who do you think

Because he died from eating too many pigs-in-a-blanket? If not then I don't get it.

The Time Warner contract (signed around then when cable and baseball interest were already on the way down) is what's making all this possible, right? When's this bubble popping? I was promised a bubble pop.

Yes. Great job playing dumb. Look up, someone wrote "gullible" on your ceiling.

Been on NBA reddit or any equivalent social media space lately? The disproportionate amount of gushing over a literal nothingburger (not a real trophy, nobody's season on the line, winners get some extra strip club money), the most visible posts/people treating it like March Madness, and negative opinions being either being downvoted off the page (reddit) or flooded with L's, clown emojis, and whatever else (everywhere else) makes it pretty obvious. > maybe people are just having fun and enjoying things So much fun that they're ready to pounce on any and all dissenters en masse.

New astroturfing script just dropped on the socials: "Isn't it wonderful that the small-market Indiana Pacers are in the (NBA meaningless meme cup) Finals? Isn't this great for the game? This is wonderful! This is what the IST is all about!" *we would have roofied Paul George and locked him in a vault to keep the small-market Indiana Pacers from eliminating Miami in 2013 or 2014 I'm right.

My opinion on the tournament itself is that I have no opinion, outside of my disdain for the awful courts. They moved some deck chairs around and drew some temporary divisions out of a hat. What annoys me is the obnoxious and blatantly obvious astroturfing campaign the NBA has launched in concert with this nothing idea, trying to frame it as some important and revolutionary thing, when it's just a format they ripped off from :censored:ing English soccer for a trophy that signifies absolutely nothing (because single-elimination is a crapshoot), and that no one will respect next to the actual championship trophy that goes in June. You basically just admitted this by stating how "incredibly cool" it is that two uggo flyover franchises that stand no chance in an actual full NBA playoffs have a chance to hoist the winter meme cup instead. (Hell, that's probably what this is all about; maybe the NBA is paranoid that fans of over half its franchises might be developing a complex about having zero chance to win in June - this year or ever - and this is how they think they can keep fans on the edge engaged. See, you guys can win a trophy too! Lol no not that trophy, Scott Foster is gonna fist your asses up to the shoulder in May, but we got a different trophy for you guys! A cooler trophy! This one was fought over on pink-and-green courts in Las Vegas while the NFL was still playing! See, there's a smile!) > but the games are better because of it! As if two decent teams have never engaged in a spirited, well-played contest in December before. We've gone from one dumb extreme narrative - the NBA literally doesn't matter and everybody's stoned until April - to the other dumb extreme of people (are call center bots people?) treating arbitrary games in December like March Madness and flooding you with L's and clown emojis if you don't go along with it. Tl;dr - the phoniness of it all is my problem

"People need to watch these December games now! Did you know that Sam Hauser gets money if the Celtics win? You don't understand, this changes everything! No NBA team has ever tried to win a regular season game in December before! This trophy matters! Teams will covet the distinction of being the best team of November and December! Why can't you just be positive and supportive of Lord Silver!"

"He was okay that one year when they were top 15 in a 30 team league" isn't the endorsement that you think it is, especially for a guy at a position that's supposed to serve as a team's defensive anchor. If Gobert is fine - better than fine, certainly better than Towns - when he gets dragged out and has to guard the perimeter, then legitimately what do you need Towns for? He's always a step slow defensively. If his best offensive play comes around the rim, why does he camp the perimeter all the time? Because he's soft. It's 2023, big guys that shoot threes and underwhelm on defense pretty much grow on trees now. No reason to pay one of them $36M to be doing that, especially in a league where there's always a handful of foolish GMs infatuated with underachievers like Towns and probably willing to part with something more valuable. Your words, not mine. Regarding fit issues, what the hell do you call last season? Popovich lost his mind after his wife died. Not that he was the most vanilla guy before, but I feel like that was when he started doing mildly unhinged things like this and hijacking his own press conferences to soapbox about some unrelated political BS.

Wasn't Kerr supposed to be a vegetable by now? I remember a bunch of stuff back in 16-17 about how he could barely make it out to the court because his spine was melting and it was a degenerative condition or something. EDIT: does [alternate term for vagina that starts with a P] automatically censor to LOLcat or did a mod do that?

The fans don't deserve it, but the organization definitely deserves to eat it. Trading three years of high-round draft picks and committing $230M in fully guaranteed money to someone who at the time a) was facing a number of serious allegations, b) had just sat out a full year because he ragequit on his old team for no reason, and c) was never good enough to justify such an over-the-top package in the first place... was really, really dumb. That the guy who has to write the checks (Haslam) is scummy even by NFL standards is the cherry on top.

They're both lumbering centers who, defensively, can't guard the perimeter or really stay with anyone besides the other team's center. Gobert is a DPoY-level rim protector, while Towns sucks defensively and everything he is good at (mainly scoring and making excuses) is highly replaceable, especially considering the Wolves also have Naz Reid behind them. Maybe in 2003 the twin towers thing would have been optimal since that's how everyone else was operating, but not now. (normally I hate the "today's NBA" argument, if only because it's typically made by the same kind of lazy idiots who kept spamming "paradigm shift" back during Tebowmania, but in this case it really is the reason) Generic Moreyball forward, poor man's Kyle Kuzma, most memorable NBA moment is starting a fight with Kelly Olynyk in a Celtics-Wizards playoff series in 2017 with actual tears in his eyes like that crying wojak meme. Regarding the bold... I think we can guess.

