Marcus Hayes Is a F*cking Idiot

A fun theory is that Dario Saric – an apparently omniscient 22-year-old basketball player from Croatia – was tipped off to a military coup that took place in Turkey yesterday, when elements of the military attempted, and seemingly failed, to overthrow President Erdogan. And that is the reason Saric left his Turkish team and will play for the Sixers at an extreme discount this season.

Never mind that Saric has said all along that he would come play for the Sixers this season (athletes do lie sometimes), Marcus Hayes is positing – seriously – that the specific reason Saric is here is because of his advanced knowledge of the coup:

OK, this is fun. But is it an actual possibility, or is Hayes just a genuine idiot who is equating A with G? Let’s unpack, using some of Marcus’ own explanation:

To summarize: Hayes believes, without a shadow of doubt, that Saric is here because of the situation in Turkey. He cites a July 2 Bob Ford article in which Ford cited terrorism concerns in Turkey as a reason for why Saric may want to leave. Ford’s take was reasonable – it is entirely possible that the deteriorating conditions played into Saric’s decision – but it had literally nothing to do with a coup. Here’s what Ford wrote:

Earlier this year, another scout answered the question by saying, “Istanbul’s not the greatest place to be right now.”

That sobering assessment was borne out by the recent terror attack at Ataturk airport that left 36 dead and scores more injured. Terrorism has been a continuing danger in the east and south of Turkey, where the country borders Syria, Iraq, and Iran, but the same threats have now reached Istanbul near the western edge.

Whether the security situation affects Saric’s plans is unknown. If he chose, he could also jump back to the Croatian league or to another European league while waiting out the one additional year that would let him join the NBA free of any salary restraints. That isn’t his plan, however, at least according to interviews with the media in Croatia.

Hayes is equating that line about terrorism – REAL, ACTUAL CONCERN – with the coup that caught the world off-guard yesterday at almost the exact moment Saric was signing his contract with the Sixers. The timing is certainly curious, and makes for a fun conspiracy theory, but implying that Saric is here because he knew of the coup is patently absurd.

According to multiple reports (I won’t pretend to have known about the political climate in Turkey the way Marcus is), President Erdogan is highly sympathetic to Islamist beliefs, and some, including those in the military, who don’t serve Erdogan but rather the constitution, which is built around secularism (essentially the separation of church and state– the same thing we have here in America), and Western nations, believed he was, at best, not doing enough to fight terrorism (read: ISIS) or, at worst, aiding them in some ways. Going against “The West” is never a good strategy for a Middle Eastern president. So some believe that Western interests may have had something to do with the coup. But seeing as though it seems to have been a poorly planned, or executed, attempt that has apparently failed, “The West,” which typically doesn’t miss in these sorts of “spontaneous” clashes, may have had little or nothing to do with it. In other words: the coup may not have been part of some large international plot to overthrow Erdogan. And though it may have had some tacit relationship to terrorism in general, it had absolutely nothing to do with the very real, everyday terrorism concerns in Turkey that Ford cited in his July 2 piece.

But Marcus won’t let facts get in the way of his “I told you so.” He even goes so far as to imply that Saric’s “people” were talking to “people” who planned and carried out the coup, and connects, in a theory straight out of a disjointed season of Homeland, the fact that Bryan Colangelo and Brett Brown apparently had to get State Department approval to travel to Turkey, which seems to have stemmed from nothing more than State Departments warnings about terrorism there, to the coup yesterday. More succinctly: Hayes is implying that Saric knew of the coup, and that you, sports dummy, would’ve known too had you been keeping up with the Erdogans.

Unfortunately (for Hayes), though coups not unprecedented in Turkish history, the one yesterday came largely as a surprise to most experts.

Here’s David Blair, Chief Foreign Correspondent for The Telegraph:

Yet a coup would still come as a surprise. Turkey has experienced three successful military takeovers since 1960, but the last one occurred as long ago as 1980. Although there have been plenty of rumours of plots – and Mr Erdogan’s mass trials of military officers in the early years of his rule – most experts had assumed that he was firmly in control.

Only Dario knew of the coup.

Dani Rodrik, “a Turkish economist and international development expert at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government” who calls the coup “puzzling” and “poorly planned,” backs this sentiment.

Only Dario knew of the coup.

And Marcus. Marcus knew of the coup, too.

Here’s the thing: It’s entirely possible that terrorism concerns in Turkey did the Sixers no harm in convincing Saric to come over when he said he was going to come over all along. Had Hayes just stopped there and pointed out that Turkey is a shit show, he actually would’ve made a salient point. But rather, in his blind-rage hatred of everything Hinkie, he attempted to connect Saric’s signing with the coup itself and, in the process, implied that the Sixers’ (Hinkie’s) plan took another step forward only because of the stroke of “luck” of an unforeseen military coup. I told you so! This Process was such an fools errand that it required a failed geopolitical event to work.

But hey, why stop at completely tinfoil bananas? Let’s go a step further: Maybe Sam Hinkie is part of an off-books operation reporting directly to globalist, Zionist Joshua Harris and orchestrated the coup from the start. Trust the process.