For what its worth I interacted with Barnwell quite a bit online before he was anyone. When he was just a Football Outsiders intern or something, or maybe even just a poster at first.
He has always been a pompous, self-important, insecure, bully. As a moderator of a relative small/pleasant/collegial community of posters, that did not that often stray into political topics (this was the early 2000s), Barnwell would regularly hand out temporary bans when losing arguments, and just generally take his position as "the received wisdom" without actually bothering to even understand his opponent's positions. Not a big one for actual argument (which is odd in an analytics community), more pontificating. Loved to point at black box numbers and then be like "discussion over".
Also lots of him making some post about a topic (IDK concussions? hard to remember exactly) where he would take the knee jerk 20 year old online liberal position, and then move the argument in a political direction, but if anyone disagreed with his politics suddenly everyone would get a scolding/bans for talking about non-football/political topics. Politics was ok as long as it as coastal elites politics (odd on a football board).
It was always shocking to me how far he rose, as he did not really even seem that talented/interesting a person even in that tiny pool, plenty of regular posters there had more insight. Though I suppose a lot of them were lawyers or doctors or something and not people looking to make a career at it.
Martin , you won my post of the year. How this guy rose at ESPN is baffling. Here’s my peeve. He always calls players “ trash”. That BS because even the least talented are supreme athletes. But once he blocked me after talking about AJ Green one year he said he had great stats that would have been better because the other wide receivers were “ trash”. I replied Marvin Jones had the most catches for a first down or TD that year and he broke the playoff Bengal single game receiving record. Blocked!!! Well saved me a lot of irritation until I saw him on the ESPN table with some lame takes.
To your point about the grizzlies Ja moment: I work in Cleveland sports media and covered a game last season where Dillon Brooks hit Donovan Mitchell in the nuts. TNT game, story of the night in nba circles. I went to the grizzlies locker room postgame to get the Memphis perspective, and.... there were no Memphis reporters in there with us. I was running the scrums and press conferences, save for in house media. Gross reporters were tweeting fragments that they found on social. Quite disorienting/depressing
Interesting to point to “regular” fans as thinking the nba has no defense now. That seems to have been the refrain from nba watchers for most of my lifetime, even in those slog 90s-early aughts years when the scores were low but nba teams still didn’t defend like college floor slappers. I agree that you can’t win people with rate stats but I think Windhorst had it right that the league doesn’t emphasize that something incredible happens near every night in the league.
It might be a dunk, a crazy jokic pass, a Luka stat line or a random player getting hot but the league seems to struggle to emphasize the somewhat contradictory “everyday amazing” that regular nba watchers can see.
It is interesting that this entire conversation happened without mentioning the insane way that the game is called and how much normal people hate it. True, there aren’t more fouls called proportionally (as the ringer and JJ Redick have messaged) but Embiid blunts a lot of his “everyday amazing” with his incessant foul seeking. It’s gross to watch and he, Harden and a litany of other players turn people off with this insurance fraud approach to offense
Pretty clear you don't watch Embiid at all, if your takeaway is that the amazing thing he does is get one more free throw a game than Karl Malone or Shaq did.
You misread. He diminishes all the amazing stuff with the foul drawing. The balletic footwork. The insane touch that doesn’t fit a player of his size. He’s incredible. He’s also one of the worst offenders when it comes to unwatchable possessions where he’s solely seeking out incidental contact or initiating contact to draw fouls while not taking a real shot.
If it was just about him taking one more ft than Karl or Shaq then the cheerleaders you’ve mentioned wouldn’t be hyper messaging that free throws aren’t “really” up while ignoring how the fouls are called in the modern game.
Spike doesn't seem like the #1 HOS guest, but as it turns out I'm most excited upon receiving the notification that he's on the pod.
One small criticism on another excellent discussion:
The difference between online NBA discourse and what fans really want was touched on here, but the blind spot both of you have is you think the basketball was terrible post Jordan until...when exactly? The ascendance of the Nash Suns? The Big 3 Celtics? The Heatles? The Dubs?
