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Trump’s Moral Price

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I was speaking to my cousin John about the most recent New York Giants game the other day when their kicker, Josh Brown, missed a 53-yard field goal attempt. Brown had just returned from serving a one-game suspension for domestic violence charges against his wife, and I expressed dismay when he missed the field goal. John correctly pointed out that 53-yards is far away for any kicker, and that Brown’s miss was understandable. However, while I acknowledged that kicking from such a distance is difficult, I explained that the Giants are paying a high moral price to employ someone as ethically questionable as Brown is, and that because of that cost, Brown does not have the luxury to be held to the same standards as the average kicker. For the Giants to justify Brown’s spot on the roster, he has to be a great kicker, and great kickers make 53-yard field goals, and while I personally do not believe that any performance, no matter how great, excuses domestic violence or other crimes, professional sports teams obviously disagree with me. The Giants are keeping Brown because he is good at what he does, the Pittsburgh Steelers have kept quarterback Ben Roethlisberger in spite of being accused of multiple rapes, and the Los Angeles Lakers kept building their team around now-retired superstar Kobe Bryant for a decade despite rape charges of his own. It seems that there are few crimes and moral outrages that will compel a sports team or a business to cut ties with its best players/employees as long as those players produce at a high level or make their businesses lots of money.

After the conversation, it occurred to me that such a standard could be applied to other aspects of life, and I immediately thought of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. Trump has spent 70-years as an ignorant, lying, bullying, xenophobic, sexist, bigoted, racist, narcissistic, anti-semitic, buffoon, and has amply demonstrated his utter unfitness to become the President of the United States of America. For someone to cast his or her ballot for Trump in November, he or she must love other things about Trump so much that he or she is willing to shrug off all those other horrible things about the man. So I am asking Trump supporters (literally, this is not a rhetorical exercise): what is it that you like about Trump so much that you can suppor him in spite of all the frightening things he has done, said, stands for, and plans to do in the future? Is it Trump’s proposed economic plans? How about his stated environmental plans? Do you believe that his ‘wall,’ between the United States and Mexico will make things so much better here in America that his other flaws do not matter to you? Are you willing to put up with his past attitudes towards women, minorities, and people with disabilities (and pretty much everyone else on earth who does not share his last name, or is not Vladimir Putin) because you feel that he will make America stronger and more respected abroad?  What about him personally do you like so much that you want to vote for him in spite of all I mentioned before?

Trump on Economics

When President Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980, he made America’s rapidly growing national debt a major campaign issue, but even at the time economists and critics, including his leading opponent for the Republican nomination in ’80, George H. W. Bush, (who would be Reagan’s Vice President, and eventually his successor as president) who famously called Reagan’s supply-side economic theory, ‘voodoo economics,’ during the campaign, correctly protected it would greatly expand the national debt. Of course, Reagan’s policies did explode the debt at unprecedented rates  due to the not-so-shocking problem that if you take in $10 and spend  $15, you wind up deeply in debt, and his policies devastated American manufacturing by making it easier than ever before to outsource jobs overseas. We have now had over 35-years of evidence to suggest that former President George H. W. Bush and other critics were correct: ‘trickle down’, ‘Reaganomics,’ were horrendous for all but the ultra rich.

As a whole, the American public has been paying atention to the real cost of trickle down, which is part of the reason that the Democratic Party’s nominee for president has defeated the Republican candidate in the popular vote in five of the last six presidential elections. Trump seems to understand the widespread distrust of the efficacy of huge tax cuts for the rich benefitting the middle class and the poorest Americans, and he has responded by speaking like a populist who is for bringing back American manufacturing jobs and undoing the free trade policies that have been supported by every president from Reagan through George H. W. Bush , Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and up to Barack Obama. But in spite of the language he used, the economic plan that Trump has proposed is just Reaganomics repacked in populist language, and not only is the core of his plan a new massive tax cut for the wealthiest American, but according to CBS, his economic plan would add $5.8 trillion to the national debt over the next decade, while former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s plan would add $200 billion. And while I happen to share the belief of economists like Nobel Prize-winning New York Times columnist Paul Krugman that neither a budget deficit nor national debt is necessarily a bad thing, many of those who today worship at the Cult of Reagan, and who take it on faith that  ‘trickle down’ economics always works and profess to care so deeply about the national debt that they support a Constitutional Amendment mandating a balanced federal budget, intend to vote for Trump even though the economic policies he has announced publicly and on his own official campaign website lay out an economic policy that will further explode the debt and continue the pace of outsourcing more American jobs. So, if you truly care about the deficit and you are against free trade agreements like NAFTA or the TPP, then why are you voting for Trump? Trump may attempt to cloak his re-packaged trickle down economic plans in populist language, but what about his entire life history has convinced you that he would govern by populist policies? Why do you believe his populist talk when the plans on his own website prove what his actual intentions are? Can you really trust him on the economy?

