In what can only be described as a slip-up of epic proportions by the employees at the senior home where he presumably lives, Denver Post columnist and flat-cap repository Mark Kizla gained access to both a computer and information about the 2017 NBA Draft, and attempted to write a column about the Denver Nuggets’ draft performance late Thursday night.

The resulting piece was posted to the Denver Post website, despite a valiant effort by the editorial staff to make it appear as a broken link for the first few minutes. Once it appeared, readers from all over the world were able to view the confused, distracted, and ill-informed basketball thoughts of a washed-up sports columnist, though most understandably declined to do so.

While many pundits and columnists had described Denver’s draft as underwhelming, the vast majority of these takes were undergirded by such features as: rational thinking, an understanding of the modern NBA, a non-superficial understanding of the Nuggets’ roster and assets, an ability to not use the same verb in three consecutive sentences, a lack of faux-folksy aphorisms that actively work to conceal the writer’s meaning, an argument that was not fatally tied to a ridiculous and self-defeating trade proposal the writer had made in an earlier column, a perspective that did not continue to labor under the delusion that the Carmelo Anthony trade was a bad move.

Sadly, Mike Kizla’s column contained none of the above features, though readers regrettably exposed to his viewpoint would discover a small-market thirst for big-name players at any cost, combined with an inexplicable yet insistent desire to refer to Nikola Jokic as "Big Honey."

But I don’t blame any of this on Mork Kizla, who has always combined the gasbag idiocy of Woody Paige with the lukewarm evil of Skip Bayless into a writing style that has gained him neither the memorability nor the financial success of either. No, the blame here belongs to his handlers, who ought to be paying more attention to him and keeping him better occupied, so that he is not placed in a position to humiliate himself like this.

Elder neglect is a very real problem in the United States, and only the most visible cases get the attention they deserve. If an old man was discovered walking down a major highway without any pants on, emergency services would be called. The man would be clothed and taken to a hospital for medical attention; the people responsible for his care would be located and possibly prosecuted. But Matt Kizla composes a cry for help like this, and it’s published in the Denver Post for all to see, and no one does anything.

I don’t know the specifics of his life or current home-care situation, but I do know that someone involved in the care and feeding of Merk Kizla ought to be ashamed of themselves, and can only hope that they will limit his computer access and give him big, shiny pictures of the 1998 Broncos to write about instead from here on out. No one deserves to be made into a laughingstock.