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You remember that time that Oscar Robertson averaged a triple double for a season (in '62) and it was considered one of the best seasons ever even though by pace it was basically a 10-3-3? And then Westbrook did basically the same thing only in the modern NBA and at modern pace and people criticized him for "not playing defense" and "losing a lot" and "only averaging a triple double and breaking the record for triple doubles in a season because he wanted to look cool," but they gave him the MVP anyway because of my very influential and convincing article? That was really something. One of the big historical achievements in NBA history, and we were all there to witness it.

And then he did it again this year and nobody fucking noticed.

I don't even get it. Like, I'm the poster child for explaining why media biases and whatever "narrative" is fuck up fans' perceptions of what's actually going on in sports, and even I don't understand how nobody noticed what Westbrook was doing this year. Admittedly there were fewer fourth-quarter explosions this time around, and the scoring fell off a little, but still: Russell Westbrook just averaged only the third triple double in NBA history, with a 25.4-10.1-10.3. Can you imagine what would have happened if LeBron had put up these numbers? No, seriously-- he would have gotten a unanimous MVP. He would have been proclaimed the Greatest GOAT Of All Time. Delonte would have welcomed him back into the James household with open arms. But Westbrook does it twice in a row and nobody cares. Just because LeBron is way better than him and has actually done things like winning in the finals and playing defense ("has done" implying, obviously, that both of these things are in the past and are not likely to happen again), we don't care that Westbrook put up maybe the fourth most impressive seasonal statline in NBA history? Are we so far removed from conventional stats that we genuinely don't care that we just saw probably the only two triple-double seasons we're likely to see in our short and miserable lives, back to back?

I'm not even saying he should win MVP. He should, but only because James Harden is a cancer on the NBA and any minor shock of disappointment in his life is like mother's milk to me. Actually, can we change subjects real quick and talk about how I literally don't watch Houston games anymore because watching Harden flop around like a fucking fish is so painful? I'm not even going to link to anything here, because if you're reading this blog and you haven't seen Harden jumping onto someone's back to draw a defensive personal foul, you're just willfully ignorant. If the Rockets and Celtics make the finals, which it looks like has about a 40% chance of happening, I legitimately might not watch them, which will be the first finals I'll've missed since like 2007 (and I honestly might have watched that and just forgotten).

Longer articles mean better journalism, so here are some more sneers and jeers for NBA players I dislike.

