Chris Sheridan notes that LeBron James opened Team USA's exhibition game against Turkey with a FIBA move, swatting a ball that had hit the rim and was likely to bound into the hoop away from the basket. That's goaltending in America, but legitimate defense under FIBA rules.
That seems like an important step to me. Over the past few years, I've consistently thought that the fact that the rules have been an underplayed problem for American teams in international competitions -- it's hard when our guys are playing under unfamiliar rules that their opponents are familiar with. But it seems that this year the players and the coaching staff are putting more emphasis on getting people to think about how the FIBA ruleset should effect their behavior.
Chris Broussard wrote last week about the Atlanta Hawks lowballing Josh Smith: "Atlanta realizes Smith has no leverage (I'm told Europe is not on his radar), and while one could argue the Hawks are being smart financially, they're screwing up by creating bad blood with one of their main cogs."
In the wake of what happened with Josh Childress doesn't the clear solution here seem to be putting Europe on his radar? Smith could even choose, at the end of the day, to stay in the states for less money than what some Euro squad is offering him but if he's not happy with Atlanta's $57 million, six year deal he should see if someone is willing to pay him more. It's crazy to leave the option of Europe entirely off the table.
Already this offseason, the weak dollar and the strong Euro have changed the traditional pro basketball balance of power with a number of foreign players either opting to head for Europe or else (Tiago Splitter) stay over there despite offers to come to the states. Top superstars can earn more in the United States, but for lesser players the calculation's not quite clear and in certain instances you can make more money in Europe. And then yesterday Josh Childress became the first American to do something similar.
As a restricted free agent in a market where nobody has cap space, he had no way to earn more than the midlevel exemption unless Atlanta decided to feel generous. So he took an offer from Olympiakos in Greece that's worth more. If this trend continues, I wonder if it might not lead to more talented 18 year-olds seeking to go to Europe to earn money in exchange for their work rather than obeying the terms of the American sports cartel and working for free for a year or three in college.
Players who want to enter the NFL draft need to take a modified IQ test called the Wonderlic that's scored on a 0-50 scale, with a 20 representing an IQ of about 100. Consequently, one can do things like assemble the graphic above which show the average IQ by position. "The closer you are to the ball, the higher your score" is one common way of familiarizing the results, though in fact the tackles on the offensive line seem to score higher than the guards. Long story short, being the quarterback demands intelligence and so does executing blocking schemes on offense.
I keep forgetting to blog about Denver's salary dump trade sending Marcus Camby to the Clippers even though the Center for American Progress primarily hired me because John Podesta felt they had to beef up their NBA coverage to prepare for the looming era of having a hoops fan in the White House.
Camby is, though kind of old at this point, still really good. This is going to make Denver much worse and yet their payroll is still going to be high and they don't seem all that well-positioned to rebuild. For the Clippers, by contrast, I'd say this is about as good as resigning Elton Brand would have been -- they'll be in the playoff mix but not among the West's elite.
Here I'd been pessimistic about the outlook for the Wizards in an Eastern Conference where Detroit, Boston, Cleveland, and Orlando are still clearly superior while Atlanta and Philadelphia seem poised for improvement while we tread water. But I hadn't been paying attention to the Dee Brown signing. Now we're set!
The housemates were watching boxing yesterday evening when I came home, and during the broadcast I had occasion to learn of the existence of the boxer Nikolai Valuev who's over 7 feet tall. Why isn't he playing basketball? Maybe he never learned the game? But no "When I was on the fifths form I started to play basketball. Finally, I moved to the boarding school ?1of Leningrad specialized in sport. When I was a member of combined team of Frunzenskoi children sport school I was managed to be the basketball champion of country among the junior boys."
Obviously, I'm a basketball fan. But that aside, it features more money and less brain damage -- what's not to like?
Arroyo isn't a sexy name, but the market has a shortage of point guards, and Arroyo was more than adequate as a backup in Orlando last season.
Recalling my use-mention distinction, it's true that Arroyo isn't a sexy name (he's a basketball player) but I think "Arroyo" is about as sexy a name as any other on the list. Certainly I'd take it over "Dooling" (number six, too close to "drooling") or "Nachbar" (number nine, too Serbian). Nachbar, meanwhile, might be the shooting the new-look sixers need at a price they can afford.
It's been a hectic day so I haven't had a chance to note that Elton Brand decided to sign with the Philadelphia 76ers rather than re-up with the new LA Clippers featuring Baron Davis. That means another trip to the lottery for the Clips, and it also means the creation of a Philly squad that's pretty damn good by Eastern Conference standards. Boston and Detroit still seem better, but Brand and Andre Iguodala is a solid inside-outside combination, Andre Miller's been underrated for years, and Samuel Dalembert is a solid role player. If this means Thaddeus Young can start at the three with Iguodala sliding over to shooting guard, thus plugging the big hole in their starting lineup.
One popular vein of analysis in sports commentary is doing "similarity scores" for different athletes. By analyzing the past career of a current player and seeing which older players he's similar to, you can glean information about his likely future trajectory. Nate Silver, who mainly does quantitative sports analysis though he's recently become known for his political blogging, has done something similar for American states based on a variety of political and demographic factors.
It's an interesting exercise and shows, among other things, that there's less similarity than I might have thought out there. A number of states, including very large ones like Florida and Texas, are essentially unique by this standard and the closest any pair gets (North Carolina and South Carolina) is 71 out of 100.
In three seasons with the trio of Arenas, Antawn Jamison and Caron Butler, the Wizards have won 43, 41 and 42 games and haven't made it past the first round of the playoffs. The three players are 26, 32 and 28, respectively, so it seems likely that we've seen about the best we're going to get from them. They're an average team, and without an infusion of vastly better players around them, they'll keep being an average team.
