writing

ALEX REVIEWS MUSIC (ARM): RYAN ADAMS – SELF PORTRAIT | 2026-01-05

Depending on how exactly you count, Self Portrait should be Ryan Adams’s 31st full length solo effort. Unlike a few of the intervening releases that separate it from BLACKHOLE—2024’s long-awaited and long-presumed indefinitely-shelved cult drop—his new 1st December 2025 exploit is a 24-cut double LP of previously unreleased studio material, including three (and a half) cover songs. Granted, the word ‘studio’ is being used extremely loosely here. No need to beat around the bush: this site’s been up for over ten years at this point, and we have pretty much covered every single piece of new music the 51-year old Jacksonville, NC native has made publicly available since 2015. Sure, we did take a few passes on e.g. his Return to Carnegie Hall (2023) or Another Wednesday (2025) live albums (not to mention his vinyl-only compilation Changes from last June). Similarly, we did not see fit to focus on his 25th Anniversary Edition Heartbreaker reissue several months ago. By and large, that was all due to the fact that none of the aforementioned projects contained no new musical numbers to speak of.

The reason we’re employing the ‘studio’ attribute loosely is because, arguably, since his extraordinary 2021 LP Big Colors none of the subsequent ten projects feel very much like they were gestated in a true blue studio recording environment. From Chris (2022) to Self Portrait (2025), the through line has for the most part been home-spun and mixtape-like. And to think that this comes without counting as many as eight other collections since Big Colors that were either of the aforementioned anniversary reissues (Heartbreaker), live tapes (Return to Carnegie Hall, Prisoners, Another Wednesday) or wall-to-wall album-play cover records (Nebraska, Blood on the Tracks, Morning Glory, Changes). Mind you, this is not to say that this is necessarily a bad thing, yet one that warrants an epistemological acknowledgement. For before discoursing about the merits and flaws of his latest, it’s strikes us as perhaps decisive to lean into the paratext that the PaxAm founder is sending us with his release strategy.

He titled this 31st studio LP Self Portrait—does it mean that this low-fidelity, erratic, and hodgepodge-y version of the DRA is his actual true self? At the very least during this third act? After all, this record does match the post-2020-2022 album trilogy modus operandi; one need not even read into that much tea leaves depth. What is sure is that with now as many bedroom low-fidelity compilations released as big league major label albums in his commercial heyday—ten in total for both classes, ranging from his seminal 2000 splash Heartbreaker to 2017’s exquisite Prisoner—the question is meritorious and bears significant valence.

So who is the real Ryan Adams in 2026? Is it the author of three lengthy novels in as many years? Or is it the alt-country prodigal son so resentfully clamored by his entitled Reddit fanbase? For what it’s worth, let us bake some method into this investigation in order to look at what the Self Portrait data tells us. To recap, the LP boasts 24 individual records amounting to almost an hour and fifteen minutes of music, which we’ll go ahead and arbitrarily claim is enough circumstantial evidence to begin drawing some representative conclusions. What we did is listen to each of the cuts on the tracklist in isolation and mapped them to the most likely and faithful originally housing post-2020 Ryan Adams studio album. Mostly, this was done by way of judging the recording quality, ethos, aesthetics, and environment of each cut, attempting to match that sonic identikit—as well as the primary writing style of the melodic toplines—to the album timbre resembling it the most. Here’s what we found:

“Virginia in the Rain“, “Stormy Weather“, “Thunderstorm Tears“, “Try Again Tomorrow“, “Theo” — Romeo & Juliet The largest batch of songs sounds like it was inherited from the PaxAm founder’s twentieth studio album as a solo act (2022), which is saying something considering the wild range of sonic styles and explorations on that record. Clocking in at over an hour of material with already 19 songs in the mix, these are likely loosies and throwaways from those writing sessions. Considering the album length and format pace the DRA has been keeping of late, few pundits would have bat an eye had these five been quietly laced into the tracklist to make it another 24-track opus like Self Portrait.

“Bye Bye Balloons“, “Fools Game“, “Lovers Under the Moon” — Wednesdays Admittedly more informed by the songwriting at the core of these tunes than the production quality, these three bare naked unplugged and acoustic numbers wouldn’t have felt out of place on his 2020 comeback record—perhaps as extra material thrown on top of a country-specific drop. The fact that none of them actually made the bonus tracks cut at the time—especially factoring in how generous Adams typically is with non-LP numbers and outtakes—speaks to the somewhat lukewarm quality and staying power they possess.

