek. So why on earth did you agree to be the mouthpiece and stooge for the new ownership group in Miami, a group which seems hell-bent on making Marlins fans long for the glory days of Jeffrey Loria?

Jeter put his own money into this mess as well, but the primary mover and shaker in the new Marlins ownership group is Bruce Sherman, who is hell bent on eliminating the Marlins’ $400 million in debt. Word came down from on high to cut the payroll, and Jeter, being the new face of the Marlins franchise, has wound up with his sterling reputation tarnished and with egg on his face.

Saying the trade of Giancarlo Stanton to the Yankees was one-sided would be an understatement. The Marlins basically gave away their suprstar for spare parts after engaging in a continuous, pointless, very public display of brinksmanship with Stanton, who had a no-trade clause and vetoed several trades – first to the Cardinals and then to the Giants – which would have netted the Marlins far more useful assets in return. And Stanton wasn’t dissing those teams so much as using his leverage and flexing his muscle. The Marlins gave him the NTC, after all, and went about doing a bunch of stupid things he didn’t like, so Stanton called their bluff and left the Marlins with no leverage whatsoever. The whole escapade was amateurish on the part of Jeter & Co., who wound up caught over a barrel and ended up selling Stanton for scrap.

The Marlins have given up on next season already, trading Marcell Ozuna and Dee Gordon as well as Stanton and turning a team that was arguably close to being a contender into what will almost certainly be among the ranks of the worst in baseball in 2018. For every team that goes into the tank and lucks out and ultimately becomes successful, far more simply stink or become no better than  mediocre. And what in the hell is there for anyone in South Florida to care about with this team? Oh, right, the Marlins don’t give a shit about the fans in Miami. They never did when Loria was running things, and they certainly don’t now.

And along the way, the always classy Derek Jeter has embarrassed himself and made himself look like a big tool. If you’re going to buy in and allow yourself to be a figurehead, you’d best learn from what Magic Johnson did with the Dodgers. Magic was more than willing to be out front and act as the face of the group that ponied up 10 figures to buy the Dodgers, but would only do so if they backed him with money and, more importantly, backed him with both confidence and competence. Nothing about what’s transpired in the past three months in Miami would indicate Jeter is going to have either to work with, and in the process, he’s managed to roust the ire of Marlins fans and Yankees haters everywhere.

Nick Pivetta with the most useless pickoff attempt of all time. Well-done by the Phils 1B to play it straight.

Colorado Avalanche
It’s pretty impressive for a non-expansion team to finish 21 points worse than every other team in the NHL. I mean, even the teams that try to tank aren’t that bad. The Canucks basically wrote off the last three months of the season and still wound up with 69 points – which was 21 more than the 48 of Colorado, who posted the worst record since the Winnipeg Jets Atlanta Thrashers only mustered 39 points in 2000. And it’s not like they set out to be terrible, either. They had 82 points the year before. Literally everything went wrong in Denver, but that can happen. In a sport of small margins, and a league where they seem to just give out points like candy, being this bad seems almost impossible. Well done, Avs. You earned yourself a shout-out for your horrible season.

Los Angeles Lakers 
As a long-time Laker hater, I’m loving the fact that the gold-and-no-don’t-call-it-purple-call-it-Forum-blue are trash. The Lakers did quite a number last season, starting 10-10 and then proceeding to go 10-40 and devolve from a fun bad team with good minutes and bad quarters of an hour into a truly horrible basketball team that was making no bones about the fact that they were tanking. They had some survivalist reasons for doing so, of course – the deals with the devil that were the Dwight Howard and Steve Nash trades were going to come back and bite them in the ass if they didn’t make the Top 3 in the draft lottery, as they would wind up forfeiting two first round draft picks if that occurred – and so the Lakers raced for the bottom, only to then rather comically nearly screw all of that tanking up by winning five straight to close out the season.

And it was truly absurd stuff to watch. If you had a good first half, you’d almost certainly find yourself benched in the second. Their big free agent signings from the summer vanished into the witness protection program. Between the Lakers and the pathetic Phoenix Suns – who benched their best player, Eric Bledsoe, for the season in March, even though he was healthy, and then went on a 13-game losing skid – they managed to bring the entire league into disrepute. This was a complete disgrace, one which the league has attempted to dissuade by modifying the NBA lottery rules to discourage tanking and encourage competence.

