Andrew J. Duddlesten

Mike Pence Knows Nothing

Vice President Mike Pence was in South Korea to lead the United States in the opening ceremony and decided that he now abides by the old adage, whatever happens in the US stays in the US (I’ve got that pretty close at least).

As per usual, whenever something is going wrong with the Trump administration, Mike Pence feigns being the last person to know about. Which begs the question, other then leading parades, what on earth does Mike Pence do? Evidently his job is to keep his head buried in the sand until the Republicans need to force a judge through Congress. Consistently Mike Pence seems to be either out of the loop or willfully ignorant of the latest mess the Trump Administration has gotten itself into, which leads me to one of two conclusions. Either Mike Pence is an empty suit or Mike Pence is eyeing a shot at the Presidency. Even with the investigation into the Trump Administration ongoing, the chances of Trump being impeached are incredibly long (as things stand, 22 Republicans would need to vote for impeachment proceedings in the House, and then a 2/3 majority would be needed in the Senate which is also controlled by Republicans.)

But if Pence thinks he can weather the storm and avoid getting dirty in the process, he could be in position to run against Trump in the Republican primary. Based on historical precedence, this would be unlikely as I cannot see a historical instance where a sitting Vice President decided to run against his boss’s reelection. However my sense is that after four years of Trump, the Republican party will at least consider moving on if Trump’s polling numbers sit where they are today (approximately 41.4 percent approval per FiveThirtyEight, but also 86 percent approval ratings amongst self-declared Republicans so who really knows). I would be interested to see some more polling data regarding Pence’s chances, but I could see him pulling the Evangelical vote out from underneath Trump and cannibalizing a portion of Trump’s base in the process. In that scenario I would have to begrudgingly tip my hat to the man for turning a potential loss in his oncoming gubernatorial race in Indiana into a presidential nomination.

Perhaps lost in this discussion is that while Pence is as he so nobly stated “honored to serve as Vice President”, his bid to retain the governor’s seat in Indiana was a long shot after the debacle that was the passage of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. The result was an interview with Mike Pence on ABC’s “This Week”, which well…didn’t go quite as he planned.

While Pence has been tasked with some hard-nosed diplomacy in Pyongyang, (i.e. shunning Kim Jong Un’s sister with the silent treatment), Pence seems to be trying to wield influence behind the scenes and stay as far out of the headlines as possible. While Vice Presidents have varied in their influence on various administrations, my read is that Vice President Pence is trying his best to keep an arm’s length between himself and the President.

Everyone is Singing the Cavs Praise

To be honest I’m getting burned out on Cleveland Cavaliers talk at this point. I get why the whole things is so intriguing, as at least in my lifetime, we have never witnessed a proverbial title contender become so dysfunctional over the course of one off-season. Even then, while people were busy speculating about what is wrong with the Cavaliers, they are still the third best team in the East. Their record was certainly not indicative of the on the court product as the team seemed to be getting blown out on a fairly regular basis. But the criticism was certainly heightened by the context of the moves the Cavs made in the off-season. But whether the degree of criticism was justified or not, it was evident that the Cavaliers roster, as it was constructed before the trade deadline, was not ready to make a deep playoff run. While the Cavaliers in the most recent Lebron era have not been defensive stalwarts, that part of the Cavs game was abysmal as they were near last in the league in defensive rating and points allowed per game.

I wrote an earlier piece stating that it was unlikely that Kyrie Irving would leave Cleveland because well…the Cavaliers had no obligation to shop him. But the Cavaliers traded Kyrie away for Isiah Thomas and some role guys in the hopes of getting deeper off the bench. Well after the trade deadline, we see now that Cleveland traded Kyrie Irving for Larry Nancy Jr, Jordan Clarkson and a pick. Certainly we can think of the Kyrie for Thomas trade as a sunk cost and the moves at the trade deadline should be graded purely on the context of the players involved at the time. On that basis, the Isiah Thomas trade to the Lakers was probably a good deal. But I need to go back to the simple question of why Cleveland felt like they needed to move Irving in the first place. What was Irving possibly going to do? Refuse to play out the last two years of his contract? Even if he mailed it in, a demotivated Kyrie is better than whatever Thomas put on the court in his 4 weeks with Cleveland. I understand the significance of the Thomas injury and the difficult situation he was put in. He rushed back unto the court and was ineffective, but he is in a contract year and approaching 30 so I’m sure he felt that max deal slipping away with every week he missed. It is a tough situation for IT but it’s a situation that Cleveland could have easily avoided. I don’t particularly like wildly speculating about what would have happened given X,Y, and Z but I would be willing to say that Cleveland would be in a better position than they are now had they just stood pat in the off-season. Not to mention if Lebron left it would be Kyrie’s team once again and you can sign him back up and build around that.

Cleveland nevertheless recognized it needed to get better and that Isiah Thomas was not a good fit for the roster. Cleveland also had a tall task in deciding whether to pursue future assets or immediate contributors to try to win now and extend Lebron’s tenure in Cleveland. Cleveland ultimately decided to try to split the difference by finding younger players with some positive upside. The Cavaliers certainly got younger more athletic. The general grading seems to be that this team got better and based on the small sample of on court product, they did. The problem is that because the organization had to thread the needle, they didn’t really do either that well. Clarkson and Nance are potentially good pieces. But if this starting roster is Kevin Love, Tristan Thompson, JR Smith, Jordan Clarkson and George Hill next year, that has all the makings of a treadmill set at an incline of mediocrity.

