Taylor Swift Beat Me To The "Stevie Knicks" Pun

We just saw the NBA and NHL championships handed out on consecutive nights. I don't have much to add to the Carolina Hurricanes win, beyond pointing out that they now join Colorado and Tampa Bay on the list of places that have now won a Stanley Cup, rebuilt, and won another cup with a different team, all since the last time a Canadian team won the cup.

Speaking of long championship droughts, congratulations to the Knicks on their first NBA championship in more than a half-century. That should give the Leafs some optimism. Maybe.

But that brings up one unsettling aspect of their win. We've now seen a few teams end long championship droughts in the twenty-first century, and the feelings around them are a bit different. Obviously, the Cubs spring to mind as a team that had a long and painful futility streak. When they won a World Series, there were generally good feelings from those who didn't have a connection to the team. We were glad to see their long-suffering fanbase have their moment of success. After all, they were the Loveable Losers, people who took their misfortune with good nature. You felt like they deserved a change in fortune.

Contrast that with the Red Sox a few years earlier. Their World Series drought was also measured in lifetimes, but there wasn't such an outpouring of joy to see them finally happy. I'm sure some of that was their rivalry with the Yankees, and thus taste-makers in the media capital weren't so happy to see them succeed. But there was also a feeling that the Bosox weren't such loveable losers; rather than being seen having a laid-back acceptance of their fate, they came across as a little too intense and taking it a little too seriously. Their continued failure gave the rest of the sports world a bit of schadenfreude, and watching them finally have their day didn't give us nearly as much joy. 

So when it comes to long-suffering fans, there's differing levels of sympathy. To bring this back to the Leafs, they'll definitely be the extreme counter to the Cubs. Yes, plenty of Leaf fans have a Cub-like humour to their futility, but for every one of them, there are twelve with dangerous levels of obsession. Even as a Leafs fan, I realize that if they ever win a cup, no non-fans will feel good for them.

So what about the Knicks? Well, I found that this was one of those Medium-is-the-Message situations. Watching them win - clinching on the road - it was easy to feel good for them. A hard-working team, coming from behind, it all seemed to parallel a fanbase that has remained passionate through thick and thin.

Contrast that to the previous game, where they won in an exciting, record-setting comeback. But that was at home. Normally it's great for a neutral observer to see a home team win, with a passionate crowd cheering them on. But a Knicks crowd is second only to a Lakers crowd in celebrity sightings, and the director of the TV coverage was intent on getting a reaction shot from every famous person in the lower bowl after every decisive play. You could just imagine him in the control room shouting out the names in succession to cut to the close-ups, "Sandler! Seinfeld! McEnroe! Stiller! Swift!" 

I have nothing against any of those celebrities, but it does make it harder to cheer for the team. If I'm envisioning the long-suffering Knicks fan as some janitor from Queens, then I feel really good to see their sports dreams come true. But if it's Jerry Seinfeld, then it's harder to imagine that this team's futility has left a gaping hole in his life. 

So I hope that future sports broadcasts will think about this. Aside from the fact that you should really have more cameras showing the game than the crowd, you should also think about how that shapes the view of the team.

Winning (More) Time

How about this NBA in season tournament? It’s an idea borrowed from soccer and grafted on to a North American basketball league. It's a new and unprecedented idea in basketball <does some research> Oh, the WNBA has already done it three times? Well, I'm just going to blame their lack of Canadian teams for that, rather than examine my own latent sexism.

Anyway, I would have thought hockey was the sport where an extra tournament makes the most sense. As many have pointed out, hockey playoffs are infinitely more intense than any regular season game. So artificially creating even more playoff hockey would sound like a good idea. I mean, except for the whole hockey culture-hates-change thing.

But I actually like this idea of the NBA in-season tournament, and the biggest reason is that it gives some intrigue to the NBA's neglected middle. So many teams get trapped in that Catch-22 of not good enough to contend for a title, not bad enough to draft the superstar they need to contend for a title. So the only intrigue for fans of those teams is whether they'll just miss the playoffs, or get in and get smoked in the first round.

This tournament will offer them a bit of hope, and thus, more reason to pay attention. Yes, the favourites for the in season tourney will be the same as the favourites for NBA champion. But as a single-elimination tournament (after the brief round-robin) there's some randomness thrown in. With one game to decide who goes on, there's more chance of an upset, and those good-but-not-great teams can dream of riding a hot streak to glory.

It also addresses one of the big, but rarely-mentioned aspects of modern team sports: there are a lot of teams, but not much glory to go around. If your league has thirty or so teams, you’re going to be waiting a while for a championship. Unfortunately, our ideas of what to expect from team success were set in an era when there were half as many teams. We expect to win lots of championships, when really, we can expect to see just two to three in an average lifetime. Having more titles available is one way to make it more tolerable as you wait that couple of generations between championships. 

I know, lots of pundits will complain that it’s not a real title. There will be plenty of hot takes the first time a team raises an in-season tournament banner — especially if it goes to a team that’s never won a championship. There have been plenty of complaints when a team commits the sin of celebrating a win in the play-in games to get the final playoff seeds. But I don’t think there’s any danger of watering-down the importance of the overall championship — just look to European soccer to see that. And the in-season tournament will be worth something — I know those hot takes are even now looking for a way to compare it to a participation trophy, but it will be a difficult thing to win. You could make the argument that a single-game-elimination tournament has too much randomness to be a good test of merit, but that argument would invalidate March Madness, so I don’t think we’ll hear it too often. And having special courts with wild colours for the tournament, thus distracting all the hot takes, was a stroke of genius.

The Basketball Diagrams

In a recent commercial, I noticed that the Raptors’ Fred VanVleet was wearing a T-shirt with an odd triangular logo that looked like one of those adaptors they used for record holes. But after a few times seeing the ad, I realized that the symbol looked like an “F” and a “V,” so I wondered if it was his personal logo.

Years ago, I made a post about athletes with their own logos, so this shouldn’t surprise me. But still — much as I identify with VanVleet as a fellow vertically-challenged person, and admire his fighting back from many challenges to become an important member of a top team — he is the second-string point guard. In contrast, the athletes I found with symbols were among the best ever at their respective sports. But I did a little digging, and was surprised to find that most of the Raptors line-up have their own logos:

It turns out that although those earlier logos were created by equipment manufacturers to associate products with the athlete, today’s players are often taking it upon themselves to create a symbol for themselves. Indeed, Fred VanVleet will sell you one of his logo shirts, so he’s essentially doing for himself what Nike et al will do for the biggest stars in the game. Also, Kyle Lowry invited logo designs, but he’s still going with clothing that just has “7” on it at least for now.

