The End of the Washington Generals, and Four Bleak Futures for the Harlem Globetrotters

To the legendary Washington Generals, we bid adieu. The finest losers in all of sports, clad in green and gold, led nobly by the late, great Red Klotz. The Generals will never face the Harlem Globetrotters again, it was announced in August, and their records—save that of their one Hall-of-Famer's eternal flame—will fade, forgotten. As their fans die off, one by one, the flame of the Generals' existence will gutter and dwindle and finally cease to exist. They will never come back.

The Globetrotters must go on, walking this dusty earth, forever bringing joy to children and sillier-than-average adults, but to do so, they will need a new team full of chumps to school. VICE Sports has obtained confidential documents detailing the plans for future Globetrotter opponents. We share those options with you now.

A group of white, small, competitive, deeply irritating Duke University guards, led by Grayson Allen, Greg Paulus, Jonathan Scheyer, and Steve Wojciechowski, are forced to play against the 'Trotters. The Clown Princes of basketball dribble around them, over them, and through them, dunking in their faces left and right, sinking four-pointers as if God Herself gave them the true and perfect gift. An audience thrills as the Azure Devils just get angrier and angrier, turning red and shedding bright tears. The crowd loves watching these angry bees lose their damn minds in the Kafka-esque cage into which the Globetrotters force their opponents.

Inevitably, an Azure Devil's emotions will spill over in a rage, and while he screams his lungs out at the referee, looking perfectly the part of a stressed-out middle manager berating a waiter during a dinner out with his wife, one of the Globetrotters will sneak up behind him, pull his shorts down, and expose to the world a pair of dirty boxer shorts with little Coach K faces on them. The crowd will howl in ecstasy at the Devil's embarrassment.

Our Azure Devil tries to run out of the stadium but he trips on his shorts and tumbles face first into a bucket of popcorn being enjoyed by an attractive woman sitting courtside. The bucket is now stuck on his head. He keep trying to leave the arena, but, his vision compromised by a giant popcorn bucket, he just keeps running into and over things until security finally takes pity and escorts him to the stadium's drunk tank, which he has to share with several obstreperous raccoons that had tried to get in the facility's trash bins before the game.

Their coach is a fella in a Coach K costume, with a giant plastic Coach K head. Sometimes, vexingly, this team will win.

A new system is now in place. You are signed to the Globetrotters. You spend ten or so years running absurd three-man weaves, yanking down shorts, tormenting referees. It is a boon time for you.

As with all things, it cannot last forever.

One day, right before a game, the CEO of Globetrotters, Inc., walks into the locker room. He hands you a letter. You have been reassigned to the Formertrotters, with all the other ex-Globetrotters.

You are convinced you can turn it around. Veteran knowhow. Teamwork. But the second you walk into that yellow-tinted, wood-paneled opponent's locker room, a wave of dread washes over you. There is nothing you can do.

For every year you served as a Globetrotter, you must serve an equivalent year as a prop for your now former team, unable to break up even the simplest three-man weave, de-shorted at every turn, whistled for fouls that didn't even happen. You will watch the game you love, the game you've given your life to, turned into a football burlesque for no reason but to embarrass you.

You will learn, once and for all, that every pleasure has its price. Ovating leads to heart disease. Smoking to cancer. Life to death. Globetrotting to Formertrotting.

The Globetrotters will square off, time and again, against a team of people who just couldn't care less about the outcome of the game. Some of them are wearing red uniforms, some aren't.

"It's just a game, and if you kick me out, there won't be anyone to play," they say. "It's not like any of this matters. It's not like anything matters."

Beat them off the dribble? They shrug. Pants them? They pull their pants back up, not even bothering to cast a furtive glance your way. Call a foul on them? They line up on the key and halfheartedly box out for the rebound.

The chill of not caring, not reacting, not doing anything, creates a vacuum in the stadium. The Globetrotters, it is slowly revealed, are playing two opponents: the Tonics, a team they are beating handily, and, in a contest that feels far more competitive, post-modern cynicism. Children turn to their fathers and ask, "Why don't they care? Are they right not to care? Should we care about anything?"

The Trotters win, but there is no score to gauge if they have managed to maintain the spirit of the enterprise. The children have hardened looks in their eyes. They leave changed, somehow older.

Three hundred beautiful, spayed and neutered house cats, of all types, are released onto the court, which is covered in Colax Co. fish treats. The 'Trotters have to try to play basketball without hurting their opponent because they are precious cats, beloved by all. They eventually discover that they cannot feasibly dribble in this environment, up to their ankles in cats, so they pass the ball around the court, the way Naismith originally intended. From here, all of basketball is invaded by cats, dragging the game, in totality, back to its originalist roots. It is good, for a while.

Soon, however, we come to regard these basketmen as a distraction from the true appeal of the New Basketball: the cats. Players and balls and hoops are scrapped altogether. It's only cats now. Instead of going to an NBA game to watch dudes dribble and shoot, you attend to see a massive pile of cats just mill about and play for three hours. (The numbers have expanded, new; the newly drafted CBA between the NBA Player's Association, its ranks now swollen with cats, requires teams to trot out a roster of at least 1,200 cats.) Playground courts, from Rucker to Venice Beach, are overrun with cats and people sitting on nearby benches watching cats.

Basketball as we know it is a fleeting memory in the minds of few.

It all started on the day the Generals flame was extinguished. Do you now see the end of basketball approach?