Coming off my 370-part player capsule series, I'm taking on a significantly less incredible task -- a 30-part frame examining the evolution of the individual teams in the NBA's 2013 season. Some in medias res, others as the season ends. Somewhat freeform, with a designated goal to bring you a few observations of note about the team's season, a view into the team's ups and downs, and a rough map of what to expect going forward. Today, we cover a team I recently deemed one of the league's biggest surprises, although certainly not in a good way -- we're covering the sordid, unhappy tales of the 2013 Chicago Bulls.

In the preseason, I notched Chicago for a record of 41-41. There were two main reasons. First, the obvious -- I'd gotten some information indicating that Rose was going to be out for all but 10-15 games of the season, and in Rose's absence, I had absolutely no idea how the Chicago offense was going to hold up. The defense would remain decent, but I was worried it too would experience a drop-off after the Bulls let bench mainstay Omer Asik go, let Ronnie Brewer go, and watched helplessly as Luol Deng suffered more injuries over the summer in London. Needless to say, I wasn't entirely apt -- the Bulls are hardly a great team, but a stay-puft early schedule combined with one of Joakim Noah's best years as a pro have kept the Bulls well above water. They're comfortably in the Eastern playoff picture, and if Rose is back into shape by the playoffs, they'll be as firmly ensconced in the eastern picture as any non-Miami team. How have they been so far, though?

• • •

TRENDSPOTTING: CHICAGO AT A GLANCE, IN TWO WEEK INTERVALS

A few comments on the format of the statbox. EFF DIFF indicates the average margin of victory per 100 possessions. OPP SRS indicates the opponent's strength using Basketball Reference's "Simple Rating System" -- high numbers indicate a hard stretch of schedule, low numbers indicate an easy one. W/L and H/A are straightforward, and ORTG/DRTG/POSS are calculated using the Basketball Reference formula. For more on the metrics in the bottom panel, see their page on Dean Oliver's four factors. Savvy?

A few metrics and observations of note in this split:

• BEST STRETCH: Although it wasn't their best stretch in terms of raw wins and losses, you'd be hard pressed to pick against their most recent two weeks if you're simply looking for their best general performance against decent competition. Home shellackings of the Hawks and the Lakers and a close overtime loss to a good Memphis team highlight the surprisingly-fast-paced stretch for the Bulls, although that blowout loss to the Suns (at home!) might end the season as one of Chicago's worst losses. Still, it's been a good stretch for Thibodeau's guys.
  

• WORST STRETCH: They were playing against moderately decent teams, but that doesn't really excuse the general play -- the Bulls were at their worst back in a memorable mid-November schneid, a five-game road trip they went 2-3 on only to bookend it with a confusing home loss to the not-really-good but not-really-bad Milwaukee Bucks. During that stretch, they very nearly dropped a game to Phoenix (barely pulled it out in OT), got obliterated at Staples center against the Clippers, and scored 93 points two games in a row against the Bucks (once to win, once to lose). Pretty bad stretch. On the plus side? Since that stretch, the Bulls have gone 9-2 on the road, which is pretty phenomenal.

One interesting trend, coming from that home/road note -- the Bulls are currently 12-5 on the road and only 13-12 at home. There aren't many teams in the league that can say they've played better on the road then they have at home. In fact, of the current 16 playoff-bound teams, only the Milwaukee Bucks can say that, and they're only better by a half-game (11-9 road, 10-9 home). If they can keep the road warrior act going in the playoffs with some Rose-fueled home improvement, they'll be an extremely tough out whether they've got home court or not.

• • •

CHICAGO'S BIGGEST MYSTERY: Who's their best player, sans Rose?

Unlike most teams, there aren't a lot of huge mysteries about Chicago's play. We know how they defend, in a general sense -- after all, just about every team in the league has adopted Coach Thibodeau's flood-the-ball-side defensive strategy that tends to spread the scoring around and give bigger games to secondary scorers to the minimization of the primary scorer's raw numbers. Thibodeau teams seem to be better at it than anyone else, but that's more a function of effort, personnel, and the tickling intricacies of the strategy than a function of Thibodeau doing something nobody else is aware of. The offense isn't much of a mystery either -- it's pretty awful, for sure, but you could make a reasonable argument that his teams are offensively deficient on purpose. That is to say, Thibodeau sacrifices offensive creativity for defensive creativity, getting his players to put their best work in on the defensive end because it's simply more consistent and more his personal style. Such as they strive and all. All that said, there's still one curiosity I've always had about the Bulls.

Who's their best player? Obviously, if you look at the Bulls with Rose back, it's going to be their MVP. But we aren't. It's a funny question, because the obvious answer isn't quite as fitting as most people think. The easiest answer is to say Joakim Noah and call it a day. And I'll admit, it's tempting. Noah's pivot passing is a stone's throw from best-in-class, he has a rangy dominance of the defensive end that's easy to underrate, and he's a vocal leader on the floor. And all of that's great, but I tend to go back to the facts I outlined in Noah's player capsule -- he's regularly been an oddly preeminent drag on Chicago's statistical performance when he's on the court, and it's been a pronounced effect for long enough that I have trouble simply looking past it without any reasonable explanation. The trend has held up this year, by the way -- the Bulls have been about a point worse per 100 possessions with Noah on the court, despite no incredible backups a la Omer Asik.

So I'm not positive that Noah's their best player. But if not Noah, then who? Carlos Boozer would be a possible answer if we were watching the Magic School Bus, but we aren't, so he's not. Luol Deng is a great player, but I've got difficulty naming him Chicago's best. He's a great defensive player whose offensive statistics are a bit inflated due to his completely insane minutes haul. And his defense has suffered a bit over the past few years as he's racked up a heavy weight of untreated maladies and injuries. I maintain that Taj Gibson is their best defensive player, but Thibodeau gives the man 20 minutes per game and never seems to consider increasing his role on the team, so he certainly can't be called their best without calling Thibodeau incompetent. Kirk Hinrich is the cryptkeeper. Rip Hamilton is torn. Which leads one back to the obvious answer -- mystifying off-court numbers aside, Noah's their best player.

I just wish I could figure out those splits, you know?

• For more Bulls scouting, check out the 2012 Chicago Bulls player capsules. •

• • •

FORECASTING: WHERE THEY GO FROM HERE, AND WHAT DOES IT MEAN?

Trying to figure out how the Bulls are going to finish the season is essentially impossible. It's not that they've been an impossible team to figure out -- as I said, they're a classic Thibodeau unit. Great on defense, lacking creativity or vigor on offense. But without Rose around to carry them offensively, "lacking creativity" becomes "lacking quality", and "lacking quality" becomes a morass that nobody in the world wants to watch. One of the sad subplots of the 2013 season has been watching Bulls fans experience profound frustration on those games where the Bulls can't seem to get anything going. They come more often than they used to, now, and it's immensely irritating to anyone paying close attention. More irritating than that, though, is the sense that the Bulls -- as an organization -- don't care all that much.

This isn't the on-court product, mind you. The Bulls are a whirling dervish of effort and energy on the court, at least on the defensive end -- they hound teams to the breaking point. Chief among Thibodeau's assets as a coach is the way his teams come to play and throttle lesser teams. If a Bulls adversary takes them lightly, it doesn't take more than a quarter or two for the Bulls to go up by 20-30 and end the game early. But that on-court product masks a general disregard for the franchise fortune from their owner. Bulls owner Jerry Reinsdorf (his titles notwithstanding) is one of the NBA's least engaged owners. He doesn't seem to care much about his team, and he has more regard for blasting past the luxury tax than he has for building a product that can seriously contend for a title going forward. How else do you explain the franchise's lateral moves, letting promising pieces like Omer Asik go for a pittance and losing more and more depth as Thibodeau puts more and more heat on Chicago's best pieces? How do you justify wasting a year or two of Derrick Rose's prime with an aging supporting cast and few avenues for improvement?

That's the real thing, for me. What are the Bulls going to do when Rose gets back? They'll compete. They'll contend, perhaps -- I think they've got a good chance of pushing an immensely lazy Miami team to 6 or 7 games. And then, in that last game, they'll get blown out of the water. Exposed. Every team in the East will, and it won't really be Chicago's fault. But it'll happen. Reinsdorf will shrug his shoulders and give his old "what, me worry?" grin. "We'll be better next year," he'll say. "We'll keep building on what we've done," he'll say. "We'll get over the hump when Derrick gets better," he'll say. But if his track record's any indication, he won't really care all that much. He'll grin and bear it as he takes the abuse of a fanbase desperately aching for an owner that cares as much as they do, and he'll watch as the Bulls continue their old habits. Maximum effort, maximum energy, maximum grind. And when the chips are down? A wheezy crew of worn-down veterans who played too many minutes with depth that was sold to save a buck.

All that said? Prove me wrong, Jerry. Please. I like Rose. I don't want him to retire with nothing but "what ifs."

• • •

I told you all I'd try to come up with a riddle. But since I'm dealing with teams, now, riddles come cheap -- I'll be using a trio of random statistics or facts from a random subset of the next team's last season. If you can intuit what the next team is from these numbers, you're a scientist of the utmost brilliance. Today's facts about our next team are:

• Team #3 has been one of the worst teams in the NBA over the past two weeks. Seriously atrocious play. This is despite going 3-6 in their last 9, too. They've sported the 25th worst offense in the period, shooting the ball relatively well but never getting second chance points and virtually never getting to the line. That's all a bit astonishing in the aftermath of their 9-3 stretch from mid-November to mid-December, but let's be honest -- we all knew they weren't that good, right? Right?

Best of luck. See you next week. (Or later this week. I'm not sure.)

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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. 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. What more could we provide? Today's three short pieces are as follows.

• HOU vs LAC: Grant Hill's Tenth Centennial (by Aaron McGuire)
• LAL vs MIL: Lurking Demons & Shot Clock Follies (by Alex Dewey)
• PHX vs OKC: Dribbling the Night Away (by Adam Koscielak)

• • •

__HOU vs LAC: Grant Hill's Tenth Centennial
___Aaron McGuire_

A lot of numbers seem strangely meaningful, even if they're meaningless outside of the way we address them. Come, foreign nations: give us your even, your prime, your divisible-by-five! It's an odd and fascinating cultural tic we all seem to share. Inordinate appreciation for the attractive digits, that is. There's no real difference between Grant Hill's 999th game and his 1001st -- arbitrary difference, at best, and if you measure by minutes it becomes even more absurd. Consider: Hill had played 34,363 minutes before last night, and finished the night at 34,379. What an accomplishment, that! We'll be writing about Hill's 34,379th minute for years. I will someday tell my grandchildren, indeed, minute 34,379 was a sight to see. ... No, these are the ramblings of a crusty statistician. The child in my soul doesn't need milestones to mean things to be interesting, and by god, quadruple digits? A thousand contests? Meaningless significance or not, sometimes an arbitrary milestone sticks in your craw. This one stuck in mine. Good work, Grant.

Oh, a story. On this, Grant Hill's tenth centennial, he entered the game to a fun introduction. On a night where James Harden had decided from possession #2 that he'd be running face-first into every player on the court, Grant Hill planted his feet and took a solid charge at the age of 40. It was a good call -- he was set, outside the restricted area, and the offensive player got into him with their shoulder. But the Houston announcers responded to the charge by chuckling, calling it a blown blocking call, and -- 1,000 games into his NBA career -- mention that Duke players like Hill and Battier get a lot of "fake" charge calls. I just sat there a bit bemused. Really, Bullard? You're calling a team that stars James Harden, Jeremy Lin, Carlos Delfino, and Chandler Parsons... and you're going to complain about fake charge calls? I realize Houston doesn't have the best broadcasting crew, but it amused me a bit.

To put it one way: we're 1,000 games into Grant Hill's NBA career and bad announcers still can't get past where he went to college. He's posted the most triple doubles in Pistons franchise history, become a cautionary tale for the young and injured stars, and reinvented himself in a late career renaissance as a perimeter defending 3-and-D roleplayer. He's lost a step or 50 and still remained an active ambassador to the game and the sport. He's got a shot at being a hall of fame player, if on potential primarily, and he's one of the nicest guys in the league. He has a body of work the size of the Grizzlies' franchise history, for Christ's sake! And the first thing you say about him when he takes a good charge is that Duke guys get fake charge calls? Sometimes in analyzing sports we have memories shorter than a goldfish. Other times, though, we can't seem to lose the nagging image of the college title contender, 20 years prior, dishing passes to Laettner and taking Krzyzewski's pet charges. It's comforting, I suppose -- we'll never forget everything, right?

As for the game itself, it was a good game. For a half. The passing dazzled, the offense hummed, and both sides played a rousing match that made the victor's identity borderline irrelevant. Then the Clippers remembered that they're a clockwork contender and the Rockets are running high on Cinderella fairy-dust and bone-grinding hustle, and the contender roundly blew the young guns out of the building in the second half. Jamal Crawford did his running-on-Portland-tears thing. DeAndre Jordan continued his renaissance. Blake Griffin controlled, insofar as he's able, and Grant Hill hit 1000. It was a good night for a team that's becoming accustomed to them. And Coach Paul the Third gesticulated on the sidelines, urging his troops onward. The Clippers are a factor. Don't call it a comeback -- lord knows they've never been here, ever.

