We’ve got the audio version of these stories, this time with timestamps!

Chapter List

• 00:00:12 — Chapter 1: The NHL’s Rating Surge Has an Awkward Explanation

• 00:10:07 — Chapter 2: Just Post the Damn Highlights

• 00:17:36 — Chapter 3: Never Apologize for Having Taste

• 00:24:51 — Chapter 4: Why I Eventually Turn Down Polymarket

• 00:33:40 — Chapter 5: Nikola Jokic’s Legacy Will Probably Be Fine

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I often find myself spellbound by Brian Windhorst’s gift for effortless NBA wisdom. How does a man come up with a koan like “the problems that confront the NBA are largely about science and money”? For today’s purposes, I’m fixated on Windhorst’s proclamation that the “NBA is restorative,” from a clip I often see shared but isn’t so easily searchable. Who else could perceive this about a league with such a perpetually negative discourse?

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Brian’s point was that, in the NBA, there’s always time. Even Rudy Gobert, much mocked and maligned throughout his career, manages his way back to redemption. We’ve come a long way since he personally started the Covid epidemic.

Brian didn’t mean “there’s always time” literally and absolutely. Sometimes, a tragedy will befall a career that truly ends an arc. But generally speaking, there’s often more time in a superstar’s story. It really doesn’t feel that way after a humiliating playoff failure that provokes supposed permanent criticism. I’ve got vivid memories of the aftermath from multiple LeBron James’ playoff flameouts. I remember sitting at Shan Dong restaurant in Oakland, wondering just how LeBron’s reputation would ever recover from a 2010 elimination. A year later the 2011 Finals happened, which seemed like a legacy death sentence. That was 15 years ago. LeBron James’ legacy lives, fruitfully, at the expense of Father Time.

The basketball version of, “there is no joy in Mudville—mighty Casey has struck out,” is less consumed as a momentary disappointment than a banishment to eternal shame. The magic of the NBA is that it’s somehow the league of a searing, “How terrible!” but also the league of, “We’ll see.” In the NFL, you don’t get as much “We’ll see.”

With that in mind, there’s an extremely negative Nikola Jokić backlash following his first round exit at the hands of the depleted Minnesota Timberwolves. It’s a whole Internet wave, as I mentioned yesterday:

The post fit perfectly into an X discourse that had grown weary of Jokić praise. Various prominent NBA media figures had heralded the Denver center as arguably history’s greatest offensive player (There’s a case for that, to be clear). Vocal fans of other players and teams had come to believe Jokić benefits from a double standard in NBA media. There was a racial component to the debate, a dash of, “What’s with all these White media nerds slobbering over this guy?” Even if taciturn Jokić isn’t exactly an obvious lightning rod, he’d become one in these spaces. The post was probably constructed to draft off that controversy.

I’m not a public Jokić Guy like others in NBA media, but I also stopped staking out positions like this. I’m largely out of the game. When you’re in the official NBA-NBA content space, you need to select MVPs and rank relative stars. This then leads to fan criticism when your stars go Casey at the Bat on you. I’ve felt the result both as fan and reporter. When I was younger, I experienced the dread of knowing my guys were going to get savaged in the Conversation. When I was part of the Conversation, I felt the shame of talking up figures who let me down, stupid as it sounds. I was a lead propagandist for Steph Curry and the 73 win Warriors. I could publicly grin and bear their humiliating 3-1 collapse but inside, I acutely felt a loss of face by proxy. And then the next season starts.

It was over for Steph Curry, similar to how it’s over for Jokić right now. We got ahead of ourselves with the hype. A reassessment is in order. Perhaps the past glory was a blip, a fluke. We can pick apart the comparison, but the sentiments are similar. Back then, the outrage was that Steph Curry was the “unanimous MVP.” Right now, the outrage is that Jokić is a 3-time-MVP, supposedly destined for a “Top 10 all time” NBA status. Now his trajectory has suffered a derailment, similar to how Steph got knocked off his 2016 pedestal. There were many questions, for many years. After the 2022 NBA Finals happened, people stopped asking.

The critics can have a point by the way.

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With apologies to Substack, I’m going to talk about Substack partner Polymarket. I’m apologizing because I don’t want to appear ungrateful. After that partnership was finalized, people at Substack reached out to me about doing a brief advertisement on House of Strauss. I received what was, to my mind, a considerably generous offer just to mention a Winter Olympics prediction market.

I took the money, which was quite welcome this tax season. I had some reservations about a partnership with a prediction market, but I prefer PMs to sportsbooks, where the game is always rigged. These days I occasionally use prediction markets, whereas I don’t use sportsbooks. I love sports prediction as a nerdy hobby, which informs why I’m partnered with Sports Predict, a non gambling platform. No, the point of this post isn’t to pump Sports Predict at Polymarket’s expense, though yes, I do love SP.

Anyway, I just received a larger offer from Polymarket, which I was on the precipice of signing. “Hey let’s buy a new car,” was a fun conversation to have in my household. But, as I look over the documents this morning, I just don’t think I can do it. The problem for me isn’t even the traditional moral questions that people discuss when it comes to prediction markets. My main issue isn’t that gambling is addictive, or that PMs create incentives for insider trading, or even that the presence of such markets might inspire real life transgressions. I mean, none of these aspects are good, but I can potentially rationalize them if pressed.