But the Lakers had the lucky ping pong balls bounce their way at the expense of the Suns (because the Suns always get screwed in the lottery) and landed the second pick in the draft, thus giving them the chance to draft the Second Coming himself, Lonzo Ball.

Who hasn’t been any good at all this season, and who, quite bluntly, strikes me as nothing more than a slightly above average athlete who can’t shoot. He’s a terrific passer, of course, and has excellent court vision, but in the modern NBA, if you can’t shoot, you’re useless, unless you are a freak of nature like Giannis or Ben Simmons, and this is especially true at the point guard position.

Lonzo Ball is the product of one of the greatest hype machines that basketball has ever seen: his father, LaVar Ball, who I barely remember as being a not-very-good player on a not-very-good team at Washington State. (My memory has not failed me, although the best thing in that article is David Sanders saying W.S.U. was full of melancholy existentialists.) LaVar is, frankly, full of shit. Then again, while being full of shit, there is also some truth to what he says: he wanted Lonzo to play one year at UCLA, and one year only, because why should some university be profiting off the free labor of his sons? He’s absolutely right about that. There are kernels of truth in most everything he says and does, but it still doesn’t change the fact that LaVar Ball is full of shit.

And I don’t begrudge a father for wanting the best for his sons, but LaVar is the equivalent of the endless and insufferable parents who have meddled and interfered and ruined countless careers of prodigies in women’s tennis. Amazingly, quite a few people bought into this nonsense – witness the BBB shoe line and the large crowds turning out to watch AAU games where LaVar coaches his high school kid and storms around the sidelines and yells at refs and pulls his team from the court in a big sideshow. His middle son then sparked an international incident with two of his UCLA teammates by shoplifting in Shanghai, and LaVar’s response to all of this was to pull his kids out of school and exile them to playing pro ball in Lithuania, since neither of them are remotely of NBA calibre and he needs to recoup.

And everyone – and I mean everyone – bought into the Ball family hype machine when it came to Lonzo. Most notably the Lakers, who are star-driven by nature and basically anointed him the savior of the franchise, which is totally unfair to the kid, who seems like a modest and hard-working guy and who seems clearly burdened by the unfair expectations placed upon him. He’s getting better, but he’s still not good, and while I hope he has a nice career, I’m wary of his star potential. Like most everything about the Lakers right now, it’s all hype and wishful thinking in lieu of an actual good product.

The Lakers are still bad – a fun bad, but bad nonetheless – and they are continuing in their longstanding tradition of acting from a position of divine right and exceptionalism when, in fact, the team is one step removed from the dumpster. They’re still holding onto the notion that, come a year from now, LeBron James will be a Laker and Paul George will be a Laker and everyone will be a Laker because it’s the Lakers. Never mind the fact that they don’t have the salary cap space available to do that, and have to find a team out there dumb enough to take some of their bad contracts off their hands in order to do so. Who knows, maybe LeBron will still want to take his talents to SoCal, but I can’t see why he’d willingly subject himself to even more annual beatdowns by the Warriors.

I love it. I love that the Lakers are awful. I love it all. Sorry, I’m not sorry.

Memphis Grizzlies
The Griz are in a bad way, plagued by injuries and having sunk to the worst record in the Western Conference at 11-25. The Griz played probably their best game of the season on Saturday night, making almost everything they threw in the general direction of the rim against the Warriors, and they still got blown out. Memphis earned my ire and a wag of the finger for their foolish decision to fire head coach David “Take That for Data” Fizdale, who wins an award for the rant of the year and who did a helluva job coaxing 43 wins out of that team a year ago. It was a classic case where the coach got crosswise with his star player – Marc Gasol – who then went about getting the coach fired. It’s a players game, sure, but in the bigger picture, what exactly has Marc Gasol done in his career to earn that kind of clout? A good player, to be sure, and sometimes even a great one, but why is ownership catering to the whims of a 30-something who is past his prime?

Well, you see, it’s because Gasol is one of their own in Memphis. He went to high school there and loves it there and didn’t leave for greener pastures when he had the chance. And when you play in a second-tier market like Memphis, that sort of thing comes to matter. The Grizzlies, to their credit, have built an entire identity and kinship with the city around the concept of “Grit & Grind,” one which has seen the franchise excel far more than I ever thought it would. The Grizzlies are big into rescues and reclamation projects, they play tough and hard-nosed basketball, and they’ve consistently punched above their weight.

