Remember our cracked-skull columnist, Alex Arnon? He hit his head a while back, fainted, and woke up a delusional man with tidings of a world where small markets ruled all comers. Over the past month, Arnon has been dealing with "personal matters", a thinly veiled cover-up for Arnon's voyage through the serengetti to produce his new TV pilot for the local access channel: "What Blue Wildebeast Wants to Be A Millionaire?" (I tried to tell him it wouldn't work, especially with a total production budget of $3.54, but Arnon is a freakishly determined young man who doesn't need my sass.) Regardless. He's been kidnapped by a rampaging horde of zebras and is being ransomed off for drugs and money, even though zebras don't have the opposable thumbs necessary to do drugs or the credit score to spend the money. Until I can patch together a resolution to the situation, I'll be taking the reins to our Small Market Monday feature. Just let me knock myself in the head with this small market butter churner and I'll be right with you.

Hello, friends! Welcome to the comeback edition of Gothic Ginobili's mainstay Monday feature, Small Market Mondays. Today, I'd like to talk about the NBA's big race that everyone is talking about. It's what some people call "the second standings." I know it's what I look at first when I see a big slate of standings. Some strange people spend the late season examining playoff position. Others look at the race for pole position in the lottery. But the real NBA aficionados know that there's only one race that matters. That race?

Why, the race for the 14th pick, of course!

All throughout history, the 14th pick has been an absolute sweet spot for teams looking to snag the lowest priced barely-rotation young player who is technically still a lottery pick. And the announcers won't ever let you forget it, either! You want to forget that Marcus Morris, Earl Clark, and Anthony Randolph were all technically lottery picks? Too bad! Every single time those players visit the franchise that drafted them, they'll be inexplicably referred to as "lottery picks." Every time, for the duration of their entire career. For a small market team with scarce funds in the coffer and a need for a convenient scapegoat, there isn't a better pick in the game. It's great! It doesn't matter that every pick from 10-20 is roughly as valuable as one-another -- picks 10-14 pick have the additional cachet of being lottery picks, and 14 has the additional cachet of being the last one! When they inevitably fail to draft anything remotely approaching an NBA starter, the management can point to their cheap-yet-poor draft selection and cast a wool over the eyes of their adoring fans to hide from their terrible free agent strategies. It's brilliant! As the race stands today, here are the main competitors for that elusive last lottery pick:

• THE FAVORITE: The Utah Jazz! Led by the "stormin' Mormon" Jimmer Fredette, these Utah Cowpokes ain't a sight for sore eyes! [ED. NOTE: Fredette isn't on the Jazz. Also: they aren't a sight for sore eyes BECAUSE THEY'RE A TERRIBLE BASKETBALL TEAM. Also: why am I leaving an editor's note for myself?] They wrangle the snakes and keep the lid on the butter-churnin' mayhem over at the Ener-Gee-Whiz Solution Farms-n-stuff (or, as some call it, "EnergySolutions Arena"). They're the overwhelming favorite to check into their summer vacations with the 14th pick in tow.

• THE SNAKE IN THE BUSHES: The Los Angeles Lakers! True to form, the Lakers are trying to play spoiler to Utah's race for the 14th pick. It wouldn't be a real NBA race if there wasn't a big-market snake here to try and take away the small-market spoils now, would it? The Lakers are currently 2 games out from the #14 pick, but if they're terrible enough down the stretch, they could clutch victory from the jaws of defeat and pull out the requisite mediocrity needed to rip it out of Utah's hands. Oh the humanity! Fun fact, though -- even if they DO steal it from the Jazz, they won't actually get the pick. The Phoenix Suns own the Lakers' pick if it falls in the lottery. Take THAT, large markets!

• THE UNDERDOG FORGET-ME-NOT: The Dallas Mavericks! Some might consider them the favorites, given that they entered today tied with the Jazz at a record of 34-36. But I don't! They're a better team than the Jazz, sporting a slightly better point differential and a far better roster at this stage of the game. Unfortunately, their closing schedule is quite a bit harder than Utah's. They're one to keep an eye on, but they're an unlikely winner for the 14-spot when all's said and done.

Fun times! We'll be keeping you posted on 14th pick news over the next few weeks of Small Market Monday action. Keep an eye out!

• • •

The State of The Small Market Union (Sponsored by The Memphis School of Modern Dance)

As they always do, small markets are dominating the NBA standings right now. In the east, small-market Indiana currently sits atop the leaderboard of teams-that-aren't-Miami, known in some circles as the NBA's "sacrificial lambs." Not much sacrificial about THESE lambs, folks! ... you know, unless you're referring to the likelihood that the Eastern Conference Playoffs are a brutal slaughter where Miami obliterates three terrible teams in a row by margins heretofore unseen by man. Because that's probably going to happen. Wait, THAT'S what that phrase means? Oh, blast it, I always thought people were literally talking about human sacrifice. Leave it to McGuire to mistake jokes for reality. Classic. Looks like I'm gonna need to call my lawyer.

In the western conference, we have a veritable small-market choke-hold on the top two seeds of the playoffs from Oklahoma City and San Antonio, two small townships whose collective population could fit in a 1,951,725 person thimble. I'm... I'm really not sure what sort of a factory would actually produce that thimble, and that's actually a terrifying thought, but that's a question for another time. Meanwhile, the race for the 3rd seed is a classic big-medium-small showdown between small-market Memphis, medium-market Denver, and big-market Los Angeles. Currently Denver is up one game on Memphis and a half a game on Los Angeles, with Memphis sporting the hardest remaining schedule and Los Angeles locked into a top-4 seed by dint of playing in one of the worst divisions in the game. Here's hoping the Grizzlies tough it out, yeah?

Also, it really makes sense that the Pacific is struggling so much. You can't have that much legalized big-market California chronic without it eventually ruining basketball. We all know Ice Cube's immortal words that are only tangentially related to this situation, after all! "It's ironic, Joe had the brew and Gavin's chronic / Seattle stole the SuperSonics." Really insightful young man, that Ice Cube. That wasn't the only time he predicted something well in advance. Just look at a few unreleased lyrics from Ice Cube's rarely-heard underground followup to "It Was A Good Day", aptly titled "It Was Not A Very Good Day":

Did you know, that in the future

Billy Mays will die someday and it will tear out my sutures

Also Steve Irwin will get stabbed by some fool stingray

Also Chuck Hagel will get confirmed for Defense Sec-Re-Tarr-Eee but not without casulat-ays

OK what am I even doing this is beyond terrible why can't I write anything anymore

what is happening to me

help me

why

• • •

Sperry's Space Stuff presents: "Rocketing To The Top!" Chandler Parsons MVP Watch

I'm torn. The general point of this feature is to highlight the REAL MVPs, the players who "understand their limitations" by covering up their inherent MVP stylings and stop shooting the ball in order to give their teammates something to be proud of. That's what Glorious Small-Market Generalissimo Alex Arnon would've wanted, I think. Chandler Parsons -- although originally a brilliant choice for this award -- may have reached an uncomfortable point in his career. That point? He's too good to be a small-market MVP. Parsons is currently averaging 18-4-3 over the month of March, shooting 50-45-76 on 13 shots a game. That's ridiculous! Parsons fits all of the other criterion for this award well. He's dashing, he's funny, and he's currently making less than one-tenth the Gross Domestic Product of the island nation of Tuvalu (their GDP is $37 million, so, he's making less than $3.7 million). But he's losing track of the name of the game, and he's performing too good to be the real small-market MVP. That brings me to you, readers. Who should be featured in the season-ending spate of incoming small-market MVPs? Criterion include, as I just mentioned...

• His salary must be less than $3.7 million (that is, less than one-tenth of Tuvalu's GDP.)
• He plays in one of the 10 smallest markets in the league (define small yourself -- it's fungible).
• His stats must indicate a player deferring much of his talent for the good of the team (except for rebounds, hustle, and assists).

Help us out, readers! Leave ideas in the comments below.

• • •

Small Market Mondays Game of the Night: MEMPHIS AT WASHINGTON

This particular match-up on the trusty Washington gridiron pits against one another two teams that are small market mainstays for different reasons. For Memphis, they're a small market the traditional way -- they're a team in a hilariously small market. Memphis isn't quite as small as San Antonio or Oklahoma City, but don't mistake that distinction for large-market wares. The city's main attraction is a daily tradition colloquially known as the "Peabody Ducks" -- every morning, five ducks march into the fountain in the Peabody Hotel to the sound of John Philip Sousa's King Cotton March. Then, every evening, the ceremony is reversed and the ducks march back to their rooftop home. I thought attraction was ridiculous enough that it had to be completely made up, but it's not. It's been going on since the 1930s. Let me drop the airs for a second, here: if "ducks marching in a hotel" ranks as one of your town's primary attractions, you're a small-market hero to me.

As for Washington, they're small-market by attrition. The District of Columbia is a pretty large market, if you're only looking at size -- but the team's been so comically bad for so long that they've just sort of transformed into an NBA small-market team. Thanks, world! Welcome to the big-time, Washington. This game should be pretty fun, given that the Wizards are 20-16 with John Wall in the lineup and the Grizzlies are fighting for their 3rd-seed lives. Be sure to check it out. Also: if my first sentence was accurate, they'll be playing a basketball game in a football stadium, which makes this a definite must-watch. HOW WILL THEY DO IT?

Other quick-hits for great small-market matchups in the coming week:

• Minnesota at Detroit (TUE, 3/26): This was the 2nd place choice of the small-market hero who picked -- out of all 30 teams -- a Minnesota/Atlanta matchup as his "must watch" matchup in the befuddling new NBA commercial. Who WOULDN'T want to see the battle of the Greg's, Monroe vs Stiemsma? A must-watch for sure.

• Los Angeles Lakers at Milwaukee (THU, 3/28): An important game for Utah's pursuit of the elusive 14th pick. If the Lakers can dig deep and find it in the depths of their blackened hearts to lose this game in their customary inexplicable/hilarious manner, Utah's hold on the 14th pick could become quite a bit more tenuous.

• Charlotte at Philadelphia (SAT, 3/30): Look, the question here isn't "why would you watch this game?" The REAL question is "why in the world WOULDN'T you watch this game?" See, I heard that if you get aggressive and flip the premise of the question, you can get people to ignore the fact that you have absolutely no argument. It worked, right?

See you next week, Small Marketeers! Keep your ducks in a row.

Continue reading

Remember how we had that one series, a long time ago, where we'd entreat our writers to scribe short vignettes on the previous night's games? We've consistently discovered there's no way for us to do that every night, but with the capsules done and Aaron back in the saddle as a more active managing editor, we're hoping that we can bring the feature back as a weekly Wednesday post. Sometimes Thursday, like today. As always, the vignettes may not always be tactful, tacit, or terse -- they'll always be under a thousand words, though, and generally attempt to work through a question, an observation, or a feeling. Today's short pieces are as follows.

• DEN vs PHI: Streakin' Ain't Easy (for ESPN by Aaron McGuire)
• SAS vs GSW: Still Confusing After All These Years (by Alex Dewey)

Read on after the jump.

• • •

__OKC vs DEN: Nuggets of Redemption
___Aaron McGuire_

ED. NOTE: Originally posted with the March 21st edition of ESPN's Daily Dime. Reprinted for reader convenience.

Since a Jan. 1 upset of the Los Angeles Lakers at Staples Center, the Philadelphia 76ers have suffered an 0-14 drought on the road. The luckless lottery hopefuls were coming off of a late-breaking back-to-back (a 29-point thrashing at the hands of the Los Angeles Clippers, one must remember) and heading into an arena where the home team had won 15 of its last 15. The Denver Nuggets have averaged 111 points per game during that home streak, a stark contrast to Philadelphia's 88 points per game during their current road losing streak.

All this is to say that the world had a pretty good idea of what to expect in last night's late-night battle between the Nuggets and the Sixers: an annihilation. Oddsmakers tabbed Denver as a 14-point favorite, DESPITE missing Wilson Chandler and Ty Lawson with injuries. The game seemed destined to be a blowout where a clearly superior team runs wild on a down-on-their-luck lottery squad with nothing left to play for. Reasonable logic, although it misses one important fact.

Talent gaps are talent gaps, and oftentimes, no amount of extra heart and hustle is going to make up for that. But the spirit of an NBA underdog manifests itself in a certain curious way when winter turns to spring and lottery position firms up.

Every once in a while, for whatever reason, a lottery team doesn't simply lie on the mat and tap out. It'll show a fire it can't tap into on a regular basis. It'll come out roaring, throw the first punch, and thoroughly eviscerate a team that shouldn't be letting it in the game at all. In this case, it wasn't just "whatever reason." The reason was simple.

