I like interrogating the thought process. The thought process is more interesting to me than anything else.
Matt Moore has been covering and writing about NBA basketball for a long time, formerly with CBS Sports, NBC Sports and his own blog, Hardwood Paroxysm. More than a few of your favs owe their career starts and springboards to him. Like many, I knew Matt via his curmudgeonly social media presence, probably through some discouraging things he said about the Raptors at a time when they were a discouraging team. When I met him at Summer League in Las Vegas a few years ago I was not struck by how smart he was (I had a good idea of that already), but I was surprised by how very funny and upbeat — a good lesson on how the internet tends to flatten everything.
We talked about Matt’s fandom — very much intact but a quality that many people who follow his work assume is absent — and fandom in small markets, the Nuggets arena ahead of Game 5 and the palpable hope Matt felt being there in person, the era of the fanalyst, making the decision to be impartial and recognizing your own biases, the psychological differences between fan bases, and the multitude of micro-decisions coaches have to make.
We also talked about how money pushes things forward and occasionally pulls them in conflicting directions within franchises in the NBA, player empowerment’s origins in the NBA, how fun it is to follow historic threads through basketball, Matt’s comfort level at being a hard truths therapist for upset fans (and whether he recognizes the parallels between that and going to school for psychology), the boring way to have an opinion about everything and the not boring way.
Plus: the Grizzlies, fighting with editors, trying to get better at not replying to negative comments, evolutions and cyclical patterns in sports media, not imposter syndrome but comparative syndrome, and the biggest evolutions in Matt’s career.
The Basketball Feelings Podcast, Episode 50: Matt Moore