“Too Old to Die Young“, “I Am a Rollercoaster“, “Look What You Did” — Chris This different crop of Self Portrait songs sports a distinctive Chris kind of musical vibe. Mind you, the highly-anticipated final installment in his powerful 2020-2022 album trilogy—completed by Wednesdays and Big Colors—already showcases some of Ryan Adams’s more immediate and catchiest, if disjointed, songwriting of the past fifteen years. Nonetheless, with yet another bloated tracklist coming in just shy of sixty minutes of runtime, it’s easy to cut him some slack and understand why these three didn’t quite make it onto any of the commercially released versions at the time. In twenty-twenty hindsight, we would have loved to see either “Too Old to Die Young” or “I Am a Rollercoaster” getting the official upgrade, or at the very least being offered as bonus tracks instead of the hair metal-adjacent “Don’t Follow” that the poet laureate actually ended up churning.

“Saturday Night Forever”, “Please, Shut the Fuck Up“, “At Dawn” — Big Colors These three LP standouts err on the shinier and glossier end of the production spectrum (not exactly an awfully high bar lately we know…), while displaying a strong lineage with what’s perhaps the best and most accomplished record in the North Carolinian’s recent discography. Although they don’t quite possess all the required sanitized nooks and crannies to be default-grandfathered into their parent album, their more careful mixing and focused songwriting handily elevate them as amongst the most enjoyable on Big Colors. “Saturday Night Forever” is gorgeous and sounds like the (even) darker coin flip B side of “In It For the Pleasure”, while “At Dawn” could go neck to neck with “Summer Rain” as the ultimate DRA album swan song—an incredibly tall order.

“Take the Money“, “Not Trash Anymore” — FM “Take the Money” was literally teased and promoted as an FM outtake around the time his power-pop affair dropped in 2022, so that’s a given and perhaps even more of a head scratcher than other jams on here. The non-LP labeling feels fair game and the right outcome for that one, but “Not Trash Anymore” is a strong and muscular tune through and through. It’s a shame it wasn’t included in it four years ago ,as it comes across as a bit of a sore thumb on Self Portrait. 

“Blue Monday“, “The One I Love“, “Shiny Happy People” — Morning Glory The cover songs for the cover album. From their homespun recording mix to the actual instrumentation committed to tape, these new renditions of New Order and REM classics were in all likelihood cut during the same DIY arrangement and recording sessions as the incredibly hushed and creative Oasis album reimagining. Let’s just say we’re glad Ryan kept these standalones, for they bear less to write home about than pretty much anything on his 2020s album covers series.

“Throw It Away” — Devolver The late 2022 Rock N Roll-spiritual next-of-kin release remains a peppy and underrated project in the alt-country phenom’s canon; this similarly vivacious and inspired cut bears all its songwriting and production fingerprints on it. Considering the more condensed original tracklist—with no single record clocking in at longer than 3:14—this should have been on it.

“Castles in the Sand” — Blood on the Tracks If you know you know, but there’s a specific brand of sound capture and playback temperature to the wall-to-wall re-recording of Bob Dylan’s masterpiece, given away for free as a 2022 Christmas present. This ambitious 6-minute jam, somewhat randomly, oozes all the hallmarks of what presumably was another home studio set up at the time. Clearly not a potential candidate for the aforementioned covers record, this one-off belter seems to have been sculpted as a torch bearer for the looser and more impromptu kind of Ryan Adams drawl.

“Someone On My Mind“, “I Am Dracula“, “Honky Tonk Girl” — Others These are long tail renegades. We couldn’t quite naturally map any of these three bops to any of his past records. They all pretty much sound like they were cut during the same writing session(s) though, so one is left wondering what kind of different record lies behind them. Their garage-y and more upbeat ethos very much situate them up one of Adams’s street. If our theory that what he sees when he looks in the mirror today is the sprawling, unedited, and primarily low-fidelity singer/songwriter of the past six years is correct, their inclusion appears based.

