Good morning, Winners! Welcome back to the Morning Win. Thanks so much for rocking with us today. We appreciate you giving us a bit of your time.
Folks, somebody has finally done it. There’s a league out there who finally had enough courage to say, “You know what? We don’t need a stinkin’ draft!”
But the biggest change was this: Eliminating the collegiate draft.
Like most American sports, the NWSL brought in talent through a draft system. Like most other drafts, the selection order was based on team record at the end of the previous regular season. The worst teams pick first.
Now, players entering the NWSL will enter free agency immediately upon entering the league and pick their teams, as they should. This is how it’s supposed to work, folks!
Look, I know you’re probably bristling at what I’m saying here. We love our drafts. They’re great theater! Leagues like the NFL, NBA and NHL essentially turn them into pageants for us all to consume and we eat it up.
All that aside, the NWSL had to do this. The league was losing out on talent to leagues worldwide that didn’t have drafts. This and other pro-player provisions in the CBA should theoretically curtail that.
I could bore you here by discussing the free market principles drafts violate, but I won’t.
Instead, imagine this: You graduate from college at the top of your class. You’re on your way into the world and ready to go to the coolest company you’ve been looking at. It’s located in a city you’ve dreamed of living in for a long time.
But, surprise! You get a phone call from another company. Definitely not a cool one. But they just drafted you. Get ready to learn not-cool-company, buddy. That’s where you’re headed.
It’s not over. On top of that, you have to talk about how it’s a dream come true to work at this precious company you had no desire to work for yesterday.
I’m sure some of you will yell at me about how this impacts parity in sports and how bad teams will never be good again because all the good players will already go to the good teams. But that’s not exactly true!
Different players have different desires. Some players will want to play for good teams, sure. But not every good team has enough playing time available for you.
For example, Brianna Pinto of the North Carolina Courage told Vanity Fair that she may not have gone to Gotham FC if she had the choice as a rookie because she didn’t get enough playing time.
“Maybe there were other opportunities to get on the field right away,” she said. Those are the things incoming rookies will have to make decisions on and those decisions won’t always lead to stacking the decks on a particular team.
Sometimes, it might! But, in the end, it’s the player’s choice. And that’s what matters most. Shoutout to the NWSL for recognizing that.
The rest of the American sports leagues should pay attention.
After 17 years in Major League Baseball, Votto is calling it quits. And what a career it was.
The former NL MVP spent his entire career with the Reds, amassing 7,252 at-bats. He wasn’t one of the biggest swingers out there. Votto finished his career with 356 homers, but he maintained a .409 on-base percentage, the 9th best of the integration era, according to USA Today’s Jesse Yomtov. You couldn’t keep the guy off the bases.
Votto was an incredible player, but more than that, he just seemed like a genuinely great human being. After seeing his retirement announcement, people poured in on social media to share their favorite Votto stories.
What a career for Votto. Enjoy retirement, my man. You deserve it.
Steph Curry is a troll
(Photo by Damien MEYER / AFP)
There’s no way Steph Curry didn’t know that removing the “Warriors guard” part from his bio would get fans to act all crazy.
That’s precisely what happened, our Prince Grimes wrote in FTW’s Layup Lines newsletter. “As you can imagine, NBA fans on social media acted totally normal about the small change,” he said. “And by normal I mean they immediately started picking new teams for Curry.”
You know how it goes, folks. Steph was on the Lakers yesterday. He was on the Suns, too. I think I even saw a few versions of Steph on the Heat out there.
In the end, this probably doesn’t mean anything. Probably. Here’s Prince again:
“OK. Look, I can see how this all looks. But we really shouldn’t read too much into it. For starters, I can’t even confirm what Curry’s bio said before today. I think we can trust it didn’t previously have a mention of his gold medal considering, ya know, he didn’t have one two weeks ago. At the same time, this literally means nothing… probably.”
Gotta keep the Warriors fans on edge, I guess.
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