Five-Star NBA Podcast Review

The eponymous host of this show is the winking kind of reporter, perfect for our time. He's always almost saying something. Forever stopping short of making a bold prediction by hinting at some impending trade or signing, effectively channeling his hard-won insider information into juvenile teasing. He puts his thumbs in his ears, sticks his tongue out and shakes his hips from side to side as he sings, I know something you don't know. It's cruelly effective at tapping into our collective lizard brain. We are either titillated that available information is being withheld, or we begin recklessly speculating about when the news that has not quite been revealed will drop. Either way, we keep listening, and we come back for more. We love to listen to a man dance on the head of a pin.

Like every modern, winking pseudo-intellectual, he needs a boogeyman, an ever-present enemy that becomes the raison d’être for his specific approach to media making. Where others extend contrarianism to its illogical, often bigoted ends, W simultaneously flirts and fights with an indomitable foe—the vapor known as aggregators. To be clear, aggregators are real, but no other voice in the take economy has elevated this hodgepodge group of unpaid college students to the status of Beelzebub. So much so, it’s obvious W loves this dance, like the thrill of conjuring a ghost or inviting a vampire into one’s home.

The number of screaming matches has gone way up and the circuitous debates, often where W cannot be moved despite obviously being on the wrong side of the tête-à-tête-à-tête, are also on the rise. Co-hosts “Good Times” and “Banned” drivel and stumble in flabbergasted exhaustion at W, but no one can stop W. He’s a hurricane and his name’s on the banner. There's a real Kaminsky Method odd throuple thing going on of late and this is a vibe improvement if not an increase in relevant information. It's growing on me.

Jalen Eutsey is a 2022-2024 Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. He received his MFA from The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. He has been the recipient of a Rubys Artist Grant and a Hatty Fitts Walker Scholarship from the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. His poems have appeared in Best New Poets 2022, Nashville Review, Poetry Northwest, Harpur Palate, and The Hopkins Review. He was born and raised in Miami.