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. But it's certainly not done yet! Today we continue with Ronny Turiaf, Anthony Parker, and Andray Blatche.

• • •

Follow Ronny Turiaf on Twitter at @RonnyTuriaf14.

Ronny Turiaf is one of the few Clippers I enjoy watching, although there's always a touch of sadness when I consider the state of his career relative to how I would've hoped it'd be years ago. Always a treat and always an asset, in his youth and prime. He's reached a somewhat young fall-off period, now, as the slow churn of injuries has made him unreliable and (in some ways) somewhat unremarkable. I'd say some of the promise that was there when he was young has been squandered, if only just. Whether you attribute that to injuries or simply not being as good as he looked is up to you. Regardless, Turiaf is one of the more amusing backup big men to watch in the entire league, period. Everyone knows the whole "energy big off the bench" trope -- Turiaf goes far beyond the trope, and makes the players that embody it look like dozed-off hobos. He's constantly, CONSTANTLY moving. All the time. Forever. He's out to prove the scientific law that particles are always moving. He revs himself up every day by internally repeating the laws of particle motion -- "cmon, be the particle, Ronny. Leggo. Prove it." This may sound really nice to you, and aesthetically, it definitely is. But it's worth noting that this constant breakneck energy isn't always something that manifests in a good way, and there ARE good reasons he's not always in high demand -- after all, Turiaf's energy leads him to foul indiscriminately, occasionally lose position, and can be considered partially responsible for Turiaf's spotted injury history. So that's not great.

Still, Turiaf is a good player, and better than a lot of people think. He's a downright excellent defender, and has always had brilliant instincts about when to help off his man and when to stay home and bother. One of the main reasons the early-2010 Knicks (with Amare, Gallo, Felton and the rest of the misfit children) were such an engaging team was Turiaf's presence -- his command of the rotations helped him act as sort of a miniature Tyson Chandler, and while the Knicks obviously are better off now with Tyson, it's worth noting that when Turiaf is healthy and clicking he provides similar qualities on defense. Phenomenal weakside blocking, killer screens, and a ready-made stick of pick-n-roll dynamite that blows up the most conventionally successful play in the league. He's quality. Even though he hasn't played a ton this year, he's definitely helped the Clippers in this respect -- they've been a markedly superior defensive team with Turiaf on the floor, and he provides the best play-out-the-string big man the Clippers have ever really put behind Jordan and Griffin. And as many note, when you play as few minutes as Turiaf does, the constant fouling is less of a serious problem. Turiaf's real issue? No offense whatsoever. His offensive game is completely bare, and unlike Chandler, he can't simply throw his size around and get buckets through effort alone. He doesn't really play an important role as an offensive threat, given that all he can really do is finish at the rim every now and again so long as he doesn't need to create the shot or need to move creatively off-the-ball to establish position. Which makes his teams traditionally offensively flawed when he sees too much court time. Which is why, despite being a massive impact player on defense, he'll probably never elicit 20 MPG again.

Off-the-court (and on-the-bench), Turiaf is an entertaining man. The man watches anime with the best of them, which might be one of the reasons I like him -- I'm no anime fan myself, but I hung out with a lot of people in high school who loved the stuff and as such Turiaf tends to remind me of my best childhood friends. Which is all great. He's probably the single best towel-waving big man off the bench in the league, with his on-bench stylings a must-watch whenever his team does anything even remotely impressive. Which, by the way, is one of the reasons Turiaf-on-the-Clippers was a hilariously good idea from the get-go. The man goes crazy for dunks, and while the whole Lob City appellation was never quite the truism it was promised to be, Los Angeles is a great team for him. Just look at examples 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10 for why that is. Finally, the man has a rather wild backstory of his own -- Turiaf's battled through heart problems throughout his career, and actually had to undergo open-heart surgery just to get healthy enough to enter the league. Which is pretty insane, and worthy of a whole lot more respect than he tends to get. I like Turiaf. Pay him some attention, next time the Clippers play your favorite team -- he might impress you, really.

• • •

_Follow Anthony Parker on Twitter at __@_AnthonyParker.___

I'm not Anthony Parker's biggest fan. Although Parker has always been a relatively effective shooter, he's also (for my money) been overly prominent in Cleveland over the last few years -- I didn't really have strong feelings one way or the other about Parker until he came to Cleveland and started taking more shots than he really needed to. Especially pull-ups -- he's a solid shooter on the catch, and you rarely felt that bad about a Parker three as long as it came at the end of an actual play-call. Far too often, though, Parker ended up going one-on-one and trying to hit off-the-dribble pull up shots (regularly from inefficient long-two range as though it would validate his career as a shooter if he could master those shots). He couldn't, for what probably are obvious reasons, and Cavs fans were left watching a possession or two every few games get lost to a doomed Anthony Parker "I CAN ISO! I SWEAR!" possession. Given that Parker's defense hasn't been anything to write home about for almost four years now and given that he's never had any real tertiary value beyond his shooting, these random possessions of taking over the offense for a pull-up fadeaway two bugged me a lot. You're on the court to finish plays and take open shots. You aren't on the floor to dribble around and create shots, no matter what Austin Carr says.

Still. Parker is part of a rare, elite team of NBA players, a group that doesn't get nearly enough dap. I refer, of course, to the group of NBA players whose sisters are infinitely superior basketball players. Candace Parker -- child rearing constraints aside these last few years -- is one of the WNBA's brightest stars, and one of the more entertaining WNBA players ever. The only other NBA player who I can even argue fits in Parker's elite company on this respect is Reggie Miller, whose sister Cheryl was (by the personal account of virtually everyone who played both of them) superior at basketball and likely good enough to be a star in the NBA, had she been given the chance. So, there's that. Beyond those two, there's the Rashad/Rashada McCants duo (neither of whom, I admit, I ever watched closely enough to really assess comparative value), Ime/Mfon Udoka (yeah, uh, "same"), Rudy/Marta Fernandez (Rudy was better) and the Pamela/JaVale McGee duo (well, that one's mother/son, but still -- JaVale is probably a hair better, if only because of superior staying power). Which makes Parker and Miller alone in their tower of "being inferior basketball players to their ballin-out-loud sisters." This isn't really notable, but it is kind of cool. I am one of the lonely few NBA bloggers who doesn't mind the WNBA at all, and in general appreciates a good WNBA game far and away above a college basketball game and (often) an international game. So I'll be sure to keep monitoring sister/brother pairings. Someone has to do it.

With Parker about to exit the league, there's a single thing I'd like to highlight before he goes. No, not a facet of his game -- I'd rather take my best efforts to forget it, thanks. No, not his time in Israel -- Noam Schiller noted that (and the reasons one should care that he retired) better than I could ever hope to for Hardwood Paroxysm last summer. No, I'd like to highlight something different. Namely his Wikipedia page. Just... just look at it. I have no idea who wrote it, but whoever did has to be the world's biggest Parker fan. Or his wife. Or Parker himself. Seriously. It reads like a fan-page. Just look at some of the wording, here:

• "In his first season with the Raptors, Parker helped the team clinch their first ever division title, first NBA Playoffs berth in five years, and best regular season record in franchise history. He helped the Raptors reach the playoffs again in the 2007–08 season, before becoming a free agent in 2009." (This wouldn't be notable, except this is describing his career in the intro paragraph. Because we need to introduce him with everything the Raptors did while he played there, natch.)

• "In a season that was fraught with lengthy injuries to a number of his team mates (such as T.J. Ford and Chris Bosh), he managed to play in all 82 regular season games and ensured that Toronto made the 2008 NBA Playoffs, albeit as the sixth seed." (Good thing Anthony Parker was around to 'ensure' Toronto made the playoffs, or lord only knows what would've happened. Might've lost 25 straight or something.)

• "Cleveland General Manager Danny Ferry said of Parker: "Anthony will be a solid addition to our roster. He is a very good, intelligent all-around basketball player. Our coaching staff will especially appreciate the good shooting and solid defense that Anthony brings to our team."In a bid to ensure that James had his best shot of winning a title before he could potentially become a free agent after the season, Cleveland also acquired Shaquille O'Neal and subsequently, Antawn Jamison, both of whom were veteran superstars." (This is one of my favorite blurbs ever. "The Cavaliers acquired Anthony Parker, and Danny Ferry said THIS about him. Isn't that great?? Oh also they acquired Shaq and Jamison but shush your face Parker was 'The Diff.'")

There you have it. Anthony Parker: the greatest shooting guard of all time. Meet the new Jordan, same as the old Jordan.

• • •

_Follow Andray Blatche on Twitter at __@drayblatche.___

Contrary to popular belief, I don't have a ton of animosity for the Brooklyn Nets. I don't think they're a great team (and I'm still quite hesitant about their defense going forward), but they're clearly much improved and they're doing some really phenomenal stuff on offense. When Johnson and Williams start playing up to their names, sparks will fly. And even on defense, watching Brook Lopez evolve into a "remotely passable" defensive player is a treat. Absolutely a treat. It's always nice to see a long-struggling team right the ship, as I'm sure Ben Swanson will say when the day comes that the Lakers finally catch up to the Bobcats. I don't mean for half the Nets capsules to be negative or jerky.

But I can't bring myself to praise Andray Blatche in good conscience. I'll admit a few things, first -- he has been playing very well this year. His currently-top-10 PER dramatically understates his defense (which has been abhorrent, even still) but it accurately describes the ridiculous level he's been performing at on the offensive end. He's brought his game mostly inside, as he's more than cut in half his rate of shots outside the paint in favor of at-rim jams and offensive tip-ins. His rebounding has gone from sickeningly substandard to startlingly sweet, and he's cut his turnovers to a career low. Blatche is a fringe 7'0" big man who's spent his entire career playing like a 6'5" shooting guard. He finally seems to have remembered that he's a big guy. It's worked, and he's having his best season ever. Nothing else is even close, for him.

Here's the thing. The Wizards have an obscenely poor grasp on player development. They don't really know exactly what they're doing. They've squandered many careers and messed up many player primes by screwing up simple things like putting a player in a role where they have any possibility of succeeding, hiring adequate skill coaches, or finding coaches that actually know what they're doing. They don't draft very well. And their medical staff -- lovely though their attempts to keep Nene's time constrained may be -- isn't anything to write home about. But I refuse -- actively, actually, acutely refuse -- to blame them for Blatche. Seriously. The man was horrible in DC. He's been one of the least valuable players in the league for about 7 years running. He's had some of the worst on/off splits in the entire league, consistently -- his defense has been awful, his offense has been worse, his rebounding has been as tepid as humanly possible for a man in spitting distance of 7 feet tall. But he's amazing right now. This is insane to me.

Look, I didn't think Blatche would give anybody anything this season. You'd think the fact that he very much is would change the picture for me, but I don't think it does. If anything, this makes me even more inclined to dislike him, because it puts his DC years in a more confusing context. Where in God's name was this effort and energy in DC? Seriously! The Wizards did nothing but feature Blatche -- they were letting him start games for a playoff team from his sophomore season onward. It's hard to get 20+ MPG in the NBA, and they managed to give him that every post-rookie year of his career. He was never in want of playing time, shots, or offensive sets that put a spotlight on his unique skillset. They paid him. They hired coaches to help him. They tossed their hat in and made him one of their featured players. And not one bit of it mattered. He still chucked almost half his shots from beyond 15 feet, showed an absolutely insane disregard for his teammates and coaches, and generally made a complete mockery of the Wizards' faith in him. Now he's in Brooklyn, dazzling the world as he makes good on his potential and shows the basketball world what he's actually capable of. The Wizards -- as the team that amnestied him -- are still paying his salary and getting to watch as Blatche does exactly what they wanted him to do... elsewhere. Insofar as they exist at all, the Basketball Gods have a demented sense of humor.

Well... that, or Blatche is just a total jerk. Either/or.

• • •

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. Dr. No, Wul.f, Mike L, Matt L, and J all aptly received their very own 3/3 on 12/12/12. Next thing you know, they'll be doing it at 144/144/144/144/144. (I'm bad at jokes.)

• Player #337 is one of the most annoying yet enticing twitter follows in the league. P.O.P. every day. Also: a hot girlfriend never hurts.

• Player #338 is better than you'd expect but worse than his fans think he is. Wait, okay. That's probably not quite true. I'm not sure he really has fans. Still, I'm actually a bit surprised he hasn't made a team yet this season. Perhaps he needs to talk to Vader.

• Player #339 enters the dragon nightly. I have absolutely no idea what that means, but ever since the 2010 second round, I try not to think about it.

I like how my body is only now beginning to tell me "HEY. WHAT ARE YOU DOING. STOP." in regards to my insane sleep schedule I've been doing for months in order to do this series and hold a more-than-full-time-job. Related note: sorry about the miss on yesterday's capsules -- hopefully I can get a day or two ahead this weekend to make sure that doesn't happen again. This does almost guarantee I'll be doing two sets on Christmas, though. FUN TIMES. Also: only 34 capsules left. Yikes.

• • •

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 summer dies down and the leaves turn, this quixotic quest of a series has happily reached the last third. But it's certainly not done yet! Today we continue with Brandon Rush, Dominic McGuire, and Chris Wright.

• • •

Follow Brandon Rush on Twitter at @KCsFinest4.

Yet another Mount Zion Christian Academy product, Brandon Rush attended the same Durham prep school attended by Amare Stoudemire, Tracy McGrady, Marquis Daniels, and John Wall. He went to college at the University of Kansas under Bill Self, a key member of the 2008 Kansas title team that outfoxed Calipari's last great vacated team. Sort of ridiculous to remember, as I always think "seasoned vet" when I watch him, but Rush is just a 5th year player -- he was an exceedingly minor piece in the Pacers' scheme for 3 seasons until finally finding a reasonably open role in Marc Jackson's Golden State system last year. Being featured in the offense a bit more and given a bit more room to show his skills, he acquitted himself admirably well -- he ended the season with by far the best offensive numbers of his career, and while his defense was really nothing to write home about, he wasn't exactly Jose Calderon on that end. He stuck with guys, and he worked his tail off. He wasn't bad. Several Warriors fans I know are intensely obsessed with the idea that Rush was an amazing defender, and good Lord, no he wasn't. He was easy to pin on screens and he was a bit too much of a ballhawk without the requisite quickness to make up for it. But he put in the effort and on a team of dismal defenders he was one of the better ones. You know. The average stuff.

On offense, he's intriguing. Rush ranks among the absolute best three point shooters in the league, having shot the lights out in college and settled in as a career 41% three point bomber in the big leagues. That's downright excellent, especially considering the number of years he spent playing poorly designed offensive sets in the O'Brien system (insofar as the O'Brien house of horrors could be called a system). Last year, freed from the shackles of Indiana's former-lottery-pick expectations and with virtually nobody paying attention to him, he put up a phenomenal scoring season efficiency-wise and showed that he's still got quite a bit of potential as an above-par NBA roleplayer. A 3-and-D guy without the D but with a more multifaceted offensive game. Good at cutting, and in something of a shocking twist, he ended up being one of the top offensive players in the league (by the numbers) at isolation situations last season. This is all with the caveat that his usage was extremely low, and few of these (with the sole exception of his wonderful three point shooting) look to hold up well with added usage. But he's definitely a solid role-player offensively, and his $8 million for 2 years looked like a very solid contract to me when he signed it. Good for both parties.

