Lobster Bowl Week

Welcome to Lobster Bowl Week, the week every summer where newly-graduated seniors pull on the pads one last time for a great cause. I'll be there again this year to cover the game in some capacity (haven't exactly figured that out yet), but in the meantime I had the man in charge, Joe Hersom, on the podcast to talk about the game, the awesome amount of fundraising they do for a fantastic cause, and a whole lot more.

Plus we get into Shriners, whether or not they rig Oscar night, and if I could drive one of the small cars. No on both, sadly. That's the sort of hard-hitting journalism you get on the Maine Basketball Rankings Podcast.

But if you can get to Lewiston on Saturday for the game, I highly recommend it. Or you can watch the game on Maine Public.

We're all working through the Stages of Grief when it comes to the Jaylen Brown trade.

Now, I'm not sure where "listening to a bunch of podcasts" slots into the stages, but I've been doing a lot of that (as I'm guessing you might have as well) and answering questions at Hannaford (again, not sure which stage that is).

There's two elements to this trade. There's the Jaylen Brown of it all, where an intelligent, outspoken young man of his skin color is always going to be discounted by a certain subset of people and reviled by a another subset (and don't even get me started on where that Venn diagram converges).

There are also people who don't like the Twitch stream. And some of those people could very well be in the Celtics front office. It's not hard to imagine that having your second best player going on Twitch all the time is just a headache that isn't worth having. I don't know how you then trade that for a guy who has his own podcast, but therein lies the great mystery of this trade.

Speaking of the Twitch stream.

He's not wrong here.

One of the many, many issues with the current media ecosystem is there's a group of pundits who are paid a lot of money to speculate. That is literally their job--to make things up and get people talking. Sometimes they have sources. But a lot of times they're guessing. They don't hide this. They'll make up fake trades or talk about what they think people should do. By itself that would be fine. Fake trades are fun. But then there's another ecosystem of people who don't create things--not even fake trades--they just take what other people have done and aggregate it either on their website or on Instagram or wherever. They throw a filter and their logo on someone's else's work and hope it takes off on social media and that's how they make their money. They're parasites, plain and simple. When you combine those two things, it quickly becomes "reporting" that such and such team is shopping this player or that. And it's nonsense.

Look no further than the Jaylen Brown trade. Everyone said they had sources! But did a single one of them mention the Sixers? Nope. Zero. None.

Don't you think that if these "experts" had the sources and access they claim to have at least one of them would have heard about a Jaylen to Philly trade before it happened? And yet, nada.

There's also the salary cap element to this.

It's becoming clear that you can't be a contender if you've got 2 supermax guys on your roster. We all kind of knew this could be an issue, but one thing that made it worse was because of the decline of regional sports networks (among other things), the cap isn't meeting expectations.

So a deal like Jaylen's becomes less financially viable if you want to contend for a title and your role players like Pritchard and Hugo become more valuable.

Again, I'm not convinced trading for a guy who makes the same money helps that much.

The unexpected NBA Development That Might Have Cost the Boston Celtics Jaylen Brown

Brad Stevens summed up his rationale for trading Jaylen Brown pretty simply. “The path looked a little bit more challenging with 70% of our cap and such a high

Inside The CelticsJohn Karalis

There's a plan to do a podcast on the Jaylen trade where we get into this more, so make sure you subscribe!

In big news, NYA is largely leaving the MPA for NEPSAC.

Would your business like to reach the kind of dedicated and knowledgable (and good-looking) Mainers who read this newsletter and religiously refresh the Tourney Odds 6 times a day? Of course you do!

I'm opening up limited advertising slots. Think "Power Rankings presented by [YOUR BUSINESS]"

By advertising here, you reach customers who know ball and I can spend more time covering ball. It's a win-win. For example, as I write this, I'm testing a live scoring app for soccer.

I would like to co-sign this.

The summer stuff starts literally before the spring sports are even done--hands off period be damned--and really what's the point of trying to schedule stuff around the 4th of July anyway? Block out a couple of weeks in July and let everyone chill at the beach.

And, really, it's only mostly about the kids. The kids will find a way to enjoy their summer. It's the parents who are coaching and/or driving kids to things all while holding down full-time jobs. Give us old folks a break!

One of the fun things about the World Cup is you get to learn a lot about people.

I'm not sure I would tell people that after three weeks (and several years of watching your kid) I can't figure out something as simple as offsides, especially if I was an "Economic Analyst", but that's me. Would you hire an economic analyst who can't figure out offsides?

It's not a complicated rule.

After Dusty May left to take the Mavs' job, it was fair to wonder if J.P. Estrella would decide to stay at Michigan. Well, he's staying with the defending champs.

In this week's edition of "Why Can't We Have Nice Things?"

Netflix Among Parties in Early Talks to Buy Letterboxd: Report

Letterboxd has reportedly held exploratory sales talks with Netflix, Paramount, Sony Pictures and other parties.

VarietyTodd Spangler

Would it be terrible if there was just one thing that didn't have to be optimized to death for a profit margin? It can't just be cool? Because Letterboxd is so very cool. And it's clearly doing well if they're talking about selling their stake for 5x what they put in!

Anyway, don't ruin it, you blood-sucking ghouls.