never a good idea, but: my playoff predictions! West: SAS in 5, OKC in 7, LAC in 7, POR in 6. East: IND in 4, MIA in 5, TOR in 5, WAS in 6.

— Aaron McGuire (@docrostov) April 18, 2014

A few weeks ago, I put those first round predictions on Twitter. I didn't have the time to do a huge piece explaining all of them, but I figured it made sense to scribe them down and revisit the predictions when reality had rudely awakened me to the dire mortality of my reasoning. Strangely enough, they haven't actually been that bad -- one in particular will haunt me for the rest of my days (... OK, no it won't), but for the most part my original reasoning has proved to be some combination of apt and silly. Given that all seven series currently have two games in the books, I felt like this would be a good time to do some revisiting. Reflect on what we've learned in the first two games, revisit my original thoughts, revise predictions when necessary. All fun things. We have a lot to get to, so let's get to it. Let's start in the east. I'll work my way westward tomorrow.

• • •

INDIANA (1) vs ATLANTA (8) -- Tied up at 1-1

Original prediction: INDIANA IN 4

Well... I was wrong about that. Look, I'm all for respecting a team that suffered injury trouble, but let's not overstate things. This Atlanta team won 38 games this year. They were outscored on the season by about half a point a game (... although, come to think of it, two other playoff teams were outscored by more), and they sport roughly two NBA-caliber high rotation players in Millsap and Horford. Jeff Teague is a marginally below league-average point guard and Kyle Korver is an excellent tertiary piece with his silky quick shot. Both of those mean something, but having those two as your 3rd and 4th best players (2nd and 3rd with Horford out) is a really bad look for an NBA team. Their offense and defense are well-designed but not well-executed, for the most part, and they just aren't that hard to gameplan. I figured that nothing Indiana did would override the fact that Atlanta is simply not a good basketball team.

Alright, yeah. I was wrong. Indiana's absurd inflexibility (as expertly noted by Zach Lowe) hurt them when Coach Bud chose to use Antic as a floor-spacing center and play "come-at-me" defense in a way that would reinforce George's worst tendencies. The Hawks romped Atlanta in Game #1 and as the series moves back to Atlanta it's an open question whether the Pacers can get it together and win the road game they need to retake home court. I still think they will, but lord almighty... how do you handicap this Pacers team? If they play to their worst tendencies they will lose to everyone. Literally everyone in America. The Kentucky Wildcats? They upset the Pacers. The Washington Generals? They upset the Pacers. Your little league team? They upset the Pacers. It's ridiculous! How can a team with such a refined command of the crisp grime (like: Memphis!) play like this without any real driving factors? Cripes.

The only thing keeping me from picking Atlanta at this point is that I can't fathom a world where Atlanta is actually a good enough team to beat this Indiana squad. I refuse to believe that's going to happen until I see it happen. Plain and simple. The Antic gimmick is a strong play by Coach Bud, but I have to believe the Pacers won't be quite so befuddled over the course of a long series that they won't be able to gameplan it out. I have at least a little bit of faith in Coach Vogel. Don't let me down, Frank. Still, it won't be a short series -- my guess is 6 or 7 games, simply because the Pacers have been rubbish on the road recently and expecting them to sweep the two games in Atlanta necessary to finish it in five is a fool's errand.

• • •

MIAMI (2) vs CHARLOTTE (7) -- Miami leads 2-0

Original prediction: MIAMI IN 5

It kind of hurt me not to make the original sweep prediction here. I'm pretty sure that this is the worst Miami team of the last four years -- even if we're accounting for the "pedal off the medal" factor, this team just isn't quite as crisp or clean as any of the last three Finals-bound iterations. LeBron isn't slower, but he's lazier. Wade is markedly worse than 2011. Bosh has been a bit of a disappointment this year, too. Not terrible, mind you, but certainly not up to the standards we'd expected. I don't think I'm alone in saying that I expected Bosh to take the reins a bit more as Wade cycled into a late career preservation phase. He hasn't, really, and although his defense has been solid his general game has been a big disappointment for me. He's a max player who's playing like a 12-13 million dollar man. Still a great player, but not quite up to snuff. And outside of the big three, this hodgepodge of declining aged roleplayers doesn't elicit nearly the teeth-gnashing fear of Miami's 2012 or 2013 group.

In sum, it's just really hard to get a feel for this Miami squad. It's a very uneven team, and while they're probably the most likely champion (even now), it's tough to predict them sweeping. So I didn't. But I kind of felt like they would. Even against Charlotte, a team that I've really enjoyed watching. As I noted yesterday, the step the Bobcats took this season has been one of the more heartwarming stories of the year. Their ceiling isn't through the roof or anything, but they're a respectable basketball team that might be even better next year as Clifford's tendrils take root. And I'd give them a puncher's chance at a competitive series against Indiana, Toronto, or Chicago. But Miami is just an absolute nightmare matchup for them. Al Jefferson (especially as balky as he's been) can't dominate against Miami's stout front-line defense in the same way he can against most of the league. Kidd-Gilchrist can't hide on offense against Miami's pressure D, and it's just incredibly hard for Charlotte's cut-based system to find daylight when Miami deigns to play its game.

So, what have we learned? Not a ton, so I'd probably maintain my Heat-in-five thoughts. Yes, Miami won both games, but they just barely won last night's contest and the first game was exceedingly close until the end. This isn't like last year, where Miami roundly obliterated the Bucks in the first two games (by 23 and 12 point margins). Or even the year before, where Miami completely stunted on the New York Knicks (by 33 and 10 point margins). It's more like the 2011 Sixers than anything else in Miami's history, who lost a tight game one contest by 8 points and a more lopsided game two by 21 points. That Sixers team went on to lose in 5 games, which is probably the most likely fate for the Bobcats now that we've got a better sense of where these two teams stand. Miami's too sloppy to sweep these next two games in Charlotte. Right? (Please?)

• • •

TORONTO (3) vs BROOKLYN (6) -- Tied up at 1-1

Original prediction: TORONTO IN 5

The way I visualized this series in my head had Toronto dominating Brooklyn on the boards and crushing them in the paint, with Jonas and Lowry and Amir rocking rims and finishing calmly over Brooklyn's not-so-stout interior defense. I didn't really think Brooklyn would be able to fight back from that without some incredible three point shooting and a lot of forced turnovers. And Garnett would need to have a throwback series, obviously. Two games in, and... well... pretty much all of Brooklyn's needs have come to pass, and they've totally outclassed the original matchup issues that I thought would swing the series Toronto's way. To wit, through two games:

• Jonas Valanciunas is averaging 16-16 on 55% shooting. Beastly numbers. Less beastly: he's turning the ball over on 30% of his possessions, which is astonishingly bad. He's averaging 6 turnovers a game. Bad news bears, kid.

• Amir Johnson is shooting 75% at the rim, as expected. Unfortunately for Toronto, he's barely ever getting there, as Garnett and Plumlee have done an expert job keeping him off the glass and away from the rim.

• Kyle Lowry is doing his normal Kyle Lowry thing, averaging 16-7-7 on 13 shots a night. One adjustment Casey might want to consider? Entreating Lowry to do his Kyle Lowry thing on defense, against Joe Johnson this time. Johnson has completely torn the Raptors defense up in the two games to date, mostly matched on Demar DeRozan. Maybe a different look with Lowry could trip him up.

Yikes. It's not a lost cause for Toronto yet -- 1-1 isn't a death knell, and there are certain adjustments the Raptors could do to change the game a bit against Brooklyn's unconventional lineups. But the Raptors clearly don't outclass the Nets as much as I thought they did (if they even do at all), and my five-game gentleman's sweep seems like an extremely unlikely dream right now. I'd still pick Toronto, but after those two games, I'm thinking this series probably goes the distance. On a somewhat unrelated note, it'd be nice if Terrence Ross could do anything. He's made 2-12 shots in 21 minutes a night so far, and he's turned the ball over almost as many times as he's snagged a rebound. Get it together, Ross.

• • •

CHICAGO (4) vs WASHINGTON (5) -- Washington leads 2-0

Original prediction: WASHINGTON IN 6

This was one prediction where quite a few people called foul. But I maintain now what I maintain then -- Nene is a terrible matchup for Noah. Noah is a fantastic defender, but like most great big man defenders, he doesn't operate well when the opposing offense drags him too far from the paint and makes an active effort to force him to guard too much space. A weapon like Nene forces Noah to guard a massive chasm of offensive activity, and it's simply exhausting. Washington has some of the best cutters in the business, too, which makes Nene's matchup difficulty doubly tough for Chicago to wrangle. But the Bulls still have a stout defense -- having one or two interesting offensive quirks like Nene's versatility that can squeeze out a few more points over the course of a game are ridiculously useful, but you don't beat the Bulls on that alone.

No, you beat the Bulls by suffocating their already-stagnant offense to "failed autoerotic asphyxiation" levels. And the Wizards are doing that well -- in spots, at least. Mostly in the second half of games. Noah, Gibson, and Dunleavy are the only Bulls that have gotten anything going offensively, and they're generally carrying the team right now. Due to red-hot starts (or, well, whatever Chicago's approximation of "red hot" can possibly be called), Chicago's offensive rating over the full series (roughly 107 points per 100 possessions) is actually a vast improvement over their season-long 102.5 mark. But that covers up the fact that Washington's stout defense has effectively shut down Chicago over the late period in both games to date. In fact, in Tuesday's win, Chicago went scoreless for almost four minutes of overtime, only able to generate offense when it was essentially too late to matter.

Honestly? I could see Washington pulling it out in 4 or 5, but I've got a suspicion the Bulls are going to win one of these close ones eventually. And on-the-ropes home teams rarely lose game 5 to a roadster. Wizards in 6 still sounds like the most likely scenario for me.

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curio, n. -- a small and unusual object that is considered interesting or attractive

No, I didn't just misspell "curious." I promise! I'm referring in plural to the singular "curio", the definition of which can be seen above. It's usually used to describe tchotchkes and baubles. In this case, I'm referring to those little statistical factoids that interest the multitude of NBA nerds among us. The general point of the matter is that there are a lot of interesting statistical oddities that we've been person to in a substantially strange 2014 season. Many have gone widely reported (Durant's point streak, Corey Brewer's 50 point explosion, Indiana's collapse). Others haven't. Some of them are more interesting than others, and some of them are especially fun for me. In this post, I'll examine my seven favorite oddities. Let's get to it.

1. No Spur has played over 30 MPG

Let's start by taking a look at their overall minutes chart.

This may not surprise you. We all know the drill: the Spurs are known league-wide for their minutes management tactics and their general strategic resting. So why would it be surprising that no Spur has played over 30 MPG? Simple. This is the first time in the history of the NBA that a team has gone without a 30+ MPG player. And not by a close margin, either. There are very few who are even remotely close -- Hubie Brown's 2004 Grizzlies almost did it, with their only 30 MPG player being a 23-year-old Pau Gasol. The 2012 Spurs were similar, with Parker's 32 MPG being their only transgression. But that's it. The actual accomplishment -- arbitrary though it may be -- has only been achieved by these Spurs.

Look, I get it. This is the Spurs! They do this! Except that what they did this season isn't just quirky and strange, it's completely historically unprecedented. Even last year, they had THREE players who averaged over 30 MPG. Portland had five this year. Every other team has a handful. The Spurs may not win the title -- getting out of the West is going to be a hell of a task, regardless of who they face. But in keeping their minutes so equal, the Spurs have grasped a substantially strange accomplishment that makes them the first team ever to even their regular season minutes to this extent. It's pretty impressive, and it lends them historical notoriety as a strange footnote in NBA history.

2. The Clippers Solved Offense

This one isn't quite as historically unprecedented as my last one. Nor is it quite as stark as the Pacers were earlier in the season. Still interesting, though. The league-leading offensive rating the Clippers put up over the whole season (an offensive rating of 112) was bettered by two teams in 2013 (the Heat and the Thunder, respectively, with 112.4 and 112.3) and by virtually every iteration of Steve Nash's Suns. So... how exactly did they "solve" offense? Simple. Very few teams have finished the season with a league-leading offense despite losing key pieces for the majority of the year. The Clippers were able to accomplish it because whenever their full complement of offensive players have played together, the results have been absolutely terrifying.

Check out the top two offensive lineups in the league this year. I'll wait. ... Yep. The two best offensive lineups in the NBA were LAC lineups. And what's more? Other lineups weren't even close. The Paul/Crawford/Barnes/Griffin/Jordan lineup scored at a rate of 117.5 points per 100 possessions. When Crawford wasn't available and they had to use Darren Collison, the same lineup produced at 117 points per 100 possessions. The third place lineup was 4 points per 100 possessions worse on offense, roughly equivalent to the distance between the 3rd place lineup and the 17th place lineup.

