The City of Brotherly Lose

A photo no one ever thought they’d see

BEFORE he was the greatest QB in the history of football, Tom Brady was Plan B. Brady was the 199th pick in the draft, a guy who had started the 2001 camp as the 4th string QB for the New England Patriots, who already had a franchise QB in Drew Bledsoe.

People forget how good Bledsoe was. I remember his first college game, when he did some mop up duty for Washington State in a loss at U.S.C. Bledsoe was the 3rd string QB as a freshman, then came off the bench and threw two TDs in the 4th Quarter, and could pretty much make all the throws. A week later, he was named the starter. Mike Price, the W.S.U. head coach at the time, told the story of going to the weekly booster club luncheon in Spokane, where he was asked by an alum why he’d elevated Bledsoe to the starting spot ahead of the two pretty good QBs the Cougs already had, and Price looked right at the guy and said, “because he’s going to be the #1 pick in the NFL draft one day.”

Bledsoe was that good, and people also forget just how bad the Patriots had to be in order to land him. The Patriots were 2-14 in 1992, earning the #1 pick in the draft after having been beaten 10-6 by the 2-14 Seattle Seahawks during the regular season in one of the worst games of football that I have ever seen. The Pats were truly a horrible team, at that point, bereft of talent and ideas, frequently owned and operated by guys with big names who didn’t have any actual knowledge of how to run a team. But the #1 pick fell their way in a year a franchise QB was available, which is a gift from the football gods when it happens. Bledsoe would then go on to set some records along the way, and lead the Pats to a Super Bowl appearance in 1997. The Pats were set at QB. They had their guy.

Right up until they didn’t in September 2001, when Bledsoe got crushed by the Jets’ Mo Lewis, leaving Brady – who’d impressed enough to earn the back-up spot during the summer – as the Patriots starter. There were modest expectations, to say the least. The Patriots had what looked to be a nice team that season – solid defense, balanced offense – but losing Bledsoe was a huge blow. Optimism regarding the backup QB was, well, not high:

“Most NFL fans have little knowledge or confidence in what Tom Brady can do.”
– Alan Greenberg, Hartford Courant, Sep. 27, 2001

Teams in the NFL pretty much deserve a mulligan when their starting QB gets hurt. A long-term injury at the QB position pretty much ruins your season. The general role of the backup QB, when pressed into service, is to do what they call “game management.” Basically, don’t screw it up. Make smart decisions, don’t turn the ball over, etc. But Bledsoe was going to be out of the lineup for a long time, and the novelty of “game management” only works for so long. If you’re trying simply to manage the game and simply hoping to get by, you’re eliminating large swaths of the playbook. This means defenses have less to worry about and it becomes easier for them to key in. Over time, it gets harder and harder to win.

So what you have to do, then, is not simply turn to Plan B but, more importantly, to embrace Plan B. In New England, head coach Bill Belichick has always been the master of Plan B. He’s never gotten near the credit for this, in fact. If something doesn’t work, he’ll try something else. He’ll shape shift on the fly. The Patriots offense has radically changed from season to season, depending on the personnel available. Some of his more impressive coaching jobs have come in years where the Patriots were injury-riddled and he was forced to get creative. He’d have receivers playing corner, linebackers running pass routes. What Belichick had figured out was that of the 53 guys on your roster, probably 52 of them were going to be necessary during the course of the season – pretty much everyone except the 3rd QB, and who knows, maybe he can return punts or something. Not only do you need depth, but you need versatility and, more importantly, you need to embrace the uncertainty and be prepared for it.

So Bledsoe goes down in Sep. 2001 and is going to be out of the lineup for a long time. Okay, now what? Well, you have this Brady kid and he’s your QB, so figure out what he does well and go with it. Buy into it: “okay, guys, this is how we’re going to win games,” which is precisely what his team did. And, of course, it turned out pretty well for the Pats that season.

