NBA Centers, The Vancouver Canucks, and Anthony Fauci: Sports Fan
Fauci chimes in on how sports can return, plus the future of the NBA big man and the dreaded Vancouver Canucks.
Wow, it’s been so long since I’ve seen you all. How has your last 24 hours been? Great to hear. Mine have been the exact same as the 24 hours before, thanks for asking.
It’s a DISTRACTION EDITION [thousands of air horns sound]. We did this a few weeks ago with the 100 free agents post that Tom Shea wrote and we’re doing it again because I’m in charge and I say that’s what’s happening.
Subscribe to the goddamn newsletter, my God you should’ve done it already.
Let’s get started:
TONYYYYY: Fauci Says Sports Can Only Return Quickly Without Crowds
The nation’s number one infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci said this week that sports will only return on an advanced timeline without crowds in attendance.
I can’t believe this, but apparently Fauci said this in a Snapchat interview because why the f—k not—I get my news in the same place you, dear reader, send your nudes, I guess.
I actually read this on ESPN like a normal person, thank goodness they’re the ones scouring Snapchat for news and not me.
"There's a way of doing that," Fauci said. "Nobody comes to the stadium. Put [the players] in big hotels, wherever you want to play, keep them very well surveilled. ... Have them tested every single week and make sure they don't wind up infecting each other or their family, and just let them play the season out."
I mean, this makes a lot of sense and I don’t understand how anyone would’ve thought 15,000-70,000 people jammed together in stadiums was happening anytime soon. Sports commissioners have been speaking with President Donald Trump and liaising with the White House and medical community ever since Rudy Gobert sent the live sports economy into a tailspin, and NBA Commissioner Adam Silver has been vocal about wanting sports to be the first segment of the economy to open back up, but if he was saying that thinking he was going to be able to tell owners they’re going to go back to selling fans peanuts for $45 and then sending them to their seats to spit all over each other, I have a bridge to sell his ass.
I wrote about this many moons ago (scroll to the last article, lazy people): From the beginning, I’ve thought games behind closed doors in situations that guarantee the health of those involved is the most likely outcome for sports leagues in the near future. Yesterday’s newsletter has a whole section about colleges being unsure if they’re returning in the fall—if people aren’t comfortable being in sort of close proximity in that environment yet, I can’t imagine people are going to be comfortable enough to be sardines packed into the Bank of America McDonald’s Tim Horton’s Fanatics Fortune 500 Arena in the fictional town of North Dakota anytime soon.
That doesn’t mean there aren’t major incentives for major leagues around the world to resume play to fulfill their television contracts with rights holders in tens of countries. Billions of dollars are at stake—players better get ready to leave their families behind for a few months. If you want my take on how leagues should play games, read the old article it’s all in there.
Let’s do some NBA.
Look Away Roy Hibbert—Is The Traditional Center Dying, or is it Just Evolving?
By Tom Shea
In the last decade, we’ve watched the entire NBA turn sideways off its preordained axis.
In the last 8 years, the percentage of shots taken from 3 has almost doubled—from 22.7% to 38.2%. At times, the game becomes formulaic—the corner 3 has become the NBA’s mathematical equivalent of Bo Jackson in Tecmo Bowl.
On the flip side, it’s made the game more relatable than ever: Wayward goobers can pop 30 footers in their driveways and have a non-zero chance of becoming the next Steph, whereas their odds of becoming the next Wilt aren’t too stellar.
But it’s not just 5’6” twigs who’ve embraced the 3-point movement: The “stretch-5” was once used to refer to a select minority of centers with a stroke from deep, like Dirk Nowitzki. Now, the phrase is almost obsolete—big men who can pop 3’s pervade the league. We’ve seen centers take it upon themselves to expand their range basically from scratch so as to not find themselves in the Roy Hibbert memorial bucket of retired old-fashioned centers.
Marc Gasol is the best example: He didn’t even attempt 3’s until three years ago—today, he’s an above average above 3-point shooter. These developments beget this question: What’s the future of the position?
I looked at recent super-teams, as well as some statistical analysis, to try to figure it out.
Go back just 12 years, which feels like 25 with how drastically the game’s transformed: The traditional big played a prominent role on this century’s nascent super-team: the Kevin Garnett-Paul Pierce-Ray Allen Celtics. Rajon Rondo is the one brought up as the primary supporting member, and deservedly so: while not yet in his triple-double prime, he was already a solid playmaker and great defender, even in just his second season in the league.
