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 any rings to Arizona.
Can someone tell me why the Nuggets stink so bad? Two superstars - check. Great rebounder/shot blocker - check. Solid role players - check. Fat ugly coach - check.
The obvious answer would be that, as some people have been saying for a long time, their "superstars" aren't really that great. Instead, Simmons offers:
Come on, the Nuggets had no heart all season. None of this was a surprise. When the going gets tough, they get going. In their defense, it's tough to get motivated to win a title when you've already broken the "Most tattooes on one team" record. How do you dip into the well and get fired up after that?
You would really think that the experience of the Iverson trade would have caused a few people to reconsider this stuff. Before the trade, Philadelphia was a pretty bad team and Denver was a decent one. Then Allen Iverson was swapped for Andre Miller in a move that was widely expected to help Denver and hurt Philly in the short-run. But that hasn't been the outcome. The obvious conclusion is that the Iverson-skeptics were right all along and he's just not that good. Denver fans should be asking themselves how good their team might have been if they'd been able to execute the reverse deal -- something like Carmelo Anthony for Andre Iguodala, Samuel Dalembert, and a draft pick.
All season long, I'd been resisting the temptation to proclaim the Wizards "better without Arenas" but the evidence from this playoff series against the Cavaliers is really tending to change my mind. The fact that Agent Zero has a solid backup in Antonio Daniels is what makes this work, but the whole rest of the team really does seem to play with both more defensive intensity and more tactical acumen in key offensive situations without Gilbert. Certainly I don't think it's a no-brainer at this point that Arenas should be paid more money if he chooses to opt out of his current contract.
The Steve Nash Era in Phoenix has been a pretty amazing thing for NBA fans (especially those of us with no allegiances to any other Western Conference contenders) to behold. When the Suns signed him to his deal, the move was pretty widely criticized, but with Nash and Amare Stoudemire in the mix the 29-53 Suns of 2003-2004 became the 62-20 Suns of 2004-2005 and electrified fans with an up-tempo game. Then Amare went down with injury and the 2005-2006 Suns stunned us by going 54-28 with the previously unheard-of Boris Diaw serving sometimes as center sometimes as a backup point guard.
Then Amare came back the next year, they won 61 games, and lost again in the playoffs. I was hoping to see them do better, just as I was hoping to see them do better this year. I think a lot of us were. It was a great story, and they played a really fun style. And now with the Shaq trade and last night's first round exit, it seems like that era's over. It's hard to imagine Shaq or Nash or Grant Hill getting any better next year and hard to see what kind of moves they can make. The window has closed, and it's too bad.
That LeBron James is a pretty talented player, huh? I think he's going to go places in the NBA.
Beyond that, I don't really understand Eddie Jordan's notion that the Wiz should close games with Agent Zero iso plays. I think the Wizards and the Cavaliers are about equally matched teams. But the Cavs' best player is much better than our best player. Our advantage is that it's a game of five-on-five.
Sorry for bastardizing "Leo the Late Bloomer," one of my daughter's favorite bedtime stories and a true classic. But I couldn't help it. Not only has Rajon Rondo's belated emergence been the most fascinating subplot of a storybook Celtics season, but he's just like the character in that book. Like Leo, Rondo never spoke. Like Leo's father, Celts fans spent an inordinate amount of time wondering when Rondo would "draw" (in this case, play with consistency) or "write" (in this case, bang home open jumpers). Leo had patient parents who believed in him; Rondo had veterans such as Kevin Garnett and Ray Allen, role models who provided the confidence and toughness he desperately needed, eventually springing him from his on-court shell and altering the course of his career. We always hear about the value of young teams adding veterans, but after watching the effects over the course of an 82-game season, it's probably impossible to exaggerrate the importance of polished, professional, competitive, proven veterans on young guys who don't know what the hell they're doing.
I think this is pretty far off-base. The reality is that Rajon Rondo played pretty well for a terrible 2006-2007 Celtics team. When you added Kevin Garnett and Ray Allen to the mix, had Paul Pierce play a full season, and rounded out the rotation with some decent veterans, the team was much better. That put Rondo in a position where people notice that he plays pretty well. But relative to last year, he's rebounding is a bit worse, his free throw shooting is a bit worse, and his field goal percentage is better. None of that would be shocking for a guy of his age, but it's especially non-shocking when you consider that it's harder to rebound when you're competing with the Big Ticket and better teammates give him more open looks.
