Wildcard Open Thread II

Celebrate while you still can!

All chalk yesterday. Hopefully some better games today. A few notes:

• This story of Jed York sticking a reporter with a bill at the French Laundry is remarkable even by Jed York standards.
• Useful compilation of coaching interviewees. I really hope that the market for Tom Cable heats up, although San Fransisco would be a perfect fit on many levels.
• Good summary by Tanier about what works and doesn’t work for the Giants. This game will be an interesting test for McAdoo.
• A not entirely unsympathetic postmortem on Rex Ryan’s head coaching career from Dom Consentino.
• ESPN’s campaign to bury Barnwell continues by replacing the rich playoff previews he used to do for Grantland with a one-factoid-about-each-team format. It’s like hiring Matisse to slap a coat of paint on your doghouse. They did at least allow him to explain why Ryan is a no-brainer for MVP in detail.
• To switch sports briefly, Sean McIndoe has a good deep dive into one of the worst trades in the history of professional sports, which of course involved my favorite player on my favorite team. Obviously, you almost never get full value when you trade a star in his prime in a salary dump, and certainly the core problem was that Flames ownership just wasn’t willing to pay market rates for players. What’s truly impressive about Risebrough’s handiwork is that Toronto would have won the trade by a substantial margin if Gilmour was removed from the trade. Macoun, a solid defeneseman even in his 30s, was by far the second-best player in the trade; the best player the flames received was Craig Berube, a generic if tastefully named enforcer. It’s probably not quite as bad as the Herschel Walker trade, but it’s up there in the bad trade pantheon.
• To pull back to make this more generally applicable, the trade — and the fact that while the media was surprisingly clear-eyed about what a ludicrous heist this was, but a lot of fans defended it — became a cornerstone of how I look at sports. First, as we’ve discussed multiple times, blaming your best players for your team’s flaws is the most reliable way of making your team worse. Second, I’m always amazed at how inclined fans are to side with ownership in salary disputes, even when the player’s position in the negotiation is perfectly reasonable.  Owners can blow up a team over money differences that are trivial in context and somehow get the players blamed for it — it’s a nice racket.