In case you’re wondering where the rest of team is on this, Danny Green doesn’t have one, but his podcast does. And coach Nick Nurse has a hat with his initials on it, though that was supposedly a gift. I’m left wondering how Marc Gasol got left out of the fun. He’s a newcomer to the team, but he was a star for Memphis for many years, so I’m left wondering if this is unique to the Raptors.

I’m sure a star studded team like the Warriors all have their own logos. Well, the famous ones, anyway; their bench probably just has “Hello my name is” stickers. So I’ll look at Eastern Conference rivals the Milwaukee Bucks. Not surprisingly, their star Giannis Antetokounmpo has one, though it’s not real creative. And better still, I found a mnemonic for spelling his name. But what about his less-famous teammates? I went looking, and I couldn’t find one for Eric Bledsoe or Brook Lopez, though Khris Middleton has one that I don’t entirely understand.

So this is a weird Raptors tradition, like Jurassic Park or Drake. Hopefully they can spin this into a new way of winning over free agents: sign with the Raptors and no matter your role with the team, you get your own logo, and as many endorsements as you have time for.

Put On My Thinking Cap

Normally, I’m a believer in the concept of the salary cap. But I’m now noticing things that are kind of unexpected. Basketball has a salary cap, but teams are thinking more and more in terms of building through big fee agent signings. The most extreme example being when the Knicks traded young superstar Kristaps Porziņģis so they’d have more money to go free agent shopping this summer. In contrast, Baseball has no salary cap, yet dozens of free agents remain unsigned at the start of spring training because there’s little interest from teams.

How did we get here? Mainly it is a result of the NBA’s relatively low maximum on individual salaries. That is, it’s low compared to the total salary cap, and the small number of players on a basketball team, and the very small number of players who make a difference in a superstar-focused sport. It’s a real distortion of the market: if salaries were free (other than the limit of the salary cap) star players would be paid much more than they are now: In the NBA, a superstar is a huge advantage, so teams would be paying large percentages of their cap for one player to build around. That would drive the salaries of star players through the roof, with the result that no team would be able to fit more than one or maybe two under their cap. Super teams with many superstars wouldn’t exist.

The irony is that now things are looking bad for small teams. As others have pointed out, if a player can only make so much money from salary, then that means there’s a big financial advantage to play on a team that’s either in a big city or is already successful, so they’ll have more chances to do endorsements and supplement the salary. So strangely, while the salary cap may help smaller-market-teams compete, artificially keeping the maximum salary low is hurting them.

It’s a very different dynamic than other sports: in baseball and hockey, there’s a huge emphasis on youth. In baseball, young players are a way for small-market teams to compete without breaking the bank, and in hockey, it’s a way to get value out of the cap. You wouldn’t see anything like the Knicks trading a young star to get cap space so they can sign veterans. On the other end of that trade, people were complimenting the Mavericks on getting two great young players to build around. But I’m wondering what good that is. They may end up getting crushed by a hastily-assembled team of veterans.

Meanwhile, baseball had its own strangeness: no one wants to sign free agents. That’s strange in a sport that used to be dominated by rich teams with expensive players. Many people are blaming this on collusion, a conspiracy of the owners agreeing not to sign anyone. That's happened before, so it's hardly tinfoil hat territory.

But I have to disagree. I don't have much faith in the morality of team owners either, I just think there's a simpler explanation. The fact is that with modern statistics, we know that a good-but-not-great player will only add two or three wins for a team. And while it’s true that more wins generally means more fans (and thus more money) a small improvement like that won’t make a big enough difference to be financially worth it. Say you’re a .500 team: signing one of these “good” free agents would mean spending $10 million a year to go from 81-81 to 83-79. There’s no way that makes financial sense. Sure, you could pay for several of these players to improve the team enough to get into the playoffs, but then you’re talking about spending about $50 million a year just to get into the wild card game.

Baseball’s high costs and hard-to-make playoffs have lead to an all-or-nothing approach by the teams, in which they either spend big to make a great team, or emphasize the farm system to slowly groom a winner. That means the market for mid-range free agents is very small. Teams waiting for the youngsters to develop don’t want free agents because they aren’t trying to win at the moment, and once those youngsters are ready, they don’t want many free agents, because they have a team full of young, talented, and inexpensive players. And the few rich teams have spent most of their money on superstars, and have little need for good players. So if you’re a good player at age 30, there simply aren’t many people looking for your services.

So now the business of sports is even stranger than it normally is. Basketball has a salary cap but may be about to grind into a no-parity rut, while Baseball has no salary cap, but is very frugal, but still has no parity. And I continue to think that the NHL may actually have the best system.

Lotto Super 7

All sports have a physical component to them. We tell ourselves it's all about heart, effort, practice, character, hussle, intangibles. It's not the size of the dog in the fight, it's the size of the fight in the dog. But we know that those things can only do so much. All things being equal, I'm betting on the big dog.

But no sport has that physical side shoved in our face quite like basketball. There are examples of small people in the game, but there are far more examples of tall folks that clearly don’t have the athletic ability of most professional athletes, but are nevertheless able to make meaningful contributions in the game.

So I wondered: if you were seven feet tall, what are your chances of making it into professional basketball. I mean, it's clear that there are plenty of tall players in the sport that could never make it without their extra vertical advantage, but how much of a difference does that make?

I googled the question, and got a reference to a widely quoted article claiming that it's 17%. However, this other post points out that there are a few problems with that:

1. The calculation is based on comparing the number of Americans who are seven-feet tall or more, with the number of seven-footers in the NBA. But most of the seven-footers in the NBA are not American.
2. The heights you see quoted in NBA statistics are measured with shoes on, while most people measure heights without shoes. So really, there are hardly any seven-foot-tall players in the NBA.

So we don't really know the percentage, but it's probably on the order of 1%. In contrast, another study looked at Americans 6'6" to 6'8" (or, Michael Jordan to Lebron James) and they had a 0.07% chance of being in the NBA. And among all Americans, less than one-in-a-million are in the NBA. So whatever the number, a seven-footer is orders-of-magnitude more likely to make the NBA.

