The Greatest Sports Story of All Time? While We’re Waiting

Happy Tuesday WFNY!

What a week we have in Cleveland sports. It’s the week of the Cleveland Super Bowl, aka, the NFL Draft. The Cavaliers have a nice full week off to rest before their next series starts. The Indians are…..um……playing baseball¹. But yeah, with the Cavaliers off for the week, we should probably focus on the Browns and the draft. But, I don’t care about the draft.

Sure, I’m eager to see who the Browns pick, but at this point in my life, I can’t still sit here and pretend like I know enough to have an informed opinion on who the Browns should take. I’m just going to sit back and enjoy the ride. So instead, lets talk a little NBA Playoffs before getting into the most amazing sports story that is currently happening, that nobody knows about. Let’s go.

*****

A better sweep

You might think there’s no such thing as a bad sweep. But I assure you, there is. The Cleveland Cavaliers’ sweep over the Detroit Pistons was a significantly better sweep than the Cavaliers’ sweep over the Boston Celtics in the first round last season. The reason is obvious. The Cavaliers came out of this series relatively unscathed, compared to last year when, sure, the Cavaliers advanced with a sweep, but Kevin Love was knocked out for the rest of the playoffs and JR Smith was suspended two games².

It wasn’t for a lack of trying on Detroit’s part, though.

https://vine.co/v/iUweKEiOlX0

But that’s what happens in the playoffs. Playing the same team four to seven times in a row is bound to develop some bad feelings and angst, especially when you throw in the fact that one team is not good enough to beat the other based on basketball alone. We’ve seen this time and time again throughout the Cavaliers’ playoff existence. In first round matchups, the Cavaliers frequently have to deal with a scrappy underdog team that has no choice but to resort to chippy tactics to find a crack that they can exploit. It’s annoying, sure, but this is competition. Almost nothing is sacred in competition.

The point is, I thought the Cavaliers handled themselves pretty well in this series. They didn’t get distracted, they didn’t take the bait, they didn’t lower themselves to the Pistons’ level. They just played their game, kept their heads down, and got out with a quick, painless sweep. Now they get a priceless week of rest while every other series in the East is currently deadlocked at 2-2. This honestly couldn’t be playing out better.

Now the Cavaliers are just resting and waiting to find out if they are going to play the Boston Celtics or the Atlanta Hawks in the next round. The Cavaliers swept both of these teams in the playoffs last year: Boston in the first round, and Atlanta in the Conference Finals. I’m not sure if I really have a preference either way on who the Cavaliers play. I’m not sure I want to play the Celtics again after what happened last year. Not that I think it would happen again, but it just feels like it’s tempting fate. Either way, the Cavaliers will be fully rested and playing a team coming off either a six or seven game series. Hard to complain about that.

*****

Is any team more immune to adversity than the Warriors?

I’ve never been one to root for injuries or to cheer when injuries happen. I hate seeing it. However, that doesn’t mean I feel sorry for teams when injuries happen to them. Injuries are an integral part of sports. Countless Championship stories have been written or altered on the backs of butterfly effect style ripples in the cosmic sports timeline. What happens if Kenyon Martin doesn’t get injured right before the NCAA Tournament? What if Carson Palmer’s knee doesn’t get taken out in the first round of the playoffs? What if Joe Johnson doesn’t break his orbital bone with the Suns in the NBA Playoffs? What if Magic Johnson and Byron Scott don’t both pull hamstrings against the Pistons in the NBA Finals? And what if Kevin Love and Kyrie Irving aren’t both knocked out of the playoffs?

That last one, of course, happened to the benefit of the Golden State Warriors. Nobody knows if the Cavaliers would have won that series with a healthy lineup. They could have still lost, of course. But the injuries made it all but a certainty, despite the Cavaliers’ scrappy wins in Games 2 and 3. The Warriors stormed through the playoffs avoiding any kind of significant injury or adversity, while playing against nothing but teams trying to overcome injuries of their own. That doesn’t take away from what the Warriors accomplished. They deserved the Championship that they won and nobody can take that away from them, nor should they even try to. Injuries are part of sports. But still, it takes a degree of luck to stay so healthy.

