How trading for Kurt Thomas jump-started the most fascinating rebuild in sports

 Like pretty much any city that has lost its Big Four sports team in, conservatively, the last fifty years, Seattle did not deserve to lose the Seattle SuperSonics. But while several relocated teams went to cities which seemed apathetic to their presence, the same cannot be said for Oklahoma City. Despite its relative lack of size—of the current NBA markets, only Memphis is smaller by primary statistical area—Oklahoma City enthusiastically supported the displaced New Orleans Hornets in the 2005-06 season and carried forward that devotion into the era of the Thunder. In a just world, both Seattle and Oklahoma City would have NBA teams. I understand why Seattleites would root against the Thunder; I do not, for the life of me, understand why otherwise neutral fans hold the sins of Howard Schultz against this lovely one-sport city.

That said, while Seattle didn’t deserve what happened to them, you can easily argue Oklahoma City didn’t deserve the windfall that came to them. A year before they moved to Oklahoma City, the Sonics drafted future inner-circle Hall of Famer Kevin Durant. In 2008, shortly before the Thunder came into existence, the then-technically-still-Sonics drafted future maybe-not-inner-but-certainly-still-in Hall of Famer Russell Westbrook. But sandwiched between those two selections came a lesser-known acquisition that paid dividends, and continues to pay dividends, for the Oklahoma City Thunder—the acquisition of Kurt Thomas.

Kurt Thomas, who last played in an NBA game ten years ago yesterday, never wore an Oklahoma City Thunder jersey. In fact, he only played in 42 total games for the Seattle SuperSonics. But what he was on July 20, 2007 was overpaid. God bless him and anyone who can reach this stage in life, of course, but his employer, the Phoenix Suns, didn’t want to pay him, and they were willing to give up actual assets to avoid doing so. Although the Suns did receive a 2009 second-round draft pick in sending Thomas to the Sonics, the real meat of the trade was the two first round picks they were gifting Seattle to take Thomas off their hands.

Of note, the Phoenix Suns were a good team at this point, which means two things—one, trying to clear out cap space in order to improve in the short term was defensible, and two, they expected the first round picks to be relatively late. They were right—the 2008 first-rounder that the eventual Thunder received was #24 and the 2010 first-round pick was #26. The #26 pick was used on Quincy Pondexter, who more or less had the expected NBA career of a 26^th overall pick—48 career starts, a decent off-the-bench scorer, the 24^thbest player of the draft by Value Over Replacement Player—though he was parlayed by the Thunder into a trade for moderately useless center Cole Aldrich and an aging Morris Peterson who played four total games for Oklahoma City, before he ever played an NBA game.

The #24 pick in 2008, however, was of tremendous value for the Thunder—Serge Ibaka. Today, Ibaka is a deep bench player for the Milwaukee Bucks, but he went on to start 413 games for the Thunder between 2010 and 2016. Although a secondary or perhaps even tertiary scorer, Ibaka was a terrific defensive player, twice leading the NBA in blocks and being named NBA All-Defensive first team in 2011-12, 2012-13, and 2013-14. By VORP, he was the 10^th best player in a fairly deep 2008 draft; Basketball Reference gives him a 0.2% chance of making the Hall of Fame, which is 0.2% higher than it gives to Kurt Thomas.

Once Ibaka arrived, the Thunder took off, improving from 23-59 to 50-32. Over the next seven seasons, the Thunder had a winning record in each. In 2015-16, the 55-27 Thunder took the 73-9 Golden State Warriors to the brink of elimination, taking a 3-1 Western Conference Finals lead before the Warriors rattled off a three-game winning streak. Of course, that the Warriors would blow a 3-1 series lead of their own in the next round also had a material impact on the future of the Thunder, as well.

The biggest domino to fall for the 2016-17 Thunder came on July 4, 2016, when Kevin Durant, by far the greatest player in Oklahoma City Thunder history to that point, signed with the Golden State Warriors—plenty could be written about what unfolded over the next three seasons for them, but very little of that concerns the Thunder. But in the lead-up to Durant’s decision, the Thunder shopped Serge Ibaka, who was growing unsatisfied with his secondary role on the team. What they received, for a player who was a year away from free agency, could be described as a haul—the package was headlined by Victor Oladipo, the second overall pick from three years prior who had been something of a disappointment as far as #2 overall picks go but had established himself as a serviceable NBA shooting guard. The Thunder also received Ersan İlyasova, who spent just three games in OKC before he was flipped with a first-round pick for Jerami Grant. The Thunder also acquired the rights to #11 overall draft pick Domantas Sabonis, who spent one season in Oklahoma City before he emerged as a three-time All-Star and the 2022-23 NBA rebounding champion with the Sacramento Kings. But before you start to think of Sabonis as the one that got away for the Thunder, I ask that you table that thought for now.

Despite the nominal rebuilding taking place, 2016-17 Russell Westbrook was simply a maniac—he became the second player in NBA history to average a triple-double over the course of a season, and he didn’t do so cheaply—he scored the most points, tallied the second most assists, and even pulled down the eighth most rebounds in the NBA that season. But even with their star player going out of his mind on his way to an MVP season, the Thunder finished sixth in the Western Conference and bowed out to the Houston Rockets in the first round of the postseason. As much fun as it was to watch Russ be a one-man show, it wasn’t going to produce title-winning basketball. So the Thunder made a blockbuster.

In one of the most shocking trades in recent NBA history, the Oklahoma City Thunder acquired Paul George, a three-time third-team All-NBA player, and didn’t have to flip a single draft pick in the process. On July 6, 2017, the Thunder sent two-thirds of their Serge Ibaka return, Victor Oladipo and Domantas Sabonis, to the Indiana Pacers straight-up for Paul George. At the time, even with George a pending free agent following the season, it seemed like robbery for the Thunder, but to the credit of Oladipo and Sabonis, they both became All-Stars in Indiana—the Pacers did not lose this trade. 

But it paid off for the Thunder—Paul George averaged 21.9 points per game in 2017-18 and earned another third-team All-NBA. But it wasn’t until after the season concluded that the Paul George OKC experiment really paid off. George reached free agency, but ultimately he re-signed with the Thunder. And in 2018-19, Paul George reached a whole new level. He averaged a career-high 28.0 PPG, a career-high 8.2 rebounds per game, and led the NBA in steals per game with 2.2. George finished third in MVP voting and cracked his first first-team all-NBA squad. The Thunder won 49 games, but for the third consecutive season, they lost in the first round of the playoffs.

And this is the part of the story where Oklahoma City Thunder Sam Presti has the greatest month in the history of sports executives.