Behind the scenes, however, the Grizzlies have quietly been one of the more dysfunctional franchises in the NBA. They’ve had to rely on rescues and reclamation projects because they’ve drafted absolutely terribly – Mike Conley is the last Grizzlies draft pick to sign a second contract, and he was drafted more than a decade ago. Drafting poorly means having to take some risks with signing players, which can go pretty disastrously wrong. (Insert a reminder here that Chandler Parsons is still owed $50 million.) They’ve run through coaches and antagonized others to the point where they’ll willingly get themselves fired and take a job in Sacramento and consider it an upgrade. In a league awash in money, the Grizzlies reportedly lost $40 million last year, and now the two out-of-town owners are  engaged in a bizarre game of chicken which could determine the fate of the franchise.

The Grizzlies moved from Vancouver to Memphis because the Little Napoleon himself, David Stern, was perfectly happy moving franchises into lesser markets which would bend over backwards and feed the league’s addiction to public money. But market forces still make Memphis a second sister, no matter how well they’ve been built and how successful they’ve been. Unless you wildly succeed and establish a long culture of excellence, like the Spurs have done, you’re swimming upstream in a place like Memphis, New Orleans, or Oklahoma City, where they can look forward to five more years of Russell Westbrook padding his stat lines before descending into the complete and utter irrelevance that they deserve. I used to think that it would be the Pelicans who wound up becoming Sonics 2.0 in Seattle, but given how messed up things are in Memphis, it might wind up being the Grizzlies. Which sucks for the fans, of course, but guess what? The fans don’t matter and they haven’t mattered in a long time.

And there isn’t going to be much that will matter to fans in Memphis in the meantime, because this team is in terrible trouble.

Sacramento Kings
Speaking of small-time thinking … one of the things that’s funny about the smaller market teams in the NBA is the ways their fans seem to take every single thing you say negative about their beloved team as a personal affront. No one is more techy than OKC fans, of course, but when you steal a team, your owner is a crook, you luck your way into success through the draft, choke that success away, find yourself mired in the center of every CBA and league-related mess, actively work to thwart lottery reform, and then your best player makes a personal decision to take a better job as is his right per the terms of the CBA, I guess you get a little defensive about the nature of your beloved franchise and how it conducts business.

I get into it with Sacramento Kings fans as well, mostly because I dared to suggest that the Kings would’ve been better off being relocated to Seattle. I’ll freely admit that I’m biased towards Seattle, as a former Sonics season ticket holder. And that would’ve sucked for Kings fans in Sacto, whom I’d previously felt some kinship with, because when I first showed up in Northern California in 2000, and the Warriors were godfuckingterrible, watching the great Kings teams with C-Webb, Peja, Vlade et. al was a delight. They were great. They deserved better than how it all turned out.

My point about the Kings, in their current state, is that in doing everything humanly possible to avoid being trumped by a group from Seattle, David Stern set Sacramento fans up for even more perpetual disappointment. The owner is a whackadoodle, the GM doesn’t know what he’s doing, and the team still sucks. The Boogie Cousins trade at the All-Star break was one of the dumbest deals imaginable, and the terrible trade with the 76ers from several years back came back to bite them in the ass when they finished 3rd in the lottry and had to hand the spot over to Philly. The Kings have now gone super young – 10 of their players are on rookie scale contracts – and the kids play hard but none of them really know what they’re doing, and they negated any financial flexibility they have going forward by signing Vince Carter and Zac Randolph, both of whom are ancient and no longer good, and spending way too much money on George Hill to play the point, who hasn’t been any good and who they didn’t need in the first place. Hey, look, the Kings have the worst offense in the NBA and one of the worst records. Color me shocked.

Kings fans deserved better than this. It’s cool that you got to keep your team, but your team is crap, and has been crap, and will continue to be crap. The Kings won’t ever win The Lose of the Year because they’re basically The Lose of Every Year.

No Speights

Chicago Bulls
I could go easy on the Bulls, because they’ve mysteriously started winning of late, and because Lauri Markkanen can actually play (which doesn’t surprise me, since he was great for Finland in the Eurobasket), and since Bobby Portis and Nikola Mirotic have apparently done some fence-mending after trying to beat the shit out of each on the practice court the day before the season starts.

But I won’t, because the Bulls are still garbage.