He's a pretty good player, and deserves credit for contributing to the team. But there's no dramatic transformation here.
As a Shaq-trade skeptic, I was feeling vindicated by the initial set of post-trade Suns games. But then Phoenix went on a nice run, and the trade's advocates were feeling vindicated. I held to the true faith, and I think I've been vindicated as Phoenix has now managed to go down 3-0 against San Antonio even though the reconfigured squad was allegedly designed specifically to match up against the Spurs, and even though this looks like a weaker Spurs team than what they've given us in recent years.
Went to last night's thrilling triumph over Cleveland, and I have to say that when I saw Gilbert Arenas limp off the court my hope -- in the absence of any television commentary to tell me exactly what was happening -- was that he'd be too hurt to get back in the game. The team isn't "better without Arenas" per se, but it's hard to avoid the conclusion that the team plays with more intensity on the defensive end without him. That's not merely, or even especially, a reflection of Arenas' defensive skills (or lack thereof), it's broader and more systemic -- a switch seems to go on that says "oh no, Gilbert's not around, we'll only win if we play defense!" which, in the end, leads to more success over all.
Is it possible that we all somehow managed to forget about the San Antonio Spurs? No exciting trades or thrilling storylines this season, but they've looked pretty damn good in two games against Phoenix. Meanwhile, the Suns are seeing that one cost of the Shaq trade is that they lost a very good perimeter defender and now don't have a real way to guard Parker and Ginobili on the outside. Maybe some of the guys who looked too old during the regular season were just taking it easy and are ready to buckle down now? Given that it's an even-numbered year, I bet they don't get the rings and take the offseason to retool some of the secondary players, but still it's amazing how San Antonio manages to sneak up year after year.
What to say about last night's disastrous Wizards game? I suppose the point to make is that LeBron James' 30/12/9 night, though impressive, wasn't really all that awesome. The nature of the Cleveland squad is that you ought to be able to give up that kind of ground to the King and still win the game. The problem is when you let the non-LBJ Cavs shoot 53 percent from the field.
That and, um, you've got to score. People kind of forget that last years' Cavaliers squad's success was really driven by their defense. LeBron is probably the best offensive player in the game, but his teammates were sufficiently woeful last year that the overall Cleveland offense was pretty middling. But the defense was top-notch and credit for that goes well beyond James. Last night, though, the Wizards offense was pathetic. Hopefully my boys can turn things around back in DC.
Wow. I wasn't particularly planning to watch the Pistons-76ers series -- nice upset. This will be more grist for Dave Berri's mill as he tries to convince the world that Andre Miller is better than Allan Iverson.
As we head into the final minutes, let me just note that there's something a bit odd about a rivalry that's this intense -- driven by three-straight first-round playoff matchups -- between teams that are basically unimpressive. I mean, it would be a genuinely shocking Black Swan event if either of these squads won a championship. Probably nobody outside of DC or Cleveland really cares about this matchup, but we care a lot.
Here's the margin of victory differentials for the Western Conference. As you can see, Utah and Phoenix both underperformed in terms of wins and losses relative to the margin of victory metric, whereas the Hornets and Spurs both overperformed. Margin of victory is, however, the better predictor of future performance.
Okay. In the East. I have Boston and Detroit and Orlando all winning easily (shocking). I think my Wizards will beat the Cavs this time in round three of the NBA's most mediocre rivalry. Next up, Detroit beats Orlando (of course) and (of course) Boston beats Washington and then beats Detroit
In the West, I'm taking the Lakers, Hornets, Jazz, and Suns though I'd really like to see San Antonio prevail and vindicate my skepticism about the Shaq deal. Then I think Lakers beat Jazz and Suns beat Hornets, further un-vindicating my skepticism. Then Lakers beat Suns.
It's funny, those two don't play the same position, but DeShawn told Caron that he'll guard LeBron (sounds like a children's nursery school rhyme) so that Caron can rest his legs. DeShawn was like, "I'll run him around and play D on him and get the fouls so you can just go off on the other end." So we have our own little gimmicks we're brewing. With a team like the Cavaliers and a player like LeBron, all you need is distractions. We got to be Bush. We got to be Bush-league. We're having everybody talking about the war, when we just want to get the oil. We're Bushing it. That's all we're doing. We're trying distract LeBron over here while we try to get some wins over there. That's all we're doing.
