Now that the dust has settled on the Luka Dončić trade we know that it's terrible. Actually, we knew that before the dust settled. If I'm being honest, we kind of knew it the moment it happened, and the only reason there wasn’t a kind of mass, unintended emotional reprogramming resulting in an immediate, steady surge of horrified NBA fans to the American Airlines Center in some communal ragegriefing vigil was that a) some of us just had to check if we had fallen asleep in VR or something b) the deal was so, so cursed that it couldn’t possibly have happened. Mischief must be afoot.
But it happened, and it continues to be disgusting.
Ew.
Because I don't know how to live with cognitive dissonance, I'm forced to believe two things:
1. I'm taking Nico Harrison at his word when he said the easiest thing to do was nothing. Now it seems that nothing, in this case, would have been great! However, for reasons undisclosed, he decided doing the easy thing was, for the mere fact it was easy, bad. Sure, dude. Whatever you say.
2. How he makes decisions with this knowledge has proven to be a sparkling sort of disaster, but I admit Nico Harrison knows more about basketball than roughly 18.6 Mats combined. Clearly that means knowledge of basketball is not necessarily a prerequisite for improving the basketball decision-making standards of the Dallas Mavericks.
Now, I’m not putting myself in for the job. I’m a little worried I might be overqualified. But that doesn’t mean other people shouldn’t be looking at Nico’s position the way sexual harassers acted in public and in media in the 80s before less abhorrent interpersonal norms were broadly accepted and adapted so that we could stop being so gross all the damn time and sexual harassment could evolve to take on more insidious forms.
Excited, yet? So the job posting looks as follows.
- Not motionless or static, but as close as you can get to it without dying
- Basketball knowledge optional, but preferred
I do not claim to be a headhunter, but I do know some people. And when I say people I mostly mean things, concepts, and other nouns. Maybe I can help parties link up if there's some mutual interest. If you find yourself on this list, I’m not saying you have an in, but you do have a questionable Google search result tied to your name.
Here we go.
Glass sinking in a window pane
You know what's important in modern management? Transparency. It's good. It's difficult, but it's effective. Sometimes you do the hard thing because it's the right thing to do, not because Luka Dončić is on your NBA team and you're treating that as a problem to be solved.
Glass. Glass has no opinion on this. Glass has very few opinions whatsoever. “Don't really like being shattered much, chief” and that's really it. If you present glass, like just some windows in a pile or whatever, with the Dallas Mavericks roster as of a month ago, the window pile isn't doing a h*cking thing! Luka when we look at the roster pages and our hearts and our arm that had the tattoo on it, Luka is still there.
Improvement, sure, but we have to assert we’re not inert. There has to at least be the possibility of change. As such, we leave a big button labeled “Trade Luka” under all them panes so over the course of a few hundred or a few thousand years the glass can make the determination to become sentient and stop itself from pressing the button and blowing up the franchise. You know, the one from a millennium before.
Luckily, before that could happen, Luka and everyone else will probably be dead.
Cool!
Sonic the Hedgehog in a really sarcastic mood
For a while if you knew about Sonic the Hedgehog past the “weeee look how fast he goes” aspect of his personality, you either grew up with a Dreamcast or you were this weird kind of semi-furry that is a Sonic fan. The plot, character motivations, and lack thereof were only fully apparent to the hopeful few who still thought, even after Sonic 06, that this next game was going to rule. That sounds like a sad life, but there’s true community there.
Then the Sonic movies came out and now everyone is all up to speed. It’s normal-er to be a Sonic fan now. General knowledge of Sonic personality is at an all-time high!
So it’s only been a recent thing that I’ve felt somewhat safe saying the following: If you’re going to interact with Sonic the Hedgehog, you know what you’re getting into. Edginess as pictured by an 8-year-old, chili dogs, and moving like nyooooom. But shut up. What I'm asking is that you imagine, say, Eggman died from finally hatching into a smaller but less evil Eggman and Sonic has retired. Just a chill life with his polycule. He took up mall-walking to, I don't know, keep his hips loose.
Then a security guard sees him charging up a spin dash one day and is like “Bro. No rolling, running, or grinding in the mall.”
