Finally our primary judge gets to dish out the big points:
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Originally Posted by True North
Others that would’ve ranked highly: Cincinnati Bengals, Arizona Cardinals, New York Jets, Miami Marlins, Phoenix Coyotes
10. Washington Generals
I mean, when your job is essentially to lose every game you play, you can’t really be called a bad franchise. Sorry.
These next two are more poster children for hard-luck franchises rather than being actively terrible:
9. Montreal Expos
The Expos were actually good. Don’t let anyone fool you. Overall, the Raines/Dawson/Carter team was probably the second-best team in the National League in the late 70s-early 80s after the Dodgers (****ing Blue Monday), with one division title (kind of) and several near misses (95- and 90-win seasons back to back that saw them come up just short both times). They were certainly the best team in the league in 1994, when a young team with two future Hall of Famers - yes, I’m confident Larry Walker will get in eventually - and several other great players came together and wrecked the National League for four and a half months, but never got to the World Series the franchise desperately needed (****ing strike).
Everyone outside Montreal only remembers them for what happened afterward, when the team got sold and eventually abandoned (****ING LORIA), and became a laughing stock for their piss-poor attendance and crumbling stadium. But that’s not really fair to the team. They don’t belong on this list.
8. Sacramento Kings
Here’s another franchise that was really, really good at one point before getting phenomenally unlucky. They won a title in Rochester before the league outgrew the city. They had some good teams in Cincinnati led by Oscar Robertson that had the misfortune of always having to contend with Russell’s Celtics and Wilt’s Sixers. Then they moved to Kansas City, where they had some more decent teams with Tiny Archibald and a trip to the West finals before poor attendance and arena problems (their roof literally caved in) forced another move to Sacramento. Once there, they saw Ricky Berry, a potential franchise player, commit suicide following a phenomenal rookie season.
It took a while, but the Kings reached the top of the Western Conference by the early 2000s, led by Chris Webber and featuring Mike Bibby, Doug Christie, Peja Stojakovic and future GM Vlade Divac. They won the Pacific Division by three games over the defending champion Lakers. As a Lakers fan, I can tell you that the Kings were the one team we did not want to face that year, and sure enough, they met in the West final and the Kings jumped out to a 3-2 lead. Game 6 was tight all the way, but the Lakers held on to win...thanks to a 27-9 free throw advantage in the fourth quarter, including such obvious calls as Mike Bibby’s nose clearly fouling Kobe Bryant’s elbow. Yes, that was the game disgraced ref Tim Donaghy would later claim was rigged for the Lakers from the start. The Kings couldn’t recover, dropping Game 7 at home in OT and losing their chance to beat up on an overmatched Nets team the Lakers would sweep in the Finals.
No matter, they would come back next year nearly as good. They blitzed the Pacific Division again, leading the Lakers by nine games. They handily beat Utah in the opening round of the playoffs, and were looking good early in their second-round series against Dallas...before Chris Webber’s knee exploded in Game 2 while driving untouched for an alleyoop dunk:
He missed a year and was never the same. The Kings lost the series in 7. That sound you heard was the Kings’ window slamming shut.
The last decade and a half have been pretty bad, with ownership troubles and a threatened move on top of just flat-out bad teams. But again, the sustained comically bad stretch isn’t there. This feels like a good spot.
7. Minnesota Timberwolves
I have to rank them above the other teams so far because their failures have been pretty much all self-inflicted, but they don’t have the rich history of ineptness and putridity that the teams above them all do. They do have the Joe Smith debacle that set them back years, they did draft two point guards that were not Steph Curry in the top six in the draft where Steph Curry went seventh, they have only won one playoff series in their entire existence...but other than that, is there really anything separating them from the Charlotte Hornets?
