Wednesday Newsletter
NBA Playoff Check-In
The play-in and first round are both out of the way, and now the tension is really about to ratchet up. I find it tough to follow this opening portion of the postseason too closely. As much as I love the excitement and stakes of playoff action, two full months is a lot of basketball, and the first round gets drawn out to extreme lengths. The league doesn’t want to farm out more than one game per night to NBA TV. As a result, on a weeknight there is a maximum of 3 games scheduled, which has a ripple effect of necessitating multiple days between games and any series that goes the full 7 games wraps around 3 weekends. At least now for the most part there is only one off day between games and series can be completed in a more reasonable period of time.
Now that we’re down to the last 8 teams standing, this postseason is also serving as a major generational turning point for the NBA. No LeBron, no Steph, no KD. No Lakers, no Warriors. No Embiid, no Giannis, no Kawhi. That means that there is a lot of fresh blood. Fans will get to see a lot more of Shai Gilgeous-Alexander & Chet Holmgren outside of That Commercial. Anthony Edwards is on the verge of officially Making The Leap. There’s even a… dare I say it… Knicks team that’s fun to watch.
It’s too early in the second round to make rush judgements - expect for the one series that has already gone two games. Boy, do the defending champion Nuggets appear to be in deep trouble. It’s bad enough that they’re down 2-0, but game 2 was a blowout & that was even playing against a short handed Timberwolves team; Rudy Gobert missed the game to be with his fiancée for the birth of their new child. For now, I’d rather take a look at some of the eliminated teams to see where they might be going next.
The early losses were letdowns, but I’m not terribly worried about the 76ers or Bucks. With the way the talent is spread across the league, sometimes all it takes is an ill-timed injury to a key player and a team could be toast. While it’s true that Joel Embiid’s history is cause for concern, the Sixers have an aggressive front office and cash to spend. They should be back in the mix next year. The Bucks are on slightly shakier ground. Giannis Antetokounmpo’s injury was a major blow, but even had he been healthy this franchise lacks direction. The firing of Adrian Griffin/hiring of Doc Rivers felt like a panic move, and as much as everyone seems to love Doc, his teams have a history of underachieving. The 2008 Celtics are the anomaly on his resume.
The advantage that Eastern Conference teams is that the lower tiers of the conference are so weak that teams have a bit of a cushion. That’s not the case in the West. Assuming that the Spurs take major steps to build a contender around Victor Wembanyama, that means that the Blazers are the only Western team that’s in complete rebuild mode. If enough things go wrong, a team with hopes of contention could quickly plummet to the bottom. Look no further than this year’s Grizzlies. Because so many of the Western teams that have already been eliminated are aging, in salary cap hell, or both, they are firmly in the danger zone.
Which is my way of saying that it would not surprise me in the least if at least 2 out of the Lakers, Suns, & Warriors, if not all 3, fall short of even making it into the play-in next season. At the moment the Suns appear to be the most solid of that group, but their owner Matt Ishbia’s impulsiveness is worrying. Real Sports had profiled him a few years back before he had gotten into team ownership. The hook of the story was that he was a walk-on player on Michigan State’s 2000 championship team. He had taken over his father’s mortgage loan company and pulled the lessons he learned from Tom Izzo to build it from a successful local business into a multi-billion dollar company. He seems to be an exhausting guy, and because he has a playing background he thinks he knows more about team construction than he actually does and heavily interferes. There’s a real Jenga tower feel to this team.
The Lakers & Warriors are in the same boat with each other. As great as LeBron James and Stephen Curry are, they are both at the point in their lives where a rapid decline or an age-related inability to remain healthy could take place at a moment’s notice. In addition, each team is trying to thread that thin line by keeping the championship window open for each legend even though it’s probably a more prudent long term strategy to plan more for the future. All of this comes with the reality that next season the Grizzlies should be back and the Spurs are coming. Playoff spots in the Western Conference will be increasingly more difficult to attain.
Before stepping away from the hardwood, there are a couple of quick WNBA notes worth mentioning. Yesterday Commissioner Cathy Engelbert announced that there will FINALLY be charter flights for all teams beginning this season. Not only is the move long overdue, but the fact that the league is paying that cost is yet another encouraging sign that the W’s finances are improving by leaps and bounds. Also, you may have seen the interaction that Caitlin Clark had at her introductory press conference with Indianapolis Star reporter Bob Kravitz that was uncomfortable at best, creepy at worst. As it turns out, not only was he quietly suspended over that, but the paper announced that he will not cover the Indiana Fever in person at all this season.
The 2024 Ceremony
The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony is more than 5 months away, but it’s never too early to speculate about what it might look like. There are a larger than normal number of mitigating factors with regards to this year’s class, as there are multiple inductees that are deceased, some that have serious health issues, and at least one who has expressed complete and utter disdain towards the institution. I’m fairly certain that the producers of the event are going to try to convince Cher to participate somehow. There’s almost zero chance that she will actually perform; the best they can hope for is that she will attend and sit in the front row to absorb the respect from her peers as if this were the Kennedy Center Honors.