But Kendrick Perkins was vital to that squad as well. He’s been (justly) maligned for his OKC days and everything that came after, but there was a reason the Thunder gave up a promising Jeff Green (not an oxymoron) to get him. The KG-Pierce-Ray-Rondo quartet had a 19.4 net rating per 100 possessions in 1073 minutes with Perk and just a 3.3 in 313 minutes without. How hard did the Celtics lean on that starting lineup with Perk? Only 19 5-man units logged 1000+ minutes together in a season since lineup stats started being tracked. Ray got another ring with the Heat, but without Perk it’s possible we view KG and Pierce in the same light as Karl Malone and Charles Barkley.
Fast forward just a couple years to the next big 3: the LeBron James-Dwyane Wade-Chris Bosh Heat. There’s a common theory, one I also believed, that Erik Spoelstra making Bosh a stretch center that second season unlocked the Heat and propelled them toward a pair of titles. While the move added an extra shooter into the lineup, it didn’t really crack some code that made the team go bats—t crazy (gotta squeeze a bat reference in there). In fact, the trio actually posted their best net rating in that 1st season at 15.2, followed by 12.4, 13.1, and 7.3 that last year—when the Heat were just average defensively.
They’re a couple reasons for the misconceptions. One’s simply that LeBron s—t the bed in the 2011 playoffs, then in 2012 came out like a man possessed and finally got the monkey off his back. Another is that the supporting cast in 2010-11 really wasn’t that much worse than in the other years: Shane Battier was touted as a pivotal acquisition, but even in his prime he was never anything more than a decent role player. Mike Miller was a nice shooter, but so was Mike Bibby, and Miller didn’t play often due to his frequent ailments. The only non-big 3 guy who averaged double digits in any 1 of those 4 seasons was 37 year-old Ray Allen in 2012-13—he averaged 10.9 per game. LeBron will forever be in debt to Allen for the Game 6 shot that cemented James’ legacy, but it’s not like Ray was consistently lighting the world on fire. Ultimately, the big 3 would’ve been champions regardless of the other 2 guys Spo put around them, and regardless of what positions they played.
Finally, we have the loathed Steph Curry-Klay Thompson-Draymond Green (ft. KD) Warriors. In terms of villainy, they made those Heat, once perceived as ISIS, look like The Wiggles. Mildly more importantly, they were one of the first real harbingers that traditional centers might be going out of style. Even before KD slithered his way into town, they rolled out the now-renowned “Death Lineup,” with 6’6” Draymond moonlighting as the closest thing to a center and Harrison Barnes and Andre Iguodala serving as the hybrid small/power forwards. Over the Dubs 4-year run, the death lineups, first with Barnes and then with KD, averaged a wild 23.7 net rating in 803 minutes.
The death lineup, however, was never used for more than 224 minutes in a given season, which ranked just 40th in the league. This fits the conventional wisdom that a unit like that can only be used for so long before they wear down from getting mauled on the boards. With the Daryl Morey wet dream Rockets’ season having been cut short, those Dubs teams are the only true precedent we have of what basketball looks like sans-a traditional center, and the individual season samples aren’t enough to disprove the notion. But regardless, a lineup as effective as both Warriors five-man units should be used more and only curtailed once the results start to peter out (unit and peter in the same sentence lol, nice). Warriors coach Steve Kerr was loath to push Iguodala, Draymond, or Durant out of their comfort zones for long and relied frequently on JaVale McGee, Marreese Speights, and Festus Ezeli to try to spell his veterans—it probably cost him one title (see: Irving, Kyrie) and almost saved him another one (see: Durant, Kevin’s achilles tendon). Despite the constant baying of analytically minded Warriors fans and analysts, Kerr never strayed from this strategy during the Warriors’ golden years—whether he was right to do that is something Golden State fans will presumably debate for years to come.
This century’s goliaths show us that while back to the basket centers certainly aren’t endangered, they could end up on the protected list before long. The curtains have been slowly peeled back as to what life without them may look like. It’s not outlandish to posit that Spo’s use of Bosh, while not an overt improvement, was part of the influence that promulgated the stretch center boon. It’s a copycat league and teams see the 2 titles that came after the fact. But what do the numbers say about the success of bigs?