You have to embrace risk. This notion is so, so hard for so, so many people to grasp. As someone who runs a scrabble club, I wind up being a de facto coach for new players, whose propensity when playing a superior opponent is to play very defensively. This is the wrong strategy. In playing very defensively, you’re actually limiting your options in a situation where your options are limited to begin with. The superior player probably has a better idea of what to do in a tight, defensive game than you do. The solution, then, is to play more openly and aggressively, take risks and increase volatility and uncertainty. When I point this out, the immediate response is almost always the same: “but they’ll kill me if I do that, they’ll play flashy bingos and I’ll lose by 200,” to which I say, “yes, they might do that, and quite possibly will do that, but what if they don’t? What if you get the good tiles instead of them? How are you going to use the good tiles to win on a closed board where you can’t make any plays? The low-percentage play is always better than the no-percentage play.” It’s usually at this point that the light goes on, although it can take quite a while to convince yourself this is true. Risk can be your friend.

That doesn’t mean be stupid about it, of course. Don’t be reckless. You have to know the situation. Don’t be like the Atlanta Falcons and stupidly keep throwing the ball downfield when all you need to do is run the ball three times and kick a field goal. Be smart about it. But if something isn’t working, or if you’re matched against a superior opponent, you have to be willing to try something else and, more to the point, you have to be committed to trying something else. Go all-in on it. Losing is the default, after all: you can do everything according to plan and have it still not work out. You’re better off trying something different.

We saw that already once this year, in the NCAA Championship Game. Alabama was toast. Georgia was killing them. So out of nowhere, Alabama turns to the big Hawaiian kid at QB in the 2nd half and basically threw their entire playbook out the window. It’s desperation, of course, but these are desperate times. You’re down two TDs in the 3rd Quarter of a championship game, you can’t move the ball, you can’t score. And then, all of a sudden, you’ve got this kid coming in and flinging the ball all over the place and Georgia has no earthly idea how to stop him, because Alabama are suddenly doing stuff they haven’t done all year, and not only are Alabama moving the ball but, more importantly, the belief in winning returns to an Alabama sideline where guys had previously been arguing and fighting with each other.

Alabama went all-in on Plan B and wound up winning in OT. It may not have worked. It could have been a disaster. But the game was already a disaster, because Georgia was kicking their ass. I’m reminded of a quote by Alabama coach Nick Saban after a game where his usually defensively stout Crimson Tide won 55:44 over Auburn but got absolutely shredded by the Auburn QB: “you have to be able to win these types of games.” Yes, in a perfect world, your defense would stuff the other side, you’d control the clock and move the ball and win handily. But it doesn’t work that way. This is why we say it’s complicated by the presence of the opponent. The other side is trying to do stuff, too, and sometimes, they do it really well. Games aren’t a perfect world. Sometimes, you have to make stuff up on the fly.

Embracing risk and unpredictibility can be a wonderful thing. Several weeks before the Royals were 90 feet from tying Game 7 of the 2014 World Series, they were getting worked by the Oakland A’s in the Wild Card game – a game which they then turned around by running all over the A’s to the tune of seven stolen bases. Conventional wisdom was that the Royals shouldn’t be doing this, of course, as outs are precious when you’re losing and you don’t want to risk getting thrown out on the bases. But the Royals needed runs and, more importantly, they needed to make chaos – to which Oakland’s relievers responded by coming completely unhinged. Louisville won an NCAA basketball title by essentially making a decoy out of their best player, as Russ Smith basically stood 25’ from the basket for the entire second half, but Michigan had their best defender on him, and he had to go out and guard him, which then opened up the floor for the Cardinals to take advantage of. But if someone had suggested beforehand that Louisville would win a national title by having their leading scorer not shoot, you’d have thought they were nuts.

And see, I’ve never bought into this ridiculous idea of playing like you have “nothing to lose” as it pertains to something like the Super Bowl. You have lots to lose. You have the chance to lose the game that you’ve pointed towards for the entirety of your career, with no guarantee that you’ll ever get there again. What you do have to do, however, is figure out how to win, and figuring out how to win sometimes means doing things differently, rerigging and rejigging and shifting things up.

