Tag: sports

It’s like Detroit always has to have a tragically bad sports team

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I don’t follow a tremendous amount of NBA these days, but there have been some interesting storylines that have played out over the course of this season that has had me attuned to the league a little bit more than usual.  The weird In-Season Tournament, the collapse of the Warriors, Draymond Green going ballistic twice and out indefinitely, the seemingly endless beef between Luka and Booker, etc, etc.  But behind all of these microbeefs, has been one thing that has grown into one of the more notable storylines that won’t just be for this season, but NBA history.

With their 27th consecutive loss within a single season, the Detroit Pistons have entered rarified air of being able to say that they’ve embarked on the worst losing streak in NBA history.  So often times in sports, we see hallowed and/or embarrassing records be reached and either they’re tickled, or in lots of cases, tied.  It’s truly not often that many records really break, if they’re of any substance, and even in today’s NBA where at any given point there are numerous teams trying to tank and deliberately take losses for draft positioning the following year, so the fact that the Pistons have managed to eat 27 losses in a row really is something that probably did involve some luck and determination to allow happen.

Of course, there is still one more record to chase, and I feel like I’m jinxing it because I am the lord king of sports fate and if I address it, I am doomed to be defied but it’s too late because I’ve started writing it and history be damned, this will stand.  But apparently in 2014 and 2015, there was a stretch between two separate seasons where the Philadelphia 76ers managed to eat 28 straight losses, but considering the Pistons are currently playing to a .067 clip, it’s a safe bet that they’ll at the very least catch the record and should for all intents and purposes break it, but like I said, I am tempting fate by writing about it right now.

It’s funny because three games into the season, the Pistons were 2-1.  Fans at home were probably thinking, it’s early, but we’re looking good!  With 10 playoff seeds now, maybe we’ll be able to get in this year!  But then that win against the Bulls back in October was the last W they’d ever see, as they’d then proceed to go through all of November without a single win, spawning all sorts of memes about how the Pistons succeeded in No-Win November, but then proceed to keep on chugging through December without any wins and are in prime position to finish All-Defeat December.

I had to look up some of the official numbers since my knowledge of bad basketball records has apparently grown outdated, but the worst record in history seems to be declared to be the 2012 Charlotte Bobcats, who went 7-59, a winning percentage of just .110.  But in a full 82-game season, the 1973 Philadelphia 76ers went 9-73, a winning percentage of just .101.  As unlikely as it would be in today’s NBA climate, but if the Pistons’ current winning rate were to stay steady, they would finish the season at 5-77, shattering both records with room to spare.

And then the ultimate failure would be that in spite of having the most balls in the draft lottery, anyone else gets picked before they do.  All the hotshot prospects in college right now are probably talking with their representation about their eligibility and NIL money comparisons to hard consider sticking around another year versus risk getting drafted by the Pistons.

It’s just funny though, because it just seems like the city of Detroit is destined to at any given time, have some tragically bad sports franchise.  Like there’s a shared pool of sports talent in the city, and when one franchise is taking the lion’s share, another is starving to death.  Like in the early 2000s, the Detroit Tigers were losing 100 games and threatening the all-time losses record, but then the Pistons won an NBA championship.  Then the Tigers were becoming playoff regulars, while the Detroit Lions had a season where they literally went 0-16 and I think tacked on a few more L’s the following season before upending the Redskins to end their torment.  And now the Lions have secured the NFC North and are playoff bound, while the Pistons are embarking on a journey to become the worst NBA team in history.

Anyway, I know I’m tempting fate by having exerted effort to write about it, but I for one love seeing sports history, especially when it’s a team that I have no real care for, at the risk of making the wrong side of it.  I can’t say that any point in my life I’ve ever really been a Pistons fan, or a fan of any team from Detroit for that matter, so here’s to hoping we’ll see some fresh history coming up in a few days.