Then, in the 2nd game of his burgeoning 2013 season, he was pushed in the back on incidental contact and ended up absolutely destroying his knee. As with the Marquis Daniels injury I discussed yesterday, I absolutely refuse to link to video -- it's grisly, it's grim, and just grotesque enough to keep me from spreading it. But if you want to find it, it won't be that hard to track it down. Originally it was thought to be an ACL tear and little else, although anyone watching would've probably been skeptical of that diagnosis. Later, when the media circus died down a bit, the Warriors continued their semi-dishonest injury reporting tactics by hiding the important reveal that Rush also tore his MCL, meaning what looked like a season ending injury wasn't just that, but an injury that could very well take out a portion of his 2014 season. Which is, suffice to say, absolutely heartbreaking. Even moreso when you read articles like this, and read how down in the dumps he is about the whole thing. He's realistic, and he's taking his rehab seriously. But he's understandably pretty depressed about it. And I'd be sad too -- basketball is a profession for an NBA player, but it's also a labor of love. Scarce few members of the league don't love the game, and scarce few players don't always want to be out there. Proving people wrong, showing what they're good for, et cetera. May not be his biggest fan or anything, but here's hoping Brandon Rush makes a full recovery and comes back strong next year. Curious to see what he does with a bit more usage, you know?

• • •

Follow Dominic McGuire because you can easily turn his name into "McGuido".

Dominic McGuire is a brutal offensive player. Simply brutal. People can laugh and chortle and make little jokes about how their guy is a poor offensive guy. People whose teams employ Dominic McGuire can't do that. Because Dominic McGuire isn't just a "poor" offensive guy, he's an abjectly horrifying one. What number do you want? Do you want his spot-up efficiency? The guy scored 0.56 points per play on spot-up attempts, and watching them, they were almost all completely open. Dominic McGuire scored 1.00 points per play on transition attempts, which included several hilarious layup misses, a missed dunk, and other hilarious possession failures. Dominic McGuire scored -- again, this is not a typo -- 0.47 points per play on offensive rebounds. BRUTAL.

That all said, he's very g... alright, no, he's a pretty bad player. I really don't know how else to put it. If you're going to make up for offense like that on the other end of the court, you'd better be one of the best defenders of your generation. He isn't. His defense is decent, although it's nowhere near as good as most people hype it up to be. By his size, he's a perimeter stopper -- by his habits, he's a big man stuck in a little man's body. Lots of fronting, some unnecessary ballhawking, a bit too eager to block shots, et cetera. He's not bad, mind you, and one has trouble isolating any one-on-one defensive attributes that look particularly defunct in the game footage I watched. But he simply isn't very phenomenal on that end. His biggest sin, defensively, is sort of problematic -- he may have decent one-on-one stopping capabilities for several positions, but he doesn't fight around screens very well at all, which makes getting an open shot for a star off McGuire not exactly rocket science. Run a few screens, he'll get lost, and suddenly your best perimeter guy has a wide-open jumpshot. Boom.

He was recently waived, which is sad, I suppose. Sort of hilarious that it happened less than two weeks after Dwane Casey called him the Toronto Raptors' primary perimeter stopper, but I'll withhold the chuckles for now. He's a decent defender and those get undervalued. Although once again, when you're as dismal offensively as McGuire is, you aren't long for the league unless you're one of the single greatest defensive players of your generation. I don't have much personal investment in McGuire, so I've got trouble looking incredibly sympathetically on his plight. He's made it to some degree based on his status as a veteran and his decently sized role on the last few decent Wizards teams. But alas. I'm one of those jerks who likes seeing D-League guys (like our next player) try their hand at new roles -- I don't tend to particularly love when middling-to-poor players like McGuire get constantly revisited and called back up instead. I like the new-blood thing. But that's just my cup of tea, I suppose. There's obviously some value in his knowledge of NBA economics, dynamics, and the rest. I probably underrate that. And again, he's a decent defender, so maybe his sticking around reflects NBA decision-makers starting to figure out defense a bit. Maybe.

But, look, come on. He stole my name. Geez, Dom. Get it together.

Ed. Note #1: More accurately, seeing as how Aaron was born in 1990, he stole it from Dominic.

Ed. Note #2: I really don't know why I referred to myself in the third person in Ed. Note #1.

Ed. Note #3: Why are these editor's notes in the first place? What am I doing?

• • •

Follow Chris Wright b... wait, Chris Wright? What?

Commenter wul.f, having correctly predicted that Chris Wright was today's 3rd, asked the following:

Why would you do a capsule on Chris Wright, though?

You know what?

I have absolutely no idea how Chris Wright made the final cut.

I'm serious. I have no clue. I thought I'd taken out most players around Wright's minute-level that I knew virtually nothing about (even if the strict exclusion criteria was > 100 minutes & > 4 MPG last season), but I must have simply overlooked the guy. Which sounds roughly similar to how Warriors games happened last year for me -- I suppose was vaguely aware of his existence, but until I watched some Synergy scouting on him last night and asked a friend who went to his college about him, I honest to God couldn't have told you a thing about him. Or recognized him. I just overlooked him, I guess. So, thought I'd state this upfront. I don't really have a ton to say about Chris Wright. I'm not sure anyone else does either, but alas.

Anyway. I'm not referring to the 1989-born Georgetown point guard currently playing in the D-League -- I'm talking about Chris Wright, the 1988-born hometown Dayton kid who went to the University of Dayton and made their team a little bit more relevant for a year or two. According to the guy I know who went there, he's really remarkably beloved in Dayton -- much like Jeff Foster in Indiana (I see you, @MillerNBA!) or any other beloved home-town hero, Wright grew up around the Dayton area and stayed at the University for the full four years, which basically guarantees he gets a beer or two on the house for free in Dayton for the rest of his life. It's one of the underrated fun facts about some guys like Wright -- no matter how badly they may end up washing out in the NBA, no matter how scant their NBA talents, they're still -- in some respect -- hometown heroes to a certain town. ESPECIALLY when they go to their hometown college and lead them to minor respectability.

As for a scouting report... look, what do you want? Seriously. In college, he was a rim-wrecking beast of a player who dominated the A-10 for a few years and put Dayton on the map as a basketball school. As players tend to do, if they're remotely NBA caliber. And he is that, as long as you make sure not to leave out the "remotely." On an NBA level he struggles to score in any consistent fashion beyond transition buckets and gift-wrapped at-rim jams, and beyond his free throw rate (which was obscenely high for reasons unknown to the world), there simply wasn't much to write home about. He's a tweener wing/big who can't shoot but can't really guard big men effectively either. He posted one of the worst assist-to-turnover ratios I've seen, turning the ball over 8 times to just 4 assists. Which is obviously a huge sample size and worthy of massive analysis, let me tell you. Of his 23 NBA field goals, 13 of them came on dunks -- most of them rim-rocking, several of them fun. His understanding of the game is, as IQofAWarrior put it at Golden State of Mind, exceedingly raw and exceedingly in need of some better basketball education. Would be pretty interesting to see Wright make it out to the Austin Toros and see if the Spurs system can't extract a bit more value out of him. Although, again -- he's a tweener wing/big with minimal shooting talent. So I'm not really sure the Spurs system gets that much out of him, unless Engelland beasts it once again and gave him a shot. So that's that. He got waived before the season, and now he's back with the Maine Red Claws.

He'll be back. Probably. Maybe I'll recognize him next time.

• • •

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. Yesterday's riddles were abjectly terrible on my part, but that didn't stop a few people from getting them all right -- Mike L, Cash McNeil, and wul.f in particular.

• Player #334 is the best high energy anime-loving center in the NBA. Related story: he's the only one.

• Player #335 is retired. There are many reasons people like him. I couldn't stand him on the Cavaliers, but I guess he was OK sometimes. Rousing endorsement, I know.

• Player #336 having a good season now after his years as a Wizard just goes to show that any God that exists has a really demented sense of humor.

See, I can still put these up on time! Every now and again.

• • •

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 summer dies down and the leaves turn, this quixotic quest of a series has happily reached the last third. But it's certainly not done yet! Today we continue with Marquis Daniels, O.J. Mayo, and Delonte West.

• • •

Follow Marquis Daniels on Twitter at @Marquis_Daniels.

The story of Marquis Daniels is something of a sad one. It's not that he's a bad player -- he really isn't, when healthy, despite most people thinking that he is after a few years of injury-tarred uselessness. Sure, he's not exactly brilliant -- he's a hustle defender who doesn't really have strong shut-down capabilities, and he floats in-between positions with the muscle (and, unfortuantely, the lessened quickness that often comes with it) of a larger man and the height of a smallish wing. He'll get you hustle rebounds, he'll draw charges if he's healthy (so, uh, he won't draw charges...), and he'll put his best effort into throwing off whatever offensive player his coach dogs him into guarding. Won't always do a fundamentally good job, but he tries his best and doesn't ever make a ton of obvious mistakes. He passes relatively well, too, which is a nice little addition. The main issue with Marquis is that his offensive game has declined to the point where he's among_ the worst offensive players the game's ever seen_ -- last season, for instance, Daniels shot 56% at the rim despite taking almost half his shots there, shot 22% from 3-9 feet, and 18% from the long two. He made zero threes. He drew free throws about as scarcely as Stan Van Gundy did last year, and he turned the ball over on a simply startling 16% of his possessions. Despite all that? Usage rate of 18%. That's rough. And shouldn't really happen. His defense is solid, but lord, he needs to learn to defer on offense.

The big knock on Marquis, NBA-wise, is the fact that his main NBA talent over his career has seemed to be "getting ridiculously injured." Suffice to say, that's not an NBA talent most teams aim to optimize. Many injuries stand out in a career as riddled with them as his, but few are as disturbing as the simply too-grisly-to-link injury that prematurely ended his promising 2011 season. At the time, he'd played 41 consecutive games without missing a single one to injury, which was (believe it or not) by far the best stretch in his career to that point. He then proceeded to fall badly after Gilbert Arenas got under him on a shot attempt, slipping off Gil's back and slamming his spine into the garden floor. Daniels was paralyzed on-the-court, with emergency personnel and teammates (Paul Pierce excepted, for some completely unknown reason that has always confused me deeply) surrounding him in this horrified silence that was palpable even in the broadcast. Nobody really knew what was going on. I absolutely refuse to watch this again, and thus, I refuse to get you a video of it -- if you know what game I'm talking about, you know why. And if you don't, just trust me -- you really, REALLY don't want to see it. Simply don't. Final prognosis was a bruised spinal cord that ended his 2011 season and threatened to end his career -- he came back fine from it, but lord, it could've been so much worse.

Off the court, Daniels seems like an excellent guy in interviews and subjective assessment of his off-court pursuits, which makes the injury problems all the more heartbreaking. People forget this, but for 3 years, Daniels was a really good bench player for a really good Mavs team. He was an important cog on the also-ran 2006 Mavericks, and while he's never really approached the levels of quality play he showed under Don Nelson his rookie year, he's never really been healthy enough to assess what he could've really brought the league. He founded the Q6 Foundation early in his career, a charitable foundation focused on fighting sickle cell anemia and helping underprivileged youth. The reason I bring this up is because during the lockout, I distinctly remember wanting to either cover live or get footage from this event from his foundation, primarily because it included a celebrity kickball game that would've included Rajon Rondo, Tony Allen, Marquis Daniels, Vince Carter, and Tracy McGrady. Like, can you imagine that? Best kickball roster ever. Seriously need a box score or some highlights or something. Anyway. Support his foundation. When he's not standing up for underprivileged youths, he's ordering black diamond Jesus head necklaces and dr--... wait, wait, hold up. Really? Am I being serious?

Yeah, no, that's a thing that actually happened.

Man, what.

• • •

_Follow O.J. Mayo on Twitter at __@JuiceMayo32.___

O.J. Mayo is going to be a starter in the NBA for quite some time, and this year serves as an excellent example of why. While Memphis couldn't really be happier to get rid of him, there was always a lot of promise in Mayo's game -- he's proven over his career to be about as good at three point shooting as any specialist has ever been. The issue in Memphis, as far as I could figure, was the same issue that dogs good shooters on poor-shooting teams -- they simply attract an inordinate amount of attention from behind the arc, being that they're the only real threats to hurt you from that range. Teams throw perimeter stoppers at them willy nilly, and without shooters besides him, there's no real incentive for their man to play off them. Ever. This year, in Dallas, he's been blessed with several decent three point shooters around him and a coach who's good at running get-the-man-open plays -- Carter's had a good start from range, Marion's always an asset, and the Mavs spent some time running sets with Troy Murphy filling the role of quasi-Dirk that have been keeping opposing teams defending the Mavs with the same gameplan they used to use when Dirk was on the floor. (NOTE: Murphy was cut. This is not happening anymore. I should stop doing scouting/notes for these things at midnight.) It worked out relatively well for Mayo, and with a slightly more open shot to subsist on, Mayo's been brilliant -- 52% from beyond the arc to date, and that's not a typo. Not much else there -- high turnover rate, low assist rate, middling rebound rate. But when you shoot the three THAT well, you'll find NBA minutes.

Still, despite his three point marksmanship, there are some flaws that somewhat doom his ability to become more than a decent starter. Chief among them is Mayo's general fear of the rim -- on his career, he takes a well-below-average percent of his shots at the rim. This made some sense when he was on a Memphis team that pounded the ball down low with Gasol and Randolph so often he was rarely able to get daylight. It makes significantly less sense on a Dallas team whose best low post threat is Christopher Zane Kaman. Then again, maybe it does make sense -- over his career, he's also been among the worst at-rim finishers in the entire game, well within the bottom 25% of guards in at-rim percentage in each year he's been on the court (which does extend to this year -- even with his torrid start). His turnover rate has always been high, and perhaps worse, he's been cursed with extremely poorly timed turnovers at every stage of his career -- just ask Grizzlies fans, because most can name a turnover or two that Mayo coughed up at extraordinarily poor momentum-changing moments. In 2012 over 33% of his turnovers came in the 4th quarter, and it just seemed like he was constantly quashing Memphis momentum with a stupid travel or a lazy pass attempt. It wasn't great. Compound this with his often lazy defense (high upside though it may be, as his quality playoff defense demonstrated) and his aforementioned troubles at-the-rim (which extend to trouble drawing fouls -- he's been around league average at foul-drawing his entire career despite being good at throwing his body into defenders on jump shots, and that's primarily because he's so bad at driving to the rim and getting calls under the basket), and you can put together a decent case why he'll never be much of a star and probably won't fully live up to whatever large contract he gets from his Dallas successes.

That said, this is all to ignore perhaps Mayo's biggest asset -- his nigh-superhuman durability. He's missed just a single game to injury over his entire career, with his only other absence coming in a 10 game suspension during the 2011 season. And that durability has him in a relatively neat position -- with 535 threes through 321 games, Mayo stands an outside chance of pole-vaulting Ray Allen on the three-point-makes leaderboard later in his career. It would require him eventually building up a few tertiary skills to go alongside his three-point talents, and he's yet to get the green light to shoot quite as many threes as Allen had in his early career. But it's certainly not outside the realm of possibility -- Mayo is currently running a bit off Allen's pace, but it's only 50 or so three point makes outside of Allen's and Allen had a few injury-hobbled years in his late 20s. Part of the reason Allen has made so many threes over his career is that he's been relatively durable, long-lasting, and minutes-sopping -- it remains to be seen if Mayo can last quite as long as Allen has, or if he can (in his prime) soak up quite as many minutes. But it's certainly within the realm of possibility, given his ridiculous injury history and his absurd ability to play through minor scrapes, and it's one of the few storylines around Mayo's career that's still somewhat interesting to follow.