Instead my stumbling block is a content problem. The Prediction Markets are now involved in the sports discourse, in a bizarre negative way that fascinates me. I want to talk about it, and if I maintained a partnership, I’d avoid discussion. I’m not a hero (Remember, I took a deal from these people?). I’m just someone who needs this space to discuss many topics of sports media interest. And I want to talk about this.

Just what the hell is this and why is it happening?

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I’ve got a recommendation for all of you. Don’t be bullied out of your own taste, especially by someone who evades a counterargument for why it’s wrong.

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I tweeted my take on sports team accounts clumsily using Gen Z lingo, not expecting any particular response. This isn’t a high-stakes subject for a lot of people. I’m not an engaged X user, and the algorithm understandably punishes me with a lack of reach (when tweets out a story of mine, it tends to get far wider distribution). I get it, and accept it. X wants you to use the platform to use the platform. Elon’s less keen on you just using the platform to promote content outside of the platform.

Anyway, there were some responses on there this time, including one from NBA All-Star Michael Redd. Redd in retirement comes off as an even sharper thinker than shooter, but that’s not what I’m highlighting here. Instead it’s this response from Jimmy Spencer, an extremely nice guy who’s worked in the NBA media space for many years.

He’s not technically wrong, by the way. And it’s a less pointed rebuttal than what I received from a Wisconsin sports podcaster.

And certainly less pointed than what I received from a Utah Jazz social media worker, which makes sense.

As subscriber Dan P joked:

Boomer here. Be careful Ethan lest you be lumped in with us. Not get off my post, er, lawn.

There’s an interesting conversation to be had, taken up in the HoS comments, about the incentives that actually govern team social media style. Is it top-down, dictated by teams? Is it bottom-up, dictated by young workers? Is this just what you have to do to get engagement on a certain medium?

I’ll probably revisit that topic, but today I prefer to focus on this idea of being too old to judge slop as slop. And yes, in using “slop” I too am appropriating trendy Internet lingo. But I like “slop,” the term, as opposed to the product. It’s a neologism that works. Out there, in the competitive attention economy, we are besieged by a lot of “slop”: Unoriginal content, divorced from legitimate self-expression, contrived to get our attention. We might overapply the term “slop” but can’t possibly deploy the descriptor beyond the scale of what it describes.

I say that to say this: I tend to know slop when I see it. You probably do too. Similarly, I tend to know quality when I see it. You probably do too. I hearken back to my old Nike post from 2021, in reference to my ripping their horrible ad campaigns:

It’s tempting to fall into the pro-vanguardism template the boomers have handed down to us and sheepishly say, “I must be getting old, because this seems weird to me,” but let’s get real. You dislike this ad because it sucks. You are having a natural, human response to shitty art. This a hollow sermon from a priest whose sins were in the papers. Nobody is impressed by what Nike’s doing here. Nobody thinks Nike, a multinational famous for its sweatshops, is ushering us into an enlightened utopia. Sure, most media types are afraid to criticize the ad publicly. You might inspire suspicion that what you’re secretly against is men kissing and women breastfeeding, but nobody actually likes the stupid ad. No college kid would show it to a new friend he’s trying to impress, and it’s hard to envision a massive cohort of Gen Z women giving a shit about this ad either.

The most common negative response to that post was similar to the critical messages I received for Tuesday’s take: You’re old and don’t get it, man.

As has been covered exhaustively here, history quickly validated my sense that those ads just sucked. Nike’s stock collapsed and the advertising fashions of five years ago have largely washed out of the culture.

Anyone in media could see what I saw back in 2021. It didn’t take a genius to go, “Wow, this is comically bad.” The main reason nobody else was saying it? I’d hazard it was fear of being mocked as behind times that soon stopped existing.

In a lot of cases, my advantage over others in media is simply that I believe my own taste. I’m not necessarily smarter. My taste isn’t necessarily better. I’m just an only child who doesn’t deny my own internal response to stimuli. I’m reminded of the viral clip of famed music producer Rick Rubin explaining that he actually has scant technical knowledge of his own craft. A bewildered Anderson Cooper asks “So what are you being paid for?” Rubin responds:

The confidence that I have in my taste and my ability to express what I feel…has proven helpful for artists.

It’s easy to mock Rubin as some fake guru who gets by on mysterious self-perpetuating cachet. There’s something to what he said, though. Almost everyone has taste, but few are honestly expressive about it. There’s a value in just valuing your own brain.

Which brings me back to sports team accounts and their hack attempts at appropriating Gen Z lingo. You can tell it sucks for a lot of reasons, but a main tell, I’d argue, is the common way it’s defended. Speaking generally, nobody says they personally like it, but instead they allege that someone else, someone much younger and cooler, must enjoy it.

Does that “someone else” ever speak up? Do we hear from the 20-year-old who goes, “Man, I love how the Chargers say mf fr, that really speaks to me”? Of course not. The young likely absorb the contrived play for their attention the same way we absorb the contrived play for their attention: As slop.

Obviously sports team account lingo isn’t that big a deal in the grand scheme, but I’d argue that the broader cultural fear of sounding old happens to be. It leads to a lot of preference falsification among thought leaders on matters far more important.

