If Clarence Thomas Wants to Take Nine-Day All-Expenses-Paid Luxury Yacht Cruises Around Indonesia, He Should Do So as a Retired Supreme Court Justice
PLUS: An NBA playoffs preview
This past week, I learned a real estate magnate and Republican megadonor named Harlan Crow collects statues of the twentieth century’s greatest dictators (i.e., Lenin, Stalin, Ceausescu, etc.) and displays them in a “garden of evil” outside his Dallas, Texas, home. He also has a signed copy of Mein Kampf, two paintings by Hitler himself, and other Nazi memorabilia. I guess he also has paintings by George W. Bush and Norman Rockwell, documents signed by George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, and statues of his heroes Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher. I am advised that while Crow’s collection of totalitarian artifacts is rather strange (the “garden of evil” is apparently not a place for veneration) Crow himself—described by Graeme Wood of The Atlantic as a “Romney Republican”—harbors no Nazi sympathies or autocratic impulses. He’s just a freedom-loving history buff who uses his spare millions to collect expensive historical artifacts.
I came to know this tidbit about Crow because the world recently learned there’s another thing he likes to collect: Living, breathing Supreme Court justices. ProPublica has the scoop:
For more than two decades, [Supreme Court Justice Clarence] Thomas has accepted luxury trips virtually every year from [Harlan Crow] without disclosing them, documents and interviews show. A public servant who has a salary of $285,000, [Thomas] has vacationed on Crow’s superyacht around the globe. He flies on Crow’s Bombardier Global 5000 jet. He has gone with Crow to the Bohemian Grove, the exclusive California all-male retreat, and to Crow’s sprawling ranch in East Texas. And Thomas typically spends about a week every summer at Crow’s private resort in the Adirondacks.
The extent and frequency of Crow’s apparent gifts to Thomas have no known precedent in the modern history of the U.S. Supreme Court.
These trips appeared nowhere on Thomas’ financial disclosures. His failure to report the flights appears to violate a law passed after Watergate that requires justices, judges, members of Congress and federal officials to disclose most gifts, two ethics law experts said. He also should have disclosed his trips on the yacht, these experts said.
As ProPublica reports, one of those yacht trips in 2019 took Thomas and his wife Ginni on a nine-day cruise around the island nation of Indonesia, which they travelled to aboard Crow’s private jet. Had Thomas paid for the yacht and the jet out of his own pocket, the trip would have cost Thomas in excess of $500,000. A trip on the same yacht with Crow ten years ago took the Thomases to New Zealand.
But there’s more. This week, ProPublica reported
In 2014, one of Texas billionaire Harlan Crow’s companies purchased a string of properties on a quiet residential street in Savannah, Georgia. It wasn’t a marquee acquisition for the real estate magnate, just an old single-story home and two vacant lots down the road. What made it noteworthy were the people on the other side of the deal: Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and his relatives.
The transaction marks the first known instance of money flowing from the Republican megadonor to the Supreme Court justice. The Crow company bought the properties for $133,363 from three co-owners — Thomas, his mother and the family of Thomas’ late brother, according to a state tax document and a deed dated Oct. 15, 2014, filed at the Chatham County courthouse.
The purchase put Crow in an unusual position: He now owned the house where the justice’s elderly mother was living. Soon after the sale was completed, contractors began work on tens of thousands of dollars of improvements on the two-bedroom, one-bathroom home, which looks out onto a patch of orange trees. The renovations included a carport, a repaired roof and a new fence and gates, according to city permit records and blueprints.
A federal disclosure law passed after Watergate requires justices and other officials to disclose the details of most real estate sales over $1,000. Thomas never disclosed his sale of the Savannah properties. That appears to be a violation of the law, four ethics law experts told ProPublica….
In a statement, Crow said he purchased Thomas’ mother’s house, where Thomas spent part of his childhood, to preserve it for posterity. “My intention is to one day create a public museum at the Thomas home dedicated to telling the story of our nation’s second black Supreme Court Justice,” he said. “I approached the Thomas family about my desire to maintain this historic site so future generations could learn about the inspiring life of one of our greatest Americans.”
It is unknown if Crow is charging Thomas’s mother, who still lives at the house, rent.
