Fact or Fiction: The NBA is ridiculous (in a good way)

Each week during the 2024-25 NBA season, we will take a deeper dive into some of the league’s biggest storylines in an attempt to determine whether trends are based more in fact or fiction moving forward.

[Last time: Is the NBA without a future face?]

Fact or Fiction: The NBA is ridiculous (in a good way)

How ridiculous is the NBA? Let us count the ways. Over the past week or so ...

• Two former players, stretching nearly 14 feet and weighing close to a combined 600 pounds, challenged each other to a fight over the way they believe the game should be covered from a media perspective.

That is what happened when TNT's Charles Barkley said, "I want all the smoke," calling ESPN's Kendrick Perkins a "fool" and an "idiot." To which Perkins said, "I will address his a** like the numbers on a house."

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And what, pray tell, could possibly be the reason for these two behemoths to be so angry at each other? Barkley believes Perkins dedicates too much time to the Los Angeles Lakers and Golden State Warriors. That is it. That is the entirety of their latest beef, at least so far as I read it. A Hall of Famer is upset because a guy who averaged 5.4 points per game for his career is not talking about the Cleveland Cavaliers enough.

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• One of the greatest players in the history of the league personally and very publicly admonished a media member for daring to talk about his son's ability to play basketball, even though his son plays basketball professionally. And one of those people is somewhat seriously being discussed as a potential candidate for President of the United States, and it is not LeBron James or his son. It is Stephen A. Smith.

James, who tweeted last season how "hilarious" it was how much better Bronny is than some NBA peers, is essentially big mad that Smith has called him out on it, saying, "I am pleading with LeBron James as a father: Stop this." "This," we assume, is the dog-and-pony show of pretending that Bronny James would be in the NBA, earning $8 million from those very Lakers through 2028, if his name were Jonny Brames.

(Actually Jonny Brames is a great name. That dude probably would be in the NBA.)

And of course Smith took every opportunity after the confrontation to call it "weak" and "some bulls***," as if James cannot possibly take issue with something he said. Bodes well for his presidential campaign.

Has anyone stopped to ask Bronny how he feels about all of this? He is a 20-year-old working professional who, by all indications, is fully capable of speaking for himself in these situations. Having his father, who set him up for all of it, fighting his battles for him makes the nepotism feel more nepotism-y.

• One active player accused another of ducking a third because two of them had a heated practice in 2018, even though the accused was not ducking anyone; he was attending a funeral for a personal friend.

Confounding, right? Draymond Green did actually say on his podcast that New York Knicks center Karl-Anthony Towns would not play his Warriors because Jimmy Butler was on the opposite side. When it turned out that Towns was dealing with the death of someone close to his family, did Green apologize?

No, he did not. He plugged his podcast instead. What fresh hell are we living in, where Green is serving up his signature dish. You can guess what is on the menu. (Hint: It's something Stephen A. Smith said earlier.)

• The guys who made the dumbest trade in the history of the NBA are, a month later, still defending the dumbest trade in the history of the NBA as if it were not the dumbest trade in the history of the NBA.

That is right: Dallas Mavericks governor Patrick Dumont is still talking about the Luka Dončić trade.  

“This was a decision about the future," Dumont recently said. "If you look at our roster today and who we have, we feel like we position ourselves to be incredibly competitive against the best teams in the NBA.”

Weird. Your general manager, Nico Harrison, said it was a win-now decision, and you kind of just said it was one, too. And your team is in absolute shambles only weeks from trading the 25-year-old superstar who led you to the NBA Finals last year. There is no future to speak of in Dallas. And no present, either.

I would tell them to stop speaking if it were not so morbidly fun to watch them dig their hole deeper. Even Mark Cuban is out here telling people that he sold the Mavericks because he did not want his kids to make a trade so dumb. That is not the reason he sold the team, but it is hilarious he is saying it is.

• One team was fined $100,000 for violating the NBA's player participation policy in its efforts to tank the season, while another is more deftly — if not accidentally — driving its campaign into the ground.

The NBA fined the Utah Jazz for "failing to make Lauri Markkanen available" against the Washington Wizards in a battle of the league's two worst teams on March 5. The Jazz must have figured no one was watching, even the league office.

Meanwhile, have you seen the Philadelphia 76ers' rotation on their current run of misery? On Wednesday they started Jared Butler, Quentin Grimes, Kelly Oubre Jr., Andre Drummond and Justin Edwards. We will wait as you search "Jared Butler" and "Justin Edwards" to ensure that they are indeed actual NBA players.

It is not Philadelphia's fault that Joel Embiid, Paul George and Tyrese Maxey are all nursing loosely defined injuries on undisclosed recovery timelines. But if I were a team that needed to win a top-six draft slot in order to not lose its first-round pick, and I owned the NBA's sixth-worst record, I would ensure that all of my best players were nursing loosely defined injuries on undisclosed recovery timelines.

• Two incredible MVP candidates played two incredible games, each enjoying a sublime performance in a win over the other, and some folks instead wanted to talk about why one of them is "afoulmerchant."

Why can't we just have nice things? Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and Nikola Jokić are very nice things. In my opinion, it is wild that Gilgeous-Alexander is enjoying one of the greatest seasons for a guard in history, and yet Jokić is in a class of his own, because his statistics are (arguably) the greatest we have ever seen.

But the debate cannot end there. We must label one of them with a moniker that gives people who have not yet been introduced to SGA a reason not to like him. Here is a counter: If Gilgeous-Alexander is not actually earning his many trips to the free-throw line, why, then, are coaches not challenging those calls?

This is the way the NBA works. Do not like something? Manufacture reasons why everybody should not like that something, so we can all enjoy it less. Or challenge someone to a fight. It is all the same show.

Determination: Fact. The NBA is ridiculous. Where else can you find this drama but reality television.