The Cavalanchers become the Cavalanched

Cleveland gives up a 22-point lead in the fourth to lose Game 1. There are few more brutal ways to start a series.

Good morning. Let's basketball.

On one level, it's a positive sign that the Cleveland Cavaliers, 48 hours removed from their blowout Game 7 win over the Detroit Pistons, were capable of going up by 22 against the New York Knicks in Madison Square Garden in Game 1 of the Eastern Conference Finals. Up through the 7:44 mark in the fourth, Donovan Mitchell had been on fire (29 points on 18 FGAs), Jarrett Allen had been disruptive on the offensive glass and, most impressively, Cleveland had held New York way under the peak offensive level they'd hit repeatedly against the Hawks and Sixers. To that point in the game, the Knicks were just 4/24 from deep.

Maybe they were due. Maybe regression to the mean reared its unpredictably predictable head. Or maybe the Cavalanchers became the Cavalanched.

In any case, the Knicks went on a 30-8 run through regulation and dominated overtime 14-3 to win the game. Of all the unbelievable basketball we've seen through two games of the conference finals, this almost beats Monday's Spurs-Thunder opener for sheer disbelief.

Mitchell and James Harden went cold, which will happen. I mean, heck, James Harden was cold all game! (15 points on 5/16 shooting, three assists and six turnovers. Just an all-time WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING OUT THERE? James Harden game. He played the entire collapse.) Karl-Anthony Towns and friends kept Allen off the offensive glass, important with all those Cleveland bricks. Most important was that Mike Brown and Jalen Brunson decided they would attack Harden relentlessly, and so they did. Brunson had 15 points on 7/8 shooting in the final 7:43. At no point did Kenny Atkinson scramble the defensive scheme or pull Harden to protect him from the abuse Brunson was dishing out.

Atkinson also waited a long time to call a timeout. Four minutes of game time, actually, to the point where the lead shrank from 22 to five. The Knicks were on an 18-1 run at that point. It almost seems as if he was in as much disbelief of we all were.

In any case, Cleveland showed they can compete with New York in this series ... but the Cavaliers have to win at least one game in MSG to win the series, and just blew a tremendous opportunity to do that and put the Knicks on their back foot. Now not only are the Knicks up 1-0, but they have some real good evidence of something that might work every time down the floor. New York doesn't play into exploiting match-ups too much, preferring to play their style. But in a pinch, they will let Brunson destroy the weakest link. It's on Cleveland to prove they can stop it. I'm pretty skeptical. No one really stops Brunson these days.

No Kidding

Jason Kidd is out as the Mavericks' head coach as new front office boss Masai Ujiri wants to bring in his own choice. Marc Stein reports that Ujiri does not appear to have a selection already made, and also reports that the dreaded Patrick Dumont will stay out of the picture on basketball operations going forward. (Good luck with that, Masai.) Kidd is always a popular coaching candidate for some reason, so it's possible that he ends up competing for the open Orlando, Portland or Chicago jobs. It's also possible that some other insane front office or owner fires their own successful coach to hire him. (I'm looking at you, Dolan. Don't do it.)

I don't consider myself particularly adept at judging the quality of NBA coaching, but I've always felt that Kidd landed in the middle of the pack at best as a tactician. One of the smartest players of all time, but it doesn't always translate. There's also his character, which is important in a role like this, especially when you have a young franchise cornerstone who's had a very weird start to his career. Pardon the screenshot, but ...

When Henry has a point to make, he freaking makes it.

All that said, assuming Dumont will become more of a check-signer than a co-pilot, this is the best available job for good coaching candidates. Ujiri has shown a willingness to give coaches long ropes, and Cooper Flagg could be a generational star.

Links and Whatnot

Dan Devine on how these Knicks are different.

Paul Flannery on whether the Celtics should trade Derrick White.

Slightly more longform Henry Abbott: the importance of playing your young players to winning.

Kelly Dwyer on Game 1 of the ECF. Kelly Dwyer on Game 1 of the WCF.

Danny Chau on Victor Wembanyama's true arrival.

Howard Beck on Daryl Morey going down swinging.

Another story about the Shaolin monastery where Victor Wembanyama trained last summer, this one from Ramona Shelburne. I will read every story about Victor Wembanyama's last summer that is published. My appetite for this stuff is limitless.

Joe Ingles is going to complete his career in Melbourne, returning home after a successful run in the NBA. Happy trails!

I can't tell a lie: I did not read the 17,000-word Wright Thompson piece on Steve Kerr yet. Give me until August, please. But there it is.

"At Long Lost, I Have Maxximized My Looks," by Josh Gondelman in McSweeney's.

