Still Gotta Come Through Chicago

The Catholic Church Comes Through Chicago

Happy Friday, Chicago!

Robert Francis Prevost of Chicago became Pope Leo XIV Thursday, and Vatican City immediately turned into a fefe on the block. Reportedly, when given the chance to speak, Leo said “God got me, fuck you talm’ bout” with a fake cell phone to his ear.

He went on to say that he loves everyone, except for sinners and sneak dissers.

Afterward, Bobby called me and continued: “Argentina? Italy? Brazil? The Philippines? Still Gotta Come Through Chicago.”

I asked him—Bobby, you got the direct line to him now?

“Speed dial, son,” he replied.

It’s going to be a great weekend. We got representation in the Vatican and I got Blest Are Those Who Love You, Jesus, Lamb of God, and Glory to God queued up for my walk home from work tomorrow.

Those Catholic mass bangers hit even harder when you’re not sweating through a suit jacket, hungover, on the edge of a panic attack waiting for your friend to kiss the bride.

Chicago, I come here to inform you, we’re indeed “up.”

I’ll leave the rest of the blasphemy here. An obligatory no offense to our more by-the-book readers, and an obligatory “and also with you” back to Pope Leo XIV. Congratulations.

Let’s get into it.

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It’s time to update the record books. Another NBA season has come and gone for LeBron James, and we were again immediately gifted with his camp pushing out news stories to 1) absolve him from his team’s failures 2) keep him in the headlines as the rest of the playoffs unfold.

Like clockwork.

It’s so resemblant of clockwork, in fact, that it wasn’t all that hard to put together this newsletter in May 2023, which detailed LeBron’s PR moves directly following each season over the previous decade.

There are so many goodies in there, so many unbelievable (in the true sense of the word) media campaigns. LeBron earns his nickname around this time of year, as no one puts forth propaganda like The King.

If the LeBron playoff exit hits like a good steak dinner for your boy, the postgame presser hits like a warm brownie with vanilla ice cream on top of it.

The day after LeBron was eliminated, I sat at work unabashedly searching the web, waiting for what I knew what was coming. Unfortunately, there’s never much to that chase. Results materialized quickly.

LeBron James undecided on future after Lakers' first-round exit

Next time, ESPN should consult me before publishing these headlines. I fixed it for them.

LeBron James “undecided” on future after Lakers' first-round exit 😂😂😂

For the third year in a row, LeBron is purportedly considering his basketball future. He “doesn’t know the answer right now” on whether he’ll play next year. Not dissimilar from him peeking to see if anyone believed his flop the other week, LeBron says he isn’t sure if he’ll retire to see if he can elicit a reaction from the masses.

Ideally, no one bats an eye at his antics anymore, but there are plenty of dumb people in the world. And I hope the writers who publish these stories feel like the implicit cronies they are when they turn them in. Like a mother allowing their child to miss school for yet another exam day.

“I don’t know. I don’t have an answer to that,” he said when asked about his future. “Something I’ll sit down with my family, my wife and my support group and just kind of talk through it and see what happens. Just have a conversation with myself on how long I want to continue to play.”

I’ll save you the suspense. There’s a zero percent chance LeBron is retiring just months after the Lakers were gifted a top-5 player.

Still, we had to wait for the other shoe to drop. He grabbed the headlines with the first one, hoping there’d be more discussion about LeBron than there would be over Game 6 and Game 7s in the coming days.

Then came the, you guessed it: the phantom injury.

The chase was not long or hard for this one, either.

Source: Lakers' LeBron James suffered MCL sprain in Game 5

If LeBron ever plans to finish a book, he should start light with “The Boy Who Cried Wolf.”

I’m sure he’ll be able to recover from his brutal MCL sprain in the same way he did his “pretty much broken hand” after the 2018 NBA Finals: with a good night’s rest.

What I sincerely hope is that LeBron’s antics will finally be largely ignored — or laughed off — this year. If they are, basketball fans will be able to focus on basketball.

And the basketball in these playoffs has been incredible. Maybe the best first couple weeks of the playoffs I’ve ever seen.