The Holiday Famiry Road Trip

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

In an attempt to tackle numerous birds with a single stone, my entire house packed up and hit the road, so that we could visit family, see some sights, and let the kids and the au pair see some things outside of our everyday life in Georgia.  All of the driving necessary to hit all of our destinations was daunting, but with hopes that breaking up the trip with strategic stops, and having an iPad full of kids’ movies and television shows to distract, it wasn’t really that bad aside from the sheer time and boredom of the driving aspect which is I guess the burden of dads everywhere in the world when it comes to a famiry road trip, but honestly I can’t complain.  The kids were great on the entire long stretches of driving, and we didn’t have to stop nearly as often as I feared we might have.

As for the trip itself, it was pretty good from the standpoint of getting to see a lot of family, and taking the kids and au pair into Washington DC to see some sights.  Say what I might about DC as a former resident of the area, but places like their zoo and all the museums truly are top-notch.  And the gentrification fairy certainly has done some work to the place since the last time I really went exploring or got lost in the city itself.

Pour one out for the husk that used to be Chinatown, which is apparently limited to like two restaurants and the big red arch that remains.  It’s also hilarious to see all the American and chain businesses that seem like they’re required to have Chinese writing on their storefronts, so like you’re seeing a Chipotle, with Chinese characters that probably say like Mexican food or something on it, since I doubt there’s specific characters to describe a burrito.

I took our au pair to a Caps game since somehow she’s inexplicably a hockey fan from South America and is apparently a New York Islanders fan, and since they were playing the Caps during our trip, it seemed like a layup to be able to gift something of a dream experience for her to be able to see the Islanders in person.  Unfortunately, the Islanders took the L, but she got to witness the general apathy and low-excitement of the DC sports scene, where the entire crowd basically waiting for Alexander Ovechkin to do something, and the guy looking like he’s playing hurt, based on the Undertaker-way he was coming into the game only at optimal scoring chances, and shooting from the same spot on the ice a few times before coming right back off.

In the past, I used to hold onto something of a kinship with the general area, and have a sense of pride of being a former Virginian.  I liked knowing that I still knew the area very well and could get around without a map, take Metro without needing guidance, and generally co-exist with the denizens of the area without much complaint.  But during the span of this trip, there were several instances of where I came to the realization that I’m just not one of them anymore, and not just that, that I don’t really like it up there very much, and often wondered how I was able to live up there for like 12 years.

People, in all of the DMV, are just so much more conceited and petty and just generally more selfish than what I’m used to living in the South.  It’s hard to explain, but there’s always the smallest of micro-aggressions that I witness that remind me that I’m not in the South anymore, whether it’s holding doors open, being in the way on sidewalks or being at restaurants and being completely unwilling to offer up extra chairs or space.  Like we’re at a restaurant with six people, and there are only 4-tops left, but both adjacent tables have people with extra chairs; perhaps it was presumptuous to assume anyone would’ve offered them up to my party, but down South, people are just a little friendlier and a little more aware of others, as opposed to the people around us who insisted their coats or their empty bag of takeout needed their extra chairs.

Mythical wife actually wants to ultimately end up back there, as she has lots of friends up in Maryland, but I have very little desire to move back up there, even if 75% of my general family lives up there.  It’s not like they’d all automatically become ready babysitters, nor would I want to put that responsibility onto all of my cousins or my parents, and then I’d be stuck up in DMV paying DMV land values and being subject to all the shitty people and worst of all, the motherfucking traffic.

Because that was absolutely one of the worst parts of the trips, was the aforementioned motherfucking traffic.  It was bad when I lived up there with the seemingly endless construction of the I-495/I-395/I-95 interchange, but because VDOT apparently needs to always have a 20-year project on their docket at all times in order to justify their existence, they’ve decided to turn I-495/I-66/Rt. 123 into their personal battlefield now, and getting stuck on a route in which I remember cruising back and forth through in the past just made me feel homicidal whenever I was caught in some standstill traffic.