The streets thought the hoop was just fine the entire time but the arrival of early blog nerd culture into early Twitter did not. The truth is the real inflection point for the post Jordan malaise was the arrival of one of the most technically brilliant but boring players of all time playing in a smallish San Antonio market.
I'm not here to defend everything about that era, (not my favorite) and that's not the point anyway. The point is the main reason people remember the 90s/Aughts poorly is so many nerds had such a come-up blasting the various inefficiencies. This modern joke flopping traveling resting track meet is THEIR CREATION. The Zach Lowes pushed us here one blog at a time for more than a decade.
The captured media that are skewered so often on HOS for their compromised cheerleading also have zero incentive to draw attention to all the dumb changes that they advocated for that got us here. And so the Aughts are remembered harshly
One of my problems with the Bear is that the dialogue is a tad too “Sorkin-esque.” When characters interact with each other, they always have the most pithy and clever responses. Instantaneously. That’s just not how people talk, especially in working class restaurant kitchens.
There is definitely a Sorkin-esque cadence to the dialogue. But is it clever? I just keep thinking about the Sidney character doing her "well, like, you can *be* an asshole ... or like, whatever ... so ... cool, or whatever" schtick, and it drives me nuts.
Great pod. That anti Hinkie email was...um...interesting.
Would be interested to know if the writer was a Sixers fan or not. If it’s that latter, that strikes me as weird to think that much about a team that you’re not a fan of.
I’m way over my personal comfort with word count but I can’t believe the “basketball is easy to understand if you just watch” point just floated out unchallenged. Generations of madden playing has both demystified football strategy but given people a clear cap on knowing what they don’t know. Basketball strategy has fewer endpoints but the strategy in plays/actions/philosophies has a depth that I don’t think Spike respected there.
For what its worth I interacted with Barnwell quite a bit online before he was anyone. When he was just a Football Outsiders intern or something, or maybe even just a poster at first.
He has always been a pompous, self-important, insecure, bully. As a moderator of a relative small/pleasant/collegial community of posters, that did not that often stray into political topics (this was the early 2000s), Barnwell would regularly hand out temporary bans when losing arguments, and just generally take his position as "the received wisdom" without actually bothering to even understand his opponent's positions. Not a big one for actual argument (which is odd in an analytics community), more pontificating. Loved to point at black box numbers and then be like "discussion over".
Also lots of him making some post about a topic (IDK concussions? hard to remember exactly) where he would take the knee jerk 20 year old online liberal position, and then move the argument in a political direction, but if anyone disagreed with his politics suddenly everyone would get a scolding/bans for talking about non-football/political topics. Politics was ok as long as it as coastal elites politics (odd on a football board).
It was always shocking to me how far he rose, as he did not really even seem that talented/interesting a person even in that tiny pool, plenty of regular posters there had more insight. Though I suppose a lot of them were lawyers or doctors or something and not people looking to make a career at it.
Martin , you won my post of the year. How this guy rose at ESPN is baffling. Here’s my peeve. He always calls players “ trash”. That BS because even the least talented are supreme athletes. But once he blocked me after talking about AJ Green one year he said he had great stats that would have been better because the other wide receivers were “ trash”. I replied Marvin Jones had the most catches for a first down or TD that year and he broke the playoff Bengal single game receiving record. Blocked!!! Well saved me a lot of irritation until I saw him on the ESPN table with some lame takes.
Former fat kid physiognomy remains sadly undefeated.
As a fat kid and then fat till my mid 20s I remain proof either that you do not have to be how he is or that I am how he is and do not recognize it.
Spike - you were very good today - I respect your pragmatic views on sports.
I’m about to be 42. Willie Nelson has been 70 years old since I’ve been born in my mind.
Totally agree, and same age.
He's 90. Makes perfect sense. In the movie half-baked (came out in 1998) he was 65. You go back 16-18 years he was almost 50...close enough to 70.
