There was a coach-firin' in Milwaukee today, and it's not who you'd expect. The Brewers canned manager Davey Lopes today. I guess that somehow they expected Lopes to succeed with the team. Despite ownerships' pursuit of the bottom line at the expense of contending. Despite shadow owner Bud Selig's stubborn insistence that the Brewers are a small-market team and by God should play like one in order to lend some credibility to his revenue-discrepancy theories. And despite the general lack of desire ownership has shown towards success. And now new manager Jerry Royster is supposed to get some wins out of the same quagmire. Talk about being put in a miserable situation, huh?

But the team on the other end of town made their own miserable situation. The Bucks entered the '64 Phillies/'78 Red Sox wing of the Astoundingly Fast and Painful Collapse Hall of Fame, losing 18 out of their last 26 games, capped off with a train wreck of a game in Detroit. This, you remember, is the team that almost made the Finals last year and was a solid pick to make it this year. Instead they go home to watch the playoffs. Anthony Mason can go work on how to rewrite his resume without mentioning that he was Milwaukee's big free-agent signing this year. And Coach George Karl (print and save those three words) can start scouting houses in Chapel Hill. Nice knowing you, Bucks; you've got nobody to blame but yourselves.