An NBA Fan Is Using Astrology to Predict Teams' Chemistry and Compatibility

Last week saw the NBA's trade deadline and a frantic reshuffling just two months out from the playoffs. As I tried to wrap my head around some of the bigger moves and what they could mean for the rest of the season, one voice cut through the noise: The Zodiac GM, a seemingly omniscient fixture in NBA Twitter whose appraisals of team chemistry and players’ destinies have frequently played out in reality. He predicted, for example, that my favorite player, James Harden (Virgo sun, Cancer moon), would leave the Philadelphia 76ers shortly after they hired Nick Nurse (Leo sun) as head coach. The Zodiac GM also predicted the Sixers’ new additions would play together with “A+” synergy and… their first few games together have proved him right so far! https://twitter.com/TheZodiacGM/status/1670948691417366530 Since it's Valentine's Day and we're one week away from the NBA All-Star break (which is when serious teams *chart* their path to the playoffs), I spoke with The Zodiac GM. And I had to wean my list of well over 100 questions down to slightly fewer than 100 questions for the hour-long conversation, which wasn't easy. As he observed about me (Taurus sun, Capricorn moon, Capricorn rising), I have a “thirst for the facts,” which is a gentle way to say I’m nosy. But it’s hard not to have questions for someone who’s combined two seemingly gendered, disparate interests to create a new and surprisingly intuitive lens to assess NBA teams’ chemistry and even their futures.  My first question was obvious: Between all my league favorites, Harden, Devin Booker (Scorpio sun), Ben Simmons (Cancer sun, Virgo moon), and Jaylen Brown (Scorpio sun), who am I the most compatible with? Of course, I was asking about romantic compatibility, but when The Zodiac GM took my question as one of basketball compatibility, I didn’t correct him—I actually love the idea that maybe I'm the missing piece Harden needs to finally win a championship ring. Alas, you’ll be happy to learn that my Taurus sun is very compatible with all of the above—but I am “by far most compatible with” Simmons, a Cancer, because as a Taurus, I would “stabilize the volatility of his emotions.” (Or, in other words, I would have saved his run with the Sixers if I’d been on the team amid their explosive falling-out in 2021.) As an Earth sign, my “grounded” energy would also pair well with Scorpios Booker (who's already received multiple love letters from me) and Brown. Luckily, I’d also be compatible with Harden. But the Zodiac GM warned me that Harden's Virgo "nitpickiness" might bother me as a stubborn Taurus—to which I had to explain that nothing Harden could ever do would even remotely bother me. The Zodiac GM, who prefers to stay a mystery to his spellbound followers, says he came to love astrology while bonding with his brother who has autism, as it helped them make sense of communicating with and understanding each other. He then wound up studying it for over 30 years. “It’s not just for romantic relationships,” he told Jezebel. Astrology is a "science." With each team, he looks at the signs of their head coach and general manager, their starting five, and their bench; then he organizes the signs by their elements and modalities—there are cardinal signs (the “bold initiators,” per WikiHow), fixed signs (“enduring followers”), and mutable signs (“dynamic changemakers”). Each team needs the right balance of all of those. The Los Angeles Clippers are a perfect example of a team with “excellent synergy,” flush with earth and water signs, whose modalities align and combine both bold leadership and stability. Even when the Clippers had a rough…