[Escobedo] As ESPN cuts expert voices and rewards viral argument, fans who want to understand basketball are building a smarter conversation elsewhere
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[Escobedo] As ESPN cuts expert voices and rewards viral argument, fans who want to understand basketball are building a smarter conversation elsewhere

After the Phoenix Suns dumped the Golden State Warriors out of last season’s play-in, Stephen A Smith settled behind the First Take desk to explain why Steve Kerr might have coached his last game. Midway through the burial, he claimed the Warriors hadn’t “been to the playoffs since that championship in 2022” – a four-year drought in his telling – before grumbling that Golden State could pay someone far less than $17m a year to miss the postseason.

Cool. Except the drought never happened. Golden State reached the conference semi-finals in 2023 and again in 2025. ESPN anchor Shae Cornette, who had command of the basic facts, tried to smuggle that inconvenient reality into the discussion. It went nowhere. Apparently, nobody on an ESPN set is permitted to correct the franchise “star”. Only weeks earlier, Smith had been inducted into the National Black College Alumni Hall of Fame for his work in media.

That morning’s mistake was ESPN’s quality control in miniature: its highest-paid voice mangling an easily checked fact about a league the network pays $2.6bn a year to televise. How much would it have cost Smith – or anyone on his staff – to spend 30 seconds checking before he went on air?

Smith churns out more than 3,000 takes a year, and there’s no way in hell he watches full games on the regular, not anymore, which is why he botches even his own team, the New York Knicks, when discussing them. Last summer on SportsCenter, while pencilling New York back into the conference finals on the strength of Mike Brown’s arrival, he ran through the returning core and rechristened Miles McBride as “Michael”. Knicks fans had seen the act before. A year earlier, Smith credited a hot streak to Quentin Grimes, whom the team had already traded to Detroit. He later explained that he had somehow confused Grimes with McBride. In the same rant, Smith waved away Isaiah Hartenstein – then the Knicks’ starting center – as “some dude name Hartenstein”.

Full article: https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2026/aug/15/espn-layoffs-nba-coverage-hot-takes

u/The_MadStork — 4 days ago

Victory Lap: Drake scores with a goth baddie

Who among us wouldn’t go on a bootleg dating show and bark like a dog in order to make sweet, passionate love to a powerfully built goth woman? It wouldn’t be my life’s proudest moment, but it wouldn’t be the worst thing I’ve ever done either.

I’m sure my parents would understand. They’ve known me since the 1980s, so they’re well aware of my prospects of scoring with such a woman otherwise. Even if there was a way you could just pay, I don’t have the money. This would spare them from having to pony up.

Drake could almost certainly just pay to make sweet, passionate love to Pinkychu, or whatever her name is, the slightly chubby half-Asian OnlyFans creator he won in a 20 v 1 on Adin Ross’ livestream, but he’s gotta be careful paying for it rather than just pretending to be interested in anything she says and implying that he’d be willing to fund her lifestyle indefinitely in exchange for being allowed to have sex with her once or twice.

It’s illegal to purchase access to a woman anywhere other than that place in Las Vegas where Lamar Odom almost died, but it’s only kinda illegal. You get busted, they take you down to the station and you’re out later that evening. Later, you can have a lawyer from any given background bargain it down to a speeding ticket for driving a car with a busted tail light. If you get busted on a Friday evening, you might have to spend the entire weekend in jail, which could get dicey, if anyone needs to go number two.

The problem arises if you need to take a girl elsewhere to score with her, like if you can only get a rod in Illinois. Then it’s covered under white slavery laws that were created to deter boxer Jack Johnson from interracial dating. He persisted, and that’s just one of the reasons he should be considered a great athlete. More recently, that was how Diddy got caught up. If he’d paid guys locally to service 50 Cent’s baby’s mother while he watched, he might not be in prison. That video of him trying to punt Cassie’s head to the moon was already past the statute of limitations. Do guys in New York not have big enough schlongs? No Diddy.

I’m not sure if such laws apply to Drake’s native Canada, but I wouldn’t want to risk it. Andrew Tate recently got locked up for sex crimes committed in another country after Trump already intervened to bust him out of a Romanian prison on orders from Baron von Trump, who must listen to a lot of podcasts. Tate was busted by US Marshals on an extradition request from England, where he’s already been acquitted of upwards of 20 sex crimes. If the other umpteen other alleged victims were lying, what does that tell you about this new batch?

No but really, Drake is in a tough situation because Kendrick Lamar implied that he tried to groom the girl who played Eleven on “Stranger Things” during the halftime show at last year’s Super Bowl, one of the most watched TV programs of all time, up there with the last episode of “M*A*S*H.” People who don’t even listen to rap music are aware of his alleged proclivities. The feds will use such allegations to hit you with a RICO even if they’re specious in nature. If you read through the charges against Diddy, they cite the guy who claimed that the “Can’t Nobody Hold Me Down” rapper tried to stick a thumb in his asshole while they were on a boat with Cuba Gooding Jr, an obvious cash grab. Is Cuba Gooding Jr even allowed to be on a boat? He might try to sail to Cuba to escape charges of being handsy with white chicks who aren’t old enough to have seen Jerry Maguire.