• • •

_Follow Delonte West on Twitter at __@delontewest.___

Delonte West was a really good NBA player, once upon a time. Let me take you back to 2009, when West was one of the best players on one of the best teams in the entire league -- West's perimeter defense was crucial to Mike Brown's schemes, and his general ability to bother and pester the best perimeter player on every other team in the league was one of the primary cogs in the Cleveland defense. West is one of the rare defenders who actually uses a smaller frame to his advantage -- he's small but sinewy, and his size helps him gets over and around screens better than many larger defenders. Combine that with his decent lateral quickness, and you end up with a beastly difficult player for a perimeter offensive guy to lose. It's one of the reasons the 2009 Cavaliers were a legitimate title favorite at many points of the season. Virtually every contender featured a star perimeter player -- Kobe, Pierce, Parker, Melo -- who Delonte could bother and frustrate. And with those players out of sync, none of those teams were quite as good as they would normally be. This, unfortunately, did not apply to the 2009 Magic. None of their perimeter players were of any particular quality, they were all just "very good" and reliant on a lot of three point shooting. Which made Delonte's role as a stopper somewhat ambiguous, and helped cause a lot of confusion on the part of the traditional Cavalier defensive schemes.

But alas. West was a phenomenal stopper on those late-aughts Cavaliers teams, and throughout his career, he's almost always been an asset of some sort on the defensive end. And on offense, he's not nearly as bad as most people think -- he's something of a jack-of-all-trades swiss army knife, combining boatloads of passing acumen with decent guard-position rebounding and about as much hustle as you could possibly put in his slight frame. He was a joy to watch, on offense and defense -- there was never a sense West was ballhogging, nor a sense that he needed to shoot more -- there was simply a perfect equilibrium, a sense that he was both as featured as he should've been without a single shot more. I don't think, in West's career, he's ever really reached that equilibrium since -- he's always been either underutilized (2010 Cavs, 2011 Celtics) or overutilized (2012 Mavericks) with scarce distance in-between. His defense has been as fun to watch as ever, although as his personal life has gotten in the way of his career, it's been clear that he's gotten more and more distracted and shiftless on defense. Despite this, he's still probably the best player bumming it without a contract right now -- his defensive intensity has been spotty at times with his personal problems, but it's never been poor, and he's never a huge threat to hog the ball when in a good system.

I like watching Delonte West play ball. His intensity is absolutely wonderful, and there's a certain edge to his game that I don't see in a lot of other players. I also respect the way he's fought through his mental issues, even if it's often been public and terrifying. Would we get along in real life? Highly doubt it. While we've both gone through some of the same mental issues and from his interviews I get the sense that our struggles aren't as far apart as they may seem, they're still relatively far apart -- he's a feisty NBA player who came from a hard past and a rough future, I'm a thrifty Jewish mathematician with self-image problems and an aversion to help. But that doesn't make him any less of a hero to me for his time spent trying to better himself in the NBA, or battling his demons without the anonymity that eases the burden for many. Delonte West is a funny, stand-up, problematic guy. These things are often seen as being mutually exclusive. They aren't -- you can have serious problems and still be funny. You can be a stand-up guy without ruining your sense of humor. You can come from hard times without letting them destroy you. I wish Delonte West was still in the NBA, and even with all his troubles, I really hope some team takes a flyer and brings him back. I think he can still be a productive player, and I think any team with an understanding medical staff and a smart coach could do well with him.

I could be wrong, though. That's kind of the point. Mental health isn't really predictable. Overcoming mental problems isn't an easily pigeonholed condition with a set treatment pattern or a regular recovery pattern. It's a long journey with twists and turns you can never really see in advance, and given the high variance, I can see why teams might be shaky on him. I can see why teams don't want to introduce that kind of a potentially harmful presence on a team if they feel they're good enough to possibly contend without him. But it breaks my heart to see him go unused when the man's such a useful player. He may have trouble practicing, he may not always be there, but when he's on and locked in he's one of the better perimeter defenders in the NBA, a useful offensive filler-piece, and one of the funnier personalities around. He's a high variance bet, and he's getting up there a bit (not 30 yet, but he's not too far out)... but he's a bet I wish someone would make. League's better when my boy Delonte's out there killin' it.

• • •

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 Matt L and Geezer for 2/3 guesses.

• Player #331's season is over. Which sucks, because he was really solid last year and really looked to be turning a corner in a contract year. Hope he comes back strong next year.

• Player #332's still being in the league surprises me. Also confuses me, when I hear my name repeated whenever he comes on the court.

• Player #333 has the Wright stuff. (Yes, this riddle sucks. Sue me, I'm tired.)

Was a struggle to get this set out today. Bad case of the Mondays. Good case of the "giddy over a girl", tho, so I can overlook the Monday blues for now. Au revoir, and #SmallMarketMondays drops later.

• • •

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“Mighty is geometry; joined with art, resistless." -- Euripides

On November 23rd, 2010, the Duke Blue Devils obliterated the Kansas State Wildcats by a score of 82-68. The game was hardly as close as the score makes it seem. It was a really impressive victory -- the Blue Devils (then ranked #1) were playing against a #4 ranked Kansas State team that featured player-of-the-year candidate Jacob Pullen, one of the most electric scorers in the college game and among the best shooters in the country. The Blue Devils were favored in the game, but only by the slimmest of margins and most thought it essentially a road game for Duke despite the neutral site locale. It was thought of as a given that Pullen would drop 20-30 on a permissive Duke perimeter defense, helmed by rookies and youngsters that hadn't quite grasped Krzyzewski's defensive system yet.

Not quite. Pullen shot 1-12 for 4 points, posting what may have been his worst game as a collegiate athlete. And Kyrie Irving? The 18-year-old jitterbug was phenomenal. Beyond phenomenal. A revolution, a revelation, a reincarnation of all that's good in basketball. A vertical Rothko in three shades of blue, disrupting almost every single shot Pullen took and making everything he touched work better. He even had a poor shooting night, missing his two threes and numerous wide-open jump shots off his pet pick and roll sets. It didn't matter. He still dominated. Nothing he did in that game was anything short of a wonder. He had four games of college experience. Four. He was facing one of the greatest scorers in the history of the college game, in his first true away game as a pro. He had jitters, as he later admitted, but it simply didn't matter -- sometimes you're just too good for jitters.

After the game, what was the topic of conversation? It wasn't really about Irving at all. Some highlights, some features, some general pats on the back for a game well-performed. But little focus on how dominant Irving was in the contest, because that simply isn't how Duke teams are traditionally understood -- instead, commentators sprung for the usual well-worn cliches, continuing to beat the drum on the idea that Duke was the most talented team in basketball and nobody was really anywhere close. Unbeknownst to most at the time, this wasn't true. At all. Without Irving, the 2011 Duke Blue Devils were a lacking bunch with scant cohesion, flawed chemistry, and a tenuous grasp of the defensive end of the court -- and even Nolan Smith's flukishly-good season didn't obscure that once Irving went down. By the time he came back at the end of the year, the 2011 Blue Devils had been exposed as something of a fraud, and Irving was relegated to being an everyday Duke player -- good, decent, and maybe a perennial all-star. Perhaps. With his dominance forgotten, his flaws overstated, and his game misunderstood, people continued to assert rank inferiority of a draft class that's ended up being (potentially) quite a bit better than the 2 or 3 that came before it. And Kyrie Irving sat, in wait, ready to be the transformative player that he knew full well he'd be.

Can you be a star when they don't know who you are?

• • •

To most, the world of Mathematics represents a world of abject certainty. The word "always" is key. One plus one always equals two. One gallon of milk will always contain exactly 16 cups. Avogadro's number will always describe the constituent particles of a single mole. Always this, always that. There's nothing inherently wrong with this stance, and indeed, it's a satisfactory description of the lower-level mathematics covered in high school and the lower rungs of college. In that sphere -- the sphere most contend with -- math is little more than a series of stark truths represented through numerous immutable rules. The broader picture, insofar as it's revealed at all, is inevitably watered down. But ever since reading an excellent piece from the always-recommended folks at Berfrois (this time the imitable Barry Mazur, a Harvard mathematician), I've come to finally put words to a thought I had throughout my studies. Once you get to a high enough level, Mathematics isn't about any of that.

It's more about hunting giraffes.

What? No, that's actually what I meant to type. Giraffe hunting. The key to understand here is the exact core of Mazur's point. Much of mathematics can be distilled to the logical skeleton that composes those previously outlined truths -- everything most people need to know, really. But there's a level far beyond that, and in the seedy and sordid world of higher mathematics, the questions become far less concrete and far more intangible. Even if you accept the proposal that the formal structure behind mathematics is inert and extant in the highest and most complete form it will ever be, as most do, you'll be hard pressed to find a mathematician worth their salt that believes the absolute meaning of these structures is comprehensible to us and entirely within our grasp (although some believe computers will eventually fully comprehend it). Yet, at least. Scrabbling to find that meaning is the core of higher mathematics. And when you apply enough abstraction to the thought, you come to an almost existential crisis -- if we're ascribing meaning to structures we've yet to fully comprehend, at what level have we really established that abject certainty mathematics is known for? Sure, one plus one always equals two, if you're working in base ten in the traditional coordinate system. But so much of higher math involves reorienting systems to solve problems too complex to describe in the traditional frame we spend so much time explicating in our youth.

It's something like this -- as a child, you learn how to shoot a perfect free throw. You are shooting 100% from the free throw line. It's beautiful. Amazing. But then the blindfold comes off, and you realize there are an infinite number of other points on the basketball court that your exacting and perfect free throw form can't make a bucket at, and that you need to be able to take the framework of your shot-making from the line and turn it into a flexible monster that can attack from every isolated space on the court, in an all-engrossing infinite sphere of possibility and wonder. You've established one single thing -- you can make a free throw. Now you need to establish everything using the basis of that single thing. It's terrifying! It's challenging! And it's beautiful, in a way. When you're a young and rising mathematically-inclined student, you're given this broad structure and this set of rules, and tasked to analyze them to their absolute completion. You do so. Life goes on, you work hard, and you finally come to some level of satisfaction with this structure. Then a teacher cracks you in the head and makes you realize the almost-too-hilarious truth. Those rules and that structure you'd been taking for granted in all your work? Indeed, those are the problems. The things that are flexible in higher math aren't the values of the numbers or the forms of the equations. It's the rules you used to get there in the first place.

And that's where the whole "giraffe hunting" tidbit comes into play. In Mazur's piece, he describes a giraffe hunt he observed in a documentary. Four men hunt a giraffe for five days, pursuing without adequate food or water their quarry for as long as it takes to catch it. He describes it as "exhausting yourself in the ecstasy of it", getting lost in your hunt. Finally, when you catch the giraffe, you use everything. You thought you exhausted yourself catching the giraffe? Hardly as much as your former prey will be exhausted for meat, bones, ears, hooves, and skin. That, right there, is what you do with higher mathematics. You hunt for the perfect framework for your perfect proof, and once you find it, mathematics cannibalizes your structure and creates dozens of offshoot proofs in attempts to explain increasingly different phenomena. Mathematics is the process of slowly ascribing meaning to the inert structures we can't quite explain or understand, arrived at through the everlasting hunt of various proofs and logical stabs. These proofs inch us closer to a truth that means nothing until we can explain it. The hunt is what defines broader math, and until the blindfold's taken off by an amused old hand late in our undergraduate career, it's rare for one to fully comprehend the enormity of it.

• • •

This isn't meant to be an anti-Cleveland screed. Really isn't. As many are aware, I'm a fan of the Cleveland Cavaliers. I have a Zydrunas Ilgauskas jersey I sometimes wear in support while rooting from my couch. I have Cavaliers pencils. I have a Cavaliers calendar. Kyrie Irving is one of my favorite players in the league -- top 5 at a minimum. This isn't an essay meant to state some sort of snide, backhanded "fact" about Cleveland being a poor showcase for its young star's talent. Think of it through the whole story, instead -- Kyrie Irving went to Duke University, one of the most over-exposed basketball schools in the country. There are millions upon millions of jokes, and most of them hold water. Duke is held up as a standard-bearer, plastered on national television for almost their entire season, and given innumerable extra coverage opportunities that most other schools simply do not get. He plied his trade at college basketball's equivalent of the Lakers.

Despite this -- despite the overexposure, the massive coverage, the big games -- virtually nobody realizes how good Kyrie Irving was as a college student. Seriously! Nobody! When the 2011 NBA draft approached, there was a serious question that floated on talk radio for some time as to whether Derrick Williams or Kyrie Irving was the better bet as an NBA player. Serious questions, by very smart analysts. This was absurd to me, as someone who watched every single minute of Irving's college career and a fair bit of his high school career. I'm not one to exalt Duke players above everyone else, but by GOD, Kyrie was preposterously good. In college, Irving shot 90% from the line, 46% on threes (almost exclusively unassisted!), and shot over 70% on plays off the high pick and roll. You're reading that right -- 70%, with a seven and a zero. He did this all despite using 30% of Duke's possessions when he was on the floor, playing reasonably solid Krzyzewski-style defense, and being the primary target of virtually every team's defensive schemes. Kyrie Irving may have been injured for much of his college career, but he put up numbers that were legitimately historic. One of the best offensive seasons in college history. There shouldn't have been any doubt whatsoever that the man was the real deal. But everyone was shaky on him, and everyone used the "health" card to explain their doubt.

Then you get to his rookie season. Kyrie didn't play a ton of minutes his rookie year -- topped out at just over 30 per game, and he missed bits of the season with a few minor maladies -- but when he played he was undeniably phenomenal. He threw passes that were steps ahead of the defense, often setting up the ball straight in the cradle of an offensive player's shooting motion for a beautiful dish only ruined by the fact that the offensive player was Samardo Samuels. Whoops. His dribble remains one of the most inexplicable wonders the league has to offer, and Irving's speed with the ball is virtually peerless. The form on his shot was legitimately immaculate, and Irving was a few trick shots at the rim and a few injury-tarred games short of a 50-40-90 season -- as a rookie, remember. His defense was poor, although to my eyes, he started the season relatively well on that end. He defended reasonably well in the preseason and only begun to fall off significantly after a minor sprain early in the year, which gives me some manner of hope that he'll recoup strong and rediscover the bulldog defensive tendencies he displayed at Duke.

In short: Kyrie Irving was all manner of remarkable. He was also nowhere near an all-star spot despite playing significantly better basketball than Deron Williams, Luol Deng, or Joe Johnson. National fans seemed to have virtually no investment in his game. He lived in the shadow of LeBron's rookie season, which was ludicrous for many reasons, not least of which being that Irving was putting up the best rookie season since Chris Paul's, and one of the best rookie years for a point guard in the history of the sport. His rookie year OBLITERATED LeBron's in statistics and standard, with about one tenth the hype and one twentieth the recognition.

But I repeat myself.