Yes, maybe you’re old. How horrible. There are downsides to this. Perhaps you’re unaware of which streamers are popular. But you still have a mind. You can still recognize quality, or at least hold your own opinion on it. It’s possible for you, an adult, to understand what works. In many cases, the prerequisite is simply to honor your own right as arbiter.

The above photo is a 2015 tweet that got the Houston Rockets social media manager fired. I found the tweet hilarious at the time, and lamented the result. I do believe that this tweet illustrates what caused a cultural shift in team social media accounts, which I’ll get into, but first, I have a decree to all of them, across sports.

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Just post the damn highlights. Please. That’s all I want and doubt I’m alone. We don’t need whatever this is.

Team media accounts have, over the years, been overwhelmed with a usage that I and Amin Elhassan used to call “Internet Patois.” Whatever’s trendy on social media filters down to the way these teams talk at you. I don’t think this is what the public demands, but social media workers demand we receive it.

Perhaps use of quirky online speak is a perk of a relatively low paying job. The above referenced Los Angeles Chargers recently served as flashpoint here. The Chargers posted an opening for “social media coordinator” with an estimated salary of $60,000, drawing backlash. Apparently a loud cohort believed that such a wealthy corporation should offer more compensation.

I didn’t quite see the issue here, but maybe I’m biased due to my own experiences. When I worked in “Media Monitoring” for the NBA in 2009, my annual pay didn’t clear $18,000. That was suboptimal for a guy living in Brooklyn, but during that era’s financial collapse, there were only so many viable options. There were benefits to being employed in a broke sort of way, though. The league laid off roughly 10 percent of the workforce, but didn’t bother to cut me. Apparently I was too little to fail.

Not that I was there for the money. Like so many other workers in sports, I was willing to suffer for the sake proximity to my favorite league. That’s their leverage over you and why the pay is so meager on the lower levels. If you quit your low paying sports job, there will be another college grad eager to take your place. There’s a currency, or least there was back then, in telling friends, “I work for the NBA.”

Anyway, working the corporate media side in sports usually means that you’re low paid and replaceable. The main bonus for some, other than social currency, is that you get to inject your “personality” into a massive account that reaches millions. The guy running the Houston Rockets Twitter channel saw it as his opportunity to use dark absurdist humor under the aegis of a brand more associated with Hakeem Olajuwon.

That sort of thing was a little too much personality for these franchises. Instead of team accounts reflecting the personal voice of those running them, the common style became lingo and memes, i.e. Internet patois. This fashion merged well with the other trend of social media manager as largely female outpost in sports. Speaking in generalities, men are less verbal and less adroit with mirroring social media communication norms. For example, a socially unaware man might, out of nowhere, freak some people out by using the team account to joke about shooting a horse.

I could get more into the history of this bizarre profession, but it would be a distraction from the VERY IMPORTANT demand I’m making: Which is, again…STOP IT.

Just, enough already. No more stupid memes, no more Taylor Swift lyrics, no more teasing the opposing team’s account in a cutesy way. You’re a sports franchise, not a person. When I visit your website, I don’t see soME oNE sArCAsTicAlly wRiTInG LiKE tHis. I get videos and information about the team, which is what I’m looking for. On X, I’m in search of the same. When it comes to your franchise, no, the medium is not the message.

So just post the damn highlights, please. Include the game score on occasion, though I don’t really need that truth be told. This was my experience following the A’s back when they were in Oakland. I merely wanted to see the latest Matt Olson home run, and didn’t get why I had to sift through a bunch of stupid Internet patios and clapping emojis to get there.

You can dismiss this as a cranky niche complaint and I get it, but the annoying presence of Internet patois in this space is so needless and anti charismatic. These team accounts are worse than they should be in part because of it. Though not a Yankee fan, I’ve found myself checking the Jomboy Talkin’ Yanks Twitter feed because it’s so rich in actual baseball clips during the game. An additional bonus of that highlight quantity is a relative absence of the cringe jokes you’ll find on the actual official New York Yankees TL.

Nobody needs that caption. Trust me, they just want to see the Ben Rice highlight. You’re the most staid franchise in sports. You shouldn’t come off as less dignified than fan produced content.

Speaking of content, this Nelly Korda highlight from the LGPA social media team is what we want.

Bring us closer to the action, use an interview, include a song if you’d like. It works wonderfully and it isn’t rocket science. Your job is to show us the people. It’s not pretending to be a person.

We’ve got in large part so we can discuss his quality as a basketball player. Of course, other less important topics were discussed. Such as!

• 49ers Draft Controversy

• The Michael Tracy/Jim Acosta Altercation

• The Jeffrey Epstein Files

• Social Media Bubbles vs. Normal People

• Hassan Piker and Modern Radical Chic

• Better career: Scottie Pippen vs. Kevin Durant?

• The “Post-Literate” Era

• Jesse’s Dirty Dirty Sexy New England Patriots

• Crisis PR Strategy Advice

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Doug Bernstein is a sharp guy who happens to be SVP of Research at TNT Sports and I hope I’m not causing trouble for him with this post. Last week, Bernstein tweeted out a fascinating deep dive on the NHL viewership boom that revealed a counterintuitive explanation. I’d show it to you but we can’t see it because the post was deleted. I know what it generally said, but not necessarily why it was taken down. I also know the numbers to be accurate, at least as a reflection of Nielsen data.