Notwithstanding the above blow-by-blow granularity, alas the sequencing on Self Portrait continues to be rough. All over the place, once more. Staccato transitions and EQ unbalances render this collection of tunes more like another mixtape, than a cohesive or even conceptual album. Think Chris, rather than Prisoner. Its further shortcomings include the annoying audio static on most of this thing’s mix, as well as many hackneyed bits of Ryan counting-in the songs. Although the latter is of course not necessarily a bad thing when done intentionally and contextually, the abundant times it appears on here feel unnecessary and haphazard at best. Also, too often one can hear Ryan’s pick hitting the acoustic guitar body before or after the performance—another clue pointing to a self-recorded affair. Indeed, as many seem to speculate online, Self Portrait sounds like yet another album cobbled together by the DRA himself, while left to his own devices. That would mean no major label studio-grading recording engineer in the picture—nor an external curator consigliere to help him guide song selection and sequencing.

Yet, for as much as his fans seem to think otherwise, the fact of the matter is that Ryan remains in control of his own creative output. He has the complete God-given right to steer the bull by its horns in whichever direction he prefers. Regardless of album creation heuristics, what stays indelible at the end of the day are his artistic choices and the way they can be interpreted by listeners. Ever the self-aware, contrarian, and ironic auteur, one’s gotta sprinkle some humor and affability for accuracy on top though. So while we shall never really find out for sure what his mirrored image looks like, or what he thinks it looks like, titling your 31st studio album Self Portrait feels daring and evanescent at the same time. Is it a giant f**k you to snob and presumptuous superfans who won’t stop crying digital tears until he remakes Heartbreaker and Jacksonville City Nights over and over, or a faithful statement of artistic intent as he evolves throughout the third decade of the new millennium? Like it or not, we’re not so sure the man even knows himself.

We’d like to thank you sincerely for taking the time to read this and we hope to feel your interest again next time.

AV

RYAN ADAMS

SELF PORTRAIT

2025, PAXAM

https://ryanadamsofficial.com

NBA CUPCAKE | 2025-12-15

There’s a new Ryan Adams double album out in the world (a pastiche grower, in case you needed to know), the Mass Appeal ‘Legend Has It…‘ series has come to a climaxing and culminating end, and Gabriel Jacoby is going to be a star. Yet we do need to come through and interrupt the regularly scheduled musical programming—AOTY and the long-in-the-works Mass Appeal Tier List are handily stuffing this jolly December—to chime in with the obligatory unfounded 2025 Emirates NBA Cup winner prediction, now that the championship game is finally set and will be won by our New York Knicks.

Hey, it’s no Larry O’Brien trophy, but after more than a half-century drought, the five Gotham boroughs will take any resemblance to ballin silverware. On any other day ending in Y, given how this first quarter of NBA regular season has fared—with reigning champs Oklahoma City Thunder entering last Saturday’s West semifinals with an otherworldly .960 winning record, hot on the heels of a 16-game winning streak—capitulating such an opponent would have likely translated into more hooping street creds for Brunson and co. than the actual Emirates NBA Cup and the lofty monetary cachet it carries. Too bad that honor has now gone to the marvelous and defiant San Antonio Spurs instead.

Zoomin out for a moment, this year’s Cup edition did feel like it finally started to establish itself as a worthy late fall slump pursuit for the thirty league franchises. Didn’t it? If anything, the NBA just announced that TV viewership of group-play games was up 90 percent from last year. 90% YoY! Now in its third edition, following a sage and well-informed name change from the management consulting-y In-Season Tournament label, if nothing else the dedicated Friday night Cup games throughout November lent buzzing and momentous urgency to an otherwise somewhat auto-pilot month in the league. Incidentally, the revamped scheduling, coupled with a few successful branding pivots, led to a fascinating single-elimination game bracket in the knockout rounds, including flipped seedings compared to regular season standings as well as somewhat unlikely ticket-punchers (Suns and Raptors?!).

Our fault—didn’t we say we were going to zoom out? For the uninitiated, or those oblivious amongst you, only here to mouth-water over next week’s Albums of the Year drop, here comes a handy recap of how the NBA Cup actually worked out this year in the first place—courtesy of the always astute Bounce newsletter by The Athletic’s Zach Harper:

We have three groups of five teams in each conference. You play against every team in your group once. 

