Stephen Curry needs help to win championships, just like everyone else

May 31, 2022


If you have spent much time interacting with NBA Twitter, you are probably aware of how stan culture has created a series of rip currents just under the surface of broader NBA fandom. It’s not unique to the NBA, but I’m still often taken aback by the rabid reactions to random people with triple-digit followers expressing opinions about star players.

For the most part, NBA player stans aren’t on the same level as, say, the Beyhive or Army, but it is still disconcerting how certain stan groups will go off when they feel their beloved player has been disrespected. Maybe there’s something to the notion that when a person stans for a celebrity — athlete, entertainer, politician, or whatever — it is because the celebrity has come to represent something in the stan’s identity, so a perceived slight of the celebrity is a slight on the stan.

All that is prologue for what I really want to write about, which is that Stephen Curry’s greatness may be overstated by his stans, but I also feel he is held to an unfair standard when it comes to historical greatness, just like every other modern basketball star is.

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Everyone's a winner if the Commanders move to the boonies

May 23, 2022


Upon reading that the Washington Commanders have taken steps to purchase land in A Town You Don’t Care About That’s A Considerable Distance From Washington, D.C.’s City Center, ostensibly with the plan of building a new stadium there, I fully expected to see complaints about how the team would be abandoning their fans, but I didn’t expect quite this level of vitriol. By now, it’s probably a reflex to condemn anything Dan Snyder does, but in this case, if Snyder wants to build a football stadium in the Virginia hinterlands, that would be a good thing, on net.

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Let's talk about Kirk Reuter

May 15, 2022


I’ve been thinking a lot about Kirk Rueter, and if he would have made it to Major League Baseball had he come up today rather than three decades ago. Heck, he might not have even gotten drafted, given his underwhelming stuff and mediocre strikeout numbers in a non-power college conference.

However, Rueter managed to fashion a long Major League career during which he had multiple solidly above-average seasons, despite being a soft-tosser who only had two full seasons in which he struck out more batters than he had runs allowed.

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