Proof the NBA is Rigged

If we are all thinking clearly.

Most NBA fans are at least open to the idea that the league is fixed. At the very least the officiating at times is too incompetent to be on the up and up, we always have the kernel of doubt as to the legitimacy of it all.

As with any conspiracy theory, the more levelheaded among us will point out that it would be extremely difficult to orchestrate anything, with so many moving parts and people involved, at some point people will talk and the truth will come out.

This is an idiotic argument. I’m fairly certain that if the Bush administration could pull off the September 11th attacks some rich guys can figure out how to rig a few basketball games.

I recently realized that I was thinking about it all wrong. Getting into the weeds. The 2001 Kings Lakers series. The Steve Nash era Suns suspensions. The Patrick Ewing lottery.

I could keep going, but I’ve learned that people tend to show their hand when they’re the most desperate, or another way of putting it, when they have nothing to lose.

The NBA Dunk Contest still exists because it is iconic, even though it has been somewhere between disappointing and a laughingstock for the past fifteen to twenty years.

The league is in a pickle. They can’t get rid of it and admit defeat, but they can’t figure out how to make anyone care about it. I have my own ideas on the matter, but that’s beside the point, the point is that they are utterly incompetent when it comes to salvaging it.

Unless they cheat.

The 2011 Dunk Contest featured Blake Griffin, who was increasingly popular as a player at the time, mostly because he was an unbelievable dunker.

In 2011, as now, Kia was a major sponsor of the league.

During the first round of the contest Blake put up rather pedestrian dunks, as if he knew he was going to make it to the next round and was saving his best dunks for later, and it was remarked upon by anyone watching live that Griffin shouldn’t have moved on to the next round, but everyone knew the drill, even if they didn’t explicitly say it.

When it came time for his dunk in the next round, a pretty spectacular prop was introduced, as a Kia was driven onto the floor and Blake jumped over it and dunked, and it was pretty cool.

It would lead anyone with half a brain to connect the dots, Blake couldn’t have been eliminated in the first round, because then what else were they going to do with that Kia, besides breach a contract?

They weren’t really hiding it.

A similar thing happened in 2024. Jaylen Brown, an All-NBA player, All Star, and tremendous tool, appeared in the dunk contest against opponents that even hardcore NBA fans had never heard of.

The league’s wet dream was and is to get well-known players to enter the contest, so they were no doubt psyched that Brown agreed to do it.

The problem is that Brown is not an acrobatic dunker and his being in the contest made no sense. To his credit Brown recognized this and came up with a few embarrassing gimmicks, such as having a really annoying Twitch guy named Cai Cynat livestream a dunk in which Brown ripped off Dee Brown’s legendary blindfold dunk while jumping over him, although Brown screwed it up pretty badly and looked embarrassingly awkward and came off as the unoriginal Gen Z meme consumer whose personality was murdered by the internet at a young age, which he is.

But they gave him good scores, he moved on to the next round.

There are some things that are inarguable. NBA games being fixed is not one of them. They probably are fixed, but it’s arguable. There’s no smoking gun. Another way of stating inarguable that only an uninformed person of low intelligence, or someone who is just trying to be an asshole in replacement of a personality, like a MAGA person, would argue against it. Pizza is inarguable. The beauty of the ocean is inarguable. Lemonade on a hot day is inarguable. Boobs are inarguable. Puppies, naps, a hole-in-one in golf, carnival rides, all inarguable.

NBA games being fixed isn’t an inarguable proposition, but the Dunk Contest being fixed is, which brings me back to my initial thought process of trying to simplify things.

Who lies about small things and not big ones? Let’s admit as a thought exercise that the Dunk Contest is rigged, so they’re going to rig that and stop there?

We’ve all heard this retarded line of reasoning: No, my husband might be a dishonest piece of shit lawyer who defends child molesters and smokes cigars with wannabe mafiosos on the golf course, but he would never cheat on me.

Yeah, he lied about being in Indianapolis when he was really in Vegas for a porn convention, but that was just a small lie, what could come of it?

I mean, yeah, my son had an ounce of ketamine stuffed under his mattress, but he said he was just keeping it for his friend, he would never abuse ketamine, he told me so.

The President has our best interest at heart. They all lie.

Have you never met a pathological liar? Ask them what they had for dinner last night. You could know, for a fact, that it was Arby’s. You could have seen them eating the Arby’s, you could have even ordered it for them and brought it to their house and sat it on their counter.

They’ll say they had Del Taco. Then they’ll insist they’ve never once eaten Arby’s in their entire life.

I don’t know why they do this but they do, so let’s collectively pull our heads out of our asses on this one, this thing is definitely fixed, the devil is in the details, the Dunk Contest, Building 7, it’s right in front of us.