Friday, Oct 11th, 2019

An NBA-obsessed newsletter for the info-craved basketball mind. Did a friend forward you this newsletter? Sign yourself up here.

  The opening tip

• Our season preview, The defeatist’s guide to the NBA season, returns, with a look at the Cavaliers, Hornets and Magic

• Al Horford opens up about last season’s nightmare 

• The Mystics won the WNBA Finals last night, Washington's first professional basketball title since the Bullets beat the SuperSonics in 1978

The Cavaliers are where they belong

What’s true: For years, the Cavaliers have sustained despite themselves. Despite Ted Stepian; despite playing in a cornfield miles from downtown; despite Dan Gilbert’s penmanship; and despite general geography. It would take, one must think, a star made of titanium with the basketball instincts of a child born to Magic Johnson and Larry Bird (this is getting weird) in the general geographic area of Cleveland, for Cleveland to leverage that into a basketball championship. Well, folks, you might not believe this, but that actually happened. And he left. And they burned his jersey. But the crazy ex-girlfriend-guilt trip brought him back and they won a title, in 2016, and now Cleveland fans can never, ever, ever, ever ask for anything ever again. This team will mega suck for eternity, or until the city of Cleveland finally sags into Lake Erie.Your 2018-19 team: JR Smith played for a little bit. Then he started making fun of Collin Sexton to the media, probably for showing up on time and trying. Anyways, Year No. 1 without the human NBA Finals ticket ended with a 19-63 record.Your 2019-20 team: This year, the roster consists of Kevin Love, who so desperately wants to return to putting up 25-15-5 for a bad team, Tristan Thompson, and all the children those two hosted at their offseason summer camps.Your coach: John Beilein, the former Michigan coach, who, at 66, is simultaneously a first-time NBA head coach and the third oldest coach in the league, behind only Gregg Popovich (70) and Mike D’Antoni (68). He’s the oldest rookie head coach in NBA history. But none of that matters, because he has the endorsement of Bill Walton, who went on a Cleveland radio show on Wednesday and praised Beilein (after talking about Larry Bird for no reason, for five minutes): 

What a coach you guys have in John Beilein. How did you guys get John Beilein? Everybody’s been trying to get him forever. And he ends up in Cleveland! What a great deal. Not just for John Beilein, but for basketball fans of the Cleveland area and all of Ohio and throughout the globe.

The Hornets are finally going to be really bad

What’s true: The NBA is a weird place. For the last six years, the Hornets have averaged 39.1 wins per season, and have actively tried to be good and make the playoffs, and all we’ve done during that span is relentless mock them for being idiots who don’t know what they’re doing. In a standard work place, they’d be praised for showing up to work everyday and getting their stuff done. In the NBA, a record consistently around .500 means 16-year-olds with Kemba Walker fan pages tweet Crying Jordan faces…at Michael Jordan, who young people know more as the bumbling Hornets owner than the greatest player ever.Now that Charlotte is finally embracing the tanking, a shady internet Twitter cult of free-thinkers will deploy their underlings against any of the sheeple dumb enough to believe in trying to win with decent players.What’s bad: This #SponCon disguising itself as actual journalism, in which a writer tries to turn Jordan’s stupid new tequila brand into a piece of reporting worth reading more than one word of. It’s called: The inside story of how Michael Jordan and four other NBA owners launched the super-premium tequila brand Cincoro. Here’s the nut graph, on how this money-humping group decided to “team up”: 

It’s the only spirit that feels like an upper, they agreed, and it’s low-calorie and can yield a lighter hangover. By the time they were seated, this multibillion-dollar table was discussing the specific characteristics they wished they could find on the shelf—a tequila with a smooth, long finish like a fine cognac or whiskey. “That was when we realized there was an opportunity in the market to create a new tequila, a better tequila. We let our hair down and became true friends that night.”

We already give our money to these people. Why would we want to know about their vanity juice?What’s depressing: Terry Rozier. Three years. $56 million.

The Magic are painfully decent

What’s depressing: With the Hornets now out of the running for the eighth-seed every year, the Detroit Pistons are in search of a new, long-term mate for the Eastern Conference’s middle-class. After a 42-win season last year and a tidy five-game round one loss to the Raptors in May, plus a perfectly vanilla off-season, the Magic have a strong resume. Whether or not they can repeat the same type of season depends squarely on their team’s ability to improve only marginally, which seems to be in the cards.What’s new: The trendy story line for Orlando this season is Markelle Fultz, the former No. 1 overall pick who doesn’t even register on the bust scale, because he’s played 33 games in two seasons. (If you’re closer to Anthony Bennett than you are to Greg Oden and Michael Olowokandi, things might not be looking too hot for you.) Just don’t tell this reporter a preseason basket doesn’t matter.What’s a bad sign: Despite making the playoffs last season for the first time since 2012, the local TV ratings for Magic games hit a 13-year low, and were last overall in the league. So, your suspicions are confirmed: No one watches the Magic, not even Orlandoans. Orlanders? Orlandites? *Brings up Orlando Wikipedia page* Orlandoans!A reminder: It’s been 10 years since the Orlando Magic made it to the Finals with Dwight Howard, Hedo Türkoğlu, Jameer Nelson and Rashard Lewis. Time moves quick, huh? (Though it’s only been seven since that cringey moment where Stan Van Gundy told reporters Howard wanted him fired, only to have Howard buddy up to him moments after.) This team used to be fun.

The Washington Mystics: Your 2019 WNBA champs

In a winner-take-all Game 5 last night, the Washington Mystics beat the Connecticut Sun, 89-78, to clinch their first title in franchise history. League MVP Elena Delle Donne, who was hurt earlier in the playoffs, scored 21 points and grabbed nine rebounds in the win. Emma Meessemen, who scored 22 points to lead the Mystics, was named Finals MVP.Here’s the Washington Post’s sports page from this morning, which the Mystics’ Twitter account gleefully tweeted at Tony Kornheiser, who grumbled earlier in the playoffs that a Mystics story was taking up too much space on the front page after the Nationals’ Wild Card victory.Watch the highlights here.

  Quick Hits 

• Steve Kerr gave an honest, thoughtful response to Trump’s criticism of him for not speaking out on the China-NBA issue.

• The Lakers and Nets played their preseason game in Shanghai yesterday, but there was no broadcast of the game in China and no media access to the players before or after the game. 

• Zion Williamson, in his second preseason game, dropped 29 points on 12-of-13 shooting, including this spinning dunk in traffic.

• Nick Van Exel, the Maverick’s new talent scout, has discovered cold brew.  

• Al Horford to the Boston Herald: “I just think that if Kyrie would have stayed, I don’t know if it would have worked. There would have had to be some major changes as far as players, because it was just clear that the group that we had just wasn’t going to be able to coexist.”

• Never a bad time to link to the video of Kevin Garnett “talking up a storm.”

• The Suns are at least trying to make it look like they care, which is an improvement from last year.

 Concrete Reads 

• On the NBA’s dwindling viewership and precarious outreach plans [The Athletic]

• What makes Patrick Beverley tick [Bleacher Report]

• How Ricky Rubio spent his summer vacation [The Ringer]

  Podcast Pick

Zach Lowe joins the Woj Pod to talk the China situation, which is the first in-house acknowledgement from ESPN since Daryl Morey’s tweet [The Woj Pod]