At the half during last night's Miami Heat-Indiana Pacers game, ESPN multiplatform presence Bill Simmons offered up a remarkable theory to explain why LeBron James came out slowly in the game. James, he speculated, may have been distracted by the results of the NBA draft lottery, in which his former team, the Cleveland Cavaliers, secured the first pick.
Maybe this was just a joke that didn't land! Still, I have my own theory here. Simmons's role as a broadcaster is basically to serve as a proxy for the ordinary NBA fan. As a wealthy professional NBA broadcaster who spends a great deal of time around the game when not producing movies for Disney and such, though, he's about as in touch with what the ordinary NBA fan is thinking as LeBron James is. What we see here, then, isn't Simmons saying what he actually thinks, but rather him saying what he thinks ordinary NBA fans think, or at least what he thinks a proxy for ordinary NBA fans should think, which is to say that he thinks ordinary NBA fans are halfwits.