Proponents of the theory that the NBA is rigged have taken their fair share of hits lately. From the Lakers getting swept to the Heat failing to push the Finals to seven games to Meghan and Harry making The Ringer look silly, things that are bad for the NBA just keep happening. Chief among them? Victor Wembanyama ended up in the 31st-biggest market in American professional sports.
Take heart, NBA truthers.
This makes perfect sense.
A theory popular among my own mind (and many of those around me) heading into the Draft Lottery last month was that the NBA would steer this incoming generational talent to the Chicago Bulls. It added up perfectly: Huge city, huge brand in need of revitalization. The problem? That shaven weasel Adam Silver was too smart for us.
If Victor Wembanyama had gone to the Bulls, he would have either 1) gotten hurt, 2) become unable to shoot a basketball, or 3) died in a calamitous Rube Goldberg-inspired accident stemming from Jerry Reinsdorf forgetting how to drive a car and crashing into something load-bearing at the Advocate Center. On the Spurs? He’ll probably inspire Gregg Popovich to coach for four more years and develop into a stretch five with Jokić’s passing ability and Kawhi Leonard’s shot selection.
The NBA doesn’t need Wembanyama to be the best player ever. It does, though, need him to not be a bust. Too many top picks are busts. Ben Simmons? Bust. Markelle Fultz? Current reclamation project, but still a bust. Zion Williamson? Currently trying to suppress tapes of himself busting. If Cade Cunningham’s injuries don’t settle out, the NBA Draft is going to start to come under fire. Anthony Bennett doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page anymore.
In the Reddit era, the NBA can afford to play unexciting basketball. The NBA’s target demographic has no interest in watching games. What the NBA’s target demographic wants is an exhilarating offseason, one with a washed-up point guard being shipped around the country and Kevin Durant playing Go Fish with third wheels and ideally the Los Angeles Clippers occupying someone’s house again to stop them from talking to Mark Cuban. The NBA doesn’t need to win April and May, and it’s incapable of winning October through March. What the NBA needs is to win June and July. The NBA’s purpose in the sports media industry used to be to give summer fill-in radio hosts something to talk about other than baseball on the hottest days of the year. The generational heir to this is generating as many knockoff jersey sales in China as humanly possible. To do that, the NBA needs people to pay attention to the draft. For people to pay attention to the draft, more of these top picks need to start working out.
So, of course Basketball Voldemort didn’t send Wembanyama to the Bulls. If Wembanyama had gone to the Bulls, the draft itself may have imploded within three years. Instead, the guy sent the game’s next great talent somewhere he can actually become the game’s next great talent.
They can’t keep getting away with this.
What a Draft It Was
Twelve NIT alumni drafted. One great Shaka Smart appearance. Plenty of fodder for joking around on Twitter.
The Bulls responded heartily to everyone’s demands to “DO SOMETHING” by making a blockbuster trade of…multiple future second-round picks for Julian Phillips. It’s a fine deal, Phillips is a fine player, I think the Bulls might think the NBA has an NIT, and I admire their desire to occupy that sphere in the sport but I wish someone would tell them that there is not an NIT in the NBA. Not yet. Oh, also, Lonzo Ball’s missing the whole season next year. Is Lonzo Ball dead? Did Lonzo Ball die in a calamitous Rube Goldberg-inspired accident stemming from Jerry Reinsdorf forgetting how to drive a car and crashing into something load-bearing at the Advocate Center?
Aaron Rodgers Likes Spelling
Mike Florio got his hands on the audio from Aaron Rodgers’s talk at the psychedelics conference, and it did not disappoint. Excerpts from Florio’s post:
“You know,” Rodgers said, “words are so interesting. They have such power in their spells. There’s a reason it’s called ‘spelling,’ because the way that the letters are put together have such power.”
“It’s gonna be hard to cancel me,” he said of his initial ayahuasca experience. “Because previous year, 26 touchdowns, 4 interceptions, we had a good season. Ayahuasca, 46 touchdowns, five interceptions, MVP.”
I would make a joke that Aaron Rodgers’s homepage is his Pro Football Reference page, but I don’t think Aaron Rodgers has a homepage. I think he always browses in Incognito Mode to stop the array of societal forces allied against him from getting their hands in his cookie jar.
Joe Kelly Sees Some Friends
The White Sox host the Red Sox this weekend, and man. 2018 was fun. That was the best Joe Kelly season I could draw up. What a rollercoaster.
One fun thing about Joe Kelly’s position as the trade deadline approaches is that everyone can always use bullpen help. Add into this that Chaim Bloom probably at least somewhat wants to appease fans without sacrificing too much young value, and the Red Sox are a decent bet for a team who could pursue our guy so long as they can stay in contention. If it happens, it’d be great for the game, and great for us as Joe Kelly fans. Love them or hate them, the Red Sox get attention, and that is a good thing for Joe Kelly’s brand.
What else is good for Joe Kelly’s brand? He passed 20 innings on the season over these last few weeks, which makes it easier for us Joe Kelly bloggers to find categories where he ranks highly when selectively sorting the FanGraphs leaderboard. Check these out:
Of the 399 pitchers who’ve thrown 399 innings or more, Joe Kelly is…
- 21st in xERA
- 40th in FIP
- 62nd in K/BB ratio
- 1st in Vibes
That’s a pretty good résumé.