Of course if the war had gotten us some oil, it would have at least gotten us something. But last I checked, oil costs more than ever.
UPDATE: Perhaps if Agent Zero bought Heads in the Sand he'd be in a position to offer a more nuanced critique of the Bush foreign policy. Matt Berman says it's "highly readable and filled with great insights."
So it seems that Bill Simmons wanted to do a podcast with Barack Obama. It also seems that Barack Obama wanted to do a podcast with Bill Simmons. Speaking as a new media professional, I can tell you that "major presidential candidate" is usually the kind of podcast guest that people like to have. I bet a Simmons-Obama podcast would have been widely listened to and gotten a lot of attention. Naturally, ESPN decided the right thing to do was kill the idea and cancel the podcast with the Daily News noting that "It's of interest that ESPN president George Bodenheimer has supported Republican Sen. John McCain's presidential bid with a donation of $1,000."
Everyone's dying to know my picks for the big NBA end-of-the-regular-season awards, right? Defense Player of the Year is, I think, pretty simple -- Kevin Garnett is the anchor of what's not only the best defensive team this season, but actually one of the best defenses of all time. So there.
Tradition dictates that Rookie of the Year should go to Kevin Durant for taking the most shots and thus acquiring the highest points per game average. But I think that's kind of bogus, and as a Durant fan I want to keep the pressure on him to actually shoot accurately and re-acquire some of his rebounding prowess from college. So I say Al Horford. Carl Landry is clearly some kind of basketball god but he didn't play in enough games.
Coach. I hear a lot of talk about Byron Scott who is, in fact, a good coach. But I think you need to give this award not to the "team many underrated in the preseason" but to a coach who faced some clear coaching challenges. In my view, that's Rick Adelman who's steered the Rockets past Yao Ming's injury.
Most Improved: Chris Paul. He's improved a lot!
Plus it's a consolation prize for Paul, because the Most Valuable Player is Kobe Bryant. As is well known, the MVP award is handed out on a highly arbitrary basis. Thus, LeBron James is ruled out for his team being too middling even though nobody thinks this is his fault. Similarly, the best player on the best team always deserves a hard look but Kevin Garnett hasn't scored the requisite 20 points per game. It's down to Kobe and Paul and it fundamentally comes down to Paul being younger and how "it's Kobe's time." So he wins.
That said, I do think every sportwriter who criticized KG's lack of "leadership" or some other BS during the past couple of years when the Timberwolves were bad owes him a personal apology. It's almost as if even the greatest players can only succeed with some good teammates.
UPDATE: Oh, yeah, sixth man. Obviously, that's Manu Ginobili.
I get the sense that a lot of folks are letting the thrilling nature of the Western Conference race blind them to the fact that no matter what happens out there, you'd have to judge the Celtics to be pretty serious favorites against any of these teams. Note, for example, that their superior record isn't a result of weaker competition -- they're 25 and 5 against the West which is much better than any of the Western Conference teams. To be sure, if Andrew Bynum makes some kind of miraculous recovery that could be a different story, but otherwise I'd rate them as a definite "buy" with their contract currently available on Tradesports for less than $30.
Photo by Flickr user Terren in Virginia used under a Creative Commons license
A lot of proponents of the Shaq deal are now claiming vindication, but while the trade's certainly worked out better for Phoenix than I expected, I'm not at all certain they're right. Obviously, having a healthy Shaq playing right now is better than having an injured Shawn Marion not playing. But if you think, as most people do, that the Matrix could play fine were the Heat not tanking then I still don't really see it. In March, Shaq offered Phoenix 13.5 points and 10.4 rebounds whereas Marion offered Miami 13.6 points and 13.0 rebounds. Shaq turned it over more than Marion did. And if the trade helped Phoenix's interior defense, it's hurt them on the perimeter.
So, Yglesias, how do you explain the Suns' success since the trade? Well part of the answer is recalling that at the time of the trade Phoenix was sitting atop the Western Conference with a 34-14 record. It was always a really good team. But since the trade Amare's started taking more shots and so he's now scoring somewhat more points and the team's doing no better than it was previously. So while there doesn't seem to be a blunder here, once you consider the cap implications it still doesn't look so hot to me. When you consider the fact that if Phoenix's ownership had been willing to spend like this just a little while back, they could have resigned Kurt Thomas and not sold their draft picks, and they'd be in even better shape today.
