I have evidence in my possession that Domantas Sabonis has, for the past few weeks, deliberately been performing below season norms. The evidence is incontrovertible. All one has to do is look at his game logs, see the recent absence of twenty-point games, and start connecting the dots. Since I have already connected all the dots, I’ll fill you in on the full picture to save you the mental exhaustion of trying to piece things together yourself:
Domantas Sabonis was afraid of being kicked off my channel, so he started underperforming in order to avoid that fate.
It’s so obvious. He, or somebody in his inner circle, was reading my video descriptions and noticed my sometimes veiled, sometimes overt allusions to the resentment that I felt towards having to make so many videos for him. Rather than face the decline in popularity that would necessarily follow a banishment from DownToBuck, Sabonis decided to take a temporary hit to his popularity by lowering the quality of his play, thus lowering his season averages to numbers more in line with the goals of my channel.
This might sound like tampering, but the league office will be hard-pressed to punish Sabonis for this subtle, but noticeable dip in on-court effectiveness. He’s not betting on games or doing anything else with immediate monetary implications. He’s just trying to stay within the parameters set by YouTube’s premier highlight-making superstar (me) so that Lithuanians have a known, comfortable place to go when they want to watch Domantas Sabonis highlight videos.
However, if Sabonis gets a $25,000 fine for unspecified “conduct detrimental to the team”, you’ll know why.