But still, it’s not like they’re just grabbing random tall people and shoving them on the court. Even among the tallest, they’re getting particularly athletic people. But the standards are not nearly as astronomical as it is for your average person. To put it in perspective, in my high school, there were about a hundred boys in each grade. Imagine you just had to be the best athlete in your grade, and that would be enough to get drafted into the NBA. That’s essentially the situation for a seven-foot-tall individual.

But when you think about it, their lot isn’t really any different from anyone else. After all, if you were, say, six-feet tall and wanted to make the NBA, you’d have to be blessed with your own set of physical gifts, like speed and agility. But in that case, your genetic traits are not nearly as obvious or measurable. And they can be augmented by exercise and practice, allowing us to believe that their success is more than just a genetic lottery. But basketball’s big men shove it in our face that their ticket to success came largely from their DNA.

Sun Life On My Shoulders

I’m stuck here watching the traditional NBA Christmas games, since it’s that or watch year-end retrospectives or sitcom marathons, or get into the twenty-first century and pay for a streaming service. I should have invited someone to watch them. I know the Raptors aren’t doing anything today, I could have asked them. Of course, that’s Canadian basketball’s yearly complaint, that it doesn’t matter how many winning seasons the Raps have, they’ll never get invited to play on one of the Christmas Day marquee games. At the same time, it doesn’t matter how bad the Knicks get, they’ll just keep getting invited back.

But I should acknowledge that this complaint is not just unique to Toronto this year. Not only are the Raps not playing despite leading the league, the Western Conference leading Denver Nuggets are also at home to unwrap presents and watch 28th-out-of-30 New York stagger around the court. I’m sure some folks are putting together anti-Canadian conspiracy theories based on the fact that one of their key players is Canada’s own Jamal Murray.

It’s more likely that the Denver market just isn’t important enough to the American broadcasters. You see the same thing in Baseball, where the Sunday night national telecast has become a tiresome rotation of the same few teams over and over. No, I’m not expecting them to show the Blue Jays — at least over the last couple of years — but teams like Milwaukee and, again, Colorado get ignored even when they have good teams. Having said that, smaller markets Portland and Utah are coming up in the Christmas night game, so you could also chalk this up to the broadcasters and league doing a bad job of predicting which teams will be good this year. If next Christmas features the Nuggets playing the Knicks while the defending-champion Raptors sit, then we can go back to Canadian indignation.

But one thing you can appreciate when watching multiple NBA games is the oddness of the league’s uniform sponsors. Starting at the beginning of last season, teams have had a corporate logo on their uniforms. It’s nice and tasteful, rather than the giant ads used in soccer or the WNBA. So I’m filing it with the NHL’s shootouts under sports ideas I hated but surprisingly don’t get angry about.

It helps that there haven’t been any embarrassing ad associations. That’s in sharp contrast to venue names, where most of the names are okay, but you feel stupid talking about Sleep Train Arena or Smoothie King Center. Actually, it’s been nice that many teams have sponsorship from local companies, such as Harley Davidson for Milwaukee or Goodyear for Cleveland.

But what’s odd is that even though the less-lucrative teams like Sacramento have not had to take sponsorship from Depends or Preparation H, the more popular teams haven’t taken sponsorship from the Blue Chips. Like, you’d think the Warriors would have a bidding war that only the richest companies could hope to win. Say, a local company like Google or Apple. But no, their sponsor is Rakuten, which is a Japanese e-commerce company and not, as I had assumed, a sound effect from Street Fighter. Apparently it’s a big company, I’m just surprised that a bigger American company didn’t want it. Or, to put it another way, Rakuten is apparently called “the Amazon of Japan,” yet they wanted to sponsor an American sports team even more than the Amazon of America did.

And the Lakers should be a big score too, given their history and their Lebron James. But again, they’re sponsored by Wish. Sure, that’s a big company, but you’d expect the Lakers to be sponsored by Exxon or something, if only to match the Celtics and their GE ads. Okay, I guess the current Lakers are promising, but haven’t truly arrived yet, which is sort of like ordering from Wish.

My point is that the ads aren’t really the prestige item you might expect; many companies are seeing it as a path to legitimacy. I guess it’s sort of like a Super Bowl ad. Sure, Coke or GM might make one, but a lot of the time it’s just some dot-com betting half their funding on making a big impression with the public.

The Revolution Is About Basketball

NBA Commissioner Adam Silver gave an interesting interview where he talked about how the league uses modern media. For instance, the NBA encourages people to post highlights to YouTube, unlike some other sports organizations. First of all, they have an agreement with YouTube that they still get ad revenue from these clips, even if the NBA itself didn't post the videos, and secondly, they understand that clips on the internet aren't really competing with the game itself.

That's a refreshing attitude, not just in pro sports but in all of business. Most corporations have a knee-jerk reaction to stop any-and-all unauthorized usage of their product. While I can understand why a company would want to guard their intellectual property, there often seems to be no thought of a greater strategy that goes into the decision to send out cease-and-desist orders.

But what I found really interesting is that they've used their streaming service to learn about fans' preferences. They can tell how much of the game people are watching, and when they're turning off the game. I guess that can lead to privacy concerns, but in the modern world, the NBA knowing when you stop watching is pretty small potatoes.

What I find interesting is that this data contributed to their decision to reduce the number of time-outs this season. On the one hand, I could have told them to do that and saved them a lot of trouble. But it also makes me wonder what other insights the NBA and other leagues could learn about what excites and annoys fans.

It's also notable that Silver mentions that they find it easier to increase viewership by encouraging existing fans to watch more, rather than winning over new people. I'd like to see this approach applied to hockey, where there doesn't seem to be much focus about whether the sport should appeal to hard-core fans or appeal to new audiences, and discussion of how to appeal to each usually involves a lot of guesswork and stereotypes. It would be good to see some more certainty, even though I fear that it might push the sport in directions that I, personally, wouldn't like.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go subscribe to the NBA streaming service. Next year I'm going to use it to watch every game, but I'm going to stop watching every time there's a bad call against the Raptors.

In Between Jays

This coming baseball season is shaping up to be strange in at least one way: how few teams are trying to win. I saw one article that pointed out that fewer than half of teams will actually be putting in an effort to compete, with the rest in mid-rebuild, and going through the motions while building up a collection of prospects.

That's a bit of an exaggeration, since their list of rebuilding teams counted teams like the Blue Jays that are half-heartedly competing, neither trying to improve the roster nor rebuilding. But then, you know that if they aren't fast out of the gate, the clearance sale will begin.

