Liberty Links: Sean Marks is carrying out his own version of The Process with the Nets

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Sean Marks Is Lifting the Nets Out of the Abyss - The Ringer

Sean Marks continues to execute a Process-lite plan in Brooklyn with the Nets:

[Sam] Hinkie established a platform through which Sixers fans could remain engaged in a game beyond the dichotomy of good or bad, win or loss; fans could celebrate the wins, few and far between, in a traditional manner, while also celebrating what the losses were building toward in a way that felt countercultural. He helped spawn a movement of like-minded fans who saw that maybe the real wins were the friends they made along the way — those friends being top-three picks, of course. But there was always that incentive — to drastically increase the likelihood of a high draft pick — built into the Process.

The Nets, who not only forfeited picks, but opted either to apply loose protections or no protection whatsoever, did not have that light at the end of their tunnel. They’d fallen out of the three tiers of team-building altogether: they were one of the worst teams in the league without the means to do anything about it. There they were on the absolute fringe, an outlier whose situation denatured the very objective of professional basketball: Winning didn’t matter because they couldn’t; losing didn’t matter because there would be no compensatory relief. It was a Kafka story played out on hardwood.

That is what Sean Marks inherited in February 2016.

That doesn’t seem too dissimilar of a situation to the one Sam Hinkie found himself in during the summer of 2013.

Steph Curry, Really Good at Basketball - Twitter

I saw this on Twitter yesterday. It sounds weird to say about someone who won back-to-back MVPs, one of which was unanimous, but I think the basketball community forgets just how good Steph Curry is because of Kevin Durant:

Mark Cuban says the first conversation he had with Mavs' draft pick involved asking him to delete 'stupid' tweets - Business Insider

"You know, one of the first things after we drafted Dennis [Smith Jr.], and I’m talking to him on the phone, I’m like, ‘Dude, I went through your Twitter account," [Marc] Cuban said, via The Comeback. "It’s time to get on there and DELETE. And so, he went through it. And to his credit, they were gone. He had a lot of stupid stuff on there.”

Cuban is someone that takes the history of your social media seriously — outside of owning the Mavs, one of his many business ventures is Xpire, an app that helps users to set up expiration dates for future tweets as well as search through old tweets quickly, making it easier to find and erase any posts that may be problematic to the users current place in life.

I’m shocked that Marc Cuban is using one of his players as an example to highlight one of his business ventures. Once a shark, always a shark.

Let players have fun on social media. A team couldn’t buy a public relations staff good enough to create the sort of publicity a player like Joel Embiid creates for himself on Twitter. As long as players aren’t being reckless and delving into racism, sexism, or homophobia online, franchises are better off not policing players and giving them free reign.

Donovan Mitchell Is the Cure for Gordon Hayward Withdrawal - The Ringer

Liberty Ballers Big Board favorite Donovan Mitchell is having an excellent summer for the Jazz:

Here’s my favorite thing about Mitchell: He definitely thinks he’s the best player on the court, and he seems addicted to disrupting the opposing team’s stuff. He is the wrench in the works — an irritant. Toward the end of last season, as more and more people got to watch the Jazz play, we saw a bit of that in the team. I’m thinking specifically of Rudy Gobert getting into it with Kevin Durant during the Jazz’s second-round matchup with the eventual champions.

This is the Jazz I like — atonal and screeching and up-in-your-face. With Mitchell, they have the perfect guy for this music.

Joel Embiid almost caught a homer at the Home Run Derby - Twitter

*Big dumb idiot voice* “I bet Joel Embiid’s gonna be out with a broken hand after that one!”

He did get a ball though later!