People are not idiots. Everyone knows that when Woj reports something, it's out there on purpose.

Also, if you burn Woj and claim he didn't have the story right, he will bury you.

Sure, there's a zero percent chance Woj went off half-cocked, but look at the wording on the ESPN story: the Nets are "moving towards" hiring Udoka, with an official announcement "as soon as Wednesday". That's plenty of wiggle room if the Nets decide it's too bad a PR look. Not saying they will, I assume they'll stick to their guns, but I don't think it's a completely sure thing yet.

I am just seeing how Durant sez he was shocked and I almost blew a beer out of my nose.

KD: It's me or the coach
Joe Tsai: No
Joe Tsai: *fires coach*
KD: ?!?!?!

What Kyrie Irving thinks about me and my religion is not important to me, really. What hurt my heart in ways that still feel difficult to untangle was what came after. Sure, the Nets owner made a statement, and Nets broadcaster Richard Jefferson was critical of Irving on the air. The NBA issued a statement. The NBPA, where Irving is a vice president, also issued a statement. Everyone in basketball seemed very happy to issue statements—and then let what happened slide into the ether. (Notably, when reserve Miami Heat center Meyers Leonard used an antisemitic slur during a Twitch livestream last year, the league suspended him for a week and fined him $50,000. Both Heat coach Erik Spoelstra and longtime player Udonis Haslem spoke forcefully and swiftly about not tolerating antisemitic speech in the organization. Leonard, a marginal player, seems to be out of the NBA.)

During Monday’s broadcast, Eagle added that there are people with the Nets who want to have a “an actual dialogue with Kyrie about this, and would like to hear an acknowledgement from Kyrie about the reaction and an apology as well.” Re-listening to that on Tuesday morning, hours after the possible hiring of Udoka became news, I felt a familiar pang in my heart. I thought about all the Jewish team employees who are, like me, giving themselves the annual refresher course on the history of antisemitism so they can explain it to others. I thought about all the women who work for the Nets and the questions they rightly have about why the Nets are looking to bring in Udoka. This would be the place to say something inspiring, or just comforting—something about how this is the slow work toward change, or whatever. But I can’t see any evidence that Irving, or anyone with any real power within the Nets organization, is listening. They are moving ahead, impervious, through the world that imperviousness has made.

People ask me, regularly, if I think Brook Lopez should be in the Hall of Fame.

I feel really good about not being high on Jabari during the draft process.

If Westbrook keeps up his recent play, it would be very good for the Lakers. I know last year he was refusing to come off bench, etc. My thought - has there ever been a high level peak player who has quickly adapted (positively) to a reduced role? My immediate comparisons were Iverson and Carmelo, and it took Melo a year out of the league to readapt.

Josh Primo story keeps getting weirder. The competing statements from the accuser's attorney and Primo's attorney both sound like they could plausibly be true and it's going to be very hard to come up with much to substantiate either version.

The statement from Primo's lawyer is pretty shocking. It manages to combine aggression, the language of therapeutic victimhood, and race all in one tight little package. It makes me believe him less, but that tells us something about the audience. I also think when read in the context of Jaylen Brown and Marcus Smart's quasi-defense of Udoka, and the complete unwillingness of the NBAPA to come down on Irving, tells us something about something, but I am not sure what.

In reality, Irving has joined a troubling club of high-profile Black male celebrities—also including the rapper Kanye West—who have stubbornly embraced conspiracy theories, particularly anti-Semitic ones, under the pretext of seeking a deeper truth about their own origins.
...
Irving later insisted that his being labeled anti-Semitic was “not justified.” I’m not sure which definition of anti-Semitic Irving is working with, but how else could someone characterize his support for a film that treats the Holocaust as an exaggeration or a falsehood?
...
In September, Irving posted an old video, from the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. [...The] Nets star has publicly defended his actions and maintained that he didn’t support Jones’s reprehensible campaign against the surviving Sandy Hook families; he just felt that Jones was right about secret societies. How Irving could place any trust in someone who maliciously lied about the murder of more than two dozen people, including 20 children, is simply bewildering.

As far as YouTube goes, YouTube is the primary vector for flat-Earth, at least when it was coming up starting 2014 onward. Their algorithm just way disproportionately promoted flat-Earth content. So you could be watching something that’s only tangentially related to flat, like, I don’t know, 9/11 videos, and it would recommend Flat Earth because it was conspiracy content. Or you could be watching just astronomy videos and it would recommend a Flat Earth video. YouTube finally got wise to this problem after tons of criticism in 2019, so five years after Flat Earth video started skyrocketing, they changed their algorithm to stop promoting Flat Earth videos that much.
[...]
Flat Earth used to be a sort of small community. It was this one weird thing that not many people bought into. But over the past five years or so, I feel like there’s been a lot more bleedover between conspiracy realms. And some of that might be algorithmic as well. I have a fake Facebook page where I join a couple of conspiracy communities and then just see what it recommends to me. So if I’m looking at chem trails pages, it’s going to start recommending pages for this apocalyptic astrological conspiracy theory, which holds a special place in my heart, but I won’t get into that one. And so between Facebook recommending this crossover, YouTube recommending this crossover, TikTok’s algorithm — which is frankly terrifying to me, I don’t know how it reads your mind — there has been a lot more cross-pollination between conspiracy worlds. I will see major QAnon influencers on Telegram just drop a Flat Earth post and I’m like, OK, I don’t like that. But also, what does this even have to do with your theory? Let’s keep some compartmentalization. And that, unfortunately, is just not happening right now.
[...]
Where Flat Earth’s future lies is recruiting from other, more popular conspiracy theories. So we’ve seen the huge popularization of QAnon-type theories or of anti-vaccine theories, and I’m seeing those groups become distribution centers for other conspiracy movements, including Flat Earth. So I think that Flat Earthers are diversifying their message. I’m looking at Flat Earth pages that in 2017 were really on message only Flat Earth stuff. And now they’ll mix it up. They’ll have anti-vax, they’ll have election truther stuff, and that makes it a more palatable community for people who might not be completely on board with flat Earth. I think those are their new targets.