The Thunder found themselves in a common place among modern pro sports teams—they were undeniably a good team, but they probably weren’t a great team, or at least a team capable of winning a title. Unlike in baseball or hockey, where teams regularly sneak deep into the postseason with rosters barely good enough to make the playoffs at all, the best team (or at least a team with a credible argument of being the best team) usually wins the NBA title. The Thunder had two choices—try to find a difference maker who could elevate the Thunder from good to great or start over. Their decision was made for them by a man who has never been employed by the Oklahoma City Thunder—Kawhi Leonard. In 2019, Leonard won his second NBA Finals MVP award; having helped to rejuvenate the San Antonio Spurs at the beginning of his career, he was the missing piece in the first ever title run for the Toronto Raptors. And now he was a free agent, and an extraordinarily coveted one at that.

Kawhi Leonard had his eyes set not on the Oklahoma City Thunder, but the Los Angeles Clippers—the southern California native was largely boxed out from the Lakers, who already employed LeBron James, but the opportunity to win a first title for LA’s secondary NBA team was very much on the table. But despite a very fun Clippers run in 2018-19, where a team led by Danilo Gallinari and Montrezl Harrell somehow won 48 games and took two road games in the postseason against the Kevin Durant-led Warriors, there wasn’t an obvious second banana for Kawhi. So he sought out Paul George.

Paul George was likewise a SoCal kid, but unlike the free agent Leonard, he was very much under an NBA contract. It was a very open secret that George sought a trade to the Clippers, and that Leonard signing there was contingent upon a deal getting done, and Sam Presti knew it. Because of the NBA’s maximum salary, even paying the max to Kawhi Leonard would be a relative bargain, so the Clippers could reasonably afford to overspend conventional wisdom to land Paul George, since the two transactions were linked, but for the Thunder, the Kawhi Leonard signing didn’t matter—this was a chance for a pure victory for the Thunder. And did they ever secure it. The Thunder acquired so much that I feel like I need to switch to bullet points to properly articulate it. Keep in mind that the Thunder only traded Paul George here; no other pieces went to LA. And George has played well in LA—in four seasons, he has made two All-Star Games, notched a third-team All-NBA in 2020-21, but the Clippers still have never made the NBA Finals and, perhaps more damningly, remain a clear #2 to the Lakers in Los Angeles, even though they have unquestionably been a more consistently strong team over the last decade. Much like the Brooklyn Nets, the Clippers have been built to win now and finally emerge from the shadow of the more popular if less successful other NBA team in their city; Leonard and George, guys who thrived in less prestigious NBA markets, trying to become true superstars in Los Angeles was the perfectly logical extension of this. Anyway, the assets the Thunder collected:

·        Danilo Gallinari, the Clippers’ best player in 2018-19 by VORP. He spent one successful individual year in Oklahoma City (more on that season later) before being traded for a 2025 second-round pick to the Atlanta Hawks; even if the Hawks implode by then, the second-round pick shouldn’t be a huge deal.

·        Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, the 11^th overall pick in the 2018 NBA Draft, started 73 games as a Clippers rookie and made second-team All-Rookie, but started to really take off in Oklahoma City. 2022-23 was his best season yet—his 31.4 points per game were fourth in the NBA, as were his 1.6 steals per game. The guard has become one of the most well-rounded players in the league and has an outside chance of making first-team All-NBA (though I think second team is more likely), and he is undisputedly the best player on the current Thunder team. Oh, and he’s also still just 24 years old.

·        A 2021 first-round draft pick via the Miami Heat, a pick traded so many times before it arrived in Oklahoma City that Danny Granger was involved in one of the trades. Simple enough—the Thunder selected Tre Mann, who is presently a backup point guard for the Thunder.

·        The Clippers’ 2022 first-round pick, which as it turns out was a lottery pick thanks to the Clippers missing the playoffs. With the #12 pick, the Thunder selected Jalen Williams, who started 62 games and averaged 14.1 points per game as a rookie. By both VORP and Win Shares, he was the second-best rookie in 2022-23. He turns 22 in two days.

·        A 2023 first-round pick swap, which allows the Thunder the superior pick between that of them or the Clippers. The Clippers made the non-play-in playoffs, so even in the unlikely event this swap gets used, it won’t be a lottery pick. Oh well, worth a shot!

·        A 2024 first-round pick from the Clippers. The Clippers have been largely competent, but Kawhi Leonard and Paul George aren’t getting any younger and they’ve traded away anything resembling a future piece in order to accommodate their star duo. The odds are this winds up being a mid-first round pick, but it’s hardly assured.

·        A 2025 first-round pick swap with the Clippers. For reasons I will detail later, I think there’s a very real chance the Thunder use this one.

·        A 2025 lottery-protected first-round pick from the Miami Heat which converts to an unprotected 2026 first-round pick if unused in 2025. This only becomes a truly spicy pick if the Heat miss the playoffs in both 2025 and 2026, and they aren’t really an organization inclined to do this too often, but even if the Thunder wind up with a mid-first, a useful piece can be grabbed.

·        A 2026 first-round pick from the Clippers. George and Leonard will be in their mid-thirties by this point.

The future assets here were obviously tantalizing for the Thunder in the future; it made sense the day the trade was made. But it also, even with Gallinari and Gilgeous-Alexander coming back, made the Thunder worse in 2019-20. Although, unlike with Durant, they got a healthy return, the Thunder found themselves in a similar situation—Russell Westbrook surrounded by question marks. But this time, Sam Presti was proactive, and six days after the Paul George trade, the Thunder sent Russell Westbrook to the Houston Rockets.

The trade made sense at the time, even if it was far less of an obvious call than the Paul George trade (either of them, really). In exchange for Westbrook, the Thunder received a 2021 top-four protected pick-swap, a top-four protected first-round pick in 2024, a 2025 top twenty protected pick swap, and a top-four protected first-round pick in 2026. But a huge part of the allure for Houston was also salary relief, as they also sent Chris Paul to Oklahoma City. Paul, though a future Hall of Famer and arguably a top-five point guard of all-time, appeared to be on one of the NBA’s worst contracts in 2019.

Ultimately, the Thunder didn’t get anything from the 2021 pick swap—the Rockets landed in the top four—and it’s impossible to know what the future holds for the later picks. But what I do know is that Chris Paul, in 2019-20, turned his career around. He became a considerably more efficient shooter and was named All-NBA (second team) for the first time in four years. In the postseason, ironically, the Thunder faced Russell Westbrook and nearly humiliated their former star, who was fine in Houston but not nearly as good as Chris Paul had become. Suddenly, Chris Paul had become not only not a trade liability, but a legitimate asset. And in the off-season, the Thunder flipped Paul to the Phoenix Suns.

You could make a case that this trade didn’t work out for OKC, and you could certainly make a case they didn’t get as much as they could have had they waited another year. The key piece for the Thunder was a first-round pick that was later used on Peyton Watson, who was traded for a 2027 first-round pick. But you can’t really argue that, broadly, the Chris Paul experiment was not a resounding success for the Thunder—not only did the Thunder acquire a ton of future pieces, but they improved in the short term as well.

