An Introduction to the 2012 Gothic Ginobili Player Capsules

Posted on Fri 06 July 2012 in 2012 Player Capsules by Aaron McGuire

Here at the Gothic, we have a big and possibly-too-often restated goal. We want to start discussions. We like talking -- not merely to hear our own voices, but to really engage our readers and the mass online following of basketball as a whole. Now, there isn't a ton to talk about in a long offseason. I think we all know that. There's the occasional trade, of course, and this year we have the Olympics to tide us over. (And yes, we'll be offering a bunch of Olympic coverage as well -- don't worry about that.) But on the whole, there's not all that much to talk about, other than frittering away at the narratives of a season gone by and handicapping a season we as-of-yet know nothing about. Not much to ruminate. We'd like to allay that, at least partially -- we'd like to give everyone something to talk about.

So here we are. ESPN has their crowdsourced #NBARank, Basketball Prospectus has its excellent preseason guide, and the esteemed John Hollinger has his thorough examinations of each player in the league for insider. And us, here at the Gothic? We offer for your consumption -- as both an offseason and an early season feature -- our Gothic Ginobili Player Capsules. Last season, before this blog even began, I did a whole lot of these. Seriously, a ton. In the GG archives we have a select few -- 30, to be precise -- but rest assured there were quite a few more. I completed 271 player capsules in the run-up to the 2012 season. They were posted on a private discussion forum, and most likely, will never see the light of day. They weren't at all edited, included more vulgarities than a classic J. Dana Teague rant, and some went far too long/short. It was a mess, basically.

This year, I'm going a bit loony. I've taken a list of every player in the NBA that played over 100 minutes last season -- that's 440 guys. I sifted through that list and took out 70 more players, because I couldn't find anything interesting to say about them and I needed to cut this project down to at least a moderately manageable amount. The plan, as it stands? Talk about the 370 players left. All of them. I've done some outlining, got some basic points set up, and worked the format down to where I get enough leeway to talk but enough structure to feel like everything comes together. I've compiled statistics for each player, articles, reports, et cetera.

And for the rest of 2012, I'm going to talk about them. Here's the plan, in a convenient and easily updated FAQ format.

• • •

WHAT'S THE SCHEDULE?

When I started this project, updates came Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, with six players each day. This quickly fell by the wayside as an outright ridiculous goal, leading to the current structure -- one post per day, Monday through Friday, three players a post. Around 10-15 thousand words a week, give or take. Lots of writing. As of August's conclusion, I'm proud to say I've only missed two days -- given that I'm a third of the way through the project, I admit, I'm pretty surprised about that. Still.

IS THIS GOING TO BE ALL YOU GUYS DO FOR THE ENTIRE OFFSEASON?

This is going to make up the majority of the Gothic's coverage this summer. This is a fact. I know that personally, this will make up the vast majority of my posts this summer. That doesn't mean that we aren't going to have other neat content, though -- Tuesdays and Thursdays will remain content-rich days for us, with our stable of wonderful writers (Adam Koscielak, Alex Arnon, Jacob Harmon, and most likely one or two new additions you'll be meeting soon) scribing their thoughts and mores as Alex Dewey leads them forward into a H.A.M. set of content primarily composed of Olympic content, thoughts on the free agency market, and a new audio courtroom-esque feature we'll be introducing in a few weeks. We aren't resting on our laurels, here. Trust us.

HOW DID YOU CHOOSE CAPSULE ORDERING? WHY HASN'T [MY FAVORITE PLAYER] GONE YET?

I will state this over and over again, ad infinitum. People will forever continue to disbelieve me. (Or troll me by pretending to disbelieve me.) I will state this as clearly as I can. THE ORDER IS RANDOM. I didn't alter, modify, or change any of the player ordering that my randomizer produced. The only element that could be conceivably considered non-random is the fact that no computer randomizer is truly random in the long run -- they rely on set seeds in a pre-randomized list that for most programs goes on longer than most human beings can comprehend. But for all intents and purposes this is a random list. So, if you're wondering why a team has been oversampled in the first 20-30 players, or why your team's star hasn't come up yet? Blame random numbers, not me. (Or, alternatively... if you blame me, you also are obligated to admit that it is your belief that I have control over all random numbers. Because that would be a pretty awesome power for a statistician to have.)

• • •

Looking for an organized directory of all capsules? You've come to the right place. Check out our capsule directory, where you can filter and sort our completed capsules by player age, team, and position. Go to the team pages for team salary data and interesting stuff like that. If you have any feature suggestions for the directory, please feel free to comment on this post or email us at "staff [at] gothicginobili [dot] com". It's fun stuff.


As a tertiary feature, we will be featuring extended versions of certain capsules at other websites to spread the word. So far, capsules that fall under this designation of Player Capsules (Plus) include the following:

If you have more questions, ask in the comments below, or ask me on Twitter (my handle is @docrostov). Stay frosty.