  • The best record wins the group.
  • If you tie, head-to-head will determine the winner. 
  • Three group winners in each conference advance to the single-elimination bracket, along with one wild card team in each conference. 
  • Wild card is based on record, then point differential, then total points scored, then 2024-25 regular-season record. 
  • If all of those tiebreakers don’t solve it, the NBA does a random draw. 

Owing to the above, all of the group-play games shenanigans would then determine the knockout bracket, with quarterfinals played with the typical home/away format based on group seeding, before moving both conference semifinals and the prize fight on neutral Las Vegas ground… Ahh how do we love the poetic irony of sending these teams, their delegations, and especially the eyes of the hooping world watching to a site that is the synonymous dictionary entry of gambling and betting—all amidst the gargantuan FBI-doctored multiple illegal investigations plaguing the league. The place is literally nicknamed Sin City, for Christ’s sake. Let’s just assume that everyone in the NBA—from Commish Silver to any franchise’s front office—would have been completely fine with setting this all up in Omaha, Nebraska this year. Just for this one subaltern season.

At any rate, as good ole De La Soul like to throw it down, it turns out that three really is a magic number (although perhaps not a Magic number, much to Desmond Bane’s chagrin). This year, both conferences’ NBA Cup third seeds entering the single-elimination round (NYK and SAS) have managed to push through all the way up to the 2025 Championship game—slated for tomorrow, Tuesday 16th December. This is a first, for the lowest seed to ever make it all the way to a Cup final before was the Indiana Pacers’ second seed during the inaugural, wait for it, In-Season Tournament (a game they eventually lost 123-109 to LeBron James’ Lakers). It’s too early to tell whether this stands to signify any meaningful shift in regular season power dynamics, but it sure does speak to the Cup’s erratic left field monkey wrench influence on this season’s juncture; whether it spoils your pre-Christmas anticipation all depends on what side of the NBA fence you sit on. Regardless, it’s tight and refreshing that no current Cup or regular season top seed is sticking around in Vegas for the prize fight this year.

All of a sudden matching most odds and predictions, our New York Knickerbockers will win this thing tomorrow. Believe us, we’d have stuck to this prediction even if the opponent were the OKC. Yeah we know, no sane person would likely pick against OKC until like 2032 at this point, but hey you all saw what Win-banyama and peers did to them this past weekend. Also, we kind of just feel like such a statement snatch is in the air for New York. They just got perennially cool Zohran Mamdani; they’ll want to keep striking while the iron is hot. Not to mention, this is virtually the same ace core team that reached the Eastern Conference Finals a mere six months ago, only with a deeper and more versatile bench as well as a brilliant gaffer in Mike Brown. We get what you’re saying—they’re up against a young, wild, and free squad with arguably all of the wind in their sail after having defeated the seemingly unbeatable reigning World champs and having welcomed the Alien back from injury. But we’re asking you to trust us here.

So there goes our Cupdate. You know it’s New York Forever, and the Knicks will take the Cupcake. Besides, Midtown West will need to be under Martial Law for the two hours following the final buzzer. They are coming.

We’d like to thank you sincerely for taking the time to read this and we hope to feel your interest again next time.

AV

WIN-BANYAMA | 2025-11-01

Happy November to those who celebrate. It just so happens that this weekend doubles as the days of the dead, or of all the Saints, depending on how and who you count. Two weeks ago, larger-than-life American singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and record producer D’Angelo moved on unexpectedly. Absolutely devastating. May the Lord rest his soul while he’s up there, we’ll take good care of his music down here.

October felt like it flew by like a 2025 Chicago Bull fast break, and there’s a lot to catch up on. Nasir Jones’s iconic Mass Appeal record label’s ‘Legend Has It…’ series cracked on fiercely, with highly-anticipated drops from Mobb Deep (Infinite) and the improbable exhuming of a patched-together compilation-mixtape by the prematurely disappeared Harlemite Big L (Harlem’s Finest: Return of the King)—hands down one of the most influential and resonant MCs ever to grace the genre. Not legend, but rumor has that this very in-house editorial team is working on the definitive ‘Legend Has It…’ Tier List once all seven projects have dropped later in the year. Another thing that happened this past month is the somewhat unexpected happenstance of a potential true spiritual successor to Frank Ocean‘s Blonde: Daniel Ceasar’s Son of Spergy—out a week ago on 24th October—has all the chops, vibes, and moods that faithfully recall the 2016 Neo soul masterpiece. Shoutout D’Angelo once again. Mostly though, October’s very own passing means that the official 2025-2026 NBA season is now fully underway.

