Welcome to the Ringer NBA show I'm Chris Vernon at the day a very special guest known from Twitter as at network his name is Jason

and he's a staff writer for the Ringer dot com and he joins us today. Hey Jason. Let's do this. First let me ask you about the the Twitter handle. You are a mysterious man. It took very serious negotiations for you to agree to even come on this podcast. Um, we're not allowed to talk about those. I want to know about the genesis of your Twitter name at network. It's my it's my Xbox.

Live gamer tag. We had first 11 12 years now. Yeah. Uh, it's just my gamer tag. And then so when I needed a Twitter handle the first thing that came to mind. Why did you replace? I wasn't yet thinking about brand synergy. You know, that hadn't yet occurred to me, but I see the importance of it now.

Is the old replaced with a three because at network with a O was not available or was that just the way your gamer tag always was. So that's what you signed up for.

That part of it was it wasn't available. So I just added the three, which is a common gamer thing to replace vowels with numbers, various letters with numbers.

These become seven eyes become ones. And so on. Do you play video games every day? No, not anymore. At one point in my life. Yes. For sure. Like every day. But you know, now it's like I mostly keep it restrained to Fridays.

Do you still have the same type? Yeah. People from people that know you from the internet found you on Xbox live and been like, Hey, are you that guy from Twitter?

That happens every week that happened just a few days ago. I was in a game. Someone sent me a message like, ask the master. Like, yeah, me.

And then I'll go on Twitter like after a game and be like, I just played with you, dude, you were trash or whatever, you know.

That is fun. That's kind of fun. The season is almost upon us, Jason. We are just a lesson two weeks away. I want to go back to an article for the ringer a couple weeks ago, which is the hipster teams. And you went through and you chronicled all the different hipster teams throughout the years, right?

Not necessarily the most popular teams are the teams that everybody likes, but what hardcore basketball fans are in the know fans. They decide is their favorite team. And I'm not going to go through all the teams that you went through over time.

I'm most interested in who you think is the hipster team now. And you said it's the T wolves. Was there anybody first? All right, first explain to me why the T wolves are the hipster team.

Well, it's young players, unproven young players that are really exciting to watch. I think Chris Dunn is like, he's either going to put up highlights every night or have nine turnovers a game.

I mean, if you know, assuming Tabeto gives him that much run, but they just got like young exciting players, that Levine scored 30 the other night in a loss.

Carlynde and Towns, the best young big head since Tim Dunngan. It's just there just a really fun team and they're all like 23-ish years old.

So it's for me, a hipster team is a team where they're potential and they're on court style.

Super sees their actual ability to win games. Kind of like that hopeful honeymoon period where you're willing to overlook like guys being terrible at defense because they're just the potential they have is just so mind boggling.

Like Devon Booker is a guy like this who is like, you know, just incredible to watch looks like he could be the future of the two guard position, but also he can't really guard anybody.

But you don't care because he's 20. Those are the teams I like. Those are the guys I like. You know, especially in the NBA where it's like you pretty much know who's going to win the championship every year.

Can you even consider anybody else besides the T-wolves?

Yeah. Who?

I mean, I looked at Philly just because I'm beat. You know, it's coming back, but I really, you know, the trailblazers a little bit.

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