In response to decades of allegations that the NBA is rigged, the NBA conspired this week to craft the most boring NBA Finals in history. At the very moment a generation of skeptical internetters pursed their lips, fully dreading the “now we’ve got a series!” narrative, the sport’s second-best player did something very dumb on defense, and the refs refused to look the other way. Moments later, to put the thing on ice, the NBA doubled down with a questionable moving screen call, sealing the Celtics’ 3–0 series lead.
“We’ll show you how not–rigged this is!” Adam Silver bellowed in his lair, then cackled as current NBA bard Brian Windhorst took the Luka Dončić bait, excoriating the fat–culture–appropriator on SportsCenter after the game. The plan had worked to perfection. The series? Antithetical to the concept of entertainment. The narrative? Centered on an intangibles-challenged young superstar capable of future growth. Boston media? Back in the fold, and on Tom Brady Night in Foxborough no less.
It was a masterclass in the long game, and a necessary one at that. Everyone in the industry has been saying it: David Stern grew sloppy in his later years. With a Celtics gentlemen’s sweep, suspicion will now be erased, fully reset in time for Bronny James’s improbable emergence next spring as the Lakers’ gamechanging sixth man during an emotional “final” playoff run (by which we mean it would be the final one before LeBron James’s retirement tour, which might have to last two years so that he can play in every city while still navigating load management). Victory for Adam Silver.
Victory as well, however, for the NIT.
You can say what you will about the 2024 NIT, and many of you fuckers have. But the 2024 NIT was a masterclass in postseason drama. Tom Crean’s Selection Sunday-defining rant. Ohio State’s shocking collapse. Jizzle vs. Cream. Indiana State’s run to a national championship at Hinkle Fieldhouse, one stopped short by Seton Hall’s crowd-gutting comeback in the final minutes. At the time, we quietly smiled at this, all class as the NIT’s little brother tournament continued to struggle to make anything remotely exciting happen on its football stadium courts. Now? Now, we’re beating our chests. Because it wasn’t just The Loser’s Bracket* that the NIT beat. It was the rest of the sport of basketball. Barring a return to 1992 levels of Olympic hype, the NIT will have been the most exciting basketball tournament of the 2024 calendar year.
Good luck opting out of that.
*We’re trying referring to the NCAA T*urnament as The Loser’s Bracket. Join us!
Etc.
- College World Series fans are arriving in Omaha, kicking off one of the great American parties. On that party note, before the baseball begins: The jello shot challenge is probably jumping the shark. The jello shot challenge was great as a subplot, an undercurrent to the party theme. Now, it’s getting so much coverage it risks overshadowing the party itself. It’s reached the point of fame where the winning fanbase might not necessarily be the hardest-partying or the best-represented. Those things will help, but an increasingly relevant variable is how inclined said fanbase is to compete in the jello shot arena. There is a point where caring about jello shots gets weird. The winning fanbase is probably going to be at that point.
- Shilo Sanders’s bankruptcy trial is in the news again, and it is really weird. The eldest child from Deion Sanders’s second marriage and a defensive back for Deion Sanders’s Colorado Buffaloes, Shilo got in a fight with a security guard at some recruiting farm/charter school in Dallas back in 2015. The security guard sued him for damages, but Shilo wasn’t present at the 2022 trial, possibly because the court couldn’t get a hold of him. Now, he owes upwards of eleven million dollars, and his attorney is telling people Shilo will tell his side of the story at a bankruptcy trial. Is this unusual for the bankruptcy court? The attention, I mean. Of course it’s unusual. Everything about the Sanders family is unusual. For everyone. Everywhere. Always.
