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LeBron James made an appearance in a video for Uninterrupted this week in which he talked about a number of things, including the documentary that’s the toast of the basketball world: The Last Dance.
The 10-part doc looked at the last great Michael Jordan Bulls team and his career to get there, and while James discussed how he and Jordan played together when he was a teenager, he also said that he thought he’d be a great teammate for Jordan had they played together in their primes.
Here is the thing: LeBron James is never going to play basketball with an in-his-prime Michael Jordan. The laws of time and space as we understand them prevent it from happening.
That won’t stop us: I’m sure plenty of sports radio folks with find a way to fill a block or two discussing the impossibility of the two of them playing together.
What I am asking is for more creativity.
While we are contemplating an impossible scenario, let’s at least make the impossible scenario imaginative. Would Michael Jordan and LeBron James work together as teammates if the game of basketball required you to kick the ball into the basket? Would the two work as teammates if their opponents could, briefly, levitate?
Would the two work as teammates if the fate of the galaxy was at stake and they were playing hulking cartoons sent to destroy all of humanity?
You may say: “That’s probably the plot of Space Jam 2″ to which I say, exactly! Let’s debate what the plot of Space Jam 2 should be. (I hope Yosemite Sam gets to shoot the ball into the hoop a lot.) It is as relevant to actual sports as any MJ/LeBron imaginative scenario, because we are in the realm of fiction. And if we’re going to be in the realm of fiction, let’s at least make it interesting fiction.
Sports hypotheticals are boring because they are both unanswerable and mundane. If we are going to delve into the unanswerable, let’s at least make them interesting.
What if MJ/LeBron were vampires? What if they were young Victorian dandies trying to make their way into an upper class society whose practices and norms they struggle to adhere to? What if they lived in some dystopian hellscape where a virus was killing hundreds of thousands around the world but half the people were in total denial about it?
Have some fun with it at least.
Tuesday’s Big Winner: Leonardo DiCaprio
The actor made an appearance in The Last Dance, and it spawned one of the great, all-time, “everyone made the exact same joke on Twitter” moments of the last decade.
Quick Hits: Tilman Fertitta, Male Goop, Ben’s Beard
– Rockets owner Tilman Fertitta met with the President this week and took the opportunity to take a partial shot at his GM, Daryl Morey, over the comments Morey made about Hong Kong. Things are looking testy, possibly, in Houston.
– Tom Brady is selling an immunity-boosting supplement that is almost certainly nonsense, nearly achieving his final form of Football Gwyneth Paltrow. Male Goop is happening!
– Ben Roethlisberger shaved his beard.
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