Yet instead of blowing that trio up, the Wizards took a Bob-Beamonesque leap of faith this week. First they extended Jamison for four years and $50 million, and then they offered Arenas a monstrous six-year, $127 million package. Given that Arenas is coming off a major knee injury that kept him sidelined nearly all of last season and is heavily dependant on his quickness to be an elite scorer, his offer in particular appears to be a reach.
The trouble is that I think the Wizards think our "big three" is really superb and the team is only average because they have a below-average supporting cast. I don't think the evidence bares that out, either if you look at certain fancy statistical metric or simply the commonsense observation that losing Gilbert Arenas didn't hurt the team very much. Brendan Haywood, Antonio Daniels, DeShawn Stevenson, and Andray Blatche aren't great basketball players but as 4-7 guys in the rotation they're totally fine. The issue is that Arenas, Jamison, and Caron Butler are all kind of borderline stars. In the case of Butler that's great since he's cheap.
But the kind of money they just committed to Agent Zero needs to be saved for a truly phenomenal player. If it wasn't possible to resign Jamison and Arenas on the cheap, then this summer was a chance to blow the team up and rebuild around Butler's excellent contract and the team's decent supporting players. Instead, we're going back to war with what we had, hoping Jamison never shows his age and Gilbert's knee doesn't hamper his effectiveness.
I don't really follow tennis and wouldn't claim that it's an especially thrilling sport to watch, but there really is something appealingly epic about yet another Nadal-Federer matchup and the rivalry between these two. There's really nothing else like it in sports right now.
Like the evil Wes Clark, I'm a bit unclear on what it is about the physical and moral courage John McCain showed while captive in Vietnam that indicates he'd do a good job of managing US national security policy. The key point I'm missing seems to be that "military background = awesome" irrespective of specifics. Thus, when the NBA tells us it's going to clean up officiating by hiring retired Army Major General Ronald Johnson we raise no eyebrows at the news that Johnson "was commanding general of the Army Corps of Engineers, Gulf Region division, from 2003-04, responsible for overseeing $18 billion of reconstruction in Iraq." After all, it's not like half that money went missing or anything.
In a surprise move, looks like Baron Davis is going to sign with the LA Clippers. My understanding is that this means Elton Brand would have to take a small paycut for the Clippers to resign him, but if they can work out a deal that's a pretty damn solid inside-outside duo.
Not quite sure how to feel about Antawn Jamison's new contract. It sounds like folly to offer a big money contract to a 32 year-old, but there's been no deterioration in his skills so maybe it'll pay off. But who were the Wizards bidding against here?
Chad Ford repeats a common assessment of Andris Biedrins: "Biedrins falls a little bit into the Anderson Varejao category -- energetic big man whose stats don't tell the whole story in terms of on-court contributions."
But here's the thing: Unless by "stats" you mean "per game scoring average and nothing else" the story Biedrins' stats tell you is that he's a very good player. His stats tell me that he average 9.8 rebounds per game in 27.4 mpg. They tell me that his 10.5 ppg came on an extraordinarily good 63 percent field goal percentage. They tell me that the Warriors defense was better with Biedrins on the floor. These contributions are perfectly quantifiable.
I think Chad Ford amptly sums up Gilbert Arenas' free agent status:
The biggest issue for Arenas is the same one that plagues all the free agents: Who else has the money to pay him? I can't see the 76ers or Grizzlies spending the cash. The Clippers would have interest, but Arenas already spurned them once.
That's why I find things like this so hard to understand: "According to a league source familiar with the situation, Wizards President Ernie Grunfeld plans on soon offering Arenas a lucrative long-term contract, one that could cover up to six years and could be worth more than $100 million." It would be one thing if the Clippers had actually offered Arenas, say, a $90 million contract and the Wizards were countering. That kind of money would still, in my view, be a mistake but I could understand it on some level. But why make a pre-emptive bid like that.
It's a bit late to be commenting on this, but hasn't Kevin McHale pulled off a great deal swapping O.J. Mayo, Antoine Walker, Marko Jaric, and Greg Buckner for Kevin Love, Mike Miller, Brian Cardinal, and Jason Collins? Of the eight players in this deal, there are two prospects, five scrubs, and one good player. McHale got the good player. And while I wouldn't be shocked if Mayo turned out to be a better player than Love, I wouldn't be shocked if things turned out the other way. And the Timberwolves didn't take any kind of financial hit on this in terms of contracts.
Basically the Wolves exchanged one plausible #3 draft pick for another totally plausible #3 draft pick and snagged Mike Miller in the bargain. That's still not a playoff team in the West, but it's a pretty damn solid trade.
Everyone seems to agree that the New Jersey Nets shipping Richard Jefferson to Milwaukee for Bobby Simmons and Yi Jianlian was fundamentally about clearing cap space to try to lure LeBron James to the future Brooklyn Nets. One could imagine this happening, but I have to say I've always been skeptical of the idea that James would have substantially more marketing power in the Big Apple.
I could see that for, maybe, Michael Redd who tends to languish in obscurity right now because the Bucks aren't a great team and they're located in Milwaukee whereas the best player on a mediocre Knicks squad would be a star. But given James' current level of fame, if I were his manager I would tell him that team success is going to be a much more important factor than team location. James is already well-known and you could make the case that he's the best player in the league right now. If he wins championships, more people will make that case. If he plays with inadequate teammates and exits the playoffs in the first round people will start talking about how he's overrated and the world will move on to its next basketball savior.
To me, that would have to be the reason to leave Cleveland -- to move to a team with a better shot of winning. Ultimately, it's hard to sustain success as an NBA star without being on teams that go deep in the playoffs.
