The 2014–’15 Anti-League Pass Rankings
This year’s NBA is rife with exciting, intriguing teams sure to set your TVs and tablets ablaze. These are not those teams.
Fed up with the endless throngs of NBA eggheads telling you which teams should be on your #LeaguePassAlert list? Wishing someone out there would have the gorillaballs to tell you what not to watch for a change?
Well, you are in luck. And by “in luck,” I mean “in for some cripplingly depressing shit.” For today, we unveil the Anti-League Pass Rankings — the 10 teams you, the sheltered NBA obsessive, should avoid like any Satan-spawned plague. Like ebola, or spending time with your kids. (Which you probably don’t do, anyway, because you just bought League Pass.)
Why? Because you, like me, see League Pass through a light not unlike that in which Bill Burroughs once described his favorite glassy-eyed pastime: “If God made anything better, he kept it for himself.”
Except for these teams. Don’t, under any circumstances, ever watch these teams. Ever.
10. Houston Rockets
What You’re Watching: Patrick Beverley slapping people in the face; James Harden falling like he’s rollerskating on a moonwalk; James Harden falling like he’s just been taken out by a flaming log rolling down hill; James Harden falling like Shane MacGowan at a three-story whiskey museum; Dwight Howard adjusting his armband; Daryl Morey trying to outsmart Daryl Morey, and somehow pulling it off.
What You’d Rather Be Watching: A 1974 PBS documentary on the life cycle of a garden slug; a cat shitting in a litter box; all seven seasons of Gilmore Girls without eating anything; the entire overtime shift of a toll booth operator on the Ohio Turnpike; Shane MacGowan shitting in a litter box.
9. New York Knicks
What You’re Watching: Remember when you paid $500 to take a weekend-long yoga workshop with that renowned Ashtanga guru, and you prayed the one guy who always took “releasing the breath” to mean “rip as many Tofurkey farts as I want” would just not show up, but then he totally did? It’s just like that. We’ll let you decide who’s Phil Jackson and who’s Carmelo Anthony.
What You’d Rather Be Watching: The Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade; summer solstice at the Cedar Waters Village nudist camp in Nottingham, New Hampshire; Dan Snyder reading Sitting Bull’s Powder River speech; mercury freezing in a bowl; a hearing of the Congressional Subcommittee on the Coast Guard and Maritime Transportation.
8. L.A. Lakers
What You’re Watching: A Kobe Bryant so impossibly pissed off that his Staples Center statue winds up being some kind of flaming-skulled basketball gargoyle, because that’s all people remember; Nick Young dodging Godzilla lasers perpetually blasting from Kobe Bryant’s eye sockets; advertisements from a high-powered projector displaying on Carlos Boozer’s head.
What You’d Rather Be Watching: Your third-grader’s Christmas play; a broken ceiling fan; people throwing pennies into a mall fountain; an endless 48-hour loop of that GEICO commercial with the Hell’s Angel made of money shedding $100 bills while One Headlight plays in the background; Bill O’Reilly cleaning the bathrooms at a Compton Burger King.
7. Boston Celtics
What You’re Watching: A team trying to figure out whether its future is best served by a point guard that can’t shoot, or an older point guard that can’t shoot and bolsters his confidence by destroying small children in Connect Four; Gerald Wallace running headlong one more time into the stanchion and exploding in a cloud of bonesmoke; the 13th birthday of noted juvenile gigantism patient Kelly Olynyk.
What You’d Rather Be Watching: All 28 Pokemon movies on four bottles of Nyquil; a construction cone assembly line; Downton Abbey; a Buckcherry tribute band in a Wal-Mart parking lot during a Memorial Day sale; a union meeting in a Chinese factory that makes CD jewel cases.
6. San Antonio Spurs
What You’re Watching: Some highfalutin liberal elitist performance art featuring a surly wino and his band of merry stubble-bearded basketball Baryshnikovs prancing around stage imbued by “an all-inclusive spirit of sharing and togetherness”; your own masculinity ascending upwards and shriveling inside you, leaving only a single, terrified hair where your balls used to be.
