#25 - Kawhi Leonard is Daniel Faraday

HELLO!!!! Oh my jizm, it’s been so long! So long, since my last post and guess what? NOTHING DIFFERENT IS GOING ON! It’s still terrible! It’s never getting better! We’re still living in pandemic times, we’re still hoping republicans stop other republicans from starting a new civil war, we’re still just as fucked as ever. COOL! COOL! COOL! And we’re staring down a starting date of a new NBA season without THE BUBBLE. Wait, did I/we never talk about the bubble?

Wow. It has been a while and the Los Angeles Lakers are the NBA champions of this past season, which ended a couple months ago and now a new one is starting up I think next week. The Bubble fucking worked! It worked and no one got COVID and the games were great and everything made sense. Of course, why do that again? Why try to repeat success? Why try to repeat success while you can do whatever else aka the NFL is doing and fuck everything up just like them? I guess it’s just more exciting to haphazardly give players, coaches, and teams this virus. Who doesn’t love DRAMA? TNT, literally, KNOWS drama, so they need it with the NBA. Oh, we’re all stupid and fucked.

LOST? Should we talk about it?

What is more ominous- the LOST *baaaaahhhhnnng* noise or Kawhi Leonard’s laugh? RIGHT?! I wish I knew how to type that laugh out to make it make sense, but if you’ve heard that robot/alien laugh once- you can recall it perfectly in your head. It’s like when the Predator at the end of the Predator is bleeding out and Arnold is standing over him and the Predator types in their suicide bomb countdown and then they start to laugh their recorded version of Billy’s menacing laugh. It’s like that, but with less reverb. And yeah, the Predator is totally nonbinary. I know that in at least two of the sequels and, probably, in the spinoffs featuring the Predator fighting those Aliens that they are like ‘these Predators have penises and these Predators have vaginas’, but weird and fuck that. Is this about LOST? What?

Daniel Faraday is THE island lovechild of two characters we really haven’t discussed yet - Charles Whitmore and Eloise Hawking - and when THE island starts going into time-travel mode- he’s the only one who really gets it. AND THAT is fucking Kawhi Leonard. Faraday has spent a large portion of his life figuring out time travel and he’s a doctor of it or something. We visit his lab at some stuffy English college and he’s got chalkboards covered in Good Will Hunting style scribbles and he’s got mice that he has names for that are names of a women he has strange and trying relationships with and he’s got a maze for them to run through and he zaps them with beams that make their consciousness travel through time and then shortly thereafter they die. And, again, THAT is fucking Kawhi Leonard. 

Basically, I’m imagining the NBA is dropped onto an island or THE island or better yet when they were simply in the metaphorical island that was THE bubble. And shit starts to flicker and make noises and blah blah blah and then they disappear and then they reappear. Everyone would freak the fuck out! And then there would be Kawhi Leonard cool as the coolest cucumber and he’d be looking at no one in particular and would say, ‘We just time-traveled.’ And then Lebron would be freaking out because he’s got the most to lose in that situation and others would cry and others would get mad and then Kawhi would calmly explain it all out to them with basketball analogies. You know that’s true. Kawhi gets time-travel. He’s that dude.

Who is Kawhi Leonard? Right, I really haven’t talked basketball in this post. Well, it’s a loaded question. Who the fuck is Kawhi? He’s the ‘Boardman’ and as we know the boardman gets paid. Ok, so Kawhi is a talented basketballer with not one, but TWO NBA championships on two different teams and he was the Finals MVP for both. Kawhi is an enigma. He’s been in the league for nine years, been on 3 teams, and he’s clearly one of the best of his generation, but he’s a fucking a mysterious guy. He is drafted by the almighty Coach Pop and the Spurs and he’s this lanky dude who is at first a role-player on one of the most storied dynasties in sports and then two years go by and he’s the bane of King Lebron James’ existence in the NBA Finals and the Spurs win the championships with Kawhi as the MVP, as mentioned. That playoffs and that Finals were a real coming out party for Kawhi. And as that older team started to shift their stars out to pasture, Kawhi became the team’s focus and it seemed like a new dynasty was probable. They had big success during the season, but they came up short in the ultra tough western conference playoffs bracket. Then Kawhi is injured and out basically an entire season and we hear that there is trouble in what most assume is paradise playing for Coach Pop. And then Kawhi leaves to go to fucking Toronto. 

At that point, Kawhi was a villain for most of the NBA faithful, in my opinion. Could be wrong, but from how I remember the media and internet peeps talking about that situation- Kawhi was seen as the bad guy. The level at which Coach Pop is revered is really remarkable or more so cannot be overstated. Like people who would never root for the Spurs ever think Coach Pop is the fucking man. People love the guy. So, when a player has a problem with him, it’s their fault- not Pop’s. Either way, Kawhi was in unflattering light then he legit flees our fucked up country to Canada to play with the Raptors who should’ve always been the Toronto T-Rex. Does anyone call Toronto ‘Ronto’? No. They do call it the big TO and shit. Anyway, Kawhi goes to an already good/not great team and has a nearly identical season as they just had and they head into the playoffs with average fan-fare at best. Everyone’s focused on the Bucks and Giannis and what does this have to do with LOST? Smash cut: Kawhi wins the title and looks baller doing it while playing for a team that NO ONE thinks he’s resigning to for the following season. HE’S A FUCKING MYSTERY! Then joins the Clippers in Los Angeles, they play great, COVID happens, they look meh in The Bubble, and we know the rest. 

People don’t know what to make of Kawhi. Is he a good guy? Is he a bad guy? And that’s Faraday in a nutshell. When you first meet Faraday, he’s on team No Bueno aka the Freighter people who are parachuting in with guns to THE island and we don’t trust them. He then is seemingly a good guy as he saves all their asses shutting down that one station that is going to kill them all with bad gas(?). So, he’s good, right? That’s a championship/MVP winning move. He’s still squirrely though. Like even this cute redhead Charlotte being oddly in love with him is kind of squirrely like she seems to be manipulated into loving him. Later, we find out she loves him because she met him as a child? Yuck. Bad guy! And Faraday’s got this notebook that he won’t show anyone and it’s clear he knows more than he’s letting on. Secrets are not the sign of a good guy. Then they start time-traveling and you legit don’t know if he is making good decisions or bad decisions the entire time even to the point where he is legit shot and killed by his own mom who hasn’t even given birth to him yet. FUCKED UP. Like why would only Paul George agree to play with Kawhi in Los Angeles and not like anyone else beyond PG? 

I’m a fan of The Boardman. I’m a fan of The Claw. The dude is a fucking mystery. I like Faraday. I like Jeremy Davies. I love the movie Ravenous and love Davies screaming, ‘HE WAS LICKING ME!!!!’ I think Kawhi being this high on the list is honestly unsurprising. I’m cool with it. Nine years in the league, played eight or whatever, two championships, two Finals MVPs- that’s legend shit. Faraday’s a weirdo, but he’s a pretty fearless dude tangling with the unknown and getting zero credit for the stunts he pulls. They both have that weird X factor and they’re both kind of freaky. And they both play piano. So, that’s that. 

Fuck styles? I feel like you really do not have any clue what you’re going to get from them, so that could be terrifying or exciting or both. Like they could give you some freaky deaky orgasms. They could also do something super awkward and you’re both just like naked and staring at each other and that goes on a while and it’s like an awkward thing where if you didn’t have a sense of smell and they just tear a rude ass fart and it’s like yeah you can’t smell it, but it’s still wrong to hear that noise and know that they did that. On some level, it’s just bad to inhale a fart because of particles whether or not you can smell them. So, that could happen. It’s like that or like floodzone orgazzies.