A guide to navigating the NBA's slowest offseason months

After getting fat on the Finals, draft, and free agency in June and July, the NBA settles in for a two month hibernation period where business grinds to a virtual halt (don’t tell the Brooklyn Nets). That doesn’t mean basketball doesn’t flood your social media timelines, though. But the dearth of NBA basketball and the hunger to see your favorite players doing anything on the floor creates some mirages out there. I’m just here to help you understand that there's no water in this desert.

Pro Am results aren’t real

All I need to remind you of is when Payton Pritchard took a day off from summer league last year to go to a Portland Pro Am and drop 92 points. 

Okay, that's fun. The highlights from these things can be absurd. They can scratch an itch. 

I’m not here to squash anyone’s fun. I’m not the “you must be fun at parties” guy (I can, in fact, be quite fun at parties). I’m also not going to pretend to be impressed by an NBA player of any level putting up big numbers at a Pro Am, because the abbreviation for amateur is directly in the title of the event. 

The Pros versus the Ams will never go well for the Ams. I don’t care how far down the bench the NBA player is, he’s going to look good when going against guys who are not in the league. 

So by all means, enjoy the highlights of NBA players destroying wanna-bes. I think it’s fun to see just how much better NBA guys going at half speed can be against motivated guys who are good athletes but completely outmatched. 

Just don’t take it a step further and try to apply it to the upcoming season. There's no “oh wow he has this now?” going on with any of these players. They're just messing around. 

The workout videos aren’t either

That leads us to my favorite August/September videos: guys working alone and making shots in an empty gym. 

I once watched Ben Simmons hit a lot of 3-pointers in an empty Wells Fargo Center hours before gametime. Andre Drummond is notorious for his late summer workout videos which show him bombing away from deep. 

It gets even better when the empty gym workouts get some slick editing and background music and maybe a caption like “no off days” or “the grind don’t stop.” 

The whole goal is to give you just enough to make the player look good. My favorite video is this four second clip of Mfiondu Kabengele making corner 3-pointers. 

That's just two makes. If he made a third or fourth one, they’d be on the video. 

The goal is to stop the video when it stops making a guy look good. 

This is more a commentary on where we are with social media. People don’t believe players are working out hard enough if the player hasn’t posted videos of himself working out, so everyone feels obligated to put something out there. And if they're putting something out there, might as well make it look good. 

All I want to see is the result. I’m not impressed by 1-on-0 drills with a chair in the way. I’m not giving out pats on the back for doing what they're supposed to be doing. 

Guys on vacation can still be working out 

Go look at the comments under any NBA player’s vacation photo on Instagram and it probably won’t take long to get to one that says “you should be working on …” and whatever the player struggled with last season. 

Guys are allowed to get away after a long season. They're allowed to get some rest and relaxation. 

They're also allowed into just about any gym in the world, and many of them do find their way onto a court for an early workout, even on vacation. 

Just because you see one snapshot of a person’s life, it doesn’t mean that person is only doing that the whole time. Don’t be that dude telling Jaylen Brown to work on his free throws or ball handling just because he’s at fashion week. 

There's a trick to muscle watch photos

I love the mid-workout, heavy shadow workout photo when muscles are at full pump and every bit of definition is highlighted by the overhead lights and layer of sweat. 

Again, let me see how you walk into media day before I get too caught up in your IG story. I’ve seen guys post some real swole photos and then show up to camp looking pretty much the same. 

I say we all borrow that trick. Before someone snaps a photo of you at the family reunion, drop and bang out 20 pushups. 

Now that you’re prepared for the doldrums of the offseason, you can cruise through social media properly prepared for all these NBA tropes. If you want to come say hi to me at the Garden and laugh about this stuff, you can find me doing dips on the railing between sections just in case you want to take a photo.