When Steph Curry hurt his knee in Game 4 against the Houston Rockets on Sunday, I certainly wasn’t cheering and I wasn’t happy. But I also didn’t feel any kind of empathetic sadness for them. Instead, I saw it as an opportunity for someone to knock the Warriors out of the playoffs. And that someone should have been the Los Angeles Clippers.

Instead, in Monday’s loss to the Portland Trail Blazer, the Clippers lost Chris Paul to a broken right hand while Blake Griffin also came up hobbling. With CP3 all but certainly gone for the rest of the playoffs, it also eliminates any chance of the Clippers beating the Warriors, even without Curry. Heck, the Clippers may not even survive Portland at this point. It would appear the Warriors once more dodged adversity. Those are the breaks in life. But it’s endlessly interesting how much injuries factor into playoffs and Championship runs.

*****

The greatest sports story of all time?

I know not many of you follow soccer. I’d be willing to bet that the overwhelming majority of readers have never heard of Leicester City, and even if you have, you might not realize just what is happening in the Barclays Premier League in England.

Leicester City is a soccer club that less than a decade ago found itself relegated all the way to the third division of English professional soccer. For those unaware of how relegation works in English soccer, the three teams that finish at the bottom of the table at the end of the Premier League season are relegated to the lower division (Football League Championship), while the top two teams of the Football League Championship along with a third play-in winner are promoted up to the Premier League the following season. Meanwhile, the bottom three teams in the Championship are also then relegated even lower to the third division, Football League One.

The easiest comparison would be if at the end of the baseball season, the three MLB teams with the worst record were sent down to AAA while the best AAA teams were called up to MLB. And then the lower three AAA teams were sent down to AA while the three best AA teams were called up to AAA.

So in that comparison, Leicester City spent the 2008-09 season in AA, before being called up to AAA, where they played until finally being promoted to MLB in 2014. Before the start of this season, Leicester City were 5000-to-1 odds to win the Premier League. It was an impossibility. It could never happen, and nobody would even consider it. For comparison, the Browns have the worst odds to win the Super Bowl. Vegas is giving them 200 to 1 odds. Yes, the Browns are 25 times more likely to win the Super Bowl this year than Leicester City was to win the Premier League.

As of right now, with three matches left to play, Leicester City is in first place, seven points clear of second place Tottenham (clubs are given three points for wins, one point for draws). Tottenham is the only team capable of catching Leicester City, but Leicester City only needs to secure three points in three games to win the Premier League. With their remaining matches being against Manchester United (currently 5th in the Premier League table), Everton (11th), and Chelsea (9th), it won’t be easy. But if they can pull it off, it will be arguably the greatest sports story of all time.

There is no logical explanation for how this happened. Traditional powers such as Manchester United, Chelsea, Manchester City, Arsenal, and Liverpool are all down a bit, creating a perfect storm where there is a bit of a power vacuum at the top, but there’s still no reason Leicester City should have been the team to grab that top spot. This is as unlikely as it gets, and it’s hard to talk about because there’s no easy comparison to 5000 to 1 odds in American sports. Even in college basketball, if you look at the futures for odds of winning the NCAA Championship next year, the lowest teams on Bovada’s board are Boston College, St John’s, TCU, and Washington State all at 1000 to 1. Essentially, the closest comparison is probably a 16 seed winning the tournament. But even then, they would only have to win six games to do that. If Leicester City hangs on to this thing, it means they will have won the title over a span of 38 games played. It’s hard to really wrap your head around this.

I know not everyone likes soccer and this is not a plea to for you to start watching or to care, but this is a sports story worth at least paying attention to. If Leicester City can hang on and win this thing, it will be the most amazing sports upset of my lifetime. And that’s something worth noting.

1. Don’t get me wrong, sweeping the Tigers was great and all, but man, it is so heartbreaking to follow that up by losing on a walk off HR in Minnesota. [↩]
2. I still to this day feel like the two game suspension was excessive. A one game suspension was necessary and warranted, but two games? Come on. That suspension was solely because his name is JR Smith. [↩]