this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2023
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It’s crazy how often we think this is just big market bias and not that these guys are actually connected to the players or people around these players. I don’t know about Simmons, but I believe Tim McMahon has also said something along these lines and he’s definitely plugged in.
I think we are really naive here when we say stuff like this. We get so many reports of guys wanting to go to LA. That’s not media fabrication, half of those dudes are from there or want to play in that market. The same is true for at least the latter in the case of New York. Whether they end up on those teams is a different, more complicated story. If you’re dealing with a respected reporter, blame the players, not the media. Or blame no one because these guys don’t owe us wanting to play in Utah or Cleveland.
Honestly, I think the "big market bias" people are describing in this thread is a real phenomenon, but this Mitchell example is just a bad one. He has concrete ties to New York, and it's been substantively rumored about him for a long time.
The same is not true of a ton of stars the media baselessly opines about "when" they'll force a move. Take Luka. Media members have been wishcasting for him to ask out to go to a big market for years. The same was true of Dame before this year, of Giannis, and of Embiid. There's nothing behind this reporting, but it's constant anyway.
There are also some tinfoil-hat breadcrumbs here. A couple years ago, Zach Lowe did a podcast around Summer League (IIRC) with a drunk Rachel Nichols on the background, who went on a long rant about a couple big name players not playing in markets she wanted to hang out in. I'm not sure that's such an uncommon sentiment around the media landscape.