It's not hard to see why this is happening. The last three World Series winners (Royals, Cubs, Astros) have shown us the optimum strategy: grooming a generation of prospects to peak at the same time. Teams that do this have a clear enough advantage that there isn't much point shuffling along with a mediocre line-up and hoping for the best.

On the one hand, that's refreshing: we went through twenty years of feeling it was futile to compete with big spending teams, so a change is welcome. Now it's futile to compete with great farm systems. The problem is that while this trend has produced some impressive teams - and allowed some smaller markets a better chance to compete - it's not very entertaining if half the teams are just biding time while they wait for tomorrow's stars to mature. And people are starting to notice.

To understand this, we have to go back to the question of why we watch sports. We may want to see our favourite teams win, and we may enjoy it when they win championships, but the truth is that most of the enjoyment of sports comes from seasons where your team is somewhere in the middle. They aren't world-beaters, but they aren't terrible either. You feel like you might compete if things line-up right for you. And it's good that you can enjoy those mediocre seasons, because that's where teams usually spend most of their time.

But if you're in a cycle of compete-selloff-rebuild-compete, then you never have those seasons. You have meaningless seasons of waiting punctuated by a few seasons of greatness. Those winning periods are nice, but the point is that you never go into any seasons with any intrigue. And if the whole league is using that same strategy, then there's not much to talk about, other than asking which of the four teams peaking this year are going to win.

It's similar in basketball, though not for the same reasons. Here in Raptorland, it's pretty strange. The team is first in their conference, in a season where the big obstacle, the Cavaliers, are looking beatable. You'd think that any team in our situation would be dreaming about winning it all. And yet, no one is talking about that. The most you hear is discussion of how we have a realistic chance of winning the Eastern Conference. No one is planning a championship parade; no one is even acknowledging the possibility.

The NBA may not be locked into baseball's extreme-makeover pattern, but in the same way that it's remarkable how few baseball teams are trying to compete, it's amazing how few basketball teams are true contenders.

But the other two big-four sports are at the opposite ebb. The NFL has had a great deal of parity for a while now. But this year we saw breakthroughs by the Eagles, Jaguars, Bills, Saints, and my Rams. That underlined the fact that coaching changes and under-the-radar personnel choices can have a big effect on a team's fortunes. For an NFL fan - as long as your team doesn't rhyme with "frowns" - You know that competitiveness could be right around the corner.

Meanwhile, hockey has so much parity that an expansion team is contending for first overall. That's got to have fans everywhere thinking that getting a competitive team is easier than they suspected.

For the last decade plus, the formula for success in the NHL has been to draft and develop a few superstars, keep them for the long-term while cycling through a succession of supporting players, holding on to them for as long as you can afford them. It was a nice system, since it rewarded planning by a well-run team, but unlike baseball, you could keep the core of a successful team together for a while, instead of selling-off the entire team and starting over after just a few years of contention.

But now, some teams with stars are failing. The aforementioned expansion Golden Knights are essentially a team that's nothing but a supporting cast, and it is succeeding. It could just be a fluke, or maybe they've stumbled across a whole new way of building a team. Who knows where that's going to go, but it certainly sounds more interesting than the baseball situation.

Kneel Before Sod

The situation in North Korea is still tense. And Puerto Rico's infrastructure was devestated by hurricane Maria. But here we are talking about football players kneeling. Well, that's what Donald Trump wants to talk about, and everyone else is following along. I'm guessing that's because unlike North Korea, Puerto Rico, and the Obamacare repeal, this is something where there's a chance to fight back.

Some have suggested that Trump made the condemnation of NFL players kneeling for the anthem as a distraction, so we won't notice the health care disaster, or because he knows that there's incriminating Russia evidence about to drop. But the world just doesn't seem to work that way any more. We're used to new megastories coming at us every few hours; we can easily drop one story for another whenever we need to. Honestly, I'm not sure why I'm writing this article late at night; there will probably be a new outrage by morning.

The real reason for Trump's attack is that it's a great issue for him to score points with his base. It's got everything he likes: nationalism, condemning dissent, and a racist subtext. The whole thing is not very surprising really. What is interesting, though, is that the way each sport has responded has illustrated the sport's personality.

Football

I was pleasantly surprised by the reaction. A lot of players protested, there didn't seem to be much anger. There was even some official sanctioning, including the anthem singer himself kneeling in Detroit. No one seems to have been fired over this, or even much anger expressed by the owners (though give them a few days.) And there was thankfully little of the feel-good avoidance I complained about previously.

Having said that, the guy who started it all, Colin Kaepernick, is still without a job. So teams and owners' tentative support of their players comes with a big dose of hypocracy. Which is typical NFL too.

Basketball

The NBA and Basketball's culture clearly won the weekend. Trump looked desperate when he revoked Steph Curry's unaccepted invitation to the White House. And the Warriors' decision to "celebrate equality, diversity and inclusion" in Washington in place of a White House visit was a bold response. And Lebron James's Twitter burn of Trump was something Kim Jong Un could only dream of. Come on, NBA stars, I'm trying to hate you. Stop acting like the only adults in the room.

Hockey

The NHL isn't really involved, but somehow managed to turn the incident into a public relations loss by choosing now to announce that the Stanley Cup Champion Pittsburgh Penguins will still be visiting the White House. It's just like them to find a way to lose a controversy they weren't involved in.

Having said that, I will forgive the NHL and become a Penguins fan if Yevgeny Malkin spends the entire visit acting like he's only there to pass on Putin's latest instructions to Trump.

But this is also typical of the paradox that hockey culture hates to rock the boat. It's a sport that takes bravery to play, yet never seems to generate bravery away from the rink among its players.

Baseball

It seemed kind of separated from the rest of the sports world. After all, it is the most conservative, traditional, and increasingly the whitest sport. So it seemed almost like an afterthought when news came out that A's catcher Bruce Maxwell knelt for the anthem. We were like, oh, right, baseball players might be doing that too.

But going back to the hurricane: given Trump's lackluster reaction, you have to wonder how many Puerto Rican players don't feel like standing for the anthem right about now.

Nascar

In sharp constrast with the other sports, Nascar was totally on board with Trump. Legendary car owners Richard Petty and Richard Childress both said they would fire any employees who didn't stand for the anthem - to my knowledge, the only owners in any sport to follow Trump's advice.

Of course, this is just the latest example of how Nascar is fine with being exactly what everyone expects it to be. It's like they want to make it really clear whether you are welcome in the sport or not. Certainly I'm feeling happier with my decision to walk away from it.