Los Angeles has a half-decent defense this year, but don't fool yourself into thinking that the defense is going to drag them to the Finals. If they make the finals, it's going to be because nobody in the league can stop their core lineups from filleting their defense. Plain and simple.

3. Miami went 1-2 against the 76ers

I can't get over how funny this is. Yeah, I know -- they were resting LeBron and Bosh for the last game of the season. Obviously. But Wade still played 23 minutes and Miami's supporting cast isn't THAT bad. In the last game of the season, Miami's obscenely permissive defense allowed the Sixers to shoot 53% (their 3rd best field goal percentage of the season) with an offensive rating of 109.8. It was one of Philadelphia's best games this year. And that's despite Michael Carter-Williams going 3-of-10 in a forgettable 12-6-4 performance.

So, it begs the question. Has a defending champion ever had a losing record against a team that ended the season with a point point differential of -10 or worse? There have been 16 teams in NBA history who have been outscored by the requisite margin. So that gives us 16 champions to look at.

Oh. Oh wow.

So, the funniest part about this? The 1988 Clippers -- who beat the Lakers once in 6 tries -- only won that game in overtime by a single point. Philadelphia's first game of the 2014 season is the first win by a team that got outscored by 10+ points per game over the course of a season has beaten the NBA's defending champions in regulation... ever. And their two wins against Miami this season doubled the number of wins that their 15 previous counterparts accumulated over FORTY EIGHT previous tries. Seriously. 1-47. That's the total record of sub-10 point margin teams against the defending champs, until now. Am I the only person who can't stop laughing about this? The Heat have as much of a chance as anyone of winning the title, but this factoid has me keeled over.

4. Spurs starters paced the league... on defense, again.

A lot of ink was spilled in the early season about how the Spurs -- despite a decent record -- were underperforming with their "core five" starting unit of Parker-Green-Leonard-Duncan-Splitter. In 2013, the unit was one of the NBA's best, obliterating the league with a league-best defense and a near-best offensive attack. Midway through this current season, results with the their starting lineup were decidedly negative, and savvy Spurs fans were starting to wonder if Duncan's absent shot and Danny Green's initially tepid defensive season had made their core lineup lose its bite.

Spurs' starters were league's best defensive lineup for 2nd straight year. '12-13: http://t.co/aDMyWv7lXh '13-14: http://t.co/bxlyuLbDKy

— John Schuhmann (@johnschuhmann) April 18, 2014

Of course, then the post all-star break happened. And for the second year in a row, the Spurs have the league's best defensive lineup. Keep in mind that the Pacers spent most of the season with one of the best defenses in league history. And, indeed, they're second. But once Leonard returned to full-form, the Spurs blitzed the league on defense in the second half to such a degree that completely overwrote their poor play in the first half. Pretty excellent result for the Spurs, and -- frankly -- the biggest reason Spurs fans feel better now than they did entering the break.

5. Grizzlies are on-track for a fourth straight OKC/LAC/SAS draw

I have absolutely no idea how I should go about quantifying how weird this is. So I won't. But the Grizzlies have played seven playoff series over the last 4 years -- two in 2011 (vs SAS, OKC), one in 2012 (vs LAC), and three in 2013 (vs LAC, OKC, SAS), and at least one in 2014 (vs OKC). This year, they're starting out vs OKC, and they may well lose that matchup. But am I the only person who's a bit weirded out by the fact that they're on track for a fourth straight year of facing OKC/LAC/SAS, if they make a deep run? If the Grizzlies make the conference finals and the other seedings play out as they'd be projected to, their draw this year would be to start in OKC, play LAC, then play SAS. That would be four years and nine separate playoff series played against just three teams. Every once in a while a franchise gets caught in a trap where they only play a team from a small shortlist, but I can't for the life of me remember a time when a team has the ability to make consecutive conference finals without facing a single new lineup. The last time the Grizzlies played a non-OKC/LAC/SAS team, Pau Gasol was a Grizzly. Just saying.

6. Mike Miller played 82 games, but Ramon Sessions played more!

On first glance, that's not a particularly surprising result. Each NBA season has somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 players who play every single game. But look at Mike Miller's career. He's only played 82 games ONCE before -- his rookie year. He hasn't played more than 60 games since 2009, when he was in his late 20s. He's had back surgeries and medical maladies that would make most people's knees weak. Despite that? He played more games than every single player on the Grizzlies, and would've tied for the league lead... if the league lead was 82. Yes, despite playing every regular season game, Mike Miller did NOT lead the league in games played.

That honor goes to Ramon Sessions, who ended up suiting up for 83 games this season due to his midseason trade to Milwaukee. It's the first time since 2011 that a player has managed to play over 82 games in a single season. Sessions joins a list of 40 players who managed the feat, with five of those coming in the last decade. The all-time leader in single-season games played is Walt Bellamy, who played 88 games in 1969 after being traded from New York to Detroit. My question for cap experts: do players who end up playing extra games due to trades get paid extra for the extra work? It depends on how the NBA distributes their salary, I'm guessing, but where does the money come from? Does their per-game salary just drop slightly after the trade to accommodate the additional games? I tried figuring the answer out myself, but I'm honestly not sure I've found it yet.

7. Charlotte -- CHARLOTTE! -- made 'the leap'

Credit to Nathan Walker's Twitter feed for bringing this one to mind for me. If there was a most improved team award for the team that improved their efficiency differential the most, the Bobcats would've won it (with a close second place finish from the Phoenix Suns). A lot of people have talked about how impressive Phoenix's rise has been, but I feel like Charlotte's got a bit of a short stick given their Eastern allegiance. But make no mistake -- watching Charlotte this season has been a joy. They haven't been one of the league's best teams, certainly, but they've been exceedingly solid. Respectable. Decent, even! Their offense is simple yet effective, their defense structurally sound though unrefined. Much of this has been attributed to first time coach Steve Clifford, and that's a fair assessment in a lot of ways. His system has been a vast improvement over the puzzling wares of Mike Dunlap, and they've put together a legitimately competent NBA defense without a surfeit of defensive talent. That takes gusto. But the men on the court are the ones who play the game, and fetishizing improved coaching strategy at the expense of the very real progress made by Charlotte's young guns would be a bit of a mistake.

Kemba Walker has broken out from a marginal journeyman into a legitimate rotation piece, and Gerald Henderson has been a minor steal on his recently resigned meager deal. Michael Kidd Gilchrist is approaching mastery of NBA defense (although his offense is still a bit grotesque) and Josh McRoberts had an unexpectedly strong comeback. Of course, no Charlotte appreciation could be written without an appreciation of the incredible season Al Jefferson's put up. He's been roughly the same as he's always been, offensively, but he's worked within a team defense better than he's ever done before. Clifford deserves a lot of credit for putting him in the right spots, but Jefferson deserves a lot too -- it's hard to wash out an entire career of bad defense in a single season. He put in the work and became passable. That's a huge achievement.

Although Charlotte's likely to find themselves run out of the building in the remainder of their series against Miami, don't sleep on what they accomplished this season. Many talk about the leap between a roleplayer and a star on an individual. Fewer talk about the leap between a hodgepodge of lost souls and a real honest-to-goodness basketball team. More should. And Charlotte, bless their hearts, managed to make that leap and drag their downbeat fanbase into a few exciting playoff games. Good work, kitties.

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Everyone loves March Madness. As we enter the NBA's least favorite time of the year, fans of the oft-maligned professional league are constantly reminded about how well the NCAA accomplishes something that the NBA's never quite been able to muster. That is, the twitchy oversimulated madness of the NCAA tournament's one-and-done stylings. The tournament, at its best, is a several week supercharge of the NBA's "league pass alert" nights with 1 or 2 crazy games on at once.

In Zach Lowe's column on tanking yesterday, he offhandedly noted that one way to increase the underdog benefits of being a lower-seeded team in the NBA playoffs would be to decrease the number of games in a series. He has a point. In almost any situation, the easiest way to inflate your variance is to lower your sample size. Many of the smartest NCAA bracket predictors bake in adjustments to account for the fact that teams like Bo Ryan's Wisconsin Badgers play at a deathly slow pace, slow enough to increase the inherent variance in their performance. This can lead to obscene pace-adjusted blowouts that break projection models (see: their numerous 30-40 point wins in 2012 that legitimately broke Ken Pomeroy's ranking system), but it also can lead to a game where the Badgers simply don't have enough possessions to prove they're the better team (see: their near-upset to Vanderbilt one game before nearly beating a fantastic Syracuse team in the 2012 tournament).

The NBA, though? It's one thing to say "hey, let's decrease the number of games in a series." It's quite another to actually figure out how that would impact things. Thing is, this isn't actually all that hard to check. So long as you have the right data. Luckily, I have exactly that. I've got a lot of data lying around that I can manipulate like this, and the question bugged me. This post endeavors to answer that very question -- if the NBA playoffs were a single elimination tournament, how would the course of NBA history change? I went back a decade, but given the size of the images, I'm probably going to post the specific brackets for five years and share the other five (and further) in a later bracket-dump post of the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s. For now, let's go back and look at the last five years. The results are, if nothing else, hilarious.

As for the methodology here, it was surprisingly simple. Playoff seedings remained the same, but each existing series was decided by the first game in the series. For instance, the Spurs and the Heat still made the finals in 2013 under a first-game-wins scenario -- as such, the Finals were determined by San Antonio's 92-88 win in Game #1. When the series DIDN'T exist in reality, the series was decided by the first regular season game that was played with the home court configuration that would've been at play. For instance, in 2012, Chicago's new second round series against Atlanta was decided by a January 3rd win where the Bulls defeated the Hawks at home. That's about all you need to know. Let's get to it.

• • •

For the first single elimination tournament, we actually see three fewer upsets than we saw in the actual playoffs. Oklahoma City beats Memphis, as they won the first game of the series behind Durant's heroics. Golden State similarly falls to the Andre Miller-led Nuggets. And Chicago falls to Brooklyn. Of course, that doesn't mean much for Denver, as their first regular season meeting with San Antonio was an embarrassing 26 point blowout in San Antonio. And it doesn't mean much for Brooklyn, as they lost their first matchup with the Heat by 30 points. The Spurs beat the Thunder in the WCF due to their win in the first game of the season. Out of the decade I've looked at so far, this is the only year where the Finals matchup actually stayed in tact. Were the Finals to end after a single game, Duncan would've probably won the Finals MVP with a 20-14-4 performance. That said, a single elimination style bracket doesn't seem to do a whole lot to 2013. What about 2012?

• • •

This one was actually pretty interesting. Due to the way I was assessing winners (that is, with regular season matchups), the Bulls technically had Rose for this entire playoff bracket. There were a two big upsets here that didn't happen in real life: Orlando over Miami and Atlanta over Boston. (NOTE: There's a typo on the MIA/ORL series -- MIA wins it 90-78, not ORL.) In the west, things actually go almost exactly the same as they went in reality -- the only thing out of wack was the WCF, where the Spurs won due to winning Game #1 of the actual series. In the East, Chicago romps the competition and makes it to a finals matchup with San Antonio. The Bulls win in what essentially amounted to a bracket made of chalk. Rose wins a tepid Finals MVP over Noah for his 29-1-4 game.

• • •

Here's the first one where upsets completely change the complexion of the bracket. The East stays untouched through the 2nd round, but Atlanta upsets Chicago in the Elite Eight and ruins the brackets of statheads everywhere. Meanwhile, in the West, Dallas is the only top-3 seed remaining after round one after the Hornets upset the Lakers and the Grizzlies upset the Spurs. The Grizzlies (America's team!) keep it going by upsetting the Thunder and the Mavericks in quick succession, becoming the first eight seed to make the finals in quite some time. (Not since Houston -- I don't think Houston makes the Finals in this scenario, but I haven't gone back to check yet.) Regardless. Miami makes it to the Finals and roundly obliterates Memphis for LeBron's first title in Miami. In a funny reflection of real life, Wade wins Finals MVP after LeBron's disappointing game.

• • •

Look, it's our first overtime finals!

This one ended up being quite a bit different than the way things actually played out -- other than ATL/ORL and BOS/CLE, none of the other series actually ended up mirroring real life. The Blazers upset the Suns in the first round, then keep it going by rallying in their Elite Eight matchup in Dallas. (No, really. They were down 4 entering the fourth -- they took a lead with 6 minutes left in the game and held on in a wild one to pull it out.) Meanwhile, the Lakers suffer a disappointing end to the Denver Nuggets, who stomp into Staples and end their one-seed dreams. Denver makes use of their surprise four-seed home court advantage in the Western Conference Finals by dispatching Portland in short order, getting the LeBron/Melo matchup we all wanted to see. Melo gets the better of LeBron this time, leading his Nuggets to a 118-116 overtime win in the Championship game. Melo scored 40.