NBA teams, tanking or not, love ending streaks. There's nothing quite like cracking the perceived invulnerability of a team on a long winning streak. The press starts talking about their championship pedigree, its players start believing their own hype, game previews become little more than their streaking statistics and lofty praises. Fans start looking ahead and checking wins off on the calendar. "Oh, look, we're playing the three worst teams in our division. We're DEFINITELY getting at least three more wins in the streak."

Expectations. Glory. Complacency. It sets in rather quickly. And it changes the game. Suddenly, it isn't just about a bad team versus a good team. It's about an underdog proving it belongs. It's about a lesser team upending the expectations and throwing conventional wisdom under a bus. It's about the flaws of the contender, not the flaws of the lesser lights. The game becomes more akin to a March Madness upset than a garden variety NBA blowout.

The Nuggets -- due to a furious late burst and a well-timed breakout night for journeyman Corey Brewer -- don't have to suffer the ignominy of losing the streak to a team that they should've beaten. But make no mistake. Win or not, Thursday wasn't their night. As the buzzer sounded to the whoops and hollers of a Denver crowd, a visible sigh of relief passed across Nuggets coach George Karl's face. Nuggets play-by-play announcer Chris Marlowe summed it up best as the players left the court: "Ladies and gentlemen, you just saw the biggest theft since the crown jewels were stolen in the 18th century."

No kidding. Philadelphia spent much of the night lording over the Nuggets, thoroughly outplaying its hosts in an exceedingly strange turnaround. They rebounded better, they scored inside better, they moved the ball better. And they deserve all the credit in the world for it -- they fought the good fight, and they put a tangible fear into the hearts of the better team. They played swarming, trapping defense and kept Denver out of their comfort zone all night long. Heck, they managed to outscore the Nuggets in the paint. That hasn't happened since mid-February!

Philadelphia's valiant effort, even in defeat, reminded everyone watching of one of the world's most sacred truths -- probability isn't inevitability. Simply having a high chance of hitting the flush doesn't mean you will. Someday, a No. 1 seed will fall to a No. 16 seed. The Miami Heat have had to come back from the dead against teams they should've destroyed numerous times over the course of their incredible streak. Truth be told, every team on every great streak does. Adversity doesn't have to come from an obvious place; it can come from the most unexpected pasties on the schedule.

Philadelphia's effort was in vain -- the streak goes on.

But just ask the Nuggets: It sure isn't easy to win 14 straight games.

• • •

SAS vs GSW: Still Confusing After All These YearsAlex Dewey

Hey, guys! I'm here, I'm a seer, but don't get used to it.

Or, alternatively: get used to me posting more!

Or, alternatively: wait, maybe I'll be too busy for that, don't hold me to it!

Whatever. Que sera sera. What will be, will be~. (Ed. Note: Don't drink on a work night, Dewey.) Ahem. Anyway, for the first time in a while I sat down to "watch" the "games." Let me tell you personally, friends: I was happy that the Spurs won against the Warriors. I was astonished by how sprightly Tim Duncan looks. That's a cliche, but that's the point: he seems to keep getting better. No, really! Athletically he's not in the same class as any of the NBA's younger lights, but I was struck with the thought that the way he moved in his brilliant-on-both-ends 4th quarter almost evoked LeBron or Durant offensively.

... OK, Aaron, stop laughing. Yes. That's a stretch, and perhaps a slightly-younger Kevin Garnett is a far better comparison, but I just want to properly illustrate my shock. It was just ridiculously shocking to have Tim "I-sometimes-joke-about-being-a-point-guard" Duncan take the ball at the top of the key on quite a few possessions, even making the odd cut away from the post, not just to clear out space but to manage the geometry of a possession. No, Duncan isn't playing as a small, but Tim somehow reaches even deeper into his seemingly endless bag of veteran tricks.

One of the things that's overplayed when it comes to wily, hyper-skilled vets like Andre Miller and Tim Duncan is the tiresome "Still Characteristic After All These Years" trope. Sure, it's nice to see Duncan hit that 19-footer again. But when I see that, I'm feeling nostalgia for a greater past. That's not joy. Nostalgia's a mild form of depression, isn't that what they say? For joy and mirth, I much prefer the more refreshing strategy employed by the old-man game players: adaptation. By occasionally doing something completely bold and different than they've ever done but after-the-fact analogous to their existing skillset, these players show the bare bones of competitiveness that got them this far. If Andre Miller is Zach Lowe's Professor, then his course is the graduate-level Fundamentals of Fundamentals. It's that one class, you know the drill -- it's a little abstract but it's really cool because the professor has been there before a thousand times but never looks bored because the professor has a love of learning and there is always more to learn and also he's always high on something and sometimes he's roller-skating but that's OK because it's a judgment free zone also he teaches you to write enormous monstrosities of run-on sentences too it's very neat I think.

Ahem.

Yes, the course is an easy A, because you just have to show up and tune in. Still, you only get what you put in when it comes to Andre Miller and Tim Duncan, and you'd best get what you can while they're still there. Until tonight, I'd never seen Tim hop over a defender's arms while receiving the ball on a cut quite like he did in the late first quarter. It wasn't because he was jumping high, but because he was jumping true, with excellent footwork and raising his knees. Before tonight I don't think I'd seen Tim curl around defenders quite like that. I rarely see Tim as quite that active a facilitator, or even (at least these days) as quite that mobile a rim defender. Duncan dominated David Lee and Andrew Bogut defensively and neither seemed to be having anything close to a terrible game. Perhaps this is a case of not having seen the Spurs enough recently or simply of not having seen basketball much, period_._ But it was pretty neat. Duncan tried everything, and some of it actually worked.

Other observations from the caw of the lion-bird: Curry is known as a great, amazing, wow-did-he-just? shooter, but there's something even more gasp-inducing about his inevitable high release shot in traffic. I'd describe it thusly: Matt Bonner can hit threes. Stephen Curry can hit an invisible rim atop the Concorde flying the opposite direction while Curry himself is tuck-and-rolling out of a burning train going over a collapsing bridge. If you meet the Duncan in the lane, you have to kill Tim, and the only way to do that head-on against Duncan's gangly outstretched arms and timing is with floaters having nearly-vertical starting angles. And Curry can do it. He can do a swift hop straight-up and heighten the full-extension floater release at the last split-second in a consistently surprising way.

Curry does all of this marvelous work in a way that suggests consistency and the competitive intelligence to get to the line and to the rim when opponents respect his shot too much and to shoot when they respect his floater too much. I don't know where he rates out among points in the league but, in my ignorance, I still have to note that I rarely see a bad game from Curry; far more often I see an indifferent and stagnant Warriors offense, which he as point guard obviously bears some responsibility for. He's smart and he's got a potentially-historical-level jump shot, but I also get the sense that he doesn't have the speed or handle to really break a good defense. Let's be honest, though: talking about Curry's limitations only happens when we're trying to take a force of nature into a meat grinder and spit out a ranking. We have to have an opinion. My opinion is that you'd have to try in order to dislike watching Stephen Curry play. He got game.

In six, blessed minutes, Richard Jefferson did all the things he'd always been criticized for not doing on the Spurs - for playing tough, physical defense, for crashing the boards, for making the right pass with utter confidence. And in six, blessed minutes, one had to feel compassion. Because none of it worked, even remotely. Despite getting the ball in isolation in the post with a soft double, Jefferson decided to drive baseline. Turnover. Jefferson later made an athletic drive to the hoop, elbowing Manu in the ribs along the way. Charging. Then Manu got a three immediately, and on another occasion Manu embarrassed RJ with a great hand-off right in front of RJ and two other Warriors. In six, blessed minutes, we may have seen the last gasp of Richard Jefferson. I sometimes find RJ funny, conceiving of elaborate narratives that capitalize directly on the humor of Jefferson. And indeed, throughout his short first-half tenure I laughed constantly and riotously. Such fan favorites amuse us greatly. Part of sports and all that. And it occurs to me that those of us with a comedic disposition will remember our old clowns and comedians and their jokes more vividly and movingly than our leaders and heroes and their noble proclamations. Tim Duncan painted one of his latter-day masterpieces last night and I wonder (as I laugh aloud) if I'll remember it more than I'll remember RJ's caricature. His circular, faded "RJ" tattoo now with blocked, school-art-project lettering standing as large as the sun in a riotous, amusing defeat.

• • •

In case it hasn't been exceedingly obvious, Gothic Ginobili has been working on a bit of a skeleton crew lately. Our good man Dewey's started a new job, and BOTH Dewey and myself are in the process of moving. Not sure how many posts per week we'll be putting out in the week ahead, but we'll try to push forward a few more objects for your eager consumption than we have over this last few weeks. We still love you, readers! Even if we're both moving large boxes and disdainfully chugging down sports drinks!

See you next week.

Continue reading

Remember how we had that one series, a long time ago, where we'd entreat our writers to scribe short vignettes on the previous night's games? We've consistently discovered there's no way for us to do that every night, but with the capsules done and Aaron back in the saddle as a more active managing editor, we're hoping that we can bring the feature back as a weekly Wednesday post. Sometimes Thursday, like today. As always, the vignettes may not always be tactful, tacit, or terse -- they'll always be under a thousand words, though, and generally attempt to work through a question, an observation, or a feeling. Today's short pieces are as follows.

• OKC vs DEN: Nuggets of Redemption (for ESPN by Aaron McGuire)
• SAC vs LAC: A Tribe Called BLECH! (by Aaron McGuire)

Read on after the jump.

• • •

__OKC vs DEN: Nuggets of Redemption
___Aaron McGuire_

ED. NOTE: The following piece first appeared as the main byline in ESPN's Daily Dime from March 20th, 2013. It is reprinted here for reader convenience.

After a late-breaking overtime win the night before, the streaking Denver Nuggets found themselves with less than 21 hours of lead time for a game against the well-rested reigning Western Conference champions. On the road, no less, against a team sporting a home record of 30-4. Most fans and analysts would call that a "schedule loss," a night when a loss of any margin is both expected and acceptable.

Don't tell Denver that.

Tuesday night's comfortable 114-104 comeback win against the Oklahoma City Thunder was an exclamation point to Denver's current 13-game streak, and continues to highlight an incredible turnaround. The Nuggets started the season with a tepid 18-16 record behind a brutal schedule, but as their docket softens, they've quietly transformed into a borderline juggernaut. The Nuggets are a startling 29-6 in their past 35 games.

That hot stretch has carried Denver all the way from a weak hold on the Western Conference's seventh seed to a virtual tie for third, and it has given them an excellent shot at wresting home-court advantage for their first-round matchup. For a team that's currently 30-3 at home and 17-19 on the road, that's not just window dressing -- it's absolutely essential to their hopes of winning a series. That said, Tuesday night was a lot more than just a continuation of an excellent streak or a boon to their playoff hopes. It's easy to overlook, but it's something to bear in mind -- games against Oklahoma City hold a special cachet in Denver.

Consider: It has been less than two years since the Nuggets were bounced from the postseason by the Thunder in 2011. In that series, the Nuggets were looking ahead to the Spurs, a juggernaut they felt they could beat, but they looked too far ahead -- the naught-but-theoretical contenders in Denver were dispatched in a quick five games. Since that series, they've shown occasional flashes of greatness without ever putting it all together.

Tuesday's win was the latest in a season-long series of minor moral victories for Karl and his merry men. With Andre Iguodala's welcome addition helming a swarming perimeter defense and a small jolt to their ambitious transition-based offense, the Nuggets have entered a level of elite play heretofore unseen in the Denver heights. And Oklahoma City provides a brilliant reflection to that end. Prior to this season, the post-Carmelo Anthony Nuggets were a dismal 2-8 against the Thunder. That record includes losses by 13, 15 and 17, with only two exceedingly close wins to counterbalance them.

That was then. This is now.

After a 20-point thrashing in their first meeting, the Nuggets have pulled out three consecutive impressive wins against their former tormentors. They've beaten them twice in Denver and once in Oklahoma City, each time with increasing levels of comfort. This time, they played the most impressive game of their season to date -- Oklahoma City lost the lead in the third quarter and barely challenged down the stretch. Winning a regular-season series against a bitter rival that's dominated you in recent seasons is hardly the same as winning a playoff series, but it's a welcome jolt of confidence all the same.

Their captors vanquished, the question remains: How far can these Nuggets go? It's exceedingly hard to handicap a team such as Denver when you're looking for their playoff performance. It's brutally difficult to assess playoff strategy of a team with a borderline-obsessive focus on at-rim scoring and fast-paced basketball.

When the game slows down and their transition offense sputters, are the Nuggets going to have the half-court game to pull out road wins in the playoffs? Their style of play foments increased volatility; their assists essential, their movement non-negotiable.