Unlike the losses of Ibaka, Durant, George, and Westbrook, the Thunder could not withstand the loss of Chris Paul, a player they almost certainly never wanted in the first place. The 2020-21 Thunder finished 22-50, though on the bright side, if you’re going to be absolutely awful, it’s hard to pick a much better season than during one without fans. They didn’t hit the lottery, in a manner of speaking, only drafting at #6, but they selected Josh Giddey, an Australian wing who averaged 16.6 points, 7.9 rebounds, and 6.2 assists a night in his sophomore 2022-23 campaign—by VORP, he ranks fourth in the 2021 draft class so far. In 2022, however, their lottery luck turned around and the Thunder picked second; although Chet Holmgren missed the entire 2022-23 season, the Thunder still managed to get a legitimate Rookie of the Year campaign via Jalen Williams and, despite constant and largely unfair commentary about their supposedly egregious tanking (I would never claim they didn’t tank a little bit, merely that their recent rebuild was entirely normal by NBA standards, far less insidious than the Trust The Process-era Philadelphia 76ers, for instance), will play postseason basketball tonight.

The three best players on the 2022-23 Oklahoma City Thunder by any advanced metric (or non-advanced metric, really) were Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Josh Giddey, and Jalen Williams. Two of these players were acquired directly via the Paul George trade, and the third was acquired in the immediate aftermath of the rebuild that said trade precipitated. The Thunder probably aren’t going to win the 2022-23 NBA title, but they will have a fresh Chet Holmgren to add to a young core and should surely be a real player in the Western Conference as soon as next year. And it’s all thanks to the Kurt Thomas trade.

The St. Louis Blues are saying the quiet part out loud, for some reason

 On Super Bowl Sunday, a day on which non-NFL sports leagues go out of their way to avoid scheduling around the biggest television event of the year, nobody would reasonably expect teams in other sports to say anything at all. The St. Louis Cardinals, for instance, tweeted happy birthday to assistant hitting coach Brandon Allen, noted that Hall of Famer Chick Hafey was born on that date in 1903, and stopped posting on social media for the day—a completely reasonable thing for a sports team that was not playing nor making transactions to do. For instance, the Chicago Blackhawks didn’t tweet at all. The Pittsburgh Penguins, a team which plays in a state with a team in the Super Bowl, tweeted a late-night game story for their Saturday night, West Coast game and then posted a link to a fan event—the kind of bland social media fodder one might expect. It probably wasn’t the highest traffic day for a hockey team, but benignly continuing about their business was the expectation of the day.

The St. Louis Blues, however, were not silent on social media on Sunday. But while they made a handful of tweets about the previous night’s game, during which they secured their first victory in 23 days after blowing a three-game lead to a team that got kicked out of their home arena days after trading one of the best half-dozen players in franchise history because they have playoff odds currently lower than the odds of them securing the #1 overall draft pick, the true attention-grabber came when they wished good luck in the Super Bowl to, and later congratulated on their victory, a team which plays its home games 241 miles away from their arena.

Although the Kansas City Chiefs are not the closest NFL team located to the Dome at America’s Center, the former home of the St. Louis Rams (that title belongs to the Indianapolis Colts, though the margin is so narrow that it could be reasonably deemed immaterial), that they became a popular choice for spurned NFL fans in St. Louis is hardly surprising—they were a reasonably nearby team, and although the St. Louis Rams and Kansas City Chiefs were ostensibly rivals, competing on six occasions during the NFL regular season for the Missouri Governor’s Cup (the Chiefs won all six meetings), the blood was never so bad that most St. Louisans took particular glee in the shortcomings of Kansas City’s NFL team.

But the arguments for St. Louisans to root against Kansas City with increased or newfound fervor were ample. In 2015, Kansas City Chiefs owner Clark Hunt was the lone vote on the NFL’s committee on Los Angeles opportunities to support the relocation of the Rams to Los Angeles, as opposed to the Chargers and Raiders, and in 2016, Hunt voted for the relocation of the Rams; before the dust had even settled, the Chiefs were already marketing themselves in St. Louis, the NFL’s equivalent to if Lee Harvey Oswald had made a move on Jacqueline Kennedy. There was a family history of this—in 1988, Clark’s father Lamar happily voted for the relocation of the St. Louis Cardinals to Phoenix. Although the Chiefs have succeeded wildly since 2016, winning the AFC West each season and amassing two Super Bowl titles plus another appearance, led in large part by Patrick Mahomes, one of the sport’s most exciting players, the culture of the Chiefs—shielding star wide receiver Tyreek Hill after multiple credible domestic violence accusations (not to mention drafting him less than four years after Jovan Belcher’s violent murder-suicide) and their repeated insistence on using Native American imagery and racist chants (the Super Bowl broadcast showed a crowd of Chiefs fans in Munich doing the Tomahawk Chop—consider, for a moment, that the franchise has managed to export racism to Munich) during an era in which both Washington’s NFL team and Cleveland’s MLB team were successfully pressured to change their nicknames, has made rooting for Kansas City a non-option for those who harbor similarly negative feelings about the Atlanta Braves, whose use of the Tomahawk Chop has received even more aggressive criticism, presumably because of the city’s proximity to the Mason-Dixon line.

Ultimately, it is not unreasonable for St. Louis sports fans to not harbor a great resentment against Clark Hunt for his votes. After all, the final vote for the Rams’ relocation was 30-2, which considering one of the 30 “yes” votes includes the franchise with over 500,000 owners (the Green Bay Packers) means there are too many grudges to potentially hold at once, and even one of the “no” votes, from the then-Oakland Raiders, was simply made so that Mark Davis could rip out of the hearts of his own fans, so hardly a sympathetic gesture (I tend to gravitate towards rooting for the Cincinnati Bengals because of Mike Brown’s far less egregious “no” vote, but it is not as though the penny-pinching failson who has shown a greater proclivity for donating money to faceless Republican politicians than to his own football team is exactly innocent). But aside from Stan Kroenke, the real estate baron and part-time NFL team owner whose franchise value increased overnight when the Rams relocated (there’s a reason Los Angeles Angels owner Arte Moreno insisted on branding his baseball team with “Los Angeles” rather than their actual home city of Anaheim), nobody profited more from the pain and suffering of St. Louis than Clark Hunt.

Third on the list of Rams relocation profiteers, however, might be the St. Louis Blues. From nearly the moment the NFL approved the removal of St. Louis’s NFL team, the Blues have marketed themselves as an alternative to the Rams. At the first St. Louis Blues home game following the relocation vote, the Blues held a ceremonial puck drop featuring St. Louis Cardinals president Bill DeWitt III and Blues owner Tom Stillman, each wearing jackets representing the other team, which received widespread media acclaim, particularly after the fans erupted into the now-familiar chant of “Kroenke sucks”. In February 2016, the Blues offered ticket and merchandise promotions to former St. Louis Rams season ticket holders. In March 2016, the Blues parlayed this jolt of attention into clinching a bid to host the 2017 NHL Winter Classic, a lucrative outdoor hockey game with over double the ticketed capacity of a typical game and with much higher ticket prices. Throughout the 2016 Stanley Cup Playoffs, which saw the Blues make their deepest postseason run—to Game Six of the Western Conference Finals—in three decades, the Blues stood as the anti-Rams in ways that the St. Louis Cardinals baseball team never could. The Cardinals are ubiquitous, an international brand with clusters of fans well beyond the Greater St. Louis area; the Blues, like the Rams before them, did not have a large national or international following, but they belonged to St. Louis.