Gotta say I'm a little baffled by Knicks fans booing the Danillo Gallinari pick. Maybe he'll work out well as an NBA player and maybe he won't -- about the same thing you could say about anyone picked sixth in an average draft year. This is about where all the "draft experts" expecting him to go and John Hollinger's Euroleague translation formula says he'll be . . . the sixth-best player in the draft:
Wizards get JaVale McGee, meanwhile, but I would have rather seen Kosta Koufos.
Swapping Jermaine O'Neal for TJ Ford, Rasho Nesterovic's expiring deal, and a Toronto draft pick seems like a reasonable move for Indiana and an excellent pickup for the Raptors. Toronto was overstocked with Ford and Calderon at the point so even though Ford's a good player they're not, in practice, giving very much up. And O'Neal should help add some frontcourt toughness and defense and create a situation where they don't feel compelled to give many minutes to Bargnani.
I haven't been following the Euro '08 tournament at all, but I did watch Turkey-Germany yesterday intrigued by the prospect of ethnic conflict. What a match! It's my sense that soccer isn't typically that thrilling, but it was certainly enough to sell me on watching Spain-Russia this afternoon. I have some Spanish ancestry (I think my father's father's father was born in Spain before emigrating to Cuba) but I'm a serious Russophile despite that country's unfortunate habit of putting dill in everything, so I'll be rooting for them.
Several people have asked me to comment on the announced roster of the US Senior Men's Basketball Team set to compete in Beijing. The way I think about it is this. The biggest stars in the NBA tend to be guys who can score frequently by getting shots in the paint either through low-post play or through dribble penetration. We also know from bitter experience that our international foes will try to counter our scorers by playing a zone defense designed to pack the paint. We also know that big-time NBA stars aren't necessarily top-notch defenders. Conclusion -- you want to focus on guys who can shoot from outside and who can defend.
It's not that those are the only important skills. But Kobe Bryant fits comfortably within that framework and he's also got more to his offensive game than that. So you've got Kobe. Then you need to ask, what do we want Kobe to do when he drives and finds the lane swarming with foreigners? Well, we don't want him to kick it out to Jason Kidd, who's a poor shot. But Deron Williams? Now we're getting somewhere. I think the ideal lineup, from big to small, would be something like Tim Duncan, Shawn Marion, Tayshaun Prince, Kobe Bryant, and Deron Williams. That's a lineup that could space the floor extremely well and defend superbly.
The problem with the roster they've assembled is that it doesn't include Marion or anyone with an Marion-like ability to defend the power forward position and shoot from outside. At the same time, the team includes non-shooters Jason Kidd, LeBron James, and Dwayne Wade on the perimeter. Those guys are both good players, obviously, but it's kind of suboptimal. Wade and James are such huge stars that it's hard to see doing without them, but I'd feel a lot better with Marion instead of Kidd (we don't need three point guards anyway). It also continues to baffle me that Mike D'Antoni isn't the coach of the team -- he has experience coaching NBA players and he has experience coaching FIBA-rules basketball; since we're asking NBA players to coach a FIBA-rules game that sounds like what we're looking for. Coach K has experience doing neither of those things.
More broadly, I think the discussion around this topic needs to pay more attention to the fact that the rules are different. You need to design teams that can beat true zone defense. The closer-in location of the three point line changes how effective some people are. And if you've been playing the game one way professionally for years, it's difficult to just switch to a different set of rules -- especially when your opponents are more familiar with those rules.
Going to play professionally in Europe for a year or two certainly strikes me as a superior option for a talented 18 year-old American basketball player than going to play for a fake-amateur team affiliated with an American college or university. Indeed, it seems like something of a no-brainer. And maybe if more people did it, the NCAA would start feeling pressure to erode the cartel's rules against compensating athletes for the work they do on behalf of the college.
Or who knows, maybe some colleges might even decide that managing for-profit sports franchises is an odd side-business for institutions of higher education to be running.
Obviously readers are aware that I don't watch much college basketball, and therefore my scouting opinions are worthless. But thought Derrick Rose looks like a fine basketball player, talk of picking him ahead of Michael Beasley seems kind of crazy to me:
Beasley scores way more (26.2 versus 14.9) on better shooting from the field (.532 versus .477) from the line (.774 versus .712) and from beyond the arc (.379 versus .337). Beasley's a forward who snags 12.4 rebounds per game (to Rose's 4.5) while Rose is a guard who gets 4.7 assists per game to Beasley's 1.2 while their turnovers are similar (2.9 for Beasley to 2.7 for Rose). Chad Ford's rationale for the pick doesn't make me feel much better about Rose:
Everyone likes scorers and rebounders, which is why Beasley is so appealing. Statistically, as John Hollinger shows, he's one of the best college prospects ever.
However, Paxson is in desperate need of a leader who's willing to sacrifice for the team -- a guy whose value doesn't always show up in the box score, just the win column. He had to be grinning from ear to ear when Rose said, "I'm an unselfish guard that's willing to do anything to win ... I mean anything."
Those intangibles aren't nothing, but the Bulls look to me an awful lot like a team that needs someone who can hit shots reliably and good rebounders are always welcome. Apparently Rose played much better at the end of the season, and if you throw out the first half of his season then the numbers look better for him though Beasley is still better.
I've been remiss -- any thoughts on Boston's crushing win.
I've been thinking, as have a lot of folks, that the Lakers are going to be monstrous next season if Andrew Bynum is able to return at anything like the level he was playing earlier this season. That still seems probable to me, but it's not clear that Bynum solves the defensive problems that mostly seem to me to be holding LA back.
Lotta ups and downs in this one. The Lakers don't at all look to me like a team that's poised to win two in Boston, but plenty of weird stuff has happened so far. Consider this your game five thread.
The answer, of course, is that it would be absurd to judge Duncan's entire career on the basis of one game during which his teammates shot 22-59 from the field, including a combined 10-30 performance from Tony Parker and Manu Ginobili. I doubt that anyone thought for one moment about writing such a stupid, slanted article about Duncan in the wake of that game. So it is worth asking why so many people--from heavy hitting mainstream writers to Joe Blogger--instantly had such a visceral anti-Kobe Bryant reaction to game four.