Because he's soft, overrated, and not needed with Gobert. He's not the reason they're 8-2.

Someone just needs to knock Green out cold. It's the only appropriate comeuppance for his career of BS, I still remember him holding Sabonis down on the floor in the backcourt during one of the Kings games last spring and nobody even cared. The league has never and will never do anything substantial about him, not with a gaping LOLcat like Adam Silver in charge and definitely not now that he's weaseled his way into the occasional TNT studio appearance. Minnesota sounds sufficiently pissed off about this, they've started off and this may help them keep it going. If they can trade Towns for something useful they might be a threat this year.

> reporting live from Adam Silver's colon

Neither would the Lakers, the Yankees would be nothing if they were still in Baltimore, the Angels only keep signing people (and will continue to do so) because of their weather plus cozy suburban location, the biggest destination cities for NHL players are warm tax havens where nobody cares, etc etc. Place is a sometimes. Miami (the location) is the carrot that gets their kind of people in the door and gives them license to work their players like dogs in training camp and beyond. Nobody wants to leave Miami once they get there. Having great scouts and great management so they can consistently find the right kind of players that can be (re)developed certainly helps a lot, but Miami itself is the key to all of it. This wouldn't work in Sacramento or probably anywhere else besides LA; they'd just end up running those guys off. (Maybe in Vegas it could work; if they get an expansion franchise, they'd do well to try and run it like the Heat, using Vegas as the hook.) The flipside to this is South Florida is a horrific sports market in terms of fan loyalty, so the Heat pretty much have to operate this way; keep that win total around 40 (at least; very doable in a league where half the teams are either actively tanking or demoralized and disinterested), keep unearthing the Caleb Martins and Max Struses and Udonis Haslems, keep enough of a foundation in place to lure the next star player(s) to bring you back into contention. If they were to ever try a full tear-down, tank-for-picks rebuild, they'll get about 30% attendance until it's over. Huh? You do realize that the Heat, Marlins, and Dolphins are all in-season at different times of the year, correct? South Florida sucks during baseball season and a good chunk of the NFL season.

Huh? How does this make sense? Who the hell came up with this garbage?

At least most of the floor here is typical wood tone, so we still have contrast. This one is merely unsightly as opposed to horrific. Are the zoomies gonna buy the courts too, just like they allegedly buy out all the new cherry blossom and AIDS needle themed city/icon/epic/whatever jerseys that get rolled out or recolored every year? There was zero reason for the league to do something like this except for attention. Like I said before, the NBA is shamelessly in its "no such thing as bad publicity" era and has gotten way hoggier than the NFL.

From what I've seen, Wemby moves around really well. The paranoia is that he's eventually going to get hurt because guys that tall almost always do, but he looks a lot more fluid out there than someone like Yao or Greg Oden.

"The big hit for the organization came early in the season as the television broadcast partner, Bally Sports and its parent company Diamond Sports, filed for bankruptcy in March." This seems relevant. Anyway, I wonder how likely the Red Sox are to go on a panic signing spree a la 2014-15. The general consensus seems to be that the team's Q rating is fading fast up there. The time seems right for one of those flailing-around, Hanley/Sandoval/two washed-up starters type of offseasons.

The Celtics are 4-0 after obliterating the Halliburton-less Pacers and hitting every three they took, then subbing in Hauser and Pritchard for garbage time and them hitting every three they took. Celtics reddit/twitter/internet is of course jerking themselves off about the offseason moves and how much better the team looks, as if last year's Celtics didn't start off on like a 67 win pace in exactly the same fashion before the other shoe dropped in December. > why do you look at reddit when all it does is make you roll your eyes and then go whine about it on a logos forum Don't worry about it.

Sounds like Bettman impersonating P.J. Carlesimo. Or maybe vice versa. I swear half of this thread is you embedding completely useless tweets. What does Ryan Drese think about all this?

Okafor is the street fighter, Ben Simmons is a thief, Fultz forgot how to play basketball after getting drafted.

First rounder in 2028, pick swap, and Clippers will send some other team's first rounder, I don't care to look up whose picks they own. The 2024 notable free agents class consists of Kawhi (never healthy and probably never will be again), Siakam (nothing special), Maxey (their own guy), Paul George (will be 34, reputation exceeds accomplishments), and old man LeBron. I don't see any of those guys turning this around. It might be Joever. In case anyone forgot, the Sixers had the #3, #1, and #1 picks from 2015-17 and found a bust who liked to get into street fights, a thief, and a guy with the yips. The fact that they got Embiid right before that takes some of the sting off, but... yeah. You can't really fault the picks either without being a MMQB.

Morey didn't get the guy he was in love with (Mann, whoever that is), so I'm guessing the league office got involved and encouraged Josh Harris to direct his employee to give the declining star what he wants. Maybe the pick swap will be worth something, if it activates after the transmission finally falls out for good on this cobbled-together Clippers' "superteam" that's always on at least one donut tire come April.