• • •

The story is essentially same as the one we saw in 2010, just with a different ending. This time we see a lot more upsets -- the Sixers upset the Magic and the Bulls upset the Celtics (and then the 41-41 Bulls upset the Sixers!), while the Rockets upset the Blazers and the Lakers in quick succession. The Nuggets, meanwhile, make it all the way to the finals against LeBron's Cleveland Cavaliers. (Yes, that means a single elimination tournament would've produced two consecutive Denver/Cleveland finals.) This time, LeBron's Cavs roundly upend Melo's Nuggets, with LeBron getting his first ring and his perfunctory Finals MVP for a workmanlike 22-8-11 game. Mo Williams scored 24, Ben Wallace shot 100%, and Billups scored 26. Fun times.

• • •

Tomorrow, I'll share five more years of brackets (including... a Detroit threepeat?!) and some collected statistics for the "single elimination" playoffs as compared to the NBA's more traditional seven game version. Stay frosty.

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Hey, all! In this new segment, Aaron will be going over recent major NBA injuries and assessing their impacts on the teams that suffered them. We are also making this into a general power rankings feature, because the kids love that. The overall style here will be similar to Jonah Keri's long-running Grantland series "The 30" where he provides his weekly MLB power rankings with detailed explications of three teams a week. Instead of broader ranking thoughts, Aaron will be discussing current injury ramifications on three teams nestled softly within broader rankings. Let's go!

• • •

1. Philadelphia 76ers (14th in the East) 15-43, SRS of -11.15
2. Milwaukee Bucks (15th in the East) 11-45, SRS of -9.34

28. Los Angeles Lakers (15th in the West) 19-39, SRS of -5.03

FIVE-MAN INJURED ROSTER: Steve Nash (Nerve irritation), Nick Young (Sore knee), Chris Kaman (Sore back), Xavier Henry (Strained knee), Kobe Bryant (Tibia fracture)

It's too little too late to make any bones at playoff contention, but it's worth noting that this five-man-deep injured roster actually represents L.A.'s least injured roster in the last few months. That's right -- five injured players represents a Laker team that's rounding into some morbid approximation of health. At times this season, their injured roster has included nearly all of their regular starters and every productive player they've got. Most notably, they played a game less than a month ago where they ended the contest with less than five eligible players. Their current injured roster is five players deep, with two of them (Henry, Bryant) out indefinitely and the rest out game-to-game with ailments of varying severity.

Personally, I keep going back to one of the saddest-yet-rarely-discussed things about L.A.'s woefully mismatched roster this year. Namely, the fact that almost everyone on this terrible team is in a contract year. Don't get me wrong -- injuries suck for every NBA player. But they almost count double for roleplayers playing for their next contract. Every missed game, every 10-15 game sad stretch where their stats suffer from awful injuries, every lost step and tentative gait... it all matters, and it's all going to conspire to dramatically stifle the amount any of L.A.'s players can expect on their next contract.

A few examples. Jordan Farmar has actually played some decent basketball this season, at least when he's been fully healthy. He signed a one-year deal with L.A. in hopes that he'd play well and stick in the league. But he's missed 30 games with a wide variety of crummy injuries, and his lagging immediately-back-from-injury efforts are deflating his stats a bit. If he'd stayed healthy and continued to play as well as he has this year, I'd probably pencil him in for a small-time several million dollar deal as a cheap point-off-the-bench for a contender. As it stands, he'd be lucky to stick in the league at all. Same goes for Chris Kaman, whose injuries this year have limited him to a little over half of L.A.'s games. He's 31 years old and looking for what will likely be his last decent-length NBA deal. But he can't stay on the floor, and his value as a player is dropping precipitously because of it despite showing himself to be, as always, a dependably mediocre big man who can't really defend a fly. He probably will stick in the league, but I'd be very surprised if his next contract is anything above a veteran's minimum.

As for how L.A.'s current injuries are impacting their play... I'm not sure it really matters. They've been a remarkably bad team this entire season no matter who they put on the floor. This isn't a team that's one piece away from title contention, or even a playoff spot. Their injuries have exacerbated their pre-existing flaws (namely: poor defensive fundamentals, old-as-dirt personnel ill suited to D'Antoni's pet style, players that genuinely don't fit together), but these are all ills that apply to L.A. regardless of their injury woes. I suspect D'Antoni would be able to wrangle a few more wins on the margins with less-injured talent, but the overall trajectory of this team would remain about the same -- they're a mediocre team that excels at nothing-in-particular in the best of times. I'm really curious to see what Kupchak does with this roster in the offseason. Lord knows they need some spring cleaning.

• • •

1. Orlando Magic (13th in the East) 18-42, SRS of -5.68
2. Utah Jazz (13th in the West) 21-36, SRS of -4.17
3. Boston Celtics (12th in the East) 20-39, SRS of -4.16
4. Denver Nuggets (11th in the West) 25-31, SRS of -1.71
5. New York Knicks (11th in the East) 21-36, SRS of -2.33
6. Atlanta Hawks (8th in the East) 26-31, SRS of -0.68
7. Detroit Pistons (9th in the East) 23-35, SRS of -3.37
8. Cleveland Cavaliers (10th in the East) 23-36, SRS of -5.26
9. Brooklyn Nets (7th in the East) 26-29, SRS of -2.86

18. New Orleans Pelicans (12th in the West) 23-34, SRS of -1.70

INJURED ROSTER: Anthony Davis (shoulder sprain), Ryan Anderson (herniated disk), Jrue Holiday (stress fracture), Jason Smith (right knee surgery)

I was pretty high on New Orleans in the offseason, a sentiment that's partially a product of my perhaps-misguided faith in Eric Gordon's defense. Still, their overall roster construction looked solid. Davis and Anderson represent the kind of perfect in-and-out configuration that represents a matchup nightmare for just about any other team in the league. The Jrue Holiday acquisition gave them a defensive bulldog who'd bother their foe's best perimeter scorer and execute a solid offense, Eric Gordon's return from injury would give them another good wing defender, and Tyreke Evans looked like a decent option to fill the gaps offensively without embarrassing them on defense. ... Well, about that. The Pelicans have been one of the NBA's least inspiring teams, if you look at record and results as a part of a trajectory. Last summer's Pelicans made a lot of moves that appeared prime to push their young roster into a tight Western playoff race.

Instead, the results have been an uninspiring stew of alternating mediocrity and horror. Anthony Davis has had one of the best years of any young player in recent memory, but the team around him has largely disappointed -- Holiday was rubbish even when healthy, Gordon and Evans have been replacement-level at best, and Anderson's injuries have made it next to impossible to fully assess how good this team can be. Worse still, their acquisitions and moves have left them financially tapped out for the next few seasons. The question of the hour for the Pelicans isn't really one of whether this season's play can be salvaged. It can't. They're 10 games out of the eight seed with 25 games left to play, which effectively means that they'd need to put up a record on the order of 20-5 to have a serious shot at playing in the postseason. Even if Davis' shoulder sprain is minor, it would make little organizational sense to trot him out there and risk a franchise-altering injury in pursuit of the impossible. The most apt injury-focused question for New Orleans is one of blame.

Namely, how much are their litany of injuries to blame for their crummy year?

I'd tend to think the Pelicans are closer to the rosy offseason projections than they are to this season's sobering reality. Davis and Anderson showed an excellent two-man game in their time together (scant though it was), and a lot of their disappointing acquisitions seem a little bit fluky. Case in point -- Tyreke Evans is putting up the largest usage rate of his career. Unlike most players, though, he's actually put up a more efficient shot distribution this year than ever before. In Sacramento, Evans took just 7% of his threes from the corner -- he's taking 25% of them from the corner this year. In Sacramento, Evans took 43% of his shots in the immediate vicinity of the rim -- he's taking 55% of his shots there this year. In Sacramento, Evans took 19% of his shots from the "long two dead zone" of 16-23 feet -- he's taking 9% of his shots there this year. In terms of shot distribution and general quality-of-shot, Evans is having a really good season. He just can't seem to make any of the well-placed shots he's taking.

Assuming Evans continues his improved shot profile, it isn't unrealistic to expect that he'd post one of his best seasons once his shot starts coming around. And the Pelicans -- despite the woeful broad strokes -- have shown flashes of brilliance even in this lost year. They hold one of the NBA's best four-man combinations in Holiday/Evans/Anderson/Davis, a fearsome group that's outscored opposing teams by 15 points per 100 possessions in the 143 minutes they've shared the court. The Pelicans are circling the toilet bowl on another lost season, but count me as an optimist for their future trajectory. Their genuinely awful defense probably nixes their potential as a contending force in the NBA (barring a massive leap by Anthony Davis on the defensive end -- hardly a remote possibility), but if they can put together a healthy season, they should be firmly in the mix for one of the West's lower-tier playoff spots in the next few years of their locked-up core.

• • •

1. Sacramento Kings (14th in the West) 20-37, SRS of -1.33
2. Charlotte Bobcats (6th in the East) 27-30, SRS of -2.13
3. Minnesota Timberwolves (10th in the West) 28-29, SRS of 4.54
4. Washington Wizards (5th in the East) 29-28, SRS of 0.00
5. Phoenix Suns (8th in the West) 33-24, SRS of 2.85
6. Chicago Bulls (4th in the East) 31-26, SRS of -0.04
7. Memphis Grizzlies (9th in the West) 32-24, SRS of 1.16
8. Toronto Raptors (3rd in the East) 32-25, SRS of 2.7
9. Golden State Warriors (7th in the West) 35-23, SRS of 4.69
10. Dallas Mavericks (6th in the West) 36-23, SRS of 2.52

7. Portland Trail Blazers (3rd in the West) 40-18, SRS of 5.56

INJURED ROSTER: LaMarcus Aldridge (groin), Thomas Robinson (sprained knee), Meyers Leonard (sprained ankle), Joel Freeland (sprained MCL)

I was going to write a bit about San Antonio's revolving door of injuries and their in-process return to form, but last night's Portland win really shocked me. So much so that I had to write about their team. I've been on record as one of Portland's biggest backers this year, and I went so far as to tab LaMarcus Aldridge as the NBA's MVP at the quarter-way mark of the season. I wouldn't quite put Aldridge at #1 on my ballot anymore. Durant has passed him handily. That said, if I had a ballot I'd still slot him firmly in the top five.

Many harbor disdain for Aldridge as an MVP candidate. They note that his play this season isn't drastically different from his play in the last several seasons, following that nobody in their right mind would've considered him an MVP candidate before this year. Ergo, he can't be considered much of one this year, especially when several other big men in his conference are putting up similarly incredible seasons. This logic isn't unreasonable, but I think it misses a few key points about Aldridge's play this season that bear repeating.

• HIS DEFENSE: Aldridge has always been a decent-to-good defender, at least when he's locked in. He's no Duncan, but he's almost always in the right place and he's fastidious when it comes to maintaining position and switching. There's a caveat, though. His defensive talent is more reminiscent of a very good accountant who knows the ins and outs of the tax system than an artistic savant who shines in any situation. Fittingly, Aldridge is prone to fits of laziness and defensive lapses when he's stuck on teams that are poor at just about everything on the court. That isn't true about this year's team. The 2014 Blazers are a pathetic defensive team -- a fact that will likely be their death knell in the playoffs -- but it's by absolutely no fault of Aldridge. His effort on defense has been phenomenal this year, and the Blazers have actually needed him more on defense than they have on offense -- the Blazers have been five points per 100 possessions better on defense with Aldridge on the floor, essentially representing the difference between Milwaukee's 30th ranked defense (allowing an ORTG of 110) and Memphis' 10th ranked defense (allowing an ORTG of 105).

• HE ACTUALLY IS PLAYING BETTER: People are correct when they note that his play isn't dramatically better than it was before. But even disregarding his markedly increased defensive intensity, Aldridge is posting his best long-two shooting percentage of his career by a decent margin despite massively increased usage from that range. He's rebounding at a higher rate than he ever has before, his assist rate is a comfortable career high, and his turnover rate is a comfortable career low. In a vacuum, the changes are all reasonably small. Compounded, though? In context with his massively increased usage? He's made a leap from "perennial deserving all-star" to a number one option you can actually contend for a title with, even if only on the fringes. That's a pretty big deal.