It’s the same dumb team run by a tag-team duo of clownshoes, Gar Forman and John Paxson, who somehow thought that signing Wade and Rondo meshed with an up-tempo, modern game, and who wound up using approximately 67 point guards last season, and traded away some useful pieces for backup OKC point guard Cam Payne, who couldn’t play, and then traded Jimmy Butler to Minnesota for a pair of shoes and bunch of other stuff, and sold a draft pick, which turned into the future starting center for the Warriors, for cash considerations – cash they stashed in order to then buy out Wade, whom they never should have signed in the first place. Last season’s Bulls were, quite possibly, the most joyless playoff basketball team that I have ever seen. They all pretty much hated each other and didn’t want to be there. The Bulls are still joyless, and now they’re also terrible. Even with this recent run of good play, I still wouldn’t be surprised if they wind up with the worst record in the NBA. And they’re still coached by Fred Hoiberg:

See you in the lottery, Bulls.

University of North Carolina
UNC wriggled off of the hook with the NCAA, after a long and exhausting academic fraud scandal, on a dubious sort of technicality: since the bogus classes that so many of the football and basketball players were taking in the school’s African and Afro-American Studies department were also offered to the student body at large, it was therefore an issue that fell outside the scope and scale of the NCAA. Essentially, it was an academic issue and not an athletic one, and therefore the NCAA had no jurisdiction.

This is complete rubbish, of course, much like people who argued that Penn State didn’t deserve sanctions and punishment from the NCAA for what was a criminal case. That is complete and utter nonsense. The NCAA can, and should, be able to do what it wants. It’s set itself up to be able to do whatever it wants, at least as it pertains to dictating the free labour they get from student athletes, but it somehow can’t sanction an institution where kids playing sports were taking fake classes, and were thus even more of fake students than the usual fake students playing football and basketball at Div. I institutions.

And at first, of course, North Carolina tried to defend the fake AFAM courses as being legit:

But that didn’t work, so at point, UNC decidedly to go with a time-tested defense, which is to simply say, “yes, we suck.” School officials basically bent over backwards and acknowledged to the NCAA that they were a crap school and a garbage institution, saying pretty much anything they could so as to save their beloved basketball team from any sort of NCAA sanction, because even though the University of North Carolina is actually quite a good university, no one outside the state would know it were it not for the fact that Dean Smith won a million basketball games and it’s the alma mater of Michael Jordan. And it’s that sort of nonsense which makes me hate all of college sports. But hey, they won another NCAA title this year, so everything is copacetic.

University of Louisville
The big problem with college sports in America is that so many schools use sports as a means to create an identity for themselves, thus making themselves appear to be relevant when, in the world of academia, they wouldn’t otherwise be. And the money in big-time athletics – not just from the games themselves, but from the sorts of donations and grants and funding opportunities that will come from having a high profile – is so great that it’s very, very easy to sell your souls and decide you need to win at all costs. As I’ve said before, the old line about how Joe Paterno built Penn State isn’t entirely fanciful. All of the slime oozing out from Baylor stems from the administration having bought into the idea that winning was all that mattered, and to hell with the well-being of young people – many of whom were, in fact, also Baylor students, but obviously not as important students, since they didn’t play football. In this sort of set-up, greed and corruption can come oh, so easily.

And when the Adidas bribery scandal began to unfold this past fall, it didn’t surprise me in the least that it involved the University of Louisville, which has been trying to use athletics to make itself into something other than a mediocre institution for years, and cared very little about the ethics of it all. This is the school that employed Bobby Petrino and Rick Pitino, after all. They also built extravagant facilities at taxpayer expense and lavished huge salaries on coaches, including being the first school to pay a college baseball coach over $1 million annually – which sounds all fine and good until you realize that there aren’t enough scholarships in the baseball program to field an actual team, meaning players in that sport are getting even more screwed than they are in the revenue sports. The idea that you are forking over $1 million for a coach while some kids are basically paying their own way to play is just preposterous.

The whole house of cards at Louisville is coming crashing down now in the wake of the bribery scandal, as everyone involved in what was essentially the making of the University of Adidas is being shown the door. The scandal is evolving slowly elsewhere in the country, with a number of assistant coaches at major college basketball programs inevitably being thrown under the bus as head coaches and ADs scurry to cover their asses, but at Louisville, they acted so smug and arrogant, and believed so strongly that they were above reproach, that they didn’t even do a good job of trying to conceal what they were doing.

