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Baseball, Basketball, Brooklyn Nets, Championships, Football, Hockey, New Jersey Devils, New York Giants, New York Islanders, New York Jets, New York Knicks, New York Mets, New York Rangers, New York Sports, New York Yankees, Sports, Team ownership

The Fall of New York Sports

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I never had a real choice regarding which professional sports teams I rooted for; I was handed them the same way I was my last name and my religion. I’m a third generation fan of the New York Yankees, Giants, Rangers, and (to a lesser degree) Knicks. I know how remarkably lucky I have been to be born into rooting for those specific teams, especially the Yankees and Giants, who have each won the most championships in their respective sports (5 World Championships for the Yankees and 4 Super Bowl wins for the Giants) during my lifetime. I was lucky be able to watch the Rangers end a 54-year-drought and win the Stanley Cup in 1994. Things have not gone perfectly for the teams that play in the metro area of the world’s premier city, but from 1968 through 2011 the longest period the city went without one of its (now 9) teams winning a championship was the relatively small gap between the Knicks winning their last championship in 1973 and the Yankees winning the 1977 World Series. Today there have been 3-years since the Giants won Super Bowl XLVI, but there doesn’t appear to be any championships on the horizon, and New York sports seems to be headed for a serious decline.

There has been another side to New York sports too besides the consistent success of the Yankees and Giants (and let’s not forget that the Devils had a dynasty of their own, winning the Stanley Cup 3 times between 1995 and 2003). As I mentioned above the Knicks haven’t won the NBA Championship since 1973 and haven’t even returned to the Finals since 1999 during the Patrick Ewing era. The Mets have only won the World Series once in my lifetime, and that was 28-years ago; the Islanders won the Stanley Cup 4-straight times from 1980 to ‘83 but they’ve not made it back to the Finals since 1984 and haven’t even won a playoff series since 1993; the Jets haven’t made it back to the Super Bowl since they shocked the world after the 1968 season by beating the heavily favored Baltimore Colts in Super Bowl III. The now Brooklyn Nets haven’t won a championship since moving to the NBA from the ABA and haven’t made the Finals since they won the Eastern Conference in 2002 and 2003 during Jason Kidd’s prime.

Perhaps the most troubling thing about NY sports at the moment is no ‘sure-thing’ anymore. Between 1995 and 2012 the Yankees made the playoffs every season except for 2008, but Derek Jeter, the face of the franchise and pretty much New York Sports as a whole for almost 20-years, just retired and the team’s success as it moves into a new era is very much up in the air. The Giants have won two recent Super Bowls with Tom Coughlin and Eli Manning, but they’re almost certain to miss the playoffs this year for the third straight season and for the fifth time in the six-seasons since 2009, and the organization appears to be far too comfortable with the lack of results the team has seen from Coughlin and GM Jerry Reese. The Rangers played in the Stanley Cup Finals last season for the first time since 1994, but it is hard to have faith in the long-term success of the team when one remembers that they’re owned by Cablevision’s James Dolan and that Glen Sather (who may not quite deserve as much credit for helping to build the 1980s Oilers into a dynasty when the team had Wayne Gretzky, Mark Messier, and other hall of famers all playing together in their primes) remains GM. Dolan also owns the Knicks and, since he appears to be a more hands-on owner with them, it is even harder to see sustained greatness for the team. There is some excitement with the franchise now that Phil Jackson has been hired to run the team, but no one knows if the experiment will be successful and it’s hard to trust that Dolan will be able to keep his word and give Jackson real autonomy to make decisions. Sadly, as atrocious a team owner as Dolan has been, he has lots of company among New York’s worst team owners: to the disgust of the team’s fans, the Mets are still owned by the Wilpon family; Woody Johnson continues to mismanage the Jets, who are now a laughingstock; no one really knows how invested Hank and Hal Steinbrenner are in running the Yankees; and Mikhail Prokhorov has been a joke of an owner who sacrificed most of the Nets’ draft picks for the rest of this decade in a weak attempt to win in the present.

I have been spoiled as a sports fan, but it is hard to see a New York team being a favorite to win a championship in the next few years, let alone one being able to build a foundation to be contenders for years to come like the Yankees were during the Derek Jeter era. Where can New York sports fans look to find stability and consistent excellence? New York may have 3 more franchises than any other city (Los Angeles, the San Francisco Bay Area, and the Washington-Baltimore metro all have 6 pro teams) but there is no obviously great team in the bunch and not one of them is even favored to win its conference/league in 2014-15, let alone to win it all. There are many superstars who play in NYC, and a good number of young, exciting players who seem to have greatness in front of them, but when you look around sports and see some of the consistently great, stable franchises like the San Antonio Spurs in the NBA, the New England Patriots in the NFL, the Chicago Blackhawks in the NHL, and St. Louis Cardinals in MLB, you don’t see any New York franchise on that list anymore. It is incredibly rare to build a strong enough organization to win and/or compete for multiple championships – we were lucky to get to watch the Yankees do it, and there is no guarantee that we’ll ever get to see it again

Baseball, Basketball, Championships, Football, Hockey, Sports, Super Bowl, World Series

It is the Best of Times, Yada, Yada…

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With game seven of the World Series about to start, it is a good time to note that we live in an era of sustained excellence in sports, a time when the same teams led by the same familiar superstar athletes keep winning championships in the four major North American professional sports leagues. The San Francisco Giants are on the verge of their 3rd World Series Championship in Major League Baseball in the last 5-years, in June the Los Angeles Kings of the National Hockey League won their 2nd Stanley Cup Championship in the last 3-seasons, and later that same month the San Antonio Spurs won their 5th National Basketball Association championship of the Tim Duncan/Gregg Popovich era by beating the Miami Heat in what was a rematch of the 2013 Finals. The same teams just keep on winning and it is hard for professional sports leagues to flourish when so few teams have legitimate chances to win championships, a fact which makes the present lack of variation at the top dangerous for the sustainability of the Big Four.

