2025-26 Milwaukee Bucks
099 · 2026-03-30 · medium
On a sun-dappled park bench, or maybe over cups of coffee, I could sit down with you and explain how artificial intelligence works. It would be a friendly conversation, I'd modulate my delivery to fit the flow of your follow-up questions (so as not to sound like an actual AI), and I'm also capable of the same sort of thing but for MPEG video compression and exchange-traded funds. The brain is limited and precious, so installing these working knowledgesets required purging several terabytes left over from college: the 1995-96 Pac-10 basketball record book, every episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, and the complete works of Kurt Vonnegut. The human mind is a cheap computer, the entry-level bargain one from the advertisement, and you can't upgrade because everything's soldered onto the motherboard. It's frustrating. A decade ago I was living in Fukuoka with a JLPT N1 certification, and nowadays I need to turn on the subtitles whenever Itomimizu talks too fast. All the replacement data seems to have to do with the National Basketball Association, which I'd completely ignored during the 2010s. Since the 2017 collective bargaining agreement, the amount of bandwidth the NBA demands from its fans is staggering. "Bird Rights" were easy enough to understand, but now there are mid-level and rookie and second-round pick exceptions, cap holds, max and supermax and two-way contracts, rules named after Kevin Durant and Derrick Rose, 5/25 and 5/30, Exhibit 10... and, of course, the Second Apron. The Financialization Of Everything began in the Reagan/Bird years, and it's the only reason why the American economy hasn't completely collapsed yet. Wrapping layers of rational instruments around simple transactions – purchasing an oil barrel, or putting a ball in a hoop – creates a class of information specialists, and soon enough nobody else can comprehend the process anymore. There's lots of money in ETFs, at least there will be until the crash comes, but expertise in financialized basketball is a dead end for losers. There you are, rotting in Reddit brain prison with your player pun username, posting memes from eight years ago, and you're still losing half of your Kalshi wagers. The post-postmodern NBA wants all of your RAM and disk space, at the ultimate expense of every other piece of knowledge you have. Take, for example, the three anti-tanking proposals unveiled last week: an 18-team "odds ladder", a two-year "win floor", and something called "5 by 5". Merely skimming that article cost me Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Christabel. The reason why Adam Silver doesn't adopt the PWHL's simple and straightforward Gold Plan – or my own idea about ordering teams in reverse order of five-year win percentage, you have much bigger problems than one new player if you suck for that long – is because the NBA is a predatory virus that feeds on human brains, and it might be time to start calling it "evil." With this past weekend's elimination of Milwaukee, the 14 lottery teams are set and it's time to start visualizing the future. Indiana, Washington, Brooklyn, Sacramento and Utah have been putting G League lineups on the floor for the past month, so they all have a 10 percent chance at the first pick, and there are nine other teams in contention because that's "exciting." So I dunno, how about the Bucks? Would the commissioner freeze an envelope for them? Despite all the advanced analytics available, Milwaukee has gone from NBA World Champions to a team with "one star, all other teams have two or three" in five short years. Would Giannis sign an extension if AJ Dybantsa showed up? What about Andre Jackson's club option, take or leave? How about if the Bucks dumped the rest of the starting lineup, utilized both the Over 38 rule and bi-annual exception, and got LeBron? What if AHAHAHAHAHAHA AHAHAHAHAHA [tears brain out of skull and throws it off a cliff]