In fact, while up in DMV, there was literally not a single instance where I got into my car and didn’t get stuck in some catastrophic traffic jam.  Going to Gaithersburg, traffic.  Coming back from Gaithersburg, traffic.  Going to my mom’s place, traffic.  Going to the nearest Metro station to pick up wife and au pair, traffic.  After my family gathering, my house was going to head back to Richmond in order to shave an hour off of the big drive the following day, and one of my cousin’s said that I shouldn’t expect any traffic on the night of December 23rd, but naturally, there’s some catastrophic traffic jam in fucking Quantico of all places, as if my time in the DMV area just had to get one last fuck you before I left.

People seem to think Atlanta traffic is, which it is, but I still think traffic up there is still way worse.  Atlanta traffic is primarily aggressive drivers and poor infrastructure, but the DMV area has infrastructure and a reliable train system.  Their traffic is on account of bad drivers who are all pussy-whipped into overly-safe-into-becoming-dangerous drivers by the Commonwealth’s egregious ticket fines and the area’s constant tampering with the road system buoyed by their $4B+ road budget.  The overall result is me wanting to blow my brains out every time I got into the car, and most definitely not wanting to be in the area, as a residence especially.

But like I said, this trip was not entirely about me.  It’s important that my kids meet and have exposure to my family, and it’s important that our au pair gets to actually travel and see places and experience things outside of her daily routines, so if it means accomplishing those things, I’ll take some traffic on the chin for the greater good.  As much as I bemoaned the traffic and aggravations of DMV living, seeing how happy my kids are around their grandparents and extended family, and seeing how happy the au pair was when she got to see her favorite Islander players in person, I really can’t ask for better gifts than those.  This is why I often insist on getting nothing for the holidays, because some of the best things just aren’t tangible things.

Not my MiLB logo

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Apparently I missed this way back from September: but Major League Baseball and Minor League Baseball have agreed to change the official logo of Minor League Baseball

And of course this wouldn’t be a post if I didn’t, but I absolutely hate it, thanks.

Fewer things are a sign of mediocrity and spinning wheels like a logo rebranding.  This was not a case like the Cleveland Indians really needing to get rid of a horrifically racist mascot, this was the case of some bored corporate stooges looking for things that weren’t broken and decided to fix them anyway, to justify their existences.

There was absolutely nothing wrong with the previous MiLB logo.  It was subtle, it was understandable, and most importantly, it was just different enough to where the shape and brand positioning of it was always consistent to MLB standards, but the visual identity of the icon itself was different enough for those looking to understand that this was Minor League and not the MLB icon that any sports fan or casual could understand.

In one of my favorite pictures I’ve ever taken with my mom, I’m wearing the old MiLB logo generic shirt.

Now this new crappy logo is basically identical to the MLB logo, except the batter is aligned to the left, and instead of a baseball coming towards the batter, it now looks like the batter has sat looking at four pitches that are now past him, and considering the escalating rate of strikeouts throughout the last half-century, the guy in the logo has probably struck-out, as much as the logo itself does in my opinion.

I hate to say it, but there are a lot of baseball fans that aren’t particularly intelligent.  The Gwinnett Braves used the excuse that there were people that actually managed to confuse tickets for G-Braves tickets for tickets for the Atlanta Braves, which I didn’t think was really a believable excuse, but I’m also not going to pretend like baseball fans are always the smartest people in the world either.  This new logo is going to 100% confuse people into thinking they’re going to Major League games and buying Major League apparel, but perhaps that really is the end game, and I’m just being hyper critical of a tactic that I think is petty, but is really some corporate shills really living in 2050 and playing chess.

And I don’t understand why they’ve put a color palette behind it, especially of two shades of blue.  MLB logos, especially on apparel, namely baseball caps, often times already ditch their own color palette and adopt the primary and secondary colors of the team, or they just go reverse white, as not to compete with the colors of the teams, especially ones that don’t utilize the navy and red palette of the MLB logo.  This Carolina/Dook blue combo logo just seems odd and uncharacteristic to professional baseball in general, where it seems like the vast majority of teams utilize shades of red, at all levels of the game.  For all the teams like the Blue Rocks or the Stone Crabs or the Pelicans that utilize shades of blue, there are teams like the Redbirds, Nuts, Crawdads and much more where adding a logo of blues into their branding is more like shoehorning a horse’s hoof into a toddler’s shoe.