World Of Tanks

Apparently, the NBA is going to do something about tanking. That's the practice of intentionally losing so as to get a better draft pick next year. They're talking about not giving the last-place team the best chance of getting the first pick, and instead just giving the last three teams the same chances. That way, bad teams get a chance at rebuilding, but there's no incentive to be last.

Personally, I don't understand why anyone cares about this "problem." Well, I figure it's because the idea of losing intentionally is so abhorrent to sports culture. And also because North American Pro sports has had some historic problems with intentional losing. But I couldn't care less. If we were talking about teams intentionally missing playoff spots to go for a better draft pick, then I could understand fans being angry. But what actually happens is that a team that might at best finish 25th out of 30th will instead finish dead last. That isn't great behaviour, but I don't think it even cracks the top hundred Things Wrong With Professional Sports.

And part of the problem is that it isn’t even possible to define tanking. If you want to tank, you trade your best players, and let the youngsters and journeymen sink to the bottom. But if you’re not tanking, just rebuilding in earnest, you trade your current assets for draft picks and prospects, which causes your team to drop to the bottom of the league.

That’s the point that was put forward by the Buffalo Sabres recently, after a bad season that netted them a second-overall pick. They’ve been accused of tanking, which is frustrating because their geographic rivals in Toronto finished last the next year and got the number one pick. The Sabres have been painted as tankers, while the Leafs were portrayed as wise rebuilders, even though they essentially did the same thing.

Some of that double standard is surely due to the bias of a largely-Canadian pool of journalists. And a lot can be chalked up to that infamous night that the Sabres’ own fans started cheering against them in the hopes of a better draft pick. But it’s hardly fair blaming a team for having insightful fans. I think the real problem is that for some odd reason, people only get angry at tanking when it’s unsuccessful. Going back to the NBA, the most obvious tank jobs actually resulted in teams getting game-changing talents, yet people look back at those incidents with a smirk, while current tankers who are yet to see any benefit get all the ire.

And that gets back to another reason I can't get angry at tankers - and why I doubt this measure will actually work. It's really hard to get a winner in the NBA without a superstar. Yes, you can point to counterexamples, including my own Toronto Raptors, not to mention superstars drafted way down the table like Kobe Bryant. But for the most part, a high pick is needed to join the league's elite, and neither lowered odds nor journalists' scorn with change that.

Weep, The North

Deadspin has an interesting article about the Toronto Raptors that starts off examining the teams options in the offseason and ends up opening up the philosophical nexus at the heart of professional sports. To review, the last two seasons have been the best in the team's admittedly aenemic history. They've gotten to the final four and final eight respectively. But both times they've been eliminated by the Cleveland Cavaliers and their star/unofficial-coach/god-of-basketball Lebron James.

So now the team is stuck in an awkward situation teams sometimes find themselves in: wondering if anything can really be done to help. One might think that if you have a good team, you try to improve it, at least until your main contributors have gotten too old. But the fact is that sometimes a team is still good, still in their prime, but can't be improved. Maybe the budget is maxed-out, maybe the players needed to improve aren't available anywhere at any price. Or maybe the players have an incompatable set of talents and it just can't be balanced without wholesale changes. But you get into the situation where you can't imagine how your team can be any better than "good."

In the case of the Raptors (and probably a few other teams in the NBA) this is complicated by the presence of James and the stacked Golden State Warriors. Teams are realizing that not only is good not "good" enough, but "great" isn't much better. At this point, you need to be a generational superteam just to get into the finals. It's not just a question of improving the Raptors, but vastly improving them. Beyond that, there's the question of what good will it do to start over? If you traded/avoid-resigning players now and sign and draft a new team, and even if you do a better job this time, you'll still run into the immovable Lebron. Or even if he's too old by then, you'll run into the next player that launches tiresome discussions of whether he's better than Michael Jordan.

It's a problem basketball (or more specifically, the NBA) has had for a while now: a superstar is such a huge advantage that it seems like you can't build a contending team without one. Obviously, great players are an advantage in any sport, but in most it is at least possible to build a contending team with a lot of good players, but not one great one. But it's hard to find such teams in the history of NBA champions. People make fun of the Philadelphia 76er's and how they seem to be in eternal rebuild mode, but I totally understand. There's not much point in starting to build until you have someone to build around, so you might as well stay at the bottom until you get lucky with the draft.

The point is that the Raptors are in a weird existential funk in which they have to decide not just what personel moves they are going to make, but what the purpose behind those moves are. Deadspin's Giri Nathan make the somewhat-radical assertion that it's okay for the Raptors to be where they are now: a good-but-not-great team that will never be more than a speed bump on the road from Cleveland to the finals.

On the surface, that looks incredibly defeatist, saying that it's okay not only to not win, but to not even care about not winning. But it also forces us to look at some uncomfortable truths about professional sports: How important is winning championships? After all, each of the "Big Four" pro-sports in the U.S./Canada have at least 30 teams, so on average, your favourite team will win less than once a generation. Even if you have a team in each league, you'll only get a championship about once every 8 years. The very purpose of sports will only be experienced ten times in an average lifetime. And too bad if you happen to be a Cubs/Leafs/Browns fan.

But lots of people get enjoyment out of sports in those years that they don't win. Even those many Cubs fans who lived their entire life during their World Series drought still seemed to enjoy their fandom. So that implies that there is something more to being a fan than actually winning.

And yet, I'd argue that while winning may not be necessary, the possiblility of winning is. It's like that old saying amongst Cubs fans, that our best season is always next season. At least, I think they used to say that - I just Googled that saying, and it just gave me pages of people talking about how their best season was last season. But the point is, I think you have to have the lure of potential. As a personal example, my Toronto Blue Jays have made it to the American League Champtionship series the last two years, without advancing further. This year, the team is off to a bad start, and as much as I try to stay optimistic, I have to admit that this incarnation of the team may be done, without winning a World Series. And I'm okay with that. I won't look back on these two years as wasted, even if no rings came from it. Granted, these years may have felt better because they followed a couple of lean decades, but having the thrill of knowing we might come out on top was enjoyment enough.