Lately, when Clarence Thomas’s name has been brought up in relation to allegations of some sort of ethical impropriety, it has usually involved his wife. Virginia “Ginni” Thomas is known around Washington DC for her advocacy on behalf of conservative causes. For example, while Donald Trump was attempting to overturn the 2020 election, Ginni was working the phones to convince Republican legislators in Arizona and Wisconsin to throw out their states’ popular vote results and just pick a slate of electoral college electors who would side with Trump. A phone call at the time to White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows landed her in front of the 1/6 Committee. The idea that the 2020 election was rigged is crazy, of course, but then again, Ginni Thomas thinks a lot of crazy thoughts.
(In all fairness, the Thomases say they don’t discuss politics at home, and maybe they don’t allow politics to bleed over into their social lives. It is weird, though, how they only seem to socialize with conservative bigwigs. It’s not that I would necessarily expect liberals or conservatives these days to make overt efforts to hang-out with one another during their downtime. It’s just that the Thomases’ social life—ranging from whom they vacation with to whom they give awards to—appears to be one big conservative networking event. Am I to believe they watch FOX News together at night in silence?)
But while it’s not necessarily problematic that the spouse of a Supreme Court justice works in politics, Ginni Thomas’s work is somewhat shady and even shadier now that we know about all the gifts they’ve been receiving from Harlan Crow. Since 2010, Ginni has founded or led at least three conservative advocacy/consulting groups, which, you may say, isn’t that big of a deal since the funds those groups raise would presumably be spent on legitimate political work. But as the Washington Post recently reported
A little-known conservative activist group led by Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, collected nearly $600,000 in anonymous donations to wage a cultural battle against the left over three years, a Washington Post investigation found.
The previously unreported donations to the fledgling group Crowdsourcers for Culture and Liberty were channeled through a right-wing think tank in Washington that agreed to serve as a funding conduit from 2019 until the start of last year, according to documents and interviews. The arrangement, known as a “fiscal sponsorship,” effectively shielded from public view details about Crowdsourcers’ activities and spending, information it would have had to disclose publicly if it operated as a separate nonprofit organization, experts said.
The Post’s investigation sheds new light on the role money from donors who are not publicly identified has played in supporting Ginni Thomas’s political advocacy, long a source of controversy. The funding is the first example of anonymous donors backing her activism since she founded a conservative charity more than a decade ago. She stepped away from that charity amid concerns that it created potential conflicts for her husband on hot-button issues before the court….
The documents do not say how or whether the money was spent. It is not clear how much compensation, if any, Ginni Thomas received.
In other words, a group led by the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas is receiving hundreds of dollars in anonymous donations and spending it in ways—perhaps even to compensate Thomas’s wife—that no one is aware of. This is all legally permissible because of a 5-4 Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United v. FEC (2010) that Clarence Thomas was in the majority on that has flooded the political system with this sort of unaccountable “dark money.”
What’s even more remarkable is that this money has flowed into an organization run by Ginni Thomas. Why? I’ll let Jonathan Last of The Bulwark explain:
Here is a secret no one in Washington is willing to say out loud: Ginni Thomas is an idiot….
Literally everyone in conservative Washington knows this about her. I’m sure her Washington friends will publicly testify to her being smart and effective. But in private, it’s a different story. I wish I had a nickel for every time I’ve heard people in the various precincts of Conservatism Inc. laugh about the self-important preening, unserious dabbling, and incompetent hackery of Ginni Thomas over the years—in the wistful way a butler might indulge a wealthy child.
None of this means that everyone kissed up to Ginni with the explicit hope of getting access to her husband (although it’s hard to imagine that sort of thing never happened in Justice Thomas’s three decades on the bench). But hiring her for “consulting” or participating in a project with her was a way to signal that you were on the right team.
And of course, that’s one of the things that people in Conservatism Inc. never talk about in the open.
Last describes Ginni Thomas as basically nothing more than “a Boomer with an internet connection, an important spouse, and too much time on her hands.” In other words, you would only give her hundreds of thousands of dollars if you a.) Had it lying around; and either b.) Wanted to prove your conservative bona fides to conservatives you wanted to impress; or c.) Hoped to gain access to her husband. You would not give Ginni Thomas money if you wanted that money spent on advancing a conservative cause, as her skills are not worth the bills. Ego and access: That’s the only reason to give Ginni Thomas money.