Is this really so hard to figure out? I think if Kobe weren't a rapist people would have fewer visceral anti-Kobe reactions. Across a whole variety of dimensions, Kobe's not "boring" like Duncan but by the same token nobody is predisposed to knock a solid citizen who sports four rings. Obviously, Kobe's extracurricular activities aren't stricty relevant to assessing his hoops skills, but I can imagine greater injustices than an athlete being judged unusually harshly due to his record of bad acts in real life. The fact that Kobe's partisans insist not only that he's an excellent basketball player, but that he deserves to be compared to the clearly superior Jordan doesn't help either. Most guys' fans are prepared to accept a compliment.
I've seen some sentiment to the effect that the Lakers' collapse in Game 4 "proves" the invalidity of comparisons between Kobe and Michael Jordan. That seems silly. The reason comparisons are illegitimate is that Jordan was clearly a much better player.
Kobe Bryant's a great scorer, and in his highest-scoring season (2008) he earned 35.4 points per game. But Jordan scored 37.1 ppq in 1987. And Jordan did it by shooting more efficiently, with a TS% of .562 to .559 for Kobe. In terms of scoring efficiency, Kobe's best season was 2007 when his TS% was .580, but Jordan bested that five times (1988, 1989, 1990, 1991, and 1996). In Kobe's best rebounding year (2003), he got 6 per game, which Jordan bested in 1989, 1990, 1992, 1993, 1995, 1996, and 2003 and tied in 1991. Kobe topped out at 5.3 assists per game in 2005. Jordan got more in 1985, 1988, 1989, 1990, 1991, 1992, and 1993. Kobe's best year for turnovers was 2002 when he only gave it up 2.6 times per game. Jordan did better in 1986, 1991, 1992, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, and 2003.
There's just no comparison, and it shouldn't be considered some huge knock on Kobe to observe that he was and is a clearly inferior player to the best player ever. I feel like even though Jordan is generally acknowledged as the greatest, people actually wind up underestimating him because the Jordan they remember best is the Jordan of the second threepeat. But that player, great as he was, was in his thirties and only a shadow of the peak-performance Jordan of the late-1980s and early 1990s.
UPDATE: Consider that in the 1988-89 season Jordan averaged eight boards, eight assists, three steals, and 32.5 points per game shooting 54 percent from the field and 85 percent on free throws; Kobe's never put up anything remotely comparable to that.
If the Lakers can't hold a 70-50 lead in a must-win game -- in a building where they were 9-0 in these playoffs -- how are they going to drag themselves out of a 3-1 hole?
Which has never been done in Finals history.
As he himself acknowledges, "I suppose you could counter with a reminder that the Celtics just pulled off their own Finals first." And, indeed, you could. Obviously, you'd be crazy to place an even odds bet on the Lakers at this point but the mere fact that no team has ever come back from a 3-1 hole in the Finals doesn't mean it's impossible. On the contrary, if the NBA survives for years and years at some point it's inevitable that someone will do it. And the current situation, where Boston has an older team coming off a grueling playoff run and currently suffering from a lot of injuries seems like as good a time as any. Certainly, I'll be watching game five with interest and not just assuming a Boston win.
Boston goes way down then comes back to win, going up 3-1 and making themselves pretty prohibitively favorite to win the series. Nice performance by the much-derided Lamar Odom, though. Lakers fans, meanwhile, have nothing to complain about as the Bynumful future of their franchise seems very bright.
The officiating in the 2002 Lakers-Kings series was definitely problematic. That said, I think the very fact that that series is so well-known for its dubious officiating casts some doubt on Tim Donaghy's allegations of rigging. What he's done is basically take two conspiracy theories that are already well-known and say they're true. It's exactly what you would do if you were making something up. I would expect a real whistleblower to not only confirm some already widespread suspicion but also bring me something totally unknown or obscure.
But whatever the truth of the matter, as with everything surrounding Donaghy the league wouldn't be in this position if not for the fact that the overall quality of NBA officiating is legendarily low. In large part, that's simply because it's an objectively difficult game to officiate correctly. But the league rarely seems to me to show a ton of interest in improving things, or to be even slightly disturbed by refs' biases in favor of home teams, or even just of the general sentiment that it's fine and proper to use different standards of officiating in different games or at different points in the game clock.
LA takes the game and we have a series. Boston was 8-18 on three pointers but only 29-83 from the field overall. That means they made 21 two point shots out of 65 attempted -- just 32 percent, way worse than the shot from behind the arc. That can't happen often.
As expected, Agent Zero is opting out of the final year of his six year, $65 million deal. He's hoping to get a big raise, but it's hard for me to see how he gets it. There are only a couple of teams with the cap space to give him big money, and I don't envision either of them doing it. Wizards management says they'd like to resign him. I'd like to see him resigned, too, but I hope they drive a hard bargain with him. Arenas is a player worth having on your team, but not a player worth paying any price for -- if someone else offers him a giant contract, let him walk.
I should have posted a thread on this earlier, but: NBA Finals, woo! I think last night's game was an example of what a fallacy it is to think that only the fourth quarter matters (or whatever) in the NBA. Given the way LA outplayed Boston near the end, they clearly would have won the game if not for the fact that the Celtics managed to build up this huge lead earlier.
At any rate, I fully expect the Lakers to come on strong when the series shifts back to California. LA has, I think, a somewhat better team but Boston has home court advantage so I think we should continue to expect a very competitive series.
