In the NHL playoffs thread I propose a few candidates for the worst team to ever manage to win a Stanley Cup.
Here’s a question for you: What’s the worst team to ever win a World Series, an NBA Championship, a Super Bowl, or a Stanley Cup? (We’ll stick with those for now.)
I’d suggest considering a number of factors:
Won-loss record during the regular season. Obviously a team can sneak into the playoff and then get lucky.
Presence of absence of great players. Sometimes you just fluke out and OK guys all have career years.
Performance in adjoining seasons. A team that wins a championship, and then also wins it the next year, is probably a genuinely great team. Example: The 2000 New York Yankees, who went 87-74, had one of the worst W-L records by a champion ever, but having won three of the preceding four World Series and making it again the following year, I think it’s reasonable to argue the mediocre regular season record was the flukey part.
Ease of schedule during the regular season making the record look better than it really is.
My first thought was 2006 St. Louis Cardinals, but they did have a great season the year before. That said, the following year wasn’t good, with them 3rd in the division.
Much as I love them, I have to admit that the 2015-16 Leicester City FC Foxes were probably the worst team to have won the English Premier League. Certainly up there. Results in the years on either side (including this year to date) tend to back me up (though, of course, one could assert that this year they were the “worst” team ever to make the quarter-finals of the Champions’ League!).
I thought the '07 team was better than the '11 team (as were their opponents in the respective years). '07 Patriots are almost certainly the best non-Championship winning team, but I think the '07 Giants would beat the '11 Giants 6 or 7 games out of 10.
Both of the Rockets’ championships during Jordan’s baseball career could easily come with a *. But the 2nd one in the 94-95 season stands out as they were 6th in the Western Conference and faced off against a good, but inexperienced Orlando Magic team.
In MLB, it feels like the 80s produced a handful of ho-hum World Series champions. The 87 Twins only won 85 games. And that was with only 2 divisions and no wild card. The next year, the 88 Dodgers had Orel Hershiser’s scoreless streak and…? Kirk Gibson won the NL MVP hitting .290, 25 HRs and 76 RBI!! Such a stat line probably wouldn’t even get a vote today. Of course, he only had the one WS at bat and I’m sure we all remember that.
How is that championship determined, though? I thought it was the team with the best won-loss record (or is it points?) over the entire season. Something like Barkis describes is a bit different. With the playoff structures in U.S. leagues, a team can have a ho-hum regular season (or win a weak division) and still make the playoffs, then get a little lucky in a few games and be the champions. I can’t explain why Leicester City played so well last year, but when they do it for a whole season it’s hard to say it was just a fluke.
The 1987 post-season schedule favored the Twins who were unbeatable at home. That’s why they got past the seemingly superior Detroit Tigers and St. Louis Cardinals.
As for the 1988 Dodgers, they won 94 games and finished seven ahead of the Reds so it wasn’t like they were a .500 team that slipped into first on the last day of the season. Still, if you look at their player stats, you’d still wonder how they won more than 80. *Esquire *did a story about the apparent decline of the LA Dodger franchise earlier that year and said that if their star pitcher, Fernando Valenzuela, continued to struggle like he did in 1987 and their top hitter, Pedro Guerrero, continued having injury-related problems, “you can stick a fork in them; they’re done.” As it turned out, Valenzuela was even more ineffective and Guerrero was traded but, rather than being “done”, they won the World Series.
Also, on a side note, Hershiser should’ve won the NL MVP that year over Gibson.
Even if fluke isn’t the right word, skill of the championship team varies from year to year, so it’s possible they were the worst one to win the top flight in England. Playoffs, and especially single game elimination playoffs certainly make it more likely that a bad team wins.
In the NFL it’s possible for a 3 win team to win the Superbowl. A league champion in European soccer can’t be that bad. They do have knockout tournaments though. It’s possible for teams from lower division, and even (I think?) amateur teams to win those. There’s where you might really see some poor teams rise up.
I would say last years Real Madrid was probably the worst team to win a European Cup that I have seen since the Champions League era. Oh the had excellent players (anyone with Ronaldo, Benzema, Bale, Kroos, Ramos etc cannot be “bad”). But they were unconvincing, requiring either their opponents to put in a below par performance (QF and SF against Wolfsburg and Man City) or favorable refereeing decisions; in the Final against Atletico.
Greece in 2004 and Portugal in Euro 2016 were teams which were limited but played to their strengths.
THe 07 team did one thing really, really well (getting after the QB)…which just happen to be one of things the rest of the teams in playoffs weren’t good at.
They also had the time honored tradition of peaking at the right time…
The 1987 Twins would probably be my pick. Far more so than the 1988 Dodgers, who did go 94-68, after all, and that’s about how good they were. They had good starters and a shutdown bullpen, and Gibson’s numbers are pretty good in context; that was a really low scoring year.
The 1987 Twins went 85-77 and they were lucky they won 85 games. As I am sure you remember, they basically had two starting pitchers; it was Viola and Blyleven And Pray The Other Team Is Blown To Heaven. (Actually, the #3 starter was Les Straker, from whom 1987 was his first year and 1988 would be his last.) Of the seven playoff games Minnesota won in 1987, Viola or Blyleven started six. Relief corps? Only one relief pitcher, Juan Berenguer, had an ERA below 4 that season, and he was at 3.94.
One of the things that made the result possible for LCFC last season was that Chelsea, Arsenal, City and United were all uniformly poorer than normal. So not only did LCFC play way over their heads, they didn’t have to be as good as they would have needed to be most seasons, because the usual suspects were cocking it up royally. Further, Leicester only managed 81 points; only once in the entire history of a 20-team 3 pts for win top flight did the champion manage fewer points (2010-11 - Man. United). So it’s not a stretch to say LCFC are the worst Premier League winning team ever.