Andy Rotherham notes that students from disadvantaged backgrounds have perilously low college graduation rates, and yet schools actually know how to give people the help they need to stay in school they do a pretty good job with their athletes and what's needed is to extend the same kind of support to everyone.
Incidentally, anyone persuaded that the NBA game is insufficiently wide open and exciting should definitely check out tonight's Denver vs. Golden State matchup. The teams are basically tied for the last spot in the Western Conference playoffs, both are quite good, and the play at the fastest and second-fastest paces in the league. Should be a very exciting game.
I think the Warriors are sentimental favorite for basketball fans everywhere, so I'll definitely be hoping they win. The Nuggets are, however, are perennially interesting team for anyone interested in basketball statistics. Conventional commentators are constantly overlooking Denver's defensive prowess because the team plays at a high pace.
I don't think anything or anyone is going to stand in the way of the Celtics' march to the 2008 NBA Championship. Still, it warms this Boston-haters' heart to know that the thoroughly mediocre Wizards seem to have their number.
That said, I find that my distaste for the Hub is actually on the decline. It was very frustrating to me to constantly be hearing Kevin Garnett blamed for the Timberwolves' problems (he didn't have enough "leadership" it seems) when it was eminently clear that he was one of the top players in the game and just saddled with terrible teammates. This year, I think he's gotten his vindication and that's all to the good, even if it does bring cheer to the undeserving people of Massachusetts.
New York magazine goes long and deep on the disaster of the Dolan/Thomas Era. I will say that I think knocking Thomas for poor draft choices is a bit unfair. Yes, there are guys you wish he'd taken who he passed on, but the draft is inherently uncertain and I think his record in that record stands up as totally okay.
The Wizards have been using Gilbert Arenas as the "face of the franchise" for a while, but last season many fans came to suspect that Caron Butler might be the team's best player -- a theory their continued mediocrity success without Arenas this season seemed to support. In terms of adjusted plus/minus, however, Antawn Jamison's the man not only the best on the team, but actually one of the most valuable players in the whole league. For that matter, he looks great in terms of regular plus/minus, too. These stats can be misused because they make a player's quality in part a function of the quality of his backup, but I think they do provide a useful perspective given how much of the game's action doesn't seem well-captured by individual-level statistics.
Hillary Clinton says George W. Bush should boycott the opening ceremony of the Olympics. Steve Clemons says she's wrong. In the real world, can anyone imagine this making a difference either way, either to US-China relations or to the PRC's human rights conduct? I can't. If we actually tried to ruin the olympics by withdrawing our athletes and trying to get other countries to do the same, that might at least hurt someone's feelings, but it hardly seems worth debating the merits of doing something totally trivial.
Still, in retrospect I really do wish they hadn't given the Olympics to China. It would have been much better to award the games to some other city, for the official rationale to just be that the other city was better on the merits, but then for off-the-record there to be some suggestion in the press that China's authoritarian politics might have played a role. Not that the IOC thinks there should be political criteria! On the contrary, IOC members were so eager to avoid politicizing the games that some shied away from the idea of an inevitably-controversial Beijing Olympics.
It's clearly not viable to have a formal "no human rights abusers shall host the Olympics" rule, but it couldn't hurt for the world's democracies to signal, informally, that a more rights-respecting government would help China achieve the sort of recognition as a great power that it's looking for. But now that the schedule's already been set, it's hard to see any protests as doing anything other than showing how ineffectual the west is in its efforts to prod China to change.
Ever since two one-sided deals sent Kevin Garnett to Boston and Pau Gasol to Los Angeles, I've been thinking about how pleased the NBA central office must be about the prospect of reviving the storied Lakers-Celtics rivalry with a meeting between two historic large market franchises in the NBA finals. It occurs to me, however, that there's a very plausible scenario in which the league gets something catastrophic like a New Orleans—Detroit matchup. Especially out West, we've got closely matched teams in quality and huge gaps in marketability between squads like LA, Phoenix, Houston (think of the China market -- and, yes, they've learned to love T-Mac over there) and laggards like New Orleans and Utah. Look for conspiracy theories to abound if the officiating in the playoffs seems to smile upon the more marketable squads.
