After the news about the NBA's judgment on the Clippers dropped recently, I listened to all of the podcasts diving in to what a catastrophe it is for the team.

One thing that came up a couple times was speculation about Kawhi's injury record over the past few years. With all of these deals going on behind the scenes, and hard-bargaining kind of way they seemd to have been negotiated, it's natural to wonder if his injuries could have coincided with the moments when these deals were being made, to allow his camp to increase the pressure.

In a previous time, this is the kind of throwaway thing that people would just speculate on and move on. However, as I was listening to people talk about this, I realized: "Hey! I can just do this analysis with Claude!" And so I did.

What I found was not actually what those podcast people were speculating happened. Instead, if you plot out the different communications in the NBA's report and overlay them with Kawhi's playing record, it's pretty clear that, at least from what we have today, there isn't really any clear kind of correlation between the two. Most of these deals were actually made in the off-season, or at times where Kawhi was already dealing with something that was clearly a serious injury.

This was actually a hopeful finding for me, because I think it's still possible to believe that even though Kawhi's inner circle (probably with is knowledge) were doing all of these inappropriate deals beyind the scenes, there was still an integrity to his play on the basketball court.

Find the full artifact here: https://claude.ai/code/artifact/9f4fb506-6780-4604-af6b-400b39b5aa7e

While not the most exciting finding, it was incredibly satisfying to do this because I could just answer a question that would otherwise be floating unanswered. For me, this has been the major unlock of AI: it's just lowered the implementation effort of everything to where I'm actually just able to do things now, without just passing it over or burning out on it like I would have before.