• PORTLAND'S OFFENSE MAKES NO SENSE WITHOUT HIM: I'm one of the few remaining weirdos who firmly believe that Dirk Nowitzki deserved the regular season MVP in the 2011 season. So perhaps that's part of where my Aldridge-inspired backing comes from -- I have a soft spot for quixotic big men whose skillset is absolutely essential to the way their team plays the game. Portland's league-leading offense is based around subverting the core concept of most defensive schemes -- mainly, the idea that the long-two is an anathema to efficiency. Most teams use that concept and try to force the opposing team to take as many guarded long twos as possible, aware that they're a better result for the defense than a three point shot or any closer two. The Blazers, Heat, and Mavericks all laugh at that concept, each featuring floor-spacing big men that extend the floor and make that theoretically distasteful long two into a downright enviable result. An offense that turns bad results into good ones is one that can sustain through droughts and playoff pressure. Without Aldridge's skillset (or perhaps more to the point, even if he was equally as skilled with a less quixotic skillset), the Blazers aren't anywhere close to the threat they are.

I maintain serious skepticism at Portland's ability to keep a sustained period of quality play going without Aldridge there to open the offense and keep their defense rolling. Especially when it comes to the defense. The Blazers still have the pieces for a reasonably effective NBA offense without Aldridge, although it's more reliant on threes and less likely to sustain productivity against a playoff defense. They just can't really defend anyone, as evinced by the disappointing home loss they recently suffered to the M*A*S*H unit Spurs last week. They scored 23 points in the last six minutes by running a slightly more traditional offense with their remaining personnel, and it was almost enough to win the game. But filling in Aldridge's absence on defense is exceedingly difficult.

That said? Last night's game was pretty amazing on that front for the Blazers. Perhaps Brooklyn was just having a bad night, and perhaps it's too easy to read too far into a single game. But the Blazers put up one of their very best defensive efforts of the season despite starting Dorrell Wright and playing serious minutes while the game was close with an absolutely bonkers Williams-McCollum-Barton-Matthews-Claver lineup. That lineup shouldn't be able to defend ANYONE, let alone a lineup fielding Brooklyn's "best five" unit of Williams/Johnson/Thornton/Pierce/Garnett. I'm admittedly hesitant to say that my initial read on Portland's no-Aldridge defense is wrong. But I can't deny that Portland's guard-fueled defensive triumph with a single active big man is tantalizing for me, even if it came against a mediocre-to-bad Nets team. If Portland's smalls can put that kind of a defensive effort together with Aldridge and Lopez together on the front line, their ceiling rises dramatically. Worth watching, as the season churns to an end.

• • •

1. Houston Rockets (5th in the West) 39-19, SRS of 4.99
2. Los Angeles Clippers (4th in the West) 40-20, SRS of 6.56
3. San Antonio Spurs (2nd in the West) 41-16, SRS of 6.41
4. Oklahoma City Thunder (1st in the West) 43-15, SRS of 6.82
5. Indiana Pacers (1st in the East) 43-13, SRS of 7.37
6. Miami Heat (2nd in the East) 40-14, SRS of 5.06

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Every year, we do SOMETHING for the trade deadline. Sometimes it's an after-the-fact reaction piece with observations that often look silly in retrospect. Sometimes it's a run-down of every single trade that happened. Well. Most of the time, it'll be that. And that "most of the time" includes today, when I'll be updating this post with running reactions to all of the NBA's huge, sea-changing moves. (Spoiler alert: we probably won't get any. We can dream, though.) Let's get to it. I'll keep a list of trades covered in the top piece of the post so you know how recently updated this post is. [LAST UPDATE: 5:43 PM]

• DEAL #1: BKN acquires Marcus Thornton, SAC acquires Jason Terry & Reggie Evans.
• DEAL #2: GSW acquires Steve Blake, LAL acquires Kent Bazemore & MarShon Brooks.
• DEAL #3: CLE acquires Spencer Hawes, PHI acquires Earl Clark and two second round picks.
• DEAL #4: SAC acquires Roger Mason Jr., MIA acquires literally nothing whatsoever.
• DEAL #5: CHA acquires Gary Neal & Luke Ridnour, MIL acquires Ramon Sessions & Jeff Adrien.

• • •

EVERY ROSE HAS ITS THORNTONS (Trade story on ESPN.com)

BROOKLYN RECEIVES:

Marcus Thornton (2-yr/$8.3 mil per)

SACRAMENTO RECEIVES:

Jason Terry (2-yr/$5.7 mil per), Reggie Evans (2-yr/$1.7 mil per)

This is an absolutely classic Brooklyn trade. Over his tenure as owner, Mikhail Prokhorov's Nets have made performance art out of trading bad contracts for worse ones that represent marginal talent upgrades. This trade is no different. Marcus Thornton has had an interesting NBA career -- after breaking out in his first two seasons as a surprisingly second round steal, the Kings traded away Carl Landry (who was at the time their best player) for Thornton. They followed up the trade by paying a king's ransom to keep Thornton in-house, specifically in the form of a 4-year $32 million dollar deal. Theoretically, if he'd developed from where he was in his second year season, that contract wouldn't be horrible. In actuality, it turned out to be a downright awful move. Thornton hasn't developed in any real fashion since his sophomore season, and in many ways has deeply regressed. His shot selection (once a mortal lock to improve) has actually gotten worse as time went on, and his shooting has finally reverted to the mean.

"Wait, what? He's shooting 31% from three, what do you mean 'reverted to the mean'?" Well, yeah. Here's what you need to understand about Marcus Thornton. Although he's a good shooter, Thornton's shot selection (in terms of TYPES of shots, not locations) has always been among the worst in the league, and he takes an obscene number of wildly contested shots off the dribble. As I pointed out in his capsule a few clicks back, Sacramento scorekeepers have had a weird habit of crediting other players with assists when Thornton takes shots off several dribbles while moving-into-the-defender. Don't let this numbers fool you. Thornton is notorious for making easy shots difficult with no particular regard for efficiency or tact, and while his awful shooting this season is out of character with his general career numbers (and perhaps more importantly someone with his technically adept form) it's hardly out of character for a player with the shot selection he has. Other than his scoring, there really just isn't much else there -- Thornton's game is essentially an iPhone app that gives you a recorded fajita sizzle without actually providing sustenance. No defense, no passing, no rebounding, no chance. And he's making $8.3 million, which is... less than ideal.

That said, I don't dislike this deal for Brooklyn at all. Nor do I really hate it for Sacramento, either. Brooklyn is at the point where they need to start looking at the future. You don't look at the future by playing the dessicated corpse of Jason Terry, who's effectively done as a professional basketball player. If we're honest, you probably don't look to the future by playing the 27-year-old Thornton either. He is what he is, and it's difficult to see a situation where he becomes a player worth his salary. But at least it's a lateral move with some limited quantity of upside. Perhaps Garnett, Kidd, and Pierce badger Thornton into playing off-ball and using his technically sound shot on fewer off-dribble heaves, making him a passable semi-young three-point gunner on a team that does realistically need more spacing. You know, given Garnett's offensive collapse and the absence of Lopez. He has a possible role, at the very least. And if Thornton DOES fail, it's not a humongous problem -- the Nets will have spent a lot of money on it, but money is essentially a concept rather than an actual restraint to Prokhorov. So it's not really that big of a deal. And the contracts are the same number of years, too.

As for Sacramento, they save a few million dollars, which is going to be essential when it comes time to give Isaiah Thomas his extension this summer -- in the aftermath of the Rudy Gay trade, they're already pushing up against the luxury tax line. They've got the potential to save a few more as well, if Jason Terry accepts a buyout. They aren't realistically going to get anything on a basketball court from Terry or Evans, but they managed to offload their worst contract and save a few bucks without giving up a draft pick. And the contracts they got are easier to move, especially that of Reggie Evans. I could imagine a team like the Clippers potentially putting out feelers for Evans and giving out a low second rounder for him to bolster their big man rotation. Hardly a shabby result, at least when your main motivation going into the trade was to simply get a gigantic albatross off your books.

• • •

BIDDING ADIEU TO THE BLAKESHOW (Trade story on ESPN.com)

GOLDEN STATE RECEIVES:

Steve Blake (1-yr/$4 mil per)

LOS ANGELES LAKERS RECEIVE:

MarShon Brooks (1-yr/$1.2 mil per), Kent Bazemore (1-yr/$0.8 mil per)

There isn't much to belittle or joke about here. This is just a solid trade for both sides, straight up. The Los Angeles Lakers are a flaming tire fire this season, a team with a record that overstates their quality (yes, they're worse than 18-36) and a rabid fanbase that was clinging to nori-thin playoff hopes for reasons passing understanding. Steve Blake is an odd looking guy whose game has never been big-picture important in the NBA. This move doesn't exactly change that, but it does reflect that he's had a tiny bit of a comeback season this year. At the age of 33, Blake is putting up his best PER since 2009 (which, full disclosure, is still well below average for a point guard). He's posting the highest assist rate of his career and his highest usage rate since 2009, and he's done that despite a gross spate of injuries and a difficult season overall. Which would indicate that he'd be perfect for the Warriors as a final solution to their irritable backup guard problem. I think it's a good move by the Warriors to kick the tires on it, but I admit that I'm not 100% positive it'll work out for them. While Blake has been involved in several of L.A.'s best lineups, a lot of Blake's best work has been done in dual-point lineups when he's alternating his ball-handling with better point guards beside him.

His two best five-man combinations this season have come while he was flanked by Steve Nash (+3.9 net rating for Blake/Nash/Young/Gasol/Kaman) or Kendall Marshall (+10.5 net rating for Blake/Marshall/Johnson/Williams/Kaman). This doesn't extend to ALL lineups including Nash and Marshall, and looking at the tape, Blake certainly did take on more of the ballhandling than you'd expect. But given that Blake's three is his best weapon, you really do need to have another good ballhandler on the floor with him if you intend to fully utilize his skillset. I'm not positive Jordan Crawford is going to suffice as that ballhandler, which may to require Marc Jackson to get creative and test out dual-guard lineups with Curry and Blake, with the two of them getting alternating off-ball reps to force double teams and open up their offense. That said, there's certainly a chance that Blake ends up being everything Golden State wants. Good passer, decent shooter, competent floor general. He's also not an embarrassment on defense anymore, which is great. Old point guards often get a little bit better on defense as time goes on, simply by dint of being around long enough to develop a good predictive sense on where a possession is heading before it gets there. Blake has that second sense, and he reacts accordingly. It doesn't make him a positive defender, but it does make him less of a turnstile than he was earlier in his career.

It's also a relatively low-cost move in the long term for Golden State, as Blake is nestled firmly in a low-money expiring deal that doesn't push them over the tax line. They also opened up a roster spot, which could be used down the stretch if they suffer a big injury and need to pick up some low-cost depth or kick the tires on a D-League prospect. As for the Lakers, the subject of the hour is money -- specifically, the fact that they saved $2 million dollars and now sit within spitting distance of the tax line. If they move Jordan Hill for peanuts (as is expected), any further minor move could place them under the tax and give them a bit more time before they run into the notoriously horrific tax-repeater penalty implemented in the 2011 CBA. Blake is 33 years old, and didn't represent any particular part of L.A.'s future. He was also having one of the better seasons on their team. Moving him out makes them a bit worse and gives them a quality opportunity to assess a semi-talented young piece in Kent Bazemore. It also sets up an epic clash in the 2014 Las Vegas Summer League between Laker Legend Kent Bazemore and the heel-turn summer league dynasty that kicked him to the curb. This is going to be the greatest subplot of the 2014 Las Vegas Summer League. If I were you I'd get a head-start on your disgustingly long oral histories now.

• • •

GUESS THAT'S HAWE THE COOKIE CRUMBLES (Trade story on ESPN.com)

CLEVELAND RECEIVES:

Spencer Hawes (1-yr/$6.5 mil per)

PHILADELPHIA RECEIVES:

Earl Clark (2-yr/$4.2 mil per), 2014 second round CLE/ORL draft pick, 2014 second round MEM draft pick

Color me a bit surprised that Philadelphia got any value at all for Spencer Hawes on an expiring contract, but I probably shouldn't be. One of this season's odd plot twists have been the soaring statistical profile of virtually everyone in Philadelphia despite the nettlesome truth that virtually everyone on their roster has had a disappointing season. This is a result of an age-old tendency to look at a player's season averages without looking at the context around them. Don't make the same mistake -- although Hawes is putting up a classic box score line on downright excellent per-36 rates (specifically, Hawes is averaging per-36 minute numbers of 15-10-4-1-1), those numbers are extremely skewed. The Philadelphia 76ers are currently playing faster basketball than anyone else in the NBA, to the point that they're playing six more possessions in the average contest than the average NBA team. This effect becomes even more pronounced when you're extrapolating per-36 numbers, massively inflating the classical box score chops of Philly's strongmen. Hawes is decent, but tricking teams into giving up actual assets for him is just that -- a trick.