• Anthony Davis, your unibrow looks like shit, because it's a fucking unibrow. It's like if I were the player known for playing with like feces smeared all over my face. Oh, what a branding opportunity! Except I'd still look better than you, you ugly-ass unibrow-having-ass motherfucker. (I'm so glad no one reads this blog.)
• Kevin Durant, I'm not even going to address the whole bitch-made Golden State thing, because I already know you're sensitive on the subject. But remember when people were talking about how you're like a great defensive player and then you were like, sike, I'm still mediocre-as-fuck Kevin Durant on D? And how everyone keeps pretending that you're somehow the second-best player in the league but you're only like in the argument for the second-best player on your team?
• And you nicknamed yourself Servant. The fucking Servant. And this was BEFORE you quit out on your team to go join the 73-9 Warriors.
• Ben Simmons can't shoot. He doesn't even try to shoot. I'm still pretty sure he's shooting with the wrong hand. He looks pretty good for a guy that can't shoot, but there just isn't precedent for someone this bad making it in the NBA.
• What the fuck, Raptors?
• And how are the Celtics this good? They lose maybe their two nominally best players (even though I've never exactly been high on Kyrie or Hayward) and they're suddenly the best team in the East? I'm all for them making the finals and losing, but if they WIN with a team led by Al fucking Horford and a couple of 20-year-olds, I'm not going to be happy.
• Why the fuck is Israel monolingual? Yiddish is such a cooler language than Hebrew, linguistically, and it's way more relevant to the survivors of the Holocaust, which is the whole damn point. But now it's dying because of linguistic chauvinism.
• Microsoft Edge is claiming now to be the fastest browser, but it still feels slow as fuck and clunky to use. Plus Chrome has finally caught up to Firefox with the extensions (although it still crashes when I have too much shit open and it's got massive fucking memory leaks -- seriously, where's the good browser these days?), and I have literally no idea what the Edge extension situation is.
• Why does the dude from Rancid sound so weird when he sings? Like weirdly British or something, even though he's allegedly American? And plus the dude from Kings of Leon. And Kendrick fucking Lamar. Am I the only one who notices these things? I've actually googled "Kings of Leon singer sounds weird" and found nothing. Is that how everyone else thinks people sound when they sing?
• Climate change is going to kill us all and nobody's doing anything about it because nobody notices or cares and because global capital is destroying any sense of moral obligation or social contract between government and governed. We've replaced morality with profitability and nobody seems to care. This is not a welcoming world. This is a broken world, heading rapidly for catastrophic ecological disaster. Doesn't anyone realize that the Great Filter is inevitable self-annihilation?
• The 118-110 Golovkin-Álvarez scoring is probably one of the most outrageous boxing-related stunts I've ever seen and is, for me, categorical proof that boxing is at least as fixed as basketball. I also find it funny, for the record, that people pretend that the NBA is like pristine and unfixable when this already fucking happened. Remember the big sweeping reforms to root out and destroy referee corruption? Yeah, me neither.
• Why the fuck aren't we holding floppers accountable? There was a tiny little effort a few years back that's just been abandoned. I had two good ideas for curtailing flopping. The first one was the exponential approach: for a player's nth career flop, they're fined $10^n. That'll stop them right quick, but it's still only my second-best idea. The other one is this: You get two warnings. Starting with your third flop (and we'll review them to make sure they're legit, don't worry) we cut off one of your fingers. After twelve flops you're probably not in the NBA any longer anyway.
• The obsession with advanced stats in basketball has become a problem. Advanced stats are for nerds. All I care about is flashy dunks.
• Oh also there's this weird obsession now with claiming that Kobe's all-defensive teams are increasingly illegitimate. It started with this claim that his last few were undeserved, and then it spread to like the whole latter half of his career, and now people are claiming that he was never even a good defender, which is kind of like when Tolstoy claimed that Shakespeare "can not be recognized either as a great genius, or even as an average author." The truth is that all of Kobe's All-Defensive teams were voted on by NBA coaches, and they were all legitimate. Suck my balls.
• I started writing this article on why Jordan is overrated and it grew and grew and I never published it and now it's like 15 pages long and still not done. I'd finish it and publish it but no one's going to read it, so I'm going to wait until I get famous and do it then. It's not like you're going anywhere, dear reader.

Peace.

Luka Dončić is a BUST and other exciting news

So I have this to say.

Luka Dončić is going to bust.

This is considered a crazy thing to say by most basketball fans. Their argument basically hinges on these points:

1. Dončić is dominating Euroleague, which is widely considered the second-best basketball league in the world (just ahead of my YMCA league but behind my intramural 3v3 Claremont Consortium league). This is true, but it's also missing a few key points about what Euroleague basketball actually looks like, which I'll get to in a bit.
2. Dončić is basically the best European prospect ever, and has a skillset that looks like it will translate fairly well to modern NBA basketball. This is because he's allegedly a killer three-point shooter (he's 30.9% this year from the Euro three, which I'm going to assume is the FIBA three, i.e. 19.25 inches shorter than the NBA three, which is just... so impressive) and is allegedly a great passer (cards on the table, I do actually think he's a pretty good passer).
3. Supposedly he's a "sure thing" with a "high floor," both of which are bullshit platitudes NBA fans tell themselves to convince themselves that they're not completely awful at projecting players -- which they are. Accept this. NBA front offices get paid millions of dollars to be very wrong about player prospects. Fans are almost guaranteed to be worse (unless they're me). The thing is, in the NBA there are no sure things (because Darko Miličić, Michael Beasley, Kwame Brown, and Sam Bowie exist, in case you forgot) and there are no high floors (because... you get the picture). Dončić's floor, much like everyone's floor, is Anthony Bennett.

Let's first double back to Euroleague and explain why it's a garbage league full of garbage players. Basically, Euro guys can't play D. I'm not trying to be like continent-ist, but seriously, go watch any Dončić tape and watch what the guys trying to defend him are doing. He has the slowest first step I think I've ever seen in a "high-end" prospect, and guys go FLYING. He gets wide-open shots because every single European pro is a sub-NBA-quality athlete (which is why they're Euro pros, if you were wondering), with a handful of exceptions, of which Dončić is supposedly one. Even if we give them lots of respect in the skill department (which I'm categorically unwilling to do; these are not NBA-adjacent players no matter how you slice it), there's no question that there's a big imbalance between how they compare to NBA players skill-wise and how they compare athletically. Dončić is feasting on guys who wouldn't make NBA benches, but somehow this gives him the highest floor in the draft?