Either way, I am very much not a fan of the new MiLB logo.  It is uncreative, homogenized, convoluted, and was something that never needed to be updated in the first place.  Not that I’m going to many baseball games at all these days, but a team’s branding is going to have to work just a little bit harder to make me decide to impulsively drop some cash on any team merch if it’s going to have this little blue turd of a brand slapped onto it.

There may be four stars on the logo, but if it were up to me, it would have none.

Whew. Let’s talk about Shohei Ohtani

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

The whew in the title has nothing to do with any sort of relief I may be feeling that I do not have to shave my balls, because anyone with a brain knew that there was no chance in hell that Shohei Ohtani was going to sign with the Atlanta Braves.  I would’ve felt comfortable betting my house that Ohtani wasn’t going to sign with the Braves, frankly.  The whew in the title really is just in regards to how much there is to unpack, now that the free agent of the millennium has finally been signed and taken off the table and the rest of MLB can move on with its tumultuous life.

It actually happened a few days ago, and I just didn’t have the opportunity to sit down and put all my knee-jerk reactions down to text, but for those who missed it, uber-star Shohei Ohtani ended his not-so silent quest for a free agent contract, and has chosen to sign with the Los Angeles Dodgers, up the I-5 from Anaheim, at an earth-shattering $700 million dollars over the next ten years.

This wasn’t just the most expensive contract in Major League Baseball history, this is supposedly the biggest professional athlete contract in all sports’ histories, surpassing even guys like Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo much less Aaron Judge, Bryce Harper and Max Scherzer.  Do the math, and it’s a guy who’s going to be getting paid $70 million dollars a year to play a children’s game.

And the thing is, most people haven’t bothered to care or learn, but Ohtani’s ability to pitch is completely off the table until like 2025, as he will be recovering from major elbow surgery over the span of now until most of 2024.  The Dodgers knew this, and they still were comfortable with giving him the biggest contract in history; he’s a remarkable hitter no doubt, but I can think of 2-3 guys I’d have pursued alternatively instead of dropping $700M on someone whom I’ll only be getting half their skillset for the start of the contract.

Whatever though, the goose chase is over, and Ohtani is going to be a Dodger for the next decade, and the rest of MLB fanbases can bemoan the rich getting richer, as the Dodgers pick up yet another marquee free agent, and their payroll looks to balloon way past what the Mets just set the bar to the year prior.  Frankly I’m not surprised that he went to the Dodgers, because as much as I knew he wasn’t going to land on the Braves, I figured he was probably either going to stay with the Angels, or go to the Dodgers or the Phillies, because those seem to be the only two teams that players actively want to end up going to these days.  And in spite of some gallant efforts by the Toronto Blue Jays, I’m sure Ohtani’s camp reminded him of the colossal pain in the ass that playing in Canada is like with all the constant customs hangups as well as Canada’s high taxes for services that he’d probably never use.

The thing is, after the breaking news of Ohtani’s signing occurred, what I really was the most curious about was the minute details of the contract, namely opt-out clauses as well as my favorite footnote in sport contracts, deferred monies.  At first, it was really hush-hush, leading people to believe that he was just going to get $70M a year, plain and simple, but baseball contracts are never plain and simple, and are astounding when they are.

When the news first came out, none of these details were made available, but ironically in the time between breaking news to when I could actually have some time to write about it, the things I cared about emerged, and hoo boy, are they some really interesting and unprecedented things.

Continue reading “Whew. Let’s talk about Shohei Ohtani” →

It’s been a while, how about building another sports property??