University of Tennessee
How not to do a coaching search. Tennessee decided to fire head football coach Butch Jones – an understandable decision, since Tennessee has become terrible while being coached by Butch Jones, and 110,000 people don’t turn up at Neyland Stadium on autumn Saturdays in order to watch a team that’s terrible. Word leaked out that Ohio State defensive coordinator Greg Schiano had agreed to become their new coach. Schiano gets high marks because he somehow made Rutgers into a good team many years ago. He gets less than high marks because he was a horrible coach in the NFL who got run out of Tampa. Schiano also was on JoePa’s staff at Penn State during the Jerry Sandusky days, and it was this fact which got the ire up of the Tennessee students and alumni, as there have been suggestions in testimony that Schiano may have known what Sandusky was doing to underage boys. Mere allegations, of course, none of which have been proven, but in the court of public opinion, none of that matters. So people raised hell, Tennessee cancelled the agreement to hire Schiano, Schiano is now contemplating legal action, and it’s all one hell of a mess.

The cynic in me suspects that, given the usual SEC and NCAA ways of overlooking any sort of issue right up until the point where you can’t win any games, the folks at Tennessee might not have raised any issues about Schiano if they actually thought he was a good coach. That being the case, I have no problem with blackballing everyone associated with the Penn State mess. I’m not at all keen on the court of public opinion, but I’m also of the mindset that pretty much no one involved, even peripherally, with Penn State during the time Sandusky was employed there should ever be allowed to coach or teach or administrate or have anything to do with an educational institution ever again. All of them were either complicit, or contributed to, a bogus culture that cared about winning football games far more than the well-being of young people. So I have no sympathy for Schiano whatsoever. None.

In the meantime, Tennessee still needed a coach, and now that this embarrassing fiasco had all come to light, they couldn’t give the job away. They offered it to about half a dozen people, all of whom turned it down, at which point the AD resigned because he’d messed up the process so badly, and the people at Tennessee were okay with this because that AD “wasn’t a Tennessee man,” making the sort of lame excuse that losers who dabble in nostalgia make about how you need someone who understands the culture and the traditions in charge. Actually, no, you don’t need that. What helps, instead is having people who know what the hell they are doing! Eventually, Vols football legend Phil Fulmer, who a national title at Tennessee, stepped in to run the athletics department and they hired Alabama’s defensive coordinator, Jeremy Pruitt, to coach the team, but only after the entire university made itself look stupid.

USA Gymnastics
The United States has the greatest women’s gymnastics team in the history of the sport, and I don’t give a shit. This is because USA Gymnastics willingly employed serial sex offender Larry Nassar for years, and did little to nothing about the allegations that Nassar was sexually assaulting female athletes. The reason they did nothing, of course, is that the athletes knew full well that saying anything potentially jeopardized their future on the team. It’s a similar sort of slimy dynamic that you see in college athletics, whereby the athlete has no say or power whatsoever because they are fundamentally expendable. If someone speaks up, they are a troublemaker, and it’s easy enough at that point to just get rid of them, since a spot on the U.S. women’s team is the most cherished position in the sport, and the U.S. is so deep in talent that you’ll easily replace the bad apples. The whole scandal is absolutely disgusting, and speaks to an organization that completely lost its way in pursuit of glory. I applaud the women who have spoken out against Nassar, some of whom are among the brightest stars in the sport. I know it’s incredibly difficult to do, and I hope that ultimately being on the right side of history will, at the very least, bring them some peace.

The Winter Olympics
This one is a first, a Lose of the Year nomination for an event that hasn’t even happened yet. But the 2018 Winter Olympics in South Korea are shaping up to be a world class dud. It doesn’t help that the Russians, having had their entire Summer Olympics team thrown out of Rio for 2016 for systematic and state-supported doping, have now had their entire Winter team thrown out as well. But there is absolutely no buzz at all about this event. There is no real star power. Quick, name me a star winter athlete. Name one. You can’t, unless you are a keen devotee of a particular sport. The star quality has been further lowered by the NHL dumbly deciding not to participate, meaning that instead of seeing the best hockey tournament on the planet, we’ll have to make do with whatever each country can cobble together. There is no real drama or tension to speak of, there is nothing worth watching. I’ve never been less enthused about an Olympics before.