6. Toronto Maple Leafs
5. Cleveland Browns
These are basically the same team…
- Dominant during their early days (Toronto has the second-most Stanley Cups of any NHL team; Cleveland won several championships in the pre-Super Bowl era)
- Purchased by a terrible owner (Art Modell for the Browns, Harold Ballard for the Leafs -- if you’ve never heard of him, look him up, he’s top 5 in any all-time worst owners draft)
=- Decades of mediocrity or worse under said terrible owner
- Sizable championship droughts (54 years and counting for the Browns, 51 for the Leafs)
- A brief resurgence that never saw them reach the pinnacle, with gut-punching moments for the fanbase along the way (Browns - The Drive/The Fumble in the Earnest Byner run, Leafs - the Kerry Fraser Game during the Doug Gilmour era)
=- Fanbases that filled their buildings no matter how terrible they were, even when they probably shouldn’t
I give the Browns the nod over the Leafs for two reasons -- their owner actually moved them out of town, and they’ve been nearly universally awful and the butt of jokes since they returned, whereas the Leafs seem to be on a good trajectory as of late. While the recent 1-31 run was the worst in league history, it was just the culmination of Browns 2.0, where even their best season (10-6 in 2007) saw them miss the playoffs. Factory of Sadness, indeed.
However, I won’t let the Leafs go without bringing up what I posted on Facebook after they blew a 4-1 Game 7 third period lead against the Bruins in 2013 in very Leafsian fashion:
“And that, Charlie Brown, is what being a Leafs fan is all about.”
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Originally Posted by True North
You know there have to be some truly horrible teams on a list that puts the Browns fifth. Here’s the top tier:
4. Buffalo Bills
The Bills are mainly known for the following things, hardly any of them good:
=- their greatest player being OJ Simpson
- Winning a playoff game after trailing by 31
=- being the only team to reach four straight Super Bowls, and losing each and every one of them in increasingly humiliating fashion
=- Wide Right
=- the Music City Miracle
=- the Peter Man
- Drunk fans trying to put themselves and each other through tables:
I spent my high school years in Kingston, Ontario, where all the American stations were from Syracuse. As a result, I got the full Bills experience during the Jim Kelly/Thurman Thomas/Bruce Smith years, the only time the team was relevant and good (not counting their two AFL titles). And damn, were they good. They should’ve won at least two of those Super Bowls. That they didn’t win any of them broke the franchise, and kind of the city as a whole.
After that team finally broke up, the Bills have spent the entire time since wandering the NFL wilderness, employing an embarrassingly bad series of GMs, coaches, and quarterbacks under one owner who was pretty much senile and another who rivals Jimmy Haslem and Dan Snyder for meddlesomeness and bad decisions. The head coaching list following Marv Levy reads like a who’s who of Coaches You Know Are Leading a Bad Team - Mike Mularkey, Dick Jauron, Chan Gailey, Doug Marrone, Rex Ryan. The one quarterback they had that was even halfway decent, Doug Flutie, was benched for a playoff game because the owner preferred Rob Johnson, who looked the part but was awful. (That game was the Music City Miracle, of course, a game the Bills should consider themselves lucky they even had a chance in, considering they were shut out in the first half with Johnson under centre. He finished 10 of 22 for 131 yards.) They benched the only other one that showed any promise, Tyrod Taylor, for Nathan ****ing Peterman — IN THE MIDDLE OF A POTENTIAL PLAYOFF RUN. They still have not won a single playoff game since Jim Kelly retired.
Oh, and lest we forget, they were so terrible this season that a player retired after the first half of a game rather than endure this sack of **** team for another single second.
My brother-in-law grew up in Niagara Falls and was a Bills fan his entire life, so one year we got him a Marshawn Lynch jersey for Christmas. That was the year he was suspended for his weapons arrest, and the year before he was traded to the Seahawks, became Beast Mode and starting wrecking the league. My BIL still jokes about how perfectly Bills that gift was.
3. Detroit Lions
The Lions seem to be inextricably linked to the Browns — both great in the 50s, trading a bunch of NFL titles; both the only non-expansion teams to never make the Super Bowl; the owners of the only 0-16 seasons in league history. But the Lions are worse, and I’ll give you three reasons why:
- In the 53 years since the advent of the Super Bowl, the Lions have won exactly one playoff game, and have only ever hosted two.
