I would think that Whitlock was a poor choice to be a manager given his lack of experience and lack of humility. But I would have said the same about Bill Simmons and Grantland but that seems to have worked out well for Bill.
Grantland is indisputably good for NBA content. A lot of the rest of it is middling commentary. Actually, less than middling; Grantland consistently substitutes word dumpage for interesting thought.
Louisa Thomas dropped, I dunno, 5,000 words on the
morality of watching Floyd Mayweather, making the most obvious contrasts possible between his boxing style and his abusive behavior outside of it, interviewed no one, and came to this conclusion by the end of the piece:
"What Mayweather does in the ring is special. He is the rare kind of athlete who, if you watch him closely enough, can help you see the human mind and body a little differently. And what Mayweather does outside the ring is reprehensible. What do you do with this? I don’t know. You can focus on the boxer or focus on the batterer. Or you can keep the two in stereo. With or without resolution, we can talk about it."
Now, IMO, Grantland consistently cons young readers into thinking that a bunch of words, making an obvious insight, is profound; Thomas is a fine writer, but she either hasn't been given the latitude to actually have real insight beyond "it's a circus" (which, again, is a flat, obvious metaphor), or she actually doesn't have it, but Grantland would like you to think she does. Either way, I suspect more seasoned readers are much smarter than this piece.
The Undefeated piece on
Mayweather/Pacquiao, is genuinely interesting by contrast. On the surface, it doesn't address Mayweather's abusive life, but if you read the whole piece, which hopes to cover a century of boxing, you get a broader sense of why it's in decline and the kind of men who populated it. None of it exactly profound, but there are dozen voices in it, some good quotes and a few sharp comparisons (the Olympics used to be "American Idol" for boxers, for example) in it.
It's far better than Thomas' piece. It's not even close. That said, Thomas' piece is much easier to produce. It relies mostly on her considerable writing talent, burying that her actual takes sidestep the whole issue. It's sort of a perfect piece of millenial writing:
Here's everything I know, and I wrote it well, but I don't actually know what to do with it. What do you think? 
