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I'm Seerat Sohi (@DamianTrillard). My aggregation skills amount to this page, which serves primarily as a link drop since I'm not really inclined to have many thoughts, musings, rants etc. I've written about the NBA for ESPN, Rolling Stone, Fansided, The Athletic, Sports on Earth, VICE, SB Nation, Sports Illustrated, and Bleacher Report.  Contact: [email protected].

[seeratsohi]

Nikola Jokic must keep playing like Nikola Jokic because no one else can

Plus, is Brad Stevens a witch?

Against the Kings in the Nuggets’ second game of the season, he went scoreless but gathered nine rebounds and doled out seven assists. Against the Raptors on Wednesday, he was two points shy of a triple-double. Jokic’s style is quintessentially European, prioritizing team concepts over individual stardom. He is easy, under North American tenets, to criticize when his pass goes haywire or a teammate rewards his generosity with a missed shot. But he is impossible to categorize, and even harder to guard. In his third NBA season, he is trying, as Denver continues to rebound from a horrendous offensive start, to redefine what it means to be star.

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Ben Simmons and Joel Embiid are the best kinds of problems for the 76ers

Plus, is the league going to learn to love Lonzo Ball?

As far as blue-chip prospects go, his skillset is surprisingly unconventional, making him an irresistible watch. He shoots with his off-hand, which might be why he’s wholly unreliable outside of 19 feet. But with a killer first step, and half a foot over most point guards, he could render that point moot. He is an athletic marvel yet, at 21 years old, he plays a cerebral style. Again, he is 6’10. And he is a point guard.

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How the NBA was saved on the back of a napkin

On the back of a napkin, the most important formula in NBA history was born.

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The Big Baller Brand Doesn't Need Lonzo Ball to Be Good

Rookie point guard Lonzo Ball holds the future of the Lakers in his hands. But his family's shoe company could succeed even if he turns out to be an NBA bust.

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Y'all Ready for Dion Waiters?

Man on an island? Nah. Most confident man in the NBA? Bet. Don't ask him? C'mon now—guy's got takes for days! Chapter 2 of B/R Mag's NBA preview.

During his career, Waiters has been the subject of ridicule, viewed as an inhabitant of an imaginary Waiters Island, dwindling in population every time he clanked another ill-advised shot. He's been a sixth man, a pariah, an underpaid shot-maker, a multimillionaire, a meme and an aspirational brand. He is also, by his assessment, a top-15 player in the NBA.

"I can one-on-one, mano-a-mano, BBQ chicken, I don't care. That's what it is," Waiters tells B/R Mag. "I like my chances."

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At NBA summer league, Satnam Singh is still fighting for his chance

After two years of development league experience, the Dallas Mavericks center has found a way to handle the pressure that came with being the first Indian-born player drafted into the NBA.

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LeBron James won’t last forever

I can’t pinpoint the exact moment it started happening. It was between graduation and the New Year. Somewhere, a light flickered off, and new things stop...

LeBron James has been a professional basketball player for over half my life. He has dominated the prism through which I consume the sport: the giant, roving platonic ideal of efficiency, of dominance, with enough mythology in tow to captivate a gothic historian.

And man, he is doing a number on me.

[seeratsohi]

Prepare yourself for the new and improved Playoff Giannis Antetokounmpo

The notion that history repeats itself can lend one a sense of nihilism. If the future is destined to be a mere variation on the past, what are we wading t...

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How Jimmy Butler's rise might force Chicago's hand

The 30th pick in an NBA draft isn't supposed to force an inflection point. But the Chicago Bulls must decide if Jimmy Butler is the leader they seek -- before Butler decides what he wants.

It's hard to know exactly what Jimmy Butler is -- this in his sixth season with the Chicago Bulls -- because what Jimmy Butler is is at odds with things. Lettuce, chocolate, pot pie.

He's also at war with the idea he's high maintenance. No, no, he insists -- he is "a normal individual," the guy who's always a phone call away, someone who can pop into a store and run an errand for you. He is, to hear him tell it ... Clark Kent.