For starters, ESPN’s real plus minus shows that centers on the whole are contributing less. I’ll reference the “wins” version of the stat, which scales RPM to the actual volume of the player’s possessions. This waters down rotational guys who post great RPMs but don’t even play half the game. There’s been a steady trend of center *wins* on the decline.
2015-16: 20 centers in the top 80, 29 in the top 120, 37 in the top 160
2016-17: 15 centers in the top 80, 26 in the top 120, 32 in the top 160
2017-18: 15 centers in the top 80, 24 in the top 120, 32 in the top 160
2018-19: 16 centers in the top 80, 20 in the top 120, 32 in the top 160
2019-20: 8 centers in the top 80, 19 in the top 120, 27 in the top 160
To contextualize this a bit, it’s not so much that there aren’t still great centers—they’re just fewer of them. Nikola Jokic and Joel Embiid have stripped the mantle from Dwight Howard as the best centers of the decade. Rudy Gobert is likely the best defensive player, not just center, in the league. Karl Anthony-Towns has proven that a stretch center can be a star. But as the 3-point shot grows more prominent, players shrink, pace of play accelerates, and big lumbering bodies struggle to keep up, hence why more teams are looking for an edge with shooting at the 5-spot.
It’s clear that archetypal rim defenders like Gobert are now the minority. I did a little deep dive into the types of centers who’ve been effective. I looked at every lineup the last 4 years that played at least 100 minutes together and the type of center deployed. I stratified the centers into traditional, tweener, and stretch. Traditional centers took less than 5% of their shots from 3, tweeners between 5% and 25%, and stretches above 25%. In the sample, 46% of the minutes featured traditional centers, 32% tweeners, and 22% stretches. Here were the results: (“games” is just the total minutes played by those lineups divided by 48)
2016-17:
Traditional: 433 games, 4.8 net rating
Tweener: 143 games, 2.7 net rating
Stretch: 61 games, 4.7 net rating
2017-18:
Traditional: 332 games, 3.6 net rating
Tweener: 167 games, 7.9 net rating
Stretch: 115 games, 1.5 net rating
2018-19:
Traditional: 296 games, 4.2 net rating
Tweener: 171 games, 5.4 net rating
Stretch: 103 games, 4.1 net rating
2019-20:
Traditional: 189 games, 4.4 net rating
Tweener: 82 games, 3.4 net rating
Stretch: 124 games, 6.1 net rating
Total:
Traditional: 817 games, 4.3 net rating
Tweener: 564 games, 5.1 net rating
Stretch: 402 games, 4.1 net rating
A couple of notes: the net ratings are all positive because the aggregate net rating of lineups that play over 100 minutes is positive (it’s around 4.5). Coaches weed out the lineups that don’t work and stick with the ones that do. That’s not meant to be complimentary, it’s literally just saying they do their jobs lol. Another thing is I only went back to 2016-17 because that’s the 1st year where there was actually a prominent sample size of non-traditional centers. In 2015-16, out of the top 60 centers in minutes played (2 per team), only 12 qualified as non-traditional.
The immediate implication is that the tweener is most successful because it balances the components of what you want out of a big man. I’m inclined to agree, but I’d like to see a bigger sample—maybe this becomes more defined in a year or two. Teams getting more deep-ball happy explains the trending increase in games for the smaller lineups, but not the year-to-year net ratings, really.
But while the sample size leaves something to be desired, going team-by-team paints a clearer picture. Jokic, a “tweener,” and his Nuggets have the best record in the west over the last 2 seasons. Another one, Embiid, led his Sixers to the 3-seed back-to-back seasons, and their drop-off this year can be partially attributed to his injury woes. Al Horford’s Celtics were a 1, 2, and 4-seed before he left this year. Myles Turner’s Pacers have been in the playoffs every year. Having a guy who can bang down low, defend, but simultaneously be able to keep the defense honest from beyond the arc has been an empirically proven component of team success, at least in the regular season.
While the tweeners are mostly in the East, a lotta the traditional guys are out west. Steve Adams’ Thunder and Rudy Gobert’s Jazz have been good but not great. Clint Capela’s Rockets were outstanding before he got traded, but he didn’t start playing big minutes until 2018-19 due to team-held health concerns. Golden State deploys traditional centers, but their volume gets offset by their experimental lineups. With the sample of minutes for traditional guys nearly doubling either of the other two, I think it’s fair to say that these types of guys are no longer the most effective.
