The Ringer has 19 people writing about the NBA

Because the season he's about to play is about to begin.

I often think our posts pass like ships in the night. To be clear: I'm not saying nobody will read it. I'm not saying anyone can't write about it. I'm not talking about the sovereignty of the thing. I'm talking about the need for it. The good of it. The purpose.

There is no need for it. There's a season to play and a title to win. After that, free agency. The presence of such a story is rooted in how the Internet works. It needs to create content every day. Key word: Create. If there's no news, Internet writers have to dream up speculation for news that may or may not ever happen. But there is no need for it. Indeed, it's kind of a waste of time. It's speculative bullshit. Talk radio nonsense, in digital print.

 

It's sports. There's no need for any of it.

 

The medium is the message.

Radio has 24 hours a day to program. So does ESPN.

Every internet page is bottomless, infinite.

Content gets created to fill it.

 

Alma, no offense, but this has been true of every news medium ever. There are many more slow news days than otherwise in every field, and it's always been that way. I will grant you the Internet has made this truth more self-evident, but it's a difference in degree, not in kind. I still have the clips of my Tuesday (players off day) for Wednesday pieces for the going nowhere Pats' teams of the late '80s to prove it.

 

Everyone thinks they'll get THE SCOOP on where Durant'll be next season.

And Alma's underlying point is correct.

 

"Where will Player X go when his contract expires?" seems like pretty standard sports stuff.

 

Read it last night. It's not as long as I remembered its being (maybe it was cut down for the book? Although that seems unlikely), and I'll confess that I'm predisposed to loving it, because of my love of Japanese culture and that country's beautiful, batshit-insane traditions. I'll agree that it doesn't quite all hang together the way it probably should. There's a weird interlude in which Brian talks about how he hasn't been able to remember anything that winter, and I'm not sure why that's there. I still love the descriptions of sumo, and the little digressions into demon clearing and the nature of hierarchies.

The ending... So, there's a passage at the start of the second section (THE DREADED SECOND SECTION), in which Brian explains how a lot of Japanese stories just end. They don't end the way we think they should end. "Some Japanese stories end violently," Brian writes. "Others never end at all, but only cut away, at the moment of extreme crisis, to a butterfly, or the wind, or the moon."

Brian's story ends when he tracks down a cultist who beheaded his master in the 1970s, and he's about to try to talk to him. But we don't see them meet. It ends with Brain about to go inside. "I get up and move toward the crosswalk. The wind is damp. It's January, so I don't see any butterflies. It is a cloudy day, so I do not see the moon."

Brian is basically using a Japanese storytelling device in his story about sumo, which is really a story about the mysteries of Japan, which is really about the mysteries of human existence. I can see how that ending can seem unsatisfying, and I can see how some might see it as just a literary trick. But it was a purposeful choice of Brian's. Like nearly everything he writes, there was at least a lot of thought put into it.

 

The cinematic equivalent is Sideways when Busfield walks up the steps and knocks on the door ... and fade to black.

It infuriated me for a few years but I've come to understand what it means (my interpretation, anyway) and I think it works.

 

Busfield? BUSfield! BUSFIELD!?!?!

Dude, that was Paul Giamatti.

 

LOL, same thing. But you're right.

 

The Ringer has excellent substantive NBA content and I like a lot of their writers. But their whole "who won the timeout?" or "Ayesha Curry, first ballot hall of fame NBA spouse?" nonsense is awful.

 

Paul Giamatti being told he's essentially Timothy Busfield.