I'm going to invite you into your own imagination. You, in this moment, are The Steve Bee, as he calls himself in his head. Stepheven Anthonio Ball Me R. Steve Ballmer. It's like that movie Being John Malkovich, except there's no weird hole. Just an article on FanSided beckoning you to dream and glomp a world of fantasy:
Being an obscenely rich white man in the year 2025.
Now that you're first-person perspective in this world, it's going to take a moment to adjust. One arm feels weird, but the other one feels oddly strong and tentacle-like for some reason?
There's a post-it note with a little drawing of a stick figure pointing at the functional arm. “The supplements are working” it says below the stick figure.
The words “what's better than ambidextrous?” flash through your head as if you're supposed to know what that means, but then they're gone.
A part of your brain tells you that's absolutely the dumbest thing anyone (you?) has ever written, but a tsunami crashes the sandcastle of humanity, and suddenly you're reminded just how right you are and just how right you've always been.
And while it's great you have $155 billion, other people have more. It's just the worst. It's just the GD worst. Elon is younger, and he traded his sense of shame to be famous among people who also didn't fit in on 4chan.
What else can we do? What else can we (I) (you) Steve Ballmer do? We can take over a city. Not in the national government sense, but in a more comfy, cultural sense. Streetlights not spotlights. Remember that shit? Of course we do. That's what the tattoo was for.
Red.
White.
Blue.
The colors of the Clippers. The colors of America. The colors of the most patriotic flavors of Mountain Dew. The Clippers should be LA’s team, do you know how we know? Neither do we. But we do. Because we have $155 billion.
I mean, think about it. We are thinking about it together in our shared Ballmer brain. Clippers are ships. They go on water. Lakes are water. Clippers ride on top of Lake(r)s, so paper covers rock. Clippers win.
This is the way things should be.
Unfortunately, they are not, yet, the way things are.
Have you been to LA? Yes you have. I mean, we have. All of us live there together in one big house in one big brain. We walk around our neighborhood (there are some people of Irish descent there) and we can just tell they're begging for Clipper Ascension.
Ellie the Elephant would not take our offer, so what do we do?
Of the remaining options, we did everything right. We've had the best team in the NBA for six years straight, according to our models. Kawhi's random knee issues keep popping up (like srsly tho why? NOT fair). Paul George hasn't shown up to work for months.
The team needs a boost. Judging by all information around me, the Clippers need to be better, the Clippers can't get better following the rules, so the Clippers must be better than the rules allow. Yes. We’re all in agreement on this in the Steve Consensus (taking ideas for names); it is a moral good for the Clippers to be better, so it is a moral good to cheat.
It's such a relief being a rich white person because all the morally correct decisions seem to benefit me the most by accident. It's not a burden I carry lightly, but it's a sacrifice I'm willing to make.
We fast forward
Real journalists wouldn't be making a big deal about this. Real journalists have bosses that people like me tell what to think. The Pablo Torre guy is out here blowing up the spot of us, the chaotic good in this scenario.
We're good, a good person. We've had a no show job for decades. What is wrong with trying to share that kind of environment with my best friend? Last time we met, Kawhi made eye contact with us four whole times. Uncle Dennis’ message notifications kept going off the whole time. It was a clip from “Meet the Grahams” where Kendrick says “the nerve of you, Dennis.” He chuckled every time, but every time we laughed along, he gave us this look. We didn't understand what it meant.
But look at us now, the victims in this situation. It's incredible how often this seems to happen. “Oh you could end world hunger. Blah blah blah.” A few weeks ago we got an email saying it would be nice if we paid taxes this year. People don't understand how triggering that is.
But “fortune favors the brave” like our other best friend Matt Damon said in that crypto commercial. We must be brave. We must invest in crypto. We must immediately stop investing in crypto, holy f that was a bad idea.
And we must buy the NBA.
The future of the NBA, the Clippers, and eight billion people across the globe
$155 billion. The average NBA franchise is worth $4.66 billion, according to CNBC. I (I'm sorry. I'm sorry. We. You. You are involved in this us too) only need fifteen franchises to have a majority.
Maybe we up the price to $5 billion. Cash. Across the board offer to all other teams. First 15 to accept win the prize of helping me get what I want.
Then we win. Again and again. All the time. Forever.
Rule changes:
- If Kawhi doesn't want to play that night, he gets to pick one to three players on the other team that don't get to play either.
- Salary cap. Let's just have fun with it. Maybe each team gets a different amount each year. I'll work out some analytical morality models to see who should benefit most. Certainly not small markets. Ha!
- The ‘B’ in NBA Cup will stand for Ballmer.
- Every broadcast will contain at least one intentional slip-up where they say “basketballmer” for some reason. They will then take the opportunity to thank us personally for all the money we have while showing some sick AI images we made of us on a skateboard.
What if the basketball had wings?
There were a couple people in The Wall this year who wanted the whole experience replaced with a big infinity pool, and I can't remember why we decided against it. I want to come back to this. Tentacle Arm, write this down. Stupid Arm, why can't you be good like Tentacle Arm? You suck and I hate your greenish tint.
It doesn't have to be this way
Hi. You're you again. I'm back to being me. Earlier today I told someone that my job is being a basketball writer. Then I came home and wrote all that.
I'm hoping I showed something though; you have to play these things out in your head in as much detail as possible. All potential outcomes. Maybe if you were trying to imagine the ongoing narrative instead of me, Steve Ballmer has two normal arms and shouldn't buy the NBA.
But there's simply no way to know, as this has happened instead, and I have now convinced you.
I'm sure we'll benefit somehow. Some day. :)