We are hitting the scary hours of the NBA offseason, and the takes are starting to get out of hand. First, Anthony Edwards opened Pandora’s box by saying Michael Jordan was the only old-timer with any skill. While it was an uneducated take to fire off in front of a reporter, the backlash from some of the NBA’s all-time greats was further over the line than the original take from Edwards.
Three of the greatest players of all time, Magic Johnson, Isaiah Thomas, and Kevin Garnett, are calling Edwards out. Players that Edwards undoubtedly aspires to be one day.
It culminated this week with Rasheed Wallace saying that at this point in his career, Gold Medalist Anthony Edwards is no better than Derrick McKey, a two-time All-Defensive selection in the ’90s. However, Wallace also inadvertently praised Edwards when he kept the take going. Wallace compared Edwards to Grant Hill and Scottie Pippen, two of the best players of their generation and members of the Naismith Memorial Hall of Fame, a club Wallace likely will never join.
If Wolves fans thought the veiled jealousy towards an up-and-coming superstar and future face of the league was all the unwarranted hate their team would receive in the offseason immediately after one of the most successful seasons in franchise history, then they haven’t been paying attention for the last 35 years.
Despite winning his record-tying fourth Defensive Player of the Year trophy in a season in which he anchored the league’s best defense and helped lead the Minnesota Timberwolves to the conference finals for the second time ever, people around the league are still mocking Rudy Gobert mercilessly around the league. The slander is coming from role players, the worst source of information in the NBA today.
Career waterboy Theo Pinson and fellow former Duke Blue Devil Dereck Lively II were sourcing material — I mean taking questions at a basketball camp — when one camper asked if it was true that teams play whoever makes the most money. Pinson and his 1,081 minutes of NBA experience (and $3.5 million in career earnings) decided he was the perfect person to offer a well-informed, measured response to a complex question.
Just kidding, he said there was zero reason for Rudy Gobert to be on the court in the Western Conference Finals, where the Timberwolves played and eventually lost to Lively’s Dallas Mavericks. DLive, who had an impressive rookie season before the wheels came off in the NBA Finals against the Boston Celtics, has bafflingly resigned himself to being Pinson’s hype man. Lively reiterated that Gobert had zero business on an NBA court before Pinson said, “You’re paying him $40-50 million, you better get your ass out there and figure it the f— out.”
To which they began repeatedly saying that Gobert did not, in fact, figure it the f— out before the video ended.
Here’s the thing with the dawn of the “new media” that Draymond Green’s been drooling over since he started his podcast. There’s a huge and significant difference between saying, We beat Gobert’s a— in a high-pressure series, and That man who is in the midst of a Hall-of-Fame career that either of us would kill to replicate shouldn’t even step on a basketball court.
We’ve gone beyond the hot take culture of Stephen A. Smith arguing into the void for hours a day and careened straight into dips— take culture. I get it, the world only remembers the Luka step back over Gobert to win Game 2 and all but seal the series, and Luka throwing lob after lob to Lively and Daniel Gafford. Some very loud NBA players have long-running beef with Gobert, and NBA casual fans probably remember him from his regrettable COVID mic incident, our hearing anecdotally that he always gets played off the court during the playoffs before deciding they don’t like him and that he’s overrated.
The Gobert slander is just getting pretty weird. And now we have generational hater Shaquille O’Neal saying that Gobert is the worst NBA player of all time simply because he makes too much money. How is this the society we created for ourselves? In what dimension is Gobert the worst NBA player of all time, regardless of salary? It makes no damn sense to drive right past the easy off-ramp and just say he’s overrated. Now, the hot-take machine has to barrel down the highway like Rashee Rice to get to the only possible hot-take conclusion: Gobert is the worst player ever to pick up a basketball and should be deported back to France for the rest of his life.
Where is this going to end? Not just with Gobert, but with all takes. How long until we get someone other than Isiah Thomas to say that Michael Jordan was actually the sixth-best guy on the ’90s Bulls? Stick any point guard on the ’80s Lakers other than Magic Johnson, and they win eight titles instead of just five. If Shaq was 6’10”, 250 lbs. instead of 7’1”, he would have been a lumberjack instead of an NBA player. We can just say anything we want now on the internet, doesn’t matter if it makes sense, doesn’t matter if it is true, you just see Shaq said Rudy Gobert is the worst player ever, and they’ve got you for what they are really after — your attention.
The Shaq clip has almost four million views on X in a day. The Lively and Pinson clip garnered nearly three million views on X for a guy named Panda Hank with 9,000 followers. Both clips will generate dozens of reaction videos and articles like this one with people who either agree with the takes because they only watch the sport through their X feed and real people who call these clowns out for just spewing bulls— into a mic. After all, it makes them more famous, and that’s the problem. No matter what, the crazier the take, the more attention it will get, good or bad. That’s the playbook in the digital age, and I fell for it when I wrote this.
If you hate Gobert for non-basketball-related issues, more power to you. But let’s keep the facts the facts. The Wolves were 10 points per 100 possessions better with Gobert on the court than off the court during the Western Conference Finals. He averaged 12.5 points, 11.7 rebounds, and 35.7 minutes per game during the “cataclysmic” series in 2021 against the small-ball Clippers, where he got “played off the court.” And if you want to look for the worst NBA player of all time, Pinson is an excellent place to start.