As I mentioned in last week’s “Nielsen magic” story, there’s been a mysterious explosion in NHL Playoffs ratings. The opening five ESPN games were up 141% Year over Year. TNT’s opening playoff hockey broadcasts also set records. So what’s going on here?

A sports bettor and hockey fan advanced an intriguing theory.

NBA going to Prime is a massive chance for the NHL Playoffs to take its place. Olympics bump + only playoffs on normal TV is massive. Most people won’t flip to Prime to watch games, even if they already have it. Don’t understand that decision from the NBA at all. If ESPN didn’t talk about it 24/7, think it would be dying more quickly than it is.

Now, I don’t believe the NHL is ever going to overtake the NBA in American popularity. Hockey fans who live in the Midwest or Northeast can sometimes forget just how nonexistent the sport is in some other parts of the country. As a personal anecdote, I don’t think I saw a hockey game on television until adulthood. Sure, San Diego had a well regarded minor league hockey team but it’s also…San Diego. For most people I knew, our conception of the sport was having heard about “Wayne Gretzky” and having seen the Mighty Ducks movie. That was it, back in an era with far less competing content.

But there’s something to this “only playoffs on normal TV” theory, and I believe it could be connected to what’s in the deleted Bernstein post. What’s funny to me about this situation is that, while the NHL loves the playoff viewership numbers, they don’t love all the viewership stats. I’m not saying that the league pressured the SVP of Research for a broadcast partner to remove a tweet, but I also know they’d largely hate what the tweet said.

So what did the data say and why would the NHL dislike the narrative such information would advance? If this is largely a positive story for professional hockey, then why would the league be averse to its true nature?

I’m reminded of what I wrote about how sports leagues feel about fans:

Sports leagues would prefer that their real fan be a sophisticated, highly educated, multiracial Gen Z woman who swings by the arena after leaving her downtown tech job. In reality, the real fan is more often Jersey Jerry, the Barstool lump who shat himself on a subway train.

Now, Bernstein’s data didn’t reveal a bunch of Jersey Jerrys, though I assume many watched the NHL playoffs. Instead it was an even less fashionable cohort.

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Sharing the pod I did with the TECH BROS over at Monitoring the Situation. Tried to give some sense of what we discuss over here at HoS, plus engage in the discourse of the day. Topics covered include:

• How sports shape the future of X/Twitter

• Caitlin Clark, the WNBA, and the business of controversy .

• Nike, ideology, and shareholder value

• The fragmentation of internet culture

• Erik Torenberg’s controversial, “Right-wing memes are displacing African-American Vernacular English as the most dynamic source of linguistic innovation” comment

  House of Strauss is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Audio version of the following five articles!

What Killed Nike?

The Guber Zone: Angie Mentink and the Crime of Asking a Machine

The Russini-Vrabel Divide: Fans vs. Gatekeepers

Nielsen’s Magic Trick and the NBA’s Same Old Story

What’s With You People and the Oklahoma City Thunder?

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House of Glass is here to discuss an especially fertile week in sports media. Ryan Glasspiegel of Front Office Sports DARED DISAGREE with a few of my takes on Vrabel-Russini. We found considerably more agreement as we shifted to NBA television discussion, as per usual. Topics!

• Mike Vrabel-Dianna Russini scandal and press conferences

• What are the chances Vrabel actually gets fired by the Patriots?

• Whether Patriots knew about relationship pre-hire

• Russini’s career fallout and future prospects

• How the New York Post coverage (story on Vrabel’s wife) went too far

• Steve Kerr’s contract options (coaching vs. broadcasting)

• Kerr’s TV analyst potential at ESPN/NBC

• NBA playoff ratings trends and measurement disputes

• Nielsen vs. streaming metrics fragmentation

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It’s common knowledge that small markets get ignored, but the Oklahoma City Thunder sure are hotly debated in the NBA world. Last playoffs I wrote an article in response to HoS friend Kevin O’Connor asking, “Why does everyone hate OKC?”

Personally, I happen to like OKC. I’m so impressed with what they’ve built from the ground up. I’m a fan of Shai Gilgeous Alexander’s mantra of, “My whole life is consistent.” I’ve actually been thinking about the phrase a lot of late in regards to my own life. Can I be more consistent? What would the compounding effects of that be? But that’s not the point of this post. Instead it’s the emergent populist angst over that small market power in the plains.

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In these playoffs, the complaints against the defending champions have grown louder, especially on apps that incentivize heated debates. To quote Andy Bailey of Bleacher Report:

My algorithm is ~60% people complaining about the OKC whistle right now.

Bailey also said the following (plus a lot more):

I understand why it annoys Thunder fans, but their most common responses (”why would the league rig things for small-market OKC?!” and “look where we rank in free-throw attempts!”) misses the point. The reaction is more about the difference in the way the Thunder are allowed defend and the way their opponents are.