After months sequestered in the Pagoda of Masculinity, which is beneath my parents’ house but is fair to consider my basement, I have emerged a new man. Through my relentless commitment to living the ascetic lifestyle of a monk who is allowed to play video games, I, the Angulord, have at long last fully maxximized my looks.

Your Enterprise Value

I still get emails from Substack corporate-slash-editorial from time to time. The latest one I opened was about Scott Galloway, the investor turned self-help guru who apparently recently consolidated his various editorial streams under one umbrella at Substack. I actually like Galloway fine without knowing too much about him; I found his lecture on masculinity on The Daily Show last year to be pretty powerful.

Galloway's interview on the corporate-slash-editorial blog On Substack is published without byline, and is clearly not written for anyone who would be in position to open it in their favorite email client.

With Prof G Media, to be blunt, I’m economically secure. I want to do something I enjoy. But the business is doing really well, and I recognize that people working at Prof G want to have their own houses and cars and college funds. About two years ago, I started thinking there’s enterprise value here. Key to that business is subscription revenue.

Our business does about $20 million top line in podcast revenues, but that business has a multiple of probably two to three times. We just started on Substack and wanted a subscription offering. My guess is we’ll be at an ARR of about a million dollars by the end of the year. That revenue has probably a four to six multiple. In addition, the entire company trades at a higher multiple when subscription revenue is growing faster than your core business. Substack’s role for us was to diversify the revenue mix and create a more valuable one. That’s the entire rationale and motivation for going on Substack.

They didn't teach me about "enterprise value" in Blog School. (Blog School: slingin' posts for AOL FanHouse for $10 a pop while writing an uncompensated Kings blog for venture-funded Sports Blog Nation Inc. and having a separate full-time job. I romanticize but do not miss Blog School.) Nothing in those two paragraphs from Galloway has anything to do with 95% of the people writing on Substack or any other newsletter-slash-independent content platform. He has 27 employees and annual revenue of $20 million on podcast business alone. He is not talking to us, and he is absolutely not on the same deal from Substack as us normies. (The Substack deal for normies: they take 10% off the top to provide the platform. There's no way Galloway is giving Substack 10%.)

The key difference between what Galloway is doing in his mini media empire and whatever the rest of us are up to is that Galloway is trying to ~scale~ his business for a rich pay-out for his staff; I'm sure he will not reject such a pay-out for himself as well despite being economically secure. So he's building a business with that explicit aim. You can probably tell when you're reading it, just like in the 2010s you could tell which web content site was trying to get sold or get Series B investment or whatever.

I suspect that no one who has read Good Morning It's Basketball for any length of time believes that I'm over here trying to build enterprise value or push the multiples of value on my annual recurring revenue. And I suspect that for many readers, that's the part of the charm: that this is a business that doesn't smell or taste like a business. I try to keep the deal as simple as possible: I write stuff that I think is good and hook you up with like-minded basketball lovers in the comments and on Discord, you appreciate and read the stuff and pay some scratch to keep it coming. A business that could have existed in any civilization in history. A business at times so ramshackle that I just realized I forgot to put in a call-to-action button in this here weekly free edition.

This all brings me to the best thing I've read in a while, from beloved colleagues Spencer Hall and Holly Anderson on the beloved Channel 6: an essay on personal scalability.

Confusing yourself for an app or an insurance company or a promising energy concern is the problem. That’s capital poisoning, the kind of thing that can have you rolling over in bed at night wondering about the wrongest shit imaginable. The work is the thing, and there is no exit from it without distancing yourself permanently from the thing you wanted to be and do in the first place.  

If you don’t want to be here, fine. But who ever dreamed of expending their precious life-hours to build something, only to sell it to Comcast? Was it ever anyone’s greatest desire, deep in their heart of hearts, to one day leverage their audience into part-ownership in the year's 24th most popular personal finance app? Is that what you want your life’s work to be? 

In the end, this has to be at some level about the love of the game. If you're too busy strategizing about how to build the enterprise value of your opinions and personality, you're no longer going to be offering up your real opinions or honest personality, and the readers will know, and unless you are a financially independent person building a capitalized media company with other people's money, you are doomed. Be real and do the work. If it's not worth it, then don't. Simple as that.

Schedule

Game 2 of Spurs vs. Thunder is 8:30 PM Eastern on NBC and Peacock. A brief lament from yours truly: Peacock makes it basically impossible to start a game in progress from the beginning and catch up by speeding through breaks and halftime. It's very annoying! Other services can be inconsistent and whoopsie show you live action when you're trying to navigate to the start of the game. But it's apparently just not an option with Peacock until the game's over? It's terrible.

Alright, that's a long newsletter. Be excellent to each other.