The stretch lineups, meanwhile, have had some rave performances in spurts. We’ve gotten a couple years of Kevin Love’s Cavs, a couple years of Marc Gasol’s Raptors, a couple Brook Lopez’s Bucks (yes, his Bucks). But we’ve also gotten a steady dose of up and down results from guys like Karl Anthony-Towns and Nikola Vucevic. My take is that the stretch center can function as a complementary piece for the LeBron’s/Kawhi’s/Giannis’s of the world. But when you force a defensively challenged 5 to put the team on his back, you run into trouble. Though Jokic and Embiid still have to break through in the playoffs, they’ve shown they can be capable alphas.
To be clear, I don’t think any of the 3 categories will ever be totally obsolete. Teams facing a guard like Russell Westbrook who drives to the basket will want to lock down the paint with a traditional big. Stretch centers, or no center at all, will be used to counter bigger teams who struggle to chase them outside. The rock-paper-scissors aspect of matchups will prevent any one style of player from going away entirely. But expect the tweeners, more favorably defined as big guys who can do it all, to permeate the game moving forward.
[Addendum from Goldman: If I had to predict what direction the NBA will choose to go in, I’d be intrigued by this year’s iteration of the Celtics. Boston went with either Daniel Theis, Robert Williams III, Enes Kanter, or played Semi Ojeleye and Grant Williams together as sort of a stretch 4 and 5 tandem against teams like Milwaukee that created severe matchup problems. From the moment the offseason ended, every NBA expert on the planet singled out the Celtics as needing center help—understandably so. Theis was coming off a disappointing season as the Celtics’ third-string five, Kanter was expected to start, and Williams was entering his second season. Somehow, Theis turned into the best version of a good at everything, great at nothing center, Kanter was effective but wasn’t able to close games due to his defensive foibles, and Williams at times shone as Boston’s best big man before injuries halted his season—he was only getting back to full health as the NBA season closed down. Anecdotally, the Celtics basically did everything they could to turn the center position into a completely unimportant aspect of their team: Theis, Kanter, and Williams were, whenever Brad Wanamaker and Carsen Edwards were off the floor, the worst players in their five-man units and Theis ceased to play the occasional four/five hybrid role he played when he first arrived on American shores. By limiting the importance of the center, the Celtics built an extremely effective defense and were able to play a five-out spacing offense or a heavy pick-and-roll/dribble-hand-off offense that survived on spacing and eventually on Jayson Tatum turning into Bill Simmons’ dream wing.
The point of this is that part of the reason the NBA is moving away from traditional centers is...there are a lot of bad ones. By playing Hasheem Thabeet-level minuses, your entire offensive and defensive systems can be hijacked. Undersized, low-ceiling centers are available for pennies on the dollar, and the number of high-paid centers dwindles every year. I think that the decreased importance of the center as the prospect pool of effective 6’10” monsters has dwindled has forced the league to face the fact that the days of Shaquille O’Neal and Hakeem Olajuwon have passed. If there are more former power forwards who can function as centers available at cheap prices, teams will take less chances on putting the Eric Dampier’s of the world on the floor just to jack up their defensive rebounding percentage, when some of the best rebounders in the league are now guard/forward tandems who team up (think Westbrook/Adams at their peak a few years ago) to form effective rebounding duos and pick-and-roll monsters. Centers aren’t a premium commodity anymore, so they’re relearning their position and adding different skills as teams concentrate more on athleticism and high-skill players—you can coach a traditional center out of a game, you can’t coach Daniel Theis out of a game because he matters so little while be so effective you can’t allocate extra resources to wipe out the center. The teams who’ve realized this the most quickly—Boston, Houston, Golden State, and Toronto—have been some of the most effective teams of the last decade. Take all that together and the dwindling traditional center corps makes a lot more sense.]
Tom Shea, known to his friends as Thomas!, is, admittedly, a bit of a charlatan. He is brilliantly able to conceal his spoiled Steelers and Penguins fandom under the guise that his Pirates anguish makes him relatable to the masses. You can find him on Twitter @TomShea5ft11. No description can prepare you for that experience.
