I got to the point in the Hornets game where I was laughing during the 2nd half instead of getting mad. That's where I'm at as far as caring goes.
Same. Forget about the playoffs, I'd be excited to watch this team look like professional basketball players for a full 48 minutes right now. The bar is so low there's nothing beneath it anymore. I'd cheer for 0-82 at this point. At least that would be noteworthy. Imagine it's late March or early April and the Clippers/Lakers are resting all of their starters for the playoffs. Can this squad pull out an improbable loss to keep the winless streak alive? Will we resort to shooting on our own basket and fouling our own players to make it happen? Excitement! Drama! Tears! Laughter!
One of my favorite movies is called
In a Lonely Place. It stars Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Grahame as unlikely lovers brought together and then torn apart by a murder investigation. It's a masterpiece of character development and it's got a real gut punch of an ending which feels relevant here. All through these years of futility I could convince myself that whatever eventual success waited on the other side would be worth it. At some point it turned though and I'm not even sure a championship would wash away the bitterness anymore. If this team eventually wins a championship it won't be for me, it'll be for the legions of young (ex -Warriors?) fans who they pick up along the way all blissfully unaware of what it feels like to support a team for decades which does nothing but sabotage itself over and over again, the cycle of hope and empty promises repeating indefinitely until it just becomes background noise while you watch the game with the sound turned off knowing before it even starts what the outcome will be...
The question then will be if that brief moment of excitement is only the entrée to further decades of suffering for those poor young fans who have no idea the trap they've entered into or if things will be different for them. This is where I'm at now. I'm rooting for these players to get as far away from this team as possible as soon as they can while they still have a chance at a successful career somewhere else. So I guess congrats to Harry Giles, Caleb Swanigan, and Bogdan Bogdanovic whose brief terms are now nearly at an end. Congratulations to all the superstars this franchise
didn't draft who have no idea how truly fortunate they are. Congratulations to Luke and Vlade and so many coaches and GMs before them for participating in something that is far greater than themselves. It takes years of effort, expert craft, and more than a little luck to completely squander every ounce of good will a one-team sports market can offer. When they write the story of the Sacramento Kings beginning to end, it may just be another masterpiece of existential
Nausea (in the Jean-Paul Sartre sense, not the one that makes you want to vomit, although... it could probably be both).