Until the playoffs come, nobody knows for certain. But one factoid has to brighten their backers. The Nuggets aren't simply feasting on awful teams this season -- this win puts Karl's boys at 9-4 against the West's top four teams, with 3-1 records against both OKC and the Memphis Grizzlies, 2-1 against the Los Angeles Clippers, and 1-1 against the San Antonio Spurs. The Nuggets of yore were never quite that good against elite teams. And with their defense peaking at the right time, the Nuggets are starting to look like an awfully dangerous spoiler, a more robust edition of their trendy 2011 vintage.

As for their immediate future? With Tuesday's unexpected win in hostile territory, the Nuggets next have three straight games against soft competition to stake out a claim to their own 16-game streak. Then they'll face San Antonio, a statement game against another team trying to exorcise the playoff demons of years past.

They will play, they will compete, and they will wait.

Because the next "schedule loss" is coming.

• • •

SAC vs LAC: A Tribe Called BLECH!
Aaron McGuire

There isn't a whole lot to say about last night's Clippers game. Sometimes, you just don't have it. Sometimes, that leads to embarrassing things, sort of like an elite team falling apart completely in the fourth quarter against a Sacramento team that has trouble walking and chewing gum in concert. Sometimes, the NBA simply doesn't make sense, sort of like when a Chris Paul team falls apart in crunch time against Toney Douglas. Sometimes, all these things are true, and there just isn't a lot to say.

Anyone remember the "tribe called bench" moniker early in the year? I'm sure you do. It was a highly publicized nickname given to L.A.'s bench squad, a formidable unit featuring players like Eric Bledsoe, Jamal Crawford, Matt Barnes, and other intriguing characters. The unit was one of L.A.'s mainstays in their 17-game win streak, and one of their biggest strengths. Kevin Arnovitz wrote a great piece early in January reflecting on how their bench unit got work done for Los Angeles. Long story short? Very well. In 230 minutes played, they outscored opponents by a tidy 15.7 points per 100 possessions. They played a risk-seeking defensive gameplan with vicious traps and constant pressure. They were an essential part to the Clippers' identity, and their success helped the Clippers succeed despite an admirable focus on maintaining long resting periods for Chris Paul, Blake Griffin, and DeAndre Jordan.

Since Arnovitz posted the paean to L.A.'s Tribe Called Bench, the Tribe's gone missing. Blame injuries, blame Vinny, blame regression to the mean. But they haven't simply been a tiny bit worse. They've been straight-up bad. The unit as outlined (Bledsoe/Crawford/Barnes/Turiaf/Odom) has played just 41 minutes since January 9th, and that's not for no reason. The unit has been outscored by -- not a typo -- 21.9 points per 100 possessions in those 41 minutes, completely reversing the script on the unit's early season dominance. Their risk-seeking defensive strategy of constant pressure and steal attempts was nice as an occasional wrinkle to start the season, but it hasn't stood up very well as the year rolls on.

And neither has their bench as a whole -- the Clippers have dealt with a distressing glut of injuries since their 17 game win streak came to a close, and it's led to their disabled list becoming something of a revolving door. A player gets injured, they go out to rest up. Their replacement plays horribly in the additional minutes, gets injured, has to sit out. The original player -- a tad contrary to their doctor's orders -- comes back early to try and stop the bleeding. They play poorly, because they're injured, and they go back out. Repeat the cycle. Net and net, you end up with a lot of games like last night's horror show -- L.A. can't rely on their bench for more than token contributions, and it's become up to the starters to create and hold big leads, even in the face of monstrous minute obligations and fresh faces on the opposing end of the court. Sacramento's bench scored 62 points on 21-38 shooting. L.A.'s bench scored 38 points, and even that overstates their contributions -- 25 of those were scored by Jamal Crawford, whose role has become continually more essential with starter-in-name-only Chauncey Billups barely able to play 10 minutes a night. The non-Crawford elements of L.A.'s bench scored -- no typo -- 13 points on 5-23 shooting. Hard to play much worse than that, offensively.

If the Clippers can get their full bench unit back together by the playoffs, they could certainly recoup. And even if they don't, lacking bench depth is hardly a death knell in the NBA playoffs -- part of the allure of playoff basketball for a star-studded group like L.A. is the ability for top-heavy teams to cut their rotations and play their stars quite a bit more. Barring further injury, a playoff core with Paul, Griffin, Jordan and Barnes in the mix isn't going to be an easy out for anyone. That doesn't change the sad fact, though -- whether you blame injuries, regression, or opposing teams figuring it out, L.A.'s early-season jolt from A Tribe Called Bench has become one of the NBA's least effective lineups. Given how fun they were to start the year, that's a dreadfully sad outcome for just about everyone watching.

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I didn't watch the Portland meltdown live. No, I chose to watch it. I chose to pull up League Pass and watch the Spurs get their hearts torn out by a lottery team in front of their home crowd. It was sort of funny -- the Spurs themselves resembled a physical manifestation of what happens when I play small-stakes poker against my work friends, all of whom are actually very good at it. That's actually exactly what I did Friday night instead of watching the game. I got score updates periodically, and somewhat fittingly, I bought into the pot the last time when I noticed the Spurs were only down 12 with 6:00 left in the contest. Given how much of a better team the Spurs are than the Blazers, I figured San Antonio's luck could help me play out the string and get my original buy-in back. (The Spurs were outscored by 18 points in the last 6 minutes. In a related story, I lost my buy-in in less than 20 hands. Luckily, it's a small stakes game and the financial damage is completely dwarfed by the fun had playing the game. Unluckily, I detest losing games and still get rather irritated about it.)

Anyway. Point is, I didn't watch the game live. I got home, saw that they'd lost by 30, and found myself staring at the box score completely at a loss. How in God's name could the Spurs -- a team that's played the entire season as one of the three best teams in the league -- get obliterated like that? At home -- where they were once 22-2 -- to a lottery team. How could their vaunted system allow it? Especially given the fact that Duncan played, Manu was active, and Leonard was on the floor for over 30 minutes of burn. I was curious. I was so curious, in fact, that I cued the game up and watched the second half, on replay. Every aching moment of the flesh-flaying. And after the thrashing was done and the blood began to dry, I wrapped myself in the sheets and nodded off to a simple truth that often gets lost in the adulation and the fandom of a team as systemically great as the Spurs.

They're mortal.

• • •

For my Player Capsule series last year, in the form of a parable, I wrote about Manu Ginobili's craftiness in escaping the death of his talents. Were I to write a similar story after this season, it would be markedly different. Manu's escape from death is no longer quite the guarantee it used to be. He's playing well, statistically -- his per-36 minute numbers are well-in-line with career averages, and in theory, he's functioning admirably as the Spurs' point guard in Tony's wake. His assist rate has been high, his shooting percentage has been in-line with his averages despite a more central offensive role, and he's playing more minutes than he did at the season's start. His personal statistics are fine. The more you study statistics, though, the more you realize one attribute that rings true above all else -- statistics often lie. Bereft of context and common sense, a set of poorly-tuned statistics can fool you into thinking up is down and down is up.

And make no mistake. This year's incarnation of Manu Ginobili is the worst incarnation we've seen since his rookie year, his sterling value-added statistics be damned. Players age in an asymmetric but roughly parabolic arc -- they start at a certain talent level and improve throughout the years as they whittle their game to match the NBA's speed and style, before their talent attrites and their abilities fade. Ginobili has staved off this talent-death for years. He's still doing it admirably, statistically, but the numbers ring hollow. Manu's defense, once a formidable perimeter stopper in a brilliant system, has devolved into a semi-comical parade of stupefyingly poor decisions and tepid efforts. (The Manu/Neal lineup in particular has been so defensively suspect it's difficult to watch.) His patented standstill stepback three is as off target as I've ever seen it, although that hasn't stopped him from chucking it up at completely mystifying intervals. His turnover rate is up, despite the fact that he gets the benefit of the doubt with the home and away statisticians and often has turnovers caused by his completely unnecessary passes attributed to the player he's passing to. Worst of all? Manu simply looks spent a lot of the time. Like a wind-up car that's lost its pep.

He isn't the only player amiss with the Spurs, and it's been something of a low-key worry as the season trudges onward. Gary Neal's been atrocious. Matt Bonner has been done. DeJuan Blair is barely an NBA player. Boris Diaw is nowhere near his last-year form. Stephen Jackson has completely lost it. De Colo, Joseph, Mills? Not ready for prime time, whatsoever. For all the boisterous celebration of San Antonio's bench depth and the wealth legitimate players they carry on the roster, they've become an awfully top-heavy team. Are they deep? Sure, in theory, and the Spurs have a system that's good enough to "cover" for the occasional injury. But at the end of the day the Spurs are exactly as star-centric as any other team. At the end of the day, the Spurs are completely reliant on Duncan's defense and extremely reliant on Parker's offense -- with both on the floor, the Spurs are an elite team with a puncher's chance of winning a title. With both off the floor, the Spurs are a living, breathing bluff.

They talk a good game and whip the ball around enough to fool a team or two. But they aren't beating anyone in a playoff series on the strength of a bluff alone, and when the play tightens up and teams start blanketing Danny Green and forcing Tiago Splitter to post up instead of pretending Splitter is a Duncan-level talent, the system doesn't work with quite the same results. Doubly so if the Spurs on the floor, those ever-perfect mechanical Turks, start to believe their own bluff. If they begin to think their inherent superiority as a team unit and a team concept grants them levity to cut their own efforts and play lazy basketball. No system covers for a team that's playing out the string like they deserve wins solely on the cuteness of their passes and the brilliance of their movement.

The missing piece in Manu's play this year isn't simply that he's getting old. It's that he throws lazy passes that he expects to work solely because the angle is cute or the idea is brilliant, regardless of his poor delivery. It's that he chucks up prayers with defenders closer than they used to be, as though he's goaded into it by a game that's finally starting to pass him by. It's that he doesn't quite put it all on the table the way he used to, as though the Spurs simply deserve the wins and the accolades without really having to suffer for it.

Then, every once in a while, a team calls San Antonio's bluff -- like Minnesota and Portland just did.

• • •

Are the Spurs a good team? Obviously. They've rather strongly established themselves as one of the three best teams of the league, despite big concerns about 75% of the roster. But when media types and friendly fans repeat a lie so often, sometimes you start to believe it yourself. Even if you know better. The Spurs aren't a good team simply because of their killer system or their brilliant coach. They aren't a good team by dint of their own existence, as this recent stretch of utterly putrid basketball makes clear.

No, the Spurs are a team powered by stars in a league that requires them. They're a team that currently suits up the unquestionably best center in the league (and arguably the league's Defensive Player of the Year besides) and the 1B to Chris Paul's 1A at the point guard position. They have a freakishly proficient young stopper with an Iguodala-esque skillset at the three, a dependable defensive shooting guard with a knack for the corner three and a scant few other skills, and a second big man that's better than many playoff squad's first. If you have a top-three like that, you're going to be a contender. Add in a good coach and a lot of well-fit role players and you have the makings of a potential title team. They're in the conversation, no doubt, but given the quality of their top-line talent, that's hardly a big surprise. And that's all without getting into any of their questionable pieces who may recoup by the time the playoffs start -- Manu, Diaw, Jackson, and Neal have all "been there." None of them are quite as bad as they've looked in San Antonio's lowest moments. It's not impossible that they have a vintage playoffs. And if any of them do, San Antonio's chances are that much better.

But as one reclines to watch the Spurs get blown out of the water by lottery teams that shouldn't have a chance, the response shouldn't necessarily be one of absolute surprise. It should be one of recognition, and acceptance of the truth -- the Spurs are not and have never been a team defined by system alone. The system can cover a small talent gap, but it can't cover effort. At the end of the day, if the players on the court are playing a lazy game and relying on the system without putting forth their best effort, the Spurs aren't all that much more than a poker player with a decent bluff and a series of terrible hands. Every tired and lazy poker player goes on a run or two, where they play out a bunch of bad hands in hope that their bluff wins them the string. Even I can win a few, often with large pots. But at some point a player -- quality be damned! -- is going to call your bluff. At some point they're going to realize you don't always have aces in your pocket and they'll want to see your hand. You'll waver, and you'll defiantly push onward, and your losses compound with abandon.

Sure, the Spurs win games despite playing like crap every now and again, like the terrible effort they put forth against Dallas last night. Tim Duncan wouldn't let them lose that one. But what happens when Tim Duncan isn't in quite the mood to put up 28-19 against a hopeless lottery team? What happens when the Spurs lay off and assume that their 50-16 record is enough to win the game on its momentum alone? What happens when teams realize that they don't really need to play Manu Ginobili the same way they used to, or that giving up a semi-open long two pointer to Cory Joseph is just about as likely to produce points as letting Matt Bonner get to the hoop? What then, NBA? What will become of the Spurs in America? We don't need to guess, lie, or ponder anymore. Because now we know exactly what happens: they lose by 30 -- at home -- to a lottery team.