• • •

The key thought that connects Kyrie to my missive on mathematics is the idea that, on some level, the idea of Kyrie Irving is a relatively inert function. Just like the broader structures we can't quite describe yet. The more I watch of his dazzling NBA play, the more I'm inclined to believe this as an underlying truth rather than a happy coincidence. If Kyrie Irving is an inert function, his own floating Sealand-style island of NBA bliss that exists under its own flag, it stands to reason that on some level it doesn't really matter that we haven't totally figured him out yet, as a collective of NBA fans. Sure, we've got some appreciation for him. But on a broad level, I've always gotten this feeling that the overexposure of Duke in no way properly highlighted the sort of a player Kyrie was for that Duke team. Nor did the overexposure of the 2012 Cleveland Cavaliers in the light of LeBron's all-universe season do all that much to properly highlight the sort of player Kyrie was as a rookie.

And this year? We're staring at a guard who, as a 2nd year player, is poised to finish the year as a blisteringly efficient 25-ish points-per-night scorer that runs a Cavalier offense with brutally poor pieces alongside him like a whirring, well-oiled machine. And yet appreciation is still, as with mathematics, shaky -- there's a vague understanding of Kyrie's structure among the basketball literati as a general collective, a weak understanding of the qualities he brings to the court. It is a weak understanding of what exactly he does that's so phenomenal. There are the little highlight films that show off his beyond-all-reason handle and his "teenage girls weeping" wet shot. There are the little publicity stunts, the Uncle Drew ads and the mushing with Kobe to give people a taste of his brilliant personality. And there are the accolades; the Rookie of the Year voting, his likely All-Star spot this year, et cetera. Each of these inches us closer to full understanding of Kyrie Irving's inherent truth, and the things that make him whole. But none of us quite inch the collective to complete understanding -- not quite.

It does not matter, in mathematics, that we've yet to come to a full consensus or fully discovered the underlying structure we're studying. Some mathematicians are further along than others. Some are still comprehending the basic groundwork they'll need to get any farther -- they're examining the remains of the giraffes that have been hunted before, discovering things that will help them on the next hunt. So too are we, as a people, learning just how we interface on a collective level with a player as good as Kyrie Irving. People have yet to quite grasp how good he is, and indeed, mathematicians have yet to quite grasp the whole truth of the structure that underlines the discipline. And perhaps they never will. But the true joy of examining and following a player like Kyrie is the same as the joy a mathematician derives from his craft -- the joy of a sailor in the age of discovery, setting anchor ashore in a steppe untouched by man and faithfully taking in the details and oeuvre of their surroundings. And that feeling -- that taste of discovery, that thirst for more -- is exactly what keeps a mathematician hungry. It's what keeps the ecstasy present in their exhaustion, the guiding light that sends them off to prove the new proof and discover the new rules. And this elation, this ecstasy of discovery? This sense that the best is just around the corner, imperceptible to even the most hardy of eyes?

That's what it's like to watch Kyrie Irving -- the showman, the structure, the star.

• • •

• • •

• For more capsules on members of the Cleveland Cavaliers, visit the Cavalier Capsule Directory •

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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. But it's certainly not done yet! Today we continue with Kyrie Irving, Wesley Matthews, and J.J. Redick.

• • •

Follow Kyrie Irving on Twitter at @KyrieIrving.

Today, in a special extended capsule, I had the pleasure of going over one of my favorite players in the entire league. It took me a while to figure out how exactly one could best cover Irving's game -- he's an extremely unique player, and I've got the unique experience of having covered him thoroughly at Duke in my failed stabs at a Duke blog, met him a few times, and watched him at every step in his meteoric rise. "Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord", insofar as Kyrie Irving is a Lord of the Australian Empire. (This isn't true.) Still, it took a fair bit of thought to come up with a suitable frame for presenting my personal take on Irving's brilliance. Lots of sifting through Berfrois, etc. And then, a few days ago? A random discussion with friends Matt and Mike about the philosophy of mathematics set the wheels turning and made me figure out exactly what I needed to do. Today, I discussed Kyrie Irving, the meaning of mathematics, and the limits of public perception. I enjoyed writing this piece quite a lot. I quite hope you enjoy reading it.

On November 23rd, 2010, the Duke Blue Devils obliterated the Kansas State Wildcats by a score of 82-68. The game was hardly as close as the score makes it seem. It was a really impressive victory -- the Blue Devils (then ranked #1) were playing against a #4 ranked Kansas State team that featured player-of-the-year candidate Jacob Pullen, one of the most electric scorers in the college game and among the best shooters in the country. The Blue Devils were favored in the game, but only by the slimmest of margins and most thought it essentially a road game for Duke despite the neutral site locale. It was thought of as a given that Pullen would drop 20-30 on a permissive Duke perimeter defense, helmed by rookies and young players that hadn't quite grasped Krzyzewski's defensive system yet.

Not quite. Pullen shot 1-12 for 4 points, posting what may have been his worst game as a collegiate athlete. And Kyrie Irving? The 18-year-old jitterbug was phenomenal. Beyond phenomenal. A revolution, a revelation, a reincarnation of all that's holy. A vertical Rothko in three shades of blue, disrupting almost every single shot Pullen took and making everything he touched work better. He even had a poor shooting night, missing his two threes and numerous wide-open jump shots off his pet pick and roll sets. Nothing he did in that game was anything short of a wonder. He had four games of college experience. Four. He was facing one of the greatest scorers in the history of the college game, in his first true away game as a pro. He had jitters, as he later admitted, but it simply didn't matter -- sometimes you're just too good for jitters.

After the game, what was the topic of conversation? It wasn't really about Irving at all. Some highlights, some features, some general pats on the back for a game well-performed. But little focus on how dominant Irving was in the contest, because that simply isn't how Duke teams are traditionally understood -- instead, commentators sprung for the usual well-worn cliches, continuing to beat the drum on the idea that Duke was the most talented team in basketball and nobody was really anywhere close. Unbeknownst to most at the time, this wasn't true. At all. Without Irving, the 2011 Duke Blue Devils were a lacking bunch with scant cohesion, flawed chemistry, and a tenuous grasp of the defensive end of the court -- and even Nolan Smith's flukishly-good season didn't obscure that once Irving went down. By the time he came back at the end of the year, the 2011 Blue Devils had been exposed as something of a fraud, and Irving was relegated to being an everyday Duke player -- good, decent, and maybe a perennial all-star. Perhaps. With his dominance forgotten, his flaws overstated, and his game misunderstood, people continued to assert rank inferiority of a draft class that's ended up being (potentially) quite a bit better than the 2 or 3 that came before it. And Kyrie Irving sat, in wait, ready to be the transformative player that he knew full well he'd be.

Can you be a star when they don't know who you are?

For more on Kyrie Irving, please read today's Player Capsule (Plus).

• • •

_Follow Wesley Matthews on Twitter at __@wessywes2.___

Wesley Matthews is stuck in an odd sort of purgatory -- while he's one of about four currently NBA-caliber talents on the Portland Trail Blazers, he's clearly the weakest of the four and clearly the most tertiary piece. Which would stand to reason he'd be on the trading block in an effort to land the Blazers multiple fill-in pieces. The problem with that? He's not quite promising enough to net much on the trade market, and he's displayed a few issues that have sapped his game in the last little stretch. Of all these issues, perhaps the most pressing last year was the sudden and complete absence of Matthews' at-rim finishing game. Matthews shot just 50% at the rim last year, rating out as one of the league's absolute worst finishers -- as John Hollinger aptly noted in his player profiles, that number made him the worst finisher in the league who didn't play for the Charlotte Bobcats. This is partly a dig at how incredibly poor several Bobcats players were at the rim last season, but it's also partly a massive indictment on Matthews. He shouldn't be that bad. He can't really finish at the right side of the basket, but he still shouldn't be that bad -- it should NOT be this easy to force Matthews right. He's spent most of his career as a below-average converter from the rim (with the sole exception of his 2nd year), but nothing quite as harrowing as last year. Beyond that, he has a few other things that hurt his efficiency. He's rather poor at drawing free throws, which is awful in the long run because he's blessed with one of the most consistent free throw strokes in the league. Really wish he could do that more often.

His rebounds and assists were paltry, and while his three point percentage was decent, it's worth noting that he had a well-below-average usage rate for a shooting guard. Well-below average. When you cull the list of guards to players in Matthews' minutes range (IE, players with 30+ MPG), only three shooting guards used the ball less than Matthews did in 2012 -- Gordon Hayward, Ray Allen, and Courtney Lee. Which may really constitute Matthews' main problem. This all can be rather problematic when you're looking at a team that only features four definite NBA talents; it's important that Matthews takes more shots when he's on the court with the Portland bench, which rates among one of the worst in the league for a reason. I'm not a fan of cliches, but one fits here -- he's an NBA shooting guard. He doesn't really rebound and he doesn't really pass. Which means__ the man needs to shoot.__ Simply has to. Matthews isn't some fill-in off the Spurs bench that can stay off-ball all the time and focus on his defense (at which he's solid, but not remarkable) -- he's a shooter with scoring talent that needs to be featured when the Blazers put out a lineup where he's one of the best two guys on the court, a situation that happens for 10-15 minutes each night. They don't need Matthews to be "that guy" all game, with Aldridge and Batum and Lilliard there to take the load. They do need him to be "a guy", though, and oftentimes he floats off-ball to the point where he really isn't. He doesn't make himself a factor in the play. Part of this was Nate McMillan and Kaleb Canales, but it's not like Stotts has done THAT much better. He simply needs to find a way to get the ball more often. His efficiency can take a dive and he'll STILL be an infinitely better choice than a Sasha Pavlovic pull-up two point fadeaway. Come on, Stotts.

It's not all bad, though. Really. At 249 games through his NBA career, Matthews has yet to miss a game. He's been almost preternaturally healthy despite Portland's overall injury troubles, which is a testament to both his durability and his generally reliable presence. His three point percentage isn't quite as sizzling as his nearly 41% mark in 2011 would indicate, but it is decent -- around 38% on his career, despite getting assisted on a lower percentage of his threes than many NBA shooting guards. Matthews is a decent defender -- as I said, solid but not remarkable -- and while he can't shut down elite wings with anything remotely approaching regularity, he takes smart chances on steals (at which he owns one of the league's highest rates) and he takes charges like a champ (about one every 3 games last year). He virtually never turned the ball over, which is partly a result of him rarely having the ball but partly a result of him not trying to do too much when he's passing or dribbling, which is usually a good thing. He doesn't shoot as many midrange jumpers as most wings, which is good, because they're (as stated roughly two hundred seventy nine thousand times in these capsules) relatively inefficient shots. So good on him. And the problems with usage aren't necessarily his fault, per se. He's not great at moving without the ball, but he's never really been guided into a situation where it's made obvious to him that he needs to get great at it. And his defense really is solid -- no stopper, but the kind of solid defender who's going to be an asset on that end for virtually his whole career. He may never be much more than he is now, but that's OK. The Blazers don't really need him to be.

They just need him to, you know, shoot. Every now and then, please?

• • •

_Follow J.J. Redick __on Twitter at @JJRedick47.___

The career arc of J.J. Redick is a strange and wonderful one, an arc more akin to a bird swooping into the ocean to pick up a fish and shooting back up into the sky than the semi-normal parabolic arc. That's to say that Redick spent college looking like a dominant all-universe shooter, entered the league only to have his shot wrenched out from under him and his lack of any supplementary game disturbingly exposed, and then recouped through hard work to a level where he's at now. His current state has him at a point where he's completely remodeled his game to become a far more versatile version of the end-state most saw as his natural role when he entered the league in the first place. It's a beautiful little story, and for Magic fans, it's been somewhat fun to watch -- Redick has effectively transitioned all the way from reviled to ridiculed to redeemed in his 6-year career, and it's seriously hilarious to watch. Even as someone who's never much liked Redick, as he came before my time at Duke and seemed to reflect in many ways the parts of the university that made my time there so aggravating.

As for last season, Redick made a genuinely big mark on a Magic team that was rather lacking. He wasn't just the Magic's best three point shooter, he was one of the best in the league -- 42% from three point range is patently solid no matter which way you slice it, but it gets even more ridiculous when you realize Redick took 46% of his shots from three -- in essence, he always took threes, opposing teams knew this and guarded him like it, and Redick still made a phenomenal mark on them. Excellent work from the guy, although (just as with Matthews) someone needs to call out the fact that Redick needs to shoot more. He had more of an excuse than Matthews, since he was on a team with a few actual NBA players, but my lord. Low usage for amazing shooters bugs me sometimes. Somewhat ironically, he's not really a HUGE passing talent (above average but only just), which tends to be obscured by the fact that he always seems to develop a few exceedingly obvious pet two-man games that announcers love to point out in great detail. Last season, it was Redick to Ryan Anderson, as assists to Anderson baskets made up almost a third of Redick's total assists. In 2011 it was "whoever plays center", as Bass and Howard combined for almost 40% of his assists. You get the drift. The one nice thing about Redick's passing is that his handle is relatively pure -- a team can deal with Redick handling the ball without the team falling apart at the seams, as he's not one to make a ton of stupid turnovers in pursuit of a pass that isn't really there. Still, he's more of a pass-before-the-pass kind of guy, and not the most creative passer on the face of the planet. Alack.

One place where Redick may still be a bit underheralded is his defense, which has been a legitimate asset for almost 4 years now. He's much like Wesley Matthews on that end -- not quite good enough to be considered a wing stopper, but he plays a consistent and solid style that's not going to wear down anytime soon and provides a legitimate asset to a team's perimeter defense. One thing that always bugged me about the usual "Dwight Howard dragged a bunch of nobodies to defensive brilliance" meme was that it never quite accounted for this -- Redick is a legitimate asset defensively, and under Van Gundy, most of the perimeter pieces were excellent at rotating and cutting off space. Yes, I know -- you can construct the argument that they only had the levity to do that because they had the confidence Dwight would cordon off the rim. I get that. But look at the Lakers' attempts to do the same thing -- part of it is Dwight, but part of it is simply that the Magic perimeter defenders weren't as bad as people liked to gripe. Redick is a legitimate asset, Richardson wasn't easy to get around, Carter was on-and-off but tended to be fine, and the only real position of defensive weakness to the Magic's perimeter attack tended to be the point guard. Which, it should be noted, simply doesn't matter very much -- in the wreckage of the hand-check, NO point guard can guard point guards. Dissing the Magic's perimeter defense on the basis that the point guard can't defend is silly, because you can diss virtually every defense in the league by this metric. And watching as Los Angeles struggles to put together its own perimeter defense with Dwight behind them and a few solid pieces (Kobe, Artest) to boot has been a bit validating to what I've always thought has been a substantially unfair characterization of the Magic's efforts.

As for off-the-court, you can't knock the man's work ethic. In a somewhat underreported fact, over the last 3 years, Redick has been the single best-conditioned member of the Magic in virtually every internal team competition -- strength training, endurance, et cetera. When he came into the league, he was an absolute twig, but he didn't let that stop him from grinding it out and getting better at it. He rates highly in the "players who got my ex-girlfriend to swoon" category, being one of only 2 or 3 guys in that category at all (other members of this exclusive group: George Hill, Ricky Rubio). So, he's clearly pretty attractive, right? I don't really know how to gauge these things but I'm going to assume he is. Heck, even my friend Brian wants to (direct quote) "suck his anything", which sounds awfully crass but supportive of my girlfriend's general attraction, although I am 100% positive it isn't a sexual love, because Brian is married and OH hello there Brian's wife how are you doing today YEP I'M GOOD I hope you are OK please enjoy your stay at the capsules and no Ma'am Brian isn't propositioning J.J. Redick do not worry. Phew. Finally, let no man tear asunder this the bonds that tie Redick to this poem, a sample of J.J. Redick's attempts at poetry when he was a student at Duke University.