There was a flashpoint in this discourse after Devin Booker received an absurd technical foul against the Thunder on Wednesday. Booker was bumped out of bounds by OKC wing Jaylin Williams, and the Suns star tossed the ball backwards before he stepped over the line. The ball hit Williams, not especially hard, and Thunder guard Alex Caruso appeared to direct referees towards punishing Booker, which stunningly worked. After the game, Booker said:

In my 11 years, I haven’t called a ref out by name, but James [Williams] was terrible tonight through and through. It’s bad for the sport, bad for the integrity of the sport. People are going to start viewing this as a WWE if they’re not held responsible.

It just feels disrespectful. I know I haven’t won a championship in this league, but I have been in it for 11 years now. So to get to this point to be treated like that, for me to even be saying something out loud, it’s bad.

James Williams clearly made a terrible call, but the NBA had to take action against the incendiary nature of Booker’s criticisms. The tech was rescinded (actually, all three technical fouls against the Suns that night were wiped out) but Booker was fined. The whole incident could be dismissed as pretty random, but it fit into a building sense among opposing fans that the Thunder get to play by different rules.

From Subscriber Clint:

Not sure if you are going to write about this, but everyone I know in my very limited set of friends who still watch the NBA (it is honestly down to < 5 people, most of whom are degenerate gamblers) *HATES* the Thunder.

We all have a natural inclination to root for David against Goliath, and the Thunder are Goliath, so that probably fuels the hate, but the disparity in how the refs treat the Thunder on offense versus defense is absurd:

• They foul bait like hell on offense. Maybe that’s just part of the game now, so good for them for exploiting the rules, but SGA in particular does it to a pretty extreme degree.

• Their best offensive players (SGA, J-Dub) rely very very heavily on off-arm shoves. Your guy Nate Duncan has talked about how the NBA needs to get rid of these, and I agree with him. SGA can basically shove defenders off of him, but then if they come close to touching him he collapses and gets a call almost every time. Again, maybe this is technically within the rules and if the refs are going to call it this way, good for them (I guess?) for exploiting it. But if you played this way in a pickup game in the playground when I was in high school, people would have laughed at you for calling a foul and the off arm stuff would have resulted in a fight.

• They hold and play super physically on defense. Caruso and Dort in particular are constantly fouling everyone. The mentality seems to be “they can’t call every foul!” Again, if they can get away with it, “good for them,” but it makes the product horrible and people hate the Thunder.

• There were numerous instances in crunch time of the final last year when SGA clearly traveled and wasn’t called.

SGA I think is the best guard since Kobe and may surpass Kobe in a few years, but I don’t blame people for finding his game and his team gross.

NBA media, on the other hand, seems to like to carry water for the NBA and any time I listen to a podcast and people (e.g., Hoop Collective) talk about the Thunder, I feel like they’re trying to gaslight me into thinking this isn’t a problem. They point out that all good scorers get to the line a lot (true, and many of them are also huge foul baiters, although others are super physical and I think earn the FTs more than SGA does), but they never address the dichotomy between how the Thunder are called on offense versus defense, or how SGA gets away with traveling and extreme off-arm shoves.

I love the NBA and will watch almost every second of every game in the playoffs, but I have come to deeply sports-hate the Thunder, who I think are a great team and don’t need this BS to be great. I hate them so much that I will actually root for the *Lakers* against them LOL.

I don’t know if you’d ever write about this, but you obviously cover the NBA and media a lot and I think this is another example of the media not getting the fan perspective and treating us like idiots. :)

First off, I like this topic because there’s a perceived unfairness absent serious conspiracy theory underpinning it. This is so rare in the Internet age. While a bunch of people are livid at OKC for getting a purported advantage from the NBA, nobody (or very few) believe that Adam Silver literally wants to contrive their success.

From the Thunder perspective, the idea of NBA assistance would seem absurd. The 2023 CBA, pitched as a bulwark to big market dynasties, is now a hindrance to what Sam Presti has painstakingly built. Obviously, the league and its broadcasters much prefer bigger market teams dominate the NBA than this group of mostly quiet kids in Oklahoma. This is like if the early 2000’s Sacramento Kings absorbed the sort of ref backlash that the early 2000’s Lakers did. What an unexpected situation we find ourselves in.

Here’s what I think is really going on and I harken back to my Did Nerds Ruin the NBA? post. Oklahoma City is an extremely savvy, professionally run outfit that keeps diligent track of both NBA rules and NBA trends. Adam Silver’s poorly run league is somehow both exactingly literal and maddeningly arbitrary. There are market inefficiencies within this paradoxical mess.

In the Sports Gambling era, refs are terrified out there. Since every choice is subject to painstaking retroactive review, they timidly call games according to the letter of law versus the spirit. The Thunder understand the benefits of literalism (the push off is never a foul), and the benefits of arbitrary grey zones (forms of contact on defense can be ignored as “incidental”).

The spread of basketball nerdom has gone on too long because the league is run too nerdily. What I mean is, Adam Silver’s NBA is so squeamishly deferential to rules as to submit authority to them. In the old NBA, a veteran ref like Joey Crawford had plenary power to call games according to his view of basketball. Players had to respect the whistle, and maybe stop flopping if Joey was sick of it. Now, with standardization pressure coming from legalized gambling, every morsel of the sport must be legislated according to the book. Lengthy replay reviews have been added just in case human “error” takes place. Players have taken so much advantage of Rule Authority that a lot of the modern game now can be construed as legal cheating. When only the “rules” are in charge, then nobody truly is.

