Jonathan Meets Trinidad James

When Jonathan woke up, the first thing he heard was an assertive voice, coming, he supposed, from another out-cropping or gable off of the house of light, piercing the darkness by just a cosmic millimeter. Jonathan  first beheld a popping noise from someone's mouth, onomatopoeically priming the listener for the full sentence: "Popped a molly; I'm sweating. Popped a molly; I'm sweating." Trinidad James, Jonathan thought, identifying the voice's source, I know that man from somewhere. But whence?

A brief guttural noise (force of habit, Jonathan thought) transitioned smoothly into his terrified one-word response of surprise: "WHAT?" Jonathan was of course responding with genuine confusion, both to Trinidad James' unusual articulation and to the strange background noise Jonathan had suddenly become attuned to, background noise seeming to Jonathan rather like a combination of desert-heavy sitars and synthesized strings from an unknown, unseen system of speakers and cables.

James repeats his description. "Popped a molly; I'm sweating. Popped a molly; I'm sweating.!"

So Jon cupped his hand to his ear to absorb and combine any possible noises that could possibly shed more light than what Trinidad was able to shed with his mystifying words. "WHAT?" Jonathan repeated with the same guttural inflection.

And without hesitation, James repeated (with identical inflection) his previous statement. "Popped a molly; I'm sweating."

I Don't Care What Wojnarowski Thinks Of Hollinger, Which Is Precisely The Point

James has helped to make it so profitable to be an NBA owner that Robert Pera bought the Grizzlies, hired a front office of novices [Ed. Note.: Emphasis mine.], ran out a successful scouting staff and began to unload genuine assets for pennies on the dollar. Just recently, James tweeted, "What the hell we have lockout for?" upon learning of the $525 million selling price of the Sacramento Kings. [...]

Levien is making these deals based largely on the recommendations of John Hollinger, a statistician who worked for a cable sports company. The San Antonio Spurs once used him as a consultant and regretfully took his advice to sign a free agent named Jackie Butler. It was such a disaster, the Spurs had to attach Luis Scola to a trade to get Butler out of town. 

This wasn't the '86 Celtics broken up in Memphis today, but, still, a contender became something far less over the past week. All of this didn't need to happen so fast. Between an owner guaranteed to make a profit and a front office guaranteed to believe it's smarter than everyone else, the Western Conference has one less contender to come chasing the defending champion Heat in the NBA Finals. 

--Rudy Gay trade shows LeBron James the future: Super team era ending, Adrian Wojnarowski

Adrian Wojnarowski - known as "Woj" for short - seems to bug NBA bloggers more than he does anyone else. Woj's exceptional sourcing and prose belies an occasionally-condescending, over-narrated, over-opinionated style. And bloggers - with our overdeveloped acuity for social signalling in writing - read right through to that style.

But we'll get to that in a moment. In Woj's take on things,  the NBA is one big soap opera with heroes, villains, kingmakers, and insiders whispering in everyone else's ear with clammy intimacy about where to sign in July. In this version of reality, Woj's presence becomes quite valuable. You see, Woj then becomes the guy that hears all of these insiders and can see through the fog of public relations to the true heroes, villains, and kingmakers. In his own mythos, Woj is not only the expert but the foremost expert of what will transpire the NBA, and not only that, but the ultimate moral arbiter of what transpires and who is to blame.

On the darker end of things, Woj's "sources" lick the reader's ear with poisonous thoughts about NBA players, coaches, and executives, but notably stay quite anonymous, almost without exception. See, being one of Wojnarowski's sources no doubt would carry ignominy, distrust, and disrespect if revealed, and so clumsy, hard-to-parse descriptions like "one high-level associate of James' inner-circle said..." emerge with disturbing frequency. And that's before getting into my impression that agents abound at every level of this process, both in Woj's mythos and in all likelihood, in his sources and motivations.