ESPN Trade Machine Collapses

Hey everyone, I found this story on online and I thought you would all be interested:

ESPN announced today that their popular flash-based on-line trade resource, the Trade Machine, had completely and utterly collapsed in the wake of continued ridiculous trade proposals.

 

 “Well, when we created it, we just thought it would be fun for people to play GM, check salaries, et cetera. We had no idea so many people would use it to create trades that had no real basis in reality, as though it were some kind of Monopoly for the NBA game,” Michael Cordwainer, the IT Manager for ESPN.com, said, “It was never designed to handle the sheer volume of idiocy it encountered, and apparently it overloaded.”

 

According to Cordwainer, the application stopped working at 12:49 PM EST on Wednesday. At the time, a user known only as “theghostofBenQRock” was attempting to create a trade involving five teams (the Orlando Magic, Los Angeles Lakers, Oklahoma City Thunder, New Orleans Hornets, and Los Angeles Clippers) that would create a lineup of the following players for the Orlando Magic: Chris Paul-PG, Kobe Bryant-SG, Kevin Durant-SF, Blake Griffin-PF, and Dwight Howard-C.

 

“The Trade Machine had endured a lot, I mean a lot, of abuse over the last couple of days,” said Cordwainer, “but when it saw some yahoo trying to trade Kobe Bryant for Gilbert Arenas and Chris Duhon, well, I think that was just too much.”

 

Marc Stein, a senior writer for ESPN, said that “what people need to realize is that while trade salaries might work, the chances of a lot of these trades going through are really, really low – like close to nonexistent. And yet, despite that, people keep creating them and posting links to them. It says a great deal about our readers-I mean, these are really dedicated people. They persist in the face of adversity, complication, and even logic. They care passionately about the game of basketball. Also, a certain percentage of them are really, really, desperately stupid.”

 

ESPN.com has said that they have plans to restore the Trade Machine, and that repairs are under way. IT consultants are reportedly working around the clock to move the application back to a functioning level, and to insulate its memory algorithms against the sort of stupidity that caused the crash initially.

 

Outside perspectives of the collapse have been mixed, with most admitting that it came to very little of a loss in the scope of things. Asked for comment, Charles Barkley (analyst for TNT) was overheard to have said: “I’ve got nothing positive to say about that stupid web-site. You want something positive? OK-it’s positively a piece of crap.”