Modern referees aren’t always certain on what a foul is, because there will always be contact in this non contact sport. They are, however, clear that the controversial “shoulder bump” is legal. The Thunder have optimized by taking advantage of what happens and doesn’t happen out there between the lines. The refs act with little authority, so you’re incentivized to push certain limits. You can hate OKC for it, and many apparently do, but I don’t believe the Thunder are beneficiaries of bias. Instead, I’d argue, that they’re just more wise to what’s wrong with the sport.

The below decree from sports newsletter guy Kendall Baker would hurt my business, but I also share the sentiment.

In that vein, I’m making a request to Nielsen and the broadcasters it works with. I understand the incentives that drive ratings inflation. I get why you added Out of Home (OOH) areas and threw in more streaming viewership with your Big Data + Panel methodology. I’m just kindly asking that you be a bit more subtle with its effects. This is all just from the sports scene yesterday. Again, this is from one day. Just one.

Cue “Everything is Awesome” as the soundtrack in sports land. As someone who follows media in all of these different leagues, it’s funny watching writers react to these “historic” growth numbers as though their favorite sport happens to be one taking the nation by storm. These people are often savvy at analyzing their particular field but aren’t necessarily into the nitty gritty of Nielsen changes. They just want to believe a positive story about their profession and gleefully run with it. It’s just tough to buy in aggregate, as demographic and Internet trends point to a decline in sports consumption.

So you might be wondering, how did the NBA playoffs stack up on opening weekend during this numerical bull run? I’ve got the actual comparison, as opposed to the PR-friendly manipulation. I also have some background on why the other NBA broadcasters hate NBC.

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I found this segment on Boston’s 98.5 The Sports Hub to be a fascinating moment in media self analysis. As discussed with Russini Defender Spike Eskin, radio dudes sometimes have an acute sensitivity to what’s resonating with sports fans relative to other forms of institutional media.

Greg Bedard of the Boston Sports Journal was in studio, as he regularly is, on Felger and Mazz, bristling at their coverage of this Dianna Russini–Mike Vrabel scandal. On Tuesday, Vrabel did a retroactive limited hangout press conference to mention and move past the bombshell that got Russini ousted from her job at the Athletic. He addressed the team, and then “sneak attack” addressed reporters, not saying much of substance to the latter. For some reason, the Patriots apparently asked those with TV cameras not to record the interaction between credentialed media and Coach of the Year. For what it’s worth, in my years spent covering the NBA, I’ve never received such a request.

Bedard, a veteran NFL reporter who covers the Patriots, appeared to share the team’s squeamishness. Hosts Matt Felger and Tony Massarotti wanted to know why he wasn’t covering the most talked about story in sports.

Felger: One of the most prominent coaches in the biggest league on the planet was apparently having an affair with one of the lead information reporters on the beat. That’s a big, interesting story that people care about.

Bedard: That you care about! That talk shows care about!

Felger: Oh, you don’t see the numbers? You don’t see the clicks? (NFL writer) Mike Florio has said it.

Bedard: Ya, because there’s nothing else going on in the NFL!

Bedard then rants about what a dead time it is in Boston sports right now, which, well, I’m not sure is true?

Felger responds, “You don’t think that the Coach of the Year having an affair…”

And then Bedard interrupts, with his voice reaching a high (and I’d argue defensive) pitch:

Mike, you’ve covered this league! You’ve covered professional sports! If it was my job to cover extramarital affairs among owners, executives, players, coaches, I’d never cover the games!

Felger conveys he’s not demanding that Bedard cover the story. To which Bedard responds:

But you’re saying it’s like, big news because you need something to talk about! Florio needs something to talk about!

Bedard then pivots to saying this is only a story because “there’s no juice in the NFL” right now and presumptive number one pick Fernando Mendoza is boring. Apparently, not only are Boston sports not moving the needle, but neither is the National Football League.

Bedard concludes this segment of the rant with:

If this happened middle of the season, it wouldn’t be nearly as big a story as it is.

And here comes the moment that inspired me to share what could perhaps be dismissed as just some middle-aged Boston sports guys yelling at each other, absent substance. “Mazz” got numerical and specific.

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I might turn this into a running segment called “Guber Zone,” in reference to Warriors co-owner Peter Guber once telling me:

There are no rules, but you break them at your peril

Many sports and sports media situations fall into that unsettled space of “unwritten rules, under dispute.” Someone is often accused of violating a standard but the standard isn’t specified or applied evenly. And then we argue.

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With that in mind, I logged into Perplexity this morning and asked:

Explain the controversy of a Seattle Mariners broadcaster using ChatGPT

As vaguely referred to on Friday’s podcast with Wos, there was a news story where Seattle Mariners broadcaster Angie Mentink used AI to potentially fashion postgame questions. The Mariners television analyst was actually employing Google Gemini, not ChatGPT, with the prompt of “Good questions after a tough loss in baseball.” Some fan recorded her doing this and posted it for the world to mock.