No bandage can cover my scars
It's hard living a life behind invisible bars
Searching for the face of God
I'm only inspired by the poems of Nas
Because the truth has carved my life's patterns
The reality of pain, and the joy of laughter
My hopes and dreams shattered
by the miscalculation of my own situation

Brings a tear to my eye. Laughter, maybe, but a tear all the same.

• • •

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 wul.f, Matt L, and__ @MillerNBA__ for their almost perfunctory 3/3 guesses. Gonna put me out of business, those guys.

• Player #328 looked like a likely candidate to be completely out of the league multiple times in the last few years, through no fault of his own. Injuries suck. But he's recouped, a bit, and playing a decent role for a surprising team. Good for him.

• Player #329 looked like a likely candidate to get a max contract as a rookie. Then he had disappointing year after disappointing year, to the point that he signed a one year deal last year in the contract year that he was supposed to deserve a max in, long ago. He might just be playing his way into that kind of a contract, tho.

• Player #330 is one of my favorites. Which makes his current fall from grace all the more jarring and sad to me. It wasn't supposed to be like this. It SHOULDN'T be like this. Not with his talent.

That's a wrap. Enjoy your weekend. Mine's chock full of exciting things to do. Hope yours is too. Adieu.

• • •

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 summer dies down and the leaves turn, this quixotic quest of a series has happily reached the last third. But it's certainly not done yet! Today we continue with Sundiata Gaines, Marcus Thornton, and Martell Webster.

• • •

Follow Sundiata Gaines, because he looks like a stock car.

I readily admit that I've personally taken a mildly selfish interest in Gaines' career-to-date. I've been interested in how he's faring ever since he broke the hearts of Cavs fans everywhere during that one incredible moment from the 2010 NBA season. Not entirely out of regard for Gaines as a player or person, no -- he's a compelling story, no doubt, but I wasn't all that intensely interested in that. I simply wanted him to turn out well so it would validate that Utah/Cleveland game winning shot going forward. You know, make future NBA fans think "oh, yeah, Sundiata Gaines! The second best player of his era, of course he'd upset LeBron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers. Of course." ... Alright, that was probably an unreasonable expectation. But you know what I mean, right? I feel like this is a relatively ubiquitous feeling among sports fan. This odd desire to see a bad team that beat you -- or a subpar player that beat you -- succeed solely to justify the loss you've suffered. When your guys lose to the worst team in the NBA, you want that team to go on a 2-3 game winning streak so you can say you lost to an "upstart" team thatreally is playing their best ball of the season, come ON guys, it's NOT A BAD LOSS! Et cetera, et cetera. Natural result of being a fan and all.

Anyway. Point is, I've followed Gaines more than I follow the normal NBA player, primarily by dint of that curious need for validation as a sports fan. It's sort of absurd that I of all people still experience this itch, because I'm a professional statistician. I understand intuitively the randomness of the NBA, and on a mental level, I don't usually get caught up in the vagaries of complete randomness in any other sphere of life. But a player's one good game out of 100 or the one time an impossible shot goes in? I'm ruined. Just brutal stuff. As for Gaines in the time since that shot, he's been a mixed bag. He spent the 2011 season bouncing from franchise to franchise, with few realizing that he ended up playing time for three teams during the season, getting waived by two -- the Wolves, the Raptors, and the Nets. He finally stuck in New Jersey, whether because he fit with Avery Johnson's coaching style or a fit with Deron Williams or who-really-knows. Last season he put up relatively decent numbers in New Jersey for a backup guard, and earned enough trust that he played his way into over 80% of the Nets' games and put up a cool 14 minutes a contest besides. His scoring efficiency was about as dismal as one could possibly expect -- about average from three point range, for a point guard, and grotesquely low percentages from every other range of the floor. His free throw shooting in particular boggles the mind -- a stocky 6'1" guard should be able to do better than low-60% from the line. He just should. It's actually funny, because he drew quite a few trips to the line and rated as one of the best guards in the league from a "FTA/FGA" perspective. If he was a good free throw shooter, that skill could've added 2-3 points to his total a night. But alas.

The Pacers made a decently large deal about signing Sundiata Gaines during the offseason, hoping that Gaines and Augustin would put together a good enough season that they'd fill in everything Darren Collison brought the Pacers on a lower contract and a lesser investment. Things didn't quite shake out that way -- Augustin has been an abject horror with the Pacers, and Gaines was rather inexplicably waived before the season. Instead of waiting around for another NBA contract that might not come, Gaines decided to throw up a middle finger and sign in China. Out of all the places a player could sign overseas, China has always been one of the more restrictive ones -- it's a nice guarantee of a salary marginally higher than you could get in Europe, but if you want to get back to the NBA, you need to wait for the CBA playoffs to finish, and if you can get into an NBA team you've only got a few weeks until the season's over anyway. Still, I like the move for Gaines. He's clearly at that crossroads where he's not quite good enough for an NBA rotation but not nearly bad enough to retire from the game. If he puts up a solid season for his current team (the currently 3-1 Fujian SBC Sturgeons, which is a hilarious team name), he could garner a bit of NBA interest next season and play a potentially larger role. And if not? He's got a good setup with a profitable overseas game. Seems like a win-win, although I'm sad we don't get to see him for a while. I don't have much more to say about Gaines. In the LeBron capsule, I wrote of the moment Gaines sunk the shot to help frame the whole story. Here's the link, if the reminder makes you itch for it.

• • •

_Follow Marcus Thornton on Twitter at __@OfficialMT23.___

There are exactly two things that Marcus Thornton does well. He scores well and he doesn't turn the ball over much. That's basically it. Thornton is a bit of a machine when it comes to scoring -- his percentages as a shooter won't wow you, necessarily (34.5% from three is decent if-not-great and his midrange numbers are quite pedestrian), but you can't really mention his offense without noting with relish the fact that Thornton takes a seriously hilarious number of shots off the dribble or in relatively contested territory. The man has a Bryant-esque adherence to taking the tougher shot when a simple shot would do the job. Much like the Kings team itself, it has to be a bit frustrating for Kings fans. It's nice to see that Thornton has the confidence to take the shots, but there's_ got_ to be a serious case of "NO NO NO okay fine"-type rumblings at Sacramento bars every single time he gets the ball. The knock on Thornton is as I mentioned earlier -- the man can score and he doesn't cough the ball up much, and that's just about it.

He ranked as one of the highest points-per-minutes guards of any kind last season, which is nice -- he also ranked in the bottom 25% of all guards in both assist rate and assist-to-turnover ratio, which is even more impressive given how rarely he turned the ball over (per-possession, at least). He was a poor shot blocker (obviously, he's 6'4"), he drew fewer fouls than his adherents would've hoped, and he's a surprisingly poor rebounder. Which surprises many. But one thing you need to understand about his numbers -- the Kings played a DRAMATICALLY faster pace with Thornton on the floor, posting 6-7 more possessions (pro-rated over a full game's time) with Thornton on the court than with Thornton off. His numbers all rate out relatively high among his peers because of it (his rebounding in particular is top-5 among guards), but if you adjust out the pace difference and examine his per-possession statistics, he's a relatively poor rebounder who's decent on the offensive glass but absolutely dismal on the defensive glass. He also is, as I noted, a very low turnover player -- the 1.6 turnover per game average is another ill product of the pace the Kings played with him on the court more than a true reflection of his ball control. Defensively he's a nonentity, but the man's scoring skill and general control over what he's doing would stand to reason that

One last observation. I could be totally off the mark here, but I noticed something while doing my Thornton scouting last night. Is it just me, or do the Kings have a really permissive statkeeper? I was watching some of Thornton's assisted shots, as I was somewhat surprised at his being assisted on 60% of his shots last season -- that didn't seem intuitive to me and I felt that was a really high number, as that's around the average for NBA shooting guards and he always seemed like a very focused off-the-dribble player. He creates a LOT of his own offense, you know? So I started looking at buckets he'd been theoretically "assisted" on. And you know what? More often than most, he'd take 2 or 3 dribbles and create a completely different shot, only to have it still count as an "assist" for another player by the Sacramento scorekeeper. This is hardly some crazy sin or anything -- statkeepers everywhere do it all the time. But I found this a somewhat exceptional case, because it seemed significantly more obvious here than it does for most teams (other than perhaps Boston and New Orleans, both of whom are notorious for it). The Kings are traditionally a poor passing team, and last year, they went 26th overall in the league with 1271 assists. Is it possible that the Kings have been so bad at setting up legitimate shots in recent years that their statkeeper decided to lower the bar on assists, for at least a year? Seriously -- go watch some of Thornton's assisted shots on Synergy. I may be seeing things. I probably am. But I feel like this is sort of darkly humorous caption to the 2012 Kings season, if it's really a thing.

• • •

_Follow Martell Webster on Twitter at __@MartellWebster.___

Last season wasn't a great one for poor Martell Webster, who had another injury-riddled season in a career replete with them. His three point stroke comes and goes with more randomness than you tend to see in a player (he's a career 37% shooter, with single season numbers wobbling between 42% and 33% depending on god-knows-what), and while he's a decent defender by the eye test he's nothing spectacular. He turns the ball over quite a lot relative to most guards, and didn't fix that with a lot of tertiary accomplishments. Poor rebounder for his size, poor passer, low-usage player who gives no guarantees of efficiency despite the low usage, et cetera. He's been very solid this season for the Wizards, and one of the one or two bright spots on a team that's been relatively absent them. The positive aspects of the current Wizards season can essentially be summed down to "beating the Heat", Martell Webster's minor renaissance, and Jordan Crawford's development. That's about it so far.

Off the court, Webster seems like a pretty great guy, enough so that it's not really fair to assess him solely on his injury-riddled and occasionally lacking game. Blazers fans who watched him tend to root pretty hard for him, and in a general sense, the most adamant fans of the teams that Webster plays with love him. The more you see Webster in interviews and learn about him, the more you realize why this is and like/root for him yourself. I recommend checking out this great interview between Webster and Kyle Weidie at Truth About It. He's mainly just talking about his role on the team and some exactitudes of a close loss against a good team, but he also drops some nice quotes, like a bomb late in the video where Weidie asks if Webster would be a good coach only to elicit a stunned, chuckling response of “No! ... I have three kids, man, I’m already a coach. Coaching a whole bunch of knuckleheads… can’t do it. I can’t do it.” Valid point. And well-stated. He generally spends the interview being respectful, talking about the importance of working for his role, and spilling some good points about strategy and general approach to changing the pace of an offense. It's a great watch.

Really, I don't know how best to describe Webster. You could call him a "bust", strictly going on his production (which has been lacking for a lottery pick, it should be said), but that doesn't really sit well with me. Mostly because he's an inspiring enough human being that distilling him down to his game being less-than-exceptional is necessarily reductive and depressing. The guy has been through things most people never even imagine -- his father abandoned his family before he was born, and his mother went missing when he was only 4 years old. Many theorize she was murdered by one of Washington's most historically prolific serial killers, and her body has never been found. Being able to overcome something like that shows strength enough -- his ability to overcome ADD as a youth and find the strength to reject a medication that changed him as a person in favor of a harder road to find his true self is inspiring. His love for his coaches, the game, and his teammates is unparalleled, and it's hard to find a guy who works harder. Does that mean he's a great NBA player? No. But it DOES mean he's one of the better people in a league with a lot of great ones, and it does make him worthy of your respect.

Also, there's this story, which honestly never fails to crack me up.

• • •

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. Everyone got 2/3 yesterday, probably owing to just how obtuse the Sundiata Gaines riddle was. But props to wul.f, Matt L, Alex, and Booze__Cruise.

• Player #325 was one of my favorite players the second I saw him suit up for my college. That's right, folks -- I'm a Player #325 hipster. I liked him before it was popular, damnit! Will be a Capsule Plus... if I get off work on time today, that is.

• Player #326 is one of the only real NBA-caliber players on a team with few. He's acquitted himself relatively well -- great three point shooter, very low turnover player, decently efficient. Doesn't really do anything else, but I mean, he IS a shooting guard.

• Player #327 looked, at first, like he'd be a sweet-shooting three point gunner with no other discernible skills when he entered the game. He's put a lot of work on his game, though, and his passing and defense are both high quality now.

Just realized I'm down to the last 40-something. The homiest of home stretches, here. Until next time.

• • •

Continue reading

War does not require bombshells and brigadiers. It does not require bloodshed and hardship. War requires a single thing -- conflict. Overwhelming conflict, traditionally between two large bodies composed of untold masses of souls lining up obediently for the cause. That's all. We don't need two large bodies to have a war. All we really need is a single large body and a small group of rebelling forces with enough pesky guile to incite the larger body to make war. That's it. Perhaps you'd think this new type of war implies a recent phenomenon. One that rose with the advent of terrorism, small cell resistance groups, weapons of mass destruction.

That would be wrong. It's not new at all.

Warfare of the second type -- a large body against a smaller, self-sufficient group -- has always been a factor in society, and always will be. And not in the way you think. Weapons of mass destruction have always been ambling about -- the nuclear bomb is the belated antecedent of weaponized knowledge. Destruction can be wrought from grim dictate of the pen and the rogue idea, in the hands of a brutal tyrant or a careless fool. The biological weapon is a diseased form of an idealist's contagion. The terrorist is the next step in the artist who uses their words to incite fear and loathing among the sycophants who follow. These weapons began with the advent of independent thought. Their rule can be cruel and unusual. The tyranny of a good idea can -- and has -- ruled the world in its history. More than any one man could ever hope to achieve.

• • •

Kobe Bryant elicits fundamentally intense reactions. There's disgust from some -- the echos of scandal and a controversial style loom over his game, and detract from his brilliance among that faction. There's devotion from others -- the style that others so hate endears him to many in an overwhelming fashion. It's a rare few who watches Kobe Bryant and thinks "oh, that's neat, I can take it or leave it though." There's a core challenge to the fan in Bryant's play. A challenge to accept, to understand, to love despite his faults.

And faults? They're there, whether the devotees like to admit it or not. Becoming a devoted fan of Kobe Bryant necessitates becoming a devoted fan of a man who -- despite being one of the most gifted passers of his generation -- simply doesn't pass very often. Becoming a devoted fan of a player whose defensive effort waxes and wanes from an all-defensive peak to a ridiculously low-effort fluff on 90% of the possessions of a season. Becoming a devoted fan of a player who, inevitably, will make life a bit harder for himself every few possessions solely in the name of style.

In a vacuum, these are all things we learn to hate in other players. We learn to dislike the passers who keep avoiding their talent. We learn to dislike the players whose defense yo-yos through incredible highs and impossible lows. We learn to throw up our hands and yell at the player who takes the awful shot when there's an easy shot seconds away. But there's an element of self-respect and self-awareness in Kobe Bryant, in his most quiet moments. This is a man who rates out as one of the most knowledgable basketball scholars of his generation. He's studied the annals of the game, the breaks of history. He understands that he makes the game a bit harder for himself. Internalizes it. He knows that he often does things inexplicable at best and actively harmful at worst. Things that increase the difficulty of his road, or might make the team worse.