Much of the reportage and commentary about these stories have noted the connection between the conservative ideology of the Thomases’ friends/clients and Clarence Thomas’s conservative jurisprudence. The implication is that Clarence Thomas’s rulings have been influenced by those who have hired his wife or plied him with gifts. I doubt that’s what’s actually going on here. It’s certainly possible Thomas’s rulings have been shaded by these relationships, that his opinions may have turned out more moderately conservative if conservative activists hadn’t bought his attention. My guess, however, is that the money followed the rulings: That Harlan Crow sought to befriend the author of opinions he dug, and that conservative activists (some perhaps deluded into believing they could influence the outcomes of Supreme Court cases) used the conservative wife of a conservative Supreme Court justice to network within conservative DC political/legal circles. It’s not as though someone bribed Clarence Thomas into being a conservative Supreme Court justice because Clarence Thomas was always going to be a conservative Supreme Court justice.
All of which begs the question: Does this scandal even matter? Thomas’s defenders are quick to point out Crow has never had any personal business come before the Court. If we take Ginni Thomas at her word, her activism doesn’t influence his work on the Court. You can’t really bribe someone into doing something they are already inclined to do. So what’s the problem?
I’ll tell you what the problem is. The problem isn’t quid pro quo corruption. It’s that Clarence Thomas is personally profiting off his work in public office. He and his wife are using his status as a Supreme Court justice to rake in hundreds of thousands of dollars in gifts and (potentially) income every year. It does not seem to have dawned on Clarence Thomas that your average conservative in the DC-area isn’t taking free vacations valued at over $500,000 to Indonesia on the regular. Or actually, maybe it has, and Thomas just regards an all-expenses-paid cruise on board a millionaire’s yacht as a well-deserved perk attendant to a job that only pays out a lowly three hundred grand a year. One would think the salary, the power, prestige, and honor that comes with being a Supreme Court justice would be enough.
One may still wonder what exactly is wrong with an officeholder accepting gifts or receiving extra outside income so long as those monetary rewards don’t influence their official actions. First of all, even if Thomas himself is not accepting a bribe, this sort of behavior creates the conditions for bribery to easily occur. Eventually, people will end up taking jobs like Thomas’s expecting these sort of side benefits to come their way. They may even perform their official duties in ways that attract such benefits.
Additionally, what Thomas has done is also unseemly. While someone who holds political office shouldn’t be expected to live a life of poverty, it is fair to expect they’re not in it for the money. Public service is supposed to be a selfless rather than a selfish, entrepreneurial endeavor. By accepting gifts and favors and allowing his wife to set up an organization that potentially allows activists to discretely pad their personal bank accounts, Thomas suggests his tenure as a Supreme Court justice isn’t just about serving the public but personal enrichment as well. That’s gross. That’s not what the office is there for, and those aren’t the benefits that are supposed to come with the job. A seat on the Supreme Court is not a revenue stream and shouldn’t be used as such.
Clarence Thomas should have known better. He is a judge, and his failure to turn down these gifts and favors reflects either a serious lapse in or lack of judgment. Justice Abe Fortas had to step down from the Court in 1969 for similar misdeeds. So what should happen to Thomas? I would hope the House would impeach him, but I doubt a chamber controlled by Republicans who couldn’t find a good reason to impeach Donald Trump after he sent a violent mob to keep them from carrying out their official duties would have the good sense to discipline Thomas. Even if they did, there’s no way Mitch McConnell and Senate Republicans—who themselves have exhibited a profound lack of principle when it comes to who does or does not get to sit on the Court—would step up to remove Thomas from the bench. One might expect the members of the Supreme Court to pull Thomas aside and urge him to step down for the sake of the Court’s integrity, but not only do I not think a majority of the Court is all that concerned about the institution’s integrity, but the one conservative on the Court who I think is—Chief Justice John Roberts—has said he is only worried about actual quid pro quo corruption rather than controlling for the appearance of it, so I doubt he’ll get all that worked up over a luxury cruise Thomas went on that was paid for by a likeminded conservative friend.