With most teams having churned out five to six games at the time of this writing, the one meteoric and proverbial sore thumb standing out from the pack hitherto is San Antonio Spurs’ French center/power forward/small forward/shooting guard/playmaker Victor Wembanyama. Currently just one of three still unbeaten teams in the league—sharing the spoils with reigning champs Oklahoma City Thunder and the other fortnightly Cinderella surprise, the Chicago Bulls—the Texan franchise puts everyone else behind them in terms of average points differential per game (+14.4), as well as average opponent points per game (103.8). News at eleven, ladies and gentlemen—when you have the most uniquely singular and impactful hooper of the 21st Century in your rank and file, listed at 7-foot-4 (225 cm), and therefore naturally leading the NBA in rebounds and blocks per game (shooting at a 56.3% whilst at that), those street creds sound like just any day ending in Y.

What’s particularly cool about the Spurs going 5-0 to begin the 2025-2026 season is that they have never done it before in franchise history. Not even the Tim Duncan-Tony Parker-Manu Ginobili-Kawhi Leonard San Antonio Spurs started their season 5-0. The club has won five NBA Championships though. Oh, and this new-found glory all comes after they had previously established a negative record by capitulating 16 straight times in 2023, only to then besting it the following season with as many as 18 straight losses. Also, for context, San Antonio lost at least five straight games on 11 occasions just in the past three years, boasting a 78-168 win/loss record par for the course during that same span. Nonetheless, they did manage to snatch Victor Wembanyama a couple years back. The rest is history still being written to this day: the unanimous first overall pick in the 2023 NBA Draft was, shockingly, named the 2024 NBA Rookie of the Year at the end of his first full season, finishing second for the Defensive Player of the Year award just behind French compatriot Rudy Gobert. Rightfully so, Wemby also became the first rookie ever to be named to the NBA All-Defensive First Team that same season.

Dude’s low-key being played in positions 1 through 5 on the floor, and is currently averaging almost eight more points per game than his career average (30.2 in five games this season, vs 22.9 all time), all the while putting up 56.2/31.2/79.1 shooting splits. We know there are literally just a handful observations in our sample, but what’s even gnarlier is that the French unicorn-meets-Alien is also cruising at better game averages in minutes played, field goal percentages, rebounds, blocks, steals, and turnovers conceded compared to his lifetime numbers so far. How does one even improve on career rebounding and blocks averages of 11 and 4, respectively?! Watch this: during the first three inaugural games this past month, Wemby was averaging 33.3 points, 13.7 rebounds, and 6.0 blocks every 48 minutes… Did we mention he’s 21-years of age?

Here it goes. If Wemby can stay healthy throughout the following eight months—he didn’t qualify for any accolade last season due to him not reaching the 65-games played threshold on account of a deep vein thrombosis—we’re anticipating a big sweep of his at this year’s individual NBA awards. This assessment should bode well for the San Antonio franchise, too. Aside from the athletic momentum they seem to have found, Mitch Johnson’s squad has some type of edge that no other team can claim this year: the emotional charge of honoring the work of record-setting, transcendental longtime head coach Gregg Popovich, who stepped down from his post after 29 consecutive years at the helm of the franchise due to worsening health issues this past May. The team appears in excellent managerial hands with Johnson, who had the privilege and honor to share gaffer duties bench with Coach Pop since 2019.

The Spurs might have found an additional improbable ally in the NBA fixtures schedule this month of November to keep this kind of wind in their sail, too. Of their upcoming fourteen opponents slated over the coming thirty days, only four teams are presently above .500: the Los Angeles Lakers, their fellow unbeaten Bulls, the Golden State Warriors (in a double header this month), and the 2023 NBA Champs Denver Nuggets. Thusly, it might not be completely out of the question that we would regroup this time around next month, and still find Wembanyama and friends in high altitude standings. This formulation is not meant as any type of shade to the Stephon Castles, Devin Vassels, Harrison Barnes, or Keldon Johnsons of the Spurs world. It’s just that this early season really does look like it put the Wemby church at the center of the Texan village. Take these first five match ups San Antonio has played so far: absent game two against the New Orleans Pelicans in which Luke Cornet grabbed one more board than him from the bench, the tall French glass of water was the team leader in both points and rebounds in each single face off. The Silver and Black are +23 points per 100 possessions with him on the floor, and a measly +0.1 with him on the bench. He’s that supreme.