I’m not sure which definition of anti-Semitic Irving is working with

Adrian Wojnarowski @wojespn
ESPN Sources: Philadelphia 76ers star James Harden has suffered right foot tendon strain and is expected to miss a month.

It's just like ... many of these guests have nothing to add. Chiney Ogwumike was the worst, and I actually turned off the podcast. But it's also just less and less good writers like Arnowitz, Pelton and Beck and more and more of these TV people like Richard Jefferson, Shelbourne and McMahon.

Adam Silver is such a coward for letting this go. Can you imagine if all the facts were the same, but it was a white guy promoting this sort of vile stuff about black people and refusing to apologize, even quasi-doubling down? And they're just letting him play.

It's similarly bizarre that a coach who everyone agrees was rightfully suspended for a year by the Celtics could be hired seven games into that season by another team. The Celtics clearly see the Nets hiring as a way to neatly have the mess taken off their hands, the Nets clearly see Udoka as a hail mary coaching hire that could solve their culture and defense issues, but it's a huge black eye for the league if you can step out of line sexually badly enough that you're canned and just pick up a new gig a month later like it's no big deal.

In both cases no one can take the overarching action needed to tidy up a loud mess that is a growing PR issue except the league itself, so where is Silver?

David Stern was overly heavy-handed a lot of the time, and one can certainly disagree strongly with some of the moves he made, but the league was well-served by his willingness to lay down the law when it was needed even if it made him the bad guy

Nets statement on Kyrie Irving: “We are of the view that he is currently unfit to be associated with the Brooklyn Nets. We have decided that Kyrie will serve a suspension without pay until he satisfies a series of objective remedial measures…”

Bridges’ lawyer worked out a plea deal with Gascon’s office today, in which Bridges would plead no contest to one charge of felony domestic violence, and will accept three years of probation, while avoiding jail time.

As far as what the penalty now entails, Holmes reveals that Bridges has been ordered to attend a year’s worth of domestic violence counseling sessions and a year of parenting classes. Another element of his three-year probation is a 100-hour community service. Bridges will not be permitted to own any dangerous weapons, including guns or ammo. He was ordered to pay minimal fines as well. Bridges is also required to honor his former girlfriend’s 10-year restraining order, which mandates that he is to have no contact with her and must remain 100 yards or more away from her at all times. He will be permitted to keep shared custody of their children.

I mean, the clear difference is that Silver is running the league in partnership with the players on these issues.

I like some of them, but in more complimentary player sort of ways. I'm fine with them just being a kind of solid team with a lot of picks. Mitchell is playing incredible right now, but they wouldn't be 7-1 with a league leading margin of victory if they had him, you know?

I think trying to be a major player in a year or two when the cap is spiking and some of the bad contracts come off the books seems like a smart, if unsexy, plan.

Jazz are already one-third of the way to beating their O/U total (8-3, O/U was 23.5)

Boston is 23rd in defense

@Ben_Dowsett
·
54m
As of today, @FiveThirtyEight
projects the Jazz to finish 47-35 - just two games worse than last season.

They have an 82% chance of making the playoffs, and currently have the 5th-highest win projection in the West.

I'm not sure how good 538 projections actually are, but it's getting harder for me to believe this team is bad, even with some obvious good luck thus far. If I thought they could get bad enough to have good odds at Victor I'd still support tanking because obviously this team has no superstar or plausible way to get one outside of the draft, but this team is so enjoyable to watch I'm not gonna be upset if instead they're like a 45 win team.

The risk is that you're the 2014 Phoenix Suns, right? You win mid 40s, but you have no foundation for future success and you end up chasing that overperformance.

My informed/homer take on this it that it's been interesting to watch how the Celtics have defended this season, but I'm not (yet) concerned. I think there are two pieces here:

Clippers coach Tyronn Lue said forward Kawhi Leonard is out indefinitely as the team continues to exercise caution with its star forward while he works his way back from reconstructive knee surgery.

“He’s progressing and he’s getting better, so that’s the most important thing,” Lue said, per the Associated Press. “There’s really not a timeframe of when he’s going to be back.”

The new Wolves PBP guy is pretty good, so there's one decent outcome from the offseason.