• • •

LAL vs MIL: Lurking Demons & Shot Clock Follies
Alex Dewey

Surreally poor clock management, especially by great offensive players, is really mystifying to me.

We always talk about defense as a big deal - generally speaking in the context of effort for older players and execution for younger players. But you only have to play defense if you let the other team have the ball, and two-for-ones/running out the clock are great examples where you simply don't have to let the other team have the ball an extra time, or where you can get the ball for yourself an extra time. It's not a totally value-free choice. The smart teams guard against two-for-ones -- they commit defensive resources and acuity to the early offense sets. And as for running out the clock? Well, it's often possible to get a GREAT shot with 9 seconds instead of a tightly-contested buzzer-beater, and in those situations, you obviously shouldn't. Danny Green's game-winner against the Lakers early this season comes to mind. That's all part of the competitive calculus, the give and take that characterizes a well-structured game. But something tells me Monta Ellis was quite far from thinking about denying the Lakers a final possession.

In a sequence at the end of the half, the Bucks totally ignored clock management as an element of strategy. There's just no other way to put it. Look: Metta World Peace hit a shot with 38 seconds left in the half. The Bucks waited for the prime seconds (32... 31... 30...) to drip off harmlessly before attempting a bad shot at 17 seconds. Then Luc Richard Mbah a Moute got an offensive rebound at 15 seconds and immediately went up for another bad shot instead of resetting. LRMAM's shot was sent out of bounds by Metta World Peace, and the Bucks rushed to get a shot on the inbounds. Monta, to his credit, got to the line. But he was struggling at the line and missed both. Off the Bucks' second free throw, Milwaukee actually got another offensive rebound. They didn't get anything close to a good shot, though. Now, I get that certain elements of strategy may be inaccessible to me when I'm watching at home, and I also get that the best player to lead a game might not be the best player to receive basketball "wisdom" from an Internet writer (and I'm the first in line to dismiss lines of reasoning like "JUST HIT YOUR FREE THROWS"). But I wasn't seeing the strategy from either team: The Lakers weren't feverishly attacking the two-for-one or addressing LRMAM's potential kick-out or trapping Ellis' dribble with :32. No, instead, I was seeing the Bucks trap themselves with bad management, and do it much more effectively.

I think players like Monta and Jennings might be "competitive" in the sense that they want to win games, but something about giving possessions away to the Lakers (with absolutely no apparent benefit) makes me pause in my assessment of them: We tend to think of these players as having feel for the shot and the game that can excuse their occasionally poor decision-making. Let Westbrook be Westbrook. And I buy that. But it was only by chance (and his offensive rebounders) that the Lakers didn't get a great possession or let the Bucks outright waste theirs. I'm giving Mbah a Moute the benefit of the doubt on the putback because he's not primarily an offensive player, but for such a smart defender of elite players, he must know: the best way to win on defense is not to play. It's just that simple. In the end, over 38 seconds of basketball, neither team scored. That sounds about fair, considering that, neither team competed for those 38 seconds.

The game itself was sort of microcosmic of that. Neither team showed up with especial gamesmanship to steal the game or get past the win condition pole. The Bucks dominated the offensive glass and used this to get back into the game several times when they were down. Milwaukee also hit a lot of random shots, but you can only take so many horrible shots before Sample Size starts to weigh heavy. The Lakers made a likable effort on defense (at least in the halfcourt, stifling a few possessions) and Dwight (with vim-and-vigor) looked like a monster offensively (and at times defensively, though 2 foolish goaltends sort of wipe out the impact of his 4 blocks). I thought the Lakers got better looks from deep than their 10-29 mark might indicate, and so all told it's hard for me to say they didn't dominate, even if it took a run in the fourth to seal the deal. Still, as dominating as the victory really was, it just strikes me as a game that they likely don't win against the Spurs, Nuggets, Rockets, or Thunder. The Lakers let the Bucks hang around. Against a coherent, good, playoff team, they would get punished severely.

Which is another way of saying the obvious: the problems are still there.

• • •

PHX vs OKC: Dribbling the Night Away
Adam Koscielak

Monday night, during a Suns game, a random tweet caught my eye. "Shannon Brown leads the NBA in dribbles per touch."

I wish I'd used the "favourite" button, but I didn't. I'm not sure whether this is a legitimate stat, or something conjured up by a frustrated mind as it watched his abomination of a basketball handle. Whatever it was, I'm pretty sure it's not that far away from the truth. Make no mistake, Shannon Brown made some strides since being Kobe's annoying backup. He learned some of the team game, he learned how to shoot better, and sometimes, just sometimes, he has that moment of brilliance where he slices the defence baseline and uses his trampoline-like legs to get a reverse layup.

But those are fleeting moments. The moments might come more often from Brown than the great moments from Jared Dudley or Wesley Matthews. The problem is, much like teammate Michael Beasley, Shannon Brown has a frustrating tendency to trade five disgustingly horrible moments for a single brilliant one. And nothing is more annoying than the ball going up and down in a fated isolation as time slowly trickles down, a staple of Shannon Brown's game, followed by a horrible pull-up jump shot.

My question: why does it happen? Even the folks at the weekly pickup game I wrote about last week have more awareness than that, and there's no shot-clock to respect, nothing to stop them from doing them but the purity of the game. They seem to embrace it. In a way, it's impressive that Brown -- despite all the pro experience, despite his two championship rings -- still manages to dribble the shot-clock out like that. It's impressive that his teammates and coaches still trust him enough to give him the ball. But the most magical fact of all is watching what exactly Shannon Brown does with that ball. Puts it between his legs, plays around with it, throws it behind his back, dazzles with it -- ... and ends up going absolutely nowhere. He rarely gets layups. If anything, he'll hit a lucky pull-up jumper that he'll follow with a brick or five.

But if he gets an opportunity somewhere other than isolation -- if he goes into the pick and roll, the pick and pop, charges the rim -- he can be a very dangerous, efficient player. He can finish at the rim, and sometimes he can make a brilliant pass. By that, I don't mean simple flashy passes. Steve Nash-style passes, straight out of nowhere. That's where he belongs, this is how he should be used, but he's not. Perhaps the coaches don't notice it. Perhaps they just want an ISO threat.

Or maybe Brown is simply content with dribbling the night away, bounce after bounce after bounce.

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Hey, all. For today's post, I'd like to present some cross-conference matchup data. A lot of people discuss cross conference games from a perspective of raw wins and losses. I'm amenable to that, in the aggregate -- there are usually enough games that looking at raw intraconference wins/losses can give valuable results. Still, there's generally more insight to be gained by looking a tad bit behind the numbers -- not simply the raw number of wins, but how they came about, what sort of statistical quirks underlie them, and what teams are best against the opposing conference. You know, all that jazz. So come with me, friends, and let's get behind a few of the preliminary factors that drive 2013's main inter-conference trends, and note a few interesting quirks

Full-size table after the jump.

• • •

I'm rather busy and crunched for time today, but here are a few observations.

• First, while this isn't a historically lopsided cross-conference split, these are still some pretty startling numbers. The West has won 137 of 230 cross-conference games -- 59.6% of their cross-conference games, overall. The West has an efficiency differential of 2.94 against the East. In a single team, that differential and that winning percentage would translate to a 4/5 seed. And those numbers were arrived at despite, obviously, having heavy game coverage from the lower-tier western teams. Look at Phoenix, for instance -- they've already played 21 of their 30 cross-conference games, which means they have fewer games to go than several better western teams. A few teams of note:

• Denver has looked pretty good in recent months, but their poor record against the East is one of the reasons they've yet to crack the West's top 5. It's possible -- even likely -- that they'll regress to their mean and post a better record in the second half of the season. Same is true about the Lakers, Grizzlies, and Clippers (all of whom have a lower-than-expected record against the East.)

• Sacramento and Dallas -- despite overall records under 0.420 -- are barely below 0.500 against the Eastern conference. In fact, almost nobody in the West is. Only four teams are, actually with just Phoenix and New Orleans below 0.400. The inverse is true in the East, where all but four teams (Miami, Indiana, New York, and Atlanta) are below 0.500 against their Western brethren.

• The San Antonio Spurs have won their eastern games by an average of 13 points per 100 possessions. This is despite sitting everyone with a pulse against Miami and playing 9 of their 16 Eastern games on the road. Also: despite their 2OT game against the Raptors.

• How is the West doing it? Offense and defense. Fun fact: the East is marginally better on defense than the West over all games played (the East has posted a defensive rating of 105.9 by my numbers while the West is at 106.2), but in cross-conference matchups, the Western defensive attack tends to shut down the East's weaker teams while the Western offensive attack tends to obliterate the East's defenses. While the West gets about a point-per-100-possessions better defensively when they're facing the East, the Western offensive attack absolutely fillets a weaker-than-it-looks slate of defensive looks, especially for poor defensive teams like the Bobcats, Nets, and Bucks.

• Going forward, most would intuitively assume there's a good chance this regresses to a less lopsided mean and the East closes the gap a bit. In theory, right? In actuality, I'm not at all sure this is going to happen, and it's more likely to get worse. The thing that one has to understand is that the current distribution of teams played actually tends to favor the East. Washington, Milwaukee, and Cleveland -- all teams that have been dismal against the West -- have a combined 54 cross-conference games left. Conversely, the East's 3 best teams against the West (Miami, New York, Indiana) have just 39 cross-conference games left! Although San Antonio has already played 16 of their 30 Eastern games, the Clippers, Grizzlies, and Nuggets combine for 51 remaining games. If you calculate out a full-season expectation for the final West/East win total, you get a number even worse for the East than the current reality, with the West going 271 to the East's 179 wins -- a final percentage of 60.2% in favor of the West.

• The other issue that could exacerbate matters for the East is that of the playoff picture. If the East featured several teams racing for a playoff spot, you might expect teams to hold off worrying about lottery positioning until they were mathematically eliminated for the playoffs. But as things stand, there are about six Western teams racing for the last 2 playoff spots with legitimate cases that all but about 3 Western teams could make the playoffs -- that stands in stark contrast to the East, where one could make a relatively strong argument that the eight playoff spots are already completely decided. If the pressures of lottery-tanking start to depress the fortunes of the East's worst teams, that's only going to worsen the picture against a Western conference with enough legitimate playoff contenders to fill a league.

• • •

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“Fool that I am, that I did not tear out my heart the day I resolved to revenge myself.”

Yesterday afternoon, we were treated to some unexpected league-changing news. From the mouth of Adrian Wojnarowski himself, word filtered down that the Brothers Maloof had finalized a deal to sell the Sacramento Kings to a Seattle-led ownership group. Most response involved some manner of shock, jubilation, and confusion. After all, it was just earlier this week that the Maloofs' Virginia Beach flirtation ended -- nobody expected them to bite on a new deal so quickly after that fell through. Jubilation is obvious -- the sad tale of the wayward Sonics is one that just about every NBA fan has been fed ad nauseam over the past several years, and the prospect of a revitalized Sonics is neat. And confusion? Again: where did it come from? Where was the lead up?

There are a lot of different considerations that bear mention when news of this magnitude shocks us. How are divisions going to realign to fit the new Sonics? How done is done -- will the Maloofs really follow through on it, or is this going to be yet another in their string of failed business decisions? And what kind of a trade is it to give up a franchise with a promising young core for a franchise that desperately needs a housecleaning? These will be answered in time, along with questions we haven't even thought to ask yet. And they may renege, it's true -- we aren't exactly talking about George W. Bush, here. No deciders. The Maloofs are notorious for their waffling, and we're already starting to see signs that this may just be their latest cowardly attempt to siphon more money from Sacramento's ownership groups.

But there was a curious lack of focus on what was actually getting left behind. Lots of thought about the future, the villains, et cetera -- almost no talk of what was to be lost. Today, I'd like to go over that history a bit. Let's remember the Sacramento Kings, and why they mattered.

• • •

Here's a fact that most people either aren't aware of or don't seem to care about -- the Kings have been around longer than almost every franchise in the league. Really! When the BAA disbanded and the NBA was formed in 1950, there were 17 teams that stuck around or were established to make the league. The Kings were a late addition to the BAA, and by extension, one of those founding NBA teams. Not all of those 17 teams stuck around, either. (Sorry, Sheboygan Red Skins!)

Of the 17 founding NBA teams, here are the eight that remain:

• Atlanta Hawks (then the Tri-City Blackhawks)
• Boston Celtics
• Detroit Pistons (then the Fort Wayne Pistons)
• Golden State Warriors (then the Philadelphia Warriors)
• Los Angeles Lakers (then the Minneapolis Lakers)
• New York Knicks
• Philadelphia 76ers (then the Syracuse Nationals)
• ... and finally, the Sacramento Kings (then the Rochester Royals)

They've been around a while. The Royals, in fact, were a very good team at the NBA's inception -- they tied Mikan's Lakers for the best record in the league in the NBA's founding season, and they won the 2nd NBA title ever awarded in 1952 -- they won it in an amusingly stressful fashion, too, beating the Knicks 4-3 in a series they shot out to a 3-0 lead in. That's right, they let the Knicks win three straight. "NOTHING EASY, WE GOING TO GAME 7 BABY." Assuming the sale goes through, that was the last time the Kings would make the finals. In a bit of sick irony, this means the to-be-defunct Kings would forever hold a tie for the best winning percentage in franchise NBA finals appearances -- after all, they made one and won one, so that's 100%! That ties the Jordan Bulls (6-0) and the Duncan Spurs (4-0). Good work, Kings.

