It’s been a minute.
Loot Sports has taken a brief hiatus after the Nuggets, a team this blog has obsessed over, won their first ever championship.
So where’s the coverage? Where’s the blog shouting from the rooftops that I was right all along? Why has Loot Sports gone dark?
Well, put simply, I was enjoying the moment. Similar to Nikola Jokic, I was taking it all in, appreciating the journey.
The first blog post on LootSports.com was on 6/3/21, titled, “It’s About Time The MVP Gets Some Goddamn Respect“. Out of the 100 blog posts on LootSports.com, 26 have been about Nikola Jokic and/or the Denver Nuggets. For over two years, I’ve been obsessed. Obsessed with the two time MVP and the team that he was carrying on his back. Obsessed with proving the naysayers wrong. I was obsessed with the journey.
The Joker is a simple man. A man who doesn’t pay attention to the narratives in the national media. My journey was quite different. It was of someone who was VERY active on the internet. I saw everything that was being said about Nikola Jokic and the Nuggets, and in all honesty, I spent too much time giving take artists the time of day. So when the Nuggets finally won the championship, why wasn’t I quick to rub it in the doubters faces? I think it’s because I realized everything the Nick Wright’s of the world said no longer mattered. They were officially wrong, and I was officially right.
So when the Nuggets won, it’s weird to say, but it wasn’t everything to me. Just like it wasn’t everything to Nikola Jokic. It was the culmination of the remarkable journey this team took to get there.
-The 2 MVP’s
-The Jamal Murray and MPJ injuries
-Aaron Gordon building elite chemistry with Jokic during the aforementioned setback
-Drafting Christian Braun and Peyton Watson
-Trading for KCP and Bruce Brown
And everything before, after, and in-between.
You can talk about potential all you want, but until you actually do the damn thing, no amount of fact driven testimonials is going to convince “the others” who don’t believe.
So to everyone else, the advanced stats saying Jokic was having some of the best years of any player in the history of basketball didn’t matter. It didn’t matter that Jokic is at the very top of the list for single season PER seasons of all time. A top 10 list that includes three Wilt Chamberlain seasons, 2 Michael Jordan seasons, two Lebron James seasons, and two Giannis seasons. The Joker was the “VORP King” or whatever label the non-believers threw at him. He was a “stat chaser” because his individual stats weren’t leading to team success.
But that’s the thing.
Now, none of that matters. Jokic led his team to a championship having one of the most dominating individual playoff runs in the history of the sport. No one can say shit, and if they do, they look delusional. Not only to Nuggets fans, but now to everyone who has half a braincell and tuned into the NBA playoffs. It’s not even a question anymore. What we saw in the playoffs validated everything we had seen up to that point.
But more importantly?
It exposed the frauds.
The ones with the worst takes, not coincidentally, were the ones paying the least attention.
And that sucks for them.
Because while the believers got to live the ultimate dream, seeing their team win their first championship in franchise history, led by an all-time great player, the doubters looked like big, fat, fuckin idiots.
And I’m extremely grateful for that.
Go Nuggs.
-MustacheMan