So I guess it’s up to Clarence Thomas to realize what the right thing to do is and resign. Herculean task, I know, but he’s had a good 31-year run on the Court. Why not just call it a career and sail off…oh wait, sorry, let me try that again. Here we go: The Supreme Court’s reputation right now is in pretty bad shape, its integrity in question, and these revelations that have come to light recently about Clarence Thomas are only making matters worse. For the sake of the Court and the sake of the Country, Thomas should take it upon himself and resign.
Presented with this request, I’m sure Thomas would decline. He’d once again emphasize there was no quid pro quo arrangement between himself and Harlan Crow and that all the favors and gifts he received from Crow were just Crow’s way of expressing fondness and “hospitality” for a dear friend.
Well guess what? I know a way Thomas can test that theory: Resign and see if those free cruises around Indonesia keep coming. I bet Crow wouldn’t hand his friends gifts worth half a million dollars if those friends weren’t sitting on the Supreme Court. So come on, Clarence, prove me wrong.
Signals and Noise
Amanda Carpenter of The Bulwark points out the key element tying many of Don Trump’s scandals together—from the hush money payments to the overtures to Russia to the Ukraine funding to the attempts to overturn Georgia’s election results to the 1/6 insurrection—is election criminality. As Carpenter writes, “Treating these investigations and indictments separately as unrelated incidents is necessary as a matter of law, but as a matter of politics, ethics, and public understanding, it diminishes how intentional Trump and his allies are when it comes to disrespecting the foundation of our democracy, our elections.”
Jed Handelsman Shugerman argues in the New York Times that Trump’s indictment is a “legal embarrassment.”
Trump has called on Congress to “defund” the Justice Department and FBI. (Neither, by the way, are involved in the charges brought by the Manhattan DA against Trump.)
Mike Allen and Zachary Basu of Axios offer Republicans a reality check on how well the GOP has fared electorally since embracing Trump.
Liberal judge Janet Protasiewicz routed her conservative opponent in Wisconsin’s state Supreme Court election, flipping control of the state’s highest court. The issue of abortion played a critical role in determining the outcome of the race. Also of note: Democrats improved their performance on college campuses compared to 2022 even as turnout was only slightly lower. (This is probably why Republicans in Texas have introduced legislation that would ban polling places on college campuses.)
Jonathan Weisman of the New York Times finds Republicans have backed themselves into a corner on the issue of abortion (as well as gun control and LGBTQ rights) and are straining to find a way forward. Steven Shepard of Politico makes a similar observation, describing the issue as “quicksand” for Republicans.
“I would simply say that the fact of the matter is, when you look at the issue of abortion, one of the challenges that we have, we continue to go through the most restrictive conversations without broadening the scope and taking a look at the fact that…I’m 100 percent pro-life.”—Republican Senator Tim Scott making word salad, one day after announcing his intent to run for president, when asked by a correspondent for the conservative channel Newsmax if he supported a federal ban on abortion.
Florida has banned abortion after six weeks. While the law makes an exception for rape, it requires women to present evidence of a sexual assault to obtain an abortion.
For a primer on the court battle over the abortion pill mifepristone, see Ellen Iones’ article at Vox.
Meanwhile, Adam Liptak of the New York Times writes that the Texas court ruling that stayed the approval of mifepristone may not receive a warm welcome at the Supreme Court despite its conservative lean.
Joe Biden’s push to reshape the federal bench has run into a roadblock in the Senate, as Democratic absences due to illness and Republican refusal to submit blue slips pose a dual have brought the confirmation process to a standstill.
As House Speaker Kevin McCarthy struggles to manage a dysfunctional Republican majority as it heads toward a debt ceiling showdown, Jonathan Swan and Annie Karni of the New York Times report he’s taken to badmouthing other House Republican leaders. Juliegrace Brufke of Axios notes that has not gone over well in the GOP ranks.
In a must-read article, Ronald Brownstein writes in The Atlantic about Republican efforts in the states to roll back the Rights Revolution, which often involves squashing local control in Democratic municipalities. Brownstein also points out Republicans intend to nationalize this agenda.
