Dispatch: The Smoothie King Center Cuck Chair

On wanting your favorite team to WIN even when they're supposed to LOSE

Preliminary business:

• January…enough already. Ready for 2026 to ‘begin in earnest.’ Haven’t heard a great or even really good album this year yet—Dry Cleaning was okay. Love the song where she’s mad about cleaning. I love tidying but it isn’t for everyone, and I understand how the politics of it can be fraught.

• Got to write about Egor Dëmin for BK Mag, never thought I’d see the day I was affiliated with Brooklyn Nets state media, I guess it’s true that anything is possible. Can’t say enough about the kid. I love that his dad is totally insane.

• Enjoyed Die My Love, don’t think it can go band for band with If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, but there’s a really incredible part where Robert Pattinson tries to defuse tensions by calling the mother of his child his “OG.” Has to have been ad-libbed. So good.

• NFL playoffs: none of my business.

• Had fun participating in the culture journalist predictions for 2026. Predicted the END OF TWITTER. It’s…just how I feel. Site is total slop now—the other day I saw some guy celebrating the Indiana Football account announcing their championship in a text-only post…just bonkers to me. Site has lost all its juice and makes me embarrassed to even check it.

Now, a blog about going to the Brooklyn Nets v. New Orleans Pelicans game and experiencing an internal crisis about the value and practice of fandom:

I’ve got about three routes that I jog through in my neighborhood, and two of them pass this beat-up pickup truck with the famous “I Like Music That Sounds Like Shit” bumper sticker. I find new-wave bumper stickers distasteful, but the OGs work for a reason—every time I see this sticker, I smile thinking about the neighbor of mine whose commitment to self-differentiation is such that they refuse to entertain music that sounds good. In my more cynical moments, I imagine the likely driver of this stickered-pickup as a person who has fundamentally imprisoned themself within the confines of their taste, someone who has foreclosed against the possibility of beauty in order to bootstrap an identity. But on days like last Wednesday, which found me spending sixty of my hard-earned dollars to ensure that a friend and I could sit as close as fiscally feasible to Egor Dëmin as the Brooklyn Nets played the New Orleans Pelicans, I begin to entertain the possibility that we don’t consciously choose our chains, that recognizing the contours of our desire is half the battle. I Like Basketball That Looks Like Shit.

In other words, after clocking out of my depressing job, I had the privilege of clocking into my depressing hobby: watching the Brooklyn Nets lose. The last time I’d gone to the Smoothie King Center to watch my Nets, I got pretty drunk with a now-ex-coworker and met the biggest celebrity lawyer in a city that revolves largely around celebrity lawyers and enjoyed what in retrospect was the last time Kyrie Irving and Kevin Durant ever played together as Brooklyn Nets.

In the three intervening years, I’d thought of the Brooklyn Nets in much the same way I do climate change: as a terribly depressing fact of life brought about by people more powerful than you and I that will probably ruin my children’s lives and of which a baseline awareness is probably enough to satisfy my civic duty. But things have changed recently, my blackpill has shaded considerably more gray, Egor Dëmin is shooting the lights out, and Michael Porter Jr. is so good at basketball that I’ve almost forgotten his gender politics. And so despite the fact that a year ago I opted out of attending a Nets-Pelicans game for which tickets were literally $0, I found myself giddy at the prospect of watching my boys in town this time around. Life is full of its surprises.

The last time I wrote about the Nets in longer-than-bullet-point fashion, I was catastrophically pessimistic. The Nets entered this season on the heels of an aborted tank, a confounding draft, and a series of Israel- and Michael Porter Jr.-related PR mishaps frustrating enough for me to question how, and why, anyone would choose to spend their time and attention rooting for the near-perennial bottom-dwellers. I don’t disown anything said then—like Nico Harrison, time will tell if I’m right. But a curious thing has happened over the course of the season, in that some combination of surprisingly competent rookie play, hard-nosed coaching, freedom from the shackles of rooting for busted-ass-journeymen, and, lord forgive me, good vibes has made it such that I look forward to watching Nets games again. Every game features something—heroics from my crazy Russian son, psychotic resolve from Day’Ron Sharpe, Nolan Traore slowly learning how to breathe through his nose—that excites me for the future. I feel myself relearning the joys of fandom in real time; that I can say this about a 12-29 basketball team is a testament to the depths of my previous desperation.

At our current historical juncture, team fandom can feel increasingly like a political statement or a consumption decision in line with, say, prioritizing physical media over digital streaming content. In 2026, sports are as legitimate a lens through which to forecast societal trends as any; sports condition how people discuss and approach politics, sports serve as the springboard for the 2020s great gambling onboarding event, sports provide grist for the content mills that colonize and replace what might once have been called interiority. People lost their shit when Trump said “everything’s computer,” because everyone wants to be hip to the next new thing, but, like, everything is sports. To acknowledge that is not to do the chungus Twitter leftist thing—you claim to be a leftist but like organized sports?—but rather to acknowledge that sports, for all their virtues, are perhaps the main entertainment product that society’s architects turn to when answering the age old question of how to get more people to buy more stuff they don’t need.

