Becoming What I Hate

And embracing the Los Angeles Lakers.

I am become that of which I hate. I have sold out my very values. Caught between my morals and my wicked, base desires. I have stabbed nobody in the back, not fornicated with my dead brother’s wife, no, my lord, it is worse.

I have become a Lakers fan.

I never thought I’d see this day. My dislike of the Lakers had been cast in the die long ago. Magic Johnson seemed like a phony (subsequent events would bear this out) and Kareem was too wooden and autistic for many to identify with, but really let’s be honest, it was more fun to root for the slow white guy in green, the everyman, and by virtue of his complexion and hick demeanor, an underdog.

But that was in the infancy of my basketball awareness. Most of my distaste for the Lakers came from my believing Kobe Bryant to be drastically overrated, and from moving to Los Angeles and hobnobbing with Lakers fans and realizing they were a bunch of spoiled imbeciles who couldn’t tell you what a pick and roll is and didn’t start wearing their jerseys until the conference finals, not to mention LeBron being the first superstar to think you pick out your personality like you do a pair of shoes, didn’t win me over.

So, yeah, I disliked the Lakers my entire life. But I didn’t hate the Lakers. I don’t take sports very seriously.

What I do hate, as anyone who knows me can attest to, is people who get paid a lot of money to suck at their jobs. Enter Nico Harrison, general manager of the Dallas Mavericks.

The news that the Dallas Mavericks traded Luka Doncic to the Lakers shocked me, as it did anyone familiar with the NBA, but my only reaction wasn’t anything basketball related, but to become angry that Nico Harrison was earning a salary to screw his own team.

It’s not necessary to go over in detail how inexplicable the trade was, but a few bullet points basketball fans will find inarguable. To someone not familiar with any of this, if that’s you, they traded Steve Perry for Kurt Cobain in 1991:

1. Luka Doncic is one of the best players in the league, somewhere between second and fifth. He had been with the Mavericks for all of his eight seasons. You don’t trade a player like that, ever, which is why it had never happened before.

2. Luka is twenty-six, they traded him for Anthony Davis, who is thirty-two. Davis has four more good seasons at best whereas Luka has fifteen more at best.

3. Much of the rationale given by the Mavericks for trading Luka was that he is out of shape. Perhaps, but they traded for a guy who is constantly injured (and injured himself in his first game with the Mavericks, causing him to miss several weeks.)

4. They traded Luka to a perennially contending team, in their own conference, a conference rival, a team which was going to immediately get better (by acquiring one of the five best players in the league for one of the eighteen best players in the league) thereby sabotaging their own success in the near (and likely distant) future.

5. According to their general manager, Nico Harrison himself, he only negotiated with one team despite having the biggest trade piece in the history of the league, thereby they secured an embarrassingly dismal haul, which would be the natural product of not opening negotiations, which are a big part of a general manager’s job description. Negotiating. Like if you offered your home to the first bidder. That’s what this idiot did.

6. Regardless of how objectively retarded the trade was, it was sure to piss of fans of the Mavericks, which is exactly what happened, and the fan base makes money for the team.

With a decision so dumbfounding, a decision no rational very slow-brained couch potato fan, no teenager who plays NBA 2K, no mentally competent individual would make, any and all conspiracies are on the table.

A lot of people say that the owners of the Mavericks, the Adelson family (yes, the family of deceased lizard person bilious dirtbag Sheldon Adelson) wish for the team to tank so that they can move it to Las Vegas and meld that wealth with their casino interests (essentially the plot of Major League.)

It’s certainly possible, but I have a more likely explanation, although before I get into it, I’d like to state that the Adelson family owning the Mavericks, which I didn’t know about until reading about this trade, makes me hate the team even more, and root for their demise.

There’s a photo of Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones involved in a pro-segregation mob in 1957 making the rounds. The young men in the foreground are black students attempting to integrate North Little Rock High School, when Jones was fourteen years old and a shameful racist on the wrong side of history, much like Sheldon Adelson and his worthless spawn (who get paid a lot of money for doing nothing.)

What an absolute piece of shit. He should speak at the next RNC Convention when they run Trump for a third term. The Cowboys are the most popular team in America, this could swing Georgia.

I bet against the Cowboys every Thanksgiving and win.

The casino conspiracy seems viable, but I like my theory better, which is that it’s insider trading (which it literally was, since Harrison only negotiated with one team) and there was a kickback.

Donald Trump and his family did a crypto dump before he took office. Literally the day before. This happened, and you thought Hunter Biden was trash.

The Trump administration has a vested interest in propagating crypto because of the ease in which it can be used to launder money, which is the entire point of crypto.

My theory is that Nico Harrison, Mavericks general manager, received a seven-figure sum’s worth of Ethereum or Dogecoin into his Coinbase wallet to sacrifice his personal and professional integrity, and this money came from someone in the Buss family (who own the Lakers, and get paid well for doing nothing.)

A bribe, in short.

I believe Harrison will sit on this money and then retire three years from now, cashing it out at a bank somewhere in Rijad or the like, and there won’t be anyone to follow up on the action since every government person in charge of investigating white collar crime will have by design been fired.

It’s just my best explanation. I also predict he will say something MAGA in the next 16 months.

So, it’s a strange feeling. My hatred for the Mavericks as an organization and for Niko Harrison (whether this was his decision or he’s just the fall guy, or a combination of him being instructed to make the trade and then securing a laughably shitty deal on his own), has led me to embrace that which I find unseemly.

There are two types of people in this world. Those who have a psychotic ex-girlfriend and hope she ends up marrying Luka Doncic, not because you wish the best for her, but because it will show by proxy how cool you are and the league you’re in, and those who hope she marries Carrot Top, because you can laugh at how much of a loser she was the entire time.

The idiocy of Nico Harrison and the Mavericks has put me on the high road, for once in my life. I can now set aside my past differences. I can hope for the best for Luka Doncic and the Lakers.

I’ve even taken to carrying a hymnal in my pocket.

I’m assuming you can see through the bullshit in that statement. I want the Lakers to win only because I want it to be abundantly clear how stupid Niko and the Mavericks are, just like I hope Rebecca shacks up with Lloyd Christmas.

I hate people who are privileged enough to suck at their jobs, and now I want hard proof, the red meat, the Lakers Championship banner hanging in, fuck… Crypto.com Arena, and me being wrong about Nico Harrison getting the money and making fun of him to his face in a sports bar someday.