The future holds the possibility to be great or terrible, and since it has not yet occurred it remains simultaneously both.

Have a terrible night and die in MANY fires.

You’re not supposed to use the term ethnic anymore. I don’t remember why

Have a terrible night and die in MANY fires.

Anyone who would take schwarma over a good cheeseburger is at best a heretic and at worst guilty of treason.

Maybe the first time I’ve ever agreed with you on anything. I better go to confession.

Have a terrible night and die in MANY fires.

Maybe the first time I’ve ever agreed with you on anything. I better go to confession.

The victims are the American People and the Republic itself.

This is shameful. It was revolting enough when the NBA gave this piece of shit a two-season soft-focus sendoff, but for him to still have clearance—from fans, from media, from the NBA itself—to act as the sitting Basketball Pope, to stand as the certifying face of business ventures, instead of wandering the fucking wilderness in disgrace and disrepute, makes me want to pull my goddamn head off. Much more importantly, it exposes as complete bullshit the Official Sport Of Woke Progressivism pose copped by the NBA and its broader community of fans and apparatchik media.

Let’s be clear: On a basic level, the NBA’s branding proposition is that it’s not like the other major American sports. If you find major-league baseball too stodgy or arcane, too targeted to the sensibilities of racist players and fans, the NBA is, it is always happy to remind you, right there as an alternative: a league centered on the expressiveness of black players that is in theory not pitched to white people dying of old age. Likewise if you find the NFL too violent, too militarized and militaristic, if you’re repulsed by how its owners closed ranks to expel a black player for even mildly expressing the idea that racialized police brutality excludes black people from full citizenship, if you’re grossed out by its increasingly depersonalized churn of replaceable bodies; or if you’re turned off by hockey’s fights, its toothless goons and backwards macho shit; or if the seemingly endless and endemic sexual violence against women in college sports precludes your enjoying them—there is the NBA, for you. Sophisticated, modern, and forward-looking.

This is the league that people who get queasy about the grossness of big sports can enjoy; the one whose commissioner not only doesn’t punish the players for expressions that might freak out the average Fox News viewer, but says stuff to the effect that he thinks it’s cool; the one whose commissioner pays lip service to the urgency of welcoming the league’s first female head coach; the one whose coaches think Donald Trump, the pussy-grabbing president, is bad, out loud; and the one whose fans and attendant media celebrated them for this, rather than performing outrage over it. The woke sport for woke people.

If there were much more to this than marketing and self-congratulation, it would bother the NBA and its broader ecosystem—including the many media types who find the sport’s positioning dovetailing in a happy sort of way with how they’d like to applaud themselves for their entertainment choices—to have as one of its celebrated icons an accused rapist who slut-shamed his accuser out of court. Kobe Bryant would not be invited to show up as a guest on NBA broadcasts to comment on the action and talk about how he’s transitioning into the next phase of his life; he would not be welcomed to do Wise Elder commentary in the video game the NBA uses to fund its e-sports venture; he would not be the retiree who shows up on ESPN Radio to perform as the avatar of the league’s flagship franchise, welcoming the sport’s biggest present-day star into the fucking Laker family. He would not get to go on The Ellen DeGeneres Show to do a cutesy promotion for his book about himself. The league’s reigning MVP, James Harden, would not show up beside him in a photo shoot, promoting their partnership in a line of beauty products for men. That would be toxic, obviously and intolerably; handlers would shoot Harden with a taser before they’d let him do it. Adam Silver himself would parachute through the ceiling to smash the camera. His grotesque animated advertisement for himself would have been booed off the screen before anyone considered giving it a fucking Academy Award.

I guess it’s not hard to figure out exactly what it means for things to have gone this way, where there’s still a lot of money and positive attention to be grasped at by associating Kobe Bryant with your brand. It’s good that the NBA, unlike the NFL, doesn’t war on its players for wearing activist hoodies. It’s good that LeBron James can call Donald Trump a bum on Twitter without being suspended or losing product sponsorships over it. It’s good that the NBA has coaches who have more and spicier shit to say about politics than grumbly caveman nonsense about supporting the troops, and that they feel safe saying it. It’s good, as far as it goes, that the NBA wants to be seen as the sports league for progressives who care about justice. It’s encouraging, in its way, to know that the cynics who run the league, and other cynics who want to sell things to basketball fans, have calculated this is a profitable avenue to pursue. But that—profit consideration—is as far as it goes, and as Kobe Bryant continues to demonstrate, it stops in a dismally familiar place.