NHL Offseason Preview Series: Goddammit Let’s Do The Vancouver Canucks
By Jack Goldman
This is the latest edition of our previews of the NHL offseason. To see them all, click here
I mean full disclosure I still hate these guys from the 2011 Stanley Cup final, but I don’t dislike them as much as I do the Blackhawks, whose preview I think almost killed me it was so complicated. Luckily, the Canucks are in a far different stage than the Hawks are and weren’t nearly as complicated to lay out a plan for.
Given Elliotte Friedman’s recent report I’m still assuming a $81.5 million cap. For the sake of this argument, we’ll pretend that compliance buyouts won’t be a part of the offseason equation—for now. Thanks to Evolving Hockey for their contract projections, they’re worth the patronage!
Canucks
Current total allocation: $63.49M ($4.23M/player)
Total spots to fill: 8 ($18M remaining)
—
Most certain: Defense
Current allocation: $14.9M ($3.73M/defenseman)
Spots to fill: 3
I thought it was going to be significantly difficult to even bring back what Vancouver has on the back end, which is average to below average, but it actually turned out to be easier than I imagined. If Vancouver just brings back Chris Tanev at his Evolving Hockey projection ($3,386,000) and re-sign restricted free agent Troy Stetcher at his ($2,020,000), I think those guys are good enough to keep the Canucks in playoff contention or better when healthy.
Vancouver could definitely use an upgrade for its back end, but given the salary obligations it has and the fact that the Canucks are at the very beginning of their window of contention, I wouldn’t rush it at this point. Ryan Spooner’s bought out contract and Tanner Pearson’s contract will come off the books in a year and give Vancouver the room to either make a trade or bring in a mid-tier free agent worth around a million or two more than Tanev to solidify its back end going into 2022. I think that’s the more prudent solution—there’s a chance even more money will come off the books at that point if the Canucks don’t buy out Sven Baerstchi and Brandon Sutter like I’m about to propose they do in the next section (their contracts expire after next season, but there’s a reason I think they’ll be paid to move on that we’ll get into).
I think that Vancouver will stay internal for its healthy scratch defenseman as well: I can’t imagine they won’t give Olli Juolevi a look with the big club—he’ll be 22 and he was a fifth overall pick. Even if he’s not going to live up to his draft billing, he needs to be given a shot before he goes into restricted free agency in the summer of 2021 for the Canucks to make a decision on his future with the team.
If the free agent class of defensemen was better, I’d recommend the Canucks go out and get him, but I don’t think they can manage to fit either Alex Pietrangelo or Torey Krug’s contract on their books—I think they could have a chance at Pietrangelo if they really courted him, while Krug I can’t imagine in Vancouver, he’ll end up in Detroit or return to Boston. Anyone else isn’t really worth so much more than Tanev and Stetcher that they have to make a change.
Vancouver has waited a long time for a contending team, and they’re close, but they need another year to undo the garbage job Jim Benning did before Elias Petterson and Brock Boesser joined the fold before they can really go all in on a cup run.
Medium certainty: Forward
Current allocation: $41.17M ($4.11M/forward)
Spots to fill: 4
The story on the forward line will be extremely similar to how Vancouver treated its defensive corps: I think they bring most of their forwards back from unrestricted and restricted free agency with a lone exception.
To pull these moves off, though, the Canucks will need to carve out slightly more space than they initially had, which leads to the buyouts of Sutter and Baerstchi (credit to Tom Shea for pointing out this was a likely outcome for those two forwards), who are both terrible and overpaid. Vancouver cut bait with Ryan Spooner as soon as they could, and now that they have the chance to do so with two more terrible forwards at a relatively low cost, I don’t see why they wouldn’t do so again in order to carve out slightly more space to pull off the moves that remain.
The most expensive forward the Canucks need to retain is Jake Virtanen, who Evolving Hockey has returning at 2 years, $3 million. I think they bring back former NCAA star Adam Gaudette as well, who Evolving has at 2 years, $1.4 million. At the bottom of the depth chart, Vancouver will choose Tyler Motte and Nikolay Goldobin as minimum contract, third/fourth line depth who can get the dirty work done while remaining a small cap charge. Both of them are projected to come back for just a single year by Evolving Hockey.