I'm not 100% convinced I'm going to be able to give you a fair lowdown, at least on the Kings' early years. They moved to Cincinnati in 1957. Given that I'm 22 years old, I... uh... wasn't really around for the Royals' days in Cincinnati. To put it lightly. Hell, my parents weren't really around for the Royals' days in Cincinnati! I'm not positive that Curtis Harris was either, but he has written a lot of wonderful work remembering the players and personalities that team starred. There was Jack Twyman, as influential for his work bringing better labor conditions to the NBA as he was for being one of the best scoring forwards in league history. There was Oscar Robertson's triple-double season, a feat almost as untouchable as Rasheed's 41 technical season. There was Maurice Stokes, the first black superstar. Lots of colorful figures, lots of notable history. All worth reading. Check out his archives at Hardwood Paroxysm for a bit of a history lesson. Might be surprised at the depth, here.

When people refer to the Kings' general lack of history, they tend to point out that the Kings of recent years have been startlingly devoid of notoriety. Which is true in a broad sense. They only made the playoffs five of their thirteen years in Kansas City, despite Nate Archibald and their other stars. Although it is worth mentioning that one of those five runs was a shocking run to the Western Conference Finals against a Moses Malone-led Rockets team. I'm 90% sure that ranked as the first and only time in NBA history that two teams with losing records played in a conference finals matchup. Fun facts abound! The playoff drought got worse after their conference finals appearance and extended their plight when they finally made their way from Kansas City to Sacramento in 1986, too -- the Kings made the playoffs their first year and proceeded to miss the boat nine years in a row, and if you're counting, the Kings didn't have a single playoff victory from 1982 to 1996.

That could have been the end, but it wasn't -- the Kings finally started to acquire some upwards momentum in the late 90s, and in 1999 under Rick Adelman they managed to post their first winning record in 16 years. This set off one of the most successful periods in the Kings' history, an eight year period where the Kings would win 63% of their games, make the playoffs every single year, and win five individual playoff series. They played a breakneck offensive game, with Adelman scheming around Chris Webber's transcendent brilliance, Peja Stojakovic's shooting wizardry, and Vlade Divac's... everything, really. The early-aughts Kings were one of the most interesting basketball teams to ever play the game, taking the court with a strangely refreshing streetball mentality. They'd taunt, challenge, and flash to their heart's content. They passed the ball beautifully, shot the ball brilliantly, and won the hearts of millions. Their ill-begotten loss to the Lakers in the 2002 season can only be forgiven by the essential fact that it also meant Mike Bibby didn't win a title. (Sorry. I can appreciate the Kings all I want, but I still hate Mike Bibby with the inexplicable fury of a thousand suns.)

Since then, the Kings have been bad. Really bad. Although it's worth noting that this isn't entirely unplanned. The Maloofs haven't put serious money or investment into making the Kings a quality team since the mid 2000s, and they've been trying to move the franchise for the past 3 or 4 years. It's insane that this needs to be given as a caveat, but it absolutely needs to -- the Kings have made abhorrent personnel moves over the past few years, and they've composed a team with absolutely no cohesion or ability to compete on a real NBA level. And it hasn't been for no reason. If you lose the fans on purpose and price them out of their seats, you can build a real narrative about Sacramento "abandoning" the team. It hasn't. The Maloofs have poisoned the water in an effort to build a story, and while many accept the story on its face, it's difficult to really blame Kings fans for getting frustrated and dismayed with an ownership group that's tried their hardest to undermine every iota of respect and love Sacramento gives their team. Impossible, for me.

• • •

One of the first "serious" books I ever read was The Count of Monte Cristo, the classic Dumas masterpiece on revenge and the toll it takes on a man's soul. I don't need to explicitly restate the story -- even if you haven't read it, it's an outline that everyone's familiar with. Man is unjustly imprisoned, man stews over his rage for years, man breaks free, man extracts a long revenge on those who wronged him, and finally... man loses sight of his humanity in his quest for vengeance and becomes, to the reader and his eldest kin, an unrecognizable phantasm of woe and misery. The whole point of the book, in a not-so-roundabout way, is to highlight the problems with revenge as a concept. It's all fun and games to think about revenge. Actually acting on it changes a man, and can fundamentally betray the soul of the person who was wronged in the first place.

Wrongs aren't forgiven simply because you suffered before you acted on them. They're still wrong.

And that's, I suppose, my big problem with the move. Or at least at some of the joy many people get from it. Seattle is a wonderful city. I'll be there twice this year for two beautiful weddings. I felt for Seattle when they lost their Sonics, and I understand the desire for a team trumps the desire for justice. But this post is, in some sense, the big problem with moving a franchise to Seattle -- if you bring back the Sonics, you're necessarily closing the book on another team's history. The Kings have been around in some form or another for over 60 years. That's an awfully long stretch of time to simply close the book. If the Kings were moving to Anaheim, or Virginia Beach, or Las Vegas... they'd still be the Kings, or some warped interpretation thereof. They wouldn't simply be erasing their soul to become an echo of a dearly departed Seattle franchise.

Why does it matter? After all, as some Sonics fans were apt to point out, "Kings fans don't care." But that's... really not correct, at all. For all the whinging about Sacramento's poor attendance numbers, it's been lost in the shuffle that the Sonics had virtually identical numbers in the season before the move -- while the Kings have been filling the Sleep Train Arena to 76% capacity this season, the Sonics filled Key Arena to 78% capacity before the shoe dropped and Bennett moved them out. For all the talk about Seattle's storied basketball history, it's been lost that the Kings are also a storied basketball franchise -- erasing the league footprint of one of the NBA's founding franchises should not come lightly, nor should it come without a healthy dollop of respect. I think Seattle is due a franchise as much as anyone, but short of moving the Thunder back, I'm not sure of any non-expansion way to get them one.

Moving franchises where the owners have poisoned the well and ruined their fan experience just to make their team more mobile is the Count of Monte Cristo approach to team-building. Much like the masterpiece, the problem isn't in Seattle regaining a franchise, or in the reestablishment of a proud mainstay of the NBA's culture. No more than the problem was the Count's revenge in the first place. It's the collateral damage. It's the wives and families of the men who wronged the Count, or the history we're obliterating to reestablish the Seattle mainstay. It's the Sacramento arena-workers who lose their jobs with no prospect of ever getting a professional sports franchise ever again. It's the fans who did absolutely nothing wrong and are suffering for the sins of their horrible wayward owners. Seattle may need a franchise. Does the city need one enough to extract its vengeance on a set of innocent fans? Does the city need one enough to commit the very sin they eviscerated Bennett for, in the name of big market exceptionalism? Do the fans need one enough to consider themselves more deserving than the luckless Kings fans?

Who knows, really?

For now, questions of Seattle's worth aren't nearly as important as appreciating what we have in the Kings, and appreciating what the franchise means before the Maloofs do their best to wash it away. Try to remember the Kings, and sift through records of their obscenely deep history. If the Maloofs have their way, one won't be able to appreciate it much longer.

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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 feature. 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. What more could we provide? Today's two short pieces are as follows.

• MIA vs IND: Dwyane Wade and the Smoking Lung (by Aaron McGuire)
• PHX vs MIL: Defenceless, starring the Phoenix Suns (by Adam Koscielak)

• • •

MIA vs IND: Dwyane Wade and the Smoking Lung
Aaron McGuire

For about 3 months of college, I attempted to keep my schedule without a caffeine or sugary beverages -- no soda, no tea, no juice. I had homework and essays and problem sets to worry my head, as well as the slog of my writing on the side and my actual job. Lots of factors, lots of problems. Without caffeine, I quickly discovered the late nights were even harder than they were before, and the depth of stupidity inherent in my overburdened schedule became clear. One particularly dismal night, I was up at about 3:00 AM, working. A friend calls me up. We talk. I mention my exhaustion.

"Want a pack of smokes? They'll keep you up..."

I didn't take it, but I'll admit the whole thought was alluring. It's stuck in my mind since. Smoking and nicotine are oddly ever-present temptations for me. It's not that I love the idea of killing my lungs. It's the other stuff. The short-lived burst of energy, as my friend described it. The caffeinated feeling of the smoke in your lungs and the inadvertently wakeful effects of a terrible wheezing cough. Others take a tantalizing drag, a secondhand fable, and dole out the wheeze of a lung on the verge of collapse. And it beckons, if you can believe it! An open invitation to this inexplicable rush of energy and this stupid rebellion against the self that lies within each little cancer stick. I've never had a cigarette, but every time I walk through a crowd of smokers, every time I inhale the secondhand smoke, I wonder how I've avoided becoming a chain smoker. And the desire itself is a terrible sign -- a red-letter warning. If I give in, I'll get addicted. It's obvious. So, I take my substitutes. One particular substitute showed exactly why he's such last night.

Dwyane Wade's play is like a Jackson Pollock painting, at times. An aggressive splattering of paint and frenetic energy. That's how you'd describe the best possessions and the memorable moments. But when you look at his current state, and examine his game as a whole? Put away the paints -- Wade's a smoker. There's the burst, of course. You still get a few possessions of classic Wade offense, night in and night out. That alluring energy, the one that smokers describe with zest. Catching a whiff of secondhand smoke -- sickening though it may be -- is oddly satisfying. So too is watching Wade trick the greenest rookie to the seasoned vets into biting on his jumper-less pump fake and going to the line. I hate free throws, and I've never been a fan of tricks like that. But there's something oddly satisfying about Wade's smug assurance as he fools his latest victim. The dunks, the hero-ball, the devil-may-care drives. The lack of regard for his opponents. For someone who's never loved Wade, it's all very tantalizing. Cool and smooth. Just take a drag, man.

But then you look at the other side of the court -- you see him a step slow on defense, wheezing to catch up with his more nimble counterparts. Then you notice the empty possessions, those protracted coughs where Wade refuses to give up the ball as LeBron or Bosh languish, open as a man could be. And then the lead begins to collapse. The Heat were up 51-44 last night, with Wade having a monstrous night and a reminder of how good he can be. And then it all collapsed -- the Pacers finished the game on a 39-26 stretch, with Wade unable to get free and the Pacers defense swallowing the Heat whole. The Pacers kept driving at Wade and slipping him on screens -- they kept challenging him to catch outside of his comfort zone, and he just kept missing the boat. He looked tired. Wheezy. Old. All actions have an equal and opposite reactions -- all risers like Wade have an equal and opposite come-down.

And that's the problem, with a cigarette. It's all fun and games until the energy fades and you're left with a wheezing shell. Tantalizing, sure, but only to a point -- the burst of energy is never going to be worth the come-down. The wakefulness is never going to be worth the cough. Lungs are a valuable thing. They say you never quite know what you have until it's gone -- I feel that, with Wade, a lot of people (myself included) have missed the boat. He's always been great. Wonderful, even. One of the best. And now that he's begun to crack and chip, and show his age, there's an internal desire among this particular fan to see him stave off the inevitable as long as he possibly can. But a reminder, as well -- don't taunt death, don't taunt age, don't mock convention just to mock it.

And don't smoke, either. I don't need a cigarette.

After all, I've still got Dwyane Wade.

• • •

PHX vs MIL: Defenceless, starring Adam Koscielak and the Phoenix Suns
Adam Koscielak

On Monday, I found myself at my weekly university-mandated basketball “class.” In actuality, it's just an hour and a half pickup game. We play 4-on-4 on a small court, which means a lot of the game is a track meet. But there were slow possessions too, where defence would actually be required. When that happened, one of two things would occur. Everyone would rotate, do their job and get beaten by a miracle shot... or, alternatively, someone would end up completely wide open under the bucket. At the beginning, everyone tried. They tried hard. Put in a good fight. But as time went by the effort became more and more lacking, until it dissipated into lazily going through the motions. Nobody lost their man, but nobody tried to stop him from getting to the bucket either. Nobody missed a box out, but nobody hustled down loose balls either. Et cetera, et cetera.

On Tuesday, I had the 'pleasure' of watching a similar defensive effort. This time it was far more remote -- I was watching the Phoenix Suns, from my computer in Poland. They didn't do this for the first time, nor did they do it for the last time. As I planned to write this, I wrote out what was wrong with the defence. Slowly but surely, note by note, I came to my own realization: fundamentally, the system is in place, and the implementation of it was mostly correct. Traps were set, rotations were made. Somehow? The Milwuakee Bucks just kept scoring. That was the first quarter, back when the offence flowed and the Suns were leading. And then, just like in my pickup game, as time went on the effort just got worse. At first it was just the bench. That made sense. It was a squad that (outside of Jermaine O’Neal) never had any defensive potential either way. But as time passed, the problems infected the starters. Jared Dudley lost Mike Dunleavy on screens, Marcin Gortat and Luis Scola missed rotations, Goran Dragic let Brandon Jennings rain threes. They weren’t lost, and they were doing what they were told.