Dammit, MLS
Christian Bale—oop, sorry, that’s Batman.
Gareth Bale (Welsh dude, played for Tottenham Hotspur and Real Madrid before retiring to LAFC) said this week, when talking about Lionel Messi’s upcoming move to Major League Soccer, that “(In MLS), they accept losing a bit more. There is no consequence. You can’t get relegated over there.”
Come on, guys.
That’s embarrassing.
Bale was complimenting the situation, I think, or just highlighting what might be a pleasant difference for Messi in the later stage of his career. He didn’t intend it as a knock on Major League Soccer. But it’s a knock on Major League Soccer. It’s a gigantic knock on Major League Soccer. When people from other countries are talking about coming to do anything in America, their first reaction should not be, “Oh it’s way lower pressure.” We’re supposed to be a big stage! New York, ever heard of it??
It does bring up two observations, and the first one’s obvious: As many have acknowledged, MLS dropped the ball in the biggest way when it didn’t set up promotion and relegation from the outset. The Big Four leagues are too set in their places to do that now (no owner will agree to the risk of calamity), but MLS could’ve done it. Part of why so few people care about MLS is that the players and teams are way worse than others we can easily watch, but another part is that there’s no upward or downward mobility, and with so little history, there aren’t championship droughts and the accompanying long-suffering fans. Baseball had the Cubs. Basketball had the Nuggets. Hockey has the Leafs. Football has the Bears. There are plenty of others. In MLS, the oldest team is younger than me, and the way teams build fans is by being good. No one has had enough time to complete the good/bad/good cycle at depths sufficient to build anything other than a whimsical, tourist-like fanhood among a significant subset of their city’s population. MLS could have manufactured adversity in its third season, when it expanded to twelve teams, by establishing a first and second division. The teams could have still played each other, but the standings could have been broken in two, with teams in the bottom six needing to win their way into the top. There could have been stakes. Instead, “There is no consequence.”
The second observation is more about soccer itself.
Soccer isn’t the most exciting game in the world. I like watching it a lot, but in most cases, it’s a relaxed watch. You wait and you wait and you drink your coffee and then finally someone breaks through with a goal and you say, “Look at all those English people celebrating. That seems fun for them.” Then you get up and have a wee, because you got excited and you drank a little too much coffee! It only gets tense when there are, as Bale pointed out, stakes attached. When Burnley was facing relegation in the spring of 2022, I was watching even other teams in the EPL with a pit in my stomach. I threw the remote when Everton tied Leicester in stoppage time. And I started following Burnley as a joke!
In Europe, soccer has successfully developed intensity by having stakes everywhere, all the time. Teams are facing relegation. Teams are playing for promotion. Teams are trying to qualify for a Europe-wide league. Teams are trying to get various monkeys off their backs from various cups. Even Manchester City fans had something under their skin for years because no matter how much they dominated in England, they couldn’t win the Champions League until this season.
I’m wondering, then, if part of soccer’s draw overseas is the quantity of places in which you have to measure up. There is always another mountain. There is always some sort of wolf at your heels. Leicester shocked the planet in 2016. Seven years later, they’re on their way into the terrifying uncertainty of a relegated world. In MLS, Austin FC has a nice new stadium and some fun novelties. It has diehards, but as we’ve talked about before, they’re diehards by choice, not by being born into it or by organically falling in love. They decided to be diehards.
Austin hosts Houston tomorrow night. The Houston Dynamo. Or Houston Dynamo FC, rather. They’re trying to do the “FC” thing while still having a nickname. Because MLS pretends to follow what works in soccer, but really tries to follow what works for the NFL. Meanwhile, Burnley fans are trying to figure out whether Dara O’Shea, the Irish defender the club just bought from West Brom, is the right piece to help keep them in the Premier League beyond this coming season and keep a light on in a small city dissolving further and further into poverty and desperation.
“There is no consequence.”
Formula E’s in Portland
I didn’t think Formula E was real when I first heard of it, and not only because I’d accidentally created the same thing in my head in the form of CaliCar. (Speaking of CaliCar: What about a series called CaliphCar governed by Sharia law and specifically marketed towards supporters of ISIS?) It is, though, there is a series called Formula E, and the premise is: Motorsports, but ecofriendly! Buy a plane ticket to come watch a dozen electric cars race for 45 minutes until their batteries run out!
The news today is not that FE is in Portland. I do not care that FE is in Portland. The news today is that FE was once supposedly popular? I’m skeptical, but ESPN ran a piece today saying FE was once on the verge of overtaking Formula 1 in the U.S.A., and given how small F1 is in America (check its ratings against NASCAR’s, haters), I guess it’s possible they aren’t just making this up. Would love to see a number. Even just one number, please.
In other news on wheels, the state of Pennsylvania brought a jet dryer down from Pocono to help speed up reconstruction of the I-95 bridge that collapsed last week in Philadelphia. How’s that for ecofriendly?