But I think that "might" was a necessary ingredient. I can't really imagine caring about going into a playoff run in which I knew all along that we had no chance. You'd have to console yourself with the knowledge that you won lots of games and made it to this level of the playoffs, even if this level is a formality. Similarly, the Maple Leafs are rebuilding, and everyone is excited. No one knows if it will result in finally breaking the team's half-century Cup drought. The team looks good, but it may well run into a dynasty developing in Edmonton that will stop it from winning it all. But the point is, we don't really know. They're going into it with what I, and most fans, believe is a reasonable shot at winning.

Of course, there's precedent for cheering for a hopeless team. Most of the soccer teams in Europe will never win anything in their respective countries. I mean, in the lower divisions, they can treat a promotion as their championship, but I don't really understand how fans of Stoke or Udinese spend their lives hoping for a Leicester-like miracle. Okay, there's a soccer example more personal to me: I still cheer for the Canadian men's team despite knowing that it will never win the World Cup without a really lucky plague outbreak. But I still entertain myself with the idea that they might outdo their previous best. Or just get back to where they once were. Or just get to the freaking next round.

But the important difference there is that it is concievable that they might improve. I - along with much of the world's population - know that my country will never win the World Cup, but I do believe that they can reach a new personal best. And that's the Raptors' dilemma. Now that they've got to best-non-superstar-team, it's hard to imaging that fans will be satisfied with never going further.

In Your Dreams Team

Sports can be entertaining, in providing action, intrigue or suspense, but the emotional content comes from living vicariously through your favourite athletes or teams. You share in their experience of accomplishment or disappointment, based on their success or failure.  It's a silly thing to do,  but it's enjoyable, and I think it's not harmful, as long as it's done in moderation.  For instance today I feel good,  because I'm writing this after seeing my Blue Jays win.  In psychology, they call this Basking in Reflected Glory.

And this is why I think that one of the basic rules of sports fandom is that you have to pick a favourite and stick with him/her/them through thick and thin. Cherry-picking the best competitors of the era is a way of childishly trying to avoid the negatives of life.  That's why I've always looked down on:

• Yankees fans with no connection to New York,  
• people who get into European soccer and decide to support Manchester United, Real Madrid, Juventus etc. 
• anyone wearing clothing of a winning team based on the other side of the continent. 

But at least those fans follow the basic premise of living vicariously.  What I don't get at all are the fans that Bask in Reflected Glory of competitors they aren't even cheering for.  I first noticed the phenomena in high school when Michael Jordan was reaching his prime. Many of my classmates seemed to draw tremendous emotional energy from seeing his successes.  Keep in mind that this is small-town Ontario, so we not only had no connection to Chicago, but little connection to basketball.

But nevertheless, here were these teenagers getting pumped up watching a guy they didn't know dominate a sport they didn't care about. From time to time I still see it happen, say with interviewers more concerned with palling-around with the athletes they interview, or commentators who seem to get untold joy from gushing about the opposing team's star.

The reason I'm bringing this up is to give a warning to my fellow Canadians: There's basically no way a non-American can cheer for the US men's basketball team without sounding like an asshole. It's difficult enough for an American; but at least they can claim a connection. Sure, it may sound arrogant to the rest of us, but Americans do have as much right as anyone to cheer for their athletes.  Though if they’re going to be polite about it, they should follow up any boasts by emphasizing that they’d rather have a silver and no Trump.

For anyone else to joyfully revel in famous millionaires from another country humiliating anonymous semi-pros from a different country, you just sound cruel and a little desperate. Sure, you can appreciate when players from your favourite NBA team play well;  and I think that's the excuse for many Canadians, that Raptors' stars Kyle Lowry and DeMar Derozan are playing prominent roles.  Well then I'd better see you cheer just as much when Jonas Valančiūnas leads Lithuania to a narrow win.

Come Together

There have been a lot of free agent signings in the NBA this week.  Locally, we were glad to see DeMar DeRozan is resigning with the Raptors.  That's good both because the team is retaining a talented and popular player, and because of all the American sports pundits who were absolutely sure he was signing with the Lakers.  So now Stephen A. Smith and Colin Cowherd look like idiots.  I mean, even more than usual.

But the biggest news is that the best player available, Kevin Durant, has signed with the almost-champions, Golden State Warriors.  Yes, the team that went 73-9 just added one of the best players. Of course, this brings to mind the situation six years ago when LeBron James and Chris Bosh joined their contemporary Dwyane Wade in Miami.  That created a superteam that went to the finals all four years it was together, winning twice.

So the big question is, how the hell does this keep happening?  The NBA, like most North American sports leagues, has a salary cap (a maximum payroll each team must observe) so it shouldn't be possible for a team to assemble multiple superstars, even if they have both the desire and resources to pay them.

Over at SB Nation, they have a good explanation. The basic idea is that the NBA also has a maximum individual salary.  I know other leagues have that rule as well, but in the NBA it's surprisingly low, especially considering how few players there are on a basketball team.  So a team can sign one of the top players in the game, and still have money left over to sign another of the top players in the game. That little wrinkle in the rules also explains the other big story this week, which is the huge amount of money thrown at seemingly mediocre players.  With a limit on how much can be spent on stars, there's lots left over to spend on not-so-famous players.

So it appears there will be a continuing phenomena of star players grouping together to go after a championship. What will the effect be?  A lot of fans are unhappy - I find myself in the strange situation where I might have to cheer for Lebron next year. Though media seems a lot happier.  Of course, that's the journalism philosophy that anything that generates news is good, even if the news is bad.  So this is the sports equivalent of journalists who love reporting on Donald Trump. I'm not so sure this will be good for sports media.  They're thinking a rematch of Warriors and Durant vs.  LeBron et al will be a good story. That may be true, but the fact that we already know the teams in next year's finals is not a good story.

Further, there's the question of devaluing championships.  It's hard to look at the achievement the same way when players come together specifically to win easy.  It's already clear that LeBron's ring from Cleveland means far more than both his rings from Miami.  Some players career's seem incomplete if they haven't won it all and only have individual accomplishments, but will that really be true now? If Durant and Bosh win their only titles by tagging along with stacked teams, is that really something they hold over, say, Karl Malone and Charles Barkley, who never won.  The Malones and Barkleys of the future may just be thought of as players who never bothered to join one of the superteams.

It'll Be Better Than Space Jam 2

Here's my pitch for a movie comedy: You've got a professional basketball team, and they're really good. But the problem is that they're good because of team play: they don't have any big superstars. So when they get into the playoffs they're at a disadvantage when referees favour big-name players. The team owner (Samuel L. Jackson) is furious, and threatens the league commissioner (Will Ferrell) with exposing their baissed officiating. So they make a deal: the team will be allowed to designate one player as their stand-in superstar. The refs will treat him as though he's one of the top players: he never gets called for anything, it's a foul everytime someone touches him, he can flop and no one acknowledges it.