Annie Gowen and Tim Craig of the Washington Post recount what led the Republican-led Tennessee legislature to expel two Black legislators and connect it to ongoing efforts in other Republican-led states to stifle dissent. (Both legislators have since been reappointed to their seats, making their expulsion one of the biggest political self-owns in recent memory.)
By David French of the New York Times: “How Tennessee Illustrates the Three Rules of MAGA” (“While Trumpism is a complex phenomenon, there are three ideas or principles that are consistently present: First, that before Trump the G.O.P. was a political doormat, helplessly walked over by Democrats time and again. Second, that we live in a state of cultural emergency where the right has lost everywhere and must turn to politics to reverse this cultural momentum. And third, that in this state of emergency, all conservatives must rally together. There can be no enemies to the right. Add these three ideas together, and you have a near-perfect formula for extremism and authoritarianism.”)
Jonathan Martin of Politico explores how Tennessee—the home of Howard Baker and Al Gore—has become the poster child for state-level political meltdown. (“Today, Tennessee represents the grim culmination of the forces corroding state politics: the nationalization of elections and governance, the tribalism between the two parties, the collapse of local media and internet-accelerated siloing of news and the incentive structure wrought by extreme gerrymandering. Also, if we’re being honest, the transition from pragmatists anchored in their communities to partisans more fixated on what’s said online than at their local Rotary Club.”) Michael Wines of the New York Times extends his analysis of Tennessee’s political problems to other states.
Natalie Allison writes in Politico about the scandal-plagued Republican supermajority in the Tennessee legislature, a body she covered from 2018-2021. (The list of scandals—including the GOP’s refusal to kick out a member credibly accused of sexually assaulting 15- and 16-year-old girls he had taught and coached—is astonishing.)
By Peter Wehner of The Atlantic: “An Acute Attack of Trumpism in Tennessee” (“How can the party of ‘family values’ defend a moral degenerate like Trump? How can law-and-order Republicans defend a violent insurrection and threats against judges and prosecutors? How can ‘constitutional conservatives’ rally around a man who attempted to subvert the Constitution by overthrowing an election? The human mind’s capacity to rationalize such things is extraordinary, but not limitless. Some Republicans have the sense, even if it’s only in their quiet moments, that they have acted not only hypocritically but dishonorably. And it gnaws at them. They know they would eviscerate any Democrat who did a fraction of what Trump did. They therefore have to expend enormous psychological energy to keep from becoming sick with themselves for what they have become. Shame is a toxic emotion, and it often causes people to direct hostility outward rather than inward….As we’ve seen in Tennessee, this frantic state of mind leads Republicans to preposterous places and to act in politically self-destructive ways. One of the two most important political parties in the world is dominated by people who are enraged, embittered, and anarchic.”)
Republican Texas Governor Greg Abbott is rushing to pardon a man recently convicted of murdering a Black Lives Matter protester in July 2020. Abbott is citing Texas’s “stand your ground” law (the man who was murdered was armed) but the killer also has a long history of posting racist messages on social media and indicated in May 2020 he might have to take it upon himself to kill protesters.
Well this isn’t a good look: The Republican-led North Dakota Senate voted down a bill that would have expanded free lunches to low-income students but increased the amount of money state legislators and state employees receive for meal reimbursements.
A Republican Missouri lawmaker thinks it’s OK for 12-year-olds to get married.
These are jaw-dropping findings from the Kaiser Family Foundation: “Experiences with gun-related incidents are common among U.S. adults. One in five (21%) say they have personally been threatened with a gun, a similar share (19%) say a family member was killed by a gun (including death by suicide), and nearly as many (17%) have personally witnessed someone being shot. Smaller shares have personally shot a gun in self-defense (4%) or been injured in a shooting (4%). In total, about half (54%) of all U.S. adults say they or a family member have ever had one of these experiences. Gun-related injuries and deaths, as well as worries about gun violence, disproportionately affect people of color in the U.S. Three in ten Black adults (31%) have personally witnessed someone being shot, as have one-fifth of Hispanic adults (22%).”
Jeanna Smialek of the New York Times looks at the possibility of a looming credit crunch (which could lead to a recession) as depositors move their money from banks into money market funds following recent high-profile bank failures.
