Michael Jordan just proved again that he’s still the most powerful man in the NBA

Michael Jordan to the rescue, again.

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Michael Jordan rescued sports fans recently with that awesome 10-part docuseries on the the 1997-98 Chicago Bulls that had all of us glued to the TV for five Sunday nights in a row during quarantine.

Now it looks like he’s saved the NBA playoffs for this season, or at least how’ll they’ll look if everything goes to plan the league begins its season on July 31 in Orlando.

NBA commissioner Adam Silver was a guest on Thursday’s night’s special edition of Inside the NBA on TNT and explained how Jordan, the owner of the Charlotte Hornets who won’t be a part of this because of their record, stepped up and insisted that the playoffs must not be gimmicky and must be the regular format we’re used to seeing.

Silver explained how it went down:

“(Jordan’s) clearly the most respected voice in the room when it comes to basketball. He felt that it was very important that after we established the 16 teams we not be gimmicky. Because there were a lot of proposals on the table to do unique tournaments and pool play like you see in international competitions – and we took many of those proposals very seriously. But I think ultimately, and I agreed with Michael, that there’s so much chaos in the world right now – I mean, even before the racial unrest that we’re experiencing now – that let’s come as close to normal as we can and as close to normal as we can is the top eight in the West and the eight in the East playing four rounds of seven games so that’s what we intend to do and our goal is to crown a champion.”

Here’s the interview.

Good for Jordan for speaking up, even though his team won’t be involved, because this is the right way to do things. This whole thing is going to be a very weird situation but it really is important for the playoffs to be as they normally are because otherwise the championship would always feels a little off.

Or maybe even a lot off.

While MLB struggles to do anything to save its season, Jordan and the NBA have thought everything through and have done their best to make a very difficult and challenging situation as good as it can be.

Michael Jordan, still the man.

Rob Manfred, still not the man.

Good for Naomi Osaka, who roasted the lame “stick to sports” crowd.

(Photo by GREG BAKER / AFP)

Some of the biggest losers on Twitter are the braindead people who yell “stick to sports” at people in the sports world when they talk about serious issues going on in the world. Seriously, the stick to sports people are the dumbest people on what can often be a the dumbest of all social media platforms. Tennis star Naomi Osaka had fun with some of those idiots this week by roasting them over their tweets to her and I couldn’t be a bigger fan of hers.

Quick hits: Drew Brees still doesn’t get it… LeBron James exposes Laura Ingraham… Coco Gauff’s moving protest speech… And more.

– Drew Brees apologized a few times on Thursday but none of them mattered.

– LeBron James exposed Laura Ingraham’s hypocrisy, which isn’t hard to do if you’re familiar at all with her work, but I still stand and applaud LeBron for doing this.

– Take a few minutes and watch 16-year-old tennis star Coco Gauff’s moving speech at a Black Lives Matter protest. It’s tremendous.

– Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter had an excellent message for the graduates of San Dimas High School.