System be damned -- the boys are as mortal as anyone.

• • •

“What though the field be lost?
All is not Lost; the unconquerable will,
And study of revenge, immortal hate,
And the courage never to submit or yield.”

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Hey, folks. Until I finish this series, Gothic Ginobili's normal content is going to be put aside for a stretch run awards/storyline handicapping feature. For the first few posts, we'll be going over each of the NBA's season-ending awards and handicapping the field, discussing the top players competing for the award and the dark horse candidates to keep your eye on. Along the way, I'll be writing meandering essays regarding various thoughts about the meaning of each award and the vagaries of sporting awards in a general sense. Fun stuff! Today we won't be covering any awards at all -- we'll be covering one of the few late season storylines with any considerable heft. That is to say, we'll be looking at the Western playoff race. And, well. Yeah. The Lakers.

• • •

THE WESTERN PLAYOFF RACE

About two months ago, you couldn't go two steps without seeing a piece or two eulogizing the Lakers and bidding farewell to their ever-dimming playoff hopes. They'd just lost a shockingly lopsided home game to the Thunder and played the Spurs close in San Antonio, but that didn't really matter -- the idea of a 17-25 team making the playoffs was insane. On the date the Lakers lost to the Grizzlies and chalked up that record, they were 9.5 games behind Golden State, 5 games behind Utah, and 3 games behind Houston -- to put that in perspective, the Lakers were only 3 games ahead of having the worst record in the Western conference. They were closer to being the Sacramento Kings than they were to being a playoff team.

The thing is? They weren't dead yet. It certainly SEEMED like they were, especially when you looked at the numbers and looked at what kind of ball they'd need to play to get back in the playoff race. Compound that with an understanding of their generally tepid play, Pau Gasol's injury, and how good the rest of the west looked? It was reasonable to get a bit hyperbolic, but most people -- myself included -- probably took things a bit too far. After all, this is a team that people thought could win 60-70 games. While they obviously weren't THAT good, they weren't some kind of Sacramento-level abomination either. Eventually, they'd stand a good chance of winning a few of the close, chippy games they lost in the first month or two. Eventually, Golden State's fairy dust stood a good chance of running out. Eventually, Houston's Grinnell-esque three point stylings could come back to haunt them. And if everything conspired for a good few weeks, the Lakers could find themselves right back in the thick of the race.

And make no mistake -- it's not just a race for the #8 seed anymore. Golden State's collapse has vastly increased the complexity of the playoff picture, giving every team currently in the playoff race reason to believe that they can leapfrog 8th and make it all the way to 6th. With the third seed essentially locked in for the Los Angeles Clippers, I don't need to explain why the Lakers might covet such a spot -- excellent though the Clippers are, they haven't looked quite as imposing as the Spurs or the Thunder in the aftermath of Paul's injury, and any Lakers/Clippers series essentially amounts to a 7-game homecourt stand for a Laker team that needs every advantage it can get. There are currently 6 teams jockeying for 3 playoff spots -- two are extreme dark horse candidates, but for the remaining four, I've put together a basic view of their games remaining, split into three buckets -- probable losses, tough wins, and easy wins. I've then wrote two short paragraph discussing both their rough chances at reaching the #6 seed and their rough chances of missing the playoffs. Teams are ordered in the order of the current standings. Let's get to it.

#6: GOLDEN STATE WARRIORS (36-29)

• _ PROBABLE LOSSES (5):_ @HOU, @SAS, @LAL, vs OKC, vs SAS

• TOUGH WINS (4): vs LAL, vs POR, vs UTA, @POR

• EASY WINS (8): vs DET, vs CHI, @NOH, vs WAS, vs SAC, vs NOH, @PHX, vs MIN

SIXTH SEED CHANCES: Reasonable. Although the Lakers still have a decent shot at the 6th seed, it'll require a bit of help from Golden State. Even if the Warriors lose every single one of the tough win / probable loss games I've highlighted here, they'd STILL end up with a final record of 44-38 if they ran the table on the easy wins. The Warriors have been impossibly awful on defense over the past month or two, but few of the teams in the "easy win" category have offenses that the Warriors are going to get burnt by. As long as the Warriors win one of their remaining two games versus LA and take care of business against the dregs of the league, they probably won't lose the 6th seed. One other factor -- the final two probable losses (home games versus OKC and San Antonio) are going to be played in the final week of the season. If the #1 seed is locked up before then, it's possible those turn from probable losses into tough-to-easy wins.

MISSING THE PLAYOFFS?: Nah. Although the Warriors may end the year as one of the least-feared low seeds of the last few years (a designation I don't agree with, but that's for another day), chances are extremely slim they miss the playoffs entirely. Look at that schedule, you know? It's really not a murder's row. At absolute worst, I'd venture them going 0-5 on the probable loss games, 1-3 on the tough wins, and 6-2 on the easy wins. That would give them a final record of 43-39, which might be enough to hold on to the 8 seed anyway.

• • •

#7: HOUSTON ROCKETS (34-30)

• _ PROBABLE LOSSES (5):_ vs SAS, vs IND, @MEM, vs LAC, @DEN

• TOUGH WINS (5): vs GSW, vs UTA, @POR, vs MEM, @LAL

• EASY WINS (8): vs PHX, vs MIN, vs CLE, vs ORL, @SAC, vs PHX, vs SAC, @PHX

SIXTH SEED CHANCES: Certainly aren't dead yet. Look at it this way -- if the Rockets play two games better than the Warriors over the next month, they'll win the sixth seed. That's not out of the question. Especially considering that they've still got 3 games left against Phoenix, a team that desperately needs Los Angeles to miss the playoffs to get themselves a Lakers-stamped lottery pick. The Rockets have a lot of home games left, and they're playing better basketball right now than any of the other teams in this group. They'll need to eke out a few of the tough wins (and probably a few of the probable losses), but they're Golden State's main competition for the sixth spot.

MISSING THE PLAYOFFS? Don't see it. I could easily be wrong, here -- the Rockets are a young team that depends on a streaky three point shot. That's good when they're playing in high-risk, high-pace, high-leverage games. That's bad when they're playing teams they're markedly better than, because it tends to let terrible lottery teams back in the game. If they miss the playoffs, it'll probably be because Orlando and Cleveland and Phoenix had incredible shooting nights against their awful defense that led to close, heartbreaking losses for the Rockets. But we'll see. There's just so many easy games left on the docket for the young guns, you know? I can see the Rockets finishing the strong 1-4 against the probable losses (owing to that risky three point strategy), 3-2 against the tough wins, and a shiny 7-1 against the "easy wins." That would have them finishing the year at 47-35 -- a record right around Golden State's best case scenario.

• • •

#8: UTAH JAZZ (33-31)

• _ PROBABLE LOSSES (6):_ @OKC, vs MEM, @HOU, @SAS, vs OKC, @MEM

• TOUGH WINS (7): vs NYK, @DAL, @POR, vs BKN, vs POR, vs DEN, @GSW

• EASY WINS (5): vs PHI, vs PHX, vs NOH, vs MIN, @MIN

SIXTH SEED CHANCES: Remote at best. While most of these teams can bank on a best case scenario with a lot of easy wins, the Jazz are in a rough spot. There aren't a ton of easy wins left, and even if they ran the table on tough wins (exceedingly unlikely), they'd still be looking at a closing record of 45-37 unless they pulled a few of their probable loss games. Rough road.

MISSING THE PLAYOFFS? Out of all these teams, Utah has the hardest road remaining. They lost a ton of games they shouldn't have lost straight out of the all-star break, and it's taken what was once a rock-solid spot and turned it into a probable miss. Unlike the Warriors or the Rockets, the Jazz can't simply bank on easy wins -- they'll need to run the table on tough/easy wins just to win 45 games. With Mo Williams rounding back into shape, it's likely they'll be better in this last stretch of games than they were over the last few months. If they intend to make the playoffs, they'll need to be.

• • •

#9: LOS ANGELES LAKERS (33-31)

• _ PROBABLE LOSSES (4):_ @IND, vs MEM, @LAC, vs SAS

• TOUGH WINS (7): @ATL, @GSW, @MIL, vs DAL, @POR, vs GSW, vs HOU

• EASY WINS (7): @ORL, vs SAC, @PHX, vs WAS, @MIN, @SAC, vs NOH

SIXTH SEED CHANCES: Less remote than the Jazz, surprisingly. Unlike Utah, the Lakers essentially own the the tiebreaker with Golden State -- they've got two wins over the upstart Californians already banked, and can clinch the tiebreaker with a single win in their two remaining games against them. Additionally, if they win the last game of the year against the Rockets, they'll own the tiebreaker against Houston due to a better division record. Compound that with the fact that the Lakers simply don't have a ton of probable losses left, and it's not impossible to see them ending the year on a 12-6 to 14-4 streak and pulling out a sixth place finish by dint of their tiebreakers. Also: on the plus side, their matchup against San Antonio may happen after the #1 seed race is concluded, which might make Pop decide to sit everyone and throw the Lakers a bone. On the minus side, the Spurs just beat the Thunder without Tony Parker. So, there's that, I suppose.

MISSING THE PLAYOFFS? Just as it was hyperbolic to declare that the Lakers were DEFINITELY missing the playoffs a few weeks ago, it's hyperbolic to declare that they're DEFINITELY in the game now. They've got a strong shot at seeing playoff action (and even moving up to the 6th seed), but they're going to need to play mistake-free basketball the rest of the season if they want to keep their fate in their hands. The 2013 Lakers have had an awful habit of losing inconveniently timed games to completely overmatched teams all season long. They're going to have ample opportunity to drop should-win easy games, with a full seven cellar-dwelling matchups that the Lakers (in theory!) should dominate. If they drop a few of those, the picture becomes a lot murkier -- I'd keep your eyes on the road games in the "easy win" category, as the Lakers have been astonishingly deficient at taking care of business against poor teams on the road to date. But let's be clear. If the Lakers take care of business, they're almost definitely a playoff team. Simple as that.

• • •

DARK HORSE PLAYOFF TEAMS: These are a number of teams that are theoretically still in the playoff race, but getting there is going to require colossal meltdowns for the West's current low seeds and a level of play heretofore unseen in any of these guys. Here's a quick rundown of who they are, the record they need for 44 wins, and why they aren't going to get it.

• DALLAS MAVERICKS: The Mavs currently sit at 29-33 -- to get 44 wins, they'll need to finish the year 15-5. While the Mavericks have a slightly better chance of doing that than the next dark horse team, it's a pretty remote possibility. Their best stretch of the season so far? Two separate instances of 6-2 ball, played against a steady diet of lottery teams each time. They won't have the benefit of many lottery teams to close the year, either. Just six of their final 20 games come against lottery squads, with one of those being the Los Angeles Lakers. They can't afford injuries, bad losses, or close losses -- the Mavericks are significantly better than their record, partially owing to the fact that 11 of their 33 losses were within a 5 point margin. They'll need one of their two big Ds -- their tepid defense or their sleeping Dirk -- to step to another level if they want to make a serious push.

• PORTLAND TRAIL-BLAZERS: Funny enough, the Blazers ALSO currently sit at 29-33. They'll also need to finish the string at 15-5 to get the requisite 44 wins to have a shot. While the Mavericks have never put together a sustained period of play that was that good, the Blazers almost did -- they were 12-3 from December to early January, when they pushed their record to its high-water mark of 20-15. Obviously, things have been a little downhill from there -- over two months after they reached 20 wins, they haven't surpassed 30. That's 9-18 since getting to 5 games over 0.500, if you're counting. Last week's stunning win over the Spurs kept them alive, but they're going to need a hell of a lot more where that came from if they intend to shove their way into the top 8. They're also going to need their swiss-cheese defense to actually stop a team or two.

• • •

Outlet tomorrow! See you then.

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One of Sloan's standouts this year was Kirk Goldsberry, the intrepid visualization expert you know from Grantland, the New York Times, and Court Vision. Goldsberry's value starts with his data, which is simply better than the data most of us have to play with. He partners with SportVU, allowing him to delve into an increasingly rich set of real-time court location data. It's pretty amazing stuff. That said? For the second year in a row, Kirk Goldsberry didn't win Sloan's yearly paper competition. In it, eight finalist papers and presentations are assessed by the conference leads in competition for a ten thousand dollar prize. Every year, the vast majority of the people who attend the presentations swear that Goldsberry has a lock on it. "His work is the best," they say. "There's no way any of the other presentations can stand up." For the second year in a row, they were completely wrong.