I will say that holding unto the Brooklyn pick was ideal given that in my opinion there really wasn’t anyone being made available that would have made it worth it to put the pick on the table. NBA organizations are right to value picks highly when one great pick can overhaul your roster in any given draft, but NBA organizations also seem to vastly overestimate their abilities to consistently turn picks into role players or better. I don’t think anyone on the planet knows what Lebron will do after the season, including even Lebron. But the Cavaliers have put themselves in a situation by dealing Kyrie where they were damned if they changed the roster and they were damned if they didn’t.

But the Cap is Going Up

Over the past two years, many teams got very liberal with their payouts to NBA players as the salary cap was expected to expand significantly. Specifically, the cap expanded by 11 percent in the 2015 and 2016 season and by 34 percent in the following season, equating an increase in salary cap space of $31 million over the course of two seasons. Essentially, teams were afforded an extra Lebron size contract over the course of two years. With lots of money chasing a limited free agent pool, many players ended up with contracts that simply did not reflect their level of production. But at the time, many contracts began to look appetizing and no deal would be too rich as many organizations expected further increases to the cap. Just looking at the contracts signed in 2016, Chandler Parsons took home a 4 year, $94.4 million contract with the Grizzlies. Bismark Biyombo took his shot blocking skill and turned that into a 4 year, $72 million deal. Timofey Mozgov got 4 years for $64 million while Joakim Noah got a similar deal but for $72 million. Well now the reckoning is going to come as rebuild teams are becoming the clearing house for many of these bloated contracts. After all the cap increases, there will be only a handful of teams that will have the space to make moves in the upcoming offseason. But props to all those guys who set themselves up for a payday in 2016. Well played to you all.

YouTube has a Logan Paul Problem

Youtube recently restricted ads being displayed on Logan Paul’s videos after the YouTube star posted another tasteless video of him tazering several dead rats. That is in fact a sentence based on true events and I hate the fact I wrote it and that I even know who Logan Paul is for that matter. A month after taking a self-enforced hiatus due to a video that caused mass outrage amongst his fanbase for showing and mocking a dead body in Japan’s suicide forest, Paul has come to embody some of the worst things that the incentives of the internet have created.

However, what is perhaps more interesting is that YouTube is now officially trying to police its content. While it isn’t stopping Logan Paul from taking down his content (a sure fire first amendment fight if they were to do so) the fact that YouTube is now choosing who can make money for their content on its platform and who can’t is a new step for the world of social media. Facebook, Twitter and others are wrestling with the fact that they can only make content as good as the people who use it. Unfortunately, there are bad actors on these platforms that can leverage these mediums to do incredible harm (i.e. Russia launching misinformation campaigns, “cheap speech“, terrorist communication and others). While certainly Logan Paul cannot be said to be anywhere near the problem of those previously mentioned, YouTube is testing the lengths it can go to patrol and curate what people put on their platforms, or at least who can benefit from it. While this is pretty much YouTube trying to put Logan Paul in timeout, social media sites have unleashed incentives that can bring out the worst characteristics in people. People seem to gravitate towards echo chambers of their own news and to reinforce our own beliefs and worldviews. Content creators are forced to pursue clicks and likes with the ever more outrageous and polarizing stunts or opinions as the competition for people’s attention continues to climb. YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat and the like measure their success on statistics like time on site. Thus while someone like Logan Paul might be doing idiotic things in the pursuit of fame, it is a strange situation for YouTube because they benefit from people like Logan Paul. They may not benefit from the most recent videos Paul has put out, but they certainly benefit from the creation of YouTube sensations, because the content they create makes people more likely to visit YouTube.

I have spent some time thinking about this phenomenon, and to be honest I still don’t have a good solution for it. Social media companies must be aware that people generally feel worse about themselves when using their products, and that is not a sustainable business model as far as I’m concerned. The Royal Society for Public Health recently published a report discussing the positives and negatives of social media, but namely the risks to mental health amongst the public’s youth when using these mediums. The topic itself admittedly deserves a much longer post, so I will have to leave the details of the problem for a later time, but if you are out there and you are spending lots of time watching Logan Paul videos, please reach out to me. Let’s find something more productive to watch. There’s some great documentaries out there. Maybe crank out an episode of Blue Planet or something instead?

 

You Don’t Get to Just Start a Rivalry…

Josh McDaniels verbally agreed to being the next Indianapolis head coach. Key word “verbally”. Somehow over the course of 48 hours, McDaniels decided that wasn’t in his best interest, and chose to stay with Tom Brady, Belichick, and the Patriots. Is McDaniels staying under the assumption he will succeed Belichik? With what quarterback I would ask? I’m not even sure who the Patriots have to groom behind Brady, but what I do know is that the succession plan got blown up midway through the season. Granted, the Colts situation is not as rosy as Andrew Luck is presumably still playing football? Multiple surgeries on your throwing arm doesn’t sound promising, and McDaniels has to know what he is getting into if Jacoby Brissett is the starter again next year. But while McDaniels’ move is curious, I find the Colts response to be pretty humorous. The Patriots went to a SuperBowl with a 40-year-old QB. The Colts finished the season 4 and 12 and are selecting third overall in the draft. If you are the third worst team in the NFL, you don’t get to say that the rivalry is back on to the second best team in the NFL. I get it, you’re mad because you got spurned. But maybe put it together on the field and try to stick it to them then.