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Josh Hart: “I Was Trying To Order Some Uber Eats”

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May 8, 2025
Basketball, NBA, Sports
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Different, but exactly the same. In a strain of cowardice that echoes fouling Mitchell Robinson for the sake of it when you know he’s burning you, I’m abandoning (most of) what I said after Game 1 except for how that game made me feel, fuck it all: the New York Knicks can do this. Whether I actually believe that…[REDACTED]

The hedges, the ankles, the stomachaches you wait until 3 pm local time to hear about on either team’s injury list; the weirdo, questionable inability to hit open shots at home, as defending champions; and here we are: the New York freaking Knickerbockers lead the aforementioned champion Boston Celtics, having now beaten them twice at home after twice being down by 20 points following Wednesday’s 91-90 win.

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I Will Tell of All Your Deeds

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May 6, 2025
Sports
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If I had to guess, right now is likely the absolute peak of this New York Knicks season[1]. Surely the odds favor that. Until some team bad enough to do it comes along, the Boston Celtics are the league standard for excellence and efficiency.

This still figures to be a slightly more disorderly slaughter, but a slaughter nevertheless. Nevermind all that: with Patrick Ewing in attendance and everything to prove, Jalen Brunson and his merry band of shithousers stepped right up and snatched one off the register in front of the Celtics’ eyes.

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His Name Is My Name, Too

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April 14, 2025
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Let’s talk names. Do you like your name? More to the point: Do you remember ever not liking your name?

Despite the compliments of people whom I assume are only trying to appease me to their own nefarious ends, it has taken me the majority of my life to like my own name. My brothers and I all have traditionally Irish names, but mine is the only one you wouldn’t readily misidentify for any other national origin. In my recollection, the one that matters in this case, nobody in South Carolina got it. No adults, anyway. More teachers than not through middle school assumed that my first name was a typo on the sheet and would ask if there was a “Cory” or, worse, the dreaded “Roy.”

Part of my distrust of and slow-burning resentment toward my own name was due to that initial imperceptibility to strangers. Naturally, though, the only people who got my name right from the start were those coming to put me in line: parents, teachers, youth group leaders, and otherwise the kind of Hidden Valley Ranch Davidians that the white Millennial recognizes instantly, like strangers who don’t want you biking too closely to their mailbox. A truth universally acknowledged: kids do not like hearing their own name from any of these people.

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Field-Reversed Configurations

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March 31, 2025
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In the middle of the third quarter of what would end up being a 39-point loss to the ascendent Houston Rockets, Kevin Durant, for all intents and purposes the only Phoenix Sun at this point as well as the guy who’d gotten Dillon Brooks ejected earlier in the game, collided with Jabari Smith and crumpled to the floor. He exited the game, a microcosm of how this Suns season has gone.

Reports suggest he’ll be out at least a week. With the Suns five games below .500, sitting eleventh in the Western Conference and with only seven games remaining, the slow burn of this disastrous year is reaching its flameout point. Trade rumors evoking Phoenix’s, ahem, Big Three of Durant, Devin Booker and Bradley Beal have been circulating for months.

At this point, if not much sooner, we can take some stock of what this era of Phoenix Suns basketball has meant as the team confronts the questions that will decide what the next era might look like. Namely: what does the team do with its stars, and with Booker in particular?

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Seeing Red Again

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February 26, 2025
America, Auto Racing, Politics, Sports
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Let’s leave aside the obvious for a moment — Jorge Martin’s injury, Pecco Bagnaia’s defrocking, Marc Marquez reclaiming the best bike on the grid, KTM’s financial stay of execution, the whole Liberty Media court case, CryptoData’s now expectedly collapsed vendetta against RNF — and focus instead on one very specific type of person: the much coveted theoretical fan of MotoGP who lives in the world’s largest market for sports entertainment.

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Let the Right One In

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November 19, 2024
America, Auto Racing, Music, Politics, Rock, Sports
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The first time I got an inkling it had gone right, not left, was when a woman cloaked head to toe in MAGA gear boarded the bus on my ride home. I’ll leave aside the notable aspect that this was a bus in downtown Chicago after 11 at night: Sat alone all the way up front, I happened to notice over her shoulder from rows back that she was glued to her phone watching a map of projections that had the country awash in red. At such a remove and with my eyesight not exactly up to the task, it was impossible for me to tell which channel she was streaming, but to make the rest of my long ride home from Thalia Hall less mentally taxing — and taking in some very conspicuous context clues — I figured it was Newsmax.

