Moving the Chains: Premature Speculation

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The orange and blue confetti was still falling from the rafters of San Antonio’s Frost Bank Center when the initial reports came out.  

According to the prognostication ‘experts’ – what they call themselves rather than just admitting your guess is as good as theirs – the San Antonio Spurs and the Oklahoma City Thunder are the early co-favorites to win the 2027 NBA Championship. 

Never mind that the New York Knicks just beat the Spurs for the fourth time in games – twice on their own home court – for this year’s title.  In convincing fashion, incidentally, overcoming double-digit deficits in all four of their wins.  

So, for crying out loud, why not give the Knicks an opportunity to just enjoy their victory – and maybe a moment or two to take it all in?  Seriously, is any of that too much to ask?  Besides, can’t we just let baseball have its moment in the sun before its eclipsed by the NFL in a few months?  

Apparently it is too much to ask, because the ‘writing heads’ have already started expressing their collective doubts that the Knicks – or for that matter any team other than the Spurs or Thunder –  can win it all next year. 

There’s a slight problem with that, because any or all of the following could happen between now and next year.  Players could get traded.  Players could demand to be traded.  Players might get hurt and miss games.  Players might hold out for more money; they’d miss games as well.  Some coaches will be fired, and other coaches will be hired.  Teams could even relocate to another city.  Or country, for that matter.    

In other words, just about anything could happen.  So why, pray tell, are these predictions made so soon?

I’ll tell you why.  It’s because it gives the ‘talking heads’ something to argue and scream about for the next five months or so, at which point the NBA will begin a new season and do it all over again.  

And who, pray tell, is responsible for allowing these talking heads to do what they do – even if what their opinions rank a notch above putting a deposit down on a house you can’t afford because you might have the winning lottery ticket on the ‘that makes total sense to me’ scale?  

Well, if you bothered to read anything with a title similar to ‘Early Line on the 2027 NBA Crown,’ I hate to be the one to tell you: the guilty party is you.  

So if that’s the case, I have two words for you, which are the same two words I would say to you if I saw you hitting yourself on the head with a hammer:  

STOP IT!

There, I said it.  Stop being an enabler.  Join me in ending the senseless stream of nonsense about what might happen, could possibly happen, or absolutely won’t happen.  Because, as I’ve already implied, your guess is indeed just as good as theirs.  

I can remember when Joe Lunardi made his March Madness prognostications near the end of the current regular season.  Now he’s making them for the following season an entire year in advance, starting with the morning after the winning team cuts down the net while One Shining Moment is still playing in the background.   

Once again, anything could happen between now and then.  In fact, perhaps even more so at the collegiate ranks, now that NIL, the transfer portal, and everything else the NCAA is messing up has come into play, turning ‘student-athletes’ into free agents always on the lookout for more money and greener pastures.     

While I’m on the subject, there’s one more topic I can’t let slide by, and that’s Mel Kiper’s mock NFL drafts.  Why is it that we’re inundated all year long with Kiper hypothesizing ‘this team is selecting that player,’ and then once the draft is completed we never see any kind of ‘report card’ showing how he did?  I guess those reports are out there somewhere; maybe they’re on the NFL’s version of the dark web – if there is such a thing. 

Getting back to college basketball, according to the first and second edition of ESPN’s ‘Way-Too-Early Top 25’ released initially on the night of the championship game – and then again just three weeks later – there was ‘massive player movement’ as ‘more than 2,700 players entered the transfer portal, more than 90 of the top 100 transfers committed quickly and another 60 players entered the NBA draft.’  It was, in their words, ‘a whirlwind.’   

So given all that, why does ESPN even go to the trouble of mentioning anything about it in the first place?

Maybe you weren’t paying attention earlier, because I already mentioned why.  They do it because people are giving them the time of day – which they don’t deserve.    

So we can begin by doing our part.  Just in case you missed what that is the first time, here it is again:   

STOP IT!  

 All you’re doing is encouraging them.