The NBA's megahyped release of its 4,826 Snubbed Players has come and gone, and now we can all get on with the rest of our empty, soulless and wretched lives. Yay us!
We can ignore the Unsnubbed 75 because, well, we do. The league claims it wanted this announcement to be a celebration of those 75 players but it knew, knows, and will always understand that nobody cares about any of them. They want to know who got screwed (by their own tortured definitions) and why the voters should be dipped in petroleum, stuck on a buoy, lit, and used as human lighthouses. This is what we did when the league named its 50 At 50, too, and the marketing gits who came up with this one are already working on the Hundo At Hundo list—which given the way the planet is going is an act of purest unjustified optimism—knowing full well what they are doing.
A celebration of hate-fanning. Or if you prefer, a snubfest. Yay arbitrary failure!
Lists with arbitrary limit are designed exactly in this way. The NBA 75 is designed largely to remind people of the debatable value of shucking one's history because because most of the people who made it are too dead to object. The argument that Bob Cousy isn't as accomplished an individual player as, say, Tracy McGrady is both compelling and silly, and it requires that one accepts the notion that an arbitrary restriction based on the number line is defensible. Which it isn't.
This is essentially a twisted expansion of the MVP argument, which is everyone gets to make up his or her own definition of "most" and "valuable." There is no such ambiguity about "75," mostly because it can't really mean "76," "78," or infinity. But everything else about this is so arbitrary that it loses whatever meaning it had. I mean, who argues of the British Empire was better than the Ottoman Empire or the Soviet Empire or the Google Empire? I mean, other than people should not be allowed to procreate? There is a point where history becomes too large to shove into a tube, so there is no logical reason to have lists like this at all unless it is to argue over Players 76 through 4901.
But since all those arguments are just annoyances sicced upon the poor swine who have to write about Snubs 1-75 because their editors are total bastards, that's what we get today. So sure, raise your voice to your god of choice to shriek about the injustice done to Who My Favorite Player Since A Week Ago Tuesday because of the inclusion of I Don't Even Know If He's Still Alive if that's what polishes your brainpan.
You just better hope that the god you choose didn't get snubbed in the Gods.com Top 75 Best Things That Really Aren't Things list, because then you'll feel like a fool and might even get smited across your earhole. Or be subjected to Kyrie Irving's History of The Universe lecture series, whichever lasts longer and is objectively worse. Yay made-up stuff!
