NBA Tank Rankings: Cleveland Cavaliers make an appearance

5. Phoenix Suns

Reaction traction from the distraction faction – 70/100

That was a nice distraction, scoring those 70 points. Devin booker, Earl Watson, and the creators of Instagram are a ferocious team.

Instead of talking about the loss simply as a loss, the discussion turned into “Is it proper for someone to drag a game down with hacking and timeouts just to have a player reach a round number?” and “Should a team really take a picture all smiley and celebratory when their team just lost a game?

These are things people care about, I’ve found. Good for people. It’s important to care about things. For example: I care about Polish sausage, and I’m a better person for doing so.

That’d be all well and good, but it wasn’t just a distraction from the outside with unnecessary discussion about locker room decorum and people telling other people how to feel. The calls were also coming from inside the locker room.

“I’ve never seen so many people so happy after an L” opined a J. “You can’t guard me,” wrote a Book.

This served two purposes:

1) Organic distraction amping from within. NBA players care about tanking too, so it’s good they have something else to care about.

2) Giving license to people who otherwise were unsure whether or not they were mandated to have an opinion on the matter as maybe this wasn’t a big deal to start firing off their own takes of varying temperature out into the world further obfuscating the importance of another loss.

Takes are distraction. Take in and of themselves are relatively meaningless, just as the rest of everything is. Just get on with it.