The Golden State Warriors are planning to sign 34-year-old center Andrew Bogut for the remainder of the season, according to a Yahoo Sports report citing anonymous league sources. Bogut, who left the NBA when the Lakers waived him last February, has been playing professionally in Australia since April, and will have to receive a letter of clearance from the Sydney Kings before he can join an NBA team.
Bogut is old as hell, struggled with injuries for basically his entire career, and was pretty thoroughly washed up even before his previous run with the Warriors ended in 2016. His value in 2019 springs pretty much entirely from whatever hope anybody has that he might be able to spread his six fouls out over as many as 12 broadly not-disastrous minutes of playing time while DeMarcus Cousins catches his breath. Golden State wants him as a downmarket Zaza Pachulia, who was a downmarket Andrew Bogut when they added him in 2016. This is not a blockbuster personnel decision. I’m only blogging this news because Andrew Bogut sucks, and his (apparent) return to the league is an occasion for me to direct you to our own Tom Ley’s very good 2013 blog about why he sucks, from our NBA Shit List series.
In particular, this paragraph:
Andrew Bogut came into the league as nothing more than the pro athlete version of a shitty hot taker, a guy who knew how to calibrate what he said precisely enough to move the needle without having anyone call his routine out for what it was. The only real difference in his case was that “needle” meant draft stock. He was Colin Cowherd in size fourteens, and all the more spectacularly vulgar just because he was a foreign national going on about his racial grievances in a culture he didn’t even understand. Imagine Colin Cowherd stepping off a plane in Germany and immediately starting in on the sinister Turk. That’s Andrew Bogut.
Andrew Bogut sucks! There’s a slim but real chance that he will start in on some extremely online redpill shit that causes Cousins to uppercut him into orbit at some point between his arrival in Oakland and when the Warriors inevitably win their third straight title this summer. Whereas there is practically no chance that he’ll ever record another double-double as an NBA player.
But also, let’s take a moment to pour one out for poor Robin Lopez, the Chicago Bulls big man. The Warriors identified greater frontcourt depth as one of their needs quite some time ago; according to the reports, they had their eyes on Lopez in the post-break buyout market, and Lopez, at least according to all the rumors (which, to be fair, Lopez contradicted with his own public statements), had the hots for joining them. In any event, the buyout never materialized—either because the Bulls’ floridly dysfunctional front office never offered one or because Lopez never asked—and now instead of coasting to his first championship ring on the most loaded team in history, he’ll stay on the Bulls. That’s awful. It’s somehow even more awful if this is the outcome he wanted.
Anyway, congratulations to Andrew Bogut on winning his second championship ring.