Left Sudan as a refugee when you were a little kid and grew up in Canada? Well, no visa for you:
Shooting guard Bol Kong has drawn interest from a number of universities and recently received a scholarship offer from Gonzaga. It is the defense he has met off the court that has slowed him -- and could prevent him from ever playing for the Bulldogs or anyone else in the United States. Kong, 20, is originally from Sudan, which is listed by the United States as a state sponsor of terrorism. Although he has lived in Canada since age 7, he does not hold citizenship there. He has been denied a visa to study in the United States three times, and it is unclear if he will ever satisfy the requirements for entry.
I'm sure this kid's a huge threat and I, for one, am glad that he'll be wreaking his havoc north of the border.
It's really too bad that ABC has the whole NBA Finals and we won't be able to get any of TNT's wildly superior broadcasting teams. My pick is Lakers in 6 and thought I'm not happy about my choices I'll root for LA.
You can get your NBA draft combine results here. As reader DM observes, "not a ton of surprises, though both Rose and Beasley measured pretty short relative to expectations." At 6'2" 1/2 in shoes, though, I'd say Derrick Rose comes in at tall enough to play point guard, even if his size isn't super-impressive. Beasely, who's definitely looking short for a power forward at 6'8" in shoes, is a somewhat more interesting case.
In recent years, there've been a series of undersized power forwards -- Craig Smith, Carl Landry, Chuck Hayes, Paul Millsap who slipped very far in the draft due to their small stature and then wound up having decent success in the league. One thing we've learned from that experience is that rebounding is one of the stats that's most directly projectable from college to the NBA -- guys good at pulling them down are good rebounders irrespective of size. Beasley certainly seems to fit the bill. What's more, he measured a 7' wingspan and a solid standing reach of 8'-11" and those factors often turn out to be more important than height.
Once you abandon the artificial four-games-to-two framework that the media has tried to impose on the series, a very different picture emerges, with the Celtics leading by a mere 549 points to 539. Yes that’s right, the margin between the two teams is less than one percent—a tie, for all intents and purposes. This is probably the closest Conference Finals in NBA history, though I will thank you not to check on that.
It's the end of the Flip Saunders era in Detroit. I understand the Pistons' thinking here, but given that the guy only had one year left on his contract I'm sort of wondering who's the better coach Detroit thinks they're going to sign this offseason. If Mike D'Antoni were still in play or something (I envision him using Rasheed Wallace primarily as a Euro-style shooting center) that would be one thing, but what's the next move here? To me, at least, it's not as if there's been some huge stretch of egregious coaching errors holding the team back.
It's the matchup the hater in me was dreading. Already the hiatus is filling with stuff about the top ten moments in Lakers-Celtics history and hearing how "Meaning no disrespect to 28 other teams, thanks for getting out of the way." But the good news is that we have a scenario where I think it's pretty clear that L.A. is the superior team, but they're not wildly superior and Boston has home court since the Lakers played much of the season without their current roster.
Consequently, I think the outcome's genuinely in doubt. I'd give the edge to L.A. but I'm surprised to see nine out of ten ESPN.com people agreeing with that since my level of confidence in that pick is pretty low.
Because the Detroit Pistons have been in the mix for so long, there's a certain sentiment of finality around the squad once again falling short in the Conference Finals. But it does seem worth pointing out that their future actually looks pretty bright. They have no bad long-term deals on the books whatsoever -- they're two highest-paid players ('Sheed and Billups) are their two highest-paid players, and the two guys on long-term deals (Billups and Tayshaun Prince) are the ones you want on long-term deals. They have several talented young players in Stuckey, Jason Maxiell, and Amir Johnson who it's reasonable to expect to see improve and who could probably step up to play a bigger role if necessary.
Consequently, can plausibly afford to trade part of its current core (most likely 'Sheed or Rip Hamilton) if a good opportunity comes along but can also plausibly afford to say "no" to potential offers and hold out for a better opportunity. All things considered, the extent to which this franchise has been well-managed continues to impress. One can't, however, help but wonder how things might have turned out if not for their unfortunate 2003 draft choice.
The NBA is going to start fining people for flopping, beginning next year. I should let Matt weigh in, but this does raise the question of whether Manu Ginobili will go broke by the All-Star break.
I'm glad Ta-Nehisi brought up the Red Sox as a metaphor for how racist people and institutions can end up punishing themselves, because I think the metaphor can be extended even further. In 2002, the new Sox ownership started a comprehensive effort to address the team's racist legacy by, among other things, equipping a 16-team baseball league run through a network of black churches. Given that African-American representation in the Major Leagues is at its lowest point in more than twenty years (8.2 percent of MLB players are black), that seems to be an appropriate investment. The Red Sox Foundation, the team's charitable arm, also formed a partnership with the Dimock Community Health Center in Dorchester in 2004, helping keep its Teen Center open.
I'm not saying that any of this represents reparations for the virulent racism that kept black players out of Boston for so long, and that inspired such poor treatment of black players when they finally got to put on Red Sox uniforms. But I think that the new ownership, when it decided to confront this ugly chapter in Red Sox history, did an intelligent thing. They looked to community needs that the team could meet in ways that leveraged its unique resources: access to baseball equipment and training. They didn't just give away free tickets, they made an investment, and took action consistent with the principle that if you want to reconnect with people divided from you by race and economics, you meet them on their turf.
I'm not sure what the model would be for Obama to do that, given the nature of campaigning, especially the nature of his campaign, and given that he doesn't have any obligation to make up for past institutional and individual wrongs. But if he wants to be the person starting conversations about the impact of those wrongs and how to overcome them, starting in Appalachia, on someone else's ground, seems like a good idea.
Tuesday was, to my mind, the first full-fledged day of low-skies-shirt-sticking-to-your-back summer here in D.C. And because of that, when I sat down to watch the Red Sox game last night, I cranked up the AC, broke out the salted peanuts and opened up Once More Around the Park, which, even though Roger Angell sides with the Mets over the Sox in 1986 in "Not So, Boston," is one of the finest collections of baseball writing ever published. (A Great and Glorious Game is a close second.)