Photo by Flickr user TheMikeLee used under a Creative Commons license
How much should we think about a player's per minute stats versus his per game stats? Dave Berri argues:
Let me close by noting that I don’t think that people should solely look at WP48 or just per-minute stats. If you did that, Jerome James - who posted a 1.341 WP48 - would have been the first half MVP. James, though, only played five minutes in the first half of the season, so his WP48 doesn’t really mean much.
Although I do think people need to look at more than per-minute numbers, I also think people need to stop focusing solely on the per-game stats. Specifically, when we are looking at players who played at least 30 minutes a contest, we shouldn’t penalize players whose minutes are closer to 30 than to 40. Such penalties — as we see in the case of KG — can easily cause us to miss the obvious.
I think the players who are playing at least 30 mpg are exactly the players we should penalize for lower minutes. After all, a great player who offers you 32 minutes per game is genuinely less valuable than a great player who offers you 40 minutes per game. Things like stamina, injury resistance, and ability to avoid foul trouble are all part of what makes for a useful player. It's the players who play less than that who we shouldn't penalize. Of course you don't want to rely on tiny samples like in the Jerome James example, but a guy who's playing well in 15 minutes per game is probably limited to 15 mpg by coaching decisions -- decisions that might be wrong, or might indicate a jam-up of good players at the same position one of whom should be traded -- rather than fatigue.
J.A. Adande correctly notes that "Coach of the Year often is a way to cover up bad predictions" and this will likely redound to the benefit of New Orleans coach Byron Scott since the team is doing better than expected. It's worth asking, though, if anything especially surprising happened. When you get right down to it -- not really. They didn't make any offseason moves that turned out much better than expected, they haven't seen a rookie turn out to be a great contributor, and they haven't seen an unheralded guy emerge into greatness.
Chris Paul was a great player last season and he's even better this season, but that's really what you expect from a young player. The main difference, it seems to me, is this -- thus far Paul has missed two games over the course of the season, whereas last year he missed 18. David West has missed six games this season, whereas last season he missed 30. Tyson Chandler has missed three games, but last season he missed nine. It's hard to win the games when your best players don't play, especially when you're a team with a bad bench. Have those players available more, and the team does better. New Orleans' success wasn't widely predicted (though there were exceptions) since they didn't do so well last year, don't have a distinguished pedigree, and didn't do anything interesting in the off-season. But their success has mostly amounted to everyone doing what they did last year but being injured less.
Does anyone out there who's seen more Golden State games this season then I have no why Andris Biedrins only plays 26.6 minutes per game. It seems to me that if I had a good young big man on my roster and no backup center, that I'd give him some more burn than that. After all, the Warriors score more points while giving up fewer points when Biedrins is playing and that whole "better offense and better defense" thing is usually what you're looking for in a player.
I'm on the road in Morgantown, West Virginia so I missed Gilbert Arenas' dramatic return in tonight's loss to the Bucks. Gilbert played well -- 17 points on reasonably efficient shooting in 20 minutes -- but precisely as one might have feared, the Wizards' Gil-free improved defense seems to have gone missing.
Agent Zero says "People who usually have microfracture are usually big players who get off the floor. I don't jump, I don't get off the floor." I dunno, I'm pretty sure he does jump:
It is true that these knee problems are normally associated with big men, but when you get down to it it seems like it's probably a bigger problem for a perimeter player. A tall guy with skills can be valuable to his team even if he's a bit slow and doesn't jump very well. A guy like Arenas, however, really depends on his quickness to make plays.
Is John McCain really only 5'7"? As Kevin Drum points out, it's been a mighty long time since we've elected a short person to the White House. To be sure, the shorter of two tall candidates sometimes wins, but this is another matter entirely.
You've got to wonder why the Nationals asked Bush to throw out the first pitch at the new stadium -- it was pretty much inevitable that he'd get booed by a DC crowd. And rightly so, the man deserves to be booed. But the fan's deserve a first pitch thrower who's not so boo-worthy. Couldn't they have gotten Mayor Fenty to open the Nats' season and sent Bush to a minor league game in Utah or some other place where he's still got a good approval rating?
Dave Berri notes that despite the sense you frequently get of the NBA declining in popularity, attendance is actually way up:
In 2006-07 the average NBA team attracted 726,954 fans during the regular season. And this was the all-time record. Let me repeat. Last season the NBA - which Shanoff says is declining in popularity - set an all-time attendance record. And this is a per-team average record (of course they also set a record for total attendance).
