Haha, Knicks.
That’s a nice rebuild by the Jazz, IMHO. The Team with Gobert was an 82 game team, rather than a 16 game team (per Draymond):
It seems kind of weird to pair your up-and-coming All-Star point guard with another undersized ball-dominant guard, even if he’s Donovan Mitchell. At least they didn’t give up many real assets for him.
Just their last 3 first round picks and three more. IMHO, that’s a lot.
Someone also mentioned they could try to swing a KD trade with Garland and Allen.
Yea, they may be several years off but it is a lot to give up.
Maybe. Utah now has seven first round picks to play around with (they got four for Gobert) , and Sexton is a real talent.
E. G. Think Brooklyn might deal KD for some of those picks? Especially if they start slow?
They have the kind of capital that teams looking to shed a superstar will listen to (or probably beg for) if things aren’t panning out. And a lot of cap space. A LOT.
And a team which might be good enough to make the playoffs as a 7-10 seed play in team even if they stand pat (tho it will be tough, especially in the West with Kawhi coming back to the Clippers.
Does KD want to go to Utah? I think he has a no trade, so he can pick where he goes.
Tweeter is an AP sports writer
https://twitter.com/williegramirez/status/1567379432813502464?s=46&t=GuCDxgrnrZrbDQbUAzDZmQ
deleted or bad link
The NBA has to be breathing a big sigh of relief.
Normally this is when a Russian billionaire tries to step in, but they are having some global issues right now.
Does Bezos want a team?
Smaller drama, but after the Twolves’ Anthony Edwards posted a pretty gross Instagram Reel calling a bunch of shirtless men “queer-ass n*'s,” the league unsurprisingly fined him a solid $40k for the conduct. Except now, the Nuggets’ Aaron Gordon tweeted Ant-supportive tweets a couple of times and then swiftly deleted them after getting dogpiled over it.
Homophobia probably runs pretty rampant in the league (see: no active gay players coming out over it, the stupid fuckin hubbub over the gay sex allegations with Dwight Howard a few years ago, numerous other famous players making horrible homophobic remarks over the years, etc.), and I really hope Ant’s remarks aren’t gonna give a bunch of players the excuse they’ve been waiting for to start lambasting the LGBTQ community out one side of the mouth while promoting other oppressed groups’ causes out the other, sigh.
But in a league where a bunch of dudes seem fully bought into the creepiest, most culty kinds of Christianity, it wouldn’t exactly be surprising.
To think it was only about a week ago that Kyrie reposted an old Alex Jones conspiracy rant on his Instagram feed!
In other bad news, SGA suffered an MCL injury and is going to miss the start of the season.
Oh good, rich guy gets to make Billions over getting cancelled.
Maybe $2b for the team.
As for the anti-gay stuff, these are guys who have led ( most of them) very protected lives that led to instant wealth and no doubt they share the athletes macho attitude.
I don’t know how the negative attention he’s received will make that more likely to happen, but along those lines, the NBA still has the tricky China problem. No easy answers.
Did I miss something, or is this an attempt to find an easy target to blame for an awkward problem?
I did see a headline recently that Tim Hardaway Jr blamed his religious upbringing for his past hatred.
It’s a little like the vax thing. Every time a Kyrie flies off the deep end talking about the vast state conspiracy to oppress humanity via lifesaving medical care, you get a half-dozen or so seemingly more sensible stars (which, given that the comparison is to Kyrie, is a low bar to clear) like Draymond or Wiggins or Iguodala piping up with moderate little supportive statements on podcasts and social media – “I’ve got Kyrie’s back on this one” type shit.
Which, like, hey, I get sticking up for your buddies sometimes. But when your buddy is spreading antivax conspiracy nonsense or dropping homophobic vids on the 'gram, maybe just let em receive their well-deserved roasting and think a little on why the rest of the world understands whatever dumbass thing they said to be unquestionably terrible.
Trying to stay away from “shut up and play ball” type thinking on it; anybody with a widely available public platform should never be giving credence to that kind of thinking, and society rightly condemns them when they do.
A LOT of the NBA do come up super sheltered and insulated, like @Scuzz mentions – you’re shipped off to academies and dropped into the AAU circuit if you show enough talent and your family is connected enough, and if that works out, you get a solid ride to 1 year at a university that’ll quietly ensure you only really have to focus on The Game so long as you help them rake in the big NCAA bucks. And hey, when the reward is becoming a multimillionaire thanks to your genetic gifts and work ethic, I can’t fully blame families for siloing the kids in that hard; competition to get to the pro level is insane, so any tiny advantage you can eke out for your kid seems worth it, even if you are locking them away from a LOT of “normal life.”
For a lot of them, though, all that also includes extremely intense Christian upbringings. If you wanna thank your magic sky wizard for making your 3 point shots go in instead of the other guys’ after the finals, you do you, but when you’ve got dudes like Mark Jackson dragging players to his cult-y church and making Steph hop around on a genuinely fucked up ankle to prove the efficacy of faith healing, or dividing players in the locker room by insinuating the non-Christian player in the room is a demon-worshipper intent on destroying the team from within, and that shit flies with most of your team, you’ve moved into cuckoo for cocoa puffs territory.
And yeah, the Tims Hardaway wound up with some gross views on homosexuality resulting from their religious upbringings. Tim Sr. did a LOT of work to deprogram himself and make meaningful restitution to that community over a period of decades after being a gigantic shitbag about it back in a time when most people were. Sadly, that kind of meaningful inner change is rare.
Macho culture is a part of it, too; it’s no fun to be the gay kid on the HS football team or in the weightlifting room in gym class. How many “out” gay folks do we have in the men’s leagues of any of the major professional sports in the US? Cuz statistically, there’s more than a few of them out there, but they are keeping that shit very close to the chest, and there’s a reason for that. See also all the huge backlash surrounding trans athletes in the US at the moment; there’s a lot of shady people using dishonest “integrity of the sport” arguments to cover their rampant transphobia.
Sadly Black American culture also might have higher levels of homophobia than average, but I mostly ascribe that to the particularly fervent brand of xtianity that proliferates there. The churches have done a ton for that community over the centuries when the rest of the country was shitting on them 24/7, but sadly, are still deep into crazy-people territory, cuz, hey, religion. Besides, plenty of white players in the league, too, and I don’t see most of them rocking pride flags at the championship parades, either.
Anyway, mercifully, society at large is better on these things than it was, say, in the midst of the AIDS epidemic (though, woof, the response to monkeypox makes me feel iffy about even saying that much), but I think you’ll find a higher concentration of latent regressive attitudes toward the LGBTQ community within men’s professional sports in the US in general, and I don’t really want Ant sounding off and getting rightly drubbed for it to convince a bunch of guys I’m fond of to reveal the extensive thoughts they’ve been holding onto about “the gays.”
What a mess in Boston. This erupted over the past 24 hours. Udoka was caught having an affair with a team employee. So the issue is the fact that it’s against policy (for a good reason), but it’s devolving into a sex thing, and reporters have already come out and said so-and-so female employee was not involved. (And you imagine the social media will continue calling out female employees one by one).
Oh, yeah, and Udoka is married to Nia Long. So his wife has a massive following of her own.