Brooklyn Buckets

—Clipped from @erikslater_

—Original quotes via @ShamsCharania

“…The basketball press exists mostly to promote the league—it tends to be in sympathy with the management, not the players. In my experience reporting on the N.B.A., I can tell you that there is no other entity that I have encountered—including politicians, police departments, and other sports leagues—that is more needlessly hostile to criticism or which harasses journalists with such consistency.

The N.B.A.’s information ecosystem does not run on investigations but, rather, on micro-scoops about meaningless player transactions that get fed to celebrity reporters who mostly seem to exist on Twitter. Not only does this mean that ‘sources,’ who are always unnamed, retain almost unimpeachable power because they are the fountain from which all the ‘valuable’ information flows but it also elbows out nearly anyone who wants to hold the league to account or even cover it from a business or investigative angle….”

A snap of our beloved Yuta Watanabe wearing his Shohei Ohtani jersey the other night while watching Japan’s epic comeback victory against Mexico in the semifinals of 2023’s World Baseball Classic. 🏀

The Glue Guys pod has a half-hour interview with the newly returned Spencer Dinwiddie this week.

I still can't make much sense out of Jacques Vaughan's rotations, and, in this, he bears an unfortunate similarity to his beleaguered predecessor Steve Nash.

In this game we got a fair amount of Day'Ron Sharpe (who put up good numbers) and fan-favorite Yuta Watanabe (who didn't), but we saw nothing of Edmund Sumner, Cam Thomas, or newcomer Moses Brown.

Could I confidently say what Vaughan was going for with these lineup changes? No.

Well, after thinking about it for a good while, and with some gentle prodding from our sister site—the more stat-centric CITY OF NETS—I've decided to start my own Brooklyn Nets and New York Liberty microblog called BROOKLYN BUCKETS.

Our Twitter account is @BKBucketsBlog.