There is one spot remaining on the depth chart at this point, and I can’t resist the opportunity to really embrace the role of Jim Benning and instead of bringing back an affordable and effective forward I already have in house in Josh Leivo at a little over $2 million a year, I bet he grabs a slightly cheaper, slightly older, definitely more ineffective, but definitely tougher forward in Kyle Clifford in for 2 years, $1.79 million. It’s the epitome of a Bim Jenning signing—I wouldn’t be surprised if he both overpays for Clifford, gives him extra term, and tosses him a no trade clause for no reason. He’ll be bought out within two years if old Jim loses his mind and does that—if Benning is an Evolving Hockey patron and gives Clifford what he’s worth, I think the move might turn out just fine. Clifford does enough old school hockey stuff while occasionally being a solid hockey player instead of just an above average one that he’ll provide decent value as a depth forward in Vancouver.
The other notable departure from Vancouver’s forward corps will be trade deadline pickup Tyler Toffoli, who I’m sure they’d love to bring back, but they don’t even have close to the financial means to pull off getting Toffolli what he’s worth without massively gutting their prospect pool, their draft pick pool, or their existing forward depth. He just isn’t worth the internal price, which is too bad since he performed so well for the Canucks in his brief time there. When hockey returns, Vancouver fans should enjoy having him while they’ve still got him.
Least certain: Goaltender
Current allocation: $1,050,000 (Demko)
Spots to fill: 1
Here’s where the true drama of the Canucks offseason lies, and the real reason why I think Vancouver doesn’t hesitate to buy out Baertschi and Sutter. Jacob Markstrom was excellent as Vancouver backstop last season and all indications point to both him and Vancouver management wanting to re-up for a few more years of partnership. The Athletic reported that Markstrom’s representatives will come to the table looking for $6 million over at least 6 years, but they won’t get that because The Athletic reported Vancouver wants to give Markstrom the same contract Mikko Koskinen got ($4.5 million for 3 years). Markstrom is worth more than that—I don’t think he has the leverage to get more than 5 years though. Robin Lehner being on the market will suppress what Markstrom could get, because I’m sure Lehner wouldn’t hesitate if Vancouver offered him something in the $7+ million for multiple years range, he might even do it for less, which gives Markstrom limited negotiating power.
I think the most likely outcome is a contract between $5 million and $5.75 million. If it’s $5 million, Canucks fans better settle in for 6 years of Markstrom as their goaltender, and he’s already 30 years-old, making that a very bad idea. In order to get him to come down on that request, I bet Vancouver buys out Baertschi and Sutter, brings Markstrom back at $5.75 million, and get him to commit to a 4 year deal with a modified no-move clause. That will leave the Canucks with enough room to sign Clifford or Leivo rather than another minimum wage forward while locking into a bona-fide number one goaltender for what has become the new definition of “the significant future.” Markstrom gets his big pay day, and the Canucks are locked in with a real core for the next few years.
The theoretical bad news is that backup goalie Thatcher Demko (randomly someone I once had a class with) doesn’t get a shot at the the number one job, but he’s still young and his performance this year when Markstrom was out of the lineup didn’t leave experts believing he’s ready to have the saddle to himself quite yet. The Canucks should definitely play a more even split between Markstrom and Demko than they did last year because it’s 2020 and that’s the obvious way to handle goalies now—that should satisfy Demko’s justifiable need for increased playing time in order to establish a rhythm in order to prove to the entire league he deserves a starting job.
CapFriendly Prediction: $802,000 in space … https://www.capfriendly.com/armchair-gm/team/1705706
Big picture:
The Canucks are a team on the precipice of particular relevance, but I think that when it’s been nearly a decade since you had one of the best teams on the planet, waiting another couple of years to work to undo the mistakes management has made the past few years via a conservative free agency is a safe a prudent way to handle the 2020 offseason. Markstrom, Pettersson, Boeser, Horvat, and Miller are a formidable set of forwards, never mind the upside Virtanen and Gaudette bring to the table. The back end will need a new number one defenseman, but perhaps Quinn Hughes takes another leap and becomes that guy on his own, giving Vancouver a whole new world of team-building possibilities in the years to come. That’s why it’s important to lock in with Markstrom and then refrain from making any other big money signings off a free agency class that is far from star-studded. Best not to repeat the mistakes of offseasons past when you don’t have to.
Then again, maybe Benning just loses his mind and does some insane stuff. It’s all on the table, honestly. Vancouver is weird.
Jack Goldman is the publisher of this here newsletter and an independent reporter who in his spare time goes to Boston College. You shouldn’t follow him on Twitter @the_manofgold and you definitely shouldn’t hit that button down there and subscribe to A View Off a Ledge.