It’s nice every now and then to be surprised.
The assumption, for a long time, was that Damian Lillard would get what he wanted. The assumption was that Damian Lillard would, by New Year’s, be a member of the Miami Heat, at which point he and Jimmy Butler would embark on a contest stretching the remainder of the season to see which most had that dog in them. Instead, the Blazers found another door out of their self-constructed prison, trading Damian Lillard today to the Milwaukee Bucks.
We should concede that the deal is not yet fully official. As those who followed Carlos Correa’s winter remember well, things happen between the announcement and the press conference. But the plan, as it stands, is for Lillard to join the Bucks, for Jrue Holiday to at least briefly join the Blazers, for Jusuf Nurkić to join the Suns, for Deandre Ayton to join the Blazers, and for a supporting cast of players and picks led by Grayson Allen to traverse between the three teams. The Bucks gave up Holiday, Allen, a future first rounder, and a couple pick swap options and received, in return, Damian Lillard.
It’s hard to see it as anything but a great trade for the Bucks. They responded promptly to their star player’s request that they try a little harder, they picked up a hall of famer, they gave up a backbone player and local hero in Holiday but they’re closer to a title than they were yesterday, closing the on-paper gap between themselves and the Celtics in the Eastern Conference. It’s also hard not to imagine the Blazers being happy with this, if for no other reason than that they managed to work themselves out of a corner without the trade demand becoming a crisis and without kowtowing to the Heat. It’s also…a pretty good trade for the Suns?
The Suns are not the main story here, but they’re an interesting part. Deandre Ayton has long been a bigger problem in Phoenix than his abilities justified, a change-of-scenery guy awaiting that change in scenery. Nurkić is not as good as Ayton, but with Allen, Nassir Little, and Keon Johnson bolstering the bench, the Suns have given themselves big flexibility behind a core that features Kevin Durant, Devin Booker, and Bradley Beal. The Suns were already above the talent threshold where a title was possible. They sacrificed a little within that core by trading Ayton, but in return they got that depth and they got to define their shape, better aligning their roster with itself.
With most trades, all front offices are happy. They were, after all, the ones who agreed to the trade. But it’s a little rare to see a trade with an immediate reaction this positive in all directions, from fans and from the national media. Adam Smith is giddy in his grave.
Clemson Wants Out of the ACC
Mere hours after we proclaimed Clemson dead with regard to their participation in the national college football scene, the Post and Courier—a South Carolina outlet—reported that a Clemson administrator had told them the school would exit the ACC “sooner than later,” adding that when asked if it could happen in 2023, the administrator said, “Stay very tuned.”
Maybe this will change by the time this reaches your internet, but at the moment, we aren’t seeing coverage of this from any of the conference realignment reporters who tend to be accurate. Nobody is refuting the report, but we aren’t seeing follow-up on it from reporters who are established in the conference realignment sphere, and we aren’t seeing the report aggregated by any outlet with a lot of standing. That could work either way as far as how true the report is. Often, with conference realignment, we see the smoke just moments before we see the fire, so it’s possible the radio silence elsewhere is an indication something big is on its way. Other times—and this was how it worked with this summer’s wave, something of a departure from the past—we hear a lot about nothing. Usually, in this latter case, the leak is intentional, a strategic leak by a school or a conference or a broadcaster designed to put some sort of pressure on somebody else. We say all this to say: We don’t doubt someone said these things to the reporter in question, but we also don’t know if Clemson has any realistic hopes of leaving the ACC anytime soon. We lean towards Clemson staying put, unless they have some funky independence idea up their sleeve or are trying to convince the ACC to break in two.
To refresh on the ACC situation:
- ACC schools are making a lot less money through their TV deal than Big Ten and SEC schools are making through theirs.
- The ACC’s TV deal is extraordinarily long, stretching roughly five years past the end of the Big Ten’s and SEC’s despite having been signed earlier.
- At some point in the ACC’s medium-term future—before the TV deal is up but not in the next four years—Stanford and Cal and SMU are believed to be owed their slice of TV revenue, something which should shrink everyone else’s slices from that point onward.
- To help alleviate these issues, the ACC has been moving more money into a performance-based pot, a pot set to be paid out for achieving things which make the conference money, like being invited to the College Football Playoff.
- Clemson was one of three schools who voted against the admission of Stanford, Cal, and SMU to the ACC. The others were UNC and Florida State.
There are a number of problems for Clemson here. The most immediate is that they aren’t making as much money as South Carolina and other schools in the Big Ten and SEC, which is disappointing for a school that’s had one of the three most successful football programs in the country the last ten years. The next is that they’re locked into that bad TV deal for a long time. The third is that even if the deal were renegotiated today, there is so much dead weight in the ACC in terms of brand power and football strength that the league would still be lapped by the Big Ten and SEC in the revenue race. College football’s Power Five is splitting into two two-league tiers, and the ACC is on the bottom tier with the Big 12, and Clemson would like to be on the top tier via the Big Ten or the SEC. The only way to get there is to buy their way out of the ACC—something which is reported to cost more than three years of TV revenue—and then get an invite from the Big Ten or the SEC to join them.
Let’s say Clemson can find 120 million dollars, the reported ACC exit fee. Is it a lot of money? Yes. But we don’t know enough about specific donors to call it impossible. Let’s say Clemson has 120 million dollars at the ready. Does the Big Ten or the SEC want them?