There’s multiple great teams, plenty of really good teams, and handfuls of budding and current superstars. There’s comebacks, game winners, and plenty of storylines worth their weight that aren’t regarding LeBron.

What the NBA needs is what LeBron is ultimately scared of, and that’s for the league to move on without him. Not without him playing — because he will continue playing — but for the league and its media ecosystem to enjoy a playoff run, and subsequent seasons, with him out of the center circle.

The path is leading in that direction. Viewership for the opening weekend of the playoffs was up 17% this year, and the Warriors-Rockets Game 7 was the most viewed Round 1 game since 2009.

Hold that thought.

The NBA can finally shoo away LeBron and his overtures at attention because of the product on the floor, and the young stars that are making that up.

Anthony Edwards took down LeBron in the first round, and is now facing off against two aged stars in Steph Curry (though hurt) and Jimmy Butler. Tyrese Haliburton has hit multiple game-winning shots with an upstart Pacers team, which is playing a 64-win Cavs team. The 26-year-old Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and his competition for MVP — Nikola Jokic — are battling it out. Two of the biggest basketball cities, Boston and New York, are throwing punches at each other, and each has plenty of recognizable faces.

All the while, the style of play has returned to something that looks like basketball to everyone over the age of 15. Ticky-tacky fouls aren’t being called, quarrels are common, and scoring seems like something to cheer for, and not something that’s expected every possession.

From a global view, the NBA is capitalizing off of all of these factors. The viewership proves that. From an anecdotal view, I’m receiving more texts from casual basketball fans during these playoffs than I have in years.

The NBA needs to earn the trust back from its American fans, and it appears to be doing so. If they don’t let up — if they let the game flow, if they grab onto the next generation of stars — this will wind up being one of the most important playoffs in NBA history.

This isn’t coming from the overzealous and cringeworthy NBA media types who believed the league would supplant the NFL because of concussions in the 2020s. This is coming from someone who grew up with the NBA, watches hundreds of games per year, and saw it losing its luster recently.

Magic and Bird saved the NBA from its cocaine-marred image in the 1980s. David Stern worked hard to save the NBA from its post-Jordan lull in the early 2000s.

The NBA needs saving again now. Yes, it just got its largest media rights deal ever, a deal that will begin next year. But what would happen if its downturn were to continue? With less streaming platforms and networks to bid on the rights next time around, and continued apathy from American fans, the NBA would be in crisis.

A stagnant TV deal or a more meager one would mean player salaries go down, and that’s when all hell would break loose. Finally, the powers that be would really start having to pay attention to what’s wrong with the NBA. But at that point, it’d be too late.

Despite LeBron’s assertion that NBA coverage is “too negative” — a conclusion he only came to after people called his son, who he had drafted to the NBA, bad — the NBA just got too far away from what makes it work.

For it to work, the games have to feel like they matter, and like anyone can win — even if they can’t. There’s some semblance of that again in 2025, which means the ecosystem does not have to rely on just one star to make the show go on. Move along Bron-Bron, you and your son can watch this one from home. Put that knee on ice!

There’s a misconception that in basketball, more scoring equals more excitement. But that’s just not true, at least for most of us. For the NBA to be exciting, a made basket has to be exciting. It doesn’t mean every game has to be 91-90, but the competition has to be fierce enough that a made basket feels like success for the offense or failure for the defense.

The back-and-forth of other high-scoring games has been great, too. But the Knicks scratching and clawing back from 20 down with defense feels like the NBA I knew and loved.

There’s plenty of time to mess this up. I won’t even go into the alternate and awful uniforms and courts. But the NBA, at a crossroads, undeniably looks like it’s headed to a place where basketball fans can embrace it again.

One thing you’ll hear all week is that it’s fun when the Knicks are good.

And that brings us back to one of the only things that’s missing from these playoffs. The Chicago Bulls, in the exact opposite position of the NBA: with a disinterested fanbase and no way forward.

The aforementioned Warriors-Rockets Game 7 drew 6.63 million viewers. It was the largest audience for a Round 1 game in 16 years.

That was in 2009, when 6.99 million watched rookie Derrick Rose and the Bulls take on the Celtics in Game 7 of Round 1.