Warning to all, ye who enter here: I am an unrepentant baseball sentimentalist and Red Sox fan. Deal with it.
NBA conspiracy theorists must reckon with the fact that the Los Angeles Lakers, the biggest ratings draw in the league, received some of the worst officiating of the playoffs tonight in San Antonio. No contact with Spurs players was too minor for the officials to blow the whistle. The first half was particularly egregious: Lamar Odom and Derek Fisher were forced to sit out with foul trouble, and what should have been a double digit halftime lead was only six points.
But stop right there, because on the last play of the game Fisher clearly fouled Brent Barry and the refs didn't make the call. So, let the conspiracy theories commence. Still, on balance, the Spurs got the vast majority of breaks tonight. And Barry should have taken Charles Barkley's advice and jumped into Fisher directly, rather than trying to get off a clean shot. If he'd done so, he surely would have gotten three free throws.
As for the Lakers, they now go up 3-1 and continue what has been a remarkable playoff run. I was skeptical a few nights ago when the TNT crew speculated that this Lakers team might be as good as the Lakers championship teams from the early part of the decade. But now, on the heels of very impressive series' wins over Utah and Denver, they are a win away from vanquishing the mighty Spurs in five games. (Remember, too, that they have been playing in arguably the best conference in NBA history).
All those who dearly love the NBA have been forced to become Celtics and Lakers fans over the past two weeks for the simple reason that a Pistons-Spurs finals is too painful to even contemplate. And this is what makes the unbelievable cluelessness of Celtics coach Doc Rivers a huge, huge problem. Last night he insisted on playing veteran point guard Sam Cassell for 17 minutes, with predictable results (no points and no assists). Normally I could let this pass without comment, but the possibility of Detroit once again playing into June is a threat to decent Americans everywhere.
If you aren't a serious NBA fan, but have tuned into any Boston games, you probably found Rivers to be a likable figure. Unlike most coaches he will smile and display excitement, and even seems to have a rapport with his players. But his coaching in the playoffs has been absolutely dreadful (for the fullest take on this see Bill Simmons).
As a friend put it (in jest) this morning, "Don’t you think the NBA has to get involved at this point?"
Back when Kevin Garnett was a fantastic player stuck in crappy teams in Minnesota, Bill Simmons was in the habit of blaming the Timberwolves' lack of success on Garnett, rather than on his bad teammates. Then Garnett got traded to Boston! And Boston became the best team in the NBA! And Simmons loved Garnett! But now Boston seems to be underperforming in the playoffs, so naturally Simmons blames KG. But in truth, Garnett's playing almost exactly the same -- a few more minutes, leading to more points but with a slightly lower FG% (though a slightly higher FT%) and rebounds and he's managed to turn the ball over slightly less often.
Consider instead blaming Paul Pierce, Ray Allen, and Leon Powe who are actually playing substantially worse than they did during the regular season leading, naturally enough, to worse outcomes for Boston.
Thrilling Lakers comeback, and Chicago beats the odds to win the lottery. I feel torn about these developments. My fundamental perspective as a fan is that of the hater who likes to see the mighty brought low. I bonded with Tim Duncan, Manu Ginobili, and Tony Parker when they crushed the Shaq-Kobe juggernaut in 2003. By 2008, San Antonio has arguably become the evil empire. But despite enormous success since 1999, San Antonio still doesn't really rank up their as an "elect" franchise like L.A. and it rankles to see a team become so good thanks to such a one-sided trade.
In the short-run perspective, in other words, the Spurs are the juggernaut possibly unseated by an upstart Laker franchise. But taking the longer view, the Lakers are still the juggernaut. Chicago winning the lottery, meanwhile, just reeks of rigging. Sure, why not send the number one draft pick to Chicago, all we need to do is tweak the raffle! Now of course last offseason it seemed like the Bulls were going to be good and then, inexplicably, all of their young players regressed instead of progressing. Consequently, the franchise is basically impossible to project.
The risk posed by Paul's success, however, is that it's going to lead analysts to look at other guys who are excellent ballhandlers who make the occasional "ohmygod I can't believe that's possible" move and who are too short to succeed in the NBA, and conclude that they can have Paul-like levels of success. But it's impossible to tell from watching highlights and very hard to tell from watching games, the small-but-real differences that have made Paul's 2007-2008 campaign much better than Allen Iverson's. Paul pulls down 6.2 percent of available rebounds, Iverson grabs 3.8 percent. Iverson's effective field goal percentage is 49 percent, Paul's is 52 percent. These are very small numbers, but they add up to large differences over the course of a season and it's not really clear that even Paul will be able to continue performing on this level, much less that other undersized guys will be able to find enormous success.
Are assists routinely misattributed by the official scorekeepers as David Friedman alleges? I'd like to hear more about this than one game's worth of tracking and some complaints from Oscar Robertson about how the kids have it too easy these days, but it's a provocative suggestion.
I was over on ESPN's website hoping to read something interesting previewing tonight's Spurs-Hornets showdown (I think New Orleans will win and San Antonio will get an infusion of foreign talent during the offseason -- Tiago Splitter, etc. -- and win the 2009 championship when the odd-numbered year gives them the edge) but instead my eye was caught by this eye-catching headline: "Wade buys mom a church after she completes turnaround".
Can you even buy a church? I wondered. But it turns out that Wade didn't so much buy his mom a church as he bought a building in which to house a church that she founded a bit back. My assumption is that it's not actually possible to buy a church or other non-profit institution, though presumably one non-profit could be folded into a larger, richer one in a purchase-like scenario. Anyways, consider this a basketball/church thread.
I've blogged before about the case of Oscar Pistorius, the double-amputee sprinter who was going to be barred from competing in the Olympics on the theory that his high-end prostheses give him an unfair advantage. Now it looks like he's getting the green light. I, for one, welcome our new prosthetically enhanced overlords.