But that's the thing -- they were doing it in slow motion! It was as if they were making Matrix impressions while the other team ran on normal speed. Every contest was there, but it was always two seconds late. Every rotation was there, but the rotating player always ended up on the off arm of a player now established in the low-post. Normally, a team has one player with a horrible defensive effort. The Suns played 9 of them Tuesday night. I could try to analyze the game, or I could watch synergy for missed rotations and point out the real culprits, the traditionally "bad" defensive players. But as I watch this happen, game after game, night after night, I don't really know if there's any specific culprit. Any particular man at fault. I watch a team that can be good-to-average defensively, if they simply were a little faster. But every single player on the team seems to dig the broader unit into a hole. They just don't try after they get tired, once their shots stop falling. And just like me, in a pickup game, they end up going through the motions as shots swish through the net. And it would seem that in the end, my search for a recipe for the Suns woes yields a surprisingly simple resolution problems.

Sometimes, all you need to do is try harder.

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Coming off my 370-part player capsule series, I'm taking on a significantly less incredible task -- a 30-part frame examining the evolution of the individual teams in the NBA's 2013 season. Some in medias res, others as the season ends. Somewhat freeform, with a designated goal to bring you a few observations of note about the team's season, a view into the team's ups and downs, and a rough map of what to expect going forward. Today, we cover a team I recently deemed one of the league's biggest surprises, although certainly not in a good way -- we're covering the sordid, unhappy tales of the 2013 Washington Wizards.

Not exactly the most grandiose of a start I could've hoped for, but you can't win them all. Today, to start this new series outlining the stories and evolutions of each team in the NBA, I'm starting with a team most people can't bear to watch: your 2013 Washington Wizards. A bit of backstory. In the preseason, I notched the Wizards for 35 wins -- short of the playoffs, but only 5 or 6 games back. I was a bit surprised to find the Wizards I had in my head -- a scrappy (though well below average) defensive unit with a roughly average offense -- apparently didn't exist anywhere outside my head. As they stand, the Wizards are among the slowest teams in the league, and currently hold the dubious distinction of sporting the 10th worst offense in the history of the NBA. Some of that's bound to improve when John Wall comes back. How much of it? Let's find out.

• • •

TRENDSPOTTING: WASHINGTON AT A GLANCE, IN TWO WEEK INTERVALS

A few comments on the format of the statbox. EFF DIFF indicates the average margin of victory per 100 possessions. OPP SRS indicates the opponent's strength using Basketball Reference's "Simple Rating System" -- high numbers indicate a hard stretch of schedule, low numbers indicate an easy one. W/L and H/A are straightforward, and ORTG/DRTG/POSS are calculated using the Basketball Reference formula. For more on the metrics in the bottom panel, see their page on Dean Oliver's four factors. Savvy?

A few metrics and observations of note in this split:

• BEST STRETCH: From 11/27 to 12/10, the Wizards faced their toughest opposition of the season to date. They went 2-3 (almost 0.500!) against that moderately tough schedule, didn't completely embarrass themselves by the margins, and looked semi-competent. For a short time, of course.

• WORST STRETCH: From 12/11 to 12/24, the Wizards were -- on average -- blown out by over 12 points a night over 8 games, even though they won one of them. They scored 90 points per 100 possessions in the stretch. I watched 5 of those 8 games, and let me tell you -- it looked just as bad as it sounds. "Your search for entertainment returned an error: 404, not found."

Despite the fact that the Wizards are the 11th best defense in the league, in not one of these stretches have the Wizards shot better than the team they're defending. Little has changed, even with Nene back -- this is a team that loses big to bad teams and has a nasty habit of losing just about every close game they could possibly lose to the good ones. Last night's brilliant performance excepted.

• • •

WASHINGTON'S BIGGEST MYSTERY: "How do you defend?"

As a team profile, I'm trying to answer most of the questions I can about the Wizards. Give some insight into what they're doing, why they're doing it, what's the point of it all, et cetera. That's the goal, anyway. But I also want to be honest about the things that mystify me. And for the Wizards, there's one thing I really can't even pretend to understand.

How in God's name do they defend so well?

Really. Despite the fact that the Wizards enter today at 5-28 on the season, they're hardly a poor defensive unit. Just the opposite -- they're on the fringes of the league's top 10, allowing just 104 points per 100 possessions. That's good for the 11th best defense in the league, and my lord, it doesn't make sense. I watched a lot of tape on the Wizards to try and figure out what exactly they do well on defense, and I've come up with a single answer. One specific thing they do well that fuels their defense and keeps them above water, defensively. That thing? They're really good at missing shots.

Let me explain. There are two or three types of missed shots in the NBA. The first are the chippies -- the ones you miss directly under the rim under little duress, that give you an excellent chance for the offensive rebound. The second are the long, semi-random chucks. Those bounce to god-knows-where, often starting a fastbreak by bouncing to the three point line into the hands of the other team's fastest player. The third are the completely hopeless missed shots, the ones that bounce behind the rim and force the other team to inbound the ball behind the baseline. The thing with the Wizards is that despite having a shot distribution that's inordinately skewed towards long two-pointers and errant threes, they're simply really good at missing shots. They're more likely to have a shot miss spectacularly (over the rim, above the backboard, bouncing off to the corner) than they are a simple long bounce that feeds a transition break. That dramatically cuts down on the number of transition opportunities the Wizards allow their opponents -- they're a top-5 team in tamping down on their foe's fastbreak points, and that certainly isn't because they're full of defensive savants.

The odd rebounds their opponents get serve two purposes. First, it cuts down on fast breaks. Second, it slows the game down and forces their opponent into their halfcourt sets. That's essential for the Wizards. Without Wall (and sustaining the sort of insane injury maladies they've suffered this season), the Wizards can reasonably claim to be the least talented team in the NBA -- when you're worse than the opponent, mucking the game up and forcing a slow, high-effort contest is just about the only way to grind out a win. With the exception of their road win over the New Orleans Hornets (where they won 77-70 in a game where both teams got an above average number of possessions, somehow), each win the Wizards have put up this year have involved holding the opposing team below their ideal pace. By pushing teams out of their comfort zone, the Wizards can throw up a few threes and get lucky. When they can't do that, they get stomped. Simple as that.

(Also, it helps that Chris Singleton is getting minutes. He's a good defender.)

• • •

FORECASTING: WHERE THEY GO FROM HERE, AND WHAT DOES IT MEAN?

At writing, the Wizards are shooting an effective field goal percentage of 44% on the season. That's phenomenally bad. It's the 20th worst mark of the shot clock era, in fact. Some excruciating stuff. The problem I have with projecting anything dramatically better to close the season is that I'm simply not sure where the improvement is supposed to come from. John Wall is a solid player, but unless he comes back from injury exactly as good as he was before, with absolutely no warm-up period? I don't see him changing the equation in a whole-scale way. He'll add a better passing wrinkle, and he's fast enough that his speed disorients the defense into giving up a slightly more open shot. But it's not like the Wizards shoot that much better on open shots -- Wall's shooters can't shoot. This team may be built around his talents, but it's hard for any one man's talents to make up for a parade of errant shooting talents and an offense that simply can't move correctly. Especially when Wall is a poor shooter himself!

Still, you have to think the Wizards are going to stumble into a better offense eventually. Maybe. Just look at last year, when the Wizards ended the year on a solid 6-game win streak after an absolutely abhorrent season, with Jordan Crawford, Kevin Seraphin, and Nene leading them to semi-respectability. Crawford actually started the 2013 season out well -- his shot selection has been poor, as is his wont, but he's made a few more threes than usual and shown a particular proficiency for the pure above-the-break dead center three point shot. With Wall back healthy to end the season, I doubt they sniff 25 wins or end the season on the same sort of a 6-game winning streak, but I could see them putting up a decent fight for 15-20 victories if they experience a marginal offensive improvement and continue their mystifyingly solid defense. Their overall outlook is grim, but as long as they continue to put in effort on the defensive end and keep missing shots with the sort of sickening aplomb that fuels their defense, they'll never quite reach the levels reached by historically awful pushovers -- you know, like the 2012 Bobcats, the 2011 Cavaliers, or the 2010 Nets. A fringe top-10 defense is more than any of those teams ever had going for them, that's for sure.

As for next year? We clearly shouldn't have been entertaining the notion of a playoff team this year, and next year seems like a comparable stretch. As good as Nene may be, one good piece doesn't make a team a playoff squad. And the offensive problems run deep. Nobody on this team can shoot, nobody can consistently draw free throws, and Randy Wittman may be the least qualified offensive coach in the NBA. Really! He's the Jay Triano of offense. In Wittman's entire coaching history, his best offensive team was 23rd in the league, and it was Andre Miller's accomplishment to get them that far. His sets aren't creative. We can pooh-pooh the Wizards players all we want -- at the end of the day, when a team spends a coach's entire tenure looking like an uninspired offensive mess with no system or strategy of movement, it's hard to really blame the players. The Wizards have an irritating tendency to take their foot off the gas and play tight every time they shoot out to even an inconsequential lead, and Wittman has an irritating tendency to either not notice or not care. They don't play to win, they play to avoid the loss -- when your team is as offensively dismal as this group, reducing your offense to 10 second no-movement half-court sets is almost like guaranteeing the other team a gift-wrapped stop. If Wittman can dramatically improve his ability to coach offense and the Wizards don't blow another draft pick, they could be decent. If Wittman can't? He should be fired, no matter how little the franchise cares about winning. Do no harm, as they say.

• • •

Hope everyone enjoyed the reprieve from my 15,000 words a week. Let's hope this series can go half as well as the last. Current rough schedule is one team a week until the all-star break, when I kick this into a higher gear and go to 3 or 4 to have scouting and stories for each team by the playoffs. I'll be writing a column about an undisclosed subject in an undisclosed location with an undisclosed family on Thursday. Look out for that. Also, I told you I'd try to come up with a riddle. But since I'm dealing with teams, now, riddles come cheap -- I'll be using a trio of random statistics or facts from a random subset of the next team's last season. If you can intuit what the next team is from these numbers, you're a scientist of the utmost brilliance. Today's facts about our next team are:

• Team #2 has as many losses against their own division in the 2013 season as they had in 2012 and 2011 combined. Their pace has slowed to a tortoise crawl, and they've averaged just 88 possessions a night since December 10th. Their All-Star probably won't repeat, but they should safely have a new representative at the game.

Best of luck. See you next week.

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As our summer mainstay, Aaron was writing a 370-part series discussing almost every notable player who was -- as of last season -- getting minutes in the NBA. As the summer dies down and the leaves turn, this quixotic quest of a series has happily reached the last third. And now, the end. Today we conclude this absurd, unnecessary, slog of a series with Matt Bonner. And me, too.

• • •

Follow Matt Bonner by listening to Arcade Fire and partying with them.

There are a lot of players in the NBA who I love despite their skills. One could make the argument reading my appraisals of NBA players now explicated in triplicate that I love just about everyone in the league, and one wouldn't be that far off. I'm a realist in my personal life and I tend to be a pragmatist in my approach to the world, but I can't lie to you: I'm a starry-eyed optimist when it comes to the humanity of those around me. I may often assume the government's an institution of lies and deceit, but I'm a big tragedy-of-the-commons guy. I can assume a team's horrible without hating the component players. I can assume a company's full of crap without indicting a single member of the company. I can make snide little jokes about how much I hate the Clippers without impugning individuals. And as such, I can recognize a player's limited talents without bearing any ill will to the player for those limits. Call me an optimist, call me foolish, call me wrong. I call it sports, and I'll like who I like.

One of those people, indeed, is Matt Bonner.

I've personally defended Bonner's ill-reputed defense a few times, mostly because I don't feel it's quite as bad as people initially think. Once or twice a Spurs game, when Bonner's on the court, opposing teams run plays specifically meant to attack Bonner's perceived defensive deficiencies. There's a problem with that. As bad as Bonner is at rotating and as immobile as he is on an overall level, he's not atrocious enough as an individual defender to make isolations-against-Bonner a reasonable offensive strategy. Isolation plays are what you go to when a play has failed. They certainly aren't something you should go to as a general rule, and in one of the biggest mysteries of the NBA, teams insist on going to them the minute Matt Bonner comes on the floor. And Bonner -- the cad -- has the audacity to stay on his feet, keep his hands up, and provide reasonable (if not incredible) defense against a stupid post-up or isolation with no outside options that never should've happened. When teams run plays like that, Bonner can hurt them simply by not being a folding lawn chair. He isn't, so he hurts them. But teams keep doing it, and the Spurs keep reaping the rewards. And good on them, I suppose.