- The Lions have had two generational talents in the past 30 years, Barry Sanders and Calvin Johnson. Both retired in their prime rather than continue to play for the Lions.
- This play:
2. Cleveland Indians
They would reach the upper tier of this list for the racist logo alone. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg for the Indians:
- They’ve gone 70 seasons without a title (and counting!), the longest active streak in North American sports by far.
- They managed only three winning seasons in the 25 years they spent in the American League East.
=- the highlight for a couple of entire generations of Indians fans Was the film Major League.
- They’re the franchise that brought us that brought us https://youtu.be/VxTtzLUteDA”]Ten Cent Beer Night[/url].
Even when they’ve found some success, they’ve managed to break everyone’s hearts in the end. Consider their four World Series appearances since their last title:
1954: The Indians won an AL-record 111 games, but couldn’t even get a single win against the New York Giants. They had a good chance to win Game 1 against the Giants with 2 runners on and no one out in an 8th-inning tie game, but then this happened:
The Indians failed to score, and the Giants won in extras and ended up sweeping the series.
1995: The Indians’ first pennant in over 40 years, only to go down in history as the only team to lose a World Series to the Atlanta Braves in their 14 consecutive postseason tries.
1997: The late-90s Indians’ second kick at the can ended in absolute heartbreak, as with a 2-1 lead in the 9th inning of Game 7 against the Marlins...well, I found this online which sums things up pretty well:
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If you say the words "Jose Mesa" to any Indians fan who watched that game, you'll probably see a visceral reaction akin to being punched in the stomach.
Mesa was unequal to the task, allowing the tying run that would allow the Marlins, a five-year-old franchise at the time, to win the World Series and push the Indians’ drought to 49 seasons.
2016: The Indians would again lose an extra-inning Game 7, becoming the first team to lose a World Series to the Chicago Cubs in 108 years.
Someday, maybe, some team will go down as the first team to lose a World Series to the Indians in...how many years? 80? 100? About 350? No matter, they’re still baseball’s worst.
1. Los Angeles Clippers
And now I’m running short of time, so if you want a great primer on why the Clippers are the worst franchise in history, read this 2009 piece by Bill Simmons. A quick summation:
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Here's how the past decade ended in terms of wins for the Clippers (by season): 15, 31, 39, 27, 28, 37, 47, 40, 23, 19.
Our final tally of post-1976 injuries to marquee Clippers players: five career-altering knee injuries (Livingston, Manning, Harper, Smith, Nixon), one career-ending ruptured disc (Johnson), one career-altering back surgery (Vaught), three season-ending torn Achilles (Brand, Archibald, Nixon), one heart arrithymia (Cummings) and multiple foot stress fractures (Walton). Every one of those guys was a top-three player on the team or headed that way.
Total number of post-1976 All-Star appearances by a Clipper or Brave: Seven.
Number of winning Clipper/Brave seasons since 1976: Two.
Number of post-1976 seasons with 30 wins or less: 19.
Number of post-1976 division titles: Zero.
Number of post-1976 last-place finishes: 15.
Number of retired numbers by the Braves/Clippers: Zero.
Overall record since 1976: 944-1730 (.353 winning percentage).
Since then, you had Donald Sterling being outed as a disgusting racist slumlord and being forced to sell the team, the resulting distraction helping to torpedo the playoff run of the best Clippers team ever (a team that was only able to be put together with David Stern’s infamous and indefensible “basketball reasons” veto of the Chris Paul-to-the-Lakers trade), the Clippers never even making the conference finals during the Paul/Blake Griffin era, becoming the first team ever to blow a playoff series lead in five consecutive years, and then the entire team being dismantled.
Steve Ballmer as owner seems like a not altogether dumb and terrible guy, so maybe the Clippers might overcome all this eventually...nah, who am I kidding? They’re the Clippers.
Basically, he's comparing how good you are doing compared to how good you should be doing at this point. Your 1st round pick should get first in the category, 2nd round 2nd place, etc.
Higher means your picks are out-performing their draft position, which is good of course.