Giannis Antetokounmpo was wrong: Not every season that falls short of a championship is a failure, though some most certainly are.
That’s because context matters.
After Miami ousted Milwaukee in five games in the NBA playoffs, the Bucks star reacted passionately and emphatically to a question of whether his team was a failure by saying, among other things, “There’s no failure in sports. There’s good days, bad days. Some days you’re successful, some days you’re not. Some days it’s your turn, some days it’s not your turn. And that’s what sports is about. You don’t always win, sometimes other people win. And this year, somebody else is going to win, simple as that.”
It is not a one-size-fits-all statement. In many seasons, losing in the first round of the playoffs is an accomplishment. The NFL Giants got clobbered in the second round this year, but that did not diminish a successful campaign.
But Antetokounmpo’s Bucks were the top seed in a season without an overtly dominant team. They did not lose in, say, a tough-fought, seven-game Eastern Conference finals to fellow heavyweight Boston. Milwaukee lost to a Miami team that lost one play-in game and barely won another just to get into the postseason. The Heat lost their second-best player, Tyler Herro, to injury in Game 1 and then lost Victor Oladipo in Game 3.
Giannis Antetokounmpo tried claiming after the Bucks lost in the NBA playoffs that “there’s no failure in sports.” Getty Images
Yes, Antetokounmpo missed two games with a back injury. But the supporting cast was still mainly the Bucks’ championship core from two seasons ago. Yet the Bucks lost. In the first round. In five games. After blowing huge fourth-quarter leads in Games 4 and 5, the last one at home. Both with Antetokounmpo playing.
It is an epic failure of a season for the collective that is the Bucks.
And why am I dabbling in the NBA?
Because what the Mets and Padres have done — hyperinflating their star power and payroll the past two years — has changed the context for them. They have entered a territory annually reserved for the Yankees and Dodgers. Essentially, championship or bust. Or, at minimum, play for the championship or bust. Getting ousted early in the playoffs or — imagine — somehow not even making a larger-than-ever postseason field would mark a season as a failure. Think about the reaction if, for example, the Mets didn’t even make a six-team NL playoff group.
Steve Cohen has built the Mets into a financial powerhouse, with massive contracts handed to pitchers such as Max Scherzer and Justin Verlander. Charles Wenzelberg
Now, I do agree with something Dodgers president of baseball operations, Andrew Friedman, told me before his organization won the World Series in 2020. He said he couldn’t live in a world in which only one of 30 teams was deemed to have a successful season. Friedman insisted that joys had to be acknowledged and celebrated along the way — stirring regular-season wins and division titles and early round playoff victories.
Winning a championship is tough, because the postseason is volatile due to small samples and strange bounces and the impact of the wrong injury at the worst time. So I agree with Friedman that other accomplishments must be cherished.
But in the NBA, for instance, in which the singular superstars such as Antetokounmpo mean so much and the Bucks were as all-in as any team, then falling short is marked as failure. No one need be taken to the public square to be tarred, feathered or tweeted to submission. This season, though, was a Milwaukee failure because chances to win championships are so precious and finite, and squandering one so spectacularly in Antetokounmpo’s prime provides an obvious final mark for the season.
And in the lone major North American team sport without a salary cap, when a team balloons its payroll the way the Padres and Mets have — and as the Yankees and Dodgers annually do — the expectations rise with it. The financial commitment is kind of like promising your fan base Paris. You then can’t give them Poughkeepsie.
When circumstances change, so do expectations and the stresses that go along with those.
Consider that the Rays have among the lowest payrolls in the majors. Yet opening the season 13-0 and 20-3 has altered their dynamic. They need to now have a special season or else this will feel like something squandered.
For most of the Padres’ 55-year existence, simply making the playoffs would have been considered a splendid accomplishment. Not now. During much of the Wilpon mismanagement, the Mets would have felt the same. For example, 2015 played like a NL championship gift. But that would not be so for the Mets under Steve Cohen. Not with a payroll $80 million-ish more than any other team. Not with the first-round, all-at-home ouster against San Diego last year.
Context matters. If the Padres and Mets make it to NLCS Game 7 against each other, that would likely soften a sense of meaninglessness to the loser. But once San Diego added Juan Soto and Josh Hader and Xander Bogaerts to Manny Machado and Fernando Tatis Jr. in a fashion that either emptied the system of prospects, enlisted players to long-term commitments past their primes or both, it made the Padres’ future most definitely now.
Juan Soto was traded to the Padres last season. Getty Images
When the Mets teamed 40-year-old Justin Verlander with 38-year-old Max Scherzer on the two largest per-annum contracts in history alongside a roster that even without them would challenge the Yankees and Padres for the largest payroll, it was a financial flex that served as a symbol for Cohen’s call to win a title during the first five years of his ownership.
Both teams are carrying that understanding with them. All involved can downplay it. Nevertheless, the rules of engagement are understood. There will be either success or failure, with little opportunity for the gray in between. There is no passing that Buck.
Payroll surge for Mets, Padres refutes Giannis Antetokounmpo’s ‘no failure in sports’ claim
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