Here Is An Extremely And Needlessly Complicated Way To Rescue Portland From Tom Dundon

In the absence of any actual NBA basketball to watch, the blogscape is currently lousy with basketball-knowers furiously knowing basketball.

It couldn't be any other way, although it is all happening at such a frantic rate that one is left absolutely convinced that LeBron James is going to sign with the https://www.basketball-reference.com/nbl/teams/FWZ/">Fort Wayne Zollner Pistons by week's end because Brian Windhorst's pal/source Spliffy The Dry Cleaner got a tip, and also that Tyler Herro either punched, was punched by, or has never actually met Bam Adebayo.

Every shovel has a name, a job, and a hole that needs digging and filling repeatedly so that the shovelers can try to seem indispensable to the league's information system, at least until such time as they get hired by some team to do some nonsensical job that will be replaced by AI by next Thursday lunch.

What you won't find, though, are owner pundits—people who know or pretend to know what the billionaires are planning, when they're planning it, and why it needs to be planned.

Let's call it, for lack of a popular alternative, the study of advanced bastardology, a largely untapped motherlode of venality that makes the basketball seem entirely ancillary to the actual work.

We know, for instance, that Jimmy Dolan is a spectacular GRA (if I spot you "giant" and "raging," can you figure out the "A"?) no matter the subject or https://defector.com/turd-makes-brief-appearance-in-punch-bowl">the moment, but he's the most recent doof to lead a parade.

We know Tom Dundon can https://defector.com/tom-dundon-applies-his-chintzy-tactics-to-the-trail-blazers">hear a C-note hit the snow and send one of the interns or worse, one of the children whose names he had engraved on the Stanley Cup, to dig it out with their face.

We know Patrick Dumont looks like a manager at a FedEx dropoff depot whose only apparent service to the business of basketball was to successfully pitch Nico Harrison into https://defector.com/every-mavericks-home-game-is-now-a-mutiny">the chipper-shredder of public opinion after the Luka Doncic deal.

We definitely know that Adam Silver is https://defector.com/the-nbas-expansion-gambit-is-about-getting-bigger-not-better">the front-facing corporate shill who would sign off on any of the aforementioned owners setting off explosives in a petting zoo and then defend the subsequent shower of animal bits as the necessary cost of doing business in the modern NBA. And we know that they all want new, publicly funded arenas by next week because they don't want the other owners to make fun of them at league meetings.