Trump on the Environment

Once upon a time, environmental conservation was a non-partisan issue, with the Environmental Protection Agency and the Clean Air Act created and signed, respectively, by Republican President Richard Nixon, but those days ended long ago. Today the Republican Party is largely united by, at best, severe skepticism about climate change – especially man-made climate change – and at worst a total hostility to climate change and the very ideas of conservation and environmental protection. Trump’s environmental plan places him firmly in the ‘hostile,’ wing of the Republican Party, and he has declared an intention to abolish the EPA and dramatically weaken or totally abandon all environmental regulation in the United States. Combatting climate change is perhaps the most important issue to Millennial voters, and Trump is on what most of those voters consider to be the wrong side of it.

If protecting the environment matters to you, then why would you vote for Trump in November? Hillary Clinton’s policy is far easier to nail down, and is the most progressive environmental position ever staked out by a major Party nominee, and commits both Secretary Clinton and the United States as a whole to fighting to minimize the rapidly unfolding catastrophe (environmental, human, and economic) that has already begun. The Republican Party, many of its largest donors, and even some on the Democratic side of the aisle have tried to muddy the water – and compared to what some of the corporations on the anti-climate change side of the issue do to water every day, mud would actually be an improvement – on this issue by acting as if there is widespread disagreement within the scientific community about climate change. In reality, there is no real disagreement among scientists, who are in almost universal agreement about the threat that our nation – and our world – faces. If you care about this issue, then why would you vote for Donald Trump?

Trump on National Security

Our nation faces many threats, and simply having the most powerful military in world history does not eliminate all dangers to our nation. In today’s world, the idea of conventional warfare, with one nation-state at war with another, seems almost quaint. We have made ourselves so powerful that no nation has the ability to wage a conventional war with the United States, but that does not mean that we do not have committed enemies. The Islamic State in Syria, or ISIS, is one of these threats, and while under President Obama we have degraded and punished the group to near annihilation, but ISIS, like al Qaeda, is more about an idea, and as such simply killing their leaders (and we have) or taking their territory and weaponry (and we have) does not insure our safety. That we face such threats and others, including the cyber threats we are currently facing from Russia, makes the Presidency as important now as it has ever been. Not only has Donald Trump shown himself to be unworthy of the massive charge of being Commander in Chief, with his lack of temperament and tendency to fire off and attack all of those who criticize him for even the most trivial things, he has shown himself to be unwilling to criticize or stand up to Vladimir Putin, Russia’s strongman dictator.

If that does not raise any red flags with intended Trump voters, what about the fact that the man is actually running on a pro War Crimes platform! He has declared his intention to violate the Geneva Convention not only by torturing human beings, but he has proposed capturing the civilian families of terrorist suspects and either imprisoning, torturing, or killing them in an absolutely despicable attempt to keep their family members from attacking the USA. All the things that Trump admires about Putin are the things Trump wants to project about himself, but he has an inability to realize that just projecting strength does not make one strong. Putin grandstands and invades neighboring nations, and tramples democracy, but nothing that he has done has restored Russia to the superpower status once held by the Soviet Union. Trump sees Putin as his role model, his exemplar of strong leadership, while he continually attacks President Obama for perceived weakness. And yet, Obama has been the one to degrade ISIS and to kill Osama bin Laden, and Obama has killed more terrorists than any other president in American history. And while Russia’s economy has gotten weaker under Putin because his bullying invasions have led to economic sanctions, when Obama came into office in January 2009, he inherited the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, and has pulled us out of that fire. Yet Trump admires Putin, not Obama; is that not a red flag in and of itself?

I can understand why some people don’t like Hillary Clinton, but for me there are more than enough things that I can find in her readily accessible and detailed policy positions on the environment, minimum wage, foreign policy, and more that I whole-heartedly agree with, which allows me to support the former Secretary of State even though I feel that she often acts entitled (as if rules do not appy to her), is seemingly allergic to transparency, and is too closely aligned with the financial powers that reside on Wall Street. Of course when she is compared to Trump, with his flat refusal to either release his income tax returns or any legitimate health records, the notoriously guarded Clinton might as well be running her campaign from within a glass house under an electron microscope. But to support Trump, one must truly love something about his positions, since it is hard for me to understand how any non-racist, non-hateful/fearful person can tolerate Trump’s racism, bigotry, sexism, dishonesty, xenophobia, attacks on people with disabilities, homophobia, Islamaphobia, bullying, narcissism, megalomania, and ignorance just because he or she hates Hillary Clinton. If someone does not love Trump’s stated positions, and trust that he will hold to them if he is elected, then how can he or she give him the benefit of the doubt that he’s not really an anti-semite in spite of having Alt-Right, Breitbart hero Steve Bannon, as his campaign manager or flirting with David Duke (who has made no secret of the fact that he believes his chance has come again because of Trump)? That he’s not really a racist in spite of his nakedly racist championing of Birtherism? That he’s not really a bigot when he calls all Latino immigrants rapists and drug dealers? That he’s not really a sexist when he calls women dogs and pigs? That he’s not really a bully when he mocks a journalist for having a physical disability? That he’s not a liar when he claims that he saw hundreds or thousands of Muslims across the Hudson River in New Jersey celebrating as the Twin Towers collapsed on September 11th, 2001? That he’s not classless and temperamentally unfit to be the President of the United States when he questions the impartiality, loyalty, and even citizenship of an American judge, Gonzalo Curiel, because he ruled against Trump’s bogus university, or attacks the Khan family because they were critical of him? That he’s not a demagogue trying to turn Americans against each other when his initial response to the deadliest mass shooting in American history was to brag about his plan to ban all Muslims from traveling to the United States?

