Surreal scenes from a never-ending irregular season NBA afterparty

It’s pitch black in here. There’s smoke everywhere. Assorted muffled names echo endlessly throughout this claustrophobic but boundless void. Someone turn the bleeding lights on. We’re at a surreal never-ending irregular season afterparty in the basement of Twitter, full of sweat-drenched beat writers and coked-up general managers and tidbit-dealing NBA scouts.  

Jonathan Wasserman is DJing in one section. Mike Schmitz is on a Zoom call, breaking down game film from 1992 with Cole Anthony’s neighbor’s second cousin. Kevin O’Connor is by the bar, playing guitar for some reason, wearing a beret. Ian Begley seems pretty sober, but looks like he’s got his hands full keeping Jonathan Macri on the straight and narrow, now on his 19th mead and enthusiastically berating random passersby with shouts of “SCUTTLEBUTT!?”, somehow equal parts accusation and question.

Knicks Twitter, entranced, oscillating between mock draft neurosis and mailbag bewilderment, is for the most part congregated around various digital draft dungeon entertainments. A wrestling match, I think, between — it’s difficult to make out through the smoke — Mike Vorkunov and Shwinnypooh, maybe? Anyway. A cluster of barely vertical bodies to the left of the Vork-Pooh bout are watching an impressively high quality endurance dance-off between Spencer Pearlman and PD Web. Both look exhausted. Are they crying? Word is they can’t stop until draft night. Poor guys. Especially in these conditions, shuffling around in month-sized puddles of pure lactic acid, admirably wafting smoke away from oblivious commonfolk.

The prime source of smoke, Bob Myers, is just camped out by the entrance, burning shit, hugging everyone like they’re best friends, intensely interested in anything tall with intact pairs of eyes and hands and feet. Most people have learned to avoid catching Bob’s eyes and steer clear of the area all together, except for Danny Ainge, who stops by on his bi-hourly rounds of the room peddling a handful of depressing first round picks. Myers doesn’t want the picks, but he wants to appear as if he wants the picks. And Ainge doesn’t think Myers wants the picks, but wants to be able to tell people that an agreement was close, with the picks — his precious picks — somewhere down the line.

Then there’s that mysterious character, sitting monk-like in the shadows, on his own, soaking up the scene, smirking ever so slightly at the sweaty entropic shenanigans scattered around the room. He hasn’t moved or spoken or so much as coughed for weeks. He just sits there, surveying, all knowing, cucumber-calm, like Aragorn in the corner of The Prancing Pony before The Lord of the Rings properly kicks off, some three-eyed league-wide raven, with the smug look of a man orchestrating a draft night temporal pincer movement. Basically — if none of those references tickle your brain’s armpits — he’s sitting there looking like Woj ten minutes before every draft ever. It’s Leon Rose, by the way, the cucumber-monk. He must have a plan, right? Right? RIGHT?

Speaking of Woj, he’s here too, except he’s finally taken on his base corporeal form: a man-sized phone with thumbs for arms and thumbs for legs and a single bespectacled thumb for a face on the phone’s screen. It/He is on a throne of sorts, middle of the dance floor, idly tossing handfuls of characters into the content-starved crowd, who scuffle and fight and gorge on these crumbs of high-grade uncut rumor. 

It smells pretty terrible, as you’d imagine. Like the carefully collected and then pulverized mush of every sweat-heavy sock ever worn in the NBA wrung out, distilled, and stored in a great big toxic canister of Eau de Postgame-Toe. And then this nightmarish weapon of mass olfactory disgust has been generously pumped into the basement of Twitter to gradually congeal with the increasingly dense seasonal smoke of thirty shit-talking franchises.

Everyone’s eyes look like they’ve been removed from their owner’s faces with a rusty teaspoon and bathed in a bottle of vodka for eight slow-motion months before being popped back into their sockets and forced at gunpoint to have a nostril-singeing staring contest with a raging bonfire. (See: Tom Thibodeau’s poor innocent pupils after the 20th game of any regular regular season.)

And the noise. Like a garage full of angle grinders having a fight with a shed full of leaf blowers, essentially 2020’s slightly more aggressive take on the soundtrack to normal NBA offseason Twitter, which has one track: A Screaming Vortex of Numb-Bored Half-Thoughts, by everyone, featuring you.

Anyway. That’s what it feels like down here, in the bowels of Twitter, at 2 a.m. on the eve of the draft. Where no one knows anything. But everyone knows someone who knows something. Who heard it from someone with absolutely no reason to tell the truth.

Never again will this latest list of names occupy so much of our collective neurological real estate. Our mental draft boards, eight painstaking months in the making, happily bobbing around on the surface of our psyches; will soon sink into useless oblivion. Shipwrecked draft feels settling on the wreckage of offseason cares long forgotten. Passionate opinions about Isaac Okoro — his free throw rate! His shooting indicators! His high-school career! — will soon be sea floor neighbors with the rusty remains of everything we were once sure we knew about Miles Bridges, Malik Monk, and Mario Hezonja.

This is no time for reflection, though. The afterparty is at its boozy zenith. Alan Hahn, after boldly expressing pro-Brodie thoughts, is in the nose-flattening nucleus of a seething blue and orange mosh-pit. Rockets GM Rafael Stone — who shouldn’t even be here — is whiteying spectacularly. Michael Jordan is getting him a glass of what looks like water. That’s nice of him. Rose is staring intently at Suns GM James Jones, like a crouched and drooling lion would a slightly too exposed antelope, as if Jones is dancing with someone he shouldn’t be dancing with, and Rose is mentally filing away this grievous indiscretion in an ominously girthy ring binder labelled “cold cuts”.

Well done, everyone. We’ve almost made it. The Bad Draft is here. Meaning we can imminently emerge from the basement of The Bad Place, released back into society looking like a horde of bubble Solomon Hills.

Until then, where’s Macri with that mead? Anyone fancy some last minute scuttlebutt? Ever heard the story of the time Patrick Williams dunked on a 22-foot rim — as a 9-year old?