But in a more literal sense, the St. Louis Blues belong to Tom Stillman. And while Tom Stillman has demonstrated himself to be a far more palatable owner from a fan perspective than Stan Kroenke, or than most, the Blues are ultimately subject to his whims and the whims of SLB Acquisition Holdings LLC. The St. Louis Blues came to life because Chicago Black Hawks owner James D. Norris owned St. Louis Arena and wanted to earn more income from his place in the NHL by virtue of having an expansion team play there. The St. Louis Blues nearly collapsed under the weight of Ralston-Purina’s ownership, with the local company so angry that they were not permitted to relocate the franchise to Saskatoon, Saskatchewan that they refused to send representatives to the 1983 NHL Entry Draft as some sort of ill-fated protest. And three years after the Rams left St. Louis, the St. Louis Blues took $70 million in public subsidies in order to renovate Enterprise Center, a project which may indeed serve some sort of intangible good for the area but which primarily exists to make the rich richer.

To be clear, I’m not offering any suggestions of a conspiracy. While Tom Stillman and company may have secretly been excited for the marketing opportunities that came with the Rams exodus, they were not the ones who turned it into reality (while Chiefs ownership can at least be reasonably considered an accessory to the crime). But the Blues undeniably benefited. In the year following the Rams’ departure, their value increased by 45%, and it has more than doubled in the years since, outpacing increases across the National Hockey League.

Certainly, when the St. Louis Blues Twitter account posted support and congratulations to the Kansas City Chiefs, it was not done at the direct behest of ownership, nor was it when the Blues tweeted such messages to the Chiefs in 2020 and 2021. But the relationship is not reciprocated even by the Chiefs themselves, who have tagged the Blues on Twitter three total times, twice via replies (thus avoiding annoying their own fans who do not also follow the Blues, which is most, because St. Louis and Kansas City are more than three and a half hours apart) and once when they posted a link showing Blues goalie Jordan Binnington wearing a Patrick Mahomes jersey, which hardly removes the feelings of Blues subservience. When the Blues tweeted positively towards the Chiefs yesterday, the response was largely negative not because it matters if some individual social media manager cares who wins the Super Bowl but because it represents St. Louis buying into the Hunt family’s despicable strategy of segmenting heartbroken sports fans. Clark Hunt decided that St. Louis was ripe for the picking; the strategy has been plenty successful, though the Blues would suggest the strategy was far more successful than it actually was and that St. Louis is firmly, unanimously Chiefs Territory. Instead, St. Louis is a city where there are more fans of the Chiefs than of any other individual team but where there is hardly unanimity.

On June 12, 2019, the Kansas City Royals offered the lone tweet they have ever issued about the St. Louis Blues, congratulating them on their Stanley Cup victory, and most of the replies are from Kansas City fans annoyed that their favorite team is celebrating the victory of a different city. And they were right to do so—if Kansas Citians want to root for the Blues, that’s their prerogative (and unlike with regards to St. Louis and the NFL, the Blues are by far the closest NHL team to Kansas City), but the Blues are not a Kansas City team. They aren’t a Missouri team. They are a St. Louis team.

After Jackson County voters approved a tax increase to pay for $850 million in stadium renovation in 2006, the Chiefs signed a lease which will keep the team at Arrowhead Stadium (you know, the stadium named after Native American imagery since they are named the Chiefs, a reference to the city’s former white mayor) through 2031. But Kansas City’s sports teams have dangled relocation, if not out of the metropolitan area than at least to different stadiums, religiously. Persistent rumors have been that the Royals may seek a new downtown stadium (Kansas City’s shared Truman Sports Complex is located in the city’s outskirts) and that the Chiefs, like many NFL teams (Giants/Jets, Rams/Chargers, Cowboys, 49ers, Patriots, Commanders, Dolphins, Cardinals, Raiders, Bills), may seek to build a stadium in the suburbs, where ample parking revenue can be more easily found. These proposals have included ones to move the Chiefs to the Kansas side of the Kansas City Metropolitan Area, a move which, if the Chiefs cared whatsoever about their status as Missouri’s Team, would be deadly. But it isn’t, because despite what the St. Louis Blues embarrassingly seem to believe, the Kansas City Chiefs are not, and barring relocation will never be, St. Louis’s NFL team.

The silent majority won

 In the Missouri House congressional district in which I live, a man named Kenneth Abram was the Republican nominee. The sixty-two-year-old Boeing manager was a newcomer to politics and ran on a platform consisting largely of the platitudes around which his party has largely crafted itself in the modern era. He referred to himself as simultaneously pro-business and pro-labor without expressing a distinct opinion on, say, labor unions, for instance. When the Call Newspapers, a small news network covering issues pertaining to South St. Louis County, surveyed Abram, he gave quick and pointed answers which lacked any semblance of nuance. His opponent, Democrat Bridget Walsh Moore, gave thoughtful answers throughout; even on matters where the two fundamentally had the same stance (like a merger between St. Louis County and City), she explained that her opposition was steeped in a lack of cohesive plan that she had seen put forward rather than any sort of dogmatic opposition as a matter of principle.

If you drove through the 93^rd district at any point in the last couple months, you would be inundated with Kenneth Abram signs. There were occasional Bridget Walsh Moore signs, but Abram’s far outpaced Walsh Moore’s. And when the votes were tallied on Tuesday, the voices of Lemay and Affton were loud and clear—Moore won by 9.2%.

We are coming up on over half a century of it being considered a given that the Republican Party represents the so-called “silent majority”, the Richard Nixon-era belief that while liberals will protest in the streets or on college campuses, mainstream Americans go to work, go to church, and don’t necessarily obsess or derive their identities from their political views but when they do vote, they tend to do so conservatively. Perhaps there was a point in time when the silent majority was based on reality, but that point has long since vanished, and in 2022, the exact opposite has proven to be true.

I live in a blue district in a blue county in a blue metropolitan area—granted, it is one which resides in a red state, but in every presidential election in my lifetime, the county in which I live has voted for the Democratic Party. The platonic ideal of a St. Louis County presidential candidate may not be a Bernie Sanders nor Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez-style socialist, but it quite demonstrably is not a brash, Donald Trump-style Republican. And yet, there aren’t any houses in my neighborhood with pro-Joe Biden flags hanging, or anti-Joe Biden bumper stickers. But when it comes time to actually vote, the loudest voices are coming from those in the minority.