Dončić is not projected as a particularly strong defensive prospect, and rightly so. But this means he's being drafted strictly on offensive merit, and he's playing against guys who are, defensively, at what I'd feel comfortable calling sub-D-I level. In other words, the supposedly higher level of competition in Euroleague vs. NCAA doesn't apply here; Dončić is in fact benefiting from the relative lack of athleticism in Europe.

I don't have a horse in this fight (my Lakers aren't going to have a top-two pick hopefully ever again, and don't pick until 25 this year, and plus I don't have much love for either top-two team this year, although I prefer the Suns). I just like making predictions and being proven right and then having no one ever pay attention. It's kinda my thing. (And yes I'm still coming back to that, because holy shit I got every one of those predictions right, except the Bortles Pro Bowl thing.)

Other Stuff

• I really like Deandre Ayton. I love his offensive game. He's the best big-man finisher I've seen in YEARS (as in I could see him being the best offensive big man since Yao, no shit), and he's got some nice range. I have concerns about his D, but with that kind of athleticism (I mean what the fuck) I have confidence he'll figure it out. Or he won't. Phoenix's problem, not mine.
• By the way, Phoenix is taking Ayton. Dončić will go to Sacramento, where he belongs.
• I also really like Mo Bamba, and not just because his name sounds like a bad reverse-portmanteau of Mamba. I like him for the opposite reasons of why I like Ayton. His offensive game is super shaky and his shot is streaky (but rangy), but on D he's one of the better shot-blockers I've ever seen at the college level. I think he has upside in the Mutombo range on D.
• I'm kind of in love with Trae Young. Only in this fucked-up basketball antifan world could we watch a freshman become the first PLAYER to ever lead the nation in points and assists in the same season and conclude that he's overrated. I mean, what the fuck? I'm saying that a lot lately, but shit, everyone is wrong about EVERYTHING IN THIS DRAFT. The other thing I love about Young, besides the fact that he's just obviously the best offensive prospect in this draft class and one of the best ever (because duh), is that he takes more of his threes from NBA range than any other prospect I've ever seen. Like 90%+ of his three point attempts are from 24+ feet, often way more. He's taking 30-footers like Steph, and making a really solid number of them (he shot 36% from primarily the NBA three, which is way better than probably any college prospect ever). His defensive ceiling is limited, but shit, so is Dončić's, and nobody's saying Trae Young is the best player in this draft (even though he is). I'm going to have to become a part-time fan of whatever team drafts him.

For context (this the Trae Young show now), two freshmen have ever led the NCAA in scoring, and three freshmen have ever led it in assists (most recently the great Lonzo Ball, if you were wondering). Young is one of each. I don't care if he's 5'5 with a 6-second 40 (what sport is this?), that's incredible.  It's one of the great achievements in college sports history. (Also up there: Pete Maravich leading the nation in scoring three years in a row, with an average average of 44.2 PPG.) And, by the way, he's not; he's like 6'2 with a 6'3 wingspan, which isn't ideal, but is about half an inch shorter (wingspan) than Steph Curry's, an inch and a quarter shorter than Chris Paul's, and 3.5" longer than T.J. Ford's, who's the other freshman to lead the NCAA in assists. This obviously isn't a guarantee that Young will succeed defensively in the NBA, but it is evidence that he isn't exactly a T-Rex/Isaiah Thomas/Nate Robinson type coming in with a great shooting talent and very little else.

Someone get me off this subject. Let's talk about Mitchell Robinson.

Mitchell Robinson is weird. He was dominant in high school (think 15-20 points, 11-14 rebounds, 4-8 blocks, depending on competition), then went to Western Kentucky (?) and got immediately cut (behavioral). He's basically been chilling for a year and is now available for the draft, but it's really hard to predict what kind of a prospect he actually is. This is literally (according to Wikipedia) unprecedented.

Also interesting: Robinson has intimated and all but stated outright that he won't play for anyone but the Lakers (who pick, again, at 25, which is just a little behind where he's projected). Hello there.