To put this mark in perspective, 20 years ago - during the peak of the Boston-LA rivalry — the NBA’s per team average was only 550,190 fans. Across the past 20 years, while the U.S. population has grown 23.8%, NBA attendance has grown 38.7%.
So more teams and higher average attendance -- that seems pretty good. What's probably going on is that thanks to the proliferation of media everything has more of a niche vibe than it used to. Back before most people had cable, anytime anything was on television at all it was somewhere between 1/3 and 1/7th (depending on where you lived) of the total things available to watch on TV and there were no DVDs or websites or OnDemand offerings to provide further options. So anything that got above a certain "it's on television" threshold automatically acquired a certain air of mass relevance that, these days, is very hard for anything to achieve.
Asked for the root of his hopefulness, Stern referred to “the wellspring of optimism that resides within me” and the “renewal presented by the draft” and the preseason. “And I do know that the ownership of the Knicks is committed to improving the team,” he said. “It’s just my perpetually optimistic self.”
I think Stern should start moonlighting as John McCain's Iraq spokesman.
The New Republic asked for my thoughts on the Israeli-Arab conflict and the appropriate U.S. policy response how to improve the NCAA tournament. Results here.
Donnie Walsh has definitely had some success over the years with the Indiana Pacers, but the idea of recruiting him away from Indianapolis and to New York seems a bit odd. Walsh will be leaving Indy on a sour note, after several seasons worth of his team being in decline. The Knicks seem like they need a guy on his upside, someone who's been having some success and now is going to take on a bigger job.
Meanwhile, I wonder what Larry Bird's plan for turning the Pacers around is? Trading away the team's unpopular-with-the-fans "bad character" guys in exchange for overpaid white guys who don't play basketball very well hasn't turned out great and it's hard to undue mistakes like that.
Malik Rose comes off the bench to deliver a team-high twenty points on 8-13 shooting in New York's 93-114 loss yesterday to the mighty Minnesota Timberwolves.
From the annals of silly sports punditry, I just heard Doug Collins explain that the Rockets are doing better because the team added "high-energy players" who've "revitalized Tracy McGrady." T-Mac's clearly an excellent player, but if you look at the numbers there's just no denying that he's performing below the peak he established during his first three seasons in Orlando. Houston didn't add players who revitalized McGrady; they've got a bunch of role players who are playing well so the team's winning more games than it did at the beginning of the season. McGrady, however, is playing just the same.
When considering a basketball player's quality, you obviously need to consider position. But still, certain kinds of crude position adjustments seem to me to produce perverse results. For example, see Dave Berri's comment on Rashard Lewis:
Lewis is listed at 6'10" and Hedo Turkoglu, the Magic's starting small forward, is listed at the exact same height. What's more, Turkoglu is a somewhat better rebounder than is Lewis. But it can't be right to say that if the Magic were to start calling Turkoglu the power forward and Lewis the small forward that Lewis would suddenly become worth paying more than he is now. The ability to guard multiple positions is an asset. If Lewis couldn't hack it at the four and had to be played strictly as a small forward, he'd be a less valuable player, not a more valuable one.
The Houston Rockets just got their 22nd straight victory and uncontested posession of first place in the Western Conference. Both teams saw disappointing shooting from their stars (33 percent for Kobe, 25 percent for T-Mac) but the difference is that Kobe took over a third of the Lakers' shot attempts while McGrady for more like a fifth of the Rockets'. There's that, and Houston's continued ability to pull quality role players out of thin air. First there was Carl Landry, then he went down with injury, and now Mike Harris, who was playing in China as of 10 days ago, delivered six points and six rebounds in ten minutes.
Gilbert Arenas seems to be getting close to returning to the Wizards lineup. Sara maintains that you can tell by his off-kilter play during those few games at the start of the season that Gilbert was psychologically shattered by the initial injury and is never going to be the same player again. I've never heard her use the term "swag" in regard to this theory, but to students of Gilbertology I think the relevance should be clear.
I'm not, however, really sure I buy it. What's more, Gilbert wouldn't need to be all that good for reallocating minutes away from the likes of DeShawn Stevenson and Roger Mason, Jr. to constitute a net improvement for the team. The real issue is that the Wizards have survived Gilbert's loss by becoming a much better team defensively. I'm not sure exactly what caused that (defense is, as ever, under-analyzed and under-discussed so I have no real idea what could cause it to improve) but the trick will be to not let it go away when he comes back.
