Pain Is Love

While the top franchises in the League continue to look for competitive edges and innovative ways to improve their teams, the New Orleans Pelicans make inexplicable move after inexplicable move. But we’ll be damned if they aren’t kinda fun to root for.

- Ben Collins

THE GOLDEN STATE Warriors’ offense was designed on a charcuterie board at an airport bar, then weaponized and financed by a dude who helped create AutoTrader.com. That sounds like a very lazy last page of Mad Libs: Silicon Valley Edition, but it is real. It was all documented in an ESPN story in September, and when you write it down like that, it’s hard to root for it.

There is no more soothing balm for this sort of Monopoly Man behavior than rooting for a muddy, industrial-sized boot and/or chainsaw to step on then defile that charcuterie board.

And that boot/chainsaw, this year, is the New Orleans Pelicans, the most entertaining headache on the face of the Earth.

“It is either excruciating or incredibly fun,” Mason Ginsberg tells me. “A little in between.”

Ginsberg writes for Bourbon Street Shots, where he watched a Pelicans team that often featured Tim Frazier as its second-best player last year. He has earned something more than a headache, but sometimes you do not get what you earn.