However it is also a time of excitement as teams and fan bases that have suffered decades of failure, mediocrity, and irrelevance have been challenging for and winning championships over at least the last five-years. To survive and thrive a sports league needs the fans of each team to have the legitimate hope that their favorite team can win a championship. The 2013 Seattle Seahawks of the National Football League won their first Super Bowl championship by beating the favored Denver Broncos in Super Bowl XLVIII; it was the first professional sports championship since the 1979 Supersonics won the NBA Championship, and it means even more because the Sonics moved to Oklahoma City in 2008, leaving the city without any championship-winning organizations. The same LA Kings listed above as one of the examples of sustained excellence only won their first Stanley Cup Championship in 2012, 46-years after the team began play. The Kansas City Royals have a chance to win the World Series tonight, but prior to this month, the franchise had not even made the playoffs since it won the 1985 World Series.

To understand if sports leagues have too little rotation at the top, it is important to choose a specific time period to compare the results of each of the sports leagues. This is the 15th season since the start of the 21st century, so it would make a good starting point, however since the MLB and NFL seasons have not yet concluded and the NHL lost the entire 2004-05 season to a lockout, we’ll use 1999 as the start point, giving us 16 NBA seasons and 15 seasons of data for the other three leagues. That means that if there was perfect parity in each league, there would have been 16 distinct NBA champions and 15 of the other three sports leagues. In reality of course, it has been quite different. The NBA has had the least change at the top, as only six teams have made up those 16 slots; the Spurs and Lakers have each won five championships since the 1998-99 NBA season, the Heat have won three, and the Pistons, Celtics, and Mavericks each won once even though each of those three teams made the Finals twice. MLB has had a bit more parity with nine teams winning 15-World Series: the Yankees and Red Sox have each won three championships (and with one more win, the SF Giants would join them and there would be nine teams accounting for 16 instead of 15), the Cardinals and Giants have won two-a-piece, while the Diamondbacks, Angels, Marlins, White Sox, and Phillies have each won once. The NFL has done one better than MLB, as 10-teams have won 15 Super Bowls; the Patriots lead the way with three, while the Steelers, Giants, and Ravens have all won twice, and the Rams, Buccaneers, Colts, Saints, Packers, and Seahawks have all won once. The NHL has had the most change at the top, as 11 teams have won the Stanley Cup since the 1998-99 season; the Devils, Red Wings, Blackhawks, and Kings have all won twice while the Stars, Avalanche, Lightning, Hurricanes, Ducks, Penguins, and Bruins have each won once. In just the last 10-seasons the White Sox ended an 88-year drought, the Blackhawks won for the first time since 1961, the Giants won their first championship since moving to San Francisco before the 1958 season, the Saints and Seahawks won the first Super Bowls in their histories, the Bruins won for the first time since 1972, and the Mavericks won their franchise’s first NBA championship. However, many of those same teams have kept on winning even after ending their droughts, in the process extending droughts for other teams and leading to less variation at the top.

Tonight will determine whether the Giants are building a dynasty or if the Royals can bring Kansas City a pro sports championship for the first time since 1985. If the Giants win their fans will rejoice, but if the Royals win it will be a far more important win for Major League Baseball. Can a David rise up and knock off a Goliath? In a few hours we’ll know.

Post World Series Update: The Giants won 3-2. They have now won three championships in five-years, becoming only the 8th team to win at least three in a five-year span after the: 1910-13 Philadelphia A’s (winning in ’10-’11 and ’13), 1912-18 Red Sox (The Sox won in ’12, ’15-’16,and ’18 to give them four World Championships in seven-years), 1936-43 Yankees (The Yanks won four championships in a row from ’36-’39, and then won again in ’41 and ’43 to give them 6 in 8-years), 1942-46 Cardinals (like these Giants the Cards won in every even-year in a five-year period, winning in ’42, ’44, and ’46), 1947-’62 Yankees (these Yanks are the real gold standard when people talk about the Yankee dynasty; they won in ’47, set the MLB record by winning five-straight championships from ’49-’53, and won again in ’56, ’58, and ’61-’62. All in all they won 10 championships in a 16-year span, and won the AL Pennant every year from ’47-’64 except for ’48, ’54, and ’59, which is an unbelievable 15 times in 18-seasons), 1972-’74 A’s (The only other team than the Yankees to ever win three consecutive World Championships is this underrated Oakland dynasty), 1996-2000 Yankees (Winning in ’96 and then from ’98-2000 for four-in-five years. The team also won six AL Pennants in an eight-year span from ’96-2003), and now these SF Giants. Considering that the WS has existed for over a century it is a pretty short list. So congratulations to the SF Giants and their fans on joining this list of MLB’s greatest dynasties; now would you please stop winning so some other team can have a turn?