The reason's straightforward. Much like last year, Goldsberry had the best presentation. It doesn't take a genius to understand Goldsberry's goals and methods, and his visual metrics, humor, and graphs made his presentation infinitely more fun and engaging than any of the other competitors. But the ten thousand dollar prize isn't awarded to the best presentation in a vacuum. It's awarded for the paper's analytic heft. Goldsberry's metrics were simple, straightforward, and extraordinarily well presented. I can't imagine that more than 1 or 2 individuals who attended all the paper sessions thought otherwise. When I think back on the 2013 conference in a year or two, I can almost guarantee that Goldsberry's paper will be the one I remember. But Goldsberry's success at capturing our minds with visuals and intuitive presentation obfuscates the fact that his work simply wasn't the most technically advanced or statistically interesting of the presented papers.

He calculated field goal percentage based on a defender's distance from the offensive player, and delved into some particularly excellent examples. It was a nice sleight of hand and an excellent filtering of data. It wasn't rocket science, but it was effective and intuitive rather than gaudy and statistically brilliant. Contrary to popular belief, Goldsberry's intuitive statistical arguments don't have to be the sort of analysis that wins a paper competition. Goldsberry's work has its own value, and outside the carefully combed and regulated world of the paper competition, it's far more valuable for real-world analytics than anything that won the competition over him. Immediately after his presentation last Friday concluded, R.C. Buford made a beeline for the podium and gave him a business card. R.C. Buford! Goldsberry has a good shot at consulting with half the teams in the NBA by this time next year.

His value becomes even more obvious when the conference attendees step back and take a look at themselves -- I talked to dozens of smart analysts who swore up and down that Goldsberry's presentation was not only the best presented presentation, it was also the greatest step in analytics since Babbage invented the difference engine. It wasn't, and I'd venture that anyone who'd read the papers would agree with me -- it was smart and poppy but significantly less interesting as a statistical concept than any number of the competing papers. But it never had to be that advanced. It simply had to be well-communicated. It was a real-time example of the conference's general theme. Having the best ideas can win you a paper competition among your statistician peers, and it can earn you the respect of many.

But if you really want to resonate, it's simply not enough to present good numbers.

You have to be able to tell a story.

• • •

Advocates of statistically minded basketball analysis have an odd tendency to conflate the strength of a communicator with how advanced and groundbreaking their statistics are. It betrays what I find to be a fundamentally hilarious undertone to most of the statistics-backing analysts in the basketball sphere. The sphere of basketball analytics has been blessed with a large group of brilliant and clever individuals with some incredible ideas. But for the most part, they aren't statisticians. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that, mind you! But the fundamental truth that most members of the "statistical movement" aren't statisticians becomes a bit ridiculous when you note just how vehemently the very same people assert themselves to be excellent judges of statistical technique and complexity. When people insisted that Goldsberry's work was statistically brilliant, I was bemused -- it's phenomenal work, but calling it brilliant because of its statistical heft is just wrong. It was brilliant because Goldsberry is a borderline savant at distilling numbers into a story. He's a phenomenal communicator who relates to his audience in a way that should be the envy of all who profess to analyze anything.

Now, granted, the point here in the most general sense is that there's nothing wrong with being unable properly assess the statistical complexity of a person's argument. But it's terribly confusing to me that people insist on doing it anyway. There's this strange desire to attribute Goldsberry's brilliance to everything but his status as a communicator, as though that somehow lessens his accomplishments or his ideas. It doesn't. At all. Let me put it this way -- I'm a statistician in the corporate world, and I'm not going to reveal to anyone who isn't close to me exactly what I do. But communication isn't just some tertiary part of my job. It's essentially my entire job. I make models, big and small, and I work with statistical analysis daily. But if I couldn't communicate the results of my work to an exceedingly wide range of people, I'd be homeless. Once you get to a certain level in the professional frame, the discipline of statistics is less about coming up with amazing statistical innovations as it is simply finding ways to share the ones you already have. It's about couching your numbers in the proper confidence intervals, and figuring out the best ways to differentiate your story as your audience changes.

In fact, one could say that it's about painting.

See, the numbers don't tell a story on their own. They simply don't. An advanced database of basketball statistics isn't a storybook, it's an exceedingly large collection of paints and primers. The analysts -- the ones sifting through the database and poking at insight -- they're the one the story comes from. They're the painters. A palette tells you nothing without a painter around to unveil the contents of their mind. The numbers are not self-explanatory. You can't simply hand a smart person a spreadsheet and tell them to read it -- you need to guide them to the point and the core idea, and you need to persuade them that the ideas are worth their time. You need to paint different styles for different audiences, too. A young painter may look at your 10 minute modern art splatters and understand your point immediately -- a crotchety old traditionalist may need a classically-minded several-hour portrait if you want to express to him the same one. It's a process. A beautiful painted process.

• • •

I've read a few response pieces to the conference openly questioning the focus on communication. "Are there really GMs and team owners who don't understand that you need to hire communicators?" First: yes, there are a few. Second: even if there weren't, I'd argue that the message isn't just for them. The message is to the statistically minded analyst who wants to be listened to. The message is to the fans who lean on statistical arguments. The message is to everyone who thinks that any numbers -- no matter how overwhelming -- can speak for themselves. There's a reason numbers never lie, you know -- they can't talk. They're illuminating under the right conditions and support good arguments under many other conditions. But it's the responsibility of the communicator to ensure that they're presenting an argument their audience can get on board with. It's not the responsibility of the audience to ensure that they're attuned to the presenter's whims and fancies.

Kirk Goldsberry's communication isn't some tertiary part of what makes him an excellent analyst. On the contrary -- it's the core. As someone who works professionally in the field, I respect that quite a bit -- Goldsberry is an academic, but he's got exactly the skillset that would make him an amazing industry statistician. The moral of the Sloan conference, to me, was a reflection of Goldsberry's success. The ability to function as a good communicator is the most important skill you can have if you're a statistician working in industry. News flash: statistical analysis in sports is no longer an academic exercise. Sports statistics have become their own large-encompassing industry, and along with that, the skills that make statisticians valuable in industry have become the focus in sports statistics.

Statistical analysis in sports is no longer a novelty -- it's a necessity.

It's time for the communicators to match that reality.

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Remember how we had that one series, a long time ago, where we'd entreat our writers to scribe short vignettes on the previous night's games? We've consistently discovered there's no way for us to do that every night, but with the capsules done and Aaron back in the saddle as a more active managing editor, we're hoping that we can bring the feature back as a weekly Wednesday post. Sometimes Thursday, like today. As always, the vignettes may not always be tactful, tacit, or terse -- they'll always be under a thousand words, though, and generally attempt to work through a question, an observation, or a feeling. Today's short piece is as follows.

• OKC vs LAL: Apple Turnovers for a Balky Spring (by Aaron McGuire)

Read on after the jump.

• • •

__OKC vs LAL: Apple Turnovers for a Balky Spring
___Aaron McGuire_

Last night, the Lakers touched down in Oklahoma City in search of their second win this season against a team that's won over 65% of their games. The super-elite, as it were. Against those teams -- OKC, SAS, MIA, LAC, and MEM -- the Lakers were an abysmal 1-11. That's not a particularly good omen for them, considering that they're almost certain to face one of the OKC/SAS/LAC triad in the first round. Another win against the Thunder could help mold the narrative, and show the league that the Lakers are rounding into shape as a threat to be feared, even by the elites.

Or... not. Make that 1-12.

As the Lakers left the court, disappointed and dismayed, I'm left pondering how exceedingly unlikely it is that any of the West's lower-rung teams knock out Oklahoma City. San Antonio and Los Angeles are great, but I can see an outside shot of either falling early, if a few bounces go the wrong way and Houston gets hot. But Oklahoma City? I don't think they're falling early. Second round exit is their minimum, with a finals or a title their most likely scenario. The reason I think this is simple, and last night's game provided a perfect teaching example. For all the good effort that Los Angeles put forth in this game, and as close as they got? There's a sense that the closeness of the margin itself was fool's gold.

Why? The Thunder had two turnovers.

Look at that number again. There's no denying that the Thunder really got up for this game, but two turnovers? That's ridiculous. And it points to one of the aspects about the Thunder that scares me, as a fan of a team vying for the right to knock them off. Believe it or not, the Thunder have one of the worst turnover percentages in the league -- on average, they turn the ball over on about 15% of their possessions. That's 28th worst in the league. And they're a markedly different team when they turn the ball over that much, too; in games where they register 18 or more turnovers, the Thunder are a quite pedestrian 8-8, including 2 of their 4 home losses. But games like last night's contest against the Lakers make me wonder if the Thunder's turnover problem is far less of a problem than anyone realizes.

Last night, it simply seemed like the Thunder had decided they'd stop taking stupid risks and they'd put the onus on the defense to actually force turnovers. LA's terrible defense was hardly up for the challenge. Which is my point. Any team that beats the Thunder is going to need Oklahoma City's weaknesses to become amplified for a short period of time -- it's how any upstart low seed beats a stronger contender. What we saw last night essentially amounted to a bored Thunder team toying with its prey, picking apart the Los Angeles defense for open shots while keeping the Lakers on life support with a steady diet of free throws. They didn't turn the ball over, they didn't get to the line that much themselves, and they STILL obliterated the Lakers!

Sure, the Lakers "only" lost the night by 17 points. Sure, they were close in the fourth. But no lesser team -- not the Lakers, not the Rockets, not the Jazz, not the Warriors, not the Nuggets -- is going to defeat Oklahoma City if they take care of the ball like that. No lesser team is going to defeat Oklahoma City if they need to shoot 16 more free throws (on the road!) just to keep the margin within 20 points. Yes, it was a road game against one of the best teams in the West. The Lakers didn't roll over, they didn't fall apart, and they weren't embarrassing. They can take some solace in that. But on a broader scale? The game seemed more meaningful to me. It was a message from a Thunder team that isn't playing around anymore.

"Go find your upsets elsewhere. We're not going down that easily."

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Hey, folks! This year, I'm covering the Sloan Sports Conference straight from Boston's Convention and Exhibition Center. If you're there, be on the lookout for the tall guy in a suit who hasn't slept in a decade. Over the duration of the conference, I'm going to try to post some quick reflections on the panels I attended. Fun stuff, right? Here are the panels covered in the post, thus far:

• 9:00-10:00 -- "THE CHANGING NATURE OF OWNERSHIP" In this panel, Peter Keating-- from ESPN the Magazine -- asked questions about how ownership is changing over time and the challenges of owning teams. I responded by spitting like an alpaca and neighing like @horse_ebooks. It was a weird moment, I admit.

• 10:20-11:20 -- "BIG DATA: LESSONS FOR SPORTS" A bunch of experts on Big Data -- people from HP, MIT, m6d, and other specialists -- got together to talk a bit about big data. I spend a bit of time recalling prior experiences with Big Data conferences and generally express appreciation for the overall tact taken by the presenters. ... Even if the overall panel was a bit forgettable.

• 11:40-12:40 -- "ESPN'S USE OF ANALYTICS IN STORYTELLING" Michael Smith headed a panel including Tom Haberstroh, Dean Oliver, Alok Pattani, and Mike Sando in a discussion of how ESPN uses analytics and statistical data in storytelling. Although Haberstroh was the Bledsoe of the panel (thanks for the joke, @kpelton), it was a really fun look at how ESPN has attempted to incorporate more statistical thoughts and methods into their work. I reflect on the general themes.

• • •

9:00-10:00 -- THE CHANGING NATURE OF OWNERSHIP

A panel with Adam Silver, Jonathan Kraft, Stan Kasten, and John Skipper discuss how ownership is changing in the NBA.

Ever been in a class where you're trying really hard to pay close attention, but you can't seem to shake the nagging feeling that your professor isn't being entirely forthcoming? Your eyes start to gloss over, the machinations start turning in the back of your head, and you find yourself lagging behind and intractably stuck in befuddlement at statements you simply can't figure out. You'll have to excuse me. I didn't cover the lockout from the ground floor, and I've never had a chance to listen to Silver or Stern speak before. They're smart, smart guys. But some of the quotes from this panel were simply incredible. From the first 20 minutes alone:

• "As you know, we were completely upfront with all of our true numbers about team losses during the lockout."

• "We all agree that profits are the focus of owning a sports team, rather than resale value."

• "Here's the problem with Forbes -- which neither Adam or I believe. I have no idea how they come up with their valuations."

My short response to each of these statements: ... w-what?