Then Sonic is like “Oh yeah? I can’t go fast? You're telling that to me, The Blue Blur? The Fastest Hedgehog in the world?” He then crosses his arms defiantly. He taps his foot, but it doesn’t make any sound in his orthopedic shoes.
Tails responds, “Sonic. Please, I love you but we can't have this conversation every day. Just walk like a normal person.”
Then Sonic goes, “Normal? How am I supposed to be normal after everything I’ve seen? How am I supposed to know what normal is?”
Then Tails is all like, “I’ll talk to the guys at the trampoline park. Maybe they’ll finally let you back in.”
Then Sonic furrows his brow like he always does and goes "Watch how slow I can go.”
Then (and remember, he’s edgy) he walks really, really slow to Sephora. Or Build A Bear. He's going to both, but I don't know in which order. He’ll get to both. It's just going to take a while.
Unlike the sinking glass from before, Sonic (in this world where he is real) is real and sentient. Sentience is usually a prerequisite for a position like Nico’s. I guess I wouldn't be shocked if the Mavs decision-makers didn’t want to mix things up.
But, let's be real here. If Sonic is doing his sarcastic slow walk, he's probably not in a great mood. Even when it comes to driving, it's “Gotta go fast!” not “Gotta save gas!” Dude is probably just waiting for the opportunity to tell someone off, to make someone else's day worse because at least by doing that he’s exerting a measure of control over someone else’s life when he feels he doesn’t have enough control over his.
And Tails was never like this when he worked at Cinnabon.
Anyways, unnerved, slow Sonic. Onto the list he goes.
Caramelizing Onions
How long does it take to caramelize onions? That answer depends. Are you a large language model convinced by online recipes that the entire onion caramelization process for two large yellow onions in a regular-size pan takes 15 to 20 minutes over medium-high heat or are you a person who has tried doing it themselves once ever, ever, ever in their life and found that time is alive and has teeth? If the answer is the latter, then you know it takes forever! If the answer is the former, I'm coming for you.
I always thought I was doing something wrong. I read all sorts of tweaks, advice, shortcuts, whatever. 25 minutes tops, it takes. They say that. They keep saying it to me. AND IT DOESN’T. Is adding water bad? I don’t know. Do you put sugar in there? Seems suspicious. Do you want them to be goopy and kind of like jam or just brown and noodley? That’s a personal choice, but they don’t tell you. It's just watching decay in real, coarse, unending time. Though it does smell nice.
There’s a trick though. Just caramelize them in the Instant Pot. A little bit of water (or stock if you want to use like a ¼ cup of stock), butter, salt, and pepper in Manual Pressure for 20 minutes. My first Instant Pot is kind of broken so I can’t really give you an accurate recipe beyond that. I’m just hoping for the best at this point. I got a new Instant Pot to replace the old one, but I don’t want to use it because I don’t want to break it. So I’m not going to have a solid recipe for a bit.
Just have fun with it. Many people are saying onions are the most entertaining vegetable. Basketball is an entertainment product. Sure! Why not make the act of caramelizing onions a millionaire?
My dog this morning moving around after she ate a half dozen muffins off a plate she shouldn’t have been able to reach.
It’s okay she threw them up later.
Our dog is my partner’s shadow. If my partner is in a room, Classy is in that room too. If there is about 6 inches by 12 inches of space next to my partner, Classy will find her way in.
I get love too! This happens when my partner and I are in the same room, my partner has no room at her side in whatever chair she’s in, and I do. Classy will sometimes lie on me, and it’s very nice, and I recommend it, and you should come to my house and pet my dog.
But again, Classy’s bond is with my partner first. So I was surprised to find out that this morning when my partner left her desk to go upstairs, Classy stayed by my side. “Awwww, maybe she’s starting to love me more,” I thought.
No, her stomach was upset. She got up and vomited at my feet shortly after.
The point of that story is to say up until that moment she was moving very sluggishly after having the terrible idea of eating a bunch of muffins. Luckily for Classy, she was able to vomit up her bad decision. Nico doesn’t have that opportunity. One can only assume that if he’s vomiting much these days he’s probably exorcising demons.
Okay, to clarify. It wasn’t a half dozen. I dramatized it for storytelling purposes.
And she is absolutely fine now, in case you’re curious. We love our puppo very much. Seriously, come give her pets if you see her.
