In the absence of any actual NBA basketball to watch, the blogscape is currently lousy with basketball-knowers furiously knowing basketball. It couldn't be any other way, although it is all happening at such a frantic rate that one is left absolutely convinced that LeBron James is going to sign with the Fort Wayne Zollner Pistons by week's end because Brian Windhorst's pal/source Spliffy The Dry Cleaner got a tip, and also that Tyler Herro either punched, was punched by, or has never actually met Bam Adebayo. Every shovel has a name, a job, and a hole that needs digging and filling repeatedly so that the shovelers can try to seem indispensable to the league's information system, at least until such time as they get hired by some team to do some nonsensical job that will be replaced by AI by next Thursday lunch.

What you won't find, though, are owner pundits—people who know or pretend to know what the billionaires are planning, when they're planning it, and why it needs to be planned. Let's call it, for lack of a popular alternative, the study of advanced bastardology, a largely untapped motherlode of venality that makes the basketball seem entirely ancillary to the actual work.

We know, for instance, that Jimmy Dolan is a spectacular GRA (if I spot you "giant" and "raging," can you figure out the "A"?) no matter the subject or the moment, but he's the most recent doof to lead a parade. We know Tom Dundon can hear a C-note hit the snow and send one of the interns or worse, one of the children whose names he had engraved on the Stanley Cup, to dig it out with their face. We know Patrick Dumont looks like a manager at a FedEx dropoff depot whose only apparent service to the business of basketball was to successfully pitch Nico Harrison into the chipper-shredder of public opinion after the Luka Doncic deal. We definitely know that Adam Silver is the front-facing corporate shill who would sign off on any of the aforementioned owners setting off explosives in a petting zoo and then defend the subsequent shower of animal bits as the necessary cost of doing business in the modern NBA. And we know that they all want new, publicly funded arenas by next week because they don't want the other owners to make fun of them at league meetings.

But where are the pundits with both the knowledge and communicative skills to explain the inner workings of the league as defined by the cavalcade of ultrarich crustaceans who actually make it go? Nowhere, that's where. Following owners for news and insight is, first of all, futile because megarich septuagenarians are by definition both secretive and stultifying. They only intermittently pay attention to what they own, they rarely explain themselves and tend to lie when they do, and can be counted on to try and make someone else catch the subsequent dungstorms, and as a result we know next to nothing about them or why they are the way they are. What information trickles out might make us wish to know even less, or just idly pine for the moment when the global economy collapses and they all decide that they need to eat their relatives to survive. Which they absolutely would.

Well, we at Defector, The Website That Looks Different Now Whether You All Like It Or Not, are going to break owner news here. Like all other news breakers, our success rate will be at best hit-and-miss, and at worst absolute nonsense. But like all good post-journalism journalists, we're willing to stake someone else's reputation on our fervid specu-guessing and call it all facts until we manufacture new facts that work better. Prove us wrong. We dare you.

Anyway, here's the deal as we know it, which is to say as we are making it up. Tom Dundon, who just bought the Portland Trail Blazers with the sole intention of never having to watch a game in Oregon even as he snivels for state money to upgrade his arena, is going to offer his services to the league by exchanging the team he has for the Dallas Mavericks franchise, which is located in the town where he and the first two rows of the Stanley Cup actually live. Not because he has an affinity for Cooper Flagg, whom he knows about as well as he knows Brandon Bussi, but because he won't have to go to the airport to see his team.

The Adelson-Dumont family, which has owned the Mavericks long enough to give Doncic away and alienate virtually everyone who ever cared about the team, goes for this deal because they are part of the heart of Vegas, the that in which the late family patriarch Sheldon Adelson did the bulk of his life's work. Why be in the Metroplex when your heart is on The Strip?

But we're still stuck with that unpleasant vacancy in Portland, and haven't even put that expansion team in Seattle yet, thus leaving the entire Pacific Northwest wide open at the arc. That won't do, because there is now unclaimed money in those two basketball hotbeds, and Silver is paid to keep beds hot, if that imagery does not put you off your food until Thanksgiving. Here's where Part B of our exclusive rumor/conspiracy-o-rama comes into play.

Steve Ballmer, who is still up his eyelids in the Kawhi Leonard Clandestine Botany For Cap Circumvention Scheme and behind the Lakers forever, decides that he can escape both traps by asking for and receiving the Seattle operation. Seattle is, of course, where his heart is. Maybe he gets to take the Clippers with him there; maybe he gets the expansion franchise. Either way, he calls in all the remaining favors he has coming to him from the league for taking the Clippers out of Donald Sterling's withered claw-hands and calls the team the SuperSonics, a hilariously dated but still venerable name in Cascadia. Plus, this part of the scheme returns the entirety of the L.A. market to new Lakers owner Mark Walter, thus winning for Silver his temporary loyalty. Temporary because, as we know from our history books, all owner loyalty is temporary by definition.

Which still leaves Portland, abandoned and furious even though having no team is a decided improvement over having a Dundon team. And here is where Silver whipsaws the other owners into finding some new well-moneyed hyena to pay for the other expansion franchise, which was supposed to go to Seattle but now goes to Oregon instead. The Portland ownership group even gets the Blazers' history as an added bonus, because Dundon doesn't care about that—for one, he can't put his family members on the team's all-time roster without someone noticing—and Blazers fans will learn to cope without the joys of Deni Avdija and Shaedon Sharpe.

And this all gets done with about six Zoom calls from Silver's office because all the owners get what they want, nobody gets sued, and the money gets worked out. Dundon gets to leave a place he clearly hates and saves thousands per year in private jet fuel. Dumont can run staff meetings in his underwear (sorry, more imagery) because he never has to leave the family's Vegas compound. Ballmer gets to start over with a new and more grateful audience, and Portland is free of all that noxious Dundosity. The circle is closed, and we can get back to more important things like changing the word "tanking" into something more publicly acceptable, like "retro-winning."

And now, with the simple late addition of the tantalizing phrase insiders like to use, "We're hearing that..." we have just broken news. Well, broken some speculation. Or, anyway, broken a blind guess born of hinted dissatisfaction and a bad case of anal-cranial inversion. That's how the pros do it, and if you figure in a soupçon of incomprehensibly Shamsian language for flavoring, you will see that we have successfully engaged in the kind of elite-level bastardology all sports are crying out for in these troubled times.

While all the big-name pundits are scrambling to get front office jobs to avoid getting laid off by their current employers, or chasing Rich Paul in search of the latest LeBron-to-Utah rumor-that-isn't, we're out there on the front lines, pulling owner-based items out of our ears and passing it off as the real deal because damn it, someone has to. Just remember where you heard this whimsical fabrication first, suckers, and press "like," "subscribe" and "sheep-tier subscriber" to keep this vital work-adjacent product coming.