The coach (Steve Harvey) decides he might as well put this designation on the team's worst player (Kevin Hart.) But because this deal is so secret, no one tells the player himself. He just thinks he's suddenly become the great player he always believed himself to be.

The whole scheme falls apart thanks to two journalists (Leslie Jones and Andy Samberg) from the struggling sports news website Doleground. They figure out what's happening, and threaten to expose it all, just as the team is about to win the championship. When they corner the player with the accusation, he's angry that he's been lied-to, but still wants to win the title. So he agrees to expose the scam by winning the game in the most extreme way possible: tripping players, giving them wedgies, sneaking over and lowering the basket, etc. Then we follow up that slapstick climax with a tacked-on moral about honesty.

Sports Inversion

A few years ago, I remember a Toronto sports journalist ask the question, what is the second most popular team in the city? The Leafs were far and away the most popular, while the Jays were still in their generation-long post-World-Series doldrums. The Raptors were post-Vinsanity, pre-We-The-North, and Toronto FC was only just getting started.

Now things have changed: the Leafs are still pretty popular, but their deliberate rebuilding process has taken their fan support off the boil. The Jays' fan support of the 80's and 90's have been reawakened. And Raptor fanaticism during their recent success has been a shock to the city and the NBA alike. Even Toronto FC finally has success and star power. Oh, and I'm pretty sure the Argos are still in business too.

It's interesting, because it's always seemed like the Leafs' fandom is a different animal from Toronto's other teams. Yes, many of the fans of all these teams are the same people. But there seems to be a different culture to them. Anecdotally, the Leaf fans are whiter and richer, and I think maler. But there's also the way the media looks at it. It's been clear for the last twenty years or so that hockey coverage comes first, then everything else is a second-class citizen.

The is important to me, because of where I fit in to it. Demographically, I fit in with the hard core Leaf fans. Yet, that's not where my greatest passion lies. I grew up during the darkest years of the Harold Ballard era. Back then the Leafs were bad year-in, year-out. It was actually worse than their recent futility, since there wasn't even the hope of getting better. You just accepted that they were awful and always would be. It didn't help that this was in the era when you only got one or two televised games a week, so the only hockey we could get were the pathetic Leafs losing to slightly-less pathetic Norris Division rivals. Meanwhile, tremendous Oiler and Islander teams were making history, but we could only dream about what their games were like. So I came to resent the Leafs.

But eventually Ballard died, and some clever trades got them in contention. They had some great runs in the playoffs, the fan base was re energized, and I got caught up cheering for them along with most people in the area. So I've been a fan since, but I don't have the same deep connection that many others have. I'd like to see them succeed - which would be the basic definition of a fan - but I wouldn't be that torn-up if they didn't. A few years ago, it occurred to me that a Leafs cup win would be a huge cultural force; I've complained in the past about the ever-increasing legend of the Summit Series, but a Leafs cup win would be ten times that. So I asked myself, would that be worth it? And I said, no, I don't think watching the Leafs win the cup would be worth having to spend the rest of my life listening to Leaf fans go on about how that was the greatest moment in Canadian history.

Anyway, it's a bit of a mystery to me why Leaf Nation is so passionate today. You'd think they'd have a "lost generation" of jaded fans like myself. And yet, the fan base has seemed to become more fanatical over time. I don't understand why, but Canadian hockey fandom in general, and the Leafs in particular, has seemed stronger in spite of mediocre play and more sports options

Today, a large part of why I want the Leafs to win is because they've finally taken my advice of tearing the team down and rebuilding. It'll be great to shove that in the face of all the folks who eternally want them to trade for veteran enforcers for a gritty playoff run from the eighth seed. But really, I'd list the Blue Jays as my favourite team. Having watched Roy Howell while I was a toddler in the crappy outfield seats in Exhibition Stadium, I've literally grown up with the team. And I've become a Raptors fan, since they've become a relief from the all-hockey-all-winter nature of Canadian sports media. So they'd go second, followed by Toronto FC. Then I'd put the Leafs after that.

So I often feel like a freak in southern Ontario sports, a fan of everybody else, then the Leafs, while most seem to like the Leafs, then everybody else. But now with the recent phenomena of the Raptors' "Jurassic Park," Canadian media's attention has been piqued, and they've been working a little harder to figure out who these people are, and why they care so much about this team that hasn't had much success. And the Blue Jays have shown themselves to be eminently marketable, with support across the country.  For once, it's the golden age of non-hockey fandom in Canada. Welcome to the bandwagon, everyone!

Things The Teenage Me Would Never Have Believed About Life In The Future, # 29

Toronto has a basketball team, named after a dinosaur. No, not one of the ones you've heard of; it's one made famous in a movie in 1993. And the team has a farm team in Mississauga. It's named after the area code.

Kobe Beef

The Kobe Bryant retirement tour pulled into Toronto on Monday, as the retiring basketball star played his final game in Toronto (with the possible exception of the upcoming All-Star game.) Although the Toronto Raptors usually have good fan support, a big portion of the audience was there purely to see Kobe, cheering him, and the rest of the Lakers. The cheers for their baskets was nearly as loud as for the home team. That rubbed a few people the wrong way, including Raptors coach Dwayne Casey, who criticized the pro-visitors fans in the post-game interview.

It bothered me too. It's not just that this retirement tour is starting to resemble the ridiculous Derek Jeter tribute tour last year. And it's not just that Bryant isn't a real great person to look up to. But it also seems like it's missing the point of being a sports fan.

This is hard for me, since my sports fandom is permeated by that rare understanding that sports are ultimately meaningless. There really is no logical reason that the Toronto fans should cheer for the Americans (and Lithuanian) in Toronto uniforms rather than those based in Los Angeles. No, there is no moral need to cheer for the home team. But I have to question their motivation. Yes, I'm sure some of them have a deep appreciation of Bryant's athletic skill, but most are just attracted to his mixture of accomplishment and attitude that is oh so marketable to young people. You know there will be similar reactions a few years down the road when Lebron James retires, but there will be nothing of the sort when Tim Duncan calls it a career.

