Nowhere To Run, Knowhere to Ride

With an aging core and few prospects, the 0-3 LA Knight Riders have no quick fixes to success - but does MLC's structure even encourage a rebuild?

There is a conflicted feeling that comes from being right about a team being bad before the season begins. I got this feeling a lot covering opponents of North Dakota State football for six years analyzing the dozens of teams they steamrolled on their way to multiple national championships, but it is not an innate intuition: it’s one that has to be honed over a long time of watching a particular sport.

So when a year of nonstop cricket consumption led me to pick the Los Angeles Knight Riders last in my Major League Cricket preseason rankings and they not only lost their first three games, but did so rather spectacularly, I felt validated.

But there’s also that fear that you’ll go too far, that Icarus will fly too close to the sun and overextend the advantage. Plenty of sportswriters or people who write about sports for fun fall into the Purple Patch Trap, as one of my college English professors called it, and think they can do no wrong.

Well, allow me to get dangerously close to that trap right now… the Knight Riders are bad in 2025, but their issues extend beyond this roster to the root of their vision and the structures MLC affords for long-term roster building.

Americans understand good sports teams pretty readily. It’s not that hard, and it’s more fun to dissect their personnel and see how coaches use players to maximize their impact on a championship team. When the Patriots were good, people obsessed over the goal line package they used with Mike Vrabel at tight end and with Chris Hogan playing lacrosse at Penn State. Storylines come easily for winners, as do ticket sales more often than not.

But bad sports teams are also trying to sell tickets and merch and sponsorship and all the things good teams are, and they can’t sell the prospect of a championship. So what do they sell? Hope. A vision for the future. American sports fans will tolerate some really abysmal teams as long as they feel like it’s going somewhere, and being there for the rise of a group of younger players builds investment in a team that becomes the legacy we pass on across generations of sports fans.

The Knight Riders are… not doing that.

Instead of selling their future by centering players like Sherfane Rutherford (26) fresh back from international duty, Australian leg spinner Tanveer Sangha (23), or even American-via-South Africa Matthew Tromp (20), they have gone the early 2000s Toronto Maple Leafs route, signing and centering late-prime or post-prime players with name recognition and hoping it will work out for the best. It has not.

Sunil Narine is back to his old MLC tricks with the bat after going for a golden duck on Tuesday and hasn’t moved the needle with the ball, either. That’s nothing new, unfortunately: he’s averaging 8.23 with the bat in 14 innings in MLC and has yet to crack the top 15 wicket-takers in any of his three seasons. Andre Russell has scored 4 runs on 11 balls in 3 games this year and his bowling economy is north of 11. Narine and Russell are centerpieces of the team’s marketing, with their jerseys readily available in the MLC store. Knight Riders Group signed Alex Hales to play in MLC and the CPL and he has not gotten any kind of traction in the top order. Andre Fletcher may have already played his last game this season, and Anrich Nortje never even saw the field before withdrawing due to injury.

So what is the direction for this team? Trot out old stars over and over on the back of a nostalgia no one in the US is invested in? That’s fine if they just want to be the KKR Road Show, but here aren’t enough Kolkata fans in the States to sustain that long-term unless they start bringing Indian IPL players over (from the sound of it, good luck with that), and it’s clearly not conducive to winning championships. So the other option is a complete overhaul: blow it up, rip it down to the studs, whatever your preferred parlance, go find a lot of young guys and let them work together for a few years and try to build a consistent winner.

That’s easier said than done in the current league environment.

MLC doesn’t offer a lot of resources for a conventional rebuild. The rookie draft is one round bolted on the tail end of the league’s glorified Rule 5 Draft that sorts out domestic and uncapped free agents. Teams can’t trade players for cash and picks to reallocate resources based on team roster needs and priorities, and nobody has player development mechanisms: MLC is very much a “pop-up shop” that’s around for one month a year, then everyone goes and plays in other franchise leagues where they may or may not get worthwhile coaching or any coaching.

T20 franchise leagues in Associate Member nations are not common, and ones with formal ICC sanctioning even less so: MLC and the UAE’s International League T20 are the only two, with the Nepal Premier League hoping for that distinction for 2025. These leagues have less of a domestic talent pool to draw on than the IPL, the Big Bash League, the CPL, or The Hundred, and in the case of MLC, they fill a major gap in the domestic structure that is still trying to bridge the gap between the national team and the various organizations like the Northern California Cricket Association or the Cricket League of New Jersey which are giving international-caliber talents a place to play when they aren’t with the national team.

It’s vital to the future of MLC and its credibility within domestic cricket that it is cognizant (no pun intended) of its role in offering a national platform not only to established domestic players, but to the sizable cohort ready to break through to a larger stage. It should encourage teams to make room for those players and nurture them into the impact players of the future. That can take many forms: roster or salary cap carveouts like MLS, special retention rules for players under a certain age, or something less orthodox. Giving teams a clear path to utilizing younger players and building long-term rosters validates trying to rebuild and acknowledging that you might not be that good this year, but there’s still something to watch, something to analyze, something to sell to the public. Some teams, like Seattle, may buy into that on their own, but other teams will need it spelled out for them that this is an option, and that option is better than signing a bunch of David Justices.

Whatever structures MLC opts to roll out in the future, the Knight Riders are on their own to start this process. It will be hard, it will be uncomfortable, and they will likely lose more games before they start winning. But if it’s done right, they will have a team that can put a trophy or two in a home ground around the time they get one built. Are they willing to pull the trigger, move on from the stars of yesteryear, and give Jason Holder (or someone else) a team to lead into the future? That remains to be seen, but for now, the Knight Riders will just have to, well, ride it out.

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Thank you so much for reading Stumps & Stripes! I’m having an absolute blast putting this project together and committing to it. If you enjoyed what you read, check out my piece on Saiteja Mukkamalla as the spearhead of the young cohort of American cricketers MLC should be pursuing.

I had to bump a couple of pieces back to get these thoughts out of my head, so I’ll have a wrap on the Oakland Coliseum leg tomorrow and something on the state of Associate cricket in the near future. I also have a piece on the impact of transplants on the domestic scene rolling around in my head that I think is important to have perspective on. Join me again soon!