Just finished The Wire for the last time. Thoughts: Season 5 worse than I remember. Some of the child acting is downright horrible, even if you have to grade that sort of shit on a sliding scale. Writing across the series is terribly uneven. Tommy Carcetti’s accent should have earned Littlefinger a permanent ban from American screens. Lester Freamon is essentially a voice-over narrator for half his scenes, which is a waste of a good actor. Waaaaaay too many “sharing-a-knowing-smile-and-nod” moments. Heavy-handed in the both-sides-are-fucked parallel storylines. Omar is a cartoon. Brother Mouzzone just makes it worse. Bubbles’ storyline still makes me misty. Essentially a David Simon cultural jeremiad as much as Sopranos was David Chase’s. Great TV, but aged TV all the same.

Never catch up with your heroes a decade later.

I am excited a bit for the Celtics to win it all, if they do, to watch the NBA Narrative Industrial Complex contort itself into making Mazzullla into a great coach.

I am loving how Mazzulla is having no time for the media, because he knows that they were all talking shit about him.

And Knicks Fan, what a horrible question. I’m partly saying something because it feels wrong to congratulate JK without addressing your question too, and partly because it’s actually a fascinating (if horrible) question.

He’s probably a fine kid, but he wasn’t just standing nearby looking at his phone when it went down. I lean pretty heavily on character, and also on not creating an endless press morass around my team. I wish the kid well and hope he has a great career, but my tendency would be to look elsewhere.

If I was a real GM and could cook the cold, hard numbers, maybe I’d think differently (and really, I only know the surface story). But from my armchair it’s easy to say, why open that particular can of shit.