Indications to this point—and a rather firm report from CBS’s Dennis Dodd in August, who has been fairly accurate in the realignment space—have held that neither the SEC nor the Big Ten wants Clemson. This has tracked with all available logic as well. But, logic can change, and illogical things can happen, and we the bloggers can be wrong about things. It’s possible the Big Ten and/or the SEC wants Clemson. Let’s explore each.
For the Big Ten, the idea behind adding Clemson would be to develop a presence in the South. It’s believable that the Big Ten would want to make this push. In many respects, college sports is an arms race right now between the SEC and the Big Ten, and whether either conference actively wants that is debatable, but there is a thought that each could try to crowd the other out. For the Big Ten, getting a footprint in SEC territory could be useful.
The issue with this is: Why Clemson? Clemson is not a member of the AAU, the research university organization from which the Big Ten has drawn every one of its members (Nebraska was a member when it joined the Big Ten but did not remain in the organization). This might not be an end-all-be-all for the Big Ten, and Clemson isn’t a worse school than Iowa, but Clemson isn’t a better school than North Carolina or Miami, each of whom has a big brand and big money of their own (it is puzzling why Miami voted to admit SMU, Stanford, and Cal when comparable powers didn’t), and Clemson isn’t in the population centers and media markets each of those schools offer. I don’t think the Big Ten is chomping at the bit to add UNC or Miami right now, but each makes more sense as a target than Clemson, aligning with the Big Ten’s consistent preference for AAU members near big media markets. (Nebraska was a little different, but Nebraska is a gigantic brand; Oregon was a little different, but Oregon came at a discount.) What Clemson would have to do, one would reason, would be to either join the Big Ten as one of four schools, rather than two, or to buy their way in like SMU bought their way into the ACC. If an ACC school is buying its way into the Big Ten, it’s harder to see it being Clemson than it is to see it being Miami or Florida State.
For the SEC, the idea behind adding Clemson would be to further its monopoly on national championships. Clemson’s fanbase isn’t meaningfully bigger than the average SEC fanbase, Clemson doesn’t give the SEC a flag in new territory, but Clemson has won some recent national championships, and the SEC likes those. We don’t believe Clemson is going to win another title for at least a decade—we talked about that yesterday, and joining the SEC or the Big Ten wouldn’t change any of what we talked about, possibly even deepening the issue by putting the ailing fish in a more competitive pond—but the SEC might, and the SEC could also believe the Big Ten is going after Clemson and want to head the Big Ten off at the pass, preventing a 20-team conference from holding a numbers advantage over their own 16-team league in a sport where a lot of people define conference strength through a counting game, tallying up how many teams each league sends to the College Football Playoff.
It’s this last piece—the idea that neither conference might want Clemson but each might fear the other acquiring Clemson—which offers a possible explanation for how this idea of Clemson leaving the ACC reached the media. If the leak was accidental, it’s easy to pass off as a low-level administrator talking out of his shorts to either a gullible reporter or a reporter cynically hunting clicks. If the leak was strategic, then there must be someone intended to hear it, and maybe it’s just a dig at South Carolina (the article did include claims the Gamecocks are fighting or will fight to keep Clemson out of the SEC), but maybe it’s an attempt to start some groupthink among SEC or Big Ten presidents, the same sort of groupthink which got SMU and Stanford and Cal into the ACC. Usually, conference realignment makes sense. The last move did not make sense. Maybe everyone’s a little panicky and Clemson’s trying to capitalize on that.
Seiya Suzuki Dropped the Ball
Seiya Suzuki has been, this season, the sixth-most valuable Cub, per FanGraphs. Even last night, he was valuable, driving in two runs with an early triple. But just as Suzuki helped build the 6–0 lead, Suzuki helped blow it, losing a fly ball in the lights at the last moment and allowing the Braves to score the tying and winning runs. It was the lowest point in a season that has ridden quite a rollercoaster.
Maybe I should have more pride, but I have a hard time being too upset with the Cubs for coughing up a 6–0 lead against the best offense and the third-best bullpen in baseball. The franchise just isn’t at the point where they’re going to consistently beat the Braves, and while every franchise should be able to hold onto every 6–0 lead, every now and then it just won’t happen. I do understand the panic, though, more than I have at any other point in the year. It was a panic-inducing loss. And while it wasn’t only Suzuki, his role in the defeat was the most direct and brutal part.
The Cubs get Jeimer Candelario back today, and they may get Adbert Alzolay back soon, though Mark Leiter continues to be mysteriously absent from the mound. If they get in, it will be with a limp, and while we’ll look back at this season in November and feel optimism no matter what, these last few weeks have not been fun.
I’ve made a few mistakes running the numbers on what the Cubs need to do to lock down a playoff spot. Apologies for that. I *think* I’ve got it right now, and what the simulations say—using FanGraphs’s single-game probabilities—is that the Cubs have a 99% chance of making the playoffs if they go 5–0 from here, a 90% chance if they go 4–1, a 64% chance if they go 3–2, a 30% chance if they go 2–3, and a 5% chance if they go 1–4. That’s inclusive of the Diamondbacks’ win today but doesn’t include any other Wednesday results. Hopefully the Mets can grab at least one win in their doubleheader against the Marlins. Hopefully the Cubs can make Darius Vines look like a quadruple-A pitcher and not yet another Atlanta prospect about to outperform expectations.
Terry Francona Says Goodbye
I have little to add here, but baseball fixture Tito Francona is set to be celebrated tonight in Cleveland to the extent he will permit, with the assumption being that this is his final year as a manager. Mandy Bell had a nice story on the topic for MLB.com.