U.S. Treasury Secretary (and former Fed chairwoman) Janet Yellen has said banks are likely to tighten lending following the recent bank scare, which she thinks may eliminate the need for the Fed to raise interest rates.
A CNBC poll found 58% of Americans reported living paycheck-to-paycheck.
In “Elon Musk’s Free-Speech Charade is Over”, Adam Serwer of The Atlantic looks at Musk’s recent suppression of Substack on Twitter and how conservatives’ recent “defense” of free speech really amounts to an effort to censor speech they don’t like.
Despite pledges by governments to cut back, the world’s coal-burning capacity actually grew 1% in 2022. To meet global climate goals, coal needs to be retired at a rate four-and-a-half times faster than pledged.
The EPA has proposed new rules that would require electric vehicles to account for two-thirds of all new car sales by 2032. Car emissions account for over half of all carbon emissions in the US; this rule could reduce those emissions by 80%.
The New York Times digs into the leaked Pentagon documents concerning the war in Ukraine to see what they reveal about the state of the war there. My question: Just how “top secret” are documents that can be accessed by tens of thousands of people, including an airman in the Massachusetts Air National Guard?
Coming soon to a Republican primary debate near you: Should the United States bomb Mexico to stop fentanyl production? Meanwhile, the White House has accused Republicans of inadvertently helping Mexican drug cartels when they call for the defunding or outright elimination of firearm-control agencies like the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF).
Garbage Time: What NBA Teams Have the Most at Stake During the 2023 Playoffs?
(Garbage Time theme song here)
Compared to other seasons in recent memory, there seems to be a lot at stake in this year’s NBA playoffs, which began this past Saturday. Even teams that didn’t make the playoffs seem to be at a crossroads, since they’ve now got a shot to draft generation-defining talent Victor Wembanyama. And then there’s the Dallas Mavericks, who wrecked their roster at the trade deadline to pair headcase Kyrie Irving with Luka Doncic, only to see that pairing flop. Given the opportunity to squeak into the play-in as a ten-seed or protect a first-round draft pick, the Mavs—who made it as far as the Western Conference Finals last year—chose to tank their last two games. The NBA fined them $750,000 for doing so. Now Dallas’ lack of playoff ambition seems to have the team on the verge of self-immolation.
But enough about the teams who decided not to compete for a championship this season. Let’s focus on those who want to raise a banner (or at least reach the Finals) because these next couple months stakes are high for many of them.
In the Eastern Conference, there are really only two teams with anything on the line this postseason. The Milwaukee Bucks, featuring Giannis Antetokounmpo (arguably the best player on the planet) want to prove their 2021 championship wasn’t a fluke but the beginning of their run as a decade-defining team. Antetokounmpo is the sort of player who should rack up championships, so if that becomes challenging to do with the players Milwaukee places around him, he may begin surveying the league for a team with the supporting cast he needs. The Philadelphia 76ers, on the other hand, want to prove their team is more than an Eastern Conference stepping stone. Philly center Joel Embiid, the favorite to win MVP this season, needs to add a trip to the NBA Finals to his resume to cement his status as one of this era’s dominant players and displace this image as his most memorable postseason moment:
What about the Boston Celtics, who finished a game behind Milwaukee in the East? They made it to the Finals last year, but they don’t seem like a perennial title contender, particularly with questions swirling around Jaylen Brown’s long-term prospects in Boston. It’s not a Finals-or-bust situation for Boston this year; they just need to be part of that Finals conversation. As for the rest of the Eastern Conference, well, they know they’ll have to settle for a participation trophy, but the clock is ticking somewhat on the Cavaliers, who will be expected to make a big leap next year now that Donovan Mitchell has had a season to adjust to his new surroundings in Ohio.
The Western Conference is where all the drama is. So long as you’re not the Sacramento Kings (who just snapped American professional sports’ longest postseason drought at sixteen seasons by securing the three seed in the West, which is reward enough) or whoever gets the eight seed, every team has something to prove.