And ten years ago yesterday, Rose hit a game-winning three-pointer over Cavalier defenders. It’s the last time the Bulls won a home playoff game.

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In my March preview, I proclaimed the performances of Justin Steele and Shota Imanaga paramount to this season’s success. I hope I was wrong.

Because now it’s May, Steele is out for the year, and Imanaga is out for the foreseeable future with a hamstring injury.

I’ll take the hamstring over an upper body injury any day of the week, but the hamstring is more finicky than the rest of the lower body’s muscles combined. Those googling whether Steph Curry will be back for Game 3 will learn that quickly.

My best guess for Imanaga would be four to six weeks, which puts him back in the rotation in mid to late June. It’s a blow, but not a huge one. At least for now.

With disappointment comes some level of excitement, however, as the Cubs top pitching prospect is now on his way to join them on their road trip to New York to face off against the Mets.

Cade Horton is the best Cubs pitching prospect to debut in a long, long time. The best pitchers of the last decade have been largely unheralded, traded for, or signed in free agency.

It’s not necessarily ideal to have his debut come on the heels of a star pitcher getting hurt, nor is it great that he’ll likely pitch his first major league innings against Juan Soto and the New York Mets.

Oftentimes, though, these pitcher call ups aren’t made for TV. And the Cubs need Horton, which adds a little extra juice to this storyline.

It’s still unclear whether he’ll start in Imanaga’s place on Saturday, or how far he’ll go in the game.

But all signs pointed to him being called up at some point this year, so now that he’s officially on the way to big the leagues, I’m falling into the camp of excitement over concern or anxiety. Let’s not waste the good innings of a 23-year-old in Iowa if he’s ready to help out a really good ball club right now.

Horton was picked 7th overall in the 2022 draft out of Oklahoma. He’s battled injuries in college and in the minors, but this year, he has a 1.24 ERA and 0.86 WHIP in 29 innings pitched in AAA. He’ll bring a 95, 96-mph fastball and a nasty slider to the mound Saturday.

The camp of excitement does not mean unrealistic expectations. I expect the Cubs to be very careful with him from the outset, particularly because of how prized a possession he is to the front office. He was drafted much higher than consensus in 2022, and has turned out — thus far — to be worth the selection.

Cubs fans have hopefully learned over the past couple of years that prospects need time. Whether it’s the failures, the successes (Pete Crow-Armstrong and sort of Miguel Amaya), or the ones we’re still waiting on (Matt Shaw), we know that not every prospect is primed for production right out of the gate like Kyle Schwarber in 2015.

Horton has also never thrown 80 pitches in a professional game, reflective of a somewhat head-scratching strategy from the organization.

This adds another thrilling wrinkle to what has been a volatile — with more ups than downs — 2025 thus far.

Generally, it’s a good thing if a series loss to the Giants in May feels this bad. The Cubs should have won it after all — in the 10th inning of Tuesday night’s game. After they couldn’t get a runner from third to home with one out, it was over. Ryan Pressly’s 8-run inning after that was just an embarrassing detour.

Pitching Coach Tommy Hottovy actually said after the game that Pressly needed more in-game work, not less. So if you hoped to see fewer outings from the Cubs “closer,” place that optimism somewhere else.

Hottovy said he believes Pressly is missing fewer bats than ever because of his delivery, which is tipping batters off to the pitch coming sooner. He’s not tipping pitches, but he’s telegraphing them.

The Cubs bullpen remains an issue, and it’s the walks that remain more irksome than anything else—even Pressly getting swallowed by eight straight batters.

But the two batters that have been moved from their early season regular spots have continued — or started — to show out with the rest of the offense. Carson Kelly hasn’t cooled, and Dansby Swanson has 14 of his 35 hits this year in the last eight games. Three of those are homers.

PCA, meanwhile, continues his path toward stardom, with PCA! PCA! chants raining down both at home and away stadiums.

The Cubs are coming out their brutal early-season schedule atop the NL Central. It’s worth mentioning that the top four teams in the Central all have plus run differentials. Pittsburgh sits at the bottom with a negative differential and a new manager just a month into the season.

From here on out, the Cubs now have the easiest schedule remaining out of all 30 MLB teams.

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