And to think that the San Antonio Spurs’ highest-paid player, De’Aaron Fox, is still sidelined due to a right hamstring strain. His return should be imminent, however. Thing is, the 27-year-old former Sacramento Kings star might need to fight a little harder for ball handling duties once he comes back—Wemby is so omnipresent and position-less, and more often than not takes care of the rock from cradle-to-grave, with a few blocks and rebounds peppered on top for good measure. For Christ’s sake is this kid good. Not that anybody didn’t notice before, but this new season has made his impact and gravity absolutely undeniable. If you’re sick of this kind of generational talent already, then newsflash: the next couple decades are going to be tough for you. He’s poised to be one of the most influential players in NBA history.

Honestly, good luck to the Alamo City this year. God bless the San Antonio Spurs. But it’s New York Forever over here. Although we are still very much concerned about Josh Hart’s right index finger. Get that thing fixed before we’re too deep into the season, Tasmanian devil.

We’d like to thank you sincerely for taking the time to read this and we hope to feel your interest again next time.

AV

THE FILE OF PABLO | 2025-09-27

I feel like Pablo when I’m workin’ on my shoes
I feel like Pablo when I see me on the news
I feel like Pablo when I’m workin’ on my house

In heeding the above not-so-veiled reference, you’d be forgiven to assume we’re about to chop it up about some revisionist account on TLOP‘s iterative hell almost turning ten years old (can y’all believe it?). Yet, for better or worse, “No More Parties in LA“‘s contribution to this story probably starts and ends there. The Pablo who might be seeing himself on the news a lot lately, is of course not Paul the Apostle, but American journalist, sportswriter, and perhaps now most famously, podcaster Pablo Sison Torre. What began as a breaking news piece of distinctive investigative journalism on his Pablo Torre Finds Out earlier this month has led to a remarkable cascade of high-profile inquiries by and into everything from government agencies, sports franchises, as well as disgraced eco-friendly ‘green banks’. The start of the 2025-2026 NBA preseason is still a handful days away, but the North American professional basketball league might have already peaked their media monitoring for the year… Go Knicks, I guess?

What’s with all the fanfare, you may ask. Well, in so many words, the fact that a relatively unknown and low-profile podcaster singlehandedly architected a substantiated and pernickety investigation alleging that Los Angeles Clippers’ heavyweight player Kawhi Leonard benefitted from a multi-year, near-$50 million partnership agreement with a now defunct and disgraced climate-finance firm FKA Aspiration (later CTN Holdings). The arrangement was said to be functioning more like a “no-show” compensation than a true blue endorsement for the premier basketball franchise’s star.

There is quite a lot more to the Kawhi-gate than that—such as the whole ‘uncle Dennis Robertson’ angle usurping officially licensed agent Mitch Frankel—but the central linchpin of the whole shebang is that this piece of financial engineering was purported to have been masterminded by LA Clippers owner and corporate stage maniac Steve Ballmer (who happens to be world’s richest person involved with any sports team), in order to improperly advantage himself by remunerating his top franchise player with a compounded amount significantly higher than the NBA Collective Bargaining Agreement-regulated salary cap would have allowed him. The league’s salary cap threshold amounted to around $113 million during the 2021-22, the season tied to the impropriety in question. To put it bluntly, a gargantuan cheat.

Just to put this into perspective—on his latest podcast episode as part of the developing story, Torre made it clear that if the fraud scheme were all to be proven true, it would make for the largest salary cap circumvention in all of professional sports history. By orders of magnitude, in fact. Let that sink in for a moment. For Christ’s sake, the whole Los Angeleno franchise is alleged to have poured about $118 millions into brand partner Aspiration over the course of one and a half years (see PTFO timeline below). What is particularly uncanny in the chronological unfolding of events is the apparent pacing of the Ballmer scheme: the reported millions of dollars ‘invested’ in Aspiration by the LAC—inclusive of shallow and puffy equity-like purchases of Aspiration corporate carbon offset credits—all suspiciously took place in or around contract renewals and payment dates owed to Leonard (aaand his uncle Dennis), according to the endorsement deal documents. Torre understandably qualifies the hypothesis that those trails of money tranches were in fact laundered through Aspiration, in order to up Leonard’s total LAC compensation reward outside of the bounds of his team contract. And outside of the bounds of strict NBA regulation.

