The standards for player effectiveness have shifted so remarkably that entire typologies of the game are fading from existence during this stylistic hegemony. Read more »
John Wilmes - Basketball Analysis
The Modern NBA Hegemony Of The Three-Pointer
How LeBron Made Winning Harder For Himself While Improving Life For The Stars
In freeing himself from old concepts about franchise loyalty and how you're allowed to move around the league, LeBron James has forged his own kind of kingdom that other ad-campaign-worthy stars see and want for themselves. Read more »
Anime Hayward And The New Bounds Of #Content
Anime Hayward is a fiction borne from a culture so over-producing and so neurotic about what it is, and who it is, that his stenciled visage feels all but inevitable. Read more »
Jabari Parker, The New Bulls, And The Capacity To Imagine
The way Chicago's signings of Jabari Parker and Zach LaVine were received by some begs the question of why is it that we have created an intellectual environment that evaluates players in the way we'd want an Amazon review to evaluate a screwdriver? Read more »
The Case Of Ralph Sampson And The Fate Of NBA Lottery Selections
Every year, we draw a shiny red circle around a handful of lottery selections, anointing them as harbingers of the future even though we know better. Read more »
The Warriors Are Not Normal
Imagine the 72-win Bulls replacing Luc Longley with Shaquille O'Neal. Kevin Durant and the Warriors have shown a path toward a title that is wholly new in its elision of competitive resistance. Read more »
Eric jr Vs. The Blog Boys: The Great Leveling Force Of NBA Twitter
It's as if Bryan Colangelo and all the Eric jrs out there, whether he pretends to be one amidst their millions or not, are chasing more similar ghosts than one might suspect. Read more »
Hating The Warriors
The Warriors have become the thing they had to fight against, but they have morphed into it in such spectacularly earth-burning fashion that their arc creates a sentiment that transcends the usual jadedness that all upstarts-become-destroyers inspire. Read more »
The Refreshing Rudeness Of The NBA Playoffs
The 2018 NBA postseason has being unusually rich with rudeness, razzing, and sometimes out-and-out animosity. Read more »
Oklahoma City's Last Stand To Stay Within History
The sheer amount of how much has happened in the Thunder's brief existence has been downright cosmic. Read more »
Denver's Mix Of Raw Doubt, Raw Hope
Denver missing the playoffs by one year again isn't the sort of disappointment that begs for start-over or vast structural change; it is the kind that promises to be transformative as motivator. Read more »
Kawhi, Isaiah, Kyrie, And The New Superstar Body Plan
Industries of their own, superstars have begun to more fully appraise where their money is coming from, and they are increasingly disabusing themselves of older definitions of success and glory. Read more »
Kawhi And Pop, Kyrie And LeBron, And The Challenging Of NBA Patriarchs
Two young men talented enough, and bold enough in their vision, have exercise their indifference to the traditions that each of these legends have wrought. Read more »
The Referee Negative Feedback Loop
The more we are able to scrutinize referees, the larger our inventory of their flaws will become, and the messiness of human emotion that results. Read more »
Joel Embiid's Punk Rock Ascendancy
A student of both the game and the fame that comes with it, Joel Embiid is not interested in prolonging traditions of generational deference, but breaking them. Read more »
Kristaps Porzingis, The New Knicks, And The Fleeting American Dream
For the first time in a long time the Knicks stand as a basketball product that's cohesive with a pie-skyed, post-everything, Kumbaya dream of excellence. Read more »
Lauri Markkanen And Beginning To Love The Scorched-Earth Bulls Again
After the Bulls burned it down to rebuild, Lauri Markkanen shoots out of the soil with rarely seen cohesion and color, ahead of schedule by even an insane optimist's standards. Read more »
The First Week Of The NBA Season Shows It's The Best Show On Earth
With the NBA emboldened by new and alarming superstar alignment, the year has begun with a series of outsize shots of ecstasy, straight to the heart. Read more »
The Extra Humanity Of Kevin Durant, Who Is Mad Online
Despite his ascendancy to the throne, Kevin Durant is clearly unsatisfied enough by the notion of people being wrong about him on the internet that he pretends to be other people to combat them. Read more »
The Cultural Curiosities Attached To Kyrie Irving
Now 25, Kyrie Irving is ostensibly ready to walk away from automatic championship contests every June for the more self-as-business glory of earnestly bowing out, but doing more on the court and for longer, every April or May. Read more »
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