He's not a 15-10 type player, and despite the gaudy averages, he probably averages out as a 3rd or 4th best big man on a contending team in the overall picture. Despite his 7'0" height, Hawes a terrible habit for completely disengaging on defense, which is something you simply can't abide as a starting center in the NBA. He reminds me of a slightly larger edition of Indiana's career-year Troy Murphy -- his rebounding total is deceptively high (10 rebounds per 36 minutes!) due to Philadelphia's pace. He actually rates out as the NBA's 25th best rebounder out of 40 bigs who receive regular minutes this season, and he's far closer to the bottom than the top. His offense is valuable mostly in that he's actually developed into quite an effective three point shooter, as he's shot an incredible percentage (40%) on serious volume this season. His post moves are an adventure and his short-range shotmaking is poor, but his range could be a deathly effective option in a pick and roll heavy offense with Kyrie Irving and Dion Waiters setting him up. Possibly. His flagging rebounding and awful defense should put the kibosh on dreams of him as a starter, but he could be a nice younger piece to grow as a tertiary big beside Cleveland's young core.

In the overall picture, I like this trade for Philadelphia. While Earl Clark has two years on his deal, next year is a team option they're extremely unlikely to take. The Memphis second round pick is probably not going to be particularly valuable (it currently projects as the 50th pick overall), but the other pick is a nice get. Reports aren't yet clear on whether it's Cleveland's own secondyou round pick or Orlando's second round pick, but it hardly makes a difference -- it's likely to end up in the 32-37 range, which is exactly where you want to be in the second round. Given the current CBA, a pick from 31-40 is arguably a higher value bet than a pick from 20-30. Players from 20 onward are all crapshoots, but the high second rounders combine the merits of a decently large player pool with the merits of non-guaranteed money and flexibly structured salary. It essentially lets Philadelphia take a flyer on a late first round talent without having to take on the guaranteed salary that entails, which is a giant boon when you're looking for cheap young talent that could make up pieces of your core.

As you might've picked up, I'm a bit more shaky on Cleveland's role in the trade. I see why they did it -- Spencer Hawes likely represents a large upgrade from any value the Cavs could've gotten from the two second round picks, and Earl Clark was an unmitigated failure in Cleveland. From a value perspective, they got good value for their picks, and it was a decent move in a vacuum. But I'm not entirely loving the end-game here. Tyler Zeller is finally having a nice stretch of games that indicates his potential as exactly the sort of 3rd-to-4th big that Spencer Hawes represents, and the Cavs currently have one of the league's biggest boondoggles in their frontcourt. Adding Hawes to the mix virtually guarantees that one or two members of the Varejao/Thompson/Zeller/Bennett foursome will lose minutes, and that's not a result I find very appealing.

Rentals for shakily valued picks are good if you're intending to kick the tires on a player who you were thinking of signing in the offseason. It's a great way to ensure the player fits with your core BEFORE you sink a large amount of money into their deal. But I don't really have the slightest idea where Hawes fits without sending out some of Cleveland's big men. Given the age and relative productivity of Cleveland's cadre of frontcourt young'ns, I'm not sure if Hawes is much of an upgrade at all, even if they'd gotten him for free. Good trade, value-wise. But Chris Grant's epitaph as a general manager was a guy who got excellent value in almost all of his trades but never had a coherent plan to use that value. Grant may be gone, but this trade echos his philosophy. Which isn't ideal.

• • •

GUEST POST: BILL SIMMONS ON ROGER MASON JR. TO SACRAMENTO

MIAMI RECEIVES:

A draft pick that literally does not exist.

SACRAMENTO RECEIVES:

Roger Mason Jr. (1-yr/$1.3 mil per)

EDITOR'S NOTE: I'm on my lunch break, so I decided to commentate this trade by simply copy and pasting a segment from the Sports Guy's feature on the James Harden trade from the 2013 preseason. I have done no editing to the text other than replacing "James Harden" with "Roger Mason Jr.", all Lakers mentions with Nets mentions, and all Thunder mentions with Heat mentions. Also, I took out a swear. This is exactly how to analyze this trade.

Never — not in my wildest dreams — did I imagine Miami breaking them up.

When everyone started playing the blame game after the trade — Roger Mason Jr. shouldn’t have been so greedy, Miami should have played it out for one more year, the trade never would have happened if Roger Mason Jr. played better in the national TV Finals rematch against the Spurs, Pat Riley didn’t get anything whatsoever back in this trade, etc., etc., etc. — I kept thinking about those three guys with their arms around each other. Do you really want to break THAT up? Weren’t these guys headed somewhere together? Wasn’t that series part of the journey? Wasn’t this like canceling a great TV series after one and a half seasons, like if Homeland just stopped right now and we never found out what happened to Brody and Carrie?

Forget about worrying whether Roger Mason Jr. is a max player (and by the way, he is — 15 teams would have given it to him), or why Roger Mason Jr. didn’t play better in the 2013 Finals (um, James Worthy sucked in the 1984 Finals and turned out fine), or if it meant something that Roger Mason Jr. didn’t just blindly take less than what he’s worth (when he had already sacrificed minutes, numbers, and shots to succeed on that team). Miami significantly hindered their chances of winning a title — not just this year, but every year. And they did it because, after raking in ridiculous amounts of money these past four years (including $30-35 million PROFIT during last year’s shortened season), they valued their own bottom line ahead of their title window. A window that included the second-best player in the league (Roger Mason Jr.), a top-10 player (Roger Mason Jr.) and a top-20 player (Roger Mason Jr.) … all under the age of 45.

That’s why every Brooklyn Nets fan spent the weekend rejoicing and making 2014 Finals plans. This was the one team that scared the living crap out of them — these past two seasons, Miami was too young, too fast, too relentless, too everything. Even after the Nets added Paul Pierce and Kevin Garnett, it’s worth noting that (a) Paul Pierce can’t defend Roger Mason Jr. unless he’s allowed to use a two-by-four, and (b) Juwan Howard is overpaid mainly because he’s been Garnett’s Kryptonite these past few seasons, someone with the bizarre ability to frustrate and even neutralize Garnett beyond any realm of common sense. After the Heat traded Roger Mason Jr., every Nets fan I know e-mailed me. They were overjoyed.

EDITOR'S NOTE: Aaron McGuire has been fired.

• • •

LET'S MAKE A NEAL

CHARLOTTE RECEIVES:

Gary Neal (2-yr/$3.2 mil per), Luke Ridnour (1-yr/$4.3 mil per)

MILWAUKEE RECEIVES:

Ramon Sessions (1-yr/$5.0 mil per), Jeff Adrien (1-yr/$0.9 mil per)

This deal is relatively minor on its face, but I'd deem it a pretty good get for Charlotte. Ramon Sessions is a useful player as a slasher, but he's a bit duplicative with Charlotte's current rotation of smalls. Kemba Walker, Gerald Henderson, and Michael Kidd-Gilchrist are all effective slashers with good at-rim games and generally shaky range -- it was somewhat unlikely Sessions was coming back after his contract expired anyway, so replacing him with a few pieces that add different wrinkles to the Charlotte offense is a reasonably strong move. Especially for the two they picked. Luke Ridnour has fallen off badly this season with the absolute dearth of talent in Milwaukee, but he's less than a year removed from a solid season in Minnesota next to Rubio and Love and his assist rate is roughly commensurate with what Ramon Sessions gave the Bobcats at the point. He's still a decent three point shooter, as well -- even in this year's down season he's sitting snug at 37% from behind the arc.

The big upside bet the Bobcats are making in this deal lies in Neal, the once-proficient three point gunner that Milwaukee poached in the offseason from San Antonio. I've never been Neal's biggest fan for a wide variety of reasons that don't really bear mentioning here, because he simply doesn't make enough money for them to matter. Neal's sitting at $3.2 million a year on an extremely short contract. Yes, he's been awful this year (39-36-83 shooting with absolutely nothing outside his scoring), but again... $3.2 million! For a team like Charlotte that all too often has to overpay veterans to attract them in free agency, getting to kick the tires on a once-proficient young shooter on a bargain bin deal makes a heck of a lot of sense. Even if Neal and Ridnour maintain their tepid play from Milwaukee, they'll still roundly upgrade Charlotte's three point attack and immediately give the team 3-4 more decent-percentage heaves from the three point line every night. If Neal can return to his San Antonio form, the bet becomes even better -- I've a suspicion that Neal at peak form would work extremely well in a space-and-drive lineup with Kemba, Henderson, Jefferson, and Tolliver. He might take too many shots, but Charlotte's stagnant offense isn't generating looks that are all that much better than any average Neal chuck anyway. It's just generally a good fit.

As for Milwaukee, they wanted to get out of Neal's long term money, and -- perhaps -- wanted to kick the tires on a cheap prospect in Jeff Adrien. Sessions is hardly in Milwaukee's future plans, and his summer departure seems like a lock to me. They'll get 30 games of two players unlikely to play a huge role in their future as they tank for a blue chip superstar. They'll hope for the best, because there isn't really much else to do. It's hard to take a long view at Milwaukee's future, because that future seems so desperately far away. Maybe Ramon Sessions will do the fans a solid and uncork one of his throwback 24-assist nights. Let's hope so.

• • •

I was pretty sure going into the day that I'd be able to fit all of the trades into a single post. Evidently, I was wrong -- I'm already hovering around 4000 words and I've only gone over 5 deals. Thus, I'll cut this post off here and analyze the rest of these in a brand new fresh-til-death post on the remaining seven deals. Taste the fever!

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If you follow college basketball in any capacity, you probably read Ken Pomeroy's excellent blog. If you don't, start reading it now and pretend you always did. Professor Pom-Pom (NOTE TO SELF: Never again call him this) recently posted a fun little piece going over two groups of NCAA players: a selection of guys that don't start but play a ton and another selection that start the game but barely play at all, headlined by the fantastically named "Matt Milk." I thought it was an neatway to highlight a segment of the league's players that have made the "starter" designation a lot less meaningful in the NBA's modern era, so much so that I decided to run the numbers for the NBA and find the NBA's closest analogues to the Tre Dempses and the Matt Milks of the world.

Now, I did need to change a few aspects. In the NCAA, there are quite literally thousands of players from which to choose from. At the time I looked up the numbers in this post, 4711 players had registered minutes in the NCAA this season. Only 456 have suited up for the NBA. As a result, outlier cases are a bit harder to wrangle in the NBA, so I had to relax the conditions on Pomeroy's lists a little bit to get a collection of players that felt representative. To wit:

• For our starters in name only, the cutoff points are players that have started more than 85% of their games played. For good measure, they also have to have played in more than 40 games.

• For our bench staples who play a ton (or our "starters off the bench", as I'm calling them) the cutoff points are players that haven't started a single game but have played in at least 45. This does eliminate a few players (like Manu Ginobili and Draymond Green), but it leaves enough bench staples for a five player list.

All that said, let's get into our two lists.

• • •

THE STARTERS OFF THE BENCH

#5: MARCUS MORRIS,_ PHOENIX SUNS
__21.9 MPG in 51 games -- 0 starts, 45.4% of PHX minutes played_

I'm a big fan of Pomeroy's adherence to "percentage of team minutes played" when looking at playing time, so I'm going to do that for this post. Hence: of all the minutes Phoenix has played basketball this season, 45.4% of those minutes featured Marcus Morris. Like his brother, Marcus has carved out quite a nice role for himself in Phoenix. Role-wise, he serves as the three-point floor spacer to Markieff's rim-rocking stylings. And he's been effective -- the Suns have been marginally less effective with Marcus on the floor than they've been without him, but he's played a role in several aggressive bench-heavy lineups that have done a lot to keep Phoenix afloat during Bledsoe's absence. Fittingly, Marcus' best four-man group is one of such bench-heavy pairings featuring him and his brother together -- the Suns have outscored teams by 24 points per 100 possessions in the 125 minutes they've played with the four man group of Channing Frye, Goran Dragic, and the Morris Twins on the floor together (alongside any of Phoenix's intriguing wing options alongside them).