If there comes a time in the future when sprinting is completely dominated by double-amputees using prosthetic legs/feet, I think this is clearly a decision that's going to have to be revisited. But that doesn't strike me as an especially likely outcome, and the Olympics will certainly benefit from the addition of an interesting plotline.
At the start of the playoffs, I felt like the Celtics were pretty substantial favorites to win it all. Right now? Not so much. It still seems like they'll beat Cleveland and I'd pick them to win against Detroit, but the Lakers are definitely looking like the superior team at this point. After all, one of Boston's advantages was supposed to be its much easier path through the playoffs. Instead, they can't win on the road even against markedly inferior teams.
Another thing about "playoff experience"-based doubts about the Hornets is that it's not entirely clear how inexperienced the team really is. Starting center Tyson Chandler went to the playoffs with Chicago in 2005 and 2006, Peja has a ton of experience in the U.S. and internationally, Morris Peterson was in the 2007, 2002, and 2001 playoffs, guys like Bonzi Wells off the bench have experience, etc.
Now obviously Chris Paul doesn't have playoff experience and he's an important part of the team. But after watching him play in the first round, was there any reason to think he'd suddenly dissolve in round two? The Hornets may yet lose the series (though they probably won't -- tied series after four games almost always go to the team with home court advantage), but if they do I don't think experience will be the problem.
Still, everyone knew that but relatively few imagined them being in a position to eliminate the San Antonio Spurs. In particular, many would have agreed with David Freedman who writes "I thought that the Hornets' lack of playoff experience would hurt them in postseason play." It's difficult, however, to see any clear evidence that lack of playoff experience has any genuine tendency to hold teams back. The teams that win usually have playoff experience because normally the best team in year N was at least pretty good in year N-1 and because playoff experience is pretty widespread in the NBA generally.
In the last 20 years, only one player shorter than 6-6 -- Allen Iverson -- has ever gone No. 1. When in doubt, NBA GMs almost always opt for a big man. However, as we watch point guards such as Paul, Williams and Tony Parker dominate in the playoffs, the thinking is beginning to change. It's no longer considered a given that a big man is the key to winning in the NBA.
Tony Parker is a very good player, but realistically he's the third-best guy on that team. Certainly anyone who's looking at the San Antonio Spurs, 1999-2008 and thinking to himself "maybe a big man isn't the key to winning in the NBA after all" really ought to pay more attention to that Tim Duncan guy. Similarly, Deron Williams is a young player that any team (except the Hornets) would be thrilled to have, but the one-two punch of Okur and Boozer is nothing to sneeze at in terms of big men.
Paul makes the point better, this season at least he's having a genuinely dominant season in the way that normally only big men have -- the talent distribution curve for backcourt players is generally much flatter and it's rare to have someone stand out from the pack the way Paul has. But it seems to me that it would be pretty crazy to toss out decades worth of information indicating that the odds favor going with the big guy purely because Paul had a fantastic season this year. Weird things happen in life, which is what makes it interesting, but to just expect that every talented college point guard is now going to put on Paul-caliber performances is crazy.
The officiating issue is the most obvious one to point to, but it's always seemed to me that the scale of home court advantage is too big to be explained this way. If this were the dominant factor, I think I'd expect to see teams' point differentials be similar at home or on the road, but they'd have better records in the close games at home. But instead the effect seems big and systematic. And as Kevin says, what's weird here isn't just that home court advantage exists, but that it seems bigger than the advantage in football or baseball, even though in football the crowd can (and does) interfere with visiting team play calls and baseball stadiums differ dramatically from each other.
Here in Round 2 of the NBA playoffs we're seeing once again that home court advantage matters a lot -- out of eight total games, seven have been won by the home team. Which makes me wonder -- is anyone aware of any good research on what the home court advantage consists of? Why should it be so strong?
Mark Leibovich floats the idea that Hillary Clinton's done Obama a favor by toughening him up with an NBA analogy:
But there is a competing view that says that Mrs. Clinton, rather than being a spoiler, has in fact been an unwitting mentor to Mr. Obama, a teaching adversary who made him better. Could competing against Mrs. Clinton have improved Mr. Obama as a candidate in the same way that competing against Larry Bird and Magic Johnson in the 1980s made Isiah Thomas and Michael Jordan champions in the 1990s?
I know it's very hard to convince people of this, but the transformation of the Bulls into a powerhouse dynasty had nothing to do with Jordan improving. From the numbers it's pretty clear that he had his best seasons in the late 1980s. Not only did Jordan have his highest per game scoring averages in those years, but he was a more efficient shooter, wracking up TS%s above .600 for four years straight in the 1988-1991 seasons. The Bulls just started winning championships when Jordan acquired better teammates.
But having better teammates didn't actually help Jordan by taking pressure off of him and letting him take fewer low-percentage shots. It's just that a slightly off-peak Jordan was still a phenomenal player and suddenly he was surrounded by other quality players and started winning championships. Also note that the "Bad Boys" Pistons won championships in the 1988-89 season and the 1989-90 season so I'm not sure it's quite right to say that Isaiah Thomas was a champion "in the 1990s." The implications of the above for the Democratic primary are, however, not large.
Mike D'Antoni to the Knicks -- just when you thought the Dolans couldn't devise any new, extremely costly quick-fix solutions to their franchise's problems. Chad Ford calls is "an improbable home run that could immediately turn the fortunes of a franchise in desperate need of optimism" and says "D'Antoni will bring a pedigree of exciting, winning basketball that should inject new life into a tired Knicks franchise." Why, yes, this is exactly the thing to turn around a franchise that hasn't seen a marquee coach since, well, Larry Brown just a little while back.