It is cliché to say it, but neither this election nor any other has ever taken place in a vacuum. Hillary Clinton is not running against a perfect candidate who will be the best possible choice and with whom one can agree on every single policy position: she is not even running against Senator Bernie Sanders, her opponent for the Democratic nomination. Instead, former Secretary Clinton is running against Donald Trump, and regardless of whether or not one decides to support either Libertarian candidate, former Governor Gary Johnson, or Green Party candidate Dr. Jill Stein, neither of them is going to be president on January 20th, 2017, and if anyone says otherwise, and concocts a scenario where either Third Party candidate, or someone else entirely, will be the 45th president of the United States, then that person is not telling the truth. It will either be Hillary Clinton who, warts and all, has shown the intelligence, skill, capacity for hard work, and temperament to do the job, or it will be Donald Trump, a dangerous demagogue who has shown ignorance, hatred, bigotry, an unpredictable temperament, displayed extreme narcissism and megalomania, has a notoriously short attention span, and has lied more often and more easily than any major Party candidate in history. If you love Trump’s stance on immigration, crime, the environment, the economy, and foreign policy so much that you are willing to live with endless stream of offenses he has committed just since he entered the race in June of 2015 (not to mention all the horrible actions and statements he’s made in the 69-years he lived before last June), then perhaps voting for him makes sense to you, but remember also that there are plenty of people in this nation – people who deserve to be called ‘deplorables,’ as former Secretary Clinton recently called them – who are voting for Trump because he is a racist, a sexist, a xenophobe, insults the disabled, is a bigot, a liar, a bully, a narcissist, and has surrounded himself by anti-Semities and White Nationalists who believe Eugenics is a real science and that ‘less desirable,’ people should not be allowed to reproduce so that they do not ‘pollute,’ or ‘contaminate,’ our bloodstream. Perhaps you love his policy proposals so much that you honestly don’t care about any of this, but you would have to have chosen willful ignorance to pretend that there are not plenty of people voting for him because of his most vile views and the despicable Nazi-wannabes like Bannon who now have his ear.

And if you really do abhor the grotesque things that Trump has said and done, but you are going to vote for him anyway because you hate Clinton and hope and expect that a President Trump’s most dangerous and vile tendencies would be kept in check either by the job itself, the other branches of government, social norms, his top advisers, or some other mitigating factor, please remember that such logic was precisely the reason that many educated, intelligent Germans elevated Adolf Hitler to power in 1932/33. I despise comparing anyone or anything to Hitler and the Nazis because some people tune out as soon as the comparison is made as it is over-used, so I do not do it lightly, but it fits here scarily well because the things those Germans knew better, and were personally disgusted by Hitler’s views on Jews, Communists, eugenics, and more, but they supported him anyway because they felt his most harmful, hateful, and deadly tendencies could be contained. If one cuts out all the noise and analysis and just reads everything Trump has said and done in this campaign concerning Blacks, Hispanics, Muslims, women, people with disabilities, soldiers, war heroes, Jews, and more, and simply decided to take him at his words, it should be impossible to support the man with a clear conscience. Put another way: unless Trump starts kicking field goals from 99 yards away and makes 30 of them each game, he shouldn’t have a place on our national team, and I would honestly feel dirty if, outside the election, he simply  purchased any of my four favorite pro sports teams, but there is not enough soap in the universe for me to feel clean with Donald Trump as my president.

 

Cheating, Legacy, New England Patriots, NFL, Scandals, Seattle Seahawks, Sports hatred, Super Bowl XLIX, Winning

A Legacy on Fire

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I hate the New England Patriots and their organization, and the only National Football League franchises that I loathe more than the Patriots are the divisional rivals of my beloved New York Giants, and I root for the Pats to lose every game they play except for the three games every four-years when they play the Dallas Cowboys, Philadelphia Eagles, and Washington Redskins. However with all of that said, I have always respected the dynasty that Bill Belichick and Tom Brady have built in New England, and I hate this scandal about New England deflating the footballs to give them an advantage in the AFC Title Game vs. the Indianapolis Colts even more than I do the team that is seemingly responsible for the scandal.