The Winter Olympics are already in trouble as it is, since no sane nation wants to foot the bill for them. They’ve rapidly grown from being the domain of sleepy mountain hamlets into this giant megaplex event only big cities can host, but they don’t build that many big cities in mountain ranges. The idea of the 2022 Winter Olympics being held in Beijing is absolutely ridiculous. And after 2022, who knows? Who wants to organize this mess? Who wants the hassle? Given that the Winter Olympics is almost going to have to downsize in order to continue exist, we’re not likely to see many more winter olympiads of this scope and scale in the future.

Instant Replay
It’s bad in pretty much every sport except tennis. Get rid of it. I hate it. I hate it in football and in basketball and in hockey, and I really hate VAR in soccer. Sure, we want calls to be right, but games are played by human beings and they are officiated by human beings, and human beings are going to make mistakes. The problems with instant replay are three-fold:

1) games happen in real time and should be officiated in real time. Slowing down and replaying a play at thousands of frames per second actually changes the way you see the play. In super slo-mo, everything looks like a reckless challenge or a flagrant foul or a fumble or whatnot, but the game doesn’t happen in super slo-mo, it happens in real time. And were you to go back and look at every single play of a game in super slo-mo, and not just the ones under official review, you’d probably find scores of other reckless challenges and flagrant fouls and fumbles and whatnot, as well;

2) In attempting to define what is or isn’t a catch, what is or isn’t a fumble, etc., instead of clarifying the issue, we’ve just made the rules murkier and harder to enforce;

3) it slows the games down, and I have a short enough attention span as it is.

Worst officiating of the year: Adrian Beltre actually got ejected for this

Paris Saint Germain
Few clubs in sports elicit less sympathy than Paris St. Germain, a traditionally bland and undistinguished soccer club that was bought, in 2011, by Qatar Sports Investments, who then poured so much money into the club that PSG were easily able to overwhelm any other French opposition in Ligue 1. There is no greater cautionary tale, in fact, about the extent to which you can rely upon sports analytics than in Ligue 1, where Olympique Lyonnais won seven straight titles using analytics and savvy buying-and-selling of players, only to ultimately be rendered irrelevant in France by the sheer buying power of PSG – a buying power on display yet again this past summer, when PSG spent €266 million to trigger the buyout clause in Neymar’s contract at F.C. Barcelona.

It’s virtually impossible to ignore the political and P.R. aspect of this – Qatar has got themselves into something of a mess by engaging in a political spat with their neighbours, and the questionable ways in which they went about obtaining the 2022 World Cup has brought many things about the way the nation does business into question. Some would argue that PSG is a de facto extension of the Qatari government and, as such, they deemed it necessary to spend that sort of money on Neymar in order to remain in public prominence and retain their stature. What’s weird about it, though, is that PSG don’t need Neymar to win Ligue 1. They could win Ligue 1 without him. (In fact, it was something of a shock that PSG failed to do so in 2017.) What they do need him for, however, is to win the Champions League, which is at most a 13-game campaign. So, in essence, they paid €266 million for 13 games a season, because the only thing PSG cares about, at this point, is winning Champions League.

They might have more luck winning Champions League if they didn’t choke. This past spring, PSG was drawn against F.C. Barcelona in the Round of 16. In the aller portion of the aller-retour, which took place at Parc des Princes, PSG dominated and hammered and completely humiliated Barca, winning 4:0. It was a massive and seemingly insurmountable margin as they headed to the Camp Nou – a margin made even insurmountable when PSG scored a goal at the Camp Nou, meaning that, because of the away-goals rule, Barca needed to score six in order to advance.

What proceeded to occur was, arguably, the greatest choke in the history of the sport of soccer. Go on, here, have a look for yourself. Three goals allowed in the seven minutes? What the actual fuck, PSG? And sure, that fifth goal was crap because Suarez flopped like a flounder on a dock and it shouldn’t have been a penalty, but PSG shouldn’t have ever got themselves into that position in the first place. They played not to lose and, in the end, deserved to lose. Just because you can’t use your hands, it doesn’t mean you should play with your hands around your own throat.