The thing where people get tripped up is when they construe my statements about Bonner as a not-team-killing individual defender as some statement of support for the idea that Bonner's a lockdown defender. As good as his Synergy numbers have always been, he's not. He absolutely is not. He's a reasonably solid isolation defender who tries very hard despite not having any great skillset for it. And his offense, good as it may be in the regular season, is far from playoff caliber. Bonner's odd shot mechanics are incredibly fun to watch and impossibly amusing, but they're also mechanics that require about a restraining order's expanse of space between him and the defender for the shot to make it home. That's not space Bonner's ever going to have in a playoff situation, and without it, he's less than useless -- his offensive repertoire beyond "wide-open threes" is about as lengthy as the movie Airplane's pamphlet of Jewish superstar athletes. He's gotten less and less playoff burn as the years go on and Popovich loses his faith that any given year will finally be the year Bonner will quicken his release and adapt it to a playoff scenario. Because each year he tries, and each year he fails. It's like Lucy and the football. Spurs fans and coaches get optimistic, Bonner works on new methods, and every year it ends the same way -- the playoffs come, the kick goes up, and a player who can't really adapt to playoff situations gets badly exposed. An unfortunate fact of life.

All this isn't to say I don't like Bonner, though. Absolutely love the man. Understanding his weaknesses isn't akin to abandoning the guy entirely -- he's good for adding on a regular season win or two, without a doubt, and off the court there are few other guys in the league I'd rather root for. He's one of the few NBA players with legitimate connections in the hoops blogosphere, being somewhat friendly with the Basketball Jones crew. He's also friendly with the blogosphere because he has his own blog. Take that, world! Matt Bonner is one of us! It's a blog about sandwiches that appears on San Antonio's NBA.com site, called "Matt Bonner's Sandwich Hunter." It's stated mission is to follow Matt Bonner's quest for the Hoagie Grail, the sandwich-to-end-all-sandwiches. Someday, Matt Bonner will succeed in his mission. He'll also succeed in his mission to bring basketball fundamentals to children everywhere, with his 90s style vide--... oh, wait. That's not Matt Bonner. It's "Coach B." Very different beast. Still, quite worth watching. It's the greatest video any NBA player has ever produced. And the sequels, video 2 and video 3, are still amazing acid trips into the world of inspirational basketball videos. I feel like every marginal player in the NBA could eventually be a league MVP, if only they all watched these videos every night before they went to sleep. And this includes Matt Bonner! I don't know why he doesn't listen to Coach B more, frankly. They bear a striking resemblance to each other and he clearly was very helpful to Bonner's younger brother Luke. Come on, Matt. Coach B is all that's separating you from MVP-caliber ball. Listen to him. Let's get this done, MVP-in-waiting. Let's get it done.

• • •

_Follow Aaron McGuire on Twitter at __@docrostov.___

Who is Aaron McGuire? Who's the idiot who actually tried to do this project? I'll scout it out for you -- I have some sources on this guy. Aaron McGuire's about 6'4", 6'5" if he stands up straight. He's a scrawny man, a pickup tweener with a poor outside shot and a worse dribble. He's never played pickup against an NBA player, which is probably for the best, because he'd get dunked on with such obscene force that he'd turn to dust and blow into the wind. One would perhaps say he's a decent defender, but one would be wrong, because he's not. That's just what all white pickup players say when they aren't really good at anything else. "Don't worry, guys, I'm a defensive specialist! I'll lock guys down!" Yeah, no. Fat chance of that. His best quality is simply that he's tall relative to the average pickup player, and he can sometimes -- if he's lucky -- see a pick and roll developing and quash it with a nice twirl. And you know what? That's about it. Because that's about it, he always gets picked last, and it's a reasonable thing for people to do it. He's not very good at basketball, OK?

Off the court, he's a bit of a bore. The man works as a statistician in his day job -- a statistician! -- and devotes an untold number of hours outside of work to the pursuit of writing things about the NBA and contributions to unshared creative writing projects he'll probably never finish. He and one of his favorite professors from back in school have a paper up for publication in the Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports, although he's been lazy about revisions, so it may never see the light of day. He's a family man without a family, a luckless romantic knave without the whole luckless part. Or the romantic part, I suppose. So he is more aptly described as a knave, simply. He likes to think he's funny every now and again, but is consistently dissuaded of those views when realizing how few people actually laugh at his openly horrible jokes. He likes helping people out, even at the detriment to his time and wallet, which can get him into trouble at times. Lots of times. But he tries pretty hard to be a decent person and by and large succeeds, even if it also makes him something of a boring slug that few in the world really want to know. He can't hold his liquor whatsoever, probably on account of the fact he's slightly underweight and has poor circulation for his height. He doesn't have very good NBA prospects. Let's just pretend this didn't happen and move on to someone else.

... wait. There's nobody else to move on to. Well, that's awkward.

• • •

THE END

All told, this whole thing has been an undertaking. I'm not going to make any promises about ever doing something like this again, mostly because I'd have to be completely off-my-rocker to promise that after this experience. I'm going to walk you through what my daily schedule has been over the last 5 months. This is partly for your entertainment, and partly for my reference -- when I'm ruminating on whether or not to do it again next year, I'll probably go back and read this post, and I'll probably see this. And I would really like my future self to think hard on whether he actually wants to do this again. So, for one's amusement, here it is. My daily schedule, my kingdom of dust.

• 6:00 AM: Wake up. Shower. Brush my teeth. Drive to the office. Sometimes earlier, but never later than 6:45.

• 6:45 AM: Nestle into my desk, spend about 2 hours writing capsules, then start in on the day's work.

• 9:30 AM: Publish the capsules. Usually. If they needed more editing I did it in off-moments from my job, or my lunch break.

• 6:00 PM: Begin to pack up my things, drive home. Often later, rarely earlier.

• 9:00 PM: After a few hours of games with my ex-girlfriend, dinner, and whatever the heck else I had to do, I'd open up my spreadsheet with all the players in the feature. I'd isolate the next 3 and start up Synergy.

• 12:15 AM: With an hour or three of scouting done, a game or two watched in the background (usually featuring a player or two from the next day's capsules), and some manner of notes made on the players for the next day, I would head to bed, ready to approach the next day's work.

• 1:30 AM: ... OK, yeah, I usually didn't go to sleep until well after the games were over. Sorry, doctor. (No, seriously. My doctor talked to me about it. Sorry about that.)

Have you ever wondered what sort of psychotic devotion to a project it takes to produce this kind of a steady stream of content over a 5 month span while working a stressful nine to five? There you have it. The project began on July 6th, 2012. The project concluded in full on December 31st, 2012. In that time I wrote 370 player capsules, which (when added up) summed to a ridiculous 373,955 words. Some people have asked me why I didn't edit these down, or try to make them shorter in an effort to ease the burden on myself. Confession: I did! For most of these players, I ended up scratching ideas and rewriting whole sections. But I treated each of these things like a several-draft essay, with each essay usually ending when I'd realize I was crunched for time and needed to slash out paragraphs. Had to get it down to a moderately short and reasonably snappy three-to-four paragraph explication rather than a long, meandering appreciation. Gross! I still meandered, as most would be wont remind me, but trust that there was more editing on my part put into this effort than it may have appeared. I really wanted to do this right.

That's the thing, though. Why did I really want to do it right, though? What made this my goal?

This is a question I've been asking myself. Why was I so intent on proving I could do this with any semblance of quality? It's not like these aren't time-sensitive. If you go back in about a year and read the capsules, I'm sure some of the observations will still be apt. But I'm just as sure others will be about as outdated as year-old milk. There's a certain temporal transience here that makes all basketball writing somewhat ephemeral, and it applies just as well to a series like this. Few people are going to go back and think "wow, I want to read the equivalent of a 1000 page novel about basketball just so I can get the views of a single capricious fan on every player in the league." I'm not trying to get a new job -- I like my current job, thanks. In terms of assessing the project's quality in-the-whole, there aren't ever going to be more than 30-40 people who can do that, and most of them aren't ever going to let me know what they thought of it. So, why? I'm not a person who tends to have a great deal of pride in my work. Ever, really. I certainly put a lot of effort into what I do, but I'm a perfectionist at heart. Never quite happy with things. Always errors, always problems. Some of my best writing has been stuff that I absolutely hated at the time and only grew to like months or years later. It's the nature of the beast. But when I look back on this ridiculously unnecessary project, I get a bit choked up.

Because, simply put? I didn't fail. Certain things are large and ambitious enough that you simply get excited when you reach the finish line. They're things you'll remember for a long time, and you know it when you feel it. For me, this is one of those things. In 5 or 6 years, I'm not going to remember the 10-15 capsules I wish I had back. I'm not going to remember the sleep lost, the struggles getting Synergy to work, the nights when I had to stay up late because I simply didn't have the joy. I'm not going to remember the sad feeling whenever I'd have to cancel a day because I simply had too much work to do. No, I'm simply going to remember this -- I was able to complete a 370-part series of 1000 word essays, and I was able to complete it in a way that made me proud. I'm going to remember how many people the project reached, and remember the fact that even if very few people read all of the capsules, just about everyone in the blogosphere at least read one. I'm going to remember those feelings of accomplishment as I incremented my calendar and watched my progress meter fill. And the satisfaction of putting that last word to the Bonner capsule and smiling to myself. No monetary compensation, no boss to cheer up. Just me. The project was for me, above anyone else. And I succeeded.

This series is full of stories. It's a tapestry of disconnected ideas, concepts, and experiments. Some were good, some were bad, some were flat-out wrong. But I was faithful to the project and I accomplished something I didn't know for sure if I could when I started. I weathered some bad personal moments during the duration of the series -- I got dumped by a girlfriend of two and a half years, I had several immensely stressful work projects, and I dealt with a lot of real life turmoil at times in the project. But I kept at it, I didn't give up, and right before the turn of the year, I finally finished my large and ambitious side-of-the-desk project. I did it in the timeframe I wanted with the detail I needed. I don't like gloating and I don't like pride. I detest arrogance. But I'm proud of myself, for once, and I think that pride is exactly why I put so much into this. I knew in the back of my mind if I finished something like this I'd have to finally admit to myself I did a good job at something. Take a moment to appreciate the work I did, the grind I lived, the time I spent.

Of course, there's one thing I didn't totally consider. Or rather, I did but I didn't want to admit it. That grind, that writer's yen? It goes on. It always does. I've had a small success, here. A moment of personal pride. I'll take a week, catch my breath, and find some new mountain to climb. Because when you feel pride in your work once, you want to feel it again. And that's what writing is, right? An addiction to the best ideas, a constant need for your foremost efforts, and a constant parched thirst for the best you'll ever be. That's what makes a good writer good. Not the words on the page but the yearning that stands behind it. And I'm no excellent writer -- not yet, anyway. But perhaps someday I'll turn the pages of something I wrote and think with pride and love of the individual hammer-strikes to the stone of inspiration that came behind it. The intractable surfeit of effort and toil it took to get a piece I could really love as my own, not in an isolated moment, but deep within my soul and heart.

Perhaps, someday. For a time, I'll stop and enjoy a project completed. Life's good.

And in a week? The work chugs happily onward. And I'll enjoy that, too.

Hope to see you then.

• • •

Continue reading

As our summer mainstay, Aaron was writing a 370-part series discussing almost every notable player who was -- as of last season -- getting minutes in the NBA. As the leaves turn frosty, this quixotic quest of a series has happily reached the last full week. Not quite done yet, but close. Today we continue with Ed Davis, Darrell Arthur, Wilson Chandler.

• • •

Follow Ed Davis on Twitter at @eddavis32.

Aha, Ed Davis. Finally. The mainstay of promising young big men everywhere. Davis is as Davis does -- he's a relatively capable defender, a decent rebounder, and (as currently utilized) a poor offensive player. He's not a willing passer, he's not good at controlling the ball, and he's a rather atrocious scorer once you get outside of about 7 feet. That said, he has the tools to be at least somewhat useful on offense -- it's up to Dwane Casey to set him up correctly. He's a quality finisher at the rim (75% last year, which is simply insane) and holds the keys to an excellent 3-9 foot baby hook he tends to rely on from that range. In fact, last season he made his hook shot as far as 11 feet out from the basket. Quite impressive, I think. When it comes to a jump shot, that's certainly nothing to write home about, but he's got a decent short jump shot from about 6 feet in that's effective on the left side of the basket and toothless on the right -- something about the angles or personal comfort, I'm assuming, because even in college he never attacked the basket for jumpers from the right. Looking through the tape, I wasn't sure I saw him make a jump shot in the paint to the immediate right of the basket over his entire career -- sure enough, looking at his shot locations on Basketball Reference, he hasn't. Ed Davis hasn't made a shot from the close-right of the basket since his rookie year, when he made three shots relatively close to the basket to its right. Last year he made zero, and this year he hasn't even attempted any.

Quite the interesting tic, and probably reflective of one of his playing time issues -- if Davis is playing a big man who knows this and effectively forces him to the right of the basket, he fumbles around a bit and usually ends up turning the ball over. Not too hard to scout when you can only attack one side of the basket with any particular efficiency. To Davis' credit, he never seems to act outside his comfort zone badly -- he doesn't try to do too much, or overpass, or hog the ball without reason to. He doesn't play a ton of minutes, but he's active on defense (sometimes too active -- he really needs to learn to get the feel for those times that help defense is detrimental to the team's overall structure) and his athletic package is excellent. The key's really got to be putting it all together. He's young, so you have to like his chances, but you also have to be a bit skeptical after two seasons of being a relative nonentity that he's ever going to establish himself as a real young star in the league. But stranger things have happened. Perhaps adding some offensive moves to the basket's right could help. And I mean anything. Anything! Just some competent offensive move. Please? Bueller?