Excessive use of the word "Cinderella." It comes up in the NBA, just not as often. Google search hits for "George Mason Cinderella": 355,000. Google search hits for "Golden State Warriors Cinderella": 70,000. And I dare any writer to go up to Stephen Jackson and compare him to a fairy-tale princess.
And, yes, I know nobody agrees with me about this.
Went to the Wiz-Cavs game last night that featured Caron Butler's return from injury. After sitting through any number of Wizards games featuring lackluster crowds, it was thrilling to be at a serious rivalry matchup with a packed arena and an audience prepared to really cheer and boo. Something that at least looked to Wizards fans like an egregious non-call on a three second violation even prompted clearly audible protests from the stands. It was good stuff.
Of course, the fact that the good guys won didn't hurt. I'm really hoping we can manage to get into that fifth seed in order to produce yet another Cleveland-DC playoff matchup.
Meanwhile, I note the following quasi-optimistic take on the 2007-2008 Wizards. Basically, they're about as good as the 2006-2007 edition. Given that this year we haven't had the services of Gilbert Arenas, some pundits have taken to talking about how the greater ball-sharing, etc., that the current squad offers makes them actually more effective without Gil. In reality, this year's team scores 107.9 points per 100 possessions (11th in the league) whereas last year's version scored 110.1; the reason the results have been similar is that the defense went from yielding 110.6 points per hundred to giving up only 108.2 per hundred. If Gilbert can come back and restore the offense to its former glory while the defense stays in touch with the skills it's learned this year, the team can graduate from "mediocre" to "prettty good."
Isaac Chotiner, longtime Rockets fan, pens an appreciation for Houston's incredible ongoing streak. There's no way they're going to break the 33 game record, but they only need one more win to move into second place on the all-time NBA streak list.
Meanwhile, eighteen in a row! I'll be rooting for whoever comes out of the West (probably Lakers or Spurs) against the evil Celtics, but Houston's definitely my sentimental favorite in the Western. What's more, a schedule of New Jersey at home, Atlanta on the road, and Charlotte at home with no back-to-backs makes a 21 game streak seem plausible.
I often say to myself while watching NBA games, sure this is pretty interesting, but it would be so much better if we switched up tournament rules so as to minimize the odds chance of the best teams advancing while also massively degrading the talent-level of the athletes. After all, what kind of basketball fan would want to see the game played by the best basketball players out there? Not me! Far better to see competition where the average guy couldn't make it in the Spanish or Italian pro leagues. Three cheers for mediocrity.
I hope the current winning streaks by the San Antonio Spurs and Houston Rockets will throw the panicky trades of Dallas and Phoenix into some relief. Both the Mavs and the Suns seemed to have taken the attitude that if LA was going to make a blockbuster deal that improved the team, that, damnit, they had to make blockbuster deals of their own without giving adequate consideration to whether or not the deals were helping. Meanwhile, other West teams who chose to just tweak and improve are in good shape.
Maybe the Lakers will win in the end, especially if Bynum comes back at full strength. And if they do, they do. It's hard to compete when a good team gets to add a player as good as Gasol without giving anything up. But flailing is not the answer.
I think Barack Obama has a much stronger chance of beating John McCain in the general election. I think Hillary is flawed in many ways, and particularly if you look at her husband's unwillingness to release the names of the people who contributed to his presidential library. And the reason that is important -- you know, are there favors attached to $500,000 or $1 million contributions? And what do I mean by favors? I mean, pardons that are granted; investigations that are squelched; contracts that are awarded; regulations that are delayed.
As I wrote in my Los Angeles Times op-ed on the subject, Hillary Clinton has, to her credit, recognized that George W. Bush's undisclosed library fundraising is a problem and sponsored a bill to ensure that the next President of the United States can't do what Bush and her husband are doing. And Bill says that if Hillary wins, then he'll disclose. But that's too late -- the election is happening now, and people deserve to know now. We do know that "Denise Rich. Ms. Rich gave the foundation $450,000 while her fugitive ex-husband, Marc Rich, was seeking a pardon on tax-evasion and racketeering charges" and that other donors as of 2004 include various Wal-Mart-linked individuals and foundations, Haim Saban, Qatar, Kuwait, the Saudi Royal family, etc.
