The Hopeless Corruption of the American Sports Media
Step 1: Create a fake story. Step 2: Hope your fake story forces a real one.
Take a moment and think of history’s greatest displays of passion. Romeo and Juliet. Cookie Monster and baked goods. Charlie Sheen and prostitutes.
Yet none of the unquenchable desires matches the need for the national sports media to see Milwaukee Bucks superstar Giannis Antetokounmpo traded to a larger market NBA team. For weeks, grown men nearly wept at the prospect of seeing the two-time Most Valuable Player, finals MVP, and NBA champion on his way to the New York Knicks or Golden State Warriors. Hour upon hour on ESPN and other sports networks was dedicated to “experts” confidently declaring the small-market Bucks would trade their greatest player (and one of the top-three players in the NBA) at the tail end of his prime.
Of course, last week, the NBA’s trade deadline came and went, and the Greek Freak remains in Milwaukee, as anyone remotely paying attention to the team could have told you.
But that did not deter reporters like ESPN gadfly Shams Charania, who has made predicting Giannis would be traded into an annual ritual. The scam is easy to spot - Charania talks to someone “close to Giannis” or “familiar with Giannis’ thinking,” who tells him the superstar is considering what it would be like to play in another city. You know, like every player does every day of his career. Then he reports that Giannis and the Bucks are “discussing his future” (as every star does with his team) or he issues a story saying Giannis is “ready for a new home” at the trading deadline. Welp.
Then Charania talks to someone in another NBA front office who tells him the Bucks are “listening to offers” for Antetokounmpo. Of course, every front office is constantly listening to offers for all their players. It doesn’t mean they take them seriously, but they will always take the call.
And, poof — just like that, Charania has created a story out of thin air that talking heads on television can spend hours yapping about with no actual knowledge of the situation. Legendary reporter and Pardon the Interruption co-host Mike Wilbon has spent the entire NBA season boldly proclaiming Giannis would be traded by the deadline. And when he wasn’t, there was zero sign of humility or reflection on Wilbon’s behalf — he and every other windbag on television simply pivoted to “well, Giannis will obviously be traded in the off season.”
He probably won’t. The day after the trade deadline lapsed, Giannis boastfully posted, “Legends don’t chase. They attract.”
That will not stop Charania and others in the media, who have been reporting for more than six years that Giannis wants to play for another team. In 2020, after the Bucks were painfully run out of the playoffs in the COVID-19 bubble, he was already facing questions as to whether he wanted to be traded.
(Perhaps my favorite made-up Giannis story came from Amazon Prime reporter Chris Haynes, who reported that the star was upset the Bucks waived Damien Lillard. As if Giannis favored keeping a washed-up 35-year-old who would miss all of the next year with a torn Achilles rather than maneuvering to be more competitive this year. It all checked out.)
It is difficult to imagine anyone in the political media being so wrong for so long and still being taken seriously. Consider a Washington Post reporter who year after year reported that the U.S. was within days of bombing Iran, only to have egg on their face when it never happened.
Nonetheless, Charania was on the case at the end of last season:
This year, it began even before the season tipped off:
And it only accelerated as the trading deadline approached during this season.
But Giannis was never going to be traded. For one, the Bucks currently employ two of Giannis’ brothers - Thanasis and Alex - and the second he is traded, the team would stop pretending either of them are NBA players and immediately cut them. Secondly, Giannis is currently rehabbing a calf injury—his second of the year—and his body seems like it may be breaking down. A team that traded for him this year may not even get to use him until next year.
Further, there isn’t any team out there that has the resources to trade for him. Two years ago, the New York Knicks forked over five future first-round picks to pick up middling shooting guard Mikal Bridges from the Brooklyn Nets. If Bridges is worth that much, what is one of the top-three players in the NBA worth? Is there a team out there with twelve first-round picks to fork over?
And as long as we are talking picks, why would the Bucks want picks for an all-time great player who still puts up MVP numbers? Any team the Bucks trade Giannis to is going to immediately become a contender, meaning their first-round picks are going to be in the late-20s. The only temptation to trade Giannis would be if the Bucks could end up with a pick near the top of the draft, where they could swap Antetokounmpo for a future star like AJ Dybantsa of BYU.
There is also the matter that Giannis seems like he really loves Milwaukee. He constantly discusses how the Bucks gave him his first chance in the NBA, how he met his wife in Milwaukee, and how all his children were born there. Take this interview he conducted with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel on the night prior to the trade deadline, in which he said he wanted to retire as a Buck:
Nonetheless, the incentive for the national media to manufacture stories is simply too strong. The NBA season is long, and this year it has been pretty uneventful—the networks need something juicy to talk about. So the die is cast:
Step 1: Spend years spreading the false narrative that Giannis wants out;
Step 2: Start saying that all the trade rumors - entirely started and spread by them - is “weighing” on Giannis and the team, making it likely they will trade him.
Shams, indeed.
When I was in high school, my father went to a speech given by political cartoonist Herblock. At the time, I remember him suggesting this as a potential career path for me, as I had a bit of an artistic streak on my mother’s side. (My dad is a military attorney and my mother is a hippie artist, the true definition of “opposites attract.”)
Sadly, I did not live up to his high expectations, as I only succeeded at the writing portion of the assignment. But recently, armed with a drawing app on my iPad, I have taken to sketching out some cartoons. Some recent samples:
There’s a documentary on Hulu called “Camden” that runs through some of the musical acts that have run through the trendy London neighborhood of the same name over the years. It tells the story of the Libertines, who came and went quickly, but who made some great music before their demise.