Which is certainly what the Patriots have done in reaching eight Super Bowls since 2002. Yes, they’ve had the Plan-B-turned-franchise-QB in Tom Brady, who I do believe is, in fact, the greatest QB in history, but that fact alone doesn’t guarantee success. I’ve referred to the Patriots as The Fragile Dynasty in the past, not as a means of deriding their success but as a means of praising it. The NFL is a league which has made it a point of attempting to institutionalize parity – which, for a long time, was really hard to do, and you can run through the litany of awful Super Bowl blowouts in the 1980s and 1990s as proof of that. We don’t get those sorts of awful blowouts in the Super Bowl too often any more. Oh, sure, you had the Seahawks beat the stuffing out of the Broncos a few years ago, both otherwise, we’ve had two decades of good, often great, and usually exciting Super Bowls. The operations in the NFL have become more sophisticated than ever, they are more data-driven and more savvy than ever before. The margins are narrower, the differences between one team and another are getting smaller and smaller. In that light, New England simply getting to eight Super Bowls in 17 years is the great achievement.

I call the Patriots the Fragile Destiny because they’ve won five of those eight Super Bowls and could easily have lost seven of them. The most “one sided” of those games still involved recovering an onside kick in the final moments after the Eagles had cut the lead to three points. (The first Pats-Eagles game. We’ll get to the second in a moment.) Can you imagine all of the ridiculous narratives that would have been spun over the years if the Pats had, in fact, lost seven Super Bowls? “Brady can’t win the big one!” “Belichick is a choker!” Blah blah blah. Even if they were 3-5 in those games – let’s say that the Seahawks run the damn ball, and let’s say that the Falcons don’t go and throw up all over themselves in the last 9:00 of the game – they’d be viewed negatively. Instead, of course, we hate them because they’re successful, and because they’ve always seemed to find a way to wriggle off the hook – which isn’t really true at all, as the best team they ever had, in terms of talent and record, got beat by the New York Giants in the Super Bowl, partly something miraculous and ridiculous took place. Managing to win five of these eight games – all of which came to the end, and some of which required great escapes that Houdini would be proud of – is, in fact, dynastic. No, they don’t just roll over the opposition like the 1986 Bears or the Montana/Young Niners or the Jimmy Johnson Cowboys. Those sorts of games just aren’t going to happen very much any more in the modern NFL.

The point is that the margins here are really, really thin, and while we look to craft and construct narratives based upon final outcomes, Super Bowls are still one-off contests and small sample sizes. All games are, in fact, with the difference being that for this particular game, you have extra time to prepare and don’t have to focus on the long-term. This is the long-term. This is the end. You’d better have a Plan B in mind if things aren’t going well and, more importantly, not only be prepared to take risks but be committed to take risks.

Which is exactly what the Philadelphia Eagles did against New England in the Super Bowl on Sunday. Your first thought, when you see the Eagles going for it on 4th Down, and you see them pulling out a crazy razzle-dazzle trick play for a TD, is to say, “wow, the Eagles are being really aggressive in this game!” Your second thought, right after that, is to say, “why don’t teams always play like this?” Football is chess on grass. There are so many things that you can do, there are so many choices. Why play it safe? Why do what is expected? The Eagles didn’t just stash that crazy trick play away on page 600 of the playbook, either – they actually walked through it the night before the game in a hotel ballroom. They were going to run if they needed to. They were the underdog, after all, against the 5-time champion Patriots. They were going to take all the risks.

