Our recent biggest losers
WE HAVE two teams now, the Knicks and the Jets, who have all but declared their intentions to tank. The Jets are careening toward having open tryouts to fill out their roster, and the Knicks are doing everything shy of forbidding their players to shoot in order to pile up losses and improve their status for the future.
Carmelo Anthony hates this idea, and so do I: The Cubs proved that tanking (even if they never used the word) can yield the ultimate reward. But that is one outlier among many tankers.
Besides, we have had plenty of lousy teams around here the past 30 years, all of those awful seasons coming organically, without any outside help, and those teams ought to be able to show us a roadmap of just how valuable it is to be vile before you become viable again. Let’s take a look at the worst New York teams going back to 1990:
1996 Jets: 1-15 (.062)
As bad as the Jets are trying to get, it is still going to take some work for them to go 1-15, because it is hard for just about any team to be that bad. Or, at the least, any team not coached by Rich Kotite. The salvation for that team was the fact Bill Parcells badly wanted out of New England. And in the short term, that was enough: The Jets went 9-7 and 12-4 in Parcells’ first two years, making it to the AFC title game in Year 2.
So, in some ways, that alone makes the pain of ’96 worth it. Still …
Parcells tried coaxing Peyton Manning out of Tennessee with the No. 1 pick, but Manning decided to stay put. So Parcells traded away the pick, and St. Louis selected Hall of Fame offensive lineman Orlando Pace. The Rams also, by the by, won the Super Bowl three years later, and the Jets are still waiting — and three times since then have gone 4-12, a .250 winning percentage that would qualify them for this list if we wanted to let teams make it multiple times.
Did losing work out? Sort of
2009-10 Nets: 12-70 (.146)
If this isn’t the warning signal for teams pondering tanking, it is hard to know what else would be. The Nets finished just three games ahead of the 1972-73 76ers and their historic 9-73 mark … and didn’t even get the top pick out of it, losing the lottery and John Wall to the Wizards, selecting Derrick Favors instead.
Yes, within three years they were 49-game winners, and within four they won a playoff series. But that involved little-return, bigmoney commitments to the likes of Deron Williams and Joe Johnson and, ultimately, the franchise-ruining exchange of draft picks for
Paul Pierce and Kevin Garnett. Now, just seven years later, there is no guarantee this Nets team will win more games than that one did.
Did losing work out? No 2014-15 Knicks: 17-65 (.207)
If Kristaps Porzingis is the only good thing that resulted from this season, that might be enough — but we’ll need to see what Porzingis’ career has in store for him first. And, also, for the Knicks.
Did losing work out? Incomplete
2003 Giants: 4-12 (.250)
This provides the perfect blueprint for turning a team around: a new coach (Tom Coughlin) resulted, and a franchise quarterback (Eli Manning) resulted, and within two years they were division champs, within four they were Super Bowl champs, and within eight they were two-time Super Bowl champs. Rarely has losing been so fruitful. Did losing work out? Absolutely
1993 Mets: 59-103 (.364)
The legacy is this: Spending money doesn’t shield you from calamity if the money is spent poorly. And the ’ 93 Mets couldn’t possibly have been assembled worse, and it was devastating for the franchise, because ’93 also happened to be when the Yankees began their rise from the muck. They passed the Mets that year and still haven’t given back the city.
Baseball is a different breed of cat, so getting the No. 1-overall pick was no panacea (Paul Wilson), and essentially the Mets had to build a new team based on trades (notably John Olerud) smart free-agent signings (Robin Ventura) and a huge commitment to a star (Mike Piazza). It took seven years, but they did get back to the World Series.
Did losing work out? Yes