Behold the single worst tackle by a professional footballer that I have ever seen

Italy
This was quite a year in World Cup Qualifying, as many regional powers slumped and wound up missing out on a trip to Russia in 2018. Chile seemed gassed, their short squad out of energy after so many summers of football. The Algerians were the highest rated team in Africa at the start of the campaign, but the Fennec Foxes didn’t turn up. They didn’t win a game. (Well, they did after the fact, because Nigeria fielded an ineligible player. Why does this keep happening?) African champion Cameroon and powerhouse Ghana also failed to make it – the exit of the former being not that much of a surprise, as they are rebuilding and their African title was somewhat fluky (but still well-deserved), while the latter fell into dysfunction in Brazil in 2014 and still haven’t found their way out of the weeds. I knew that Côte d’Ivoire were sunk when I saw they had tethered to fortunes to bumbling ex-Belgium manager Marc Wilmots, whose Belgian team had probably more talent than any team in the world but couldn’t get out of the quarters at the Euros and got run in circles by Wales. Speaking of Wales, they would probably have had made it to Russia were it not for the fact that their talisman, Gareth Bale, appears to be made of glass.

Then, of course, there are the Dutch: 

But the true shock in Europe came when Italy, the 4-time World Cup champions, failed to qualify for Russia, failing to score over a two-legged playoff and losing 0:1 to a so-so Sweden team. This will be the first time since 1958 that the Italians have missed the World Cup, but for all of their pedigree, this was a failure that was a long time in coming.

Oh, the Italians have teased us in the past couple of Euros, reaching the final in 2010, and then losing on penalties to the Germans in 2014, but the fact is that those successes owed a great deal to coaching acumen and tactical prowess – first under the guise of Cesare Prandelli, and then Antonio Conte, who jumped at the Chelsea gig after the Euros in 2016 and left the Italians in the lerch. The Italians somewhat strangely decided to hand the keys over to Gian Piero Ventura, a journeyman manager who’d had 20 previous jobs over 40 years and never been particularly distinguished. Ventura was in over his head – he had no solid tactical plan and no one took him seriously, not the least the team’s senior players.

Oh yeah, and about those players. Italian soccer has been in a bit of a down cycle the past decade, and they were still dependent upon a core of guys who played for the Italian side that won the World Cup in 2006 – a side which, to be blunt, is probably the worst team that ever won a World Cup. By all accounts, the old guard from 2006 had the run of the place, and there have been reports that they were as much as picking the lineups for the games behind the scenes. Ventura had that little sway and say over the proceedings.

Not that he did anything while in charge that gave you much confidence. Being manager of the Azzurri can be pretty thankless, as you get criticized from all sides, but Ventura would respond to criticism by simply doubling down and being stubborn – going so far as to leave his best attacker, Lorenzo Insigne, on the bench as the clock ticked down against the Swedes, which made no sense to anyone, least of all the players. Ventura had said previously that Insigne was not playing because he didn’t fit into the Italian system – which is dumb. This is international football. These are basically all-star teams and sometimes, you don’t have ideal groups to work with. You can’t go out and buy a player. You have to go with what you have. What the Italians have, at the moment, is a mess, with young players who are too green and old vets living off of past glory who should have been put out to pasture years ago.

It should not be forgotten that Italy winning the 2006 World Cup came amid a match-fixing scandal in Serie A, but winning papers over a lot of cracks. Structurally, the game had been on the decline in Italy, and Serie A had long ago lost its status as the best league in Europe, but that 4th World Cup win meant any sort of reform was hard to justify. As such, those needed reforms were slow in coming, and this year, it finally caught up to them. None of the Italian journos I follow seemed all that surprised that Italy failed to qualify, since they weren’t very good and haven’t been for a while. The surprise was doing well in all of those Euros, as it turns out. As good as they looked in Euro 2012, the team that went to Brazil in 2014 seemed shockingly unprepared for the conditions and completely wilted in the heat. There is now some good young talent in Italy, talent which deserves to be on the field instead of the bored old guard. Now, there is no reason not to let them have a run.

A World Cup without Italy just won’t be as good. You can say the same about the Dutch and the Chileans and the Fennec Foxes, Black Stars, and Elephants as well, but in the end, the table doesn’t lie, and if the table says you didn’t earn enough points to qualify, then tough shit.

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Outstanding nominees, all, but there are two in particular who stood out in 2017, and I have to admit that I was torn in picking between the two. But wait a minute, why do I have to choose? These two nominees are so good (or so bad, as the case may be), that trying to decide which one was better/worse was impossible for me to do. It was essentially splitting hairs, because in any other year, these two would be slam dunk, case closed winners. I simply could not decide. I even flipped a coin, and it fell off the desk and rolled behind the bookcase.