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Over the span of the last decade or so, Georgia and primarily the Metro Atlanta area has seen a lot of sports-related projects be dropped onto us.  Spouting bullshit like economic impact, (minimum-wage) job creation and moar reasons for people to come visit _____ to feebly mask the reality that a bunch of old men are going to be getting rich on their investments while the taxpayers of each locale eat the brunt of the cost, we in Atlanta have witnessed such projects emerge or be proposed:

  • ScumTrust now Truist Park, the brand new home of the Atlanta Braves so that Braves fans could get away from all the scary black people in Downtown Atlanta
  • Mercedes-Benz Arena, the home of Atlanta United and the Atlanta Falcons because there was nothing wrong with the Georgia Dome other than the fact that it wasn’t designed to look like Megatron’s butthole and didn’t have an endorsement built into it
  • Atlanta United’s Training Grounds, because practicing and training at their brand new stadium is probably difficult because of all the traffic in Downtown
  • Gateway Center Arena, in Jurassic Ghetto College Park so that the Atlanta Hawks could have their developmental G-League squad have their very own stadium too
  • It was once proposed to build a Cricket Stadium out in Smyrna, coincidentally there is an extremely high concentration of Indians in the area, whom could probably actually justify its existence, but thankfully nothing really came from this
  • Out in Dawsonville, some developers want to build a Battery-like multi-purpose park, centered around a massive arena that would hope to lure an NHL team back to Atlanta in the event there are any more expansions in the future

So short of an NHL team that the city had already squandered, Atlanta’s pretty well represented in most major spectator sports, with the Braves, Hawks, Falcons and United, as well as minor league baseball and hockey smattered around the outskirts.  And they’ve all got their expensive little homes to mostly themselves; you’d think at this point, the city was actually full of sport venues/facilities, and couldn’t actually find any more means to build sport-related shit to bilk taxpayers, right?

LOL this post wouldn’t have come to fruition if the answer were actually yes.

So let’s congratulate Fayetteville, Georgia, for becoming the new and future home of the US Soccer National Training Center and the US Soccer Federation, and the latest victim member of Georgia’s club of regions to get more than likely fleeced by the building of something that the state had no need for in the first place.

Continue reading “It’s been a while, how about building another sports property??” →

Rarely are there ever winners in college football

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Okay, so I’ve been marinating over this topic over the last few days.  The 2023-2024 college football playoff field is set, and unsurprisingly there exists a ton of salt from various fanbases, just as much pointless analysis to simulate a bunch of hypotheticals, and then a whole lot more salt from the results of such hypothetical matchups.  Honestly, this isn’t something that I was really intending on writing about, but it’s getting a little slow at the office as we’ve entered the tail end of the year and the holiday season, and I’ve found a little bit of time here and there to help kill time by writing, win-win.

Honestly, I think the committee did an okay job with the four teams that are slated to play for the National Championship.  The only one I really don’t agree with is Texas, but I’m completely okay with Michigan, Washington and Alabama being in the playoff.  I wholeheartedly agree that Florida State, in spite of their 13-0 record and ACC championship aren’t a top-4 team, because the ACC has been more or less anything but a Power-5 conference since well, Trevor Lawrence left Clemson.

Trying to not sound like such a Georgia homer, but despite the fact that they did lose the SEC to Alabama, I still feel that they should’ve been in the playoff, especially instead of Texas.  CFB is always about recency bias above all else, and Georgia did finally lose, at the worst possible time ever, but nobody’s going to convince me that the two-time defending National Champions who hadn’t lost in two years doesn’t deserve to be in the CFB playoff.

An even harder sell is convincing me, as well as millions of other CFB fans, that a Michigan/Washington/Georgia/Alabama field wouldn’t be absolute money for all parties involved, because it’s no secret that the SEC has flexed on the entire sport for decades at this point, and what better way for other conferences to try to overcome the mountain than by having two SEC powerhouses in the field?