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A Well-Trained Crew

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November 15, 2024
Basketball, NBA, Sports
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While we aren’t yet twenty games into the NBA season, the generally-accepted sample size for knowing what a team looks like and, more importantly, what it’s about, some useful-enough things have happened that we can start to posit theories: the post-championship Celtics remain dominant; neither of the Knicks nor Timberwolves is necessarily better nor worse than before That KAT Trade; the Phoenix Suns maybe, possibly have it figured out; and, perhaps most noticeably to the average viewer, everybody just wants to jack threes.

In the age of players like Kevin Durant and Victor Wembanyama, arborescent men who can reliably shoot threes, spacing has become even more paramount than when Steph Curry initially began running rampant from 22+ feet. Even a player like Brook Lopez, who didn’t hit a three until his seventh season in the NBA, has been crucial for keeping defenders honest, allowing Bucks teammate Giannis Antetokounmpo to take advantage of the space Lopez’s outward movement affords him.

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(Approximately) 30 Thoughts On 30 NBA Teams, 2024-’25 Edition

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October 22, 2024
Sports
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Hello.

Did we enjoy a summer of Olympic basketball, and did we dip our toes into the WNBA for the first time? (Not separate questions, by the way, until it is: Brittney Griner, 2024 gold medalist). When it isn’t your battle, it isn’t worth fighting: just know where they get their weapons. Fighting ain’t for peace.

On the way to never letting people watch basketball in real time again, the NBA signed broadcast deals with various partners who will continue to divide and devour the broadcast schedule, causing a big problem for the league’s streaming partners, which will once again rise: cable television. Who are we kidding? This NBA season will have no direction without the protagonists of every season: Adrian Wojnarowski and Zach Lowe, both formerly of ESPN. The Inside The NBA gang, however detrimental to actual basketball they may be, remain a reason to tune in, yet their presumptive farewell tour begins tonight. Come on, save us.

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Freedom Ain’t [Phee]

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October 21, 2024
Sports
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They did it. They actually did it. After 28 seasons of existence, and in the final WNBA Finals of the best-of-five format before moving to best-of-seven next year, the New York Liberty finally won their first championship in the full five games featuring two overtimes it took to undo the Minnesota Lynx, featuring Defensive Player Of The Year and MVP runner-up Napheesa Collier (awesome playoff run, and thanks for the headline, but: we will not be hearing about her for the remainder of this post). Behind Finals MVP Jonquel Jones and Nyara Sabally, the latter of whom put up a much-needed thirteen points and six rebounds in seventeen minutes off the bench Sunday night, the Liberty won 67-62.

Despite Sabrina Ionescu’s (1-19; alt text: ONE FOR NINETEEN FROM THE FIELD) and Breanna Stewart’s (4-15; alt text, but slightly – only slightly – more cordial this time: FOUR FOR FIFTEEN FROM THE FIELD) worst efforts on offense of their respective playoffs, the Liberty’s defense carried them through. The New York Liberty are the WNBA champions.

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BREAKING: ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski To Sleep, Finally

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September 19, 2024
Basketball, NBA, Sports
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Adrian Wojnarowski’s tweets were the only ones I ever received directly to my phone. I cut that off right around when his relationship with agents would upend the NBA Draft broadcast in a way that made Woj himself start using verbs like “tantalized” with regard to Robert Williams III, or “zeroing in on” Kevin Huerter, but for a few years, I would open my phone and, usually, nod my head in agreement with “sources say” reports from the same man a few hours earlier.

As the chief news-breaking person of the NBA since his days at Yahoo! Sports, Woj barnstormed Twitter basically from its inception, giving the real heads credence and giving credence to the fringe candidates, letting them know and postulate about trades and draft picks hours before anyone would get back to a computer and realize that Carmelo Anthony didn’t play for the Nuggets anymore.

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