I have never put a political bumper sticker on my car nor put a political sign in my yard, and my reasons are simultaneously pragmatic and paranoid—I’m not trying to get attacked. Do I believe police officers (who lean to the right politically) are going to specifically target people with “I’m With Her” bumper stickers? With almost no exceptions, no, but subliminal biases do exist, and can I honestly say that, if I were a traffic cop, I wouldn’t take some extra level of glee in issuing a ticket to somebody with a 2020 election denying bumper sticker? Anyway, I’ve made the decision to avoid the potential conflict of interest altogether.

Despite Joe Biden being broadly unpopular across the country, it appears that the Democratic Party did shockingly well in a midterm election cycle that for years has been assumed to be a disaster for the party. While the United States Senate is still not yet determined, it looks increasingly likely that Democrats will maintain (potentially without the “with Kamala Harris as the tie-breaking vote” caveat) control of the Senate, and while Republicans remain favored to take control of the House of Representatives, it will hardly be the “red wave” that was repeatedly predicted. In Midwestern swing states which voted for Trump in one of his two presidential bids, things went quite well for the Democratic Party—lieutenant governor John Fetterman flipped a Pennsylvania Senate seat blue, Wisconsin reelected its Republican senator Ron Johnson but also reelected Democratic governor Tony Evers and avoided a worst-case scenario in which the state’s Democrats were gerrymandered into absolute irrelevance, and Michigan’s legislature flipped blue for the first time in decades. 

Ultimately, for as unpopular as Joe Biden is, the opposition party proved to be even less popular. This was the case in St. Louis County, when not-especially-popular County Executive Sam Page was re-elected over Republican challenger Mark Mantovani, whose yard signs overwhelmed the county. I don’t know that I saw a single pro-Sam Page yard sign in the months leading up to the election. But he had his voters, and that bore out on Election Day, even if the overwhelming majority of his voters did not actively campaign on his behalf.

The juxtaposition of the 2020 presidential candidates is perhaps the most instructive example, and certainly the most famous example, I can give of how Democrats became the true silent majority. Joe Biden received more votes than any other candidate in any other presidential election in history, and this was despite a distinct, somehow almost aggressive lack of personality cult surrounding him. Sure, there were cutesy Onion articles about him, but unlike Hillary Clinton or especially unlike Barack Obama, a self-stylized Joe Biden superfan wasn’t really a thing—he won the nomination largely by being broadly acceptable by the majority of the party’s voters, even if he barely cracked 50% of the votes despite the primaries being largely ceremonial for the second half of it. 

That Biden, an old white guy, was not historic like Clinton or dynamic (and historic) like Obama, couldn’t conjure passion, however, did not materially impact his ability to swing voters. As much press as Barack Obama’s campaign rallies received, the overwhelming majority of his voters never attended one. Even if the COVID-19 pandemic had allowed for rallies, Biden’s certainly would have been quite underwhelming compared to what Obama produced. Meanwhile, Donald Trump became his own political identity, despite never received as high of a percentage of the popular vote as Mitt Romney or John Kerry. I have met many, many Joe Biden voters—I have never met, and God willing never will meet, a person who identifies themselves primarily through their support of him. If you drive through any Midwestern state (this is the case in Missouri, but it is also absolutely the case in Illinois, a state which twice denied Trump electoral votes, too), you will see barns on the sides of highways painted to represent support of Donald Trump.

The impact of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Supreme Court decision which unpopularly overturned Roe v. Wade, has been repeatedly cited as a thing which helped Democrats to close the gap in 2022, but abortion is hardly the only issue on which Democrats are in the majority. Most Americans support gun reform. Most Americans support funding public education and increasing taxes on the wealthy. But they do so not through big, dumb, inevitably futile gestures like painting the side of a barn or turning the back of their cars into moving billboards, but by voting and by supporting those who share their beliefs. Unlike the midterms under Barack Obama, during which Democrats got absolutely smoked, the first (and perhaps only) midterm under Joe Biden went fairly well because the party, rather than running on the public face of a charismatic leader, ran as a party guided by popular policy. And it worked.

If they really believed this

Like the majority of Americans, I do not believe that abortions are analogous to murder. The simple fact that this is a majority opinion does not inherently make it the correct opinion. But I do know that if I believed that abortion was murder, and therefore tens of millions of murders had been conducted with the tacit blessing of a major American political party and many millions of its members and supporters, I would not be able to sleep at night. I would not be able to function in society. The amount of therapy I would need just to make sense of the world in which I live would keep me from being able to do anything else.

Maybe I am an extreme case of internalized guilt—I can’t bring myself to eat meat because of an outsized level of guilt regarding living things, and I feel legitimately upset any time I am forced to kill even a tiny insect. And I of course value human lives considerably more than (other) animal lives. But it sure seems like most people value human life enough that what could reasonably be termed a holocaust would paralyze a material number of the tens of millions of Americans who would deem abortion to be murder.

And yet that didn’t seem to happen, and when you consider the central thesis of the anti-abortion movement—that hundreds of millions of Americans are complicit in the murder of innocent babies—it is incredible that the self-stylized “pro-life” movement is not considerably more militant than it is. Why would a true believer in the cause ever seek the approval, or any level of companionship, with a so-called baby killer? If your pro-choice relatives won’t speak to you because you oppose murder, aren’t they just saving you having to sever ties yourself?

At the very least, why would an anti-abortion person not feel a strong, undying urge to sway the people they know and otherwise care about to believe in the immorality of abortion? Sure, the movement to overturn Roe v. Wade was not centered around changing hearts or minds and it was ultimately successful in subverting the will of the American people, but they still live in a country where, in their eyes, murder is popular. They live in a country where abortion is still going to be legal in large swaths of the country and where there is a widespread effort to fund abortions in states where they would remain legal.

Again, I don’t believe that abortion is murder. But those who do believe it is and respond with seething hatred are not the ones who confound me—it’s those who believe that abortion is murder and compartmentalize it, who regard the pro-choice as misguided in the same way they might view those with differing views on taxation—people with whom they agree to disagree. That is impossible for me to comprehend. And it’s why I don’t believe them.

If the anti-abortion were serious, how could they not feel invested in making the world acutely aware that what is happening is a moral abomination? How could they not participate in measures that, whether impacting its legality or not, would decrease demand for abortion, such as increasing availability of pre-fertilization birth control, promoting forms of sex education that demonstrably decrease unwanted pregnancies (i.e. “not abstinence-only”), and establishing a social safety net that would make having a child seem like something other than financially ruinous? Why would opposition to abortion have a strong inverse correlation to opposition to the death penalty, or to war, or to a welfare state robust enough to prevent homelessness or starvation, or to universal health care?

The scientific argument for the abortion of a non-viable pregnancy being murder is effectively non-existent—the aborted pregnancy is a wholly dependent extension of the mother. The religious argument that it is murder is not especially robust, either—the direct Biblical condemnation of abortion is, at most, open to an interpretation of passages that is largely about confirming prior instincts (the Biblical argument against eating shellfish or men not growing a beard is considerably more overt), and Judaism specifically requires abortion in certain cases, though for freedom of religion to apply exclusively to a very specific interpretation of Christianity is hardly new.