If anything, the one flexible school that is in the field in my opinion is Washington, because they’re always a strong regular season school, but have done jack shit come postseason, with them getting trounced by Alabama just a few years ago the time they did make it in.  Plus they have a far smaller fanbase that isn’t nearly as willing to spend money, travel, spend money or spend money than programs such as FSU, Texas or Ohio State, and as long as the CFB playoff remains a biased invitational, there will always remain arguments of keeping certain programs out for the pursuit of money.

Regardless of my armchair analysis, the one thing that most everyone can agree upon at this juncture is that the CFB playoff field desperately, desperately needs expansion.  Fortunately, this is something that is mutually agreed upon by the CFB committee, but unfortunately this is not the year in which it rolls out, otherwise we’d have a pretty lit playoff field set.

But the word is that starting next season, the playoff will become a 12-team field with the top four seeds all getting bye weeks, and then 5-12 playing games to reduce to eight, then to four, before setting up the game for the Natty.  And although this system is probably more than sufficient to get a lot of CFB fans wet, sure there is a lot for me to like as well, but I just think that it isn’t a particularly good idea as well.

Continue reading “Rarely are there ever winners in college football” →

I didn’t realize we were witnessing some sort of history

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Okay then: South Carolina’s women’s basketball team defeats Mississippi Valley, 101-19

A year or two ago, a friend of mine sent me a link to a stream of a high school girls basketball game, that a guy we went to high school with was coaching.  I clicked it out of curiosity, since this guy in question was one of those guys where nothing in the world ever seems to treat him particularly well, and my friend isn’t one to steer me to dud content, and when the stream began for me, I noticed that the score was like 31-3. 

I texted my friend and said that I thought that maybe the stream was broken or something, because the score seemed to be stuck at 31-3, but then I noticed in actual manual scoreboard in the video itself, which was still live and moving, and I had one of those ohhhhhh moments, because it turns out that the score was actually, 31-3.  Naturally, my friend’s boy was the coach of the team that had only put up three points, and we laughed heartily over the ownage we were witnessing, because we do love some good old fashioned ownage.

I don’t remember what the final score was, but I don’t think my friend’s boy’s team surpassed ten points.  I do remember watching on the stream that after the clock mercifully ended, he stormed immediately off the court; no handshaking the opposing coach, no handshake line between the two teams.

My in-laws are both sports fans as well as supporters of South Carolina sports, so when they were over during the holiday weekend, and while the girls were down for a nap/quiet time, we turned on the Lady Gamecocks since they were playing live at the time.  It was the third quarter, and the score was like 62-12, and I immediately had flashbacks to the high school game that my friend and I watched, and my first thought was that the ESPN feed was fucked up or something, and that the score was not refreshing maybe.

But it turned out that South Carolina really was wrecking Mississippi Valley that badly, and mythical wife, who is neither a fan of basketball or women’s hoops, began complaining of why we were watching at all, considering the game was long past over at this juncture.  I mean, I like a good blowout every now and then, but there’s no denying that it does get kind of boring after a while and both teams begin just going through the motions to get debacle over with.  I was more surprised that there was no running clock or something to speed things up, and prevent MSV from getting throttled even more than they were.

We turned the game off in after the third, because the margin was only getting worse, but then I would discover later on that South Carolina passed the 100-point mark which is very impressive at the college level, men or women, and that they blew out MSV by 82 points.

Now it’s not as easy as it should be, so I can’t figure out where in history that an 82-point blowout stands in rank.  I did find out that at one point, UConn reamed St. Francis in the Women’s tournament by a margin of 88 points, but beneath that was a whole lot sub-70 point blowouts, so South Carolina’s 82-point margin definitely is up there in the history books somewhere.

For context, the biggest ass-whooping in NBA history was 73 points, and in the NFL, a 59-0 blowout has occurred twice, so an 82-point beatdown is definitely noteworthy and worth some mention on the brog.  Regardless of where the margin lands in history, it’s still historic in the sense that 19 points allowed is a new school record, and is definitively the largest blowout in the Dawn Staley coaching era for the school, so it’s not inaccurate to say that we were witnessing a little bit of history after all.