The future holds the possibility to be great or terrible, and since it has not yet occurred it remains simultaneously both.

Everyone agrees that ethnic food is better than American food. This doesn't seem like a good debate.

https://deadspin.com/why-the-fuck-isnt-kobe-bryant-a-pariah-yet-1829494689



There are a lot of excellent points here that I've been waiting for someone to articulate. But I've been waiting for so long because who has been more complicit in building the brand of the Woke Bae NBA than Deadspin, which has spent the better part of the past four years fawning over everything the league has done? If I didn't know better, I'd say they soured on the NBA because the Warriors won too many times and wrecked their narrative -- for all Deadspin's efforts, it was still the hedge fund monster from Big City But Actually Bad and the Not Really Black Guys who kept coming out on top.

Of course, the commenters, confronted with actual criticism of the NBA from Deadspin, don't know whether to shit or wind their watch: YOU MEAN TO SAY THE OTHER LEAGUES ARE ACTUALLY GOOD, NO, THEY'RE ACTUALLY BAD

https://deadspin.com/why-the-fuck-isnt-kobe-bryant-a-pariah-yet-1829494689

THAT'S YOU! THAT IS LITERALLY YOU! YOU DO ALL OF THAT!

https://deadspin.com/why-the-fuck-isnt-kobe-bryant-a-pariah-yet-1829494689



There are a lot of excellent points here that I've been waiting for someone to articulate. But I've been waiting for so long because who has been more complicit in building the brand of the Woke Bae NBA than Deadspin, which has spent the better part of the past four years fawning over everything the league has done? If I didn't know better, I'd say they soured on the NBA because the Warriors won too many times and wrecked their narrative -- for all Deadspin's efforts, it was still the hedge fund monster from Big City But Actually Bad and the Not Really Black Guys who kept coming out on top.

Of course, the commenters, confronted with actual criticism of the NBA from Deadspin, don't know whether to shit or wind their watch: YOU MEAN TO SAY THE OTHER LEAGUES ARE ACTUALLY GOOD, NO, THEY'RE ACTUALLY BAD

Weird, I see Dolphin looking in my asshole

Kinda reaffirms my suspicions that this is all just echo chamber stuff by people who are Extremely Online. I don't really hear any of this woke nba nonsense outside of this board and certain other abstract parts of the internet. People in real life don't give a shit about any of this shit when discussing sports.

You don't remember Lebron's comments on Trump being pushed by ESPN and almost every other outlet as though Henry Kissinger was just biting Lebron's style?

Kinda reaffirms my suspicions that this is all just echo chamber stuff by people who are Extremely Online. I don't really hear any of this woke nba nonsense outside of this board and certain other abstract parts of the internet. People in real life don't give a shit about any of this shit when discussing sports.

The future holds the possibility to be great or terrible, and since it has not yet occurred it remains simultaneously both.

Have a terrible night and die in MANY fires.

LeBron James is an ignorant piece of shit. I hope he is first in line for the showers.

Have a terrible night and die in MANY fires.

Deadspin isn't really an abstract corner of the internet, is it?

No it was mentioned and washed away in the 24 news cycle the Kerr and Pop comments were.

Generally human beings have an instinct about who is actually extraordinary and who isn't. Despite the media's constant insistence that LeBron is some sort of mentally gifted genius people still look him and think "nah, that dude's kinda retarded". And the reason for that is the fact that LeBron is kinda retarded and anyone can sense it. Even LeBron senses it, which is why he runs around dressed up as a urban-chic university professor all the time.

I dont even think the people writing fawning pieces about how clever LeBron is actually believe what they are writing, but the LeBron Brand Machine pays pretty well so they will suspend disbelief. And anywhere you go you'll find rubes who will believe anything they are told.

Guy is a hell of an athlete though. Truly.

The future holds the possibility to be great or terrible, and since it has not yet occurred it remains simultaneously both.