Kyrie Irving is, as of yesterday, a Dallas Maverick, because the only thing that can fix a man who’s as much trouble as Irving is playing under Mark Cuban.
In all seriousness, I like the trade, even as a man who once had a large poster of Dirk Nowitzki on his childhood bedroom wall. For one thing, it takes Kyrie Irving to a place with a much smaller Jewish population than Brooklyn, which could help calm things down. For another, uhh…you know where JFK got shot?
I feel like this is a thing to do with folks prone to conspiracy theories. Rather than let ‘em get into the kinds of things that will lead to Holocaust denial and trouble at TSA and storming the United States Capitol, just send them down the JFK rabbit hole. The JFK rabbit hole is gigantic. The JFK rabbit hole is so large that I wouldn’t be surprised if the real conspiracy is a bunch of psychologists in 1964 getting together and convincing the CIA it would be useful down the line to have a massive but fairly harmless conspiracy to sidetrack conspiracy theorists before they got into the really bad shit. Kyrie Irving when he said the world was flat? Quirky. Kyrie Irving when he promoted an antisemitic movie? Terrible. Props to Adam Silver for trying to get the quirky guy back. He’s already said he thought JFK was trying to “end the bank cartel in the world.” Imagine what he’ll find now that he has proximity to research effectively.
A Bonus NIT Bracketology Thought
You can find most of the NIT situation here, including a passing allusion to my pulsating fear of Tulane taking over the world, but one other thing to point out on this beautiful Monday:
Duke isn’t done yet.
Yes, the Blue Devils beat UNC. Yes, the Blue Devils are an NIT longshot. But it ain’t over yet. Not with Notre Dame and Syracuse and Louisville and a few more competent teams still on the schedule. The bubble may never come for Jon Scheyer. But if it does, we’ll be ready for it to pop.
A Bonus Burnley Thought
A continued happy Burnleytide to you and yours. Love Blackburn’s touch today, continuing their collapse from the one time they won three games in a row by playing a scoreless draw with the last-place team in the league. Hilarious bit, Blackburn.
The Clash Was Good and Bad
NASCAR’s Clash was chaos, for better and worse. Chaos is the name of the game with NASCAR, the entertainment was cool, we got a lot of beef out of it, this is all good. Counterpoint? It was less tactful than even a bunch of bump & runs. It was like if, in the sport of boxing, they had a practice of handing one guy a bazooka once things got a little boring. The race would be going on, the race would be fun, then—BAM. Quite literally. Someone would feel the only way to make a pass would be to concuss the guy in front of them.
So, we’ve got mixed emotions heading into the season. This could be awesome—we could have so much beef settling that it turns into that final scene from Slapshot and resolves with everyone re-learning the lesson to drive courteously and follow the unwritten rules—but it’ll be hard to enjoy it if that does go down, because the traumatic brain injuries will be everywhere.
Wow, They’re Starting Hockey Back Up Fast
I really assumed there’d be no hockey tonight after the All-Star Game was Saturday, but they’re already back at it, and good for them. You’ve gotta make your claims aggressively in the days when football’s winding down. Once the Super Bowl’s over, people start getting all in on something. You want it to be you.
Best of luck, NHL. No Sens game tonight so I will not be paying attention.
**
Our evening menu:
9:00 PM EST: Texas @ Kansas (ESPN)
Texas goes to Lawrence in Part I of their battle for the Big 12’s hypothetical NIT automatic bid (look, there’s a universe where it could happen). I did see some Rodney Terry handcuff talk creeping in up in the national media this weekend, so watch out for that trickling down to the local levels over the days to come. Big win tonight? Someone’s running a story asking if Terry has Texas trapped. Right? They have to. They have to do that. Maybe that’s why no one was melting down after losing to Barnes.
8:00 PM EST: Spurs @ Bulls (League Pass)
Just found out the trade deadline is this Thursday. That explains the Kyrie Irving timing, I guess.
Good point from Brian Windhorst about the Bulls not having any benefit from being worse this year because they don’t have any draft picks this summer, but if the obvious smart thing to do this offseason is going to be trading LaVine, why not trade him now? You could even have draft picks that way! Maybe I’m the idiot here. Back to college basketball.
7:00 PM EST: Duke @ Miami (ESPN)
Get down here, you little shits.
(Either of you, really, but we’d prefer Duke.)