In the wake of Boston's fairly comfortable win over the Detroit Pistons it's perhaps time to revisit the obvious point that this is a really good basketball team. Kevin Garnett has consistently been one of the top players in the league, and now for the first time ever he's playing alongside another legitimately great player in Paul Pierce. Ray Allen's not really the force he once was, but he's no slouch, either. And contrary to how things looked over the offseason, Boston's now got reasonable depth. Rajon Rondo is pretty good and Kendrick Perkins is good enough. Add on to that Glen Davis, Eddie House, James Posey and now P.J. Brown and Sam Cassell off the bench, and you've got a really great basketball team.
I kind of lost sight of the Celtics because they fell off their seventy win pace and then there were blockbuster trades out west, but the slip was driven by injuries. When healthy, I see every reason to think they'll win the championship.
Photo by Flickr user The Mike Lee used under a Creative Commons license
I was looking at ESPN.com's "Hollinger stats" page and was surprised to see that in terms of Hollinger's PER stat, Durant is the 26th best small forward in the league. Not great, by any means, but good enough to be a starter somewhere. And, indeed, by the formula Durant is just ever so slightly below average.
I'd been under the impression that Durant was actually playing terribly. So I looked up the breakdown. It seems that in terms of scoring efficiency, Durant is pretty bad -- 50th among small forwards in true shooting percentage. As a rebounder he's worse -- 55th best rate among small forwards in rebound rate. 52nd in turnover ratio, and 53rd in assist ratio. Basically, he seems to be a bit worse than the fiftieth-best small forward in the league. That's probably good enough to get some minutes as a backup, especially since in light of his age he may well improve if he gets a chance, but it's a far cry from 26th best as Hollinger's aggregate statistic makes him out to be. What accounts for the difference?
Well, it turns out that Durant does excel at one thing -- getting plays called for him. He's got the third-highest usage rate among small forwards. But does he really deserve to get the level of credit for this that Hollinger's giving him? I mean, if you're not a very good player, your usage rate ought to be low. Using tons of possessions isn't helpful if you're at Durant-like levels of effectiveness.
Jeff Van Gundy explains in a cool feature for the Play website. Given that defense is half of basketball, there's shockingly little discussion of it in the sports media. Everyone knows that Boston has put together a great defense this year, but you don't hear much about what makes it so great except for vague allusions to Kevin Garnett's "intensity." I'm sure he's intense, but there's more to it than that.
Gilbert Arenas cleared for practice but no schedule for returning to playing. I've got my fingers crossed that he won't have lost a step when he does get back.
The Wizards are now 4-1 over their past five games, despite Caron Butler and Gilbert Arenas both being out with injuries. This is a major improvement from the early days of the Butler injury when we were losing left and right. What accounts for the difference? Well, I notice that the team has ditched Kanye's "Stronger" as opening music in favor of quasi-local Clipse's "Roc Boys" which I think is worth about 2.6 points per game all on its own.
The Wizards' injury situation gets worse and worse as it seems Caron Butler has a "labral tear" which is worse than what they though he had. He's out indefinitely. Arenas is out indefinitely. And there are so many bad teams in the East that there's no guarantee the Wizards can even manage to sink low enough to snag a high lottery pick for the trouble of our ruined season.
Barack Obama offers his endorsement to the San Antonio Spurs, terming them his "second-favorite team" after his hometown Chicago Bulls:
It seems a bit non-credible to me for Obama to cite the Spurs' no-flash, play-the-right-way image as the decisive factor. The Obama-esque element of San Antonio's team is the unlikely cosmopolitanism of the roster. In current NBA terms, though, Obama may be most like the Lakers -- a juggernaut that came out of nowhere.
The same Chad Ford article I mentioned early says that Andris Biedrins "falls somewhat into the Anderson Varejao category: energetic big man whose stats don't tell the whole story in terms of on-court contributions." But the story the stats tell is that Biedrins is a pretty good basketball player. Unless, that is, by "stats" you just mean "per game scoring average." But my stats say that Biedrins' ten points per game come on just seven field goal attempts. They tell me that he's also averaging ten rebounds and one block per game, and he's doing all this in 27.5 minutes as a young center who's coach likes to play small ball.
Ford's not wrong about Biedrins, the numbers say exactly what he's trying to say, namely that Biedrins is a good player and that especially given his age your team would be glad to have him. But for some reason he thinks these attributes are intangible when, in fact, they're right there in the numbers.