A bit longer: what, you mean the team loss numbers that made absolutely no sense and were quickly picked apart by several prominent business writers? If profits are ACTUALLY the sole focus of sports owners, they're being obscenely stupid businessmen. Owning a team is valuable for the cache and ego inherent in general ownership, not the X's and O's of making a marginal profit on a year-to-year basis. And the resale value IS the big thing, even if the people on the panel all rejected the entire concept that it was a worthy discussion topic. On a much larger level, it's like owning a house in a city you don't really like. You may not love the city, and you may know with absolute certainty you're never going to pay in full that 30-year mortgage. But you DO know that when you decide to sell, even if it's at a relatively bad market period, you'll make back a decent amount of what you invested in the house (plus or minus a bit) and make up for a decent number of your year-to-year losses.

If you improved the house, maybe you'll make a bit more. If it fell into disrepair, maybe you lose a bit more. But you take out the mortgage knowing that you're building equity instead of simply lighting money on fire with massive rent payments. Teams are similar. Resale isn't just an important topic to discuss, it's arguably the only topic to discuss when you're assessing franchise valuations. Finally, as for the Forbes data... they've been relatively upfront about stating that their franchise valuations comes from the rough market value of everything that team owns. It's really disingenuous to imply that they're a completely mysterious black box with absolutely no logical backing. The land, the team quality (measured through revenues), the stadiums, the television contracts, et cetera. It's not a completely public formula, but "no idea" is gross oversimplification of their methods.

Regardless. I don't mean to bloviate, but this was a hard panel to sit through. And to be completely honest with you, the panel completely lost me at forty minutes into the presentation. I almost left the room. The owners turned to the subject of lockouts, and "who won". The money quotes, from (as Bomani Jones noted) non-billionaires John Skipper and Adam Silver:

"... Nobody won the lockouts." This was followed by a nod of assent and a strong agreement from Adam Silver. Silver then followed with, almost unbelievably... "Look, the players had ENORMOUS leverage during the NBA lockout. Enormous leverage. We never even considered using replacement players. That's leverage. ... We felt 50% was a huge win for the players. That was nowhere near what we went into the negotiations looking for."

OK, Adam. Good talk. As for the rest of you? If you're looking for the big story of the day, I've got four words for you:

There's another lockout coming.

And pillaging victors -- incredibly -- don't think they won the last round.

• • •

10:20-11:20 -- BIG DATA: LESSONS FOR SPORTS

A panel with several big data analysts discuss how big data impacts sports.

I went to a large trade conference late last year. Big Data was a huge subject matter -- I'd say 50-60% of the seminars and sessions were related to big data and the various insights and uses of big data. Spoiler alert: it was the worst conference I've ever attended. Under the bright lights of the conference stage, the concept became this comically broad abstraction. "Solve your problems with big data. Analyze better with big data. Be careful with big data ... but only if you're using this product that you need to approach big data because if you don't use big data you'll die a painful everlasting death." It was excruciating, especially as an analyst who's dealt with several real-life manifestations of "big data" in research I've done and seen. There was virtually nothing of value amidst all the hubbub.

Ever since, I've tried to seek out big data panels, mostly in an effort to find something better. ANYTHING better. Perhaps better isn't the right word -- the best word for what I want isn't better, it's realistic. There are a lot of inherent issues in using massive gobs of data to try and approach problems. Having that kind of data can be extremely helpful to the clever analyst, if you have the right mindset and the right understanding of the inherent hazards you're exposing yourself to when you try to use data that massive. The problem isn't that it can't be helpful, the problem's that it won't always be. There's an incredibly large amount of noise in data that's that humongous, and while you can get a lot of value if you increase the burden of proof and keep a strong eye to sample size and logical reasoning, you can just as easily take a problem and make it an intractable mess of noise-puffing mush. You can make your analysis completely useless. With that in mind, early in the presentation, Chris Selland shared this particular gem:

"If you torture data enough, you can get any answer you want. We have to be careful"

My response? THANK YOU! If the entire panel was simply the panelists getting up, reciting that quote, dropping the mic and fleeing the room with abandon... it still would be more useful than the aforementioned trade conference! You can show specific methodologies and share new technology all you want. If you don't apply the proper context and warn the audience of the method's drawbacks, you're doing a fundamental disservice to the point and use of overwhelming amounts of data. You have to transform, structure, and regulate your data to effectively use large data analytics. You have to clean your data, you have to scale the data to answer your questions. Big data is a method to solve problems -- it's not the be-all and end-all of problem solving. As a whole, the panel wasn't anything particularly special. It was simultaneously a very high-level discussion that was significantly more useful to people with experience in the field. But -- and perhaps this is just my bad experiences before -- I much appreciated the way the presenters generally embraced uncertainty while supporting hypothesis-driven analytics and smart use of big data methodologies. It's a common theme in academic circles and a rare theme in trade circles -- Sloan exists in the hazy boundary between the two, and it's nice that they took a bit of the best of both worlds to put together the Big Data panel.

• • •

11:40-12:40 -- ESPN'S USE OF ANALYTICS IN STORYTELLING

A panel discussing how ESPN uses statistics and analytics to tell stories. Starred Tom Haberstroh, Dean Oliver, Michael Smith, Mike Sando, and Alok Pattani.

To start the presentation, ESPN provided a neat little video showing about five minutes of clips from various ESPN shows. The theme was simple: demonstrate places that ESPN uses statistics in storytelling. There were a lot of different examples, from Skip Bayless to Jay Bilas to Numbers Never Lie. But the general goal was to express ESPN's growing comfort level with using statistical thought to support on-air arguments. Their on-air talent has bought in -- to some extent -- to the use of statistical facts and figures to tell stories and share findings. The money quote from Pattani: "It's like value-added to your IQ." The overall attitude towards statistical thought has changed in the organization -- the world has changed, and if you use statistics to dispel myths, you can get a strong response from the viewers.

Which, in general, was what the ESPN panel was about -- how can you get a stronger educational product on national TV? ESPN isn't always on top of the game, but the panel was extremely elucidating. They put together a group with a bunch of the network's best analytic journalists and let them discuss the implications of what they do. They try to dispel myths, give proper context, and give credibility and cache to the numbers they use. It's about trying to educate fans without being snippy and self-superior. It's about making the numbers part of the popular conception, and using statistics that shed light on the games in fun and interesting ways. "Criticize on a higher level."

Adding statistical analysis to popular sporting discourse isn't about simply showing other people you're smarter than they are. It's about changing the universe fans get exposed to. You're building the starfield, the galaxy, the rocketship. You're inspiring curiosity and enticing the reader to use statistics and numbers to illuminate their fandom.

• • •

I'll try to make these a bit smoother and a bit quicker to the uptake -- if you missed it, I actually finished editing all of yesterday's panel discussion early this morning. Go check that out, if you get the chance. I'm on to the next session. More later.

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Hey, folks! This year, I'm covering the Sloan Sports Conference straight from Boston's Convention and Exhibition Center. If you're there, be on the lookout for the tall guy in a suit who hasn't slept in a decade. Over the duration of the conference, I'm going to try to post some quick reflections on the panels I attended. Fun stuff, right? Here are the panels covered in the post, thus far:

• 9:00-10:00 -- "REVENGE OF THE NERDS!" On this particular panel (featuring a loaded roster of Morey, Cuban, Silver, Lewis, and Marathe), the big theme was the rise of statistics in sports and the challenges the high-rolling panelists faced during their rise. I discuss the overall oeuvre of the panel and the one place I wish they'd gone.

• 10:20-11:20 -- "DATA VISUALIZATION" This panel involved -- surprise! -- a discussion on data visualization. Moderated by Rockets' Sam Hinkie and starring a variety of visualization experts, the panel took a broad view of philosophies behind their data visualization strategies through minutiae and examples. Strange format, but a fun panel to follow.

• 11:40-2:50 -- "THE DIRGE OF THE SHAMROCK SHAKES" ... OK, no, this wasn't really a panel. It had panels in it, but that's beside the point. Due to the nature of the panels that were located in this timeframe, I won't actually be covering them in this post, but if you all are really good this year, Santa will tell you the story sometime later because it was a hell of a lot of fun.

• 3:30-4:00 -- "THE DWIGHT EFFECT" This was a paper presentation with Kirk Goldsberry, discussing new ways to assess interior defense in the NBA. It was a great presentation. I've shared some of the biggest findings and the best practices Goldsberry used to strengthen his case in this recap.

• 4:00-4:30 -- "THE VALUE OF FLEXIBILITY IN BASEBALL ROSTERS" Although this is a basketball blog, this was actually a REALLY neat paper with a tantalizing core idea. Here, I describe the rough summary of what their work implied as well as the NBA-related continuation of the idea I'd love to see in the near future.

• 5:00-6:00 -- "XY PANEL: THE REVOLUTION IN VISUAL TRACKING ANALYTICS" Kirk Goldsberry joined a who's who of visual analytics gurus to discuss the technology in a broad sense and some of the challenges and triumphs it's faced thus far. This ended up being one of my favorite panels of the day -- in my reflections, I describe the limitations of communication and the fun discussion on why teams don't use these analytics.

• • •

9:00-10:00 -- REVENGE OF THE____ NERDS

A panel with Daryl Morey, Mark Cuban, Nate Silver, Michael Lewis, and Paraag Marathe discussing their sports upbringing and various values and tradeoffs they've faced in their rise and their jobs.

"How did you get here?"

There was a short sigh from Cuban and a knowing nod from Morey. His one sentence answer? "It's not easy."

A wave of laughter spread through the ballroom. Amusing as it was, it wasn't really a joke -- getting there wasn't easy for the men on the stage. Sports is a strange world for a statistician, in a few ways. It's not that it's not a good laboratory -- it's actually PHENOMENAL one, with unbiased criterion for success and rich multivariate datasets. It’s a wonderful world to explore. Sports is an excellent place to learn statistics, and with the sole exception of Mark Cuban, everybody up there cut their teeth on applied statistics at a young age through baseball's fruitful data. In a perfect vacuum, sports is the perfect field for statistical analysis -- it's simply a beautiful place to analyze.

But that's all in a vacuum -- it ignores the very discipline-centric problems that analytics aficionados face in the sporting frame. Silver, Morey, and Cuban emphasized many of them, in different ways for each. The biggest issue? It's SPORTS! It's a world of loud testosterone-rippled men who don't love changes to the status quo. When analytics began to rise to prominence, there was a large pushback from coaches and the traditional analysts. There's a knife-edge balancing act between the long-term and the short-term. There are intractably huge datasets and false-leads that can lead a franchise astray. There's the randomness, the injuries, the coaching. The exogenous pressures from the traditional analysts has begun to wane over the years, and when asked how much of a challenge he experiences today when trying new analytic techniques, Cuban's answer summarized the sea-change in perspectives: "none whatsoever. Advances are always welcome." Things are different, hence the name. Revenge of the Nerds implies that the so-called nerds have won.

All things considered, it was a fun panel – I highly recommend watching it online yourself, as you can do here later today. But I felt that in their effort to simply describe how things happened and how things are, the presenters missed the most interesting angle -– that is, the why behind the analytical sea-change. Why have perspectives shifted? Why have sports analytics become so ubiquitous? Statistical analysis doesn't only involve success stories, even if we'd like to think it does; some teams fail miserably at it, and the first thing any statistician would tell you is that a lot of statistical analysis can be useless and ineffective. The reason things have shifted isn't just some rah-rah success story about a perfect way of thought, it's a story of statistically minded analysts learning to communicate. It's a story about how Nate Silver's writing made statistical thought engaging. It's a story about how Daryl Morey learned to navigate the give-and-take with his coaching staff and his players. It's a story about how deeply Mark Cuban understands the business structures at the core of a sports team. That's the story I was hoping to hear, and while the panel was fun regardless, I felt they missed the boat a bit by covering the what instead of the why.

• • •

10:20-11:20 DATA VISUALIZATION

A panel with Sam Hinkie, Joe Ward, Ben Fry, and Martin Wattenberg discussing the visualization of data in sports analytics. Broad theme, right? Well...

There was a lot of audible grumblings in the audience during much of this panel -- most of us skipped out on the Stan Van Gundy panel for this one. Hopes were high that we'd get a lot of new and interesting data visualization methods. Final verdict? Not so much on the "new and interesting" front. As it turned out, the panel turned into something akin to a nerdy fever-dream spinoff of American Idol -- they placed a bunch of (primarily) public-use data visualization tools on a large screen and picked them apart.

There were a few panelists who were generally focused on descriptive problems, and issues of presentation. Who was the visualization meant for? How did it do its job? What were the positives, drawbacks, et cetera? Some of them liked most of the visualizations, most of them had a few comments for improvement, some of them They even had their own Simon Cowell in Joe Ward, the graphics editor for the New York Times. Ward was a tireless critic, giving drawbacks and missed opportunities for almost every single visualization put on the screen. One that I found particularly funny -- a relatively old Kirk Goldsberry shot visualization came on-screen, and Ward almost immediately pointed out a small problem endemic to most of Goldsberry's oldest work -- the drop shadow on each basket area actually muddles the coloring in many locations, which can badly obfuscates the point of the chart.