Which is actually a weird thing to say, because the risks they took on Sunday were, in retrospect, smart. This trick play – reverse and throwback from a backup tight end to QB Nick Foles – came late in the first half, with the Eagles up 15-12 on the Pats. You could kick the field goal here on 4th down to make it 18-12, but you’re then giving the ball back to the Patriots, most likely around the 25-yard line, ahead by only one score with time remaining on the clock, and Tom Brady has already shredded your defense for 250 yards. You could easily go into the locker room only up three, or maybe even behind 19-18. (Although, given how pathetic New England’s kicking game was on Sunday, you might have liked your chances.) You’re on the 1-yard line, so if you go for it and don’t make it, the Patriots have 99 yards of field in front of them and are likely to just run the clock out and be glad they’re down three points. So the bold play here – going for it – is also the right play. Go for it, score and you’re up 10 and the pressure is back on the other side. Brady may have been amassing zillions of yards, but so long as they have to chase the game, the Eagles have the advantage. So go for it, damn it! And going for it on 4th down in the 4th Quarter was the only right choice: the Eagles are down a point, they might not get the ball back if they punt, and if they turn it over on downs on their own 35-yard line or something, and New England goes in and scores, at least you get the ball back again.

But this is “radical” thinking in a league where far too many coaches can’t do the math and far too many of them fail to realize that you need to stop trying to establish the run and start trying to actually win the game. The reason for conservative play-calling, of course, is that if it doesn’t work, you look bad. But so what? LOSING LOOKS BAD! Had the situations been flipped, I think the Pats would have gone for it in both of those instances, because Belichick gives ZERO FUCKS about looking bad. He cares about winning football games, and amid all of the second-guessing afterwards, had it not worked out, he would have said, “we thought it was our best chance to win.”

Doug Pederson gave zero fucks as well. The Eagles were one of the most aggressive teams in the league during the season when it came to going for it on 4th down. And the Philadelphia Eagles had already embraced uncertainty and risk, because they’d been forced to turn to Plan B when QB Carson Wentz, who was likely to be the MVP, went down with a knee injury, and the Eagles had to turn to backup Nick Foles. The first few games after Wentz went down were, well, a mess. Even though they were the #1 seed in the NFC playoffs, the Eagles were still underdogs at home in their first two playoff games.

But there is stuff Nick Foles does well. Nick Foles went to the Pro Bowl when he was the Eagles QB the first time around. No one gets to a Pro Bowl in their career who doesn’t do stuff well. So during the bye week, which the Eagles earned for being the best team in the NFC, Doug Pederson and his staff went back and looked at the film and figured out what it was does Foles did well and adjusted the offense on the fly, adapting the passing game to create more play action and what they call run-pass options or “RPOs.” It was sort of murky in the first go-round, as the Eagles stumbled past the Falcons, but then the new offense kicked in against Minnesota, a 38:7 rout in which the Vikings – who had the best defense in the NFL – looked completely flummoxed. The Eagles were the best team in the NFL before Wentz got hurt, not just because of Wentz but because they have good players all over the field, and now, all of a sudden, here they are running all of these weird plays Chip Kelly drew up back when he was at Oregon – plays designed entirely to take advantage of speed mismatches in space – and now you’ve got big strong receivers running free all over the place, and more room for the backs to run, and they’re throwing it out in the flat to scat backs who can beat you to the corner. Foles can make all of those plays. Whereas the tendency is to play it safe and game manage with a backup QB, the Eagles went the other way: turn the disadvantage into the advantage, use the element of surprise, be hyper aggressive and, above all else, trust Foles to make the plays he’s capable of making.

And if Foles is making plays he’s capable of making, and doing what he can to cancel out – even a little – the enormous Brady advantage at QB, then guess what? The Eagles have better players than the Pats at almost every other position on the field. They have a great offensive line, they have more speed on defense and in the skill positions. I had taken the Eagles +4½ bet offered me by my Pats-lovin’ columnist buddy Piano because across the board, save the QB position, the Eagles were a better team. In the end, I wasn’t that surprised that the Eagles won.

I was, however, surprised at how they won. I would have expected the Eagles to win by making some big plays on the defensive side. Instead, they made exactly one of those, but one was enough, because the Patriots made none.