Even if I do not agree with it, I understand, if you consider abortion to be murder, how one cannot accept a simple difference of opinion. The same cannot be said of opposition to same-sex marriage, which impacts nobody outside of the marriage itself, or opposition to contraception, a thing which has stopped millions of abortions from happening, both of which Clarence Thomas has openly stated could be reconsidered in the wake of the Roe v. Wade overturning (Thomas famously did not reference the court’s Loving v. Virginia ruling that legalized interracial marriage, another harmlessly legal thing which Thomas, an active participant in an interracial marriage, apparently would not reconsider). The Roe v. Wade precedent is not being used in a legal fight against capital punishment; it is being used in a legal fight against pet cultural grievances of social conservatives to enforce that their concept of monoculture is preserved as a legally binding requirement.

The prospect of a country, and more broadly a world, where murder is shrugged off as either a secondary concern or an outright net positive, would terrify me, if this was what I believed was happening. I would devote every waking moment to comprehending the callousness and trying to change minds about it. I can’t even imagine the pain that this would cause me internally, or how I would be able to live in such an evil world. It is so inconceivable to me that I deem it truly and literally unbelievable.

What is possibly the end game of all of this?

During the first round of the 2021 Stanley Cup Playoffs, Colorado Avalanche forward Nazem Kadri was suspended for the sixth time in his career for an illegal hit, this time to the head of St. Louis Blues defenseman Justin Faulk during Game 2 of their first-round series, a hit which ended Justin Faulk’s season (and, given Colorado’s eventual disposal by the Vegas Golden Knights, Kadri’s season) prematurely. It would be willfully ignorant to believe that the reaction of Blues fans at Enterprise Center to Kadri barreling into red-hot goaltender Jordan Binnington during Game 3 of their second-round series, causing an injury which will cost Binnington at least the remainder of their set, was unrelated to previous events.

Kadri was not penalized for what appeared to be a reckless if not patently illegal instigation, a decision which was probably not any more or less egregious than the referees’ ignoring of an earlier hit by Blues forward Ivan Barbashev on Avalanche defenseman Samuel Girard, which will likewise cause a player to miss the remainder of the series. Kadri was not sanctioned further with any sort of suspension, an outcome that never would have even been suggested had literally any other player on either team committed such a penalty—this was clearly a response to Kadri’s history, and not an unfair one given that repeat offender status is a major factor in how the NHL legislates dirty play. Likewise, the NHL chose not to suspend Jordan Binnington for throwing a water bottle at Kadri during a post-game interview, a thing that, since the water bottle was not frozen nor filled with explosives, was the only reasonable course of action.

There is a 100% chance that St. Louis Blues fans will boo Nazem Kadri profusely tonight, as they did for the remainder of Game 3 on Saturday night. Is this a rational response to a player, even if the player is deemed worthy of such scorn? Not really—it’s not like Kadri, who is if nothing else a very productive NHL veteran with a long history of being booed by opposing fans, is going to fold like a card table upon moderate heat. But the repeated “Ref you suck!” chants levied at Denver’s Ball Arena during Game 2 were productive, either. Sports fans like chanting and they like booing and doing so is a perfectly harmless pastime.

What is not perfectly harmless is what some number of dumbasses did on Saturday night into Sunday by hurling racial slurs at Kadri, the NHL’s highest-profile Muslim player, with some sending threats of violence against him. Players from both teams, rightfully, condemned the attacks, and local police have appropriately investigated the threats—even if the supermajority of them came from crackpot keyboard warriors on Twitter who would have never acted upon their words in real life, it is their responsibility to treat any threats as serious until proven otherwise.

It seems pointless to explain that, in a metro area of 2.8 million people with many more St. Louis Blues fans outside of it, the percentage of Blues fans who sent racial slurs or threats to Nazem Kadri was a minority. The percentage even represents a slim minority of those who took to the internet to criticize Kadri for his role in the play that left Binnington hobbled (a group to which I belong). And those who were contacted by authorities for levying such threats will assuredly not be among the chorus booing Kadri tonight. Those people will, um, be busy.

But for as much negative energy as there has been towards Nazem Kadri by countless NHL fan bases over the years, a force more powerful than hatred of Kadri has taken control—hatred of St. Louis. And for the life of me, I cannot figure out what the end game of this is.

Those who rationalize the Best Fans St. Louis-ification of the Internet, a collective of well-paid writers and sporting rivals who mobilize at the notion that St. Louis is a giant, regressive shithole that is a half-century behind the times, do so under the guise of civil service—that those who say racist or homophobic or otherwise problematic things (or, in the case of the Best Fans St. Louis Twitter account specifically, commit the unholy sin of referring to the local baseball venue as “Bush Stadium” or not paying one’s hard-earned money to attend a given baseball game in lieu of doing literally anything else with one’s leisure time) deserve to be called out for it. It’s not an unfair point, but in the case of those who threatened Nazem Kadri, who absolutely deserved to be called out for doing so, the feds don’t need you to research the matter yourself. Which is more likely to shut down an asshole cold in his (or her, or their, but let’s be honest—usually his) tracks: giving him a platform of thousands of Twitter followers to read his mini-manifestos, or the damn police calling him?

In America, liberals tend to view the country through a prism of red states and blue states while conservatives tend to view the country through a prism of rural and urban, which makes St. Louis arguably as universally maligned as any semi-large city in the country. St. Louis is a majority-minority city where over 80% of the votes in the 2020 Presidential Election went to Joe Biden; a city whose congressperson, Representative Cori Bush, came to prominence as a Black Lives Matter activist and is among the most far-left members of the U.S. House. About two-thirds of St. Louis city and its surrounding county voted Democratic in 2020, while about two-thirds of the remainder of Missouri voted Republican—this puts St. Louis in the unusual spot of being in two completely separate culture clashes with both the progressive national remainder and with the broader remainder of Missouri.

None of this is to say that St. Louis is perfect—like pretty much any other hockey market, the St. Louis Blues fan base is disproportionately white (the same could be said of the Colorado Avalanche fan base, existing primarily in Denver, a city which is already less than 10% Black) and there are a ton of reprehensible elements to the group. But when any and all criticism of Kadri, a thing that 48 hours ago was considered a universal truth of hockey fandom outside of Colorado, is reduced to the same omnipresent image of Get A Brain Morans Guy (you never really hear about the mostly Missouri residents protesting the Iraq War that he was counter-protesting, do you?), you are essentially telling those who by and large agree with you on most actual issues, issues far more important than whether or not they like the same hockey guy you like, to get fucked.

