Sports
Odds Are Good Your Team Will Never Win A Title In Your Lifetime
“There’s no failure in sports. There’s good days, bad days, some days you’re able to be successful, some days you’re not. Some days it’s your turn, some days it’s not your turn. That’s what sports is about. You don’t always win. Some other people’s going to win. And this year somebody else is going to win. Simple as that.” Milwaukee star Giannis Antetokounmpo on losing in the playoffs last spring.
Antetokounmpo was simply stating the obvious math. In a time where leagues are 30 or 32 teams, media expectations are rooted in the odds of a 12- or 14-team league when playoffs were just two rounds. There’s luck and sheer numbers working against your team. Fans follow this standard that your team must win titles or be forever damned. The closer a club gets the greater the expectations.
Still reporters demanded accountability from the man who’d helped the Bucks to the 2021 NBA title. But Giannis turned it back on reporter Eric Nehm . “Oh my god. You asked me the same question last year, Eric. Do you get a promotion every year on your job? No, right? So, every year your work is a failure? Yes or no? No. Every year you work, you work toward something, toward a goal, right? Which is to get a promotion, to be able to take care of your family, provide a house for them or take care of your parents. It’s not a failure, it’s steps to success.
He has a point. In the modern age failure is relative. The traditional poster boys for “failure” are the Buffalo Bills from 1992 to 1996. After wining the AFC every one of those years Marv Levy’s team went to four Super Bowls and lost every one of them, branding them forever in the media and fan perspective as losers.
No other team has ever made four consecutive Super Bowls. Kansas City made four title games in five years. None have made it to three straight Super Bowls. The Detroit Lions have zero Super Bowl appearances before this season and have won just three times in the postseason since their NFL championship in 1957.
Even in a league with 28 teams, the Bills’ feat was remarkable. Unprecedented. And yet, because they lost all four consecutive championship games they’re an avatar of failure. When compared to dynasties such as the 1970s Miami Dolphins (two Super bowls) or the 1980s-90s San Francisco 49ers (5 Super Bowls) the Bills are seen as chokers or losers. The New England Patriots’ winning six SBs from 2002-2016 are the real outlier.)
The current poster boys for hockey failure are the Toronto Maple Leafs, without an NHL championship since 1967. That year was also the last time the Leafs appeared in the Final series. They have since made the final four five times, the most recent being 2002 when Boston dispatched them. Most fans of the team, as well as most hockey fans, see them as a punchline. But in these times of bloated leagues, a semifinal appearance is the equivalent of making it to the Finals in the six-team league of 1967.
Fans and contemporary media still think they we are living in a time when every club, given a little luck and a good draft, will reward its fans with a champions parade. That’s what the mania for parity and salary caps was about. Balancing the draft would give everyone a shot at a star who’d take them to the holy land. But with 30 or 32 teams that formula doesn’t work. There’s just one Stanley Cup. One Lombardi Trophy. And 31 disappointed fan bases.
Where the 1955-60 Montreal Canadiens, 1976-80 Habs, 1981-84 New York Islanders and 1984-1988 Edmonton Oilers defined clutch with multiple Cups in consecutive or near-consecutive seasons, today’s gold standard is closer to two and done. Detroit won four Cups but it was between 1997 and 2008. Chicago won three Cups in five years (2010-2015). Pittsburgh had three Cups in eight years (2009-2017) .
Basketball (with its smaller rosters) still has super teams dominated by LeBron James and Steph Curry. But the NFL and MLB lack the traditional domination by repeat champions. Since 2000 only the San Francisco Giants have three titles and those were from 2010-2014). While the big-budget Dodgers and Yankees have been perennial playoff teams they haven’t dominated the current 30-team league as they did in the 1970s-1990s.
It’s likely that with the NHL talking about 36 teams fans of many of those clubs will not see their team win a title in their lifetime. Parity will sound nice coming from the league, but after decades of coming up short, the odds say fans shouldn’t be praying for a title.
As Giannis says, we need a new standard of success. Michael Jordan’s great accomplishment wasn’t simply the title he brought to the Bulls, it was the totality of seasons in which his club was a viable contender. “There’s always steps to it,” said Antetokounmpo. “Michael Jordan played 15 years, won six championships. The other nine years was a failure? That’s what you’re telling me?
In our book Ice Storm on the 2008-2013 Vancouver Canucks, GM Mike Gillis made the same point when describing his formula for success with a team that has gone longest without a Cup. Understanding the place luck and injuries play, he said his description for success was having a contending team that had a puncher’s chance every year and, eventually, a title winner. Yes, there would be down years. On average, however, it would reap tiles and profits for owners.
But Gillis’ owner, Francesco Aquilini, who’d originally subscribed to this formula, panicked when a near-miss for the Cup in 2011 was followed by two first-round eliminations in subsequent years. The bleating of disappointed season-ticket holders and the criticism from hostile media moved Aquilini to replace Gills with local hero Trevor Linden. The Canucks then missed the playoffs in eight of the next eleven seasons.
Setting too high a bar is a recipe for failure to any management. Explaining the rarity of a semifinal appearance— as Giannis did— can lessen the stress. But until media cite a more realistic standard it’s unlikely anyone will cut teams losing in the playoff any slack. They may well ask what’s in it for them when owners cash a fat expansion fee and push a Cup that much further away.
Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada’s top television sports broadcaster, he’s a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. His new book Deal With It: The Trades That Stunned The NHL And Changed hockey is now available on Amazon. Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History, his previous book with his son Evan, was voted the seventh-best professional hockey book of all time by bookauthority.org . His 2004 book Money Players was voted sixth best on the same list, and is available via brucedowbigginbooks.ca.
Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them. George Orwell
Or, in the case of Olympic legend Simone Biles, only gymnasts believe in the incendiary issue of trans men competing in women’s sports. Biles, who has made a secondary career as an object of pity, took exception when former swimmer Riley Gaines, an opponent of trans men competing against women, sent a picture of Minnesota softball team that recently won a state title with a pitcher who is reported to be transgender.
“Comments off lol,’ Gaines wrote in response to the post which wasn’t permitting any comments from the public. “To be expected when your star player is a boy.”
That brought Biles into the fray. ‘You’re truly sick, all of this campaigning because you lost a race. Straight up sore loser. ‘You should be uplifting the trans community and perhaps finding a way to make sports inclusive OR creating a new avenue where trans feel safe in sports. Maybe a transgender category IN ALL sports!! ‘But instead… You bully them… One things for sure is no one in sports is safe with you around!!!!!’
She then poked Gaines again, saying: ‘Bully someone your own size, which would ironically be a male.” (Gaines husband is 6-foot-4)
The loser reference was to Gaines having lost to a trans swimmer in an NCAA race. Since then Gaines has launched a campaign to outlaw biological males from competing with cisgendered girls and women. She has testified in the U.S. Congress and has appeared in numerous interviews espousing a position supported by the vast majority of Americans.
One might think the proof of this position— unquestioned as recently as a decade ago— would be obvious. But Biles and gender radicals who’ve tried to make trans into the Emancipation Proclamation of the 21st century are not giving up the fight.
Here’s someone named Nancy Armour in USA Today. “There is no scientific evidence that transgender women athletes have a physical advantage over cisgender women athletes, but that hasn’t stopped Gaines from claiming they do..” When legislation banning trans men in girls/ women sports was presented in the U.S. Congress 106 Democrats voted against the motion. The chattering class on CBC, MSNBC and CNN likewise have a cohort of those opposing the ban.
But it was the outburst from Biles that most appalled fans who’d worshipped her as the GOAT of Olympic gymnastics and then sympathized with her victimization by Dr. Larry Nasser. Even when she bailed on her teammates at the 2024 Games they cut her slack. But suddenly a woman who’s preached against body shaming and intolerance was deriding a fellow athlete’s body and mocking her complaints.
Critics were quick to post Biles’ hypocrisy about compassion, citing her own tear-stained testimony about how she was taken advantage by a doctor. Here’s how we described her psychological distress last August during the Olympics. “Prominent among them was gymnast Simone Biles who described the abuse she’d suffered from a male trainer and on social media as the greatest female gymnast in history. Even as she added more golds to her mantle she’d seemed unable to find peace in her accomplishments.
“Due to mental blocks, she’d had to step away from the sport for a time to get her head straight. She had a lot of company from fellow competitors who described sexual harassment and intimidation on social media for their unhappiness. (Hence the constant mental health commercials on the TV broadcasts.)”
Now the same role model is mocking Gaines? It seems unthinkable. As for the claims that men have no advantage against women, it was pointed out that there are zero women who try to reverse the equation, going into men’s sports. They show the hard truths about competitive records of men versus women in a range of sports. They describe the physical risks for women playing against larger, stronger men. Here. Here. And here.
It’s still stunning to see Biles toeing the radical LGBTQ line while asking for traditional pity of a victimized woman herself. Or the amount of support that the cause has garnered from progressives throughout society. When did people became so obtuse about the growth this societal contagion?
We wrote earlier this year about how such notions take hold. MacDonald Laurier Institute fellow Mia Hughes charted a history of similar social contagions such as bulimia and multiple-personality disorder. “In 1972, British psychologist Gerald Russell treated a woman with an unusual eating disorder involving binging and purging. Over the next seven years, he saw a further 30 woman presenting with the same condition. In 1979, he wrote a paper published in Psychological Medicine, in which he gave it the name bulimia nervosa….
“Then something remarkable happened. The illness swept the globe like wildfire… affecting an estimated 30 million people by the mid-1990s, the majority of whom were teenage girls and young women. The explanation for this rapid spread is what philosopher Ian Hacking calls ‘semantic contagion’ – how the process of naming and describing a condition creates the means by which the condition spreads. The epidemic of multiple-personality disorder in the 90s was spread this same way… Multiple studies demonstrate the media’s culpability in the spread of social contagions.”
The new contagion is trans athletes. USA Today is just one example of how influencers try to legitimize campaigns to boost their own self esteem. As the battle to reverse the trans incursion shows, there are only too many willing to play politics in the gender debate. Like the pro-Palestinian movement in North America the trans athlete hoax exists is a bubble where reality and fiction can co-exist, knowing they’ll never be put to the test.
Orwell called it doublethink “the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.” Biles and the liberal elites have it mastered. Nursing their grievance while finding it a fault in others.
Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada’s top television sports broadcaster, Bruce is regular media contributor. The new book from there team of Evan & Bruce Dowbiggin is Deal With It: The Trades That Stunned The NHL & Changed Hockey. From Espo to Boston in 1967 to Gretz in L.A. in 1988 to Patrick Roy leaving Montreal in 1995, the stories behind the story. In paperback and Kindle on #Amazon. Destined to be a hockey best seller. https://www.amazon.ca/Deal-Trades-Stunned-Changed-Hockey-ebook/dp/B0D236NB35/
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