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And I’m not talking about Christmas.

Despite vaccination numbers north of 95%, a new variant of the Coronavirus has breached the walls of the NBA and is wreaking havoc on a league that is already being thinned out by non-virus injuries that stem from playing three seasons in two years. The sick are just getting sicker (Tuesday night’s Brooklyn/Washington matchup was postponed) and as a result, the NBA has thrown off some of their normal roster restrictions to ensure that teams can field full squads. Names that are normally reserved for the silly season of March and early April are now turning up before the unofficial start of the season on Christmas Day. Consider Marquese Chriss, one of the newest Dallas Mavericks, as an example. A lottery pick in 2016 who has never found his footing in the Association, Chriss was added as a reinforcement to the Mavs roster amid a Covid outbreak in Dallas. To his credit, Chriss looked springy, played well, and actually closed the game for Dallas against Minnesota before the ink dried on his contract. Chriss was joined out there by luminaries like Theo Pinson and Sterling Brown, and all across the league there were was a mix of old names and new showing up in NBA box scores. Guys like Wayne Seldon in New York and Tony Snell in Portland resurfaced after time spent in the NBA hinterland, while Marcus Garrett saw some burn in Miami, and Leandro Bolmaro and Nathan Knight popped up for the Timberwolves.

Amid these strange times in the NBA, it was good to see that Damian Lillard is still good for a bucket or two.

Please, blog, may I have some more?

Bullshitting is bad. Or is it? There are four reasons why people lie. 1) To hide or protect something. Good if you were harboring a Jew in Nazi Germany. Bad if you have a mistress. 2) Fear. Of getting caught. I guess that ties into protecting oneself. 3) To elevate one’s self-perception. You went to which school? You’re how tall? You slept with how many women? 4) It is the wise thing to do. Do I look fat in these jeans? BS’ing is often annoying or straight up lame, but it is an integral part of life. There are many situations in which being brutally honest serves no purpose other than to hurt the other person, which is lame. Damn it, is everything in life lame then? Last night, we had another example of BS’ing being bad….the good bad, though….as in dope. Now that I think about it, sometimes we just BS to mess around, which is what Ben Simmons did last night against the Bulls. Ironic, huh?

PTS REB AST STL BLK TOV 3PT FG FT
 19 17 14 0 2 6 0 6/15 7/10

Simmons has now messed around five times on the season. He had been in a slump lately, looking disinterested and lacking aggression. It’s mindblowing to think that he can dominate a game without being able to shoot from the perimeter. He’s that good. Anyways, BS is a nightly triple-dub threat and will contribute with the D stats. As we established above, there’s good and bad with BS. The bad? Literally no 3s, like he hasn’t made one the entire year. The turnovers are plentiful. As I always say, good if you are high in a pastry shop. Not so good for fantasy. The free throw shooting is abysmal, like 55% bad. DeAndre Jordan, with his 60% on the year, is like, “Yo, Ben. You really need to practice bro.” Simmons is the 75th player for fantasy on the year. For the last month? The 110th. There are just too many holes in his game to approach Top 50 territory, but for punt FT% and 3 teams, BS is lovely.

Here’s what else I saw last night:

Please, blog, may I have some more?

Image result for grizzlies logo

Two or three times a month, I take my kids to the local yogurt shop. It’s crazy the flavors they have these days: black forest cake, caramel macadamia, cinnamon coconut, guava grapefruit sorbet, etc. Man, when I was a kid, there was no fancy shmancy yogurt. We had ice cream. Flavors? Vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry. The classics. Now, any store you go into, there will always be vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry flavors placed among the almond midnight mochas, cookies & creams, and alphonso mango tarts. Why? Although not sexy and often overlooked, they get the job done and still taste damn good. That’s how I feel about the Memphis Grizzlies. They play a boring, methodical style of basketball and don’t have star power, although Mike Conley and Marc Gasol are really good players. With that said, all they’ve done is make the playoffs for seven consecutive years.

Please, blog, may I have some more?