[seeratsohi]

Drake, 2K and Netflix: Five Moments at Home with the Phoenix Suns

Devin Booker and Tyler Ulis give us an inside look into their young, rich and laid back lives

Their connection stretches far beyond table tennis. Booker, a second-year shooting guard, and Ulis, a rookie point guard, have been tight since middle school. From underrated high school prospects who made unconventional sacrifices to garner notice, to fighting for minutes on the loaded 38-1 Kentucky Wildcats, Booker, 20, and Ulis, 21, are bound by shared experiences and by living in the same apartment complex 15 minutes outside of Phoenix.

They don't live together, but they might as well. Despite having separate pads, Booker and Ulis operate like roommates, with Ulis dropping by Booker's place for bourre battles and pizza dinners. Barely legal, the rising Suns recently showed off their own kind of side hustle: down-home fun.

[seeratsohi]

Anthony Davis is a different kind of future

We like to predict the future. To maintain a front of intelligence, of self-assuredness, but more importantly, to really believe in it, to nourish a proper...

For years, supporters of new age basketball, ushered in by the statistical revolution, have considered two futures certain: Anthony Davis would take over the NBA, and a 3-point shot would become a necessary ingredient to superstardom — at the least, to efficient superstardom.

How is it, then, that Anthony Davis is second in the league in scoring, averaging 29.6 points per game, a cool 57.8 true shooting percentage, while nailing just over one triple every two games. Since the turn of the century, no player has disregarded the arc to that level and scored more than 28 points per game. The last player to do so was none other than Shaquille O’Neal. In a season that just saw the Warriors and Rockets face hoist more 3-pointers in 48 minutes than at any point in NBA history, how does Davis maintain that efficiency, that volume, that power to astound? He is proving, above all, that change isn’t linear, and we’re never as smart as we think we are.

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Are the Raptors finally Canada's team?

In their 21st season as an NBA franchise, the Toronto Raptors have bred nationwide fandom in a country typically more accustomed to icier sports.

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How do you solve the Golden State Warriors?

We’re coming off the season of the defensive highlight. It’s no small thing that the highlight of the NBA Finals was not a shot, nor a dunk, not even a...

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LeBron James, Michael Jordan, and chasing ghosts

LeBron James is untouchable, finally, inconceivably, inevitably, for the first time in his NBA career. In returning home and ending Cleveland’s champions...

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The NBA and its fans are now the most progressive in major sports

The first glimmers of progress only ever materialize in vague blurs and visions, deciphered as either signal or noise, until it all crashes down like a ton of bricks, crystallizing a collective hunch. Two years after Donald Sterling was handed a lifetime ban from the NBA -- which even then considered the easiest move in sports history,…

It’s undeniable that the NBA is now the most progressive league in major sports, and it might even be among the most progressive of American institutions, a stride it never would have been able to make without its fans. On the internet of 2016, with its infinite niches, there is no singular, reliable definition for what constitutes “mainstream.” What’s clear, though, is that the mainstream NBA fan is more diverse, young and internet-savvy than ever, which has given the league the space to alter its decision-making.

[seeratsohi]

NBA stars don’t all need to carry themselves like Tim Duncan

Tim Duncan’s aversion to the spotlight has its virtues, but it doesn’t make him morally superior to those who embrace it.

“When LeBron and his brand-conscious buddies Chris Paul, Dwyane Wade and Carmelo took the stage at the ESPYs donning black suits and urging athletes and others in the crowd to get educated on the issues of gun violence and racial profiling ravaging the country, the size of their spotlight mattered a great deal. If you have something to stand for besides yourself, self-promotion can double as a moral imperative.”

[seeratsohi]

The Wonderful, Terrible, Hopeful Journey of Skal Labissiere | VICE Sports

At 14, Skal Labissiere left a Haiti devastated by disaster and followed his basketball dream to the United States, and the NBA. It wasn't any easier than it sounds.

“Then the earthquake struck. A wall collapsed on Labissiere's back, and forced him into a crouch that would make his legs go numb for weeks. Underneath the rubble, he couldn't see a thing. He couldn't move. The only hint of the outside world were screams: cries for help from families, friends, a whole community of voices outside, pleading for familiar voices to respond. Labissiere and his family, trapped inside, were screaming only for recognition, signaling for anyone at all who could hear them to help. Labissiere did this, too, until the moment came when he stopped believing help would arrive.”