A friend of mine once told me that Ed Davis was really cool, and by far the coolest guy on the dismal Carolina team he left behind right before my senior year. I never had much of a reason to believe him, and the rivalry feelings are strong, so I didn't really pay him much heed. This came to mind while looking up today's off-the-court research for Ed Davis, and after reading a few interviews with him, I have to agree. He's accurately describing himself in the following excerpt from this particularly fun interview with Eric Koreen of the National Post:

What’s one thing about you that people don’t know that they should know?
I’m a boss. I’m a boss.

Go on.
I just do boss things, move like a boss, talk like a boss, act like a boss. That’s about it.

Made me smile, if nothing else. Keep bossin', Ed.

Oh, also! Fun fact -- Ed Davis went to high school in the same city I live in now! That's crazy to me. Virtually nobody in the NBA comes from this part of Virginia. Of course, it's not like people around here really remember him -- he went to a private school in Richmond. Still though. This is the sort of thing I go scrabbling for when I've reached players like Ed Davis, who are fundamentally hard to separate out of the rest of the NBA's promising young big men. Sorry, Davis.

• • •

Follow Darrell Arthur and his outsized impact on a great Grizzlies team.

Although the Grizzlies are going through a bit of a rough patch now, let it be stated for the absolute record that the Memphis Grizzlies DID improve this last offseason. People slept on it, didn't really think about it, and continually underrated it. But they did. They really did. Although the core is the same and the upgrades aren't sexy, the Grizzlies got Darrell Arthur back and shored up a bit of their three point shooting problems with a few solid acquisitions straight from the scrap heap. The Grizzlies having a good, semi-elite season was always in the cards, even if it may not have been the easiest thing to see from the outset. The team has been blessed with some rather incredible roster continuity ever since the Randolph acquisition, and they've seen improvement from most if not all of their pieces. Much as I liked to put down Chris Wallace's strategy no less than 3 years ago, time has seen him successful. They're mean, lean, and they aren't leaving for a year or two. And unlike last year's debacle, they now stand a pretty good chance of being better in the playoffs than they've been in the regular season. They aren't going anywhere. The Western top seeds should be quaking, a bit -- they're a challenge, a roadblock, and a grit-and-grind nightmare to any good offense that relies on their execution. Like the Clippers during their current streak, or the Thunder, or the Spurs. Wait. That's all three top seeds. Huh. Fancy that.

Although Darrell Arthur isn't a humongous world-changing part of that Memphis equation, he's certainly not useless. Arthur's an excellent defensive player, to start with -- not exactly Marc Gasol-type world changing, but very good. He does a good job defending the pick and roll, and that was one of his main values in 2011. The Grizzlies were one of the only teams in the NBA that could (at all junctures of the game) put a competent pick-and-roll big man defender on the floor. If you spammed pick and rolls against the 2011 Grizzlies, it didn't really matter how ornate they were or how well-designed they were -- they weren't going to be as effective as they were against virtually any other team in the league. Most teams have one or two good pick and roll defenders. Some teams have zero. The Grizzlies? They had 3 or 4 available in the frontcourt, depending on your view on Zach Randolph's pick and roll defense (I think it's fine, especially next to someone like Gasol or Arthur). When you have a team who can effectively take away the pick and roll and control the game's tempo, it doesn't really matter what adjustments the offensive team makes -- it's going to be impossible to consistently hit 100-110 points against that kind of a defensive unit. That's why this particular Grizzlies team feels so elite, and it's why the 2011 Grizzlies were such a nightmarish matchup for the 2011 Spurs.

Offensively, he's nothing to write home about but he's nothing to scoff at either. Arthur is a decent at-rim big guy, with a few decent moves and a good sense of space on his layup attempts. He's good at the rim, but not so overwhelmingly good that he won't mix it up a bit outside, and that's a good thing, because his best use on this Grizzlies team is to act as a floor-spacing stopgap and can a bunch of long two point baskets. Not bad. Combine the picture and you have exactly what you'd want from a backup big -- a few offensive talents that complement the team well, great defense, and a gritty devotion to the team. "But Aaron," you'd say, quizzically cocking an eyebrow, "That's hardly good enough to greatly improve a team. How does he make the Grizzlies better than last year?" Good question, Time's 2006 Person-of-the-Year! He helps the Grizzlies for exactly the reason San Antonio's regular season depth helps the Spurs. In last year's first round series against the Clippers, Marc Gasol was tired. He was visibly lagging, and dead in the second half of almost every game of the series. Randolph wasn't in great shape, and that was one of the main catalysts of their loss, but to assume it was all on Randolph misunderstands just how important Gasol is to this Grizzlies team.

If Gasol had been a bit less winded from a terribly long season that forced him into far more minutes than he'd ever played in his career, he provides enough defensive resistance to stave off LA's game deciding run in game one. He showed some vintage Gasol brilliance in the fourth quarter of game 6, when the Grizzlies were fighting for their lives -- He proceeded to fall apart in Game 7, an exhausted mess. Arthur's main and primary use for the Grizzlies is simple -- he just needs to help Hollins rest Gasol and Randolph. They don't need to rest much, they simply need to rest. Marc Gasol is not a 36-37 minute-per-game player -- he's a 32-34 minute guy, at least until the playoffs dawn. He simply doesn't have the fitness to play that much more in a single game without balking. Arthur's a better defender than last year's Speights experiment, and he's a better stopgap to fill those minutes without forcing the Grizzlies to change their playbook or give up regular season wins for Gasol's health. So that, in a nutshell, is why Darrell Arthur can help this Grizzlies team. If he can fully return to his 2011 form, he can help Hollins draw Gasol's minutes back as the season goes on, and keep him fresh for the playoffs. And facing down a Memphis team with a fresh Gasol in a playoff situation? That's terrifying. One of the greatest fears of ANY Western contender, for sure.

• • •

_Follow Wilson Chandler on Twitter at __@wilsonchandler.___

Wilson Chandler hasn't been very good lately. In fact, that's probably the nicest way to put it -- in the aftermath of his relatively inauspicious stay across the pond in Hangzhou with the Zhejiang Lions, Chandler has looked about as far from a real NBA talent as he possibly could. Last year he had his surgery-requiring strained hip to contend with. This year? Same problem. During his time battling this injury, how's his game failed him? Let's examine.

• First, his defense. Chandler was never an excellent defensive presence. He was one of those shot-blocking wings who would sacrifice position and rotation for the good block attempt or the semi-smart steal. But even if you couldn't get behind his exact style, you would never concede him to be a nonentity -- as of late, though? He's been just that. Guys blow by him like he's not even there. Opposing wings salivate, knowing he'll go for the block on nearly every attempt he stays in front of. So if they don't blow by him, it's no real problem -- they just jump into him, throw up a wild shot, and get the call. It's rough to watch.

• One of Wilson Chandler's primary skills on the court is a solid shooting stroke that had him canning around 35% of his threes in New York and Denver the year of the Carmelo Anthony trade. This is sort of problematic, given that his shot -- outside of that year -- has been relatively shaky. Decent at the long two, awful at the three. But his shot has been absolutely abhorrent ever since he got back from China. Really bad! Just 36.9% from the field, including 5-of-20 from the three point line. Rough times.

• Finally, the tertiaries -- one of the places Chandler really helped the Knicks in his time with New York was in his assistance on the boards for a team starting Amare Stoudemire and a bunch of scrap metal. He had a relatively low turnover rate his first few seasons and it helped supercharge the Knicks' offense. His rebounding has stayed solid, but his turnover rate has skyrocketed -- he turned it over on almost 20% of his plays last year, and while he settled down a bit in his limited burn this year, it was bad when he first got to Denver too.

"So what's the prognosis, Doc?"

First, James... I'm a statistician, not a doctor. (Even if I play one on Twitter.) Second, nobody really knows. He's been out since mid-November, sidelined with the same hip issue that caused him to get surgery last season. If you erase his anemic play over the past year due to his injury, you've got a mixed picture. He's had one valuable year and a whole lot of flashes outside of that year -- stretches where he looks like an unimpeachable at-rim monster and a lord of dunking artistry, stretches where he looks like a very solid defensive prospect, and stretches where he looks like a pure shooter. His shot-blocking IS very good for a wing, and he's got the sort of athleticism scouts drool over. And that one year he had a three point shot? Gorgeous. Absolutely gorgeous combination of skills. But there's an issue. He's 25 years old and he's had one good year -- a year in which he played 33 minutes a night and still had a bit of trouble fitting in after the big trade.

All in all, I'm not 100% sure what everyone sees in him. It's not that he's bad, or that he utterly lacks potential. He certainly doesn't. It's just that he's at an age where he's going to need a relatively big jump and a full recovery from these hip problems to really make it as an impact player in the NBA. His shot looks bad, his defense looks worse, and I'm a bit worried about this sudden spate of turnovers. I'm also a bit worried about the impact his time in China had on his game. In a nice TrueHoop piece, J.A. Adande detailed how the Nuggets felt they were getting an "improved" version of Chandler -- he averaged almost 27 points a night in China, and professed that he learned to be a more vocal teammate. My issue? I'm not sure being a vocal teammate really helps when his overseas tenure seems to have done little more than make him prone to jack up shots with impunity. Indeed, Chandler was "The Guy" in China. He was the one who needed to take all those shots. But he isn't anything remotely close to that in the NBA. If his time in China gave him the idea that he needs to be that kind of a player, he really needs to reevaluate his lessons learned. Or risk a league leaving him behind as his contract grows musty. Off the court, seems like a very nice guy -- I point you directly to the Chandler anecdotes in this great New York Times piece on the NBA's China boondoggle. Taking his team out for kareoke, staying over his winter vacation to keep practicing, et cetera. Lots of great stuff. And I hope he improves such that he can do that all in the NBA too -- just need to see a bit more before I'm all that confident in it, I suppose.

• • •

At the end of each post, I've been scribing riddles for the next group. Whoever gets the most right has gotten a shout out at the end of the next post. On last week's final Friday post, I gave four riddles, representing these three and the player from our next post. They were a bit easier than normal, and as such, more people got them right. This includes: Matt L, Billy Hoyle, wul.f, and Sir Thursday. Good work on the only 4/4 scores ever awarded in this riddle competition, where the prizes were made up and the rules didn't matter.

I'd like to say I've been keeping track of the riddle guesses and that I can now give lifetime scores to those of you who've stuck with me, but that's a level of nerd well beyond even my considerable capabilities. Nevertheless, I'd like to offer some overwhelming thanks to the people who've been guessing for the majority of this feature's duration. I do hope some of you will stick around and keep reading even at the cessation of the capsules, even if we don't have neat guess-worthy features anymore. I might try to implement some sort of ongoing riddle about what I'm writing about next for my next column project, but it'll never be quite the same now, will it?

In any event, thanks to everyone. I get every Gothic Ginobili comment straight to my phone's email inbox, and I can't tell you the number of times I was between meetings at work and started cracking up at a particularly well-humored, ingenious, or off-the-wall guess. Special thanks to a few comment-fiends of explicit notoriety (i.e., those that I can remember off the top of my head at 7:00 AM): Sir Thursday, wul.f, Chilai, Geezer, Matt L, Mike L, the other Matt L, the other Mike L (yes, I looked at the emails, we had 2 of each), Adam Johnson, Dr. No, Mike Munday, Luke, Ian, Atori, Chris, Corn, Brian, Krishnan, Zero20, Der_K, BaronZbimg (I PROMISE I WILL REPLY TO THAT EMAIL SOON), Steven S (I PROMISE I WILL REPLY TO YOURS TOO), and soconnor.

And, finally, inestimable thanks commenter J, whose riddle jokes were often my favorite emails of the day.

Thanks for sticking along with the ride, friends. Appreciate it more than you'll know.

Final capsule drops in about an hour.

• • •

Continue reading

As our summer mainstay, Aaron was writing a 370-part series discussing almost every notable player who was -- as of last season -- getting minutes in the NBA. _As the leaves turn frosty, this quixotic quest of a series has happily reached the last full week. Not quite done yet, but close. Today we continue with Tyrus Thomas, Rashard Lewis, and D.J. White._

• • •

Follow Tyrus "T-Time" Thomas on Twitter at @TyrusThomas.

Would you care to sit with me
For a cup of English tea?
Very twee, very me
Any sunny morning

What a pleasure it will be
Chatting so delightfully
Nanny bakes fairy cakes
Every Sunday morning

Miles and miles of English garden, stretching past the willow tree
Lines of hollyhocks and roses listen most attentiv--

OK, OK, I'll stop. I just saw the "T-Time" nickname and frankly couldn't help myself. I'm a fan of tea as a drink, although I haven't had any of late in a late-year push to eradicate caffeine and soda from my diet and get a tad healthier about the chemicals I ingest. Still, I tend to enjoy tea of any type -- green, black, chai, jasmine, whatever. Whenever I see a name like that, I tend to get caught up with myself and start reciting Paul McCartney lyrics. Or, alternatively, I start reciting Ray Davies lyrics. There are so many excellent songs about tea in my record collection, it's really wonderful. Tea works in mysterious ways. So pull up a cup and let's speak a few words about Tyrus "T-Time" Thomas.