And -- surprise, surprise -- he doesn't care. In fact, he scoffs in the face of the people who do. Because much like Manu Ginobili can make his aesthetic keynote a fundamentally inconceivable three point shot, Kobe Bryant makes his aesthetic keynote the imposition of impossibility in any possession he can safely manage it. What should be a simple dish through the double team to Gasol becomes a double teamed bicycle shot. "And-1! And the foul?!" What should be a simple case of rotating on the help for some becomes a dread steal, with Bryant refusing to give an inch edgewise and refusing to let his prey escape the tendrils of his pressure defense. What should be a simple play in most playbooks becomes a one-on-five as his teammates turn to stone and Bryant takes a few pretty dribbles and hoists up a terribly ill-conceived high-arcing shot as time expires.

Swish. The crowd goes crazy.

• • •

Mikhail Bulgakov was a very good writer.

Mikhail Bulgakov wrote plays, novels, and vignettes. No piece better represents the stark way Bulgakov's own nature challenged the world around him as his early-career short novel, Heart of a Dog. In it, a mad scientist takes a dog off the street and transplants into the beast the spleen and reproductive organs of a man, causing the dog to transform inexplicably into a disturbing half-man with a nose for the grotesque and horrifying. When stated like that, it sounds like a silly romp through a now-worn science fiction premise. In execution, it was far more. The book was an examination of the ethical difficulties of enforced transformation, and a reflection of the Soviet's attempts to fundamentally change the Russian people to a nation of communist principle and moral.

Mikhail Bulgakov was fond of the story-within-a-story critical piece, even when it ruined all chance of his work seeing the light of day. Bulgakov wrote dozens of plays that were banned for production in Russia for his entire life. The aforementioned Heart of a Dog wasn't published in Russia until well after his death. His masterpiece -- The Master and Margarita -- was a vicious critique of the Soviet literary establishment baked within a masterwork of a two-frame story and high philosophical questions about life, art, and the general state of man. Writing his masterpiece took an incredible toll on Bulgakov, and realizing the dismal chances he would ever see his life's work published sent Bulgakov tumbling into depression and agony. His inability to get his grandest work published destroyed his health and placed the artist on death's door. Not less than a year after the completion of his manuscript, Bulgakov died.

Mikhail Bulgakov was a casualty of two wars. One was the first world war, where he served as a front-line surgeon and suffered several terrifying injuries that caused him to become hopelessly addicted to morphine for much of his life. The second was a war of ideas, a war balancing Bulgakov's harsh critique of the Soviet establishment against the establishment's disgust towards any and all criticism. There was a distinct irony in the way Bulgakov's work was treated -- Stalin himself was a noted admirer of Bulgakov's. But powerful men like Stalin never quite realize that ideas are bigger than any one man, even one as important as Stalin. Bulgakov's work continued to elicit censures and suppression throughout his life, despite Stalin's general appreciation for his work, with lower level communist officials continually rejecting his attempts to publish until finally levying a full-scale ban on the publication or dispersal of any and all work produced by Bulgakov in 1929, and maintaining it well beyond his death despite his pleas. Bulgakov continued to write, and to bury pieces he could never publish in a drawer he'd never return to. The man knew no fear. Unfortunately for the world, he also knew nothing of old age.

Mikhail Bulgakov died at age 48, a tragic victim of a silent war.

• • •

"Il Fait à présent la Pluie et le beau temps." *

To some, basketball is a game. To Kobe Bryant, basketball is a war.

But here's where things get tricky. It's not a traditional war, as earlier described -- it's not some large-scale conflict between two teams as masses. That's an average basketball game, a brightly colored facsimile of a two-country war as played on a comically abstract field of battle. Kobe Bryant's approach to the game is different -- far before any pretense of the team or the franchise, his war is personal. Kobe vs the machine. Armies lined up to face down the barrel of Bryant's long gun. One versus many.

Bryant's war is one man taking on an entire defense, dozens of possessions a game. Few stars are as good at Kobe Bryant at simply taking ownership of a rogue possession -- turning, for one stirring moment, the game of basketball into a vicious 1-on-5 cage match. If you're one of the people who wonder aloud why Kobe Bryant elicits such stirring praise from his comrades in arms, or why Kobe Bryant is considered one of the best to play the game? Watch how he commands the audience's attention. Watch how he molds and shapes context around the vagaries of his goals and desires. Some stars shoot, over and over again. They'll hog the ball, play some hero-ball, refuse to work in the team concept. Bryant approaches it in a similar way. He wages war on the opposing team, hoping his own overwhelming force will be enough to guide his team through.

This all is_ described_ in a similar way as the hero-balling star, but that doesn't mean it's the same. It's not. The casual star molds their style to fit the game -- Kobe Bryant molds the game to fit the style. He's a showman with a command of his craft so effective that most who watch him can't help but revise their entire idea of what a star should do to follow Kobe's example. Understanding what makes one a fan of Kobe requires understanding the way his game depends on the viewer buying in to his dictate. It requires the viewer to see him take over a game and begin to fundamentally enjoy the takeover more than you would have enjoyed a series of expert shots from his supporting cast. Abandoning, at least temporarily, the idealization of teamwork and taking as your dictate exaltation of the individual. Better than anyone in the game right now, Bryant turns the game into a manifesto, a personal statement. Like Iverson, Jordan, Arenas at his peak.

He takes a game of many and produces a game of one. That's his gift.

* - "He runs the whole show, now."

• • •

There's exactly one person in the game today who reminds me of Kobe Bryant. Not a player, an official, an owner or a fan. It's the man who redefines coaching and changes the meta-game for those around him. It's the man whose machinations often cause the fans to throw their hands up in confusion and anger, whose adherence to the long game can make his individual actions immaterial or confusing. It's a man who -- above all else -- acts like a tremendous jerk and gets away with it on a daily basis simply by dint of his incredible talent and his tendency to change the game.

Gregg Popovich, that is.

There's a certain allure Popovich holds beyond his already considerable coaching talent. And it's exactly what makes Bulgakov and Bryant enduring as personal figures. They find themselves thwarted, at times -- by reason, by logic, by the fact that they're simply trying to fight a personal war too vast for one man. Kobe Bryant, for all his successes, has a lot of incredible failures where he shouldn't have flown solo or alienated his teammates with inexplicable jesting and harshness. Gregg Popovich, for all his titles and talents, has lost the Spurs numerous games stubbornly fixating on crazy tics like small-ball or Blair/Bonner, and he's gotten the franchise fined on multiple occasions on sole account of unnecessary rank churlishness. Mikhail Bulgakov, despite being by far the best Russian writer of his particular era, was unable to parlay his brilliance into any tangible recognition or praise simply because he refused to play the game in the way the Soviet censors wanted the game to be played.

In the final estimation, Popovich is among of the greatest coaches of all time -- and in my book, the greatest -- not for his coarseness and brackishness, but not despite it either. Will Pop's surly answers be entombed in the hall of fame, for all to remember? Probably not. But they will mark the memories of those who remember him, and they will form the first two or three stories that old hands will tell when the children of tomorrow ask what was so special about Popovich. When Bryant is enshrined in the Hall of Fame, the same applies. Bryant's hall of fame career will demand mention of his titles, his scoring, his will to win. All that fun stuff. But the first story old hands tell won't be that of Kobe's 81 point game, but that of his style. His absurdist 1-on-5 fixation that killed the Lakers as often as it helped them. The complexity of a man's failures is as key to their own greatness as the actions that make one great in the first place. Both Popovich and Bryant exemplify that.

Bulgakov once wrote -- semi-prophetically -- that "manuscripts don't burn." He was right. Although he himself once burnt The Master and Margarita in an effort to rid himself of it, he rewrote the book from memory. The ideas and theories underlying Bulgakov's brilliance were too overwhelming to prevent its eventual release, even by his own hand. His work was too good to sit in a musty drawer for the rest of his natural life. Bryant and Popovich -- luckily, for their devotees -- are not faced with the same restrictions. They do not have to file away their brilliance in a drawer and hope that someday an ex-wife will push it to publication. Popovich gets fined, not jailed. Bryant gets criticized, not silenced. Both will leave the league, someday -- and their remembrance will be vast, a multifaceted tapestry of accomplishment and challenge, of brilliance and mistakes, of obvious greatness and obvious prickishness. There will be complicated memories for complicated men, and stories to tell until the young get bored to hear them.

Manuscripts don't burn. And neither do legacies -- those that really make a man, at least.

• • •

• For more capsules on members of the Los Angeles Lakers, visit the Lakers Capsule Directory •

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 summer dies down and the leaves turn, this quixotic quest of a series has happily reached the last third. But it's certainly not done yet! Today we continue with Mike Dunleavy, Rip Hamilton, and Kobe Bryant.

• • •

Follow Mike Dunleavy by going to Duke. ... Actually, don't__.__

Mike Dunleavy is one of the quietly effective NBA players you might miss if you aren't paying attention. You might be shocked to know that with the sole exception of his 3-9 foot floater (in roughly the 60th percentile), Dunleavy shoots in the top 25% of wing players from every single range on the floor. He converted 67% at the rim, 46% from midrange, 44% from the long two, and an absolutely blistering 40% from three last season. All extremely good. He compounded that by making over 80% of his free throws and getting to the line 2.6 times a game, slightly above the average for wing players. He produced 1.08 points per possession for last year's Bucks, and despite the Bucks' relatively shaky offense for much of the year, ended up with efficiency numbers that would indicate he's one of the top offensive players in the game. Unfortunately, that isn't quite accurate -- late-career Dunleavy's always been a bit too passive of a player on offense, and that was true again last season as he posted a usage percentage of just 19%, well below average. He also was a well-below-average rebounder, hurting his team on the glass without providing the extra box-out advantages you'd get from a player like Epke Udoh.

Still, the man's effective. He gets most of his offense as a catch-and-shoot option, floating around the court on offense in an effort to space the floor as a threat. The vast majority of Dunleavy's shots are assisted -- last year, for instance, he was assisted on a startlingly high 83% of his shots taken. But that's by design. Few plays are ran specifically for Dunleavy, he's just employed as a useful and efficient option that can get his shot off despite a strong close-out and makes any open shot the opposing defense gives him from virtually anywhere. I'm rather undecided as to whether Skiles has been using him entirely correctly or not -- while he's been better with Skiles than he was in his last few seasons with Indiana, when a player is as efficient and effective as Dunleavy was last season for an offense that (prior to the Ellis trade) was about as dismal and low-down as you can get, I think it's generally a coach's responsibility to run more plays for the one efficient mainstay. You may harm the player's overall efficiency, but a slightly less efficient Dunleavy shot was a lot better than yet another awful Drew Gooden 20 foot brick, right? I also understand that Dunleavy isn't a good defender (he's pretty awful), but it's not like you're subbing him out with Mbah a Moute -- Dunleavy and Delfino tended to play the large wing spot in Milwaukee last year, and Delfino was just about as awful defensively as Dunleavy is, if not a slight bit worse. But when your offense is your main problem, getting minutes for guys like Dunleavy becomes key.

As for aesthetics, I can't really speak to ever waking up in the morning and really feeling like I needed to watch Mike Dunleavy. I can't exactly speak to assertions of creative brilliance on Dunleavy's part -- he's not some modernized basketball Picasso. He's the efficient, tedious, and not particularly groundbreaking. An efficient shooter with a nice catch-and-shoot game who defends sparingly and has a famous dad. Maybe I've just written too much of these by now, but it's hard to get too excited about that, although I certainly see his value in the league. The last notable thing that comes to mind, to me, is his face -- I can't be the only person who's spent much of Dunleavy's career having nightmares about his strangely proportioned, oddly structured face... right? Once, when I was a wee lad (read: 21 years old, less than a year ago) I had a dream where I woke up with Mike Dunleavy's face. No, I'm serious, stop laughing at me. It was like Face-Off, except terrifying and all-too-real. I got fired from my job and had to get a job in a traveling circus. I became a supervillain, intent on exacting revenge on Mike Dunleavy (senior) for bringing into this world such a cursed face. I woke up before I could do that, but trust me, it was going to happen. It's not even like Dunleavy's really ugly -- I'm sure there are people out there who find him quite attractive. There's just some aspect about his face that seriously upsets my sensibilities. Any thoughts on what it might be? (Not a rhetorical question. Legitimately curious.)

• • •

_Follow Rip Hamilton on Twitter at __@ripcityhamilton.___

I understand why a lot of people saw Richard Hamilton as a disappointment last season. Really. The old hand was relatively productive when he played, but it was rare he saw the court -- injuries limited him to just 25 minutes per game (in only 28 uninjured games), and unfortunately for Hamilton, the time he spent on the court didn't often overlap with the time Derrick Rose and Joakim Noah saw the court. Per our friends at Basketball Prospectus, in games where the Bulls played their full starting lineup (Rose-Hamilton-Deng-Boozer-Noah), the Bulls went 14-2. Hamilton helped open the floor and take some of the pressure off Rose (as expected) and was slightly more efficient as a shooter than he'd recently been in Detroit (as expected). Unexpectedly, his free throw rate tanked into absolute nothingness and his defense (which was good enough in Detroit alongside middling-to-poor defenders at every surrounding position) became a slight problem-spot on a team that was backing him up with crack defenders like Butler, Brewer, and Watson. Guard-heavy teams tried to abuse Hamilton, as he was regularly the worst defender on the court. For the most part, they succeeded. Which helped keep his minutes down as well.

On the other hand, I think it's important to emphasize that first thing, because it gets lost in most of the retrospectives on his 2012 season: he was productive when he played. Maybe not in the most efficient ways he possibly could've been, but he certainly wasn't bad. I've heard a lot of frustrated people talk about how Hamilton has been a monumental failure in Chicago, or the worst of all possible players. Hamilton was never going to give Chicago exactly what they needed -- he's always been more of a long-two than a three point guy, and his passing and rebounding were both a bit disappointing relative to what was expected of him with a roster like Chicago's around him. But his shooting was far, far better than Chicago had any reason to expect, and the free throw woes were partly caused by the fact that he simply didn't have as much reason to handle the ball as an injured cog when Rose was on the court and when Noah and Deng were rolling. Hamilton is great at drawing free throws when he drives it and when he creates off the dribble -- he's considerably less great at it when he's primarily being employed as an off-ball catch-and-shoot guy in a motion offense. When a role changes, sometimes you lose the skills that made you a star. It happens. He shot as well as could be expected, he was OK defensively, and he didn't show an incredible amount of falloff despite being a creaky 33 year old. He needs to get healthy, obviously, but he did about as well as could've been expected.

Which is actually exactly the problem. Hamilton represents, in perhaps the most obvious form, the big problem with the last few years of decisions by the Bulls management. The Bulls have taken what looked like a relatively young, vigorous roster around Derrick Rose back in 2010 and turned it into something of a retirement home beyond their core four. Other than Rose, the only three important members of Chicago's cast under the age of 30 are Deng, Noah, and Gibson. Deng is far older than his calendar age in NBA mileage due to the insane amount of minutes and overwork Thibodeau (and Del Negro as well) placed upon his shoulders. Gibson is young in minutes but old in years. Noah's great, and the four of them make a considerably great core when they're all healthy. But when you're looking at a four-man core like that, you don't really want to surround them with brittle old men. But that's exactly what Chicago's done. Kirk Hinrich, Rip Hamilton, Carlos Boozer, Nazr Mohammad -- the Bulls have dropped quality young players (C.J. Watson, Ronnie Brewer, James Johnson, Omer Asik) in pursuit of these old hands, and the net result are a bunch of moves that have been marginal upgrades at best. At worst, they're overpriced low-level moves that barely move the needle on the Bulls as a title contender, cut off opportunities for the franchise to keep their young talent, and plug in low-upside filler that costs more than they should to replace actual young talent that may someday deserve the money. It's ridiculous. I'm hoping that the Bulls make some serious moves this offseason to vacate the old and overpriced vets in favor of a serious infusion of youth. I'm not positive this is going to happen, and in fact, I'm pretty sure it won't. But we can hope, can't we?