#4: JEREMY LAMB,_ OKLAHOMA CITY THUNDER
___

22.2 MPG in 54 games -- 0 starts, 46.0% of OKC minutes played

Last season, Lamb was less than an afterthought in the rookie of the year race -- he played 147 minutes in the NBA (alongside 689 minutes in the D-League) and did just about jack-all with the opportunity, showing a tentative shooting stroke against more aggressive NBA defenses and an even worse grasp of himself on the defensive end. Although he was young and the Thunder didn't need a ton out of him, the initial returns on the Harden trade looked to be bunk. Guess we spoke too soon. Lamb's play this season has been reasonably excellent, and as a result he's played more minutes at the all-star break than he did in the NBA and D-League seasons combined last year. He'll never be better than Damian Lillard or Anthony Davis, but this year has lent a much more sympathetic eye to the infamously panned Harden trade. His defense is still a bit of a struggle, but he puts in time on that end and does about as well as an mildly undersized guard can do. His real value hasn't been in value added as much as it has a terrific continuity of Oklahoma City's offensive flow -- the Thunder's loss of Kevin Martin turned out to be a blessing, as they've replaced Martin's expensive, waning, and aging contributions for Lamb's time. He produces just about the same excellence as the 2013 Thunder came to expect from Martin -- he just does it cheaper, better, and with more staying power. He's an offensive fulcrum who waxes and wanes with the flow of Oklahoma City's offense, but he's a piece for the future rather than a fragment of the past.

#3: MO WILLIAMS, PORTLAND TRAIL-BLAZERS
24.3 MPG in 49 games -- 0 starts, 46.4% of POR minutes played

This is not Mo Williams' best season. It's a rarity among NBA talent to have a guy's best season cleanly overlap with the only time in their career where they're in a position to make an all-star game. But Mo's a lucky one -- there's exactly one season in Mo's repertoire where he played all-star caliber ball, and it just so happened to be the exact season where an injury opened a spot for him in a weak eastern conference slate. All that said, while it certainly isn't Mo's best season (he's a no-defense player with a PER of 11 -- that's ROUGH), he's taken on his most important season in his post-Cleveland years by accepting and thriving in two separate roles. In most lineups, he serves as a decoy from beyond the arc meant to open up offensive sets inside and keep defenders honest. But in his best lineup, his function is different -- the Blazers are the first team in quite a while to demand that Mo take on primary ball-handling duty for long stretches of games and have it NOT blow up in their face. The Blazers have outscored teams by 17 points per 100 possessions in Mo's most-common lineup (104 minutes played). It features Mo at point, Matthews and Batum at the wings, and Lopez/Aldridge at the bigs -- their starting lineup minus Lillard, essentially. This lineup has not succeeded with much help from Mo's shooting -- without Lillard to set him up, Mo puts up a borderline-disgusting 35% TS% in that lineup. It's successful because everyone else on the floor works incredibly well together, and Mo and Batum combine to assist on nearly half the made shots this lineup produces. Good on Mo -- and the Blazers -- for finding one of Mo's first post-LeBron lineups where his passing is actually effective.

#2: VINCE CARTER, DALLAS MAVERICKS
24.1 MPG in 53 games -- 0 starts, 49.1% of DAL minutes played

Although making fun of Vince Carter is something akin to a Canadian national pastime, at some point you have to admit that his longevity is pretty impressive. We've only got 15 players left who were drafted in 1998 or earlier, and few of them play any time at all. In fact, only five of them have played over a thousand minutes in the 2014 season. To wit, these five:

1. DIRK NOWITZKI -- 52 games, 52 starts, 1675 MP at the age of 35
2. TIM DUNCAN -- 49 games, 49 starts, 1448 MP at the age of 37
3. PAUL PIERCE -- 45 games, 38 starts, 1303 MP at the age of 36
4. VINCE CARTER -- 52 games, 0 starts, 1276 MP at the age of 37
5. RAY ALLEN -- 47 games, 9 starts, 1246 MP at the age of 38

Nobody else among the oldies is contributing much at all, with Kobe representing the single player out of the remaining 10 who might ever return to a contributing form at all. Isn't that sort of impressive? I've never been a big fan of Carter's case for the NBA's hall of fame, but his late career renaissance in Dallas is starting to make the prospect a bit less absurd to me. If you'd told me a few years back that Vince Carter would be toiling at the age of 37 for a marginal playoff team, coming off the bench and working his ass off for barely any return or glory, I'd have thought you mad. But there he is.

He's fallen off, obviously, and he's not an amazing asset anymore... but he's a productive three point shooter with more dependable pressure defense than most of the young guns in Carlisle's wheelhouse, and he still shows flashes of his stat-stuffing wunderkind days long past. I mean, really -- he averages 17-5-4 per 36 minutes, which is hardly far removed from his 19-5-4 he put up in 2010 when he helped Orlando make the Eastern Conference Finals. He's not a massive factor, obviously. Nor is he particularly important. But I can't help appreciating the fact that the player who supposedly never gave a damn is -- somehow -- still putting up a strong facsimile of his old play at age 37 , as the 8th oldest player in the entire league.

#1: MARKIEFF MORRIS, _PHOENIX SUNS__
25.0 MPG in 50 games -- 0 starts, 50.9% of PHX minutes played_

Ah, the other Morris! Although Markieff has played in fewer games than Marcus, he's played quite a few more minutes and had a bit more time to shine. Mostly because he's better. One of the somewhat-hilarious dangers of Phoenix's connective reliance on the Morris twins is that it makes it all the less likely that either of them win any sixth man of the year hardware. If I had to choose, Markieff would be the obvious one to pick -- he's played more efficient offense, more effective defense, and has been a lot more important to Phoenix's overall attack. Like Marcus, he's a true sixth man -- he does good work with elements of Phoenix's starting unit, but he's a member of the Suns' bench mob through-and-through. While Marcus essentially spots out beyond the arc and opens the floor for his teammates, Markieff functions as his team's primary rebounder when he's on the floor. In previous years, this would bea death knell for the Suns. Although Markieff has always been a good individual rebounder, he didn't used to very aggressive in boxing out and contesting rebounds. That's changed this year, and his newfound aggression is paying dividends -- it allows Phoenix to play wonky bench lineups with Markieff playing the nominal center, which gives the Suns a ton of weird lineup advantages on the offensive end. And when you combine his excellent rebounding with his quick trigger passes off offensive rebounds and his crafty layups, you have one of the NBA's strongest contenders for this year's 6MOTY honors. (Provided Marcus doesn't steal his votes, of course!)

STARTERS IN NAME ONLY

#5: JASON THOMPSON, SACRAMENTO KINGS
25.7 MPG in 53 games -- 47 starts, 53.0% of SAC minutes played

Thompson's an interesting case -- theoretically, given his relatively young age and longtime experience with the franchise, he'd make a good building-to-the-future pairing next to DeMarcus Cousins and would be considered a strong piece for Sacramento's future. This season has been a bit disappointing, though, and Kings fans are left wondering a bit if Thompson is going to pan out as the permanent Cousins-flanking option the franchise hoped he'd be. With Mike Malone's new system chaining Cousins deep in the post on offense (which, let's be fair, has been absolutely incredible for Cousins and unleashed a dominant side of their star that had been seen in little more than glimpses in seasons prior), it stands that whoever is next to Cousins is going to need to operate a lot more outside the paint. Just think of the Duncan/Splitter conundrum in San Antonio or the Asik/Howard conundrum in Houston. Hence, Thompson has to step out and shoot outside the paint.

The issue? He's not great at it. He's not BAD, but he isn't exactly a spacing threat, which harms Sacramento's overall spacing and creates offensive duplication. He's entirely dependent on other players to get him the shots he lives on when he's shooting outside the post -- to wit, of Thompson's 42 made shots outside of 10 feet, 38 of them were assisted. Thompson is a very good post player when he's assertive with the ball and goes up strong -- unfortunately, he's been a bit off this season, and with Cousins taking up so much room in the post in Sacramento's offensive scheme, it's been a bit difficult to get Thompson the possessions needed to work through his struggles. Defensively, he's been fine -- at least against smaller players. Thompson is good at covering smaller power forwards and decent at stepping out to contest shots, but he doesn't function nearly as well when he's switched onto larger centers. Luckily, at 6'11", there aren't exactly a ton of NBA centers dwarfing him in size. Unluckily, if you're a good offense, running plays that switch Thompson onto a larger center isn't THAT hard, and Sacramento doesn't have anywhere near the defensive discipline to accommodate it.

Anyway. All that said, the fact that Thompson -- a player who's played 53% of Sacramento's possible minutes on the season and does represent a reasonably important piece for Sacramento's future -- is showing up on a "starters-in-name-only" list probably says more than any criticisms that could be made to explain his slightly waning role. While the NCAA has a lot of coaches who play with the starter designation and give spot starts to players that aren't huge players, there are only a handful of guys in the NBA who ACTUALLY fit that role. Those handful are the four players below, and nobody else really qualifies.

#4: KENNETH FARIED, DENVER NUGGETS
24.8 MPG in 48 games -- 45 starts, 49.6% of DEN minutes played

Out of all the players on this list, Faried is by far the most confusing. Unlike Thompson, he's actually played less than 50% of Denver's minutes this season, despite Denver's odd depth situation and despite the fact that Denver's strange new management decided to clear out their big men in an effort to free up more minutes for Faried and Mozgov. Outside of Ty Lawson, Faried is the only other player on Denver's roster that really qualifies as a young talent, and he's not supremely injured -- he's battled some ankle trouble, but nothing to write home about. Denver also has one of the most unenviable cap situations in the NBA, featuring dead weight salary on players that don't figure to play a part in their future and very little flexibility over the next 2 years, despite a team that looks the part of a perennial noncontender. So, I say it again -- why isn't Faried playing more?

His defense is as it always has been -- awful. But they knew that going in. He's shooting essentially exactly as well as he did last year from the floor, and his finishing has been the same as it's always been. His rebounding is excellent, as usual, and he's only been in foul trouble once this season (a January 15th win against the Warriors where he played 17 minutes with five fouls.) The Nuggets have denied all season that Faried is on the trading block, reaffirming that he's a big piece of their future. Sure. Then why not play him? If I had to venture a guess, I'd probably think this is their odd management coming to a head with new head coach Brian Shaw. Shaw came to Denver directly from Indiana, a team where everyone defended like their lives depended on it and every player put in a lot of effort. Faried, for all his energy, is not a good defensive player nor does he put in more than a cursory effort on that end. Shaw's minutes restrictions for Faried -- while frustrating -- are probably his attempts to impose discipline on Faried in an effort to whip him into shape defensively. Doubt it's a good idea, but that'd be my guess.

#3: KEVIN GARNETT, BROOKLYN NETS
21.5 MPG in 43 games -- 43 starts, 38.9% of BRO minutes played

Now the doctor came in, stinking of gin,
And proceeded to lie on the table.
He said, "Rocky, you met your match".
And Rocky said, "Doc, it's only a scratch.
And I'll be better, I'll be better, Doc, as soon as I am able".

Every time I watch Kevin Garnett play this season, I get "Rocky Raccoon" stuck in my head. Not the whole song, just an echo of it. At first. Then it gets louder and louder as I watch him fumble around with Brooklyn's awful entry passes and tokenizing attempts at getting him offense. Then it isn't an echo anymore. I watch as the Nets thrive in their odd "longball" configuration where Garnett is reduced to a husk of the player he once was. And you can see him calling for the ball, and begging, and trying to do the things he used to do. He's this defiant man, struck down in ignominy and trying to play out the string for a team that barely deserves the echos they got of him. And it's sad, because he just can't do what he used to. But there's this glimmer of defiance and anger and fury, and occasionally the echo of Kevin Garnett crystallizes into a cry, and he uncorks a perfect post move or a furious rebound or a crisp game-deciding jumpshot. And then the song starts up again. And then it stops, because it's only an echo that can fool you every now and again. That's what it's like to watch Kevin Garnett play this season.

It hurts me.

#2: SHANE BATTIER, MIAMI HEAT
20.9 MPG in 43 games -- 39 starts, 37.6% of MIA minutes played

One of the long-running subplots of the LeBron/Bosh/Wade Heat that I've been most interested in is their reliance on essentially over-the-hill veterans. The Heat have been an amazing team during the dynasty. But outside of their big three, they've mainly done so on the backs of some unfathomable throwback performances by once-star players on the very last legs of their career. Don't get me wrong -- that's the way to do it. If you rely on young guns with talent and guile around your young and highly-paid stars, the role players will inevitably price themselves out of your range and leave the organization before you're ready for them to do it, a la Lance Stephenson in the coming summer or James Harden for the Oklahoma City Thunder. (Or you'll overpay them to keep them, clogging up cap space and eliminating future flexibility in the name of roleplayer retention.) Relying on over-the-hill veterans does a lot to fix this problem, because few teams are going to field competitive offers for a 35-year-old vet that didn't even star on a title team. They have enough money in the bank to be focused on winning rings, and they have enough NBA experience that it's easier for them to pick up your system. Best of all worlds, except when it comes to upside.