Only a few, though. Let's be clear. Anyone here remember when Tyrus Thomas was better than LaMarcus Aldridge? It wasn't all that long ago when the Bulls chose Aldridge second overall and decided to inexplicably flip him for Thomas, making a judgment that Aldridge and Thomas weren't really that far separated. The only other pieces moved in the deal were a 2007 2nd round draft pick and Viktor Khryapa, a player who'd played atrocious basketball in the two seasons prior. It's a rare feat to move down in the draft and extract no other objects of value from the opposing team, one that's actually historically rare -- the only other instance I can think of where a team moved down in the draft without actually acquiring value was in Sacramento's aggressively poor trade to acquire John Salmons and Jimmer Fredette at the expense of a higher draft pick and a valuable backup point guard. Quite uncommon, though. And it made certain that Thomas and Aldridge would be measured against each other, as a team had actively and determinedly made a binary decision between the two. Their fates are intertwined, in that way. Obviously, Aldridge very clearly "won" the contest. And the Bulls lost it, I suppose, when you consider the fact that having Aldridge around would've probably kept them from signing Carlos Boozer in 2010. Live and learn.

As for Thomas... the downward spiral of Thomas' career has been sad to watch, and at this point, even an NBA optimist like myself has to cede that it's rather unlikely he'll ever entirely pull it together. He's simply not a very good NBA player, despite his innumerable physical gifts. His offense is bad, both in the decisions he makes and the base skillset that guides him. He shot a beyond-reason 33% on 15-23 foot long two point shots last year, and somehow took that incomprehensibly low number as carte blanche to put up over half his shots from that range. He doesn't take it to the rim very much, which is probably good, because the results are so often cringe-worthy when he does -- he's notorious for his missed dunks, completely botched layups, and (essentially) hands of stone. If you shoot under 50% at the rim as a big man, you're in a bit of trouble. He's had more turnovers than assists in all but one season in the league, he's one of the worst rebounding big men I've ever seen go to work on the block, and he doesn't even draw free throws to make up for his awful shot selection. Gross. Defensively, he's a bit more useful -- he's an adequate shot blocker and accumulates steals with some level of acuity, and while he floats a bit and doesn't always stick to the scheme, he's certainly not the worst you can do. Still, so long as he's making poor decisions and playing like the worst offensive player in the league, he's not going to be so good on defense that it merits NBA minutes. If Thomas wants to become a legitimate asset on the court, he's going to have to show some manner of restraint on the offensive end going forward, and key improvements in several areas of his game. I'm dubious of his prospects. While he's only 26 years old, the man's been in the league six years now -- he may eventually rediscover his early-career high water marks, but betting on any substantial improvement is a shaky prospect.

• • •

Follow Rashard Lewis by doing completely unnecessary steroids and getting "caught" in the act

I kind of wish this capsule had come a bit earlier. When the Heat signed Ray Allen and Rashard Lewis, the general response was that the Heat had improved to nigh-impossibly high levels, and that the Miami offense would improve by leaps and bounds while the defense would stay at top-of-the-league levels with the additions. After all, while Allen certainly isn't in his prime, he was a solid defender just 2 years prior! And Lewis was an important part on a Stan Van Gundy led Orlando defense that made two consecutive conference finals! The positionless revolution was here, the Heat had solved the equation, yadda yadda yadda. So everyone bleated and honked and ranted and raved. How many consecutive titles would the Heat win? Would they score on 9 of every 10 possessions or 8 of every 10 possessions? How could any team cope?

You can isolate the brunt of my thoughts in the Ray Allen capsule, but suffice to say, I wasn't convinced. There were two reasons. One, as outlined in the Allen capsule, was simply age concerns -- Allen is old and balky, and while he's still obviously immensely talented, I was worried he wouldn't come back in quite the form people were expecting, or suffer minor injuries over the course of the season that lessened his contributions dramatically. That hasn't happened yet. But the second reason I was a bit dubious has, and it's the one I was going to focus on in this capsule -- the idea that people were drastically underrating the defensive dropoff from any-other-big-on-the-roster to current-career Rashard Lewis and that even if Allen's offense came around and he rained threes like he was 25 again his defense would remain porous. Up to this point, that view has been justified. The Heat have hardly been the world-beating monstrosity the world's expected, but it hasn't been due to any problems whatsoever of offensive fit -- both Lewis and Allen are having their best offensive seasons in years, and despite the Heat's "struggles" to date, this incarnation of the Miami Heat has been rating out as the best offensive team in franchise history. Really! In fact, Zach Lowe made a prediction before the season that even I thought was ridiculous. He predicted the Heat would have the best offense in the league. They haven't, yet, but they've been #2 with a bullet for most of the season and stand a pretty good chance of improving that number as the year goes on. The Heat offense has actually overperformed my expectations.

But the defense? That's been as bad as I'd expected and worse, and for that, a lot of the blame has to fall squarely on the shoulders of their two big acquisitions, Rashard Lewis and Ray Allen. They simply aren't good defenders at this point in their careers, and with Lewis, you have the concurrent issue that he's completely lost the always-slim rebounding talents he used to have (which gives the opposing team extra possessions to take advantage of Lewis' defense). The Heat defense relies heavily on each player having a good understanding of space and the natural switches the team needs to use in order to make up for the fact that they've never had a strict "rim protecting" big guy. Lewis doesn't really have the athleticism or the defensive instincts to do it. Worse yet, he doesn't seem to care. The Heat's defense becomes a virtual layup line with Lewis in the game, with opposing teams having carte blanche to attack the rim with impunity. Lewis has been a mildly helpful offensive player when he's on the court, but it hasn't mattered in the overall picture -- he's been such an incredible drag on the defensive end (the Heat are 15 points per 100 possessions worse on defense with Lewis on the court) that the Heat would've been better off not signing him at all. It wasn't impossible to see this coming after his dismal defensive years in Washington, but most people simply didn't think about it. Now it's hard to think about all that much else, and Lewis is quickly losing his spot in Spolestra's rotations.

Outside of all that, it's worth noting that I like Rashard Lewis a lot. Every interview I've seen with him implies a very soft-spoken and intelligent NBA player. He's a smart guy with a good attitude on life. I've always enjoyed watching his somewhat awkward-looking shot, and while his defense has frustrated me even since his days in Seattle, the smooth flow to his offensive game has always interested me. He probably should never have gotten a max contract offer from Orlando but given what they got out of it (two conference final appearances, their first win in the finals in franchise history, some fleeting legitimacy) I'm not sure anyone can rag on them too much. He was involved the single most hilarious steroid scandal ever, where he was caught using a steroid he didn't realize was a steroid and wasn't actually giving him any competitive advantage whatsoever. He was also involved in Nike's short lived "Hyperize" ad campaign, a short video where four completely and utterly unrelated players (Mo Williams, Kevin Durant, Andre Iguodala, and Rashard Lewis) came together to put up one of the most inexplicably entertaining music videos ever. Look at it. I'm of the view that Lewis crushes his verse, here, even though it's against some admittedly weak competition. The special effects are hilarious, even if they went overboard on it, and the whole thing is definitely worth a watch. Wish Rashard Lewis wasn't so poor on the basketball end of the spectrum at this end of the career, but honestly? He's played for 14 years. At this point, most players aren't in the league at all -- it shouldn't really be much of a shock that he's not the man he used to be.

• • •

_Follow D.J. White on Twitter at __@dj_white3.___

D.J. White is sort of underwhelming. Not on a purely objective level, obviously -- he's an NBA-caliber tweener, which means he'd destroy 99.9% of everyone on the face of the earth in a 1-on-1 matchup. That's sort of the understated subtext to everything I (or, frankly, anyone else) writes about the NBA -- yes, we can profess to analyze their games til the cow's come home, but they're still quite a bit better than us. For all the "lord almighty, ____ can't do _____" we're necessarily leaving out the " ... but he CAN do it better than I can" subtext. It's sort of implied. And it's not really necessary -- other than a few internet trolls who love to bring it up at every plausible juncture, most of the people who read articles about basketball understand on a fundamental level that we're talking about the best 0.1% of players in the world. When we say that X or Y is "bad", we aren't saying that on an objective sense, just against the reflection of their peers. I'm mostly just mentioning this because I hate to get overly negative with players who have reached a level of play that's so tantalizingly close to that of the best league in the world, but that particular accomplishment is doomed to be slept on due to the fact that they're still underwhelming from an NBA perspective.

Don't get me wrong, I don't dislike his game on the whole. Especially his scoring game. He's a fantastic finisher at the rim, albeit on limited attempts, and he's one of the better long-range shooting bigs around. Remember in the Channing Frye capsule how I mentioned long range shooters? White doesn't have a three, but he still fits the long-range stereotype to a T. Takes 65% of his shots from beyond 10 feet, and does a very good job of it -- he shot 42% from 10-15 feet last season and 43% from 15-23 feet, which both ranked in the top 25% of all large forwards despite his high usage on those types of shots. It's an inefficient shot, so the numbers look middling-tier, but being able to consistently hit the low 40s on those types of shots as a big guy is great. So that's nice. Unfortunately for White, what makes him underwhelming is every other aspect of his game. His rebounding is anemic, his defense is pitiful, and his passing is gross. He's a player with a clear offensive role, but without the rebounding to back it up, he's a positionless tweener. Indeed, that's his big problem. He plays like a poor-rebounding power forward but he's just far too small for that. He can't make threes, so he's not a good wing player, and his defense is bollocks from any position. Too slow to guard wings, too small to guard bigs. Tweening can be acceptable if you're a good pound-for-pound rebounder, but he's not.

Regardless of his value as a legitimate long-two threat, if he can't produce on defense or find a way to increase his output on the boards, he's going to have trouble sticking in the NBA. White appears to have realized that, and he's gone overseas to play for the Shanghai Sharks until his NBA prospects look a little better. Not sure if he'll be back barring a rebounding vision quest on his overseas tour, but he should be good enough to make a decent chunk of change overseas and stick in their pro leagues for a spell. Fun fact -- the Shanghai Sharks actually have three American players, rolling with Gilbert Arenas, D.J. White, and Elijah Millsap as their three foreign-born friendly-friends. It's also the team Yao owns, which is sort of cool in and of itself. Still. Despite their three NBA-ish talents, the Sharks aren't a very good team -- they're currently 4-10, which has them placed 15th out of the 17 teams in the CBA. They're better than T-Mac's team, but that's about it. The problem is less on White's shoulders than Gilbert's knees -- Arenas was injured less than 6 minutes into his Sharks debut, and as lingering injury troubles sapped his game, he was temporarily deselected from the Sharks' roster to make room for someone who could actually play. White has been putting up absolutely monstrous numbers for the Sharks (21-10 a night in 31 minutes a contest and 56% shooting), but they've just kept losing. Poor D.J.

• • •

At the end of each post, I'll be scribing riddles for the next group. Whoever gets the most right will get a shout out at the end of the next post. Tweet me your answers at @docrostov, or post them in the comments. Realized after the fact that I'd totally flubbed riddle #366 -- D.J. White didn't play one bit for the Spurs in preseason, that was Derrick Brown, who I regularly get confused with White. Alas. Sorry about the flubbed riddle. A few people guessed D.J. for player #1, so I'm going to count that and say that Mike L, wul.f, and Alex got 2/3. Should've known I'd totally mess up a riddle eventually. Today's four (!) riddles, covering Monday's four players.

• Player #367 has been guessed for something like 10 different riddles. The big guy had to come up eventually, right?

• Player #368 was the quietest off-season addition by a contender. This is primarily because he was already on the team, and everyone simply forgot he existed.

• Player #369's career spiral has been tough to watch. He's still in the league, but only nominally -- if he doesn't recoup soon, nobody's going to be shocked if he gets cut back to China.

• Player #370 is the greatest power forward his franchise has ever known. At least when it comes to hoagies.

Until next time, gents and lasses. It's the end of the capsules as we know it, and I feel fine.

• • •

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As our summer mainstay, Aaron was writing a 370-part series discussing almost every notable player who was -- as of last season -- getting minutes in the NBA. __As the leaves turn frosty, this quixotic quest of a series has happily reached the last full week. Not quite done yet, but close. Today we continue with Channing Frye, Richard Jefferson, and Timofey Mozgov.

• • •

Follow Channing Frye on Twitter at @Channing_Frye.

As an NBA center, there tend to be two general offensive paths any individual player can adopt. You can either:

• Become a post-up monster, demanding all your offense on-the-block or on smart cuts to the rim. Alternatively...

• Become a "long range" shooter who can make a jump shot from 15-20 feet pull the opposing C out of the paint to free up lanes.