To your point about the grizzlies Ja moment: I work in Cleveland sports media and covered a game last season where Dillon Brooks hit Donovan Mitchell in the nuts. TNT game, story of the night in nba circles. I went to the grizzlies locker room postgame to get the Memphis perspective, and.... there were no Memphis reporters in there with us. I was running the scrums and press conferences, save for in house media. Gross reporters were tweeting fragments that they found on social. Quite disorienting/depressing
Grizz * reporters
Interesting to point to “regular” fans as thinking the nba has no defense now. That seems to have been the refrain from nba watchers for most of my lifetime, even in those slog 90s-early aughts years when the scores were low but nba teams still didn’t defend like college floor slappers. I agree that you can’t win people with rate stats but I think Windhorst had it right that the league doesn’t emphasize that something incredible happens near every night in the league.
It might be a dunk, a crazy jokic pass, a Luka stat line or a random player getting hot but the league seems to struggle to emphasize the somewhat contradictory “everyday amazing” that regular nba watchers can see.
It is interesting that this entire conversation happened without mentioning the insane way that the game is called and how much normal people hate it. True, there aren’t more fouls called proportionally (as the ringer and JJ Redick have messaged) but Embiid blunts a lot of his “everyday amazing” with his incessant foul seeking. It’s gross to watch and he, Harden and a litany of other players turn people off with this insurance fraud approach to offense
Pretty clear you don't watch Embiid at all, if your takeaway is that the amazing thing he does is get one more free throw a game than Karl Malone or Shaq did.
You misread. He diminishes all the amazing stuff with the foul drawing. The balletic footwork. The insane touch that doesn’t fit a player of his size. He’s incredible. He’s also one of the worst offenders when it comes to unwatchable possessions where he’s solely seeking out incidental contact or initiating contact to draw fouls while not taking a real shot.
If it was just about him taking one more ft than Karl or Shaq then the cheerleaders you’ve mentioned wouldn’t be hyper messaging that free throws aren’t “really” up while ignoring how the fouls are called in the modern game.
Spike doesn't seem like the #1 HOS guest, but as it turns out I'm most excited upon receiving the notification that he's on the pod.
One small criticism on another excellent discussion:
The difference between online NBA discourse and what fans really want was touched on here, but the blind spot both of you have is you think the basketball was terrible post Jordan until...when exactly? The ascendance of the Nash Suns? The Big 3 Celtics? The Heatles? The Dubs?
The streets thought the hoop was just fine the entire time but the arrival of early blog nerd culture into early Twitter did not. The truth is the real inflection point for the post Jordan malaise was the arrival of one of the most technically brilliant but boring players of all time playing in a smallish San Antonio market.
I'm not here to defend everything about that era, (not my favorite) and that's not the point anyway. The point is the main reason people remember the 90s/Aughts poorly is so many nerds had such a come-up blasting the various inefficiencies. This modern joke flopping traveling resting track meet is THEIR CREATION. The Zach Lowes pushed us here one blog at a time for more than a decade.
The captured media that are skewered so often on HOS for their compromised cheerleading also have zero incentive to draw attention to all the dumb changes that they advocated for that got us here. And so the Aughts are remembered harshly
One of my problems with the Bear is that the dialogue is a tad too “Sorkin-esque.” When characters interact with each other, they always have the most pithy and clever responses. Instantaneously. That’s just not how people talk, especially in working class restaurant kitchens.
There is definitely a Sorkin-esque cadence to the dialogue. But is it clever? I just keep thinking about the Sidney character doing her "well, like, you can *be* an asshole ... or like, whatever ... so ... cool, or whatever" schtick, and it drives me nuts.
I just can't handle the screaming.
Great pod. That anti Hinkie email was...um...interesting.
Would be interested to know if the writer was a Sixers fan or not. If it’s that latter, that strikes me as weird to think that much about a team that you’re not a fan of.
I’m way over my personal comfort with word count but I can’t believe the “basketball is easy to understand if you just watch” point just floated out unchallenged. Generations of madden playing has both demystified football strategy but given people a clear cap on knowing what they don’t know. Basketball strategy has fewer endpoints but the strategy in plays/actions/philosophies has a depth that I don’t think Spike respected there.
Didn't get challenged because football is much more complicated and difficult for a layperson to understand than basketball.
The bear email was assssssss
Show is goated.
Good pod 👌 Need that Shanahan take from ES (wouldn’t mind his thoughts on McVay, either)