Coming to terms with the NBA Draft Lottery disaster
Back to blogging, choosing peace, getting it together...
Haven’t blogged in upward of two months. Goodness me—seriously, goodness me. Terrible. Basically everything has happened since last dispatch: Nets draft lottery debacle, The Drama, NetsDaily cited to a Michael Porter Jr. video podcast with “N3ON”, war of aggression in Iran, Madeline Cash height reveal through her Gap campaign, Slayyyter album and subsequent performance at Duke University, New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival 2026…don’t want to spend an entire return blog explaining why I haven’t blogged, so I’ll bury a mea culpa in the footnotes.1
The upshot is a few pieces out in the wild since we last gathered around the gold toilet—a (now poorly-aged?) take on the Brooklyn Nets’ ethical tank for BKMag, a really fun interview with Juvenile about getting older and looking at your phone for POW Mag (which, check out POW MAG if you haven’t, the stuff Paul, Jeff, and co. are putting out is insane, special shouts to Paul talking with Blu, Paul on Afrika Bambaataa, Jeff on Bieber doing the YouTube Thing), plus a profile from this week of Derby, one of my favorite young musicians working, for Pigeons and Planes.
So, enough throat-clearing, the long and short of it is that Never Hungover is back and will do its best to not leave for that long again. There’s still just so much to tackle out there—Mr. Beast on Survivor, Jaylen Brown on stream, the steroid Olympics, Spirit Airlines going goodbye, that unsolvable NYT crossword from the other day, Darryn Peterson creatine cramps, Neighbors. All in due time. But for today, the blog is:
Coming to peace with the Brooklyn Nets’ draft lottery disaster; or, What if Charlie Brown knows there’s no football and just likes swinging his leg because it’s how he has fun with his friend?
No two ways around it: Sunday’s NBA Draft Lottery was an unmitigated disaster for my beloved Brooklyn Nets. After two years of anonymous journeymen stints, an influx of timid, dribble-awerse twinks, serialized lectures from Professor Porter Jr. regarding the platonic ideal female body count, Nic Claxton lower-lip tattoos, Mr. Whammy’s widowed spats with Draymond Green, the drafting of a French point guard who finishes 45% at the rim and whose favorite movie, somehow, is Avatar, two straight Eastern Conference Finals runs for the New York Knicks, the Israeli draft influx, biannual NetsDaily age reveals, the Brooklyn Nets have concluded the portion of their rebuild for which, for the first time in franchise history, they control their own lottery picks. For their efforts, they earned the eighth pick last year and the sixth pick this year.
What that means, of course, is that for the second straight year, the Nets have ostensibly lost on purpose and yet failed, whether through NBA deep state machinations or the cruel whims of lottery balls, to land in the tier of either draft at which surefire, franchise-changing talents would be available for selection. Last year, that failure inspired the Nets to reach on Egor Dëmin, the beanpole teenage Muscovite-turned-Mormon who, despite an utter inability to dribble the basketball, has in all fairness won over a good deal of my affection. This year, it likely means choosing from a group of four flawed guards who, each, in their own right, represent one of contemporary basketball’s four humors (Darius Acuff Jr. as aura, Kingston Flemings as dog, Mikel Brown Jr. as upside, and Keaton Wagler as tall-but-a-burger). The Nets, and their pitiful 20 wins, were a millisecond away from picking first overall.
Over the last four years, the most exciting moments to be a Nets fan have been the moment they traded away Mikal Bridges, the seconds before the 2025 Draft Lottery, the game where they almost beat the Orlando Magic, the experience of reading the tweet where Kyrie Irving suggested that The Simpsons is “supposedly fiction,” and the seconds before the 2026 Draft Lottery. Those perverse enough to nevertheless live and die with this team have found themselves embroiled in what could only be conceived of as an anti-fandom: watching not to root, per se, but to cement their credentials so that they may one day root again. The only reason that Nets fandom is not the sort of pathology listed within the DSM is because there are not enough people suffering from it. But among the afflicted, the sense that their boys in black and white were due for some small fortunate break has, since Sunday, coagulated into the grim notion that the Brooklyn Nets are permanently cursed as perhaps some divine punishment for the time Jay-Z lied about losing 92 bricks. Far be it from me to suggest that this response is incorrect—today I saw a fifteen-second video of Caleb Wilson dunking and was so blinded by rage and self-pity that I had to take a twenty-minute walk. It is, in every meaningful sense, over. And yet it is precisely that fact that compels me to sketch the contours of the “so back” counterargument.
The Nets got hosed, and it is at this juncture functionally impossible to imagine their path to future championship contention. Over the next few years, they will revert to form and perform the sort of basketball indentured servitude that their fans have come to know and love, under which model the Nets suck and some other team gets to reap the draft rewards. The microtank that promised a franchise-saving talent infusion just two years ago has failed. And yet—and yet. Is it so impossible to imagine that perhaps a condition of Nets fandom is enjoying the trenches to which they have, time and time again, been condemned? The Brooklyn Nets will surely tinker with their roster at the margins this offseason—they have too much money and too few good players to not—but after that, there is no next. The Nets have no draft picks to intentionally lose for, no stars waiting around the corner for them to tidy up in preparation of. The Nets, from here on out, must try their best with the limited assets they have to try and win basketball games; for Nets fans, rooting for such endeavor will require a complete and total reorientation toward living in the present rather than in the dissociative fugue or forward-thinking-deferment that has characterized every moment since Kyrie Irving watched some video about the secret truth behind the COVID vaccine. The secret truth about Nets fans is that they, almost to a person, preferred the scrappy antics of the first-round-flameout 2019 team over the anticipation, expectations, and actual greatness of the infamous Big Three’s Eight Games in Power. Nets fans can be likened to Resistance Liberals—we are happier and more fulfilled when their energy is spent celebrating small victories rather than spinning out into vertiginous, existential big-picture thinking. What I’m suggesting, basically, is that making the best of a bad situation is what Nets fandom is all about.
