Those of us who have spent untold, unwarranted amounts of our lives watching a bad sports organization have some sense of what makes one tick. It’s usually some combination of bad decisions, bad luck, bad personnel and bad management. Occasionally it just boils down to a bad owner. The Los Angeles Clippers and Memphis Grizzlies have been bottom-dwellers for years, for reasons too varied and depressing to enumerate. But both clubs feature bottom-of-the-league ownership. Disastrous recent turns in the spotlight for Donald T. Sterling and Michael Heisley  the two teams’ respectively reviled owners  have reminded those organizations’ fans of the greatest sources of the teams’ misery. Or certainly the wealthiest.  Sterling’s Clippers have been one of the NBA’s worst organizations for generations, and a series of unflattering profiles  Franz Lidz did the honors in Sports Illustrated a decade ago, and Peter Keating reprised and deepened the story in a damning 2009 piece in ESPN The Magazine  have revealed their owner to be a heroically vain figure. So in a sense it’s not surprising that Sterling recently made himself look foolish by trashing his team’s new coach and GM  and mid-tier free agent signings Ryan Gomes and Randy Foye  in the Los Angeles Times.  The recent episode fits nicely into Sterling’s pantheon of churlish behavior, which includes the numerous personal misdeeds related in the Keating article and a hilariously contentious round of lawsuits involving former coach Mike Dunleavy.  For Clippers fans, this episode marks another unwelcome reminder of their unloved owner. “The Clippers’ curse isn’t a supernatural phenomenon,” ESPN’s Kevin Arnovitz writes. “It has a name, a face and an unfortunate history of personal failure.”  Heisley, for his part, has generally escaped the state of perpetual opprobrium in which Sterling lives. That changed somewhat when Heisley, seemingly at random, decided to play hardball in contract negotiations with draft picks Xavier Henry and Greivis Vasquez this season, in apparent defiance of the NBA’s rookie salary scale. Heisley took to the airwaves earlier this week to explain why. But over the course of a bluster-intensive 37-minute interview with radio host Chris Vernon, Heisley revealed himself to be both unfamiliar with the NBA’s collective bargaining agreement and profoundly unready for prime time.  “Intimate knowledge of the collective bargaining agreement may not be a prerequisite for NBA owners, since, typically, general managers and other executives are charged with that,” the Memphis Flyer’s Chris Herrington writes. “But Heisley has appointed himself the de facto president of basketball ops. And if Heisley is going to be directly driving much of the day-to-day operation of the team (down to something as ostensibly minor as negotiating rookie contracts) then it is not okay that he knows less about the contents of the CBA  essentially the league’s team-building rule book  than I do.”  ESPN’s Henry Abbott delivers the lesson behind these two sad spectacles with admirable succinctness. “More than any one piece of information, [Heisley] demonstrated something that is often hard to get across meaningfully,” Abbott writes. “And that’s that we ought not assume that the people running your local NBA team are all that thoughtful or wise.”  And, furthermore, definitely not the sort of people most 30-year-olds would want to hang out with. But that will be Josh Kroenke’s lot, sooner than anyone expected. With Denver Nuggets owner Stan Kroenke buying the St. Louis Rams, son Josh will take the reins of his father’s two other teams, the NBA’s Nuggets and the NHL’s Colorado Avalanche.  It doesn’t sound like a bad gig, but Kroenke  and reported new, Nigerian-born G.M. Masai Ujiri  will inherit a team in chaos. “From [Carmelo] Anthony’s stubborn reluctance to sign a three-year, $65 million contract extension, to the unceremonious dumping of squabbling front-office executives Mark Warkentien and Rex Chapman, to word the Nuggets have finally tired of guard J.R. Smith’s stupid human tricks, there’s a sense that cleaning house is rapidly becoming a higher priority for this franchise than chasing the Los Angeles Lakers in the Western Conference standings,” the Denver Post’s Mark Kiszla writes. “Sad to report, but this feels like the end of an era with the Nuggets.”  Kiszla doesn’t mean that in a good way, but as the younger Kroenke takes over, Nuggets fans should take heart. Clippers and Grizzlies fans have been waiting for years to hear the phrase “end of an era” applied to their ownership.  Plenty of people, both on and off the PGA Tour, use their cell phones as alarm clocks. And plenty of people have experienced the singular unpleasantness of a cell phone that doesn’t work as it should. But perhaps no one knows that pain more acutely than Jim Furyk. Bad luck with a cell phone alarm conspired to make him late for his tee time in the pro-am round of The Barclays tournament on Wednesday. Thus, thanks to an obscure PGA rule, Furyk was disqualified from the event.  Considering that the pro-am round had nothing to do with the tournament itself, it seems odd that Furyk’s oversleeping should cost him a shot at a win. But, as ESPN’s Jason Sobel points out, Furyk is only the most recent golfer  Dustin Johnson and Juli Inkster being two others of note  to suffer from golf’s seemingly random rules. “Yes, the rules of golf  whether from the actual rulebook or as instituted by an individual tour  are in place for very good reasons,” Sobel writes. “When they don’t serve every player equally, though, that’s when they fade from black-and-white to some form of disillusioned gray.”  The phrase “rebuilding season” is familiar to fans of just about any sport, but it doesn’t quite suit what will be happening with the University of New Orleans Privateers basketball team in the upcoming college hoops season. De-building season might be more like it, actually. UNO, which saw its enrollment fall from 17,000 to 10,000 students after Hurricane Katrina, is leaving the Sun Belt conference and going all the way from NCAA Division I to Division III in hoops. They’re not doing it this year, though, which means that the school, and 33-year-old head coach Joe Pasternack, are trying to field a competitive Division I independent team this season without offering any scholarships, and without nearly all of the players from last year’s team, all of whom have been released from their scholarships and all but one of which will have transferred elsewhere by the beginning of the year.  In Sports Illustrated, Luke Winn reports from what surely counts as the oddest of Division I recruiting sessions  players without college scholarships auditioning for spots at a school without scholarships to offer.  Found a good column from the world of sports? Don’t keep it to yourself — write to us at dailyfixlinks@gmail.com and we’ll consider your find for inclusion in the Daily Fix. You can email David at droth11@gmail.com.
Baffling behavior from the men behind the Clippers and Grizzlies. Plus: Furyk's costly late wake-up; a "de-building" season in New Orleans; and more.