Overall, a bit of a weird result for the attendees. A panel with a theme as broad as "Data Visualization" ended up being (essentially) a treatise on the minutiae that made up their personal philosophies on data visualization. Take out that drop shadow! Realize your minimalist dreams! Consider your audience! Et cetera, et cetera. While enjoyable, it was somewhat of a surprise for most of the audience, which led to all the grumblings -- especially when Van Gundy was talking about Dwight Howard just a few rooms over. I'm glad I went, if only for professional reasons -- a lot of the work I do in my Clark Kent job involves tireless data visualization, and although most of the things discussed were things I've thought of before, it was actually quite helpful to hear that kind of critique and analysis on a broader scale. It was a pretty strange format for a data visualization panel, and I expect I could gotten a bit more out of the Van Gundy panel. But I don't think many attendees who stayed til the end were disappointed in the overall result. Unless you aren't a ridiculous visualization nerd. If that's the case, this probably was excruciating for you.

... That said, why would you be here if you weren't a ridiculous nerd? The world may never know.

• • •

3:30-4:40 -- THE DWIGHT EFFECT WITH KIRK GOLDSBERRY

The Dwight Effect is a research paper presented by visual analytics guru Kirk Goldsberry, whose work you may be familiar with from Grantland.com and Court Vision. He discussed new metrics to measure interior defensive efficiency and shared some of his most interesting findings.

This one was different than the above two, as well as the panel on randomness that I'm waiting a bit to write about because I want to mull over some of their statements a tad more. This was simply Kirk Goldsberry (the visualization guru behind the much-lauded Court Vision location analytics) presenting a few explications of new defensive analytics. He'd brought a few of them out before, but never quite this starkly. I think it's safe to say that this was one of the best individual presentations you can put together at a statistical conference -- in classic Goldsberry fashion, his presentation was light on the tables and heavy on the visuals, with the highlight being a 2 minute blooper reel of David Lee's defensive mishaps in last week's Golden State/Minnesota game. The panel focused specifically on a few of the most notable findings from Goldsberry's work. It started with "LARRY SANDERS!", the statistically-minded blogosphere's new mancrush.

Sanders has developed into one of the best defenders in the NBA, completely shutting down the restricted when he gets within an arm's reach of another player. Given that he has such long arms that "arm's reach" is akin to Tyler Zeller's "thirty miles away" (TBJ joke!), that helps him destroy players in the post and when they try to shoot anything close when he's on the court. Conversely, while Anderson Varejao is an excellent rebounder and a player who does a good job getting into defensive position, Goldsberry's metrics showed that he was surprisingly permissive when a player actually got a shot off against him. He got to a lot of shots, though, and that turned out to be an important key -- Goldsberry's metric was only half of the story, as it measured what opponents shoot when the player actually gets to his spot and makes an attempt to guard it. What wasn't covered in depth during his presentation (but WAS a part of his paper as a whole) was the flip side of that defensive equation, essentially summarizing how often the player actually gets to his spot.

They were two extremely intuitive splits to measure defensive efficacy, with Andrea Bargnani being presented as the number one example. As I mentioned in the Player Capsule for Bargnani, his problem isn't that he allows a crazy percentage when he actually defends the shot -- he's a reasonably effective defender, overall, and Goldsberry had him in the top 5 of his "FG% against" in the restricted area. His problem is simply that he never gets to the shots! He lays back and misses rotations and posts very few challenges, in effect creating a defensive vacuum that's easy to observe when you watch him play. He may defend the shots he defends reasonably well, but if he's refusing to defend, who really cares?

One last thing I liked a lot: Goldsberry gave an excellent drop-down of some of his limitations. All too often in conferences like this do you see presenters and panelists become too wrapped up in their own work and refuse to acknowledge their biggest limitations. Goldsberry pointed out that he ran into major time/space constraints due to the heavily visual nature of his work, he had limited timespans of data to work with, and -- after being aptly pointed out by Andres Alvarez from Wages of Wins -- the fact that Goldsberry's defensive metrics remain untuned to the impacts of fouls and free throws drawn. All that gave the presentation a nice aura of a work in progress, and a general air of a presenter who didn't think he was the greatest thing since sliced bread. As someone who's seen far too many presenters take (essentially) that exact tactic, it was much appreciated for me.

• • •

4:00-4:40THE VALUE OF FLEXIBILITY IN BASEBALL ROSTER CONSTRUCTIONS

This paper analyzed the value of positional flexibility in baseball.

I won't spend too long on this one, for obvious reasons -- namely that this is a basketball blog rather than a baseball blog. But I have to mention the overall theme and the response beating so vividly through my head after the presentation concluded. The main idea was that a researcher could create a two-stage model to assess the true value of flexibility for baseball players. It essentially involved a first stage where you measure the probability of injury for each player and a second stage where you measure a player's potential efficacy when that player's role changed on the field. For instance, if your center fielder was struck by lightning, who was the best replacement on the team? There's a really interesting subtext to these questions and this mode of analysis -- you're essentially trying to come up with a way to predict how a player will function in a role they've theoretically never played before, and assess the value of a player when they've been sequestered to the role. It's interesting stuff.

My first thought, though? Isn't this possible in basketball? Don't get me wrong -- we could try to use the cardinal five positions, but I don't think that's quite the best way to approach it. I was thinking about the question with certain skillsets instead of positions. Take, for instance, Tim Duncan. You can argue all day whether he's a center or a power forward, but NOBODY who's ever watched the Spurs needs to argue about his rebounding. When Duncan is on the court, he's San Antonio's primary rebounder. Period. When Steve Nash is on the floor, he's the primary ballhandler. When Kyrie Irving is on the floor, he's the primary shot-consumer. Et cetera, et cetera. Instead of measuring how basketball players fit into a somewhat outdated positional archetype, I think a neat way to approach the question would be to pose -- statistically -- the idea of giving each player a score of how well their underlying metrics imply that they'd function (relative to the league average and baking in adjustments for role) if they had to switch roles.

What if we lived in some horrible Don Nelson alternate universe where Tony Parker was asked by Popovich to be San Antonio's primary rebounder? What if we examined what a team would be like if they asked Darko Milicic to be their primary ballhandler? Et cetera, et cetera. It opens up a lot of interesting questions, and if you make the overall point of the statistic a cardinality ranking, you could potentially uncover certain lineups and player-roles that coaches rarely use that could be more advantageous than the fan or the coach might initially assume. It's an interesting question, in any event -- it'll be interesting to see (if I happen to get the time, or if one of our readers takes this idea and runs with it) what this kind of analysis uncovers.

• • •

5:00-6:00 -- XY PANEL: THE REVOLUTION IN VISUAL TRACKING ANALYTICS

For the last panel of the day, Kirk Goldsberry joined a who's who of visual tracking analytic experts and discussed

No typo: Tony Parker's max speed in an NBA game last year was 20.9 MPH.

That sort of mind-blowing stat is the sort of thing we'd see more of if we had public access to the sort of visual player-tracking data that SportVU measures on a day-to-day basis. They're cooking some ridiculous numbers back there. What's the goal of data like that? Put simply, it's a matter of learning how space affects the game. In a vacuum, the idea that Tony Parker can go 20.9 MPH with the basketball in an NBA game has no value -- in context, it can be more important than any individual line on the box score. It's a representation of the marginal tidbits of skill that makes Tony Parker such a brilliant basketball player. It represents Parker's ability to change the entire shape of the defense, and in a broader sense, measuring in-game speed like that allows more granular analysis of draft combine data and other such physical attributes.

After shocking the audience -- or at least Tim Varner and I -- with a jaw-dropping opening stat like that, the panel changed course into the more interesting question: if the stats of location analytics are so game changing, why do only 15 out of the 30 NBA teams buy them? The panelists provided a lot of great answers, and they touched on what I feel is the main problem: the confusing interpretability of multivariate coordinate data. What do you actually DO with that data, especially without the right personnel? Kirk Goldsberry put it best when he noted that the data -- while burgeoning with potential and beautiful to analyze from a purely academic perspective -- is borderline gibberish when you aren't putting it through the proper treatment and proper rigor. Not every team has the sort of academics you'd need in order to apply that sort of treatment. If you don't have those people, you aren't really going to get much out of data like this -- you may get a few facts and figures that make scouting a bit easier, but you'll barely scratch the surface at best and waste a whole lot of money at worst. You need a certain set of people to really sift through this sort of data. Simply acquiring the data doesn't tell you enough about how the team is using it, or even how CAPABLE they are of using it.

That whole problem points to a deeper problem with the general sports analytics community that Kirk Goldsberry -- more than almost anyone -- understands and dares to approach. It's similar to the inherent issue I talked about in the blurb above during "Revenge of the Nerds." Even if analytic thinking was a golden bullet that solved every single basketball problem on the planet, you can't simply try to impress people with great information -- you have to be good at sharing it. There's a big lumbering abstraction that many like to lean that statistical-leaning basketball analysts like to lean on; it's this idea of the grizzled old Clint Eastwood-esque coach is just constantly belittling and whining at the poor wide-eyed stat-guys trying to bring them the good work. It's a tale where those who refuse statistical analysis are ignorant, incompetent, and intransigent to change. That's a fun little story to repeat ad infinitum, but it's also completely wrong. The fault isn't on the coach in this situation, necessarily -- the fault lies just as strongly on the statistical analyst who refused to communicate effectively with his audience! Communication isn't simply a war of attrition, it's an earnest effort to find the right ways to present and fashion your work in a way that your audience can actually approach it. It's one thing to impress a bunch of people with a logorrhea of numbers and figures. It's quite another to actually make a presentation your audience can actually use.

One way to do that -- as Goldsberry knows full well -- is visuals. Another way is to hire the right people to analyze it. And yet another is to -- as many teams have -- ignore the data entirely and wait until a team figures it out and the information leaks. It's the classic "Lobochevsky-Lehrer strategy", where an organization can remain willfully resistant to pouring money into innovation with the goal of piggybacking off the first successful model once the details leak. (Lobochekvsy-Lehrer strategy is a rarely-used metaphor, so I'll explain in short -- I'm a big Tom Lehrer fan, and Lehrer has a song about the great mathematician Nikolai Lobochevsky. The song outlines the merits of plagiarizing in the academic world. Lobochevksy himself wasn't ACTUALLY an esepcially notablle plagiarist, and the song isn't a slur on his character. It's simply an example of a far-more-common-than-you-think tactic that companies, academics, and organizations use when they don't want to invest in research. Simply put, they ignore the problem entirely and hope that when someone actually figures it out they'll be able to find a leaked version of the work and piggyback off of that. It's a bit annoying, but it's something that happens extremely often. It's actually more surprising to me when everyone tries to innovate than it is when half the organizations try to piggyback. It's tried and true. It works, you know?)

Anyway. All-in-all, it was an excellent panel. As with Revenge of the Nerds, when MIT puts the video online, I highly recommend taking it in.

• • •

Day #2 coverage comes on Saturday. GET EXCITED!

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Hey, folks. This week, Gothic Ginobili's normal content is going to be put aside for a weeklong awards/storyline handicapping feature. For the first few days, we'll be going over each of the NBA's season-ending awards and handicapping the field, discussing the top players competing for the award and the dark horse candidates to keep your eye on. Along the way, I'll be writing meandering essays regarding various thoughts about the meaning of each award and the vagaries of sporting awards in a general sense. Fun stuff! Today we'll be touching on two awards, both given to non-player personnel. I refer to our yearly coach and executive achievement awards. Let's get at it.

• • •

EXECUTIVE OF THE YEAR

Nobody, and I mean NOBODY, can say with any certainty who's going to win the award. We can (and will) go over all the prominent candidates, and we'll discuss the merits of the award in general. But we first need to admit to ourselves that there's absolutely no way we're going to really "predict" the way the voters turn. This is one of the most inscrutable awards out there, relying only on the ever-changing preferences and ideals of the NBA's GM collective. Now. All that said... what IS the Executive of the Year award, anyway? Let's check NBA.com. ... or, wait, let's not! The first kerfuffle: there's no official definition of the award. The NBA states many things outright -- what positions you can vote in the all-star game, the exactitudes of voting for your MVP, whether or not you can safely call out another player for being "bout dis life", et cetera. The Executive of the Year award is not one of those things. We all agree that it's supposed to honor an executive who's had a great year, but we've never been entirely sure what that means.