The Raptors are an interesting case for this kind of worship. You know that Boston fans won't be so fawning over Bryant, just as they weren't with Jeter. Of course, that's a team that has both success and history, things the Raptors have little of. But I also think there's a bit of good old Canadian self-deprecation, where we just have a natural assumption that American things are better and cooler, at least in matters pop-cultural. It will be interesting to see how the Minnesota Timberwolves react to the Kobe retirement tour - they too are a young and not-so-winning team, an American counterpart to the Raptors. And oh look, the Lakers are playing there on Wednesday. So we'll get a quick comparison on how to host a retiring superstar.

Sizing Up Sports

I've heard it said that one reason for baseball's popularity is that it seems like an everyman's sport. Yes, many baseball players are athletes, but there are also many who are just schmucks that happen to be good at this one odd skill of hitting a ball. There's something to be said for that: a lot of sports fandom is about fantasy, and it's easy for any of us with Y chromosomes to imagine ourselves playing baseball. You can be as thin as Ted Williams, as heavy as Babe Ruth, as tall as Randy Johnson, as short as Craig Biggio, or as whatever as Kirby Puckett.

That's something that's missing in other sports. Football is played by people who are increasingly far from the mean. Offensive linemen are expected to be 300+ pounds, linebackers have to be big enough to push aside people who weigh 300+ pounds, and Drew Brees is considered small at six feet. The running backs are the closest to normal size, but have the life expectancy of a fruit fly.

Hockey used to be played by average people (can you believe Rocket Richard was 5'10"?) But increasingly it's dominated by large people. Yes, there's still the odd Johnny Gaudreau, but they're pretty rare. During the draft, count how many times teams take a chance on a small player, and how many times they draft a big, unskilled player, assuming he'll learn eventually.

But the ultimate physically-unreachable sport has always been basketball. When all the seven-foot-tall people on earth get drawn to this one sport, it's hard to feel like those of us with lesser genetics even have a chance. But it's not just the super-tall people: you need to be about six-and-a-half feet to be considered for the "small forward" position. 

And it's not just the size of the players: even the players nearer the hump of the bell curve seem to be perfectly balanced muscular specimens. Not like baseball's spectrum from the lanky to the muscle-bound.

All of this is why the NBA's new MVP Stephen Curry is a breath of fresh air. It's not just his relative lack of height, it's that he's downright scrawny. He looks like the "before" picture to Lebron James's "after." And yet here he is, not just competing but dominating in a sport that that's usually too busy celebrating superstars to even notice the underdogs.

Hopefully this is a turning point for basketball. Maybe someday we'll feel like you can succeed in the sport without winning the genetic lottery, and that a team can succeed without winning the draft lottery.

It's Gotta Be Da Symbol

I remember when the Toronto Raptors and Vancouver Grizzlies entered the NBA and choose their names, they were congratulated by marketing experts. The reasoning was that by choosing animal names, they could easily create a nice recognizable logo that could be put on all kinds of products. Remember, this was the mid-nineties, when Michael Jordan was at the height of his fame, and every teenage boy on earth had at least one item of clothing with the Chicago Bulls logo on it. These marketing experts believed that the Bulls' marketability was due to their colourful, recognizable, easily reproducible logo.

That was the point I realized that most of the self-appointed experts commenting on things in the media are idiots. Really, they expected us to believe that the ubiquity of that symbol was due to the bull himself, with no credit apparently going to that Jordan guy, or the Nike marketing machine.

...and upside-down, it looks like an angry robot reading a book

But there is something to be said for a symbol's ability to, you know, symbolize. I mean, I'm sure the 90's Bulls could have used the poop emoji as a logo and still would have sold a billion shirts and hats, but that's assuming it's a recognizable poop emoji. If a team has a plain, forgettable logo, its hard to convey their fame and adoration into merchandise sales. As an example, the New York football Giants and San Francisco baseball Giants have both won multiple championships in recent years, but their lack of real logos have prevented them from becoming popular on clothing.

This all came to mind recently because the Raptors - in their latest attempt to turn the page on their sorry franchise history - have adopted a new logo, and it's a basketball with the seams shredded, presumably by a Raptor's claws. So rather than show the raptor, it shows indirect evidence of the raptor's presence. It's clever. Not quite Hartford-Whalers-negative-space-H clever, but pretty clever. But the point is, the logo doesn't have a raptor, the distinctive aspect of the team. Those marketing experts from twenty-years ago would be horrified.

I'm not really sold on it either. It's nice and simple and reasonably attractive, but not real distinctive. As many fans have been pointing out, it looks quite reminiscent the symbol of the Brooklyn Nets, who are not only a hated rival, but also one of the ultimate how-the-hell-do-we-get-a-logo-out-of-this nicknames.

I've found a number of fan-made logo proposals on the net from the last few years. Some are amateur, some urge new nicknames altogether (especially reviving the "Huskies" name.) But some are actually pretty good. Good enough that I'd choose them over the new logo.

Going Back In Time

So, an NBA owner is selling his team after we learned that he had said racist things in private.  Let's see, I'm sure I can use the last post I made when that happened.  Just search-and-replace, and...

Shame on Bruce Levenson for what he said in private.  Of course, now he's going sell his under-performing Atlanta Hawks, and will probably make a big profit.

...Okay, maybe I can't reuse much more, but still, that is an embarrassing trend for the league.  It's also an embarrassing trend that in about two-and-a-half years of this blog, I've used the "race" tag five times now, with three of them in the past month.

Levenson wasn't nearly as overtly racist as the Clippers' Donald Sterling, though some have pointed out that he's probably a lot more representative of the racism in the NBA and throughout American business.  Since whites have more average income than blacks, there have probably been a lot of discussions about how to get more white people to the games. There may be a lot of incriminating e-mails out there.

One thing Levenson wanted was more white-friendly music, with more country and less hip-hop.  If we're going to complain about racist music at NBA games, I've been waiting to get this off my chest for a while:  A lot of arenas play House Of Pain's "Jump Around" before every jump-ball.  Yeah, it has "jump" in the title, but:

• It starts with a fanfare that most people won't recognize.
• The vocalist wears a Celtics shirt in the video
• There are so many other songs with "jump" in the title

While I appreciate that white people rapping about jumping confronts two negative stereotypes at once, you'd think they'd give diversity a shot.  I realize that The Pointer Sisters' "Jump (For My Love)" is a little too retro, but they could go with Kriss Kross's "Jump."  I know, I didn't like that song either, but if they were going for quality then their sop-to-whites choice would have been Van Halen's "Jump."