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
Sports
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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
Sports
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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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You Know You Sometimes Lie

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February 3, 2025
America, Basketball, NBA, Olympics
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“I don’t do anything that’s scary.” – Nico Harrison, Dallas Mavericks general manager, February 2nd, 2025, right after taking one of the wildest, most inexplicable swings in NBA history.

Firstly, no: I have no idea why the Dallas Mavericks would do this, “this” being trading Luka Dončić for Anthony Davis, which is exactly what they did late Saturday night. Secondly, yes: I do think LeBron and Luka can work it out as an oversized Tatum-Brown spanning generations and leading a dynamite offense, if only anybody on the Lakers could defend anymore. 

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Garth Hudson, 1937-2025

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January 22, 2025
America, Blues, Folk, Jazz, Movies, Music, Pop, Pop Culture, R&B, Rock
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The very first sound anyone hears on the Band’s debut LP Music From Big Pink is that of an organ, melancholically ascending ahead of introducing the other instruments and Richard Manuel’s voice, a kind of knock on the front door from an old friend. It’s sad and haunting, familiar and forlorn, an extension of Bob Dylan’s “wild, thin mercury” sound of Blonde On Blonde. 

“Tears of Rage” opens Big Pink, having traversed from a slow folk grind in Dylan’s hands on The Basement Tapes to a steady, driving lament. Behind the organ was the oldest and last remaining member of the Band, Garth Hudson, who passed away in his sleep on Tuesday morning in Woodstock at 87. 

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You Might Say I’m Unlearned

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December 28, 2024
America, Blues, Folk, Movies, Music, Politics, Pop, Pop Culture, Religion, Rock
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One thing that you need to know about my viewing of A Complete Unknown was that I saw it with a couple of coworkers from college work-study in the heart of Times Square on Christmas Day. Later on that night, I ate some of the best risotto I’ve ever had at the home of a separate college friend from the same job in Astoria. It was a normal day, before I rung the fallout shelter bell.

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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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