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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Brothers In Arms

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September 9, 2024
Music, Pop Culture, Rock, Soccer, Sports
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Disclosure: I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time around men directly related to each other recently. To that point, in three out of four recent weekends, I was surrounded by brothers, including my own. I’ve always enjoyed feeding off the fraternal vibe, yet I went to a college without Greek life. The camaraderie, the internal knowledge, the handoffs one can only perform with a certain degree of intimacy: this is what gets me.

From back-to-back bachelor parties through, of all things, a Phish festival, the brotherly tone has been a strong presence for me recently. And then, lo and behold: rumors of an Oasis reunion began haunting my phone on a recent Saturday.

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BluesBreaking NewsBreaking (John Mayall, 1933-2024)

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July 25, 2024
Blues, Music, Pop Culture, Rock
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I didn’t ask for a Les Paul[1] for my birthday one year because of Eric Clapton; I did it because of Jimmy Page, who by 1973 had become all of Rock Music, as far as what most of the U.S. and England – therefore, most of the popular rock music world at the time – had accepted and acknowledged should be. Page maximized what a Les Paul guitar could sound like and expanded that context further than its namesake, an incendiary jazz player in his own right, likely imagined.

I don’t know that my request happens, though, without Clapton’s playing on what is probably the definitive British blues record of that time, in a period when British blues is reviving American blues sensibilities.

The Beatles, the Stones, the Kinks, among others, witnessed it all and drew from it. “It,” in this case, is John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers. Mayall himself, a Macclesfield native son whose stretch we may not completely realize, died on Tuesday at 90, leaving an influence that extends at least as far as Cream and Fleetwood Mac.

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Promises, Promises

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June 18, 2024
America, Basketball, NBA
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It’s about Jaylen and Jayson, to be clear, but we’ll return to them. Everybody else involved with this Celtics run made it possible. To follow the blueprint for what the Spurs and Sixers were looking for in essence, and then pull it off as efficiently as they did, has to be maddening to detractors. Nevertheless, Boston was the best team in the league all season. It turns out: that means all season.

After seven years of will-they, won’t-they together, Jaylen Brown and Jayson Tatum finally put it together, albeit with the help of Jrue Holiday and Kristaps Porzingis, as well as mainstays returned or otherwise in Al Horford, Peyton Pritchard, Sam Hauser and Derrick White. Brad Stevens ran his game on the rest of the NBA. Now, finally, the Boston Celtics are the NBA champions.

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The Refusal

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May 21, 2024
Hockey, Sports
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New York Rangers fans themselves present with such variance that I never really know who or what is happening when they show up, even when watching a game in suspected good company, until they’re finished with an unsolicited monologue during a 0-0 second period, or until the Rangers score or surrender a goal – this is the style of critically-intensive, or at least intense, brand of Rangers fan I most encounter, who explodes in rage or laughs in sorrow, similarly red-faced in either case.

The Blueshirts went up 3-0 against the Carolina Hurricanes, one of the teams they specifically battled for the Presidents’ Trophy and, with it, the rights to home ice throughout the playoffs, and then lost two straight to force an anxious Game 6 in Raleigh.

With the familiar so close, the agony, the defiance, the broken brunch matinee that the Rangers being in a game 7 means for playoff hockey ratings, with Gary Bettman presumably seething over his hatred of hockey’s organic growth; with all of it staring them in the face, only a miraculous effort would save New York. Well then.

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Hit Cruise Control; Rubbed My Eyes

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May 20, 2024
Basketball, NBA, Sports
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As diabolical as Google searches have so quickly become recently, I’ll take a chance on the Industrial Metal and Supply Co. of California and concur that iron has a melting point of 2,800 degrees Fahrenheit. At some point, then, with enough energy driving it on either side, iron begins melting against iron.

The point is, it’s not a toughness thing: iron wears down either way. Having sharpened themselves against an MVP-level Joel Embiid and a noticeably heightened Tyrese Maxey, the New York Knicks pulled out an improbable six-game victory in the first round.

Against exact counterpoints in the Indiana Pacers – the fastest team in the NBA, whenever Tyrese Haliburton was in the lineup – the Knicks tried to grind the opponent again, only to now find themselves, “Metamorphasis”-like, ground. A parsimonious Knicks offense just kept losing options. In the spirit of the ’90s series preceding this one, the Pacers are more survivors than winners.

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Tomorrow: The Future

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May 19, 2024
Basketball, NBA
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Today: the now. The Dallas Mavericks closed out the Oklahoma City Thunder, everybody’s favorite “look at this team!” team for the second decade in a row, in a sixth game on Saturday night to advance to the Western Conference Finals, where they’ll meet the winner of the ridiculous Denver Nuggets-Minnesota Timberwolves series, those teams entering a Game 7. 

With MVP candidate Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and the now-underrated 2024 rookie do-everything big Chet Holmgren in tow and singing Aguilera to their hearts’[1] content, OKC dropped a 17-point lead. Melding at just the right time, Luka Doncic, Kyrie Irving and the rest of the Mavs had come into the series operating an offense which countered Harden-era Rockets isolations with Curry-led dictation in Golden State circa-2017 to great success.

Against a calling-all-cars Thunder defense, the Mavericks offensive plan fell apart, but Dallas kept pushing. Its stars shining, and role players inhabiting exactly their spaces, they put a mirror to the slightly younger, slightly-brighter Thunder. In so doing, they put away a new-era league darling, one that calls to the past while looking toward a different future.

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