While major cities in the United States (including both St. Louis and Denver) are growing bluer over time, it is dwarfed in comparison to how those in red areas are growing more conservative. There are 115 counties/independent cities in Missouri, and only eight of them had Joe Biden within twenty percent of Donald Trump. But when it comes to statewide referendums, when voters are voting on specific issues rather than reflexively choosing between a D and an R on the ballot, voting is much further left than one might assume based on election results. Earlier in 2020, Missouri voted in favor of expanding Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, and in 2018, Missouri voted to legalize medical marijuana and increase the minimum wage to $12. These may not be “defund the police” levels of leftism, but they do reflect a state that is fundamentally willing to vote for liberal Democrats (it was barely five years ago that Missouri had a Democratic governor, Jay Nixon, and a Democratic senator, Claire McCaskill, who were at the very least healthily to the left of a Joe Manchin type). Urban liberals from blue states smugly want to believe it is entirely a reflection of having a Black president, but this shift was already well underway pre-Obama—rural Democrats wanted you to treat them with some respect. I don’t condone those who felt so marginalized by those in urban areas whom they believed to be on the same team as them that they started voting for goddamned Donald Trump, but I get it. No matter how far left my politics, and they aren’t exactly getting more moderate as I age, any time I see myself being framed as some sort of racist insurrectionist hillbilly, I do ask myself why I am fucking bothering to care when it is seemingly never going to result in me feeling like I belong anywhere.

It's time for me to discuss the ugliness during last night's Academy Awards

I have needed almost a full day to gather my thoughts on what I saw unfold during the third hour of the broadcast of the 94^th Academy Awards, but it is time to ask questions about the unsettling sights I saw. What the absolute Hell was that Godfather tribute?

I was a bit weary when I first heard that the Oscars were going to do a tribute to The Godfather—last night was only the 49^th anniversary of the film’s Academy coronation (the film was released in 1972 and was celebrated in 1973), it’s not even close to among the most celebrated films in the history of the awards (it won three trophies, which doesn’t even put it among the 100 most celebrated films in Oscar history), and anything interesting that happens at the Oscars inevitably happens by accident. My expectations were low and somehow things went way worse than I expected.

The Godfather might be the single easiest film on the planet for which to find somebody to give a good Academy Awards tribute. It’s modern enough that it doesn’t seem like a history project to watch it and it is widely esteemed enough that the volunteers should be plentiful. Martin Scorsese, the director emeritus of the Academy Awards, surely would have shown up to pay tribute to his good friend Francis Ford Coppola’s magnum opus. Steven Spielberg, also a friend and contemporary of Coppola and probably 1A to Scorsese among the Academy, was already in the theater as a Best Director nominee, and surely Paul Thomas Anderson, also in-house as a director, would suffice. But instead, the Academy went off the board and brought out Sofia Coppola, Francis’s daughter and a respected director in her own right, to introduce a tribute to a film that she, as a baby, appeared in, well before her much-maligned appearance in the third chapter of the series.

Just kidding, they went with P. Diddy.

With all due respect to Monster’s Ball or Get Him to the Greek, this was certainly not the cinematic figure I would have expected. But I can also see some argument for a bit of an outsider. Like, think of the most completely random, non-film celebrity you can think of. How about Tom Brady? It would be extremely weird if Tom Brady introduced the Oscars’ Godfather tribute, but it would speak to the film’s wide appeal. But the big problem wasn’t that Diddy approached the tribute as an outsider—it is that his influence took over the tribute.

For reasons beyond my comprehension, rather than showing the countless classic lines of dialogue or the film’s breathtaking cinematography, the montage portrayed The Godfather as though it was Scarface, a film which is perfectly fun and watchable but is nobody’s idea of truly significant. It turned out not to be a tribute to a film celebrating its 50^th anniversary but rather a tribute to the trilogy as a whole, giving nearly equal weight to all three parts, baffling even for those of us who think The Godfather Part III is far better than its reputation. In theory, the montage’s soundtrack should have been simple—the film’s iconic score—but instead it was scored mostly by music from Kanye West and, of course, Diddy himself.

My wife, who has never seen The Godfather, turned to me during the tribute and remarked, “This movie doesn’t look very good.” And I can’t disagree with her on the merits of the tribute! You got a car explosion and some violence and some brooding shots of Vito and Michael Corleone, things which are certainly part of The Godfather but in no meaningful way convey what makes it great. How is there not even a glimpse of Vito and Michael speaking to each other? How are there more clips of Joe Mantegna speaking than Robert Duvall? Diddy prefaced the tribute by stating how much he loves The Godfather, but based on this montage (and yes, I am firmly aware that he probably had minimal input on the montage’s creation), I have no idea why he would.

Next, Diddy brought out Francis Ford Coppola, the director of all three films, Al Pacino, the star of two films and a prominent supporting actor in the other (and, really, the gravitational center of that film too), and Robert De Niro, who was the fourth credited actor in one of the films, and not even the one being theoretically commemorated. That De Niro was even in The Godfather Part II is basically a footnote to his career. It helps of course that De Niro is the most relevant of these three to modern movies and looks by far the most vibrant of the trio today, but this would be like doing a tribute to Back to the Future and bringing out Robert Zemeckis, Christopher Lloyd, and Elisabeth Shue.

The audience gave an extended standing ovation because, again, what person involved in making movies does not cherish The Godfather? Only Coppola spoke—given that he is an 82 year-old man who was never a performer even in his prime, it went about as well from a dynamism perspective as could be reasonably expected. But he had virtually nothing to say—he thanked Mario Puzo, the author of the novel The Godfather and co-writer of the film screenplays, and producer Robert Evans. The only time either Pacino (who, and I cannot stress this enough if you have not seen the films, far and away the most significant on-screen presence throughout the trilogy) or De Niro spoke was at the tail end, when De Niro repeated Coppola’s well-meaning but lethargic “Viva Ukraine” used to close out his speech.

The Godfather is both one of the greatest films ever made and a film that has been continuously embraced by dumb guys. It seems like every Trump administration lackey would cite The Godfather as his (always his, in this case) guiding template in life, despite the lessons of the films very much not being that you should like your life like Michael Corleone does. After this tribute, I understand why people who haven’t seen the movies think The Godfather is some meathead action movie rather than a beautifully made, poignant epic of mortality, guilt, and how the American dream and the American nightmare are so frequently one and the same.

The Godfather came out before I was born but it didn’t come out that long before I was born. I knew when I first watched it that it wasn’t a new movie but I also didn’t think of it as musty or stale. But some day, the film will exist entirely in the past—it’s pretty remarkable that so many prominent Godfather people such as Pacino, De Niro, Robert Duvall, Diane Keaton, and James Caan are still with us, but this won’t always be the case. And it would be a shame of the legacy of one of the great American artworks was as the dumb gangster movie it never was.

The one where John tries to rationalize a Los Angeles Rams Super Bowl win

On February 13, if the often-though-not-always correct bookmakers in Las Vegas are correct, the Los Angeles Rams are going to win the Super Bowl and cause me to be in a terrible mood for days. I want to try to mitigate this as much as I possibly can.