Still, there's also an inherent risk in putting so many of your eggs in the "old and creaky" basket. That's the risk they'll fall off for good. And I'm afraid that time might have finally come for Shane Battier. He's still been moderately effective in a few ways, but his defense has fallen to the point where he takes the "D" out of "3-and-D". Which is sort of sad. Battier essentially can't hope to cover larger players any more without constantly fouling and hoping the refs don't notice, and he isn't really quick enough to shade smaller players either. His offense is one-note to the verge of stark absurdity -- he's taken 35 two-point-shots and 144 threes this season. He's made only 10 unassisted shots all season (to put it another way: Battier creates his own shot once every 4 games) and his percentages are down across the board despite his reliance on Miami's offensive system. His offensive ineptitude hasn't harmed Miami that much, as teams still respect his three point shot, and Miami's offense has been better with Battier on the court than it has been with Battier off. But one wonders if taking advantage of Battier's eroding game could be the crucial matchup advantage that a team like Indiana uses to finally oust the Heat this year.

#1: KENDRICK PERKINS, OKLAHOMA CITY THUNDER

20.1 MPG in 52 games -- 52 starts, 40.0% of OKC minutes played

Okay, let's be honest. You knew this was coming, right? Who else could possibly lead the list? Perkins is widely maligned as the NBA's worst starter, and that's not a particularly hard argument to make. His defense has fallen off badly in the years since his huge extension, and he's actively made Oklahoma City worse on both ends this season. That's partly because Steven Adams replicates Perk's positives without any of his negatives, and it's partly because Brooks doesn't really utilize him effectively. But let's be fair -- how the hell DO you utilize Perkins effectively at this stage of his career? He's effectively immobile in the post, and I feel like I've seen him cause OKC three second violations (a stat tracked by NBAWowy -- he has seven, meaning he gets one once every six games or so) in every few games I've watched this year, and he commits uncalled violations of the type in every game. He currently has 83 turnovers to 74 field goals on the season. He has 150 personal fouls to 27 blocked shots. His field goal percentage is at a career low, and he has a PER of 6.2.

Despite all this, he has started every single game he's played. The only positive you can really find with Perkins is that he's the least-played regular starter in the NBA (on an MPG basis), and that Brooks has only played him 40% of the minutes he possibly could. If the playoffs come and Perkins is still playing 40% of OKC's minutes, I'd be somewhat surprised. As a Spurs fan, I'd be happy, because that gives my guys (and the Warriors, and the Clippers, and the Rockets, and the Blazers) a fighting chance. Of course, I'd also be deeply depressed as an NBA fan, because it would be the equivalent of the 2001 Lakers limiting Shaq to 20 minutes a night to see if they could win with a handicap. Perhaps they could, but I mean... why? There's little reason for historically dominant teams to play with a handicap. Oklahoma City, at their best, is that kind of a team. And Kendrick Perkins is exactly that handicap, moreso than Fisher or Thabo or any of the other players that fans complain about when it comes to Scott Brooks.

Still, I'm a Spurs fan. Can Perk can go 48 minutes, Scottie? Let's find out!

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I have a friend from work. Let's call him "Chief Kickingstallionsims." Kickingstallionsims absolutely HATES the city we live in. Just despises it. He goes full hog on the anti-Richmond jokes just about every day. Some quotes from my guy: "I wish a volcano would rise from the ground and erupt, leveling the entire town in a hipster-rending explosion that kills millions." ... "I hope there's a shortage of skinny jeans such that the hipsters revolt and start killing each other off in an orgy of senseless violence and terror." ... "If the zombie apocalypse ever happens, I hope it happens here and that the government traps all Richmond citizens to be consumed by the horrors they have created."

Not a big fan of our humble abode. As a result, Chief's been job-hunting ever since we started at our firm. Recently, he struck gold on the job market. The guy had three concurrent offers! In one, he would make his current salary but with higher bonus potential and a bit more leadership responsibility. In another, he would make about $10,000 more than his current salary but the job was with a company he wasn't sure he respected. In another, he would pull in about $15,000 more than his current salary and receive a signing bonus that would cover his "projected" bonus at our current firm and receive a complimentary moving budget... but the job looked really boring, with a high emphasis on technical work rather than creative work. All three of these jobs were in his hometown, a place he's wanted to return to for years.

We all figured he was done, and we started setting up the farewell party. Well, we were wrong. Chief Kickingstallionsims didn't take any of them, which led to shocked head-explosions among just about everyone who knew him. His logic behind rejecting all the offers and staying with our firm was simple: we tend to get yearly merit raises, and he has solid bonus potential in his role. The thought was that the merit raise in conjunction with the bonus would erase most of the salary gap between our current job and the job offers, and he enjoys his job here even if he doesn't like the city at all and wants to leave it desperately. We also were up for promotion, which he wasn't sure if he'd get or not, but if he WAS to get a promotion his salary would kick the pants off any of his "new job" salaries. So he decided to roll the dice with all the possible good things that could make his current job preferable to all the offers.

And you know what? That was a hilariously huge mistake.

We just learned our compensation information for the new year -- the results were incredibly disappointing for him. No promotion, obviously, and his raise clocked in at under $1000/year. His bonus was middling-tier, one of the smallest he's received at the firm. He was ALSO just moved between departments, which means his job -- the one he liked in the first place -- has completely changed anyway! Barring a scenario where he didn't get a raise at all and didn't get a bonus at all, this is a worst-case-scenario for Chief Kickingstallionsims -- he rejected exceedingly solid offers on the table in favor of a perfect ideal he deemed more likely than it was. He didn't account for downside risk. Unremarkably, he got burned for it.

• • •

All names, salaries, companies, and identities were changed in the previous story to protect the innocent. (I can only wish I was actually friends with Chief Kickingstallionsims.) I also changed some of the parameters of the story. Hence, it isn't a real-life story so much as it is a sketch painted in broad strokes roughly imitating life. But the essentials are there. And the moral is a universal maxim: my friend valued the intangible perfect over the attainable great. He saw all of the upside and none of the downside for his final move. He chose to value the possible future over the probable present.

Although we like to herald the NBA's new era of crack decisionmaking and analytics-inspired masterstrokes, this sort of thinking is hardly a thing of the past. It's essentially an NBA general manager's pastime. And I don't think it's really their fault; blame it on the environment. As far as I can surmise, it's mostly due to the fact that trades and acquisitions take so much time and effort to push through your management that you really HAVE to approach them in that kind of a rose-colored classes way (at least publicly). I don't remember which of the NBA's talented national scribes wrote it (probably Zach Lowe, that cad), but there's a maxim that's always rang true for me. "For every single trade we see, there are -- conservatively! -- seven deals that sputter out just before the finish line, because somebody gets cold feet." In a vacuum, most NBA decisions a GM has to make involves fooling themselves and their management into completely ignoring downside risk and hyping up the upside reward to make the final decision livable. It involves belief in the franchise's overall health and the idea that the franchise will do things with the retrieved assets that the other team couldn't. Sometimes they're right. Sometimes they're wrong.

And if they're neither of those, they're Chris Grant.

When a general manager gets canned it's usually pretty easy to isolate exactly what they did wrong. David Kahn made terrible trades and boneheaded draft picks. Glen Grunwald was in the same organization as James Dolan, a big no-no for any sensible person. Otis Smith was fired for being unable to put together a competent supporting cast around Dwight Howard. Et cetera, et cetera. The hits go on. In Chris Grant's case, there's an easy Occam's Razor answer to the question of "why he got fired." His rosters have been terribly constructed and profoundly disappointing, and someone needs to take the blame for Cleveland's nightmarish 2014 season. But I think that's oversimplifying a bit. Because of the core truth that many Cleveland scribes are discovering as they look through all of Grant's moves (such as here, in Sam Vecenie's excellent enormous rundown) -- namely, the fact that they aren't very bad moves.

In a vacuum, you can make a fringe case that Chris Grant has produced many of the most lopsided trades (comparing assets in versus assets out) of the past three years. The issue with Grant's tenure hasn't really been that his individual moves were bad, or that he's failed to accumulate assets. It's hard to even say for sure whether his player assessment is that bad -- he's had his misses, but he's had some successes too. With the exception of last year's nightmare draft, most of Grant's picks have shown at least a modicum of NBA talent, and they compare quite well to most of the players who were selected immediately thereafter. The jury's still out on many of them.

The issue has been that effectively none of Grant's innumerable assets have panned out as they were expected to despite the ready accumulation of them. It's common for a large proportion of assets to flame out. It's NOT common for virtually every single one of them to turn into a dud in your hands. It's the reverse of a Midas touch. Everything Midas touched turned to gold... and everything Chris Grant touched turned to pot. Somehow, despite effectively wiping the floor with trade partners in every trade he's conducted to date, the upside assets he's accumulated have amounted to virtually nothing.

To wit, a few choice examples of the upside versus the reality in some of Grant's most publicized moves.

• THE TRADE: Ramon Sessions and Christian Eyenga for Luke Walton and a first round picks, with added swap rights.

• THE PRE-RESULTS UPSIDE: Grant traded an expiring contract and one of the least talented NBA players I've ever seen play the game for a marginally overpaid player that could augment Cleveland's bench rotation, swap rights, and a first round pick. Nobody does that anymore, because that's a beyond crazy haul for a marginally above average point guard on an expiring contract.

• WELL, ACTUALLY... As it turned out, Luke Walton was actually the best thing Cleveland received in the trade. The coveted lottery swap didn't happen, because the Cavaliers are horrible and the Lakers aren't quite that bad yet. The 2013 draft pick DID convey, which was cool, but it ended up netting them the #19th pick in the draft, which got them Sergey Karasev. Neither Karasev nor Walton have given Cleveland nearly enough to outpace what Sessions gave Los Angeles over his few months as a Laker, which means that none of the trade's upside scenarios came to pass, and the best aspect of the trade was Zach Lowe's annual "Luke Walton All-Stars" column. Whoops.

• THE____ ACQUISITION: The Cleveland Cavaliers sign Andrew Bynum on a team-friendly hail mary contract.

• THE PRE-RESULTS UPSIDE: If Bynum played up to his potential, Cleveland would have a max-salary big waiting in the wings on a below-market contract, and they controlled the parameters of his salary due to the way the deal was structured. At his best, Bynum was a driving force behind the talent-bare 2012 Lakers and one of the league's best centers. He could help the Cavaliers on both ends. Right? ... RIGHT?!

• WELL, ACTUALLY... It turned out that all the hand-wringing about Bynum's attitude wasn't a joke. Bynum made a toxic Cleveland locker room even worse, and completely submarined Cleveland's play when he was on the floor with lackadaisical effort and mindless ball-hogging that would make Nick Young blush. The thought when the Cavs signed him was that $6 million dollars couldn't possibly be an overpay for what a healthy Bynum would produce. Turns out that was wrong -- it WAS an overpay, and a pretty big one at that.

• THE DRAFT PICK: The Cleveland Cavaliers selected Dion Waiters #4 overall, causing the world to go bug-eyed in confusion.

• THE PRE-RESULTS UPSIDE: Although a lot of people were weirded out by the pick, it wasn't necessarily a bad idea. In theory, Waiters represented a burly two-man who had an enviable at-rim game and a three point shot that would pair beautifully with Kyrie Irving's gifts as a setup man and off-ball threat. It would cement a similarly-young backcourt duo that could grow up together.

• WELL, ACTUALLY... I mean, on paper, it made sense. Sort of. But Dion's shot selection leaves a lot to be desired -- he's not a bad three point shooter, but his habit of constantly taking fully-guarded isolation threes from odd angles needs to stop. And his habit of pulling up and taking doomed long twos instead of driving with a clear path to the rim is similarly frustrating. As for the two-man game... well, with about one and a half years gone in his career, it's safe to say that Irving and Waiters have about as much of a two-man game as Coyote and the Roadrunner. They freeze each other out and (reportedly) quarrel in the locker room on a bi-weekly basis. Waiters may very well be the 3rd or 4th best player from the 2012 draft. He also turned out to be about as poor a fit for Cleveland's team as he could've possibly been, in a situation that effectively utilizes zero of his skills.