As someone who loves and respects sports history, the last things I want to think about are cheating and related scandals. I enjoy some of the more nerdy aspects of sports (and history in general), and one of them is compiling lists of which teams, players, coaches, and dynasties are the best. I devote more time to these things than I probably should, and I hate thinking of cheating because it gets in the way of my rankings. How should I rate Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens when there is clear evidence that they used performance enhancing drugs? How should we view the Baltimore Ravens 2012 Super Bowl-winning team when Terrell Suggs and Ray Lewis both suffered injuries that should have cost them the entire season (a torn Achilles tendon for Suggs, who was the reigning Defensive Player of the Year at the time of his injury, and a torn bicep for Lewis) and both came back with almost superhuman quickness and playing better than they had when they were initially hurt? I hate having to answer these questions rather than just trying to place Bonds, Clemens, and the 2012 Ravens in some historical context.

However there is one element to the Patriots’ role in what’s being called “Deflategate,” that makes it easier to be morally outraged about the Pats’ alleged behavior than the other scandals I mentioned, and that is that the act – which seems small and was almost certainly neither the cause of nor necessary for the Patriots 45-7 thrashing of the overmatched Colts – seems par for the course with the image that the public has of Bill Belichick as an arrogant cheater who views himself and his team as being above the petty rules that must govern the other 31-franchises in the NFL. Most of this perception is the fault of Belichick’s own administration and the fact that he was caught back in 2007 recording the defensive signals of other teams during games, a practice that was and is banned by the NFL, in a scandal that became known as “Spygate.” It has not helped the case of the Patriots and their fans that before Belichick was busted for spying in 2007, the Patriots routinely won big games as heavy underdogs, as they did on the way to the franchise’s first championship in the 2001 season, and that since Spygate the Patriots have not won the Super Bowl and have lost some big games as heavy favorites; most famously, they went into Super Bowl XLII as the first team in league history to win its first 18-games of the season, only to lose that Super Bowl to the Giants and finish 18-1, costing them what would have been prime position in the ‘best single-season team ever’ conversation.

Spygate has slightly tarnished the Patriots’ legacy as the first true NFL dynasty of the post-free agency era, but until now Patriots defenders could brush off criticism from players like Marshall Faulk and Kurt Warner (the two most prominent members of a 2001 St. Louis Rams team that came into Super Bowl XXXVI against the Patriots as 14-point favorites before losing 20-17 to those Patriots, and who have both accused the Patriots of secretly taping a closed practice session for those Rams in the days before the Super Bowl and using the ill-gotten knowledge to upset the Rams) as mere sour grapes. However, the existence of Inflategate means that Spygate is news again because it all seems just as much a part of the Belichick/Brady years as the usual 12-13 win season and accompanying first round bye. Patriots’ fans are nervously hoping that the scandal doesn’t somehow get worse and that the penalties the franchise will likely have to pay for this latest shady scandal doesn’t get in the way of the fourth Super Bowl trophy they have been chasing since the 2004 season, and that they all expected long before now.

The historical implications of Super Bowl XLIX are what I’d much rather be writing about today; we have a game where the last NFL team to repeat as champions is trying to keep the Seattle Seahawks from being the first team since them to win back-to-back Super Bowls; a game where the two teams that were the best in their conferences for most of the season made it to the Super Bowl for the second year in a row. The Patriots come in having played in four-consecutive AFC Championship games, and with a win they would join the 5 teams in NFL history to win at least 4 Super Bowls, a club led by the Pittsburgh Steelers with 6, the San Francisco 49ers and Cowboys with 5, and the Green Bay Packers and Giants with 4; with a loss they would tie the Broncos (who were also dispatched there, as the Pats will be if they lose, by the Seahawks) for the most losses in SB history with 5. Tom Brady is making his third attempt to equal the record 4 Rings won by Steelers’ hall of famer Terry Bradshaw and 49ers legend Joe Montana, and it his fourth attempt to equal Montana – Brady’s boyhood idol, by the way – with 3 Super Bowl MVP awards. This is what I want to talk about, but instead we’re left trying to determine where to rank one more scandal for the man Patriots’ haters can resume happily calling “Belicheat.” Belichick, in his arrogance, has sullied his own name, but he has also made the history of the NFL a little foggier, and for a sports nerd like me, that’s only slightly less distasteful than the thought of Belichick standing atop the podium after winning his fourth Super Bowl and sporting his familiar smug grin, secure in the belief that he’s gotten the best of us once more…and us knowing that he’s probably right.

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?