Basketball is like Chance the Rapper.

I saw Chance the Rapper at Austin City Limits in 2015. He played the Miller Lite stage at 5:30 PM — before the Weeknd, before the Strokes, and before Of Monsters and Men. I’d never sat down and consciously listened to him before. At the time I was a high school history teacher, and my only exposure to Chance was via my rather enthused students, who assured me that I should stop by his set. 

And there he was: a harmonious menagerie of hymns and horns, melodies and turns of phrase. The way Chance slides through tunes with almost literally everything a song could possibly include is, on a studio-produced record, stunning. In real-life the music, near-perfect as it is, somehow — unbelievably, really — pales in comparison to the energy in Chance himself. 

The game of basketball does what Chance’s music does; basketball incorporates into one thing athleticism, strategy, pace, fluidity. Basketball is peculiar in that the sport is nearly unwatchable when played at a poor or subpar level, but in its highest expression hoops is nothing short of sublime.

But hoops is more than hoops, like Chance in real life; it’s life — courts and cities, broken chain nets, Charles Barkley on TNT; hoops isn’t shutting up and dribbling; hoops is DeAndre Jordan emojis and opening schools and taking the game global.

Preamble over. 

The point of this is to introduce the brand-new chaos of FloHoops’ NBA column, the Kerfuffle. The aim of the Kerfuffle is to be as random and offbeat as basketball itself. Each week, this column will bring you three to five of the most important NBA items of the past seven days, and by “items” we mean anything that falls into the following categories (which the author — hey, that's me — will select completely arbitrarily):

We’re unfortunately many weeks from the start of the 2018-2019 NBA season, but that doesn’t mean we can’t talk shop right away. 

And I won't be the only one talking shop, because the mainest man at FloSports, Adam Oestreich, is here to dish as well. Adam lives in the great city of Des Moines in the great state of Iowa, and he's got hot takes hotter than hot cakes. 

Over to you, AO.

Get Off My Parquet, As Told By Adam Oestreich

By Adam Oestrich, of course

The Golden State Warriors haven’t even won a game in the 2018-2019 season, so guys — how can they have already won the NBA title? Let me throw five names at you real quick:

1. Gordon Hayward
2. Kyrie Irving
3. Carmelo Anthony
4. DeMarcus Boogie Cousins
5. LeBron James

Why these five people? These are the five people who make it extremely hard for me to crown the Golden State Warriors the 2018-2019 NBA title, in August. 

Gordon Hayward played all of five minutes last season. With a healthy Hayward expecting to play more than five minutes this season, plus a seemingly healthy Kyrie Irving returning for seemingly the full campaign, the already very good Celtics are poised to be very great. The Celtics will have the entire season to figure out to best utilize their depth that will include a highly anticipated second year out of Jayson Tatum; this team could be very scary in the playoffs. But again, it's only August. 

Another team that will have an interesting time experimenting with their new lineup is the Houston Rockets. Adding Carmelo Anthony is either going to go very poorly or pretty well. I believe Carmelo is still one of the best scorers in the NBA, but hey man, coming off the bench isn't a terrible thing. If Carmelo wants to become a role player and realizes he isn’t the best or second-best player on this team, the Rockets will make a rematch of the Western Conference Finals even more exciting. I mean, they were only 27 straight missed threes away from the NBA Finals. 

Speaking of the NBA Finals: the Warriors have to get there before they can win it! All the talk of Boogie Cousins joining a stacked team is great and all on paper, but in the real world let’s not forget that Boogie is coming back from an Achilles injury and hasn’t always been known as a ray of sunshine in the team chemistry department. How do we know this team will be better with Boogie? With reports of an already-rocky situation in the Golden State locker room, I can’t wait to see how this one plays out.

Lastly, you have LeBron James. I really don’t need to say more, but I will. Of course, this current Lakers team does not appear to beat Golden State in a seven-game series (or a game of HORSE for that matter), but if history tells us anything about LeBron James’ teams, it's that come playoff time, they usually don’t look like they do in August. 

So let’s just see how this whole thing plays out before we crown what will most likely, definitely, probably be the Golden State Warriors.

Back to H-Dawg:

Inaugural Kerfuffle Section: LeBron James Watch (vs President Donald Trump)

The exchange below — if you can even call it that — isn’t recent, but it’s too neat a starting spot to ignore. 

Shortly after a TV interview in which James discussed the school he helped open in Akron — a public school that helps parents by providing a number of resources most schools don’t, like job placement services and a route to getting a GED, a public school that feeds its kids, a public school that hands out free uniforms, a public school that will provide tuition for graduates to the University of Akron — President Donald Trump went out of his way to, via Twitter, insult James’ intelligence (and bring up, completely out of left field, Michael Jordan and the belabored GOAT debate):

Lebron James was just interviewed by the dumbest man on television, Don Lemon. He made Lebron look smart, which isn’t easy to do. I like Mike!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 4, 2018

Um . . . what?

Sure, James isn’t technically paying for everything, but make no mistake: This doesn’t happen without him, and it’s a ridiculously amazing thing to do.

The President sent that tweet on August 3, and James tweeted this the following day:

Let’s get it kids!! Love you guys https://t.co/kY88geedus

— LeBron James (@KingJames) August 4, 2018

This is an excellent way to begin the season. 

Episode 2 of the Kerfuffle: coming soon.