With intelligence and perspective, we've dulled our pleasure centers and curbed our ability to produce meaning for ourselves. Read more »
Colin McGowan - Basketball Analysis
The NBA MVP And The Eternal Rearranging Of Lists
The Lottery Pick Gleam Still On Kris Dunn
We are not making it all up in our heads, thinking well of Kris Dunn because we want to: he has real talents to bring, and a body that for the time being will allow him to use them. Read more »
You Partially Remember, Or Not At All
There's been a discussion, both lately and near-constantly over the past seven or eight years, about how carefully the minutes of most NBA stars are managed. Your experience watching these games, or not, exists beyond the plane of problems and solutions. Read more »
Cavs Remain More Cute Than Contender, For Now
Against the transformation of Donovan Mitchell, the Cavs are broadly unsettled. This is mostly a good thing. Read more »
The Distinct Experience Watching The Raptors
The Raptors play in a way that emphasizes their length. They appear in your imagination as a mass of adolescent sycamores with limbs like an interstate highway system. Read more »
Kyrie Irving Provides Nothing To Engage With Beyond The Initial Provocation
It is immensely sad and angering when rich and famous people poison the cultural water supply because they are bored, or unwell, or the morphine drip of public attention has slowed, and they are itching for engagement. Read more »
The Limits Of NBA Media Day
This is the time when everything is happily, vaguely defined. Read more »
Donovan Mitchell Playing At Superstardom Or Homecoming Hero
What Donovan Mitchell is seeking, beyond the experience of living and working in a massive media capital, is not personal growth so much as to be glimpsed from a fresh angle. Read more »
Kevin Durant Will Never Resolve All The Contradictions He's Accrued
Kevin Durant is fickle and shortsighted and a little bit tragic, the second-best player of his generation searching in vain for a single achievement that will certify him, in some cosmic sense. Maybe fleeing to Boston is the least imperfect solution. Read more »
Bradley Beal Has Become The Anomaly Of The Player Empowerment Era
Bradley Beal might be happier, or at least less dogged by criticism, in the league Kevin Garnett was drafted into, where it wouldn't be out of the ordinary for him to cash gigantic checks from a middling-to-awful franchise in perpetuity. Read more »
When Miami's Dream Flickered Into Delusion And Went Dark
When Jimmy Butler heaved that doomed, cannoning jumper he saw six or seven games into the future, kissing the trophy and cussing out doubters imagined and real. He lives in that dream perpetually, but it never felt closer at hand. Read more »
Brooklyn's Crisis Of Definition
Be careful of easy diagnoses, especially applied to teams that nobody likes, but: the Nets seem as if they were swept due to a bone-deep or perhaps cosmic apathy. Read more »
The NBA's Bigfoot
Zion Williamson came into the league a physical freak that college players couldn't handle and almost immediately it became apparent that 30-year-old pros didn't know what to do with him either. And now he's something between a myth and a punchline. Read more »
It Is Time For Ben Simmons To Become A Less Aggravating Version Of Himself
With Ben Simmons having gotten that trade he wanted, we can finally stop twisting ourselves in knots, stop calibrating what benevolent or rotten people we are by examining our role in the possibly fraudulent plight of a rich and famous athlete. Read more »
The Implausible Love Of Superstar, Executive
James Harden and Daryl Morey likely see themselves as mercenaries at this point. They only want to win a ring. It doesn't matter where or how, just so long as they get a solid share of the credit. Read more »
DeMar DeRozan Is In The MVP Conversation
Receiving MVP votes is a way of saying that a player touched greatness, that for a spell he was about as good as anybody else. And memory is fuzzy, memory is generous. Its appoximateness is appealing. Read more »
Haliburton, Sabonis Stuck In A Trade
When you are young and skilled in the NBA, you have the whole world in front of you. The whole world viewed through the prism of whatever town you're stuck in. Read more »
Andrew Wiggins Has Finally Become An All-Star But Not Quite
This is comfortably the most successful season of Andrew Wiggins' career, and it's been exactly successful enough to get him a piece of recognition he doesn't deserve. Read more »
Orlando Remains Strangely Unreal
As Markelle Fultz and Jonathan Isaac remain on the shelf and the rest of the squad can't quite get right, this is turning into a brutal wash of a season for the Magic. Read more »
De'Aaron Fox's Prolonged Funk
There is so much in front of De'Aaron Fox, and yet it feels at this particular time in his career that he's going to play through all of it smacking slightly of disappointment, not quite lining up with our early expectations. Read more »
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