In practice, this leads the Executive of the Year award to have some interesting tics that other awards don't necessarily have. It doesn't really honor the greatest executive of the year, nor the executive who's done the best job running a team. Nor does it necessarily describe the front office that has had the best year, as you'd note when realizing that in 2011 Pat Riley and Gar Forman tied for Executive of the Year while Forman's partner-in-crime John Paxson ALSO got 3 more votes for Executive of the Year. (So, 14 votes for Chicago, 11 votes for Miami ... and a tied award?) So, no, it's not a front office award in and of itself -- if it was, the Bulls would own the 2011 Executive of the Year "title." So what does Executive of the Year describe?

So far as I've been able to demystify it, the award essentially exists to describe a single aspect of an executive's job role. It describes, above all else, an executive whose team made a trade that worked out. It's a bit jarring, actually, if you look back in recent history and try to find examples where an executive won the award without his team having made a strong free push in free agency or made a blockbuster trade that worked out well in the preceding year. Your team has to be good (in a surprising way), but it also has to have seen some sort of large shake-up. Let's look back at the last five years.

• 2012: Larry Bird (IND) -- acquired George Hill and put together Vogel's perfectly enormous roster for his coaching talents.
• 2011: Pat Riley (MIA) -- acquired Miami's "Big Three" of Mike Miller, Mike Bibby, and Juwan Howard.
• 2010: John Hammond (MIL) -- NO BIG TRADE! ... Did offload Richard Jefferson, though, and had just drafted Brandon Jennings.
• 2009: Mark Warkentien (DEN) -- acquired Chauncey Billups for Allen Iverson in the biggest trade of the 2009 season.
• 2008: Danny Ainge (BOS) -- acquired Boston's "Big Three" of Eddie House, Scot Pollard, and James Posey.

Et cetera, et cetera. There's a reason this award's ambiguous definition is of the utmost importance. A particular name is missing from the award's ledger, a name whose absence generally mystifies just about everyone who's ever chanced to think about it.

That name? R.C. Buford. He's never won the award, nor has anyone in the Spurs' front office since Bob Bass snagged it in 1990. The Spurs organization has maintained as one of the best in professional sports for over 15 years running, with remarkable continuity in their front office and an incredible run of successes by Buford and associates. But there's the thing -- over the last five years, the award has been approached from a standpoint where GMs are assessing the other executives as poker players. A big trade is looked at as a team's "all-in" bet on their current team -- in recent memory, executive of the year reflects the teams whose all-in moves happened to work out. This generally ignores a lot of the (arguably more important) aspects of an executive's job role than the headlining trade gambles. It ignores things like the marginal decisions I discussed last week, the ones that Daryl Morey conventionally excels on. It also ignores things like an executive's commitment to scouting, investment in analytics, general focus on increased player health, success at drafting, and general historical success with their team and management chain -- in some years, like Bryan Colangelo's quite confusing victory back in 2007, simply shaking up a bad front office into general mediocrity and helming a marginally over-performing team can be enough of a case to win the award.

Given all that, it's rather elementary to see why R.C. Buford has never won the award -- the Spurs haven't made an "all-in" trade in Buford's entire tenure, because that simply isn't his style. But you don't actually win Executive of the Year by being the best executive in a single year -- you win Executive of the Year one of three ways: you make a big move that pays off big, you dramatically shake up a bad front office, or you helm a team that was expected to be dismal but ends up being a solid playoff-caliber team (a la Milwaukee, Toronto, et cetera). Additionally, you need to be the only notable NBA figure in your front office, because a split vote between several front office officials (a la Chicago in 2011) will seriously keep you from winning the award. Now, the big question -- when you couch it in those kinds of conditions, does that really describe an "executive of the year" award?

Not sure. But so long as it's called "Executive of the Year" rather than a perfunctory "Trade of the Year Blue Ribbon", R.C. Buford should be a top-5 candidate -- speaking as separated as I can from my Spurs fandom, I don't see how anyone can really refute the idea that the man's playing 3-dimensional chess to the average GM's tic-tac-toe. His proteges go on to become highly successful general managers and coaches around the league, he sticks the landing on nearly every decision he makes in free agency, and he's willing to invest heavily in the oft-neglected scouting and analytics that make basketball decisions smarter. Were I to vote, I'd go with Buford, but I'd be willing to hear a strong case for Danny Ferry, Daryl Morey, or Sam Presti. Out of those, I'd expect Daryl Morey to have the strongest shot at the award -- quite ironically, short of Kupchak and King's big acquisitions this summer, Morey is responsible for the biggest trade of this NBA season and it's worked out surprisingly well for him.

No "dark horse picks" required for this one -- there's no executive in the NBA that doesn't have some particular case for the award, however small it may be. Except maybe Quvenzhané Wallis. She does not have a case for this award, no matter how excellent of an actress she is. Sorry, Ms. Wallis. [Editor's Note: Aaron McGuire was fired after completion of this piece.]

• • •

COACH OF THE YEAR

As I noted on Monday, I recently ran a survey of TrueHoop Network bloggers in an effort to sift out the popular consensus on the top candidates for each award. The shortlist is solid, and good enough to warrant starting this section out with our top three candidates for the year's award.

1. Gregg Popovich -- Avg. Ranking: 1.9 (1)

2. Tom Thibodeau -- Avg. Ranking: 2.5 (2)

3. Mark Jackson -- Avg. Ranking: 2.7 (3)

While I'll still be picking dark horse candidates below, these three all have far stronger cases and I'd be genuinely shocked if the award didn't go to one of these three. These three candidates all represent the spirit of the award (a coach having a great season for a team that's been surprisingly good) while posting fundamentally different was of looking at the award, which makes Coach of the Year one of this year's more enjoyable awards to think about and handicap. In a nutshell, the three cases (as well as their more succinct counter-cases) are:

• "THE BEST COACH OF THE BEST TEAM" -- While the Spurs have had their share of crushing playoff disappointments over the past few years, it's hard not to recognize the fact that they've also been one of the most shockingly good regular season units in the NBA's history. If San Antonio wins 62 or more games this season, it'll mark the first time since Jordan's Bulls that an NBA franchise managed to win over 75% of their games during a three year period. Which is fundamentally insane for any team, but especially so given their aging stars and constantly shifting roster dynamics. Gregg Popovich adds to his COTY case by being the only current NBA coach that's a legitimate coaching legend (and arguably the greatest coach of all time) and the only coach on this list who's held his job for more than a decade.

COUNTER-CASE: If we simply gave the award to the best coach every year, Phil Jackson and Gregg Popovich would own the last 20-or-so trophies. That can't be your main consideration. Additionally, voter fatigue weighs more heavily on the Coach of the Year award than any other NBA award -- there has quite literally never been a successful title defense in the history of the award. A few repeat winners, but never in a row.

• "THE BEST COACH AT PERSEVERING THROUGH AWFUL CIRCUMSTANCES" -- This one's relatively obvious -- every year, one or two coaches are faced with an awful injury-or-trade related dilemma. For whatever reason, they lose their best player or two and have to survive without them for an extended period of time. It's generally on the coach to try and cobble together a new rotation, which can get exceedingly difficult if his front office (COUGH REINSDORF COUGH HACK WHEEZE) has decided to liquidate half their assets and leave him with a skeleton crew of parts. To his credit, Tom Thibodeau has navigated the thorny waters well, and he's been able to piece together_ just enough fight_ out of this year's Bulls team to challenge for home court advantage. Might even challenge for a title, if they can get Rose back to full-form in time. Startling accomplishment.

COUNTER-CASE: This one may be my pet peeves talking, but I can't stand Thibodeau's minutes management. I realize that playing Noah and Deng almost 40 minutes a night has been essential to Chicago's excellent record, but it's also led to a ridiculous number of minor injuries and scrapes that -- when not properly treated -- shorten careers and recklessly exposes his players to muscle tears and profound exhaustion. Until Thibodeau learns to stop treating every single second of every single regular season game as a must-win worthy of endangering his players, I'm not sure he really deserves this award.

• "THE COACH OF THE BIGGEST SURPRISE" -- This one's probably the most historically apt case for the award -- generally, if you're tasked with the helm of a historically awful franchise and you lead the team to prominence (with prominence here meaning 'playoffs'), you'll get the award. Mark Jackson looks like he's on the cusp of that, and for much of the season, it looked like he was on the cusp of a lot more than that -- his players had well-adopted Jackson's new playbook and executed it to a crisp perfection befitting a contending team. A lot of people thought the Warriors would be good, but they're currently looking at a season where they'll finish 6-7 games above 0.500 despite missing Andrew Bogut for most of the season and Stephen Curry for a few games as well. It's a shocker, and one that's (perhaps!) worthy of the highest recognition.

COUNTER-CASE: Have you seen the Warriors lately? They've been awful. Atrocious. Disgusting. As the Warriors fade, so does Jackson's case, however unfair it may be -- the first third of the season set an expectation that the Warriors would perform at the level of a contending team, and every week that exacerbates their struggles feels like a disappointment to anyone who'd internalized that as Golden State's "true" talent level.

Whichever case you prefer tends to reflect your overriding philosophy towards the award. For me? Most would assume I'd be a Popovich guy given my Spurs allegiance, but in this case, I'm actually not! While I think Popovich is the 1b to Uncle Phil's 1a all-time, I also agree strongly with the counter-case that you can't simply give the award to the best coach year-in and year-out -- I really do like the idea of recognizing surprising teams, even if it may end up nothing more than a flash-in-the-pan recognition of a team that never quite puts it all together, like the Byron Scott Hornets or the Avery Johnson Mavericks. There's value in recording that shock value -- in sharing with future generations of NBA fans a general primer on teams that overperformed and overachieved, for whatever reason.

Given that, despite the Warriors' schneid, I'm one of 10-20 people in the world who still likes Mark Jackson as a deserving winner for this award. While they looked like contenders early in the season, it's important to step back and reevaluate what exactly we were expecting from this Warriors team in the preseason. Me, personally? If everything went right, I felt they could scratch the surface of a 44-46 win team and scrape into the 8 seed. It looks like they'll end up a bit above that, at 48-50 wins, despite getting a wholly balky Bogut and missing Stephen Curry for more time than I thought he'd miss . Additionally Klay Thompson has been FAR worse than I'd expected he'd be, Harrison Barnes has been questionable, and Brandon Rush was lost to injury. Mark Jackson STILL has this team looking like a playoff team, and they aren't even technically out of the race for home court.

Whether or not you bought the Warriors as a contender, taking their season as a whole would demand Jackson's inclusion on the short-list of award's candidates. And if you like the general "surprise coach" definition -- as I do -- there's no one better.

DARK HORSE PICKS: For each of these awards sections, I'll also be going over in brief the year's top dark horse candidates for each award, along with a quick blurb on each stating their case and their problems. Three sentences apiece. THREE! THAT'S IT! There are three main tertiary candidates outside of the three main contenders. With a late push, I could potentially see one of them breaking the top 3, though it's unlikely any of them pull it out.

• KEVIN MCHALE: Much like Jackson, McHale's case is one of the tried-and-true surprise stories -- most analysts (myself included) had the Rockets bumming the season near the bottom of the lottery. While Harden deserves much of the credit, McHale deserves some too -- he's done a great job in a tough situation. That said, the Rockets are a bit less surprising than the Warriors to me, given the general variance of their young talent going into the season compared with Golden State's more veteran-weighted core, and as a lesser Jackson candidate it's unlikely he pole-vaults him in the COTY standings.

• ERIK SPOLESTRA: While the Heat were a bit disappointing to start the season, they're rounding into form. They're not a surprise, per se, but the way he's changed their general style underlines some of Spolestra's versatility as a coach -- additionally, he deserves some recognition for the excellent job he did in last year's playoffs. He's a clear step below Thibs and Pop, though, barring an insane end-of-year run leading the Heat to win 65+ games.

• MIKE WOODSON: The Knicks have been surprisingly good for most of the year, but that's not the main reason Woodson deserves mention. It's his flawless handling of Stoudemire's return -- after mass media hand-wringing for months, the story ended up being a complete non-issue, and Woodson's expert handling of Amare's minutes and role is much to his credit. That said, the Knicks are underperforming on defense and fading fast -- it's unlikely he gets back in the conversation without a late push to regain the Eastern 2-seed and return to their early season form.

• • •

Apologies for being unable to post this yesterday -- this has been an exceedingly crazy week and is only about to get more ridiculous. I'll be driving up to DC tonight, working from DC tomorrow, and driving from DC to Boston (AAAAAAHHHHH) on Thursday night for MIT's Sloan Sports Analytics Conference. Don't worry -- we'll have plenty of on-the-ground content starting Friday with my thoughts and impressions from the Sloan conference. Ideally I'll still finish this series on Friday, but the final installment (ruminations on this MVP race) may drop next week. I'd apologize, but I'll actually be doing a few weekend posts from Sloan, so I'm not that sorry. See you tomorrow.

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