What You’d Rather Be Watching: Michelle Malkin signing books at a Barnes & Noble in Stillwater, Oklahoma; a fork-lift drag race; four straight hours of TED Talks on why compassion is really, really great; a driver’s education video narrated by Gilbert Gottfried; a possum eating a muskrat carcass.
5. Orlando Magic
What You’re Watching: Possessions with a thousand passes that somehow always end with a 19-foot baseline turnaround from Moe Harkless; Elfrid Payton and Aaron Gordon setting a new NBA gold standard with 335 shots that end with the ball stuck between the rim and the backboard; Channing Frye continuing his stunning streak of 11 consecutive seasons without taking a single dribble.
What You’d Rather Be Watching: Worms trying to cross a rain puddle; 50 First Dates dubbed over in Russian; a CVS employee restocking Maxi pads; ice hockey; a town hall meeting where the only order of business is one 94-year-old man’s three-hour diatribe about how the crackheads never pick up their used rubbers.
4. Indiana Pacers
What You’re Watching: What happens when a team’s only reliable offensive option is suddenly taken out of the equation, namely: 4,000 minutes of Paleolithic cave-dwellers trying to hunt saber tooth tigers with tree branches; Roy Hibbert completing his graceful basketball metamorphosis from promising NBA center into a refrigerator on stilts; the bags beneath Frank Vogel’s eyes becoming so dense and dark they swallow the known universe.
What You’d Rather Be Watching: Boy Scouts tying knots; a festival attendant refilling the hand sanitizers in every outhouse at Bonnaroo; a troop of spider monkeys squeezing their own nuts with potato ricers; the Azerbaijanian Parliament debating a bill to ban American-made glue; a Chris Christie sex tape.
3. Utah Jazz
What You’re Watching: Sell-out oceans of the whitest people you’ve ever seen chanting “GOR-DIE!” whenever Gordon Hayward touches the ball; Derrick Favors and Enes Kanter collecting so many three-second calls the paint actually becomes a sinkhole to the center of the earth; Quin Snyder’s statuesque face and gorgeous locks aging and shriveling like Walter Donovan drinking from the wrong goblet in The Last Crusade.
What You’d Rather Be Watching: Security footage of a 7–11 manager sleeping in a beer cooler; An Easter egg hunt at a polygamist compound; Honey Boo Boo’s mom bouncing on an exercise ball; chickens being mechanically separated; a Korean knockoff of Field of Dreams that somehow ends up being a snuff film; static on an analog television through a storefront window that’s covered in ice and birdshit.
2. Philadelphia 76ers
What You’re Watching: Enough steam spewing out of Brett Brown’s ears to power a Mississippi River casino boat; at least seven or eight players you could swear you saw lose to that team of English professors in your YMCA league just last week; Michael Carter-Williams living the basketball version of Shawshank Redemption; Jason Richardson single-handedly disproving the idea that matter cannot be created out of nothing.
What You’d Rather Be Watching: An Ebola Benefit concert featuring a lineup of U2 and Billy Crystal; wastewater flowing out the back of a leather tannery; a snake being microwaved alive; The Alabama Spelling Bee; Hulk Hogan knitting mittens; a 15-minute YouTube video of Julia Child saying “butter”.
1. Philadelphia 76ers (No, really, this team will make you want to stress-eat a trash bag full of barbershop clippings)
What You’re Watching: A team whose front office has determined its blueprint for success is to be as bad as possible for as long as possible, shedding salary and “collecting assets” until Kevin Durant or Anthony Davis decide they’ve accomplished just about all they set out to accomplish, so now it’s time to go win a banner for… “Yo, Jay-Z, it’s KD. I thought you said I was signing in New York?… Philly is a suburb of New York?… If you say so. Where do I sign?”; a team so terrible fans don’t even show up for Free Children Night (Like, not only does your kid get in for free; they actually give you a free child if you’re one of the first 5,000 through the gate. The most adorable little children ever—no glasses or braces or anything. And nobody shows up.); Ronald Roberts, Jr.—currently 19th on Philadelphia’s small-forward depth chart—breaking the NBA single-season record for minutes played; Sam Hinkie winning a MacArthur Genius Grant.
What You’d Rather Be Watching: The Milwaukee Bucks.