Naturally, this attracted the ire and sanitized press releases by a whole host of interested parties, all of them holding more or less stakes in this blow up. From Steve Ballmer himself to former Aspiration executive Andrei Cherny and NBA honcho Adam Silver (who called salary cap circumvention a ‘cardinal sin‘ in the league)—no one in hoopslandia seems to shut up about this. The NBA was forced to investigate soon after the Pablo’s reports started to circulate. Meanwhile, minority Dallas Mavericks-owner and angel-investor-next-door Mark Cuban was quick to hop on the court of public opinion’s bandwagon, challenge Pablo’s findings and side with ‘team Ballmer’. We wonder what on earth might he be benefitting from in adopting such a stance?

Moreover, in the above mentioned third PTFO episode installment on the Kawhi-gate series, Pablo underscored how his bombshell reporting and the ensuing investigations naturally infiltrated the September NBA Board of Governors meeting in New York, BIG TIME. How could it not. The sad, strange, beautiful irony in all of this? How about Steve Ballmer doubling as the Chair of the NBA’s Audit Committee on the Board of Governors, ergo the league’s own self-regulatory body furthering financial transparency across the thirty franchises. Ouch…

Aside from this potentially erupting as the biggest financial scandal of the modern NBA, this discursive dynamic holds a great deal of further analytical fascination, if you’re someone interested in media power structures like us. First of all—Pablo Torre didn’t ‘snitch‘ on anybody. Just like true blue investigative journalism once led the way, it took him countless hours of publicly available documents scrutiny and parsing all information with a fine tooth comb to begin to uncover certain laundering patterns. In a world succumbed to short-memory instant gratification inertia, this kind of journalism feels like a dying breed. His ability to construct a substantiated and believable conjecture of events, going after the eight richest man in the world, and leading to what is poised to become one of the most talked about fraud’s in professional sports history needed to overcome a thankless and gregarious job. This is no small feat. Where are all the award-winning ‘investigative’ newspapers of record when you needed them?

Bizarrely enough, although a number of legacy press outfits have saluted and given credit to the former Sports Illustrated and ESPN reporter, a loud majority of traditional sports media have failed to do so hitherto. Yes, they might have incorporated his unique piece of breaking news in their own circadian coverage rhythm, but their self-centered intake of such profitable story seemed to be more driven by skepticism than embrace. In fairness, some, like the Boston Sports Journal and the Toronto Star—not exactly top dogs in the press market—did add valuable and enriching reporting of their own to the developing narrative. What this act of dialectic reinforcement demonstrates is the underutilized power of decentralized and distributed investigative journalism, that when collectivized in solidarity such as in this Kawhi-gate can indeed hold giant power apparatuses to account.

Matter of fact; Pablo’s reporting was the kill. Regardless of the criminal and athletic outcomes from the various official ongoing investigations (we aren’t necessarily holding our breaths for their swiftness and justness anytime soon), we can’t imagine any regulatory agency carrying out a better job in advancing this type of circumstantial evidence to an adjudicating jury. If this piques your interest—and if you’ve read this far we’re going to assume so—do yourselves a favor and spend a few hours peeping the three episodes tracing the overall story timeline. They are worth it. Then arrive at your own conclusion.

For all intents and purposes, the jury is still very much out on this one. Yet, much like Pablo and his multiple featured guests have repeated several times on the podcast: what more evidence does one need to bring forward to overwhelmingly convince the court of public opinion that the LAC-Leonard-Aspiration farce triangle was a highfaluting scam? The NBA, the Department of Justice, the FBI, and the SEC certainly thought it was enough… By the way, there is some cheeky someone who has remained awfully quiet throughout this whole time. Wanna guess? The notoriously stoic and taciturn Mr Kawhi Leonard himself, of course. ‘It’s (gr)apple time, (gr)apple time‘.

We’d like to thank you sincerely for taking the time to read this and we hope to feel your interest again next time.

AV