This standing floor fan I have in my office
This fan has been steadily tunneling down into lower tiers of functionality for about ten years now. The base is basically shattered, so it stands at a 10-degree angle. There is enough duster-eluding cat hair in it that I could fashion a scarf for a gerbil. It doesn’t really swivel anymore, or at least it doesn’t when you want it to. It’s held together by hope. I’m starting to wonder if that’s where all my hope is going.
Usually, the air will be at the highest setting which I would call “The gust of wind from someone swinging their open hand near your face.” Just enough to be annoying that it’s not more noticeable. The swivel option is on. I look at it and tell it to swivel. It doesn’t swivel.
I look back up, then all the air will be on a different portion of my legs because while I dared break eye contact, the thing shifted. It’s like those angel statues from Doctor Who. Except of you dying or whatever, you get inadequate breeze sprayed at your leg.
This would be scary to install as commander because, while it barely does anything, it does do something. Arguably. Just enough to be kept around. And GMs with the mindset of just hanging around as long as they can are not the people with the vision to lead a team.
And as Nico Harrison said, the easiest thing would be to do nothing. Presumably, that means trading Luka means doing nothing. Doing nothing is better. It struggles, but yeah. This fan does something.
Look. I don’t want to throw it away. I just want it out of my house.
Gains in the sense of faith in humanity
So much of what happened with Nico Harrison’s decision to trade Luka is completely unrelated to the performance, presentation, and practice of basketball. It feels like the type of decision-making one develops after reading a Reddit thread of “What was the most important thing business school taught you?” and ignoring all the parts about how people, presumably, matter.
It’s not enough to just have something awesome. It’s not enough to have happy customers. If you can’t turn your product into a subscription service, you must make it Greater and More. You can’t do something Greater and More if you don’t change what you’re doing. So you change what you’re doing. It doesn’t matter if what you were doing was already Really Great and Super A Lot. You’re in charge now. It’s Nico time.
And no one else’s time. Not the fans’s time. I’m sure they’ll stick around no matter what I do. It’s not the time for the future of the franchise. The next guy can worry about that. And it’s not Luka’s time. What do I care about that guy? He’s an asset. A collection of talents with a birth certificate.
If I swing for the fences on a decision that maybe might work in my favor, the worst-case scenario is I’m out of a job I don’t see myself in three or four years anyway. Best-case scenario is I’m a genius. And not only am I a genius, I’m a genius that proved all the haters wrong. The best kind of genius. The self-aggrandizing genius.
If the Luka trade truly was a Nico decision, this is the thought process that makes the most sense to me. And I hate it.
... yeah, I'm just uncomfortable going any further than here
After my initial “omg wtf” reaction, the Luka trade was maybe the most depressing news I've heard in my time being what I'd consider a committed NBA fan. There are not a lot of situations as a fan where you feel safe rooting for a specific player for a long period of time. Sometimes vets hang around for a few surprising contracts, but to have any real kind of longevity, and for fans to trust that you will have that longevity, you kind of have to be one of The Guys.
There are very few of them. Some people might include D’Aaron Fox in that tier. I don't know if I would, but while everyone's subconscious definition of A Guy is just a little bit different, you'd think that 99 out of 100 people would consider a five-time All-NBA player who just took his team to the NBA Finals at the age of 25 would be safely one of those guys. And in Dallas, the ratio was probably tighter than that. 99.7? 99.9?
And then The Guy, Their Guy was gone.
It's hard to sit with being a fan of professional sports when these things happen. You either have to become a little bit more jaded, a little less real, or you admit to and feel pain. Sometimes a lot.
It’s not fun, and that's just as a sympathetic concept of a sports fan. “Man, it would suck to have to feel that.” Or “Man, it sucks that people have to feel that.” It's difficult enough as second-hand grief. People in Dallas and elsewhere are actually feeling the thing you fear.
I don't know. I know levity helps me, but I can't help but feel they're not my jokes to make.
Anyone with a heart would be a better GM. There are few times in life where you can, in the moment, recognize the right moral decision and the right practical decision as the same one. “We can't take Luka away from our fans, and also we'd be complete morons in a basketball sense to do so.”
But this happened.