In a statement that mourned “the extinguishing of one of the league’s oldest and most infernal lights,” the Washington Wizards announced Tuesday that the organization’s founding wizard, Osric the Baleful, had died at age 682, bringing to an end a centuries-long career in necromancy, prophecy, and NBA ownership.
Osric’s 1997 acquisition of the team then known as the Bullets is said to have taken place after an omen from the entrails of a hanged usurer convinced him that possession of a middling sports franchise would grant him an inexhaustible river of mortal anguish on which to float into eternity. Osric emerged from his crypt during a lightning storm and presented the team’s owners with a yellowed parchment granting him “full dominion over basketball in the District of Columbia, together with all courts, revenues, and towering gamesmen, who are hereby subject to permanent indentureship.” Before the owners could protest, the wizard had already turned them into wooden pestles.
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