Seriously, at this point isn't it obvious that it's the search for improbable home runs that's the problem here? When your roster doesn't contain good players, you can't win. And when the roster contains lots of players on bad contracts, it's hard to trade for better ones. The only solution is to admit that this is the kind of problem that it would take several seasons to solve and to stop trying to create an atmosphere of optimism.
Paying some ridiculously large sum of money to Mike D'Antoni does seem like the kind of expensive, won't-work quick fix that would appeal to the New York Knicks management, so I kind of hope that happens. Remember when Larry Brown was going to cure what ails the team? Well that didn't work, and helping a listing team learn how to play defense is the sort of thing Brown has done well in the past.
D'Antoni's a good coach in my view, but what the Knicks really need to do is focus on the fact that their roster doesn't have enough good players. Absent canny draft choices, good free agent signings, or a lucky trade the team is just bound to be terrible. Under the circumstances, they may as well save money and hire a caretaker coach while trying to rebuild the team.
I wish Mike D'Antoni well, but Chicago seems like an odd choice of destination considering that the Bulls have been constructed around a defense first gameplan and that's hardly what D'Antoni's known for. On the other hand, the way in which Chicago spectacularly failed to meet anyone's expectations this year certainly seems to argue in favor of a change in direction. It was so strange to watch a pretty good and very young team regress so far.
Word is that the Wizards are planning to resign Gilbert Arenas and Antawn Jamison. That all simply raises the question resign them for how much money? Jamison is unquestionably a good player, and Agent Zero was a good player when he was healthy and presumably will be again -- they're guys that, all else being equal, it's good to have on your team, but all else is rarely equal.
Gilbert, in particular, keeps talking as if he expects a max deal and I think that'd be crazy. The maximum salary rule is a great opportunity that allows a select number of lucky teams to underpay elite players -- guys like Chris Paul and LeBron James are never going to be able to do what Shaq and Kevin Garnett did and get paid their real market value. You don't want to blow that kind of opportunity on lesser players unless you've got good reason to. This year, Jamison's earning $16 million and Arenas is earning $12 million and I seriously doubt there's another team in the league that's in a position to offer either of them more than that. And yet, sometimes you see a franchise do what Orlando did with Rashard Lewis last year and overbid the market for no real reason.
Several weeks ago, a colleague turned me on to David Freedman's 20 Second Time Out blog about the NBA. I don't really agree with all the themes Freedman develops, but one very solid point he's been making is that despite Greg Popovich's sterling reputation and solid track-record of success, his love of hack-a-X plays -- whether "X" is Shaw or Tyson Chandler or whomever -- doesn't make a great deal of sense.
To get it down to cold, hard math the NBA's top team in terms of offensive efficiency this year, Phoenix, scored 1.11 points per possession. Even if you assume no chance of offensive rebound that's equivalent to giving up two shots to a 55 percent free throw shooter. And that's the average for the best offense in the league. San Antonio only gives up 0.95 points on its average possession which is equivalent (again, wrongly ignoring the possibility of an offensive rebound) to giving up two free throws to a 48 percent free throw shooter. In general, bad as guys like Shaq and Chandler are at shooting free throws, for either of them two free shots is still a more-efficient-than-average offensive possession.
As I say, Popovich's love of this tactic is unusually odd since the Spurs are a very good defensive team. The Wizards, by contrast, are a not-so-hot defense that was at times facing off against Ben Wallace who's even worse than Shaq or Chandler, creating a situation where hack-a-Ben really might have been a good idea.
Most NBA fans are sort of dimly aware of European professional basketball without really knowing much about it. But this year is the Euroleague's 50th anniversary, and here's an interesting rundown of their history from Ian Whittell. Here's the top 50 Euroleague players of all time.
To return to the Allen Iverson discussion from the other day, the point was not to deny that the 2007-2008 Denver Nuggets are better than the 2007-2008 Philadelphia 76ers. The point, rather, was that if Iverson was as good as many people say he is, the Iverson-Miller swap should have made Denver much better than it was before the trade while Philly should have gotten much worse. After all, if Iverson is really much better than Miller, then swapping them should have that kind of impact. But you didn't see that kind of impact. Because Iverson's not genuinely much better than Miller.
People like to bring up the 2001 76ers in this regard. After all, they had Iverson and not much in the way of offense besides Iverson, and not withstanding that they had playoff success in a weak East. But Iverson & co. actually put up exactly what you'd expect -- a mediocre offensive effort that ranked, in efficiency terms, 13th out of 29. What made them viable was excellent defense -- 5th out of 29. After all, besides Iverson they had Dikembe Mutombo, someone who's still capable today at the age of 9 million of helping to anchor a first-rate defense.
And, yes, I think Carmelo Anthony is somewhat overrated, too. But the larger point is just that you keep hearing from Denver fans that the team is "underperforming" and has "so much talent." The reality is that Denver's better than most teams, and the reason it's not better than it is is that the talent's not quite as good as many people think.
Talk of the Phoenix Suns firing Mike D'Antoni seems petty misguided to me -- there are some things to be said in favor of the idea, but realistically what better coach is going to emerge? Meanwhile, it's pretty clear that over the years Phoenix has been sabotaged by management. Not necessarily even by bad management, just stingy management -- the Nash/Stoudemire/Marion core was very successful and won a lot of games, but the teams fielded always lacked bench, depth, and flexibility.
And the Suns could have had more depth pretty easily -- they were the sort of squad usable veteran role players like to sign with, and they could have used their first round draft picks on players. Instead, they never made the sort of signings that Boston did to fill out its roster this year or that Miami and San Antonio have done in the past, and they essentially sold draft picks. There were totally cognizable reasons for that behavior -- they saved money -- but they weren't good-faith efforts to field a championship-quality basketball team and they were Mike D'Antoni's fault so it seems perverse to blame him for not bringing