(Also, as an aside: this concludes all of our Chicago Bulls capsules. Adios, Chicago!)

• • •

Follow Kobe Bryant into the tides of fate. You're in God's hands now, friend.

Went in an odd direction for this one. Do I ever go in any other, though?

Kobe Bryant elicits fundamentally intense reactions. There's disgust from some -- the echos of scandal and a controversial style loom over his game, and detract from his brilliance among that faction. There's devotion from others -- the style that others so hate endears him to many in such an overwhelming fashion. It's a rare few who watches Kobe Bryant and thinks "oh, that's neat, I can take it or leave it though." There's a core challenge to the fan in Bryant's play. A challenge to accept, to understand, to love despite his faults.

And faults? They're there, whether the devotees like to admit it or not. Becoming a devoted fan of Kobe Bryant necessitates becoming a devoted fan of a man who -- despite being one of the most gifted passers of his generation -- simply doesn't pass very often. Becoming a devoted fan of a player whose defensive effort waxes and wanes from an all-defensive peak production to ridiculously low effort-level performances on 90% of the possessions of a season. Becoming a devoted fan of a player who, inevitably, will make life a bit harder for himself every few possessions solely in the name of style.

In a vacuum, these are all things we learn to hate in other players. We learn to dislike the passers who keep avoiding their talent. We learn to dislike the players whose defense yo-yos through incredible highs and impossible lows. We learn to throw up our hands and yell at the player who takes the awful shot when there's an easy shot seconds away. But there's an element of self-respect and self-awareness in Kobe Bryant, in his most quiet moments. This is a man who rates out as one of the most knowledgable basketball scholars of his generation. He's studied the annals of the game, the breaks of history. He understands that he makes the game a bit harder for himself. Internalizes it. He knows that he often does things inexplicable at best and actively harmful at worst. Things that increase the difficulty of his road, or might make the team worse.

And -- surprise, surprise -- he doesn't care.

For more on Kobe Bryant, see his Player Capsule (Plus).

• • •

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. Just about everyone got last night's set correctly. Time to capriciously up the difficulty again. Jerico, Utsav, Booze_Cruise (sounds like my weekends), J, and Mike L all got it right, although I'm being nice and assuming the first three meant Dunleavy Jr. If they meant Dunleavy Sr., as Mike L aptly pointed out, none of them deserve shout-outs. Technicalities!

• Player #322 broke my heart, once. But it's okay. Now I just hope he stays in the league.

• Player #323 is better than most people think, but not as good as he thinks. And I have trouble seeing him as a star in this league. He could be good, though, if he gets out of that toxic California morass and makes a team that needs his scoring.

• Player #324, on the other hand, was amnestied for a reason. He's fallen off to absurd levels, as of late. But he's somehow putting up halfway decent numbers for his currently dismal team, and if it continues, he may stay in the league a little while longer. Recently lost his car keys and slept in his car for a night, in a nationally reported story that has yet to make sense to me.

Tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow.

• • •

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 summer dies down and the leaves turn, this quixotic quest of a series has happily reached the last third. But it's certainly not done yet! Today we continue with Tyreke Evans, Tony Allen, and Nicolas Batum.

• • •

_Follow Tyreke Evans on Twitter at __@TyrekeEvans.___

It's really hard to figure out what happened to -- and what SHOULD happen to -- Tyreke Evans going forward. Do you remember his rookie year? There were so many things he did well. So many things! Most notable, to me, was his rookie defense. Yes, his defense. While he wasn't the most effective by the numbers, he was a pretty fun defender to watch back in the day. He looked to me like a potentially great defender his rookie year -- he had a certain amount of swagger to his isolation defensive game, and it portended (to me) flashes of a possible stopper-quality defensive talent down the line. Didn't turn out that way, at least not yet, and that's primarily because his defense has become extremely easy to scout. That intensity, that tenacity, that strong isolation coverage? All of that's pretty darn useless if you don't fight over screens, and chief among all of Tyreke's defensive flaws is his dogged insistence on going under screens and letting his man loose instead of fighting over it and sticking to the man. If Tyreke is dogging a player, all a team really needs to do at this point is set a series of screens. Tyreke will get hopelessly lost, his man will score, and he'll slump his shoulders and try again next time. Only to fare badly on the screen and let his man score again. It's kind of a vicious cycle, when your skills are so easy to thwart on the defensive end.

Offensively, things are more confusing. Evans has never been a particularly impressive presence on the offensive end, even going back to his red hot rookie year. There was never any real outside shot to speak of -- even as a rookie, the man shot only 31% on jump shots, including a dismal 25% from three. That decreased to 30% as a sophomore and 26% as a junior. For Evans to really shine as an offensive player, that has to improve -- if not by improving his actual jump shot (something I'm 90% sure would happen if he had a legitimate shooting coach -- Chip Engelland, anyone?) then by working hard on a floater or a jump hook and really incorporating that into his game. As it stands, the Tyreke Evans scouting report is about as simplistic as you can get. "Pack the paint, let him shoot from 10-25 feet. He'll miss. Badly." And why not let him shoot it? As a rookie, Evans dove into the teeth of defenses and racked up fouls by the bushel. By dissuading him from doing that, not only have teams effectively neutralized his greatest offensive threat, they've also kept themselves out of foul trouble and kept Tyreke from getting to the line. Which was actually the main place Tyreke's superstar scoring came from, his rookie year -- he had an insanely high FTA/FGA split that year, and that more than anything else was what propped up his shaky shooting into a well-rounded and dangerous offensive whole.

Other than his easy-to-scout defense and easy-to-scout offense? He has a good command of the tertiary stats -- a good assist rate (for a large wing), solid rebounding for his position, and a relatively low turnover rate despite a lot of ballhandling. But he's not great on the intangibles. He's had a lot of problems moving without the ball, though, and as aforementioned his formerly solid-looking defense has been something of a detriment recently, it's hard to really see what he's bringing you on the floor. He scores "efficiently" only insofar as he's an awesome offensive option when he gets to the rim. Anywhere outside the rim and Tyreke Evans is a jumpshooter -- and a bad one, too. Which is what led the Kings to decide against signing Evans to an extension -- he'll be a free agent after his 4th year. I can't think of it off the top of my head, but has a rookie of the year winner ever NOT been picked up to an extension by the team with his rights when the extension period comes? Some ROTY winners have been traded -- Mike Miller and Jason Kidd come to mind immediately -- but it's extremely rare that they're traded without being a key piece of the trade, and they generally get a nice extension. For Evans to not only NOT get the extension but to be going into restricted free agency is smart on the part of the Kings but crazy given his pedigree and the way things looked little more than three years ago.

All that said, I have trouble giving up on him. In fact, I really haven't. I'm of the evermore lonely belief that Evans still has quite a ways to go until he reaches his peak. Two reasons for this. One, I want to see him with an actual chance to work on his shot with a good shooting coach. He called in Keith Veney -- a famous shooting coach with an immaculate college stroke -- to help him rediscover his shooting. He responded to Veney's work by cutting off his three point shot entirely, a move that was probably for the best given his disgustingly low conversion rates from that end. It now falls on Tyreke to figure out some kind of off-ball offensive game and rework a close shot to be more accurate. How will it happen? Not really sure. Maybe Veney needs to mix things up and try different form adjustments to improve Tyreke's flagging jumper. Maybe he needs to work on his floater. Maybe Evans just needs a change of scenery. I'm really not sure. Something needs to happen, in any event. I see Tyreke's final form being something of a poor man's next Iguodala -- lower usage than he has now, a better picking-of-his-spots outside the rim, and a lot of dunks and cuts to maximize the number of times he can get to the rim and finish. More of a focus on rebounding, being a pivot in a working offense, and (of course) defense. Evans needs to take the time to learn how to handle a screen and fully internalize it. He needs to do a lot of things, but in the main, all he really needs to do is "play better." I can scream to the high heavens about the potential I continue to see in his game all I want -- if he doesn't really do much with that, it's hardly the fault of Kings fans or NBA fans to ignore him and refuse to give him notice.

• • •

_Follow Tony Allen on Twitter at __@aa000G9.___

Tony Allen is the greatest free agent signing the Memphis Grizzlies have_ ever made as a franchise_.

Alright, now that you're laughing, I'll dial back from that a tad. No, he's not their best player. He never will be. I specifically gave myself the weasel-worded "free agent signing" bit to exclude the Conley/Gasol/Randolph extensions, all of which have been arguably as important or moreso to their current success than the Allen signing. But don't sleep on the Allen signing. Really. Don't. Do you remember how much they signed Allen for? Don't look it up. Just guess. How much money does it take to lock up one of the 2 or 3 best perimeter defenders in the NBA for 3 years in the absolute prime of his career, coming off three years in a key defensive role in a defensive juggernaut? How much money does it take if you're one of the smallest markets in the NBA, with none of the built-in discounting factors of an LA, Florida, or Texas team? Have a number in your head?

If that number is more than $9.5 million for three years, you were wrong. And yes. It boggles my mind too. I realize that there were numerous reasons Allen wasn't seen as a premier free agent during the summer of 2010. There were more enticing options at the top of the ticket -- LeBron, Wade, Bosh, Dirk, et cetera. So much so that teams like Memphis found it relatively straightforward to snag bargain bin deals on pieces like Allen, whose offensive woes made him a persona non grata for the majority of the league's front offices. But that's the problem with overlooking elite skills because of singular flaws. Tony Allen's problem is the same one that will eventually depress Sefalosha's value and can lead to highly deflated contracts for defensively talented players. He's simply awful on offense. He turns the ball over all the time with his atrocious handle, and would make it a habit of missing some of the easiest bunny shots he could possibly take. You never know what you're going to get with Tony, and that's often a problem. Sometimes, it meant playing Tony Allen amounted to playing 4-on-5 on offense. But Memphis has been good to Allen -- although he'll always be a far cry from a positive contributor on offense, he's had significantly more chemistry with the Memphis big three than the Boston big three and he's worked hard to modulate his more irritating tendencies -- the turnovers have gotten marginally better, and he doesn't foul nearly as much as he used to.

What makes Tony Allen so unique on the defensive end is that he's not only an incredible one-on-one stopper, he's also a beast in the passing lanes and a bulldozer through screens. Elite scorers who are used to shedding defenders with a screen or two have no real recourse to get past Allen -- his lateral movement is too crisp, too quick, and too bruising. He's also got a modicum of shot-blocking talent, as well -- he's good at the Ginobili-type "touch from behind, apply backspin" block that ruins a shot and usually allows a teammate to take the ball out of midair, control it, and start a transition break. Celtics fans who watched Allen for years know how good he is. Laker fans who watched Kobe and Allen duke it out in the finals twice know how good he is. And anyone who's ever paid close attention to Allen's ridiculous defensive game knows how good he is. He's simply an amazing defender. For the sake of sharing, here's a video you may not have chanced to see -- this is a compilation by The Two Man Game of a sampling of Allen's defensive play on Kevin Durant during the 2011 playoffs. It's absolutely something to behold. Watch how he frustrates Durant -- Durant finds himself unable to make enough space to comfortably shoot, despite being far taller than Allen, but Allen maintains enough distance that Durant can't safely draw the foul. He rotates on a swivel foot while off-ball, able to change directions quick enough to remove the need to exactly anticipate what Durant and Westbrook were going to do next. When they finally get him out of a possession, he comes from behind and erases the shot with a brilliant backspin block. The depth of Allen's defensive skillset is absolutely obscene. Nobody in the league has a deeper well of tricks to draw from.

There's a question that often gets asked by fans of elite closers -- Kobe, Dirk, Manu, Melo, et cetera. Who do you want taking the last shot? Me, of course, I'd take Manu, while accepting the fact that Dirk is probably the best answer in the NBA (and that the best answer of all isn't any one player, just "whoever the hell is open"). But I genuinely prefer to ask a different question. Who do you want defending the last shot? And that answer is a lot more straightforward. You want Tony Allen. Think back to the final shot of the third game of Memphis/Spurs in 2011. Can't remember it? Watch it again. People pounced on Manu and the Spurs for not getting a shot off, claiming that it was a massive mistake by a franchise that never made them. The thing is, it really wasn't a massive failure of the offense so much as an incredible triumph of the defense to quash a fast-break transition three opportunity -- there was no way that Tony Allen could've defended that shot attempt better. He bothered Manu all the way down the court, and by the time Manu had made it far enough to shoot it, Allen used every possible trick to keep Manu's shot from going off and Manu himself from calling a timeout. The Spurs offense was broken on the possession, it's true, but nowhere near enough credit goes to the man who broke it -- Tony Allen, in the flesh. He's a pitbull. He's a beast. And now that his offense is passable enough to keep on the court at all (it's still bad, mind you, but good enough to keep him on-point for 20-30 minutes a night), he's essentially a star player. He's an incredible defender whose contract is -- I maintain -- the greatest free agent signing the Grizzlies ever made. He's Trick or Treat Tony, the baddest $3 million dollar a year veteran in the NBA. And he's gonna getcha.

Also, I say it on top, but I'll emphasize once more.

Follow him on Twitter. Really. He's the best NBA follow and nobody else is close.

• • •

_Follow Nicolas Batum on Twitter at __@nicolas88batum.___

While I'm not Nic Batum's biggest fan, I will say this -- the man is smart. We often pile on players who tend towards inefficient shot locations and chuck up poor percentage shots. We tell them to take fewer long twos, tend towards the efficient ranges, and run far away from the areas they aren't excellent at. Batum does that. He does that very well, in fact. Last season, Batum shot above average percentages at the rim and from three point territory. Fitting with that, almost 3/4 of Batum's shots came from those two regions, and it was enough to offset the fact that Batum shot an utterly abysmal 29% from 10-23 feet last year. He did this despite setting a career high in usage percentage and a career low in the percentage of his shots he had assisted by someone else -- primarily, to these eyes, due to the dismal state of the Portland point guard hierarchy last year. The main knock with Batum -- to me, at least -- is his defense. I have a lot of friends who are Portland fans that swear by Batum as a stopper of the future. I just don't see it, yet.

Don't get me wrong -- the man's useful, and his defensive fundamentals are extremely solid. He draws charges by the bundle, has some shot blocking talent, long arms, solid quickness, et cetera. All the things you want. But he has yet to put them together in a statistically evident way, and watching footage, you start to see small syndromes of laziness. Those possessions where he goes for a steal then gives up on the play as soon as the player gets daylight. Those possessions where he's floating, looking in the lanes, and paying little heed to his man. Those are the possessions that stick in my craw, and make me wonder about Batum as a true stopper. Tony Allen, for all his faults, never takes possessions off. Iguodala doesn't take possessions off. Batum acts like a superstar on defense, pulling the little LeBron/Kobe punch where he takes some time off as though to modulate for the long haul. That's the thing, though. They can do that because their offense is so vital to the team, they kind of need to. Batum isn't that offensively important to warrant off possessions defensively. And frankly? He's not good enough -- yet -- to be defending so well that his defense can withstand possessions where he's a total nonfactor. LeBron is there. Kobe -- for a few years -- was there. Batum isn't, yet.