The show lineup and format figures to be largely contingent on Cher’s ultimate decision. The key decisions come down to who will open & close the evening. It makes sense that the festivities will begin with a song that will get the audience to get off their seats and dance, perhaps a tune that points out that the night will be a big celebration. It’s safe to say that Kool & the Gang will kick off the ceremony. Celebration is a song that I have mixed feelings over. It quickly became the biggest cliche imaginable; a requirement for every wedding/graduation/bar mitzvah with every old person in attendance screaming “whoo-hoo!” to prove that they’re still young. I got so sick of it, and as I’m typing this out I realize that I’m older than the older people that would embarrass me back in the 1980’s. I shall now curl up into a fetal position.
Who then will close? It would make logical sense to give that slot to the biggest, most crowd pleasing star, which would be Cher in this case. With a Cher performance unlikely, I could see Mary J. Blige blowing the roof off in the same way that Missy Elliott did last year. (Dave Matthews Band is more likely to get a mid-show slot to give the evening another big kick.) I’ll go with a different choice. I think the most likely contender would be an artist that could perform a song that would get the whole crowd singing along, & ideally many of the other performers would join in on stage. My prediction is that Foreigner will end the night with a rendition of I Want To Know What Love Is.
The interesting thing about Foreigner is that none of the members who are going to be inducted are part of the current touring version of the band. Not to worry, Lou Gramm had said as early as the nominee announcement that he would perform, so the Foreigner segment will not consist of acceptance speeches followed by the equivalent of a cover band playing Foreigner tunes. Mick Jones is the big question. He has left the road due to Parkinson’s, but he has left open the possibility of performing if he is feeling well enough to do so. He’s not the only inductee whose participation is dependent upon health.
Ozzy Osbourne also has Parkinson’s; he has hinted that he is going to try his best to perform. Peter Frampton has been suffering from a degenerative muscle condition. He has continued to tour and is adamant that he will perform at the ceremony, but there is no way of knowing how quickly his ailment will continue to progress. This will remain to be seen.
As for the rest, there is only 1 living member of the MC5, so they are likely to only get a filmed package that evening. A performance from the surviving members of A Tribe Called Quest is the longest of long shots, they too will be limited to a filmed tribute + speeches. The easiest call of the evening is that as the closest modern equivalent to Jimmy Buffett, Kenny Chesney will perform in his honor. There will be some sort of all-star blues jam to collectively honor Big Mama Thornton, John Mayall, and Alexis Korner. Finally, there figures to be some sort of group of stars that will perform a medley of Norman Whitfield compositions.
I’ve done the hard work and plotted out the show lineup free of charge. I’ll leave it up to the producers of the show to make the phone calls and book the actual talent.
The Streaming Orphans - Brooklyn Bridge
There was an extremely small niche of TV series types that ran in the early 1990’s. I’ll leave it to someone more clever than I to come up with a catchy phrase to categorize them, but this is what they had in common. They were period pieces, critically acclaimed yet poorly rated, which each ran for only 2 seasons and do not currently run on any legitimate streaming service. To make the symmetry even better, each of the traditional big 3 networks had one. I have previously discussed Homefront from ABC, and I’ll Fly Away from NBC. Now it’s CBS’s turn.
Brooklyn Bridge was a semi-autobiographical series created and produced by Gary David Goldberg, loosely based on his experiences growing up in Brooklyn in the 1950’s. His doppelgänger was Alan, a pre-adolescent boy in a close-knit Jewish family. It was an idealized look back at his youth, it portrayed the sort of rose colored glasses nostalgia that often turns me off but in this show the tone was so heartfelt and sincere that it couldn’t help but suck me in. I can’t speak for Goldberg, so I don’t know if his childhood was actually as utopian as it was depicted here, but isn’t it our natural instinct to highlight positive memories? In the Brooklyn shown here, every local shopkeeper was friendly, and there was little overt antisemitism to be seen.
That means, of course, that there were not many heavy dramatic stakes. That may be part of the reason why this show has faded from memory. I watched the show on a semi-regular basis when it originally aired from 1991-1993, but I couldn’t recall a single plot point. It was simply a feel-good show, and there’s nothing wrong with that.
The cast was filled with recognizable, if not particularly famous, faces. For example, the father of the family was played by Peter Friedman, these days best known as Frank from Succession. Marion Ross, who apparently will never be allowed to escape the 1950’s, portrayed the grandmother. Then there was this. When I did the research to refresh my memory on this show, I was surprised to see the name of the child actress who portrayed Alan’s pre-teen crush. It was Jenny Freaking Lewis!
As I said, Brooklyn Bridge only lasted for 2 seasons. It is yet another of the streaming orphans in which someone has uploaded the episodes onto YouTube, so it is available to see if so desired. I wouldn’t claim that it’s an essential piece of pop culture, but it was a sweet show nonetheless. Not everything needs to be highbrow Peak TV.
Closing Laughs
For some reason the Pulitzers overlooked me yet again this year. If only Mike Pence had the courage… Somehow I’ll plow on and we’ll all be back at this same spot on Friday. See you then, and thanks for reading.