(Streeter Lecka/Getty Images)

It was a crazy game, an astonishing game with more total yards than any game in league history. It looked like some college game from the Big 12, some Oklahoma-Texas Tech game where they run up oodles of yards and “good defense” constitutes holding the other side to a field goal. Brady threw for 505 yards, often in massive chunks, but Foles threw for 373. I would never have thought that Foles would be going toe to toe, shot for shot against Brady and matching him. If anything, the Pats scored too quickly – it’s sort of hard not to if you’re moving in 30-yard bursts – because their defense couldn’t get off the field. The Pats defense was terrible: the Eagles scored eight times, including several long drives lasting more than seven minutes. In that sense, it reminded me of the Giants-Bills Super Bowl of 1991, where the Giants managed to hold the ball for 40 minutes – which is what they had to do, because the Buffalo offense were gaining 20 yards a minute, but the Bills just simply ran out of time. And on Sunday, there were the Pats launching the unsuccessful Hail Mary into the end zone with :09 left, out of time. The Eagles had done just enough to win.

But just enough is good enough, and I’m happy for my many, many good friends from the City of Brotherly Lose … I mean, uh, Brotherly Love … because Philadelphia has been an underratedly terrible sports town over the years. Philly has seen it all, when it comes to losing. The Phillies have lost more games than any team in the history of sports. The 76ers have managed to post the 2nd- and 3rd-worst seasons in NBA history. But then it goes the other way as well: since the Broad St. Bullies won a couple of Stanley Cups in the mid-1970s, the Flyers have lost in the Stanley Cup finals six straight times. In the heyday of 76ers basketball, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, they managed only one title. Those Sixers teams were great. They really were truly great teams – but the 1980s Celtics and Lakers were simply better, and I have no idea how they managed to lose to the Blazers in 1977. That ’77 Sixers team was one of the weirdest, zaniest, funnest teams ever, and also one of the best. It sort of sucks they didn’t win a title.

And the Eagles, of course, had never won a Super Bowl before this past Sunday. In fact, there is no question that, prior to Sunday, they were the best franchise in the sport that hadn’t won one. It’s cyclical, of course, with ups and downs along the way,  and they’ve had a few down years like most everyone, but the Eagles have generally played at a high level for the past 40 years, losing several Super Bowls and a gaggle of NFC Championship games along the way. And that sort of consistency matters in the end. All you have to do is compare them with the 76ers, who tanked and lost on purpose for three years and less resembled a basketball team than an interpretive dance troupe. Sure, maybe all of that losing will result in enough talent to win an NBA title, but there is no guarantee of that, and in the meantime, 76ers fans had to put up with a shitty-ass product. Seriously, fuck the process. I take issue with any pundit in sports who is an advocate of tanking, because they usually are media people who don’t have to actually buy tickets to the games. Who wants to watch that crap? Anyone who thought Sam Hinkie’s Process wasn’t bullshit obviously didn’t have to pay to see it.

We’ve come to overvalue losing in creating this sports culture of “RINGZ.” Being good all the time matters. Being consistent matters. The Eagles have usually been pretty good, and what’s wrong with that, exactly? Winning is hard. It’s really, really hard. Anyone can lose. Losing doesn’t impress me. It’s good job security, but it doesn’t impress me.

Being good matters, in the end. The idea that being terrible is somehow what’s necessary in order to some day be good is complete folly, and always has been. I’ve always admired teams like the Patriots for being so good for so long. Being consistently good is impressive. And it’s cool that, for once, the Eagles finally figured out how to be great.

All hail the gooey cheese of bliss!

 And we’re the big winners in this household, because we had cheesesteaks for lunch on Sunday. I like to regionalize the cuisine on Super Bowl Sunday. I did po’boys for the Saints, salmon for the Seahawks, I even did clam chowder for the Pats back when they played the Packers in the mid-1990s. (No small feat, mind you. Try finding good clams in the mountains of New Mexico in the middle of winter.) But cheesesteaks? Oh, be still my foolish heart. Cheap beef, gooey cheese, a mountain of onions. One of life’s great guilty pleasures. So wrong, yet it feels so right.

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.

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.