Regardless. Batum is a good player already, and if he makes a few leaps, he'll probably deserve his fat contract. One thing I found amusing about the aftermath of Batum's contract signing was Batum's insistence that he could average 15-5-5 in an interview with Joe Freeman of the Oregonian. That's a pretty reasonable goal, in some respects. He's actually averaged 14 points per game before (last season), and from 2009-2012 he averaged exactly 15 points per 36 minutes. So if he can get to 36 minutes, he stands a good shot at 15 points per game. In that period, he also averaged 5.3 rebounds per 36 minutes, which means he just needs more time on that one too. But the assists? Batum has had -- in his entire career -- a total of 9 games at five or more assists. Three of those came this season. So, at the time Batum stated that as a goal, he'd managed to reach the number he wanted to average in exactly 6 of his then 202 career games played. That's... that's phenomenal. That's essentially equivalent to what would happen if I looked at my life, examined my data, then came to my friends saying that because I once drank fifteen beers in one sitting, I plan on raising my per-week beer average to fifteen beers each Friday. It doesn't make sense. It's the hilarious assuredness of it that gets me. I think what gets me is how he essentially just took his per-36 averages and then randomly decided "oh, yeah, I should pass too" and more than doubled his career high in assists just to make it even. It is pretty even, come to think of it. 15-5-5? Maybe Batum watches too much Adrian Monk? Or maybe not. I'm not sure there's such a thing as too much Adrian Monk. ... on a related note, is it obvious that I've written too many of these this week? No? THEN PREPARE FOR MORE TOMORROW, FOLLOWERS!

• • •

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. Shout-out to Matt L and Zewo for properly isolating the correct players based on tangential evidence! (Words!)

• Player #316 was stealthily one of the most cost-effective acquisitions of the offseason. Probably won't be there when the rebuilding project finishes, but he can't hurt until that happens. Not on that salary.

• Player #317 was a remarkably good shooter as a rookie. Not sure if it'll hold up forever, and he needs to get a bit better defensively, but he's a solid young guy with strong upside next to a rising star PG. Sounds good to me.

• Player #318 looked GREAT as a rookie. And as great as he looked as a rookie, he looked atrocious last year. And now he has that huge contract. Mistakes, everywhere!

Because I'm getting on a plane at 1:00 tomorrow, the string of two-set days ends tomorrow. With my vacation from work drawing to a close, I'm back on track to finish the series on Christmas or Christmas Eve. Fun times. See you tomorrow morning for the Friday capsules.

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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. But it's certainly not done yet! Today we continue with Jrue Holiday, Darren Collison, and Reggie Evans.

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_Follow Jrue Holiday on Twitter at __@Jrue_Holiday11.___

I'm going to be honest. I fell into a trap with Holiday. While I tend to be a proponent of giving players ample time to continue their development -- especially when, as with Jrue, you're talking about a player who entered the league at an uncommonly young age -- at some point you start to wonder if you've seen enough. Three years into his career, Holiday had yet to enact any large or present changes to the configuration of his game. He seemed about the same as he had when he started -- a very poor at-rim scorer with a surprisingly decent floater-to-long-two range on his shot that made him retain some manner of offensive value. A decent defender from the point guard position who nevertheless didn't have a surfeit of defensive creativity and was relatively easy to figure out if you were a crafty guard like 2011 Wade, Rose, or Paul. Good at fighting over screens, good at contesting, not so good at rotating when forced and a bit overly focused on staying with his original man off a switch. That often led to wide-open shots that he'd have to recover on out of nowhere, or perhaps more commonly, disoriented the relatively substandard Philadelphia defensive bigs into leaving their man to add additional help, which allowed smart coaches and teams to pick and roll the Sixers into (relative) oblivion.

I was also worried about Jrue Holiday's overall suitability as an NBA point guard. His passing always seemed decent-but-not-quite-there, posting assist rates that were hardly in the same stratosphere as any legitimate NBA point guard. Philly fans -- and Jrue fans -- tend to laugh at this. There's a lot of creativity in Holiday's passing, and I don't deny that at all. But it's not an idle complaint. There were 52 point guards that played greater than 20 minutes a contest in 2012 -- Holiday's assist rate ranked 11th worst among them. He clocked in slightly above Brandon Jennings and Kyrie Irving and slightly below Kemba Walker and Jordan Farmar. And while Jennings and Irving were lords of the hockey pass, much of Philadelphia's offense revolved around shooting the long two straightaway off the pass, far moreso than the offenses of Milwaukee or Cleveland. (Not to mention that Kyrie's teammates couldn't make a shot to begin with). Regardless, here's a visual representation of where Jrue stood among the point guards. It's not a nice graph to look at.

Y-Axis represents assist rate, X-Axis represent the player's spot in the 52 player line. Darkened portion represents the guards under Jrue. As you can kind of tell, rather poor spot for our man. He falls well short of the position-average, and clearly comes far behind the "elite assist-man" cutoff around player #46, where Andre Miller delineates the basic split between guards that destroyed worlds with their passing and guards who were merely decent at it. This would be fine, if Holiday wasn't the Sixers' primary passing option and the primary steward of their awful offense. Much like Rajon Rondo shoulders some of the blame for the Celtics' poor offensive results, so too does Holiday bear some for that of the Sixers. Not all -- Collins probably deserves more, for not really putting his guys in a position to succeed offensively. But some. So, rather understandably, I did not expect huge things for Holiday this season, and wasn't 100% sure about the size of his contract -- I felt it was certainly possible for Holiday to live up to it, but it wasn't exceedingly likely.

Count me as wrong on that, so far. There have been a lot of disappointing aspects of the Philadelphia start, not least of which being that their current record and differential are mirages forged against terrible no-good teams in a home-heavy start. And, of course, "anything having to do with Andrew Bynum." But Holiday has been one of the true bright spots of the year, much like Brandon Jennings was last year. He's looked smart and in control, and he's been playing like one of the best guards in the eastern conference. Some of it may be unsustainable -- Holiday has been shooting markedly better on the road, especially from three point range (52% from three on the road this year) and things are likely to normalize. But he was already above average from everywhere but the rim -- and his at-rim scoring has been excellent this year, with Holiday seeking out the finishing play far more readily and sinking the lay-up like a pro's pro. He's been Philadelphia's best player absent Bynum by a country mile, and he's led the Sixers to several wins they shouldn't have even been close in.

He's had poise, and with his talent finally being tapped into, he's been a lovely guy to watch. I'm hoping he keeps it up and makes the all-star team, although the Eastern game is a bit packed. Rondo, Kyrie, Deron, Lowry, the formerly all-star point guard Raymond Felton consumed to augment his powers, et cetera. Even Rose, if he's back on time, has a good shot of making it. And Jennings has been good too. So I fear he may end up as Brandon Jennings did last year, a player who starts the season on a huge tear, misses out on the all-star game, and just tapers off afterwards as though offended at the unbecoming absence. Let's hope that doesn't happen and that Holiday can keep it up long enough to garner some notice, reenergize to finish the season, and continue showing people like me just how far from his ceiling he actually was. Keep at it, Jrue.

(Also, on a related note, Tim: that waiter DEFINITELY was giving you the eyes.)

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_Follow Darren Collison on Twitter at __@Darren_Collison.___

Another UCLA product, Darren Collison is remarkably similar to Jrue Holiday in the basic numbers. In fact, they're almost entirely the same by the numbers -- Collison is slightly worse at getting to the rim, Holiday is slightly worse at passing. Both are good at controlling the ball. Both are exceedingly young starters on fringe playoff teams. Both are having decent starts to this season, although Collison is starting to fall off a bit. Both are great free throw shooters. Lots and lots of similarities. Obviously, differences too. Collison's defense is nowhere near Holiday's, despite both being a bit undersized for their position (Collison far moreso than Holiday). Neither are wonderful at developing an offense -- Collison has balked at running an effective pick-and-roll offense since a short flirtation with fame as a brilliant rookie behind Chris Paul, and Holiday (as any point guard probably would) has had some difficulty running Collins' pet longball program with any real efficiency. Still, Collison has a few interesting offensive wrinkles. Mainly that he's one of the quickest guards in the NBA. Being the son of two Olympic sprinters has its advantages, you know. While this makes him (theoretically) a beast in transition, he's shown some problems actually converting on that.

Which, actually, deserves some special mention. One of the reasons Collison's two point percentage is so low is that he simply has a lot of trouble actually finishing transition layups. He can get to the rim relatively easily, and he can get an open shot there without going through too much trouble. Having speed is useful that way. The problem -- and the thing that differentiates him from other NBA speedsters like Tony Parker or Ty Lawson -- is that he's simply so bad at finishing (regardless of the duress he's under) that his speed advantage impacts his game marginally at best and uselessly at worst. And, as stated, he balks at running a traditional set-play offense -- he regularly dribbles himself into oblivion, ending the play far away from the screen that's been set for him. Going forward, could potentially make him a poor fit in Dallas, as Carlisle likes calling plays. As do, well, most coaches. But still. Collison's best offense is probably going to be a Ramon Sessions-type spread surrounded by shooters as he pushes the tempo a bit. He's not going to get that very easily in Dallas, although I'm interested in the offensive prospects of a Collison-Mayo-Marion-Nowitzki-Brand lineup if Carlisle consents to running Collison's pet spread. He's a good player, it's just an open question as to how useful he'll be in a set-play lineup.

This all would be a lot easier to handicap if Collison would just develop a reliable at-rim finish. Just... something. Anything. A better twist to his layup. A better sense of space under the basket. I don't know. Collison often misjudges how open he is and tries to finish layups from 2-3 feet away from the basket -- if he'd curb that, his at-rim numbers would look a lot better. My fear with Collison is that after an excellent start in Dallas he's been oscillating between abject horror and decent play every few nights. This wouldn't be all that big of a deal if Dirk was around and the team still looked decent without him, but Mayo and Collison have been so important to the Mavericks so far that Collison's poor performances have been that much more noticeable. When Collison registers a game score over 10, the Mavericks are 6-3 -- when Collison registers a game score below 10, they're 1-5. With Collison seeming more important without Dirk around to take some weight off his shoulders, any perceived struggle can lead to drastic measures. Like the Mavericks inexplicably pulling Collison from the starting lineup. Kind of worried that the Mavericks might take a flyer on some washed up old point guard in an effort to spell Collison, not realizing that the new guard has virtually no chance of actually improving their team and he's simply not ver--...

THEY SIGNED DEREK FISHER?!?

The Mayans are coming. Prepare yourselves for the soothing embrace of the grim reaper.

• • •

_Follow Reggie Evans on Twitter at __@ReggieEvans30.___

I'm not a big Reggie Evans guy. There are a few players I legitimately can't stand watching, and Evans is one of them. I don't know if it's the style of play, the lack of offensive talents, or the atrociously off-base calls that Evans seems to get on a daily basis in the NBA. Wait. Yes I do. It's the calls. It feels like Evans draws at least 3 ridiculous off-ball calls a game, which is pretty absurd given the fact that he plays less than 15 minutes a game. The man is a freaking SAVANT at getting under a player, drawing incidental contact, and sprawling on the floor like he's at the mercy of John Henry's hammer. Not to mention his most absurd talent, that being his absolutely remarkable ability to shove players in the back willy-nilly and never get called on it. I honest to God don't know how Evans gets away with half this stuff. You know how there's that whole "David Stern knows where the bodies are buried" thing? Yeah, I think that's crap. David Stern doesn't know where the bodies are buried. Reggie Evans does, and the entire lockout was a ruse to make us think he doesn't.

I'm joking, but explain this to me. How do you internalize the way Evans gets to the line? The man's taken 30 free throws to 21 field goal attempts this season. This isn't a new thing -- last year, he took 71 free throw attempts to 72 field goal attempts. He's been on the edge a few times (IE, within a few free throws of it), but Reggie Evans may very well be the single greatest free throw drawing machine in the history of the NBA. Want to know how many seasons he's had in his career with free throws greater than field goal attempts (or the two virtually even)? Four seasons, out of 10 years played. Want to know how many other players had four? Dwayne Jones. That's it. There are only 16 other players that have had multiple such seasons in the three point era. ONLY 16 PLAYERS. This is not some common thing. It's extremely rare for a player who uses the ball as sparingly as Evans (who sports a career 12% usage rate, although he hasn't passed that in 3 years) to actually register enough free throws to overtake even the sparsest of field goal attempts. Refs flock to Evans like lawyers flock to malpractice suits, waving their arms and screaming bloody murder. "Leave our Reggie all alone," they say! (They don't, but they should. Or they should stop calling so many phantom calls.)

Beyond the absurd calls, he's a hustle player whose defense is shaky at best and harmful at worst. He was fantastic last year against the Grizzlies in the playoffs (in what may very well have been the greatest playoff series he'll have in his entire career), but don't let that fool you into thinking he's a plus defender in the regular season. The man's single-minded focus on drawing fouls and getting rebounds leads him to constantly lose prime defensive position in hopes that he'll get better position for the board, and it doesn't help that he's undersized to begin with. And although he's a great rebounder for his size, he'd be a hell of a lot worse if they actually called him when he grinds his elbows into an opposing player's back to move them out of the way and grab the carom for himself. But that probably isn't going to happen any time soon. Referees have had 10 years to figure out Reggie Evans. They've either all gone blind as bats or discovered that Reggie Evans is the man Kool Keith wrote about when he wrote out the lyrics to Dr. Dooom's "Apartment 223." (Also, for the love of God, don't look them up if you aren't familiar. They're brutal and terrifying. Just be content knowing that the 10 people who actually listened to Dr. Dooom know exactly what I'm talking about and are cringing, locking their doors, and swearing off Brooklyn games until they forget the comparison.)

Really, though. Nothing's going to change. Evans will be Evans -- the most frustrating player to watch in the entire league, if he's not on your team. If he is? Try to enjoy it. It's hard, but you're essentially watching "history" happen when you watch this man draw free throws and crush the boards. Kind of. It's like watching a man set a world record for the most sardines eaten in a single sitting. You know it's a seminal moment in his life, and something you'll personally remember forever. It's "history." You're "rooting" for him insofar as you can root for someone like that. But you also will be nauseated, unentertained, and confused at the reason you're actually watching it. That's what it's like to be a fan of a Reggie Evans team, insofar as I can understand it. But perhaps you have a stronger stomach than I do. You wouldn't be the first.

• • •

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. Shout-out to commenter Okman on an admirable 2/3 guess. Even got the team right, just the wrong guard. Heh.

• Had you told me in 2010 that Player #313 would not be receiving an extension, I would've balked and laughed at you for hours. And I would've been wrong. He will not be getting an extension. It's been a shocking turn for the guy's career.

• Player #314 is one of the best defenders in the NBA, and among the best twitter follows to boot.

• Player #315 is considered to be a great defensive player. But he's not. ALMOST NOBODY BELIEVES ME. But he really, really isn't! I'm serious! Stop laughing! Argh!

In Los Angeles, my friends. All the drugs, money, and Coco Puffs my streetcar could possibly desire. Unfortunately, other people are the actual owners all three of those things, so I can't seriously partake in any. RIP Aaron McGuire. Knew ye well.

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