There was a pile on against Mentink, which she handled quite well, but also a defense from others in media, who expressed criticism of the Fan Spy. In some quarters, there was an odd gender angle to the affair. The Sports Illustrated write up of the incident:

Internet Trolls Tried to Shame a Female Mariners Broadcaster for Using AI. She Rose Above It

Mentink suffered a stroke on February 21st that had temporarily paralyzed her left side. Given this, it’s a miracle she’d made it back to work for Opening Day and should be afforded a little grace. She’s also, for what it’s worth, a breast cancer survivor, who recovered after surgery and radiation treatments. After receiving word of Mentink’s struggles, Barstool walked back their participation in the pile on.

While acknowledging that Mentink should be given latitude following a stroke, and while sharing the distaste for people who sneak record others for the sake of Internet engagement, I’m stuck on a question: In a vacuum, did Mentink do anything wrong?

I’m going to go with a hard “no,” especially because asking questions as part of a sports broadcast isn’t, frankly, a job of ethical seriousness. I know the intuitive response is, “But why then even use humans?” and I think the answer, among a few, would be, “Because we prefer the presence of humans.” Plus, a broadcaster’s job might be more in having the discretion to use a good question than in originating the question itself.

We don’t care if some producer fed Mike Tirico a good query for an athlete, so why should we be angry over a broadcaster asking AI? The most reductive answer to that question would be that people hate AI.

But let’s change the scenario a bit and make it a hypothetical. Let’s say Mentink was a journalist working for the Athletic. Would this be wrong? Fireable? Why?

Personally, this sort of activity doesn’t offend me, even though perhaps it should. For years, I had to come up with my own questions in post game press conferences and my ability to do so was a stupid point of pride. It was sometimes quite difficult to arrive at a question that was open ended enough without being embarrassingly banal. I sympathize with trying to figure out, “Good questions after a tough loss in baseball,” because those situations are the hardest. You’re trying to get someone to publicly analyze which actions led to a disappointing result. Beyond whatever intellectual challenge the information gathering is, it’s socially fraught.

By the way, this is a lot of what people use AI for, outside of sports. The “I use AI to do my job more efficiently!” is what people publicize, but, “I use AI to bypass my anxiety on sending certain socially awkward emails” is probably the more common use in private.

It only occurs to me now that I’ve never asked AI to generate questions for podcast guests. Arguably I should but I don’t. That’s less an ethical barrier for me than it is an alien process. I understand the appeal of using LLMs as muse to help spark ideas, but if I have a guest, I’m already interested in the conversation. That’s why I booked them. I’m not a late night host, having to suffer airhead actors for the sake of TV ratings and advertisers. I’m having the conversation I want to be having. Why would I ask the machine for prompts when I already arrive with my own?

When I see various influencers tweeting out transparently AI infused essays (It’s not just this — it’s that), I can feel pretty old school. I don’t write using AI because the act of writing organizes and clarifies my own thinking. I don’t pretend to read a guest’s book based on LLM summaries — I actually read it. I took a break from narrations for a few months, handing the task off to Substack’s in house AI reader, but that wasn’t good enough for customers so now I’m back narrating. I want an easier life, but there’s truth to the old adage:

If you want a job done right, you have to do it yourself.

And yet…

I’m not completely AI free. This morning wasn’t the first time I asked an AI-powered search engine to explain a story. I’ve found that Perplexity is just more efficient at search than pre-AI Google. I’ll also confess the following usages, which might be a bit more controversial…

Following a podcast conversation, I now use Perplexity or GPT to help generate topic bullet points in the posted run down. I lack recall on what was discussed over an hour in which I’m fully present, but the machine easily digests the transcript. If the bullet points ever read unlike something I’d write, you now know why.

If not pressed for time, I load up the rough draft into an LLM to look for typos. Sometimes this is helpful, but other times, I get bogged down by all my colloquialisms and jokes getting flagged.

Finally, I’ve been experimenting with article title suggestions via AI. While I’d never ask the machine for topic ideas, I might lean on it to summarize the ideas I just processed. I load up the article draft, ask for a title and…most times, reject all the suggestions. For the sake of novelty though, I’ll use a Perplexity suggestion here: “The Guber Zone: Angie Mentink and the Crime of Asking a Machine.”

This title sounds goofy to me, for reasons I can’t quite articulate. There’s nothing wrong with it, necessarily, and yet it doesn’t work in my opinion. And I suppose this is one broadly shared fear some of you have about public figures delegating their decisions to AI. It’s easy to let the elimination of drudgery bleed into a compromise of taste.

Anyway, I want all of your thoughts on where the ethical lines are on AI and content creation. Because, right now, there are no rules, just people breaking them at their peril.

Nike is really getting piled on right now. Ahead of Monday’s Boston Marathon, the apparel brand displayed a punchy sign at its Newbury Store:

Runners welcome. Walkers tolerated.

That brash message makes sense in the context of the famously difficult Boston Marathon. Apparently there was some backlash in niche circles because some people end up walking parts of long distance races and shouldn’t walking be encouraged too?

That backlash didn’t register in the mainstream, though. You know what did? The backlash in response to Nike taking the ad down over accusations of “pace shaming.” That walk back, as it were, didn’t make anyone happy. As House of Strauss guest and former Nike executive Jordan Rogers said:

If you try to serve everyone, you don’t serve anyone.