Similarly, I’d have to recommend that Drake not demand a percentage of Pinkychu’s OnlyFans, even though he’s arguably entitled to. I’d never even heard of this girl, and I’m about to go have a look as soon as I get done writing this. I’ll only be looking for things people pilfered and posted for free on Reddit, but even that contributes to her earnings, because OnlyFans use sites like Reddit, X f/k/a Twitter, Instagram and what have you to funnel people to their paid content. In a sense, I’m about to do this girl a favor.

In addition to the $100 million or whatever she’s about to make from OnlyFans, Drake agreed to buy her mother a house. He said to pick one out and that he’d pay for it. He didn’t specify how much it could be, so she could pick a ginormous house like Rick Ross’. Maybe they made her sign an agreement afterward with a lot of fine print like Publisher’s Clearing House. On TMZ, there’s a video of Pinkychu explaining to her mother that Drake agreed to buy her a house after winning exclusive access to the OnlyFans creator on Adin Ross’ livestream. She seemed less surprised or confused than you’d think to hear of such an arrangement. Hmm…

byroncrawford.substack.com
u/The_MadStork — 6 days ago
▲ 6 r/dipset+1 crossposts

Why was Jim Jones forced to ride a bicycle?

Erstwhile weed carriers and various other also-ran types are having what you might call a moment. Many of them have their own podcasts, and probably the least successful of them is more popular than the new YouTube version of the Hot 97 morning show with Ebro, Peter Rosenberg *et al*. They’re out here doing their thing.

Jadakiss is involved in a beef with an even more obscure rapper named 38 Spesh (presumably named after the early ‘80s-era rock band) that somehow led to Jim Jones’ wife catching a few strays. It doesn’t make sense to me, logically, how that could happen, but I’m glad that it did, and I might have took look into this further, for the sake of music journalism.

As if Jim Jones wasn’t having a hard enough summer, what with the weather, being foreclosed on and whatever his wife did, he was forced to ride a bicycle—or so he claims.

It doesn’t make sense how a grown man could be forced to ride a bicycle. Certainly, you could see Joe Jackson forcing the Jackson 5 to ride bicycles. Wasn’t there a scene with them riding bicycles in that cartoon they used to have back in the ‘70s? That may have been what that was based on.

The Zone 2 cardio would have been good for their stage performance, so they could sing and dance at the same time without worrying about getting winded. If they refused to ride a bicycle, or if, God forbid, they lost their breath on stage, he would of course just break his foot off in their ass.

Jim Jones says that Fabolous forced him to ride a bicycle across the Brooklyn Bridge. Did he lose a bet? Could he not afford an Uber? You have to have both a cell phone and a credit card to get an Uber, thus preventing many homeless people from quickly and easily getting back and forth to the airport. That might be something for New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani to look into. He’s already made it free to get on the bus.

You can get a credit card again after you’ve been foreclosed on and your credit has therefore been ruined, but it takes like seven years, so I’m not sure what Jim Jones is doing in the interim. I’m not even sure how he got on that bicycle. It appears to have been a rental. If he did any damage to it when he fell off of it, Fabolous could be on the hook. I wonder if they make you take pictures of the fenders before you drive it off the lot, like a rental Nissan Altima, lest they accuse you of getting into an accident. They probably only do that if you opt to not get the extra insurance, so they can take your ass to the cleaners, knowing good and well you wouldn’t be in a rental Nissan Altima in the first place if you had that kind of money.

This may have been Jim Jones’ first time on a bicycle. It was an ebike, raising the question of why he didn’t just put the pedal to the metal. Don’t those things go like 40 miles per hour? He wasn’t wearing a helmet, and if he’d gotten into an accident going that fast his brains almost certainly would have spilled out onto the pavement. He may have been afraid. In the video he posted, you can see that he’s been crying. A (free) city bus is riding his ass like it might run him over, and people are riding up alongside him cursing him out and making homophobic remarks as if he’s Dustin Hoffman in the movie Midnight Cowboy, making the sight of the bus in the background that much more poignant, not to mention the fact that Jones always looks like he has the sniffles.

Jones is going to have to have a talk with Fabolous. He could have died! He says that he fell from the bicycle and hurt himself and also lost his glasses. How is he going to replace those glasses? I used to work with a guy who couldn’t afford to buy glasses and was therefore forced to wear the free pair he was given in the Army. Apparently, they’re very recognizable in the economically challenged white part of town where I used to work. This was a sensitive issue for him, because people would come up to him wanting to talk about it, and he’d been kicked out of the Army for being too much of a wimp. They don’t give you severance pay or anything, if you get kicked out of the Army. It’s tragic, really. At least they don’t make you give those glasses back.

Possibly the worst part about this for Jim Jones is that his wife refuses to give him a blowski, if the 38 Spesh song about him is to be believed. Imagine having a night like the one he just had and having to go home and rub one out in the next room. I can see her not wanting to put her mouth on him until he gets back on his feet, especially if she lost some personal items when they were kicked out of their house. You don’t want to reward failure. But I feel like these are special circumstances. He’s been through a lot, and he needs comfort.

open.substack.com
u/The_MadStork — 13 days ago

“There is no country on earth that pays waitstaff a living wage. But Europeans and Australians lack the self-awareness and knowledge that cultures other than their own exist to understand that”

u/The_MadStork — 25 days ago

Republican rapper Travis Scott quickly switches allegiance to Spain after Argentina players Cristian Romero and Lisandro Martinez snub Donald Trump

u/The_MadStork — 1 month ago