The hell with it. This is my blog, and I can do what I want.

So I have decided that, given the uniqueness of the situation, it would be best if I award The Lose of The Year award in 2017 to both of these worthy nominees. Yes, that’s correct, we have co-winners of this year’s TLOTY. But don’t get used to it. I don’t intend on this ever happening again:

The Lose of the Year Award Co-Winner:
Atlanta Falcons
In general, when thinking about The Lose of The Year, I’m inclined to reward sustained incompetence rather than the result of a single game. After all, single games are inherently small sample sizes and, thus, inherently fluky. Weird stuff can happen, whereas showing systematic incompetence, over a prolonged period of time, speaks to a foundation that is most likely rotten to the core and some seriously screwed-up thinking. So it seems a little strange to be giving the TLOTY entirely on the basis of one game.

But in writing this blog entry, and doing research for it, I went back and reread my recap from February, and then I rewatched the final 10 minutes of the 4th Quarter of the Super Bowl, in which the Atlanta Falcons committed what is, given the stage and the circumstance, the biggest choke in the history of sports, and I just can’t ignore that accomplishment. I’ll be surprised if I see another choke that colossal in my lifetime.

I also couldn’t believe what I was watching, even though I had seen it before and knew what was coming, because it’s a complete train wreck. My goodness, the Falcons do SO MUCH DUMB STUFF in the final 10 minutes of that game, and seriously, had they not done any one of those stupid things, they still would have won the game. Every single one of those bad plays was necessary in order for New England to come back and win that game. The margin of error, at that point, was that great for the Falcons, yet they still screwed it up and lost.

You just can’t lose this game, Falcons. You can’t. And yet, somehow, you did. I watched it a second time, and I still cannot believe that happened.

The Lose of the Year Award Co-Winner:
USA FC
If the Falcons represent Lose in its purest, one-off form, then the U.S. Men’s National Team represents it for its body of work over the past three years, which culminated in one of the most embarrassing losses of all time, against a second-rate Trinidad & Tobago with nothing to play for, and failing to qualify for the 2018 World Cup. Along with rewatching the Super Bowl, I also combed the video archives and looked through all of the terrible performances this team put up in the past three years in the build-up to their own demise. I watched them lose to Guatemala. I watched them lose to Jamaica at home in the Gold Cup. I watched them try three in the back for the first time against Mexico and try what looked like a 10-0-0 formation against Argentina. I watched Costa Rican attackers running through acres of space in their central defense. I watched them get pinched and played by the most basic of Mexican ploys at the Rose Bowl and not be able to figure it out. And what I saw, time and again, was a team that seemed poorly coached, disjointed, lackadaisical, and occasionally downright clueless.

There was no excuse for missing the World Cup. None. And everyone involved in this team seemed to think they’d actually accomplished something, and acted as if they did. No, losing in the round of 16 in the World Cup isn’t accomplishing anything. No, finishing 4th in the Copa América isn’t accomplishing anything. Everyone involved in USA FC thought they were doing something great, rather than going about doing it.

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So that’s all for 2017. Thank you for reading, and I’ll try to do better in 2018. Hopefully, I won’t have some major life crisis interrupt me and get in the way and take up all my time. More Lose in 2018! I think this needs to happen. And I didn’t even bother to get into the political and social aspects of 2017 in this blog. This is because I easily become depressed when I think about that stuff. I’d rather that I go out of 2017 on an up note, a humorous note, and continue doing what I can to treat all that comes before me with humor and a heightened sense of absurdity.

Let’s go out with some music here. I need some music. One of the things which people find unusual about me is that my personal loathing of nostalgia means I don’t make many sentimental attachments to songs. I’m always interested in what’s new. As such, my musical tastes tend to always be tilted towards what’s contemporary. Even as I age, I want to hear new sounds. I like old sounds and old songs too, of course, but I don’t feel attached to them to the extent that I want to be listening to them all the time. I don’t need to listen to the music of my youth. My youth sucked. Why be reminded of it? So let’s go out with a nice groove here from a record released in 2017 that I enjoyed. I love these guys, and member Rob Garza also has produced records for The House Band of In Play Lose in the past, so he is clearly awesome. Peace out and I’ll catch all of you in 2018.

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