This screw-up is now a flashpoint for a company that, for years, managed its brand in more absurd, but often less criticized ways. That was then, though, when prominent people were scared to speak against florid displays of hyper sensitivity. Also, “walkers” isn’t an identity group, armed with its own public relations department. Nike’s capitulation to POWs—People of Walk—feels safe to mock. The biggest factor, though, in why it’s open season on Nike might just be that it’s a weak horse these days.

The UBS report listed Nike’s litany of problems, but was neutral (hold) in its advice. “Hold” might sound fine enough absent context but this rating follows a five-year stock collapse. You’d hope, from Nike’s perspective, that someone with authority was telling everybody to buy the dip. Instead, UBS looked over the apparel brand’s bleeding, battered body and shrugged. Neutrality in the near term is terrible when you hate where you’re at.

Speaking of where Nike’s at, a week into launching this Substack back on August 23rd, 2021, I had only one regret about the inaugural Nike’s End of Men article.

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Trying something new and curious what you all think. Instead of separating this week’s articles into their own narrations, I combined them all into one narration. It’s an audio compilation of the following:

Eagles Fan Shows the Flaw in NFL Broadcasting

UBS Report: NBA Decline Hurt Nike

NBA’s Solution is More in Stakes Than Style

LaMelo Ball is an Idiot and a Savant

The WNBA Wants Attention—Just Not This Kind

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Honestly, this was one of the most enjoyable podcasts for me. I credit the WNBA, everyone’s favorite league, and also give thanks to the incomparable Wos. We had a great time cathartically venting on what’s unsaid about recent NFL media and WNBA “coupling” scandals. Topics! Include!

• WNBA romance frenzy: Fudd-Bueckers #1 picks dating? Team hides dynamics amid HR risks, media gatekeeps.

• Have two NBA players ever “dated”? What would we guess?

• Russini Talk: Sex between media and sports stars is often incidental

• Teammate hookups convo: WNBA’s open lesbian ties baffle coverage norms.

• Bueckers as Caitlin Clark counter in WNBA culture

• Sophie Cunningham’s MAGA hints

• Insider sleaze exposed: Woj/Shams/Schefter all flatter sources

• Is Adrian Wojnarowski struggling in Olean, New York because he’s anti Trump?

• Is it bad that an MLB broadcaster used AI for questions?

• LeBron James and Memphis

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I’m a fan of ’s Normal Sport golf newsletter, and also the ironic phrase it’s named for. Kyle likes to say, “Normal Sport” whenever an absurd golf situation arises, as it so often does. Now it’s in my head. I see a dude remove his shirt to hit a ball out of alligator infested waters and think, “normal sport!”

I’d like to say I do the same for the WNBA, which can be absurd in different ways, but that’s untrue. Instead it’s a different phrase, one that’s a little more pejorative. The main reason I feel any hesitation in telling you about it is that I sometimes see who subscribes. There are indeed WNBA media members and officials who sign up for this newsletter, though I doubt they’d openly brag about that fact. Okay, enough throat clearing, here’s the phrase and write up of an odd WNBA story that blew up, by accident, into a newsworthy media controversy.

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Good morning. If you’re like me, you spent dawn watching the wildly entertaining last 7:54 of the Warriors-Clippers play-in as announced by Nate Duncan and Danny Leroux.

To quote extemporaneous Nate:

They can’t win a championship anymore, but the level these two guys can summon, Draymond and Steph, in the biggest moments, still is incredible.

The Warriors are hard to watch in the regular season, because they’re clinging to the past, but exciting to watch in elimination scenarios, because the past sometimes gets a reprieve in the form of glorious resurrection.

Steph Curry and LeBron James are still the NBA’s biggest stars, with fame dating back to a monocultural era. But what of the future? As mentioned here, the NBA lacks plausible superstars on the level of these aging millennials.

Obviously new teams and powers have risen, but there’s nobody who threatens to transcend beyond the sport. Well actually, arguably, there’s one guy. The Warriors could have saved themselves by drafting this individual in 2020, but it was also hard to blame them back then for taking a pass.

Why? Because LaMelo Ball is an idiot. Actually the more precise term is “idiot savant.” That phrase has fallen out of fashion, at least when we’re describing a specific guy, but oh does it fit in this case. I say it here because apparently it’s controversial to say elsewhere, so the broader conversation sort of talks around this dichotomy. And it was funny to watch First Things First host Nick Wright get intense backlash for pronouncing of Ball, after he tripped and injured Bam Adebayo in Charlotte’s play-in victory:

That young man is a clown.

How dare anyone think that LaMelo Ball is clownish. Anyway, here’s a clip of him pondering the difficult question of which Thanksgiving food he likes.

LaMelo is both a fool and a genius, maybe more so than anyone else in professional sports. He’s accomplished the now rare professional athletic feat of being popular with kids, tethered somehow to his overlap with the 6-7 meme. The Charlotte Hornets have lost a lot since drafting him, but are dramatically worse when he sits. He plays inefficiently, while somehow proving that efficiency doesn’t matter. I’m not sure there’s anyone else quite like this in sports culture. You could potentially say Ball’s like a basketball Jake Paul in that he’s a tatted up and totally nuts Zoomer engagement magnet. I believe he’s a difficult subject to broach for one very specific reason though, connected to the out of fashion idea of “idiot savant.”

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