Let’s begin with the top-seeded Denver Nuggets, who, despite retaining the talents of two-time reigning MVP Nikola Jokic, are feared by no one. Since March 8, right around the time NBA teams began ramping up for the playoffs, the Nuggets are 7-10, including a 124-103 loss to the lowly Houston Rockets a couple weeks ago. The Golden State Warriors dismantled Denver last year in the playoffs, but despite putting a much healthier team on the court this year, the Nuggets just don’t seem like a team that can impose their will on an opponent. Denver and Jokic need to prove they’re serious title contenders. If the Finals remain out of reach even as a one-seed, they’re going to need to retool.
The Nuggets should be able to dispatch the Minnesota Timberwolves in their first-round series, but they’ll have their hands full in the second round with whoever comes out of the heavyweight 4-seed/5-seed bout. The four seed is the Phoenix Suns, who haven’t lost a game when trade deadline acquisition Kevin Durant (who can give Antetokounmpo a hard run for his money as the planet’s best player when healthy) takes the floor for them. With Durant, Devin Booker, Chris Paul, and Deandre Ayton forming a big four for Phoenix, many have the Suns as the favorite to win it all. Anything less would be a disappointment. The Suns’ opponent, the Los Angeles Clippers, was picked by many at the start of the season to make it to the Finals, but they’re more likely to be washed out of the playoffs early since one of their star players, Paul George, has no timeline to return from a sprained right knee. George has been paired with Kawhi Leonard for the past four years in Los Angeles, but injuries and “load management” have kept them from realizing their potential. If the Clippers are ever going to be taken seriously as an NBA franchise—something they’ve longed for over past decade and a half—George, Leonard, and this deep L.A. team need to find a way to play basketball come June.
That other Southern California basketball squad—the Los Angeles Lakers—spent much of the season as a sub-.500 team before sneaking into the playoffs as a 43-39 seven seed. The Lakers overhauled their roster at the trade deadline and weathered a late season injury to LeBron James to finish the season 16-6. NBA analysts are pretty divided on the team’s prospects, however: L.A. is either the most dangerous team in the West or ready to crumble. (Their poor performance in their play-in victory over the Timberwolves seemed to validate their detractors.) This LeBron James/Anthony Davis version of the Lakers is supposed to win championships plural, so expectations are high. Los Angeles will be taking on the two-seeded Memphis Grizzlies, who are still young enough to weather a postseason disappointment but have also announced to the world that they consider themselves contenders. There’s no reason not to take them at their word. The Grizzlies have also set themselves up as the latest iteration of the Bad Boys, which makes them either a team people love or love to hate. Put it all together and what you find is a team that could be seriously deflated if it can’t put its money where its mouth is.
The winner of the Grizzlies-Lakers series will draw either the three-seeded Sacramento Kings or the six-seeded Golden State Warriors. The Warriors flirted with a .500 record for most of the season and only really began to get it together over their past ten games, when they went 8-2. It’s been a rough season for the defending champions. Draymond Green’s assault of teammate Jordan Poole during a preseason practice (and the subsequent release of video of that incident) seems to have loomed over the team all year. They have been one of the league’s most productive offensive teams but have struggled to clamp down on defense. They have been nearly unbeatable at home and have struggled mightily on the road. Without homecourt advantage, their dynasty is more vulnerable than it’s ever been this season, but no one wants to discount a four-time NBA champion.
The Warriors’ legacy is not in question at this point, but a fifth ring for Steph Curry, Klay Thompson, and Draymond Green would move them past LeBron James and Shaquille O’Neal and place them alongside Magic Johnson, Kobe Bryant, and Tim Duncan (and, BTW, Steve Kerr.) The path to that fifth ring would be epic, too: Through former assistant coach Mike Brown and former Warrior starter Harrison Barnes in Sacramento; through either wannabe rivals Memphis or long-time rival LeBron James in the second-round; in all likelihood through former Warriors Finals MVP Kevin Durant in the Western Conference Finals; and then perhaps a rematch with the Celtics or a showdown with Giannis in Milwaukee.
In other words, the Warriors are beyond having anything at stake in these Finals. What they face instead is the opportunity to add to their legend. James, Durant, Leonard, and Antetokounmpo may have similar ambitions, but if any of those individuals go on a championship run, their saga would pale in comparison to the tale the Warriors can tell.