Summer -- the draft is past, free agency is upon us, and news of the NBA for the few months will be long stretches of nothingness punctuated by the signing of a player here and there with a burst of chatter that follows.

But minds cannot stand the quiet. This season cannot be marked by the serence absence of content, with us content to read a book or go swim in the creek or pay attention to baseball. No, our idleness must be busy, or at least have a veneer of busyness.

And thus, we have the question mark. In the absence of real news, with the holds of team's ships shut tight, we must create news. We need something to talk about. We will take a story filled with nothing but air like a journalistic beach ball to toss about for a day or two until the next pretend story emerges. But we also must hold some vestige of credibility, of plausible denaibility, whilst we fabricate stories out of whole cloth about thus and such player signing with thus and such team. Otherwise, after the third or fourth lie is exposed, people might stop listening to us, and not being listened to is even worse than having nothing to listen to. So after knitting together our latest masterpiece of a mendacity, we append the glorious "?" to the le.

With the "?" neither feasibility, nor common sense, nor anything near as complicated as understanding NBA salary-cap rules need apply. We are limited only by our imaginations. Are you one of the six or seven Grizzlies fans left existing, stranded with no hope? Then how about a "LeBron to Grizzlies?" thread to tide you over for a day or two? You can create a world where LeBron James wants nothing more than to get away from it all and set up shop in a sleepy, decaying river town for fifty cents on the dollar. It's no different than the escapism of a summer movie.

Some use the "?" like a lottery ticket. The odds of your winning the lottery are terrible, but the dream of seeing those six numbers come up is tantalizing. It's just six numbers, right? And sure, your trade scenario where another team sends your favorite team their young superstar in exchange for various flotsam and jetsam of bad contracts, has-beens, and never-weres is highly unlikely, but in the unlikely event it does happen, you will be seen as a great sage for at least two or three days, on some part of the internet. And it costs you nothing except that extra keystroke, the "?"

So let's salute the "?" and all the threads that bear it. Like one of those summer so-called reality shows, we know they're totally fake, but for some people it's fun to pretend for a few minutes that they aren't.