Being a former St. Louis Rams fan is just an absolutely insane bummer, and it does not help that every team I want to be bad is now good. Hell, we were one first-half touchdown by Tyreek Hill, the guy who strangled his pregnant girlfriend and then broke the arm of his now-born child when he was three (I usually add “accused of” type caveats, but he straight up says it on audiotape), from the super racist team that has spent the last half-decade scavenging the wreckage of St. Louis football fandom (and largely succeeding) for new adherents that they themselves had a role in creating in making the Super Bowl. A Chiefs/Rams Super Bowl—Jesus absolute Christ.

The Rams have, instead, an extremely likable opponent in the Cincinnati Bengals. There are undeniably faults—Joe Mixon is indefensible, and while I give owner Mike Brown credit for voting against the Rams’ relocation, this doesn’t exactly make the notorious cheapskate who himself extorted Cincinnati into building him a stadium he named after his daddy a sympathetic figure more broadly. But there’s Joe Burrow, the quarterback who looks like a bully in an 80s teen comedy but instead is the protagonist of a beautiful story—the Ohio native who was squeezed out of fulfilling his childhood dream of playing at The Ohio State University and instead became a folk hero at LSU alongside Ja’Marr Chase, who is now his top receiver with the Bengals. With all of the attention in the world on Burrow, his social media presence has been aggressively combed and all anyone seems to have come up with is a bunch of innocuous tweets about the mid-2010s Cleveland Cavaliers and some shockingly progressive tweets about social and economic justice.

In a perverse way, that Joe Burrow has become maybe the most broadly beloved player in the NFL mostly over the course of a few weeks makes me less confident that the Bengals can pull this off. When the Rams played the still-Tom Brady-led New England Patriots in the Super Bowl in 2019, the fact that it was Brady and Bill Belichick, arguably the two greatest to ever do what they do, did give me a sense of relief, even if rooting for the Patriots was never exactly my favorite thing to do. But now I’m rooting for a second-year quarterback who is certainly good but I am absolutely not convinced is great to maintain St. Louis’s 1-0 lead in Super Bowls won vs. Super Bowls won by teams that abandoned it.

What to do if the Cincinnati Bengals win the Super Bowl is very simple—pound a few celebratory shots and/or beers, run around screaming along to “Song 2”, and sending derogatory taunting text messages to every single Green Bay Packers fan I know. That’s the fun part. But what if the Los Angeles Rams win the Super Bowl? How do I cope with that? Here are the things I will tell myself:

1.     This wasn’t going to happen in St. Louis: I’m old enough that I remember when the Arizona Cardinals won the first playoff game in franchise history—a 20-7 victory over the Dallas Cowboys in the NFC Wild Card Round in the 1998-99 season. I remember a local sense of melancholy, that this was something that should have happened in St. Louis but didn’t (this sense evaporated eight months later when the 1999 Rams took charge). That is probably true—there wasn’t really a material change in the operations of the St. Louis, Phoenix, or Arizona Cardinals. But had the hundreds of thousands of NFL franchise owners banded together and stopped the relocation of the St. Louis Rams, what is currently unfolding in Los Angeles never would have happened. Stan Kroenke bought the Rams with the express intent of relocating them—the Rams spent the first six years of his majority ownership treading water, openly cavorting with Los Angeles while employing Jeff Fisher to oversee the most aesthetically unpleasing football team possible. If Kroenke were unable to move the Rams, he probably would have sold them, and as awful of an owner as Stan Kroenke is from the perspective of St. Louis, every move he is making is built around bringing Los Angeles a championship right now. It’s not exactly a mystery as to why—he’s 74 years old and despite giving his son, former awful Mizzou basketball player Josh Kroenke, control of the Denver Nuggets in order to subvert the NFL’s ownership rules, he only cares about himself and doesn’t care what happens to the Rams franchise once he’s dead.

2.     Good for Aaron Donald: Aaron Donald was more of a regional curiosity when he played in St. Louis for two seasons—it was against league broadcast rules (citation needed) for ESPN to discuss the St. Louis Rams (even the relocations of literal NFL franchises are covered with all the fervor of a pretty bad Russell Westbrook shooting night). And now everybody accepts that Donald is awesome, which he was in 2014 and 2015 as well. I have no grudge against Aaron Donald. What am I supposed to do, ask a guy not to get paid to play in LA and instead stay loyal to a city he isn’t from which doesn’t have a team? Aaron Donald should get to body-slam Stan Kroenke off the stage if the Rams are handed the Lombardi Trophy. Maybe take a shot at Goodell while you’re up there too. Note: There are two other former St. Louis Rams still on the team—Rob Havenstein, who was only with the St. Louis team for one year and for whom I have no emotional attachment either way, and Johnny Hekker, the punter who seems like a cool guy but is a living reminder that for the last four years they were in St. Louis, the most marketed players on the Rams were the kicker and the punter.

3.     Matthew Stafford is cool, too: How is Joe Burrow in a Super Bowl and he’s arguably not even the guy whose bro/bully appearance is most incongruous with everything we actually know about him as a person? The Los Angeles Rams have a ton of irritating offensive players—Cam Akers was openly wishing concussions on opponents less than a month ago, Tyler Higbee straight up did hate crimes, and Cooper Kupp forced every NFL announcer at gunpoint to say both his first and last name any time he catches a ball. But Matthew Stafford spent a long time being jerked around by an incompetent Detroit Lions franchise (I mean, I don’t want to deny his complicity—nobody was forcing him to take the money) and now he gets to play for a team that cares. If this were a different team, I’d love it. Also, his wife called out fan apathy and that is insanely funny to me.

4.     The twelve Los Angeles Rams fans deserve happiness: When it comes down to it, if I am going to critique the relocation of the St. Louis Rams to Los Angeles, I have to acknowledge those who were hurt by the original sin of the St. Louis Rams—their relocation from Los Angeles. The face of the relocation to St. Louis, Georgia Frontiere, inherited the team from her husband, who himself only acquired the team after a 1972 franchise trade with the then-Baltimore Colts, a thing that I still can’t wrap my head around. I can note that Rams attendance was rarely very good in Los Angeles and that Frontiere gave Los Angeles a more sincere chance to keep its team than Stan Kroenke gave St. Louis, and that’s all true, but I wouldn’t expect that to be much solace for Angelenos who lost their favorite team. There may not have been as many die-hard Los Angeles Rams fans as there were die-hards of some other teams, but that doesn’t mean there were zero. And while most of my experience with die-hard Los Angeles Rams fans came from those who spent decades trolling St. Louis Post-Dispatch comments sections and therefore my perception of them is a bunch of antisocial lunatics who celebrated the relocation of my favorite childhood sports team with fervor they would not experience again until November 8 of that same year, I know that this is a self-selecting group. In a perfect world, St. Louis, Los Angeles, and San Diego would all have NFL teams. And just as I compartmentalized Los Angeles’s absence from the NFL team list when the Rams were in St. Louis, I can’t really get mad at LA fans who do the same with St. Louis, so long as they aren’t aggressive jerks about it.

All right, there we go. And now I can take a deep breath and root for the Los Angeles Rams! Just kidding, I still hope they lose by triple digits and that Kroenke falls out of his luxury box.