Which is to say: I’ve been thinking a lot about the excellent recent TrueAnon episode with Pablo Torre, in which Liz and Pablo discussed what it means for organized sports to be strip-mined by the gambling industry. Their conversation, which is both characteristically funny and comprehensive, contains perhaps the best articulation of what gambling and its industrial logic (literally every other big engagement account on sports Twitter is sponsored by Kalshi or Polymarket now, that Cam Newton Kadoosh video you just liked is probably promo for odds on whether Trump will invade Greenland) does to shake the until-now settled meaning of organized sports. Sports, the argument goes, are not just a celebration of athleticism and competition, but an exercise in settling differences. Before “see the game?” was a meme, it was among the great experiential levelers in human history; rooting for a team alongside neighbors and strangers alike is a transcendent experience. The real tragedy of gambling, then, is that by operating from the premise that the experience of mere fandom is not enough to justify watching a game, it silos young suckers into the hyper-individualized experience of rooting for their prop bets and parlays and out of the communal experience of watching a game as game. In the age of gambling ascendant, watching a game because you root for a team involved can feel like watching a roulette wheel spin not because you have any chips down but because you like the way the colors look. The implication, to borrow a phrase from the worst people alive, is that you’re NGMI.

Look, this is supposed to be a dispatch from my night at the Smoothie King Center. The reality is I don’t have too many notes from the night. I see now that I thought it was worth observing that the Pelicans production team was seemingly unable to distinguish between Danny Wolf and Egor Dëmin, such that the Jumbotron was never able to reliably tell you which tall white guy was on the floor for the Brooklyn Nets. I thought it was funny that the dreadful New Orleans Pelicans play in jerseys adorned with patches for Newage Grills, which as I search them now look quite nice but from an insulation-from-slander standpoint were probably not the best idea. I wrote “Jordan Poole looks like Justin Bieber now,” I have a reminder to request my friend for dinner (she paid before I even thought to charge her, stand-up act), I see a note from when a dude appeared to grind with his young daughter in order to win the timeout break dance-off, and I have a note that reads “Zion goatee” followed by one that just says “Nets.” I can tell you that the arena was unsurprisingly empty, that in the upper-deck there were often complete sections that were empty, but that over the course of the game I noticed couples decamp to them to enjoy a section entirely to themselves, which I thought was romantic. I can tell you that the guy doing the Crumbl cookies 3-shots-in-30-seconds challenge was really on track to win a year’s supply of cookies but then he got to the halfcourt line and it got really ugly, I can tell you that a guy beat a lady 2-1 in the “2010s dance moves” timeout battle but that they scored the rounds incorrectly (he should have won the first two rounds, not the first and the third, it was the sort of thing that makes people stop watch boxing). I can tell you that I saw the King Cake Baby mascot again, and how cool it is that a major sports franchise has a time-limited mascot whose explicit purpose is to be scary.

Each of these observations slipped off my exterior before making an impression because I was so distracted, over the course of the game, by the utterly unnatural and antisocial experience of rooting for an ostensibly tanking team in person. Which, ultimately, is what I was trying to get at with the gambling crap. My abiding takeaway from my Wednesday night with the Brooklyn Nets in New Orleans is that it is bad for the human spirit to root for your team to lose games. The fact is that I had a lot of fun at the game: I got to see my gigantic son Egor Dëmin go characteristically ape from behind the arc (he’s so tall, it’s crazy; love that kid), I got to see Drake Powell smooth out his shot and pogo-stick himself across the court, I got to see Cam Thomas be totally evil (done with that guy), I got to see Michael Porter Jr.’s totally insane hairstyle. I don’t get to do that a lot, it felt like hearing a beloved band play live, I got to point at dudes and say things like “that’s Nolan Traore, he’s French and so fast but he doesn’t really know how to make layups.” The problem is that this primal, innocent fun was repeatedly beaten down by the smug superego that colonizes the minds of all people who root for bad teams, the poindextrous voice that insists that it’s better for your team when they lose, the utterly perverted notion of a “good tank loss.” To root for the Nets to play well but ultimately lose was, I realized then, to fully and totally inhabit gambler brain. The common sense among Nets fans—that the Nets should lose every game by one to three points atop promising games from five young players and stock-increasing showings from every tradable veteran—leads to the experience of viewing every game through the lens of a convoluted, long-shot parlay. It is the undeniably logical position for a Brooklyn Nets fan to have; it is also the sort of dork shit that stamps out whatever genuine joy can be found within the inherently illogical framework of sports fandom.

All of that is to say that when Michael Porter Jr. launched one of the most ill-advised shots I’ve ever seen on a basketball court, much less in person, to seal a come-from-behind victory for the New Orleans Pelicans, I told both myself and my friend that I was happy the Nets were able to lose such a close game. I was lying. I wish that the Nets had won, because a life well-lived is not one in which everything is optimized and predictable and wack and soulless. Call it tank resistance, Chad humanism, or whatever else you’d like. I want my terrible favorite basketball team to win games, and so should you.