Sick Priest Learns To Last Forever

I left the first Barclays Nets-Knicks game at halftime.

Don't Worry About the NBA Draft Lottery Or Anything Else

Yesterday’s annual rash of irrational optimism, unwarranted entitlement, and unreasonable faith in good luck charms has given way to unadulterated ecstasy, forced rationalization, and utter disappointment. Yeah, the NBA Draft Lottery causes excessive verbosity. So it goes.

It also cause fans, media, and team front offices to lose their grasp on reality. Fans stack their team’s past tragedies against those of other teams to argue that their team “deserves” a higher pick. Nope. No one deserves anything. Media members bicker about what every team’s front office should/shouldn’t do with picks that they don’t have yet. Front offices send various good luck charms to represent them in the lottery even though good luck isn’t a thing that exists. Simply put, there is hardly any reason to discuss the draft lottery before it happens because it’s random. It’s a quite literal lottery. But humans seem conditioned to obsess over things we can’t control, thus the outpouring of words leading up to yesterday’s ping pong ball fiesta.

Now that the draft order has been determined, teams in need can start their off-season activities in earnest. So now, the obsessing shifts to how teams should use the picks they’ve cemented to fortify their future. But once again, what’s the point? You can’t control this. Plus, you (whether you’re a fan, professional writer, NBA insider, whomever) don’t really know what a team should do because the actual draft is almost as much of a crapshoot as the lottery.

In fact, the success of pretty much every NBA front office decision is ultimately left up to chance, right? There are a million variables plus injuries. If you’re one of the very few people involved in the decision-making, all you can do is make educated guesses and weigh out risk accordingly. And if you’re not involved (which, chances are, you’re not) just relax. Stop worrying because that's not fun and sports are supposed to be fun. This is especially true if you’re a fan of one particular team. Don’t worry about who your team should pick. Don’t worry about who your team should trade for. Don’t worry about who your team could have gotten if they had kept a draft pick. Don’t worry about who your team could have drafted instead. Don’t worry about anything because you can’t control this, it doesn’t really matter that much, and life is short.

Most of all, if you can't help but worry, at least don’t be angry. Don’t hate anything about the NBA. It’s useless and unbecoming. Try watching basketball games instead. They are fun.

The NBA Draft: Where We Find Our Nihilistic Fandom

Attending the NBA Draft last Thursday was akin to buying a ticket to sit in the comments section of a Deadspin article for two hours. It's crowded and the guy behind you gets stuck on magically vapid phrases like "He put his nuts in his mouth!" and "Better buy a coat, it's cold in [insert name of draftee's new city]!" The entire affair oozes with negative vibes.

Even the booing of commissioner David Stern, which is a tradition I fully support, is clearly a hollow and ridiculous exercise. The man is not without flaws, but the immediate jeers he faces when he first walks out on stage each year have nothing to do with his performance as captain of the league; they seem to be anti-authoritarian in some respect, but are ultimately directionless.

This all seems odd, as the draft is designed as the league's one immaculate beacon of hope. In the warm confines of draft night, the hardships of last season shouldn't matter, because there may just be a 20-year-old ready to fix any roster deficiency or chemistry issue that's been causing your favorite team's computer to crash. All-Stars have been picked all the way into the second round, so why not trick yourself into thinking your team has found that hidden coin in the loaf of Vasilopita—even if just for one night.

But as hard as Jay Bilas and Jon Barry tried to trumpet each and every pick, the atmosphere in the building just didn't match this presumed optimism.

As is normally the case with the NBA Draft, which has resided in the NY/NJ metropolitan area more often than not, the entire affair was best exemplified by Knicks fans. Twenty minutes after New York picked Iman Shumpert to a cacophony of boos, the gentleman sitting to our right in an Allen Houston jersey was still loudly lamenting the pick. Adam Ain't politely leaned over and said, "Excuse me, I'm a Knicks fan too. Just wondering, who did you want them to pick?" Without taking even the briefest of moments to consider the contradiction about to tumble from his lips like a drunkard at a Cirque Du Soleil audition, he responded, "Oh I don't know. Who are you going to get at 17? There's no one there that can do anything."

To combat all this negativity permeating the event, we retreated back to a sort of devil-may-care optimism, what we'll term our Nihilistic Fandom. We greeted most draft decisions with a hearty, "Why not! Print his name on the back of a jersey and get him a locker! He'll get out there!" It's a philosophy we began to develop part of the way through the 2010-2011 season, as a reaction to the sometimes overwhelming spaciousness of the 82-game season. The season is so long, and so many things happen, and so many people have so many things to say about how important or revolutionary or devastating each and every event is, we stopped caring about all of them at a certain point. This is not to say we're not passionate about this league; we spend as much time thinking about the NBA as anyone who actually gets paid to follow the league. We're panicked about a lockout, not even because the threat of missing games, but because we are continually enthralled by the offseason. We are consumed by the league and every single detail it has to offer. At the same time, we know none of it really matters—in both the real world and cosmic senses.

Sitting in New Jersey or Brooklyn, No Regard staff conversations have increasingly started to sound like this:

"Definitely put Jamario Moon in the game. He'll run around and work up a sweat, for sure. Maybe deflect a pass or two. Or not, no worries."

"Kurt Thomas? Absolutely. Get him in there and find out how many rebounds the old man can pull down."

"Ok, trade for Hasheem Thabeet if you have the chance and invite him to a few practices! He'll drive his car to the gym and work out a bit!"

For fuck's sake, our only reaction to the Mavs winning the title was a post about Coach Spoelstra playing Eddie House for 21 minutes in game six.

This ideology is what got us through draft night, and it's what will get us through the lockout. When regular season games finally commence in December, and the players are out of shape and barely aware of the new offensive and defensive systems in which they've been placed, we'll be thrilled with the entire situation—because what does it really matter? Why not enjoy it?

I guess what I'm trying to do here is invite you all to this New Age NBA philosophy of ours, which can be reduced down to this: Nothing matters, and everything that happens in the NBA is fun.

Nihilistic Fandom, welcome.