It's quite rare to find a center who effectively does both. Centers who can make long shots tend to get pigeonholed into the type and called on to do it all the time. Centers who can post up with monstrous results don't tend to work their outside game to an extent that it's game-ready. The general reason is rather simple -- the skillsets are quite different, and players who excel at one end of the spectrum very rarely excel on the other end. Posting up well requires skills that disagree with those required for shooting pure jumpshots. With post-ups, you need a fundamental sense of how to contort and alter the minutiae of movement and angle to squeeze in a skin-of-your-teeth roll. With jump shots, you need to do the same thing thousands of times, a developed devotion to muscle memory and an understanding of the different shot you take at each differing angle. They aren't mutually exclusive, but they're close.

Still, of those two general paths, I don't know if I even need to tell you which one Frye embodies. He's the second, and even by the standards of most centers, he's an odd variation on the form. See, centers simply don't make three pointers. Even noted long-range centers -- like Kevin Garnett or Tim Duncan -- tend to be toothless beyond the arc, Duncan's famous make notwithstanding. To shoot an above average percentage from beyond the arc, as a center, you need to shoot 15% from three point territory. That's it. Only three center-designated players shot over 30% from three last season -- Channing Frye, Josh Harrellson, and Boris Diaw. The fact that Frye actually managed to put up not only an above 30% performance but a positively solid one (his EFG% on three point shots was 52%, a brilliant number) was exceedingly impressive. It also begged the question, as Frye's game has begged the question for almost his entire Phoenix tenure -- why don't more teams sign three point shooting centers? Sure, some centers have a long range game, but virtually nobody plays centers who actually make three point shots. Why not?

I've wondered about this for a while, and while watching tape of Frye, I think I figured it out. The offensive style -- while original -- is little more than a poor gimmick when it's applied in an actualized in-game situation, even if the theoretical basis is solid. The reason? First, if you're slender enough to get off a three point shot under any pressure whatsoever without the help of a transcendent offensive structure to get you open (see: Boris Diaw), you probably aren't going to be able to bang in the post with the post-up threats of the league. More importantly, though, players that act as legitimate three point threats from the center position leave themselves almost completely out of the equation for offensive rebounds, and often float too far out on the defensive end as well in hopes of leaking out for a transition three. Offensive rebounds aren't incredibly important to a functioning offense, but you need to at least have the threat of the rebound -- if not, the opposing team tends to find it easier to game plan the boards and increase their defensive rebounding totals. Which puts a rather large burden on the Phoenix offense -- it's as though you know for a fact you're only going to get one shot, so you darn well better make it a good one. The rebounding problems (coupled with the issues when skinny, slender, lanky centers when faced against centers of the first type) make Frye's contributions less than the sum of their parts. Interesting contributions, but less all the same.

As for those contributions on their face? His defense is rather awful, and his offense is a bit one-dimensional -- he can shoot threes and finish off loopy cuts but he can't really do all that much else. No good post moves, startlingly bad at lay-ups, et cetera. A pure jump shooter if there ever was one. And a phenomenally poor rebounding talent, for what it's worth -- among the worst of any big man. On the plus side, he doesn't try to act outside his role all that often, which is good. And as a change-of-pace big guy off the bench, he's got a limited amount of value. A poor man's 2009 Rashard Lewis, if you will. Off the court, he's a nice dude -- he's one of the few players on Tumblr, and while his isn't especially interesting I've grown to like the way he engages with fans on it and humanizes his road back from his heart condition. I really do hope he comes back strong next season -- Frye has never been one of my favorite players, but at some point, you do simply become interested in the whole "three point shooting center" thing. It's original, it's weird, and it's a fun style to watch. As long as you blind yourself to the subpar defense and the rebounding for a little bit. Here's hoping he recoups.

• • •

_Follow Richard Jefferson on Twitter at __@DewNO.___

I'll try to focus this capsule more on the personal side of the ledger than the basketball side, but for the sake of completeness, I'll start with the essence of Jefferson's game. He's the prototypical player whose game looks better the worse his team is. His defense isn't very good (nor has it ever been), but he does put a semblance of effort in. That makes him stand out among players on a poor defensive team only to look increasingly incompetent when put in a situation with good defensive players around him. His offense takes this concept to a whole other level -- Jefferson is one of the rare players whose shooting percentages never got that much worse when you incrementally increased his usage rate, which made him shoot somewhere around the same 45-36-75 range no matter if he was taking 5 shots a night or 20. This tends to lead smart people to assume (as the Spurs did when they first traded for him in 2009) that on decreased usage he'd post markedly more efficient numbers. That wasn't the case, nor has ever really been the case. His primary value as a scorer is in his ability to put up those extra shots without losing much efficiency -- it's hard to really get much added efficiency from Jefferson's game, even when he lowers his usage. Which is why he's currently out of the Warriors rotation not one year removed from starting for a 60 win team. He's relatively durable, but even that comes with some hilarious foibles -- in 2008, during the best season of his career, he ended up missing games because he thumped his chest too hard and tore something. I can't bear to quit you, RJ.

As for the personal sphere, that's where things get sort of interesting. At least to anyone who's talked to Dewey about him. See, Jefferson may not be Alex Dewey's favorite player, but he's Dewey's focus player. He's the case study for nearly everything Dewey writes or thinks about. Most people don't understand why that is, and I've decided to spend this capsule attempting to explain it. The key with understanding Richard Jefferson, for me, is to grasp the fact that he's a fundamentally regular person. He's simply normal. Average. He's a relatively smart guy who isn't too smart, a relatively lucky guy who isn't too lucky, a relatively boring man who isn't too boring. I feel like I've watched billions of hours of Jefferson interviews over the years due to the frequency Dewey and I talk about him -- I haven't, but it certainly feels that way. One ACTUAL interview stands out above the rest. In 2009, Jefferson went on -- of all things! -- the Howard Stern show to explain why exactly he left his fiancee at the alter and backed out on their marriage. I doubt you'll have the time to watch it, simply because it's obscenely long -- it appears as a three part series (1, 2, 3) on YouTube and the combined run time is somewhere in the neighborhood of 25 minutes. Quite a slog. But if you're ever in the market for a single interview that encapsulates the kind of person Jefferson appears to be, you can't do a single one better than the Howard Stern tape.

In the tape, Jefferson explains why it was a poor personal decision to get into the marriage, and explained his thought process behind leaving her at the alter instead of going through with a marriage he wasn't sure about. And you know what? It was compelling, well thought out, and overall wholly reasonable -- most people instinctively balk at the motives and thought process of those who break engagements at the last minute, including me. But he'd clearly thought it through and done his best and made the most of a bad situation. By the end of the interview I'd essentially come to his view on the marriage, despite being ready to tear him apart at the slightest misstep. It was sort of shocking to listen to, given that my only real experience with Jefferson before that interview was from afar. I thought him something of an overrated fraud-star, and by extension I'd assumed him to be a relatively feckless, boring, and unreasonable jerk. Jefferson is none of those things. He's a soft-spoken man with a good head on his shoulders and a strangely advanced sense of context and his place in the world. He's not perfect, and he knows that. He's not some kind of MVP-caliber player, and he knows that too. He's simply Richard Jefferson, and he's come to terms with who he is and found personal happiness. That's beautiful, in some ways -- achieving actualization of the self by setting reasonable personal goals is an ideal we don't tend to get exposed to very often, even though it's by far the most reasonable way to achieve personal happiness.

To summarize, I think it's worth your time to bring up one of the more apt conversations I've had with Dewey regarding RJ. It occurred after the Lakers' tight win over Golden State a few days ago. Unedited:

Alex: so, RJ didn't play a single minute against the lakers
Aaron: welp
Alex: he only played the game before because stephen curry literally fouled out
Alex: the worst part is... he looks really decent whenever he's played. but the warriors are rolling and even if they weren't mark jackson has to develop draymond green and harrison barnes, so RJ has no place in the lineup
Alex: it's like... noooooo
Alex: also he can't be traded
Alex: he is a living contract albatross at this point
Aaron: yeah, that's awful, but it's awful in this very blessed way
Aaron: which is the essence of rj to me. every negative aspect is the result of a better and equal positive aspect
Alex: awesome
Alex: it's awful, and it's also absolutely hilarious for exactly the same reasons.
Alex: "oh, yeah, the warriors are rolling. they're great. the spurs have stephen jackson and kawhi leonard. the bucks are doing well too. even the nets are good for god's sake. arizona's #4, just beat duke a couple years ago. only... RJ can't play. oh, he's not injured, not really. just everything around him got so much better that he's not good enough to play anymore. also he can't complain because that would be a jerk thing to do."
Aaron: "but he's making too much money to be traded, which means his family has too much security for him to waive his contract. "
Alex: yeah, that's the best part. rj could opt-out theoretically. it just makes no sense for him financially

In a nutshell, that's what RJ's made of. Some sad parts, some awful parts, but always in this weirdly blessed way.

Acceptable, regular, decent. Richard Jefferson, everyone. Give him a hand.

• • •

_Follow Timofey Mozgov on Twitter at __@TimofeyMozgov.___

Unfortunately, Timofey Mozgov is not very good. He's not very good in exactly the opposite way most people would expect him to not be good -- most instinctively expect white foreign players to be stiffs on defense and rangy knobs on offense. A proclivity for midrange shots, allergic to the rim, et cetera. Mozgov? He's an at-rim player at the core, taking almost 60% of his shots in the immediate basket area over his entire career. Unfortunately for his teams, he's not very good at those -- his mark of 56% ranks among the lowest-of-the-low for big men, and he's cursed with particularly poor form on his dunks. Most players make 95-100% of their dunk attempts -- over his career, Mozgov's only made about 85%. Rough news. He also has a terrible hook shot that's funny to watch but depressing to contemplate, and he tends to miss about 50% of his layup attempts. Compound all that with his awful jump shot and his completely nonexistent handle (his turnover rate of 20% sounds bad, but it looks even worse when you watch him a bunch) and you have an offensive skillset that's about as far from NBA-ready as you can get.

This isn't to say he's useless, though -- he's stuck around for a reason. Mozgov is a mammoth of a man, and mammoths are useful on defense. He's a solid post defender, with a knack for using his size to keep big guys out of position. Not the BEST pick and roll recovery guy around, but he's not awful and he'll always challenge the shot. Very rare to see Mozgov actively take off a possession, defensively -- this can work to his disadvantage at times because it leads him to appear on the receiving end of quite a few highlight reel dunks, but you should remember that the only reason he's around to get dunked on is that he's trying to provide the most resistance he can. His rebounding isn't very good, but he has one skill beyond his defense that's obscenely useful when correctly utilized. I refer to his off-ball screens, of course! Dear lord, the screens. Mozgov's enormity isn't always helpful, like on times he's slow to get to spot-up shooters or slow to get up and down the court. But when you ask him to stand in the way of a tiny guard or provide the screen to slip up the other team's defensive assignments? The man stands. He's bulky, immobile, and surprisingly dedicated -- often, if you watch his minutes closely, you'll see him set 2-3 successful screens in a single possession.

Given his screen-setting and his general defensive prowess, I'd expect him to stick around a while. His offense is so bad he'll never play more than 15-20 minutes a night, even for a dismal team, but the life of a tertiary player isn't that bad. His ceiling is low and his prospects for serious career enhancement slim, but the D and the screens will be enough to keep him on the minimum. Off the court, the man's pretty funny. I highly recommend checking out some of his quotes from this article. My favorite is the exchange in the end, where he admits he's never heard of Wilt Chamberlain and expresses shock at the idea that Wilt was able to score 100 points, noting that Wilt would've needed "at least" 50 shots to make it happen prior to the three point era. He isn't the greatest English speaker ever, but he's got a touch of that Fesenko English-as-a-second-language charm. It's colloquial and fun. I highly recommend this classic Mozgov blog post, which happened after his semi-famous 23-14 game against Detroit where he busted out and looked (for one night only) like a phenomenal NBA center, on both ends of the court. Nice guy. I certainly hope he sticks around, if only for us to keep getting posts like those two. Or this one, where he discussed who pays when the Nuggets go out to dinner. Can't read enough of the guy's journal. Too much fun. (And special thanks to Alexander Chernykh, the intrepid Russian hoopster who translates his blog posts for the people like me whose Russian is rusty. Fun fact: I used to actually know Russian. I took two years of it in college. Just don't remember enough to read Mozgov's journal entries, evidently.)

• • •

At the end of each post, I'll be scribing riddles for the next group. Whoever gets the most right will get a shout out at the end of the next post. Tweet me your answers at @docrostov, or post them in the comments. Props to Dr. No, our first 3/3 in a while. Come to think of it, he could be the last -- there are only two more chances for readers to register 3/3 guesses. Come one, come all! Guess like your lives depend on it!

• Player #364 was once compared to LaMarcus Aldridge. Favorably. Times have changed since then, and now he's almost out of the league.

• Player #365 starred in one of the most inexplicable and hilarious steroid scandals in the history of the league. Also: threes!

• Player #366 couldn't stick with the Spurs, but he showed some good stuff in the preseason. Here's hoping he makes it back up to the big leagues soon.

Join me later today for a second set. Shocking!

• • •

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