There’s that Camus quote, “one must imagine Sisyphus happy,” that those in the absolute mud tend to employ to make sense of their otherwise abject circumstances. One need not betray common usage and sense that profoundly in order to get the gist of what I’m saying here. Happy? Christ, no. But can one not imagine Sisyphus chopping it up with his buddies on the internet, taking pride in the fact that Egor Dëmin has transcended his heroin-chic circumstances and developed something like Real Swag, nesting his repeated choice to root for the league’s most pitiful basketball team within a labyrinthine and fundamentally rewarding meaning-making apparatus? It’s going to be okay, or it won’t, but that’s what you actually watch the games to figure it out. And so to all my despairing comrades, I implore you: take a deep breath, go for a nice walk around the block, pretend it’s 2018 again, and choose your aforementioned fighter. I’m partial to aura, myself; the way Acuff wears his cutoff is really sick, he’s basically Darryn Peterson without the White Monster poisoning,2 and while defense wins championships, don’t kid yourself.
I recently posted a philosophy of mine coming into shape on Twitter. Thought being:
(Aside—nice that Tweets embed here again. Glad to see those guys have figured out the whole Elon Musk fracas.)
What’s happened, basically, is that looking at Twitter has been inducing a more profound sense of spiritual sickness within me than ever before. The site, on its last fumes for quite some time, has died. It’s dead—plain and simple. What those continuing to feed the sick rat in their brain by refreshing the site are encountering is in fact the zombified corpse of Twitter. Nothing’s happening there anymore. Or, rather, one thing happens, and it becomes the thing that happens repeatedly until a week later, when a new thing happens. Apparently last week that was about how much money is an appropriate amount of money to make in New York City, which was evidently prompted by a job listing from The Baffler that paid $65,000 (I will do it in a flash if you guys let me stay in New Orleans, I think you’ll love my sensibilities, team spirit, and elbow grease), which is what happened like a year ago with n+1. Point being that this will happen again with, like, The Drift, and if you are still stuck on that sinking ship you will engage with it hook, line, and sinker, because the people still using Twitter are addicts looking for our fix. That’s all well and good—it’s probably less bad for you than a lot of other things you can get addicted to, like pornography or diet soda. But it creates a really perverted sense of culture—one that, increasingly, is refracted out into what we might call actual life through trend and culture writers working for established institutions whose jobs, increasingly, are to translate what happens on our phones to, like, your grandmother. Old hat by now, Minh Tran articulated one side of it well on his great Clavicular piece, eliza mclamb another on that piece about Geese and co. that turned everyone insane for two weeks, and the final part is sort of not worth speaking about beyond a sentence or two. And so basically the mild psychosis I’m experiencing is the sense whereby it’s increasingly difficult to discern where “what’s happening on my phone due to the algorithm trying to boost engagement as Elon Musk turns abandoned Twitter to Reddit” stops and where “what is meaningfully happening in the world around us” begins, which is intensified by the fact that “what people choose to write about” has functionally lost its power as a signifier. Like, go to Google right now and type in “boy kibble” and then filter to the “news” tab. Things are bleak! What I’m saying is that these are bad times to be writing—or even, for that matter, blogging—insofar as the writer’s task of synthesizing, interpreting, and translating information has gotten muddied by the ambient information-delivery systems around us totally decaying as we wait to see what will come and replace them. To paraphrase Lana, my poetry’s bad and I blame the news.
All of which is to say: it appears the only two paths through this totally putrid information economy appear to be the Idris Elba “sit back and observe” approach or the sort of blogger-double-down spray and pray approach. Fear I’ve strayed from my roots and overcorrected toward the former.
On the creatine thing—Jesus Christ. Nutrition story of the year? Feels like just yesterday the lovely ladies in my life were texting me about the potential benefits of creatine gummies, and now, boom, Darryn Peterson is claiming that his experimentation with going Creatine Crazy sent him to the hospital with full body cramps. Look, I love the kid, but as the fellas said on this week’s excellent Nothing But Respect…there’s just no way this is the full story. In a sense I’m happy he’s not coming to Brooklyn for his own sake—imagine how he’d react to peptide nausea? I’m imagining the first thirty pages of Infinite Jest but it’s just DP tweaking off the NAD+ they shot into his stomach for a marathon film session during which Jordi Fernandez analogizes switching and defense effort to the principles of Basque separatism. Utah will be good for him—it’s more innocent, they don’t even rock with caffeine, it seemed good for NBA Youngboy’s head when Meaghan Garvey talked to him a while back.