Grant's failure to survive the season serves as a reminder of one of the life's harshest realities. You can do virtually everything right within the basic parameters of your job and still be a no-holds-barred failure if you inherited the wrong situation and run into a string of bad luck. It's not ENTIRELY bad luck that's sunk him, of course -- he's made some controversial moves, and like Chief Kickingstallionsims, he's made many decisions where the upside scenario was sort of unlikely. Presidents fall on the sword of economic maladies they had nothing to do with, Chief Kickingstallionsims can vastly overestimate his raise and get burned by the perfect over the good, and Chris Grant can win every trade in a vacuum and still average out as a bad-to-terrible general manager when none of his assets pan out. It's cruel, but it's life.

The problem with inextricably tying your career to endless asset accumulation, upside bets, and celebrations of the possible is simple -- it's never a guarantee. And if the downside crashes upon you all at once, the job security that your upside bets got you lasts about as long as a snowman in summer. And thus ends the curious case of Chris Grant, the General Manager who did everything right... right up to the point where he had to deliver an actual NBA team. C'est la vie.

• • •

Programming note here. Apologies for the inactivity -- work's been hectic beyond reason for me in recent months. If you want more of my writing, you can read last night's Daily Dime as well. There's some interesting data-driven work coming up in this space later this month, which should be good for fans of the site. And at the end of the month I'll be slumming it at the Sloan Sports Analytic Conference again, where I'll be bringing you all the latest insights from the NBA's beloved egghead convention. In the meantime, let us know in the comments below what you miss most about our former content-heavy slate, and we'll try and accommodate your whims as we get back in the saddle. Stay frosty.

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Remember how we had that one series, a long time ago, where we'd entreat our writers to scribe short vignettes on the previous night's games? This is that series, only it appears once in a blue moon and often has little to do with the games of the previous night. As always, the vignettes may not always be tactful, tacit, or terse -- they'll always be under a thousand words, though, and generally attempt to work through a question, an observation, or a feeling. Today's short pieces are as follows.

• CHI at CLE: Gothic Ginobili goes Wojnarowski, Part I (by Aaron McGuire)
• OKC at SAS: Gothic Ginobili goes Wojnarowski, Part II (by Aaron McGuire)
• POR at OKC: Durant's New Wrinkle (by Jacob Harmon)

Read on after the jump.

• • •

CHI/CLE: Gothic Ginobili goes Wojnarowski, Part I
Aaron McGuire

When this game began, my intention was to use it as a springboard to talk about all the things Cleveland did wrong. That was the goal, anyway. As most of you know, I do have some allegiances with Cleveland sports, and I figured that a midseason tilt against the blown-to-pieces Bulls as the Cavs chase their playoff spot would be a good game to use as a "what's wrong, what's right, what's awry, what's on rye" type of post. The answers, in short: everything, nothing, most things, ham. That's pretty much all one needs to say. After watching this depressing, depressing game, there wasn't much point in rehashing it, and there isn't much point in belaboring said point. The Cleveland Cavaliers are a bad basketball team that's only still in the picture because the equal-opportunity east has seen fit to keep them there. That's about all there is to it.

But I'm not one to shy away from writing even when there's little to say. My plan today is simple. Going forward, Gothic Ginobili will no longer be only a place to get weird sporadically dropped basketball analysis written by even weirder people. It will no longer be exclusively a place to find stories about Richard Jefferson and Tim Toms Merlin Dunkman (sic). No, we will now also be the finest scoop-finding journalistic love story in the entire industry. Some people look at scoops and say "why?" I look at scoops that never were and ask "why not?" That's our new brand, our new strategy, our new raison d'être. To start us off, I'm going to make all of my sources really happy and maliciously leak random documents I've gotten a hold of in recent months. I'm taking the classic pick-up artist strategy towards scoops -- if I act like a unconscionable prick to every source I have, they'll all come back to give me more scoops and soon I'll be buried in scoops so deep I can't "scoop" my way out.

Anyway, today's leaked document is an internal scouting report from the Cleveland Cavaliers. This one is on a player nobody even realized they were working out, mostly on account of him not actually being a real person. This exclusive report represents the summary of all Cleveland's attempts to work out NBA journeyman Dexter Douglas. You may not recognize this name. This is because he is most often known by his superhero alias, star of the mid-90s superhero cartoon "Freakazoid." Evidently, cartoon characters age differently than normal human beings, as Douglas only aged 4 years from the cancellation of Freakazoid in 1997 to his workout earlier this week with Cleveland. He is currently engaged in a riveting internal debate as to whether he should declare for the NBA draft or continue leading the team for the top team in Division IV basketball, the West Virginia Clown College "Eucalyptus Trees." (Fantastic mascot, guys.) Well, Dexter, let's see if this maliciously leaked scouting report helps you make a decision.

CHRIS GRANT'S SUPER-PRIVATE NOTEBOOK OF PRIVATE THOUGHTS, JANUARY 22th 2014

I am a very big fan of gourds.

Whoops, sorry, wrong leak.

CHRIS GRANT'S SUPER-PRIVATE NOTEBOOK OF PRIVATE SCOUTING REPORTS, JANUARY 22th 2014

10:05 AM -- Dexter "Freakazoid" Douglas has not arrived yet. We scheduled his workout for 9:30 AM, but he DID warn us that he often sleeps in and would have trouble commuting from West Virginia to Cleveland in a single morning, especially since he'd be up late studying for his juggling midterm. So I guess that's fair. Dan is pacing around frantically. When I tried to calm him, he snapped at me, yelling about how we're on the clock for last year's #1 pick and that he wasn't even sure Stern would accept it if we turned our pick in this late. I don't have the heart to tell him.

10:23 AM -- Dexter Douglas is in the building. Somehow, he showed up in his bed, still sleeping -- when we tried to wake him, his hair slapped our hands out of the way. Dan and I agree that this ability shows great promise for his court awareness, although I admit that Dan is more open than I am to the idea of playing basketball games while every single player on the court is asleep.

10:47 AM -- He woke up shortly after my last entry. He was very apologetic -- apparently, he often flashes to random locations when asleep, and he was having a dream about being a Cleveland Cavalier. We decided to start him off on some easy stuff and do some combine tests and measurements. First discovery -- Douglas is 6'10". Sort of a tweener, a la Anthony Randolph. His wingspan is 7'0", which is good as well. The big issue we ran into when doing measurements was that because he's completely flat he doesn't technically have any weight. He can still hold onto things and apply pressure, but he doesn't actually weigh anything. Big knock on his screen setting ability, but since Dan once saw Mo Williams set a good screen, he's convinced Douglas can set good ones. I'm dubious.

11:43 AM -- We decided to start his drills off with a simple shooting test. For this classic Cavaliers scouting test, we cover the floor in "Twister" boards then yell out colors, forcing the prospect to sidestep dribble to that color and keep shooting until he makes the shot. Over the course of 30 minutes or so, this becomes incredibly exhausting, but it gives you a good sense of how the player adapts to shooting off the dribble. Also, Dan likes Twister. A lot. In this case, though, this probably was a poor choice for a drill -- Douglas could NOT stop playing Twister, and kept trying to get shots off WHILE playing Twister, which is a skill that has literally no NBA value whatsoever. He made a few, mind you, mostly when he did this weird move where he headbutted it to get the shot moving then slapped it with his hair for the follow-through Dan was enthralled, again, but I am not feeling great about this session.

12:23 PM -- Just finished a few passing drills. These were inconclusive. Every once in a while Douglas would break out some crazy pass we hadn't seen in this practice gym since LeBron was in wine and gold. Some next-level court vision, that sort of thing. But then he'd intermittently just pass the ball through the ceiling, literally breaking pipes and destroying plaster with the speed of his passes. Once, he actually passed the ball THROUGH the backboard, where it bounced back around and landed softly in the ballboy's lap. Dan was very impressed, but I mean, the ballboy was out of bounds, that would've been a turnover in an actual NBA situation. Come on. Get real.

12:49 PM -- I don't really think Douglas understands what we mean when we say "screen" drill. He keeps changing his clothes into the outfit Nic Cage wore in Face/Off and reenacting one of Cage's Travolta scenes. This is even more confusing than it sounds on paper.

1:52 PM -- We finally decided to simply axe the solo drills and try some one-on-one drills, bringing the team in for some burn with Douglas. I don't really know if this was a success or a failure. In the one-on-one game, Douglas got to show off one of the more interesting parts of his game, a completely unpredictable first step. I mean, seriously. Kyrie is bad at defense, but I'm not entirely sure how anyone is supposed to defend someone who can apparently move vertically as well as horizontally. Unfortunately, this unpredictable first step usually leads to more unpredictable steps thereafter, and I have no idea how Mike can work that into his always-completely-predictable offense. Can he, even? Dunno. Major philosophical question. Will need to consider this deeply. But I also think the refs will probably call a travel if Douglas continues to carry the ball after rising into the air with no feet touching the court. Just a suspicion of mine.

2:32 PM -- After the one-on-one game, we decided to finally simulate a full five-on-five game with Douglas subbing in on our "wine" team for Alonzo Gee. The wine team lost by 45 points, which is actually better than usual, given that the wine team is usually composed of Jarrett Jack, Sergey Karasev, Alonzo Gee, Tyler Zeller, and Anthony Bennett. The practice team designations are drawn at the beginning of the year and never changed, per team policy. Due to this, our "wine" team practice squad loses every practice game by roughly 70 points, which is actually pretty impressive given that we usually play "first team to 70." I keep telling Mike and Dan that this practice team thing completely defeats the purpose of practice teams and probably is completely destroying everyone's confidence, but Dan won't hear it and Mike's too busy chewing tobacco to hear me. (It's really loud. I wish he'd stop.)

2:46 PM -- Oh, wait, I didn't actually talk about Douglas's performance. Well, Douglas was better than Gee, but he also caused more than his fair share of errors. For whatever reason, whenever he received the ball to handle it, he would just dribble in ever-expanding concentric circles until he migrated out of bounds, at which point he would produce a trumpet and do a solo. It was fun, but it also meant he finished a 30 minute practice game with 15 turnovers, which is just insane. He also has an incredibly strange understanding of how dunks and three pointers work. Whenever he caught the ball in the paint, he'd backflip from the paint to the corner beyond the three point arc and whip the ball up in the air. He actually made all his corner threes taken like that, although most of them bounced off something else before going in the basket. Conversely, whenever he got the ball outside the free throw line, he'd jump as high as he could (which, let's be fair, is REALLY HIGH -- big advantage to not weighing anything whatsoever, will have to keep this in mind for future scouting reports) and slam the ball down with abandon. Very entertaining, but your offense can only make up for so much when you turn the ball over once every two minutes in a practice game against one of the worst defensive practice teams ever. He also had a strange understanding of defense, choosing to simply wave his hands in the air and make funny faces in an effort to distract his man. Funny enough, this actually worked on Anderson Varejao, because he thought he was looking in a mirror and started trying to check out his teeth. At that point, Douglas stole the ball and ran for a breakaway dunk, but apparently forgot what he was doing because he simply ran straight past the stanchion and through the wall with the ball. Heh, funny enough, we're actually still waiting for him to come back.

4:32 PM -- Still waiting.

7:55 PM -- Man, I liked that ball.

9:34 PM -- Well, the team is playing tonight's game now, so it's time to cut our losses and stop waiting for Douglas to come back with our ball. Dan and I both agree that Douglas has a lot of potential if he cuts down on the turnovers and learns to stop traveling so much. He has some attitude issues, but I mean... we just dealt with Andrew Bynum, right? I was going to slot him in at 15th on our draft board, but then I let slip that he used to be on a cartoon show, and Dan gave an executive order to slot at first. I knew I shouldn't have told him that...

Dexter Douglas: first pick in the 2014 NBA draft. You heard it here first, folks.

• • •

OKC/SAS: Gothic Ginobili goes Wojnarowski, Part II
Aaron McGuire

Oh, but you thought Cleveland would be the only team to face my "leaking important scouting reports" wrath? No. Wrong. Incorrect. The Spurs are a good team that plays like a crummy one when playing other good teams, Kawhi Leonard was injured, and grumbles encase my heart like Han Solo's carbonite face. So I will also leak San Antonio's scouting report of Dexter "Freakazoid" Douglas, as secretly went to work out with the Spurs as well. Aaron McGuire: Your Man With The Important Scoops, forever. The Spurs have a much more succinct, efficient, and organized style of scouting reports -- it was on a printed form sheet not unlike an SAT answer key.

POSITIVES: Quicker than Tony, can literally jump out of a building, can pass with his hair.

NEGATIVES: Wears underwear outside his pants.

FINAL VERDICT: No.

The sheet is slightly crumpled, as though it was passed between two people a dozen times. There is a conversation in the margins:

"...That's it? Come on! He's young talent! He'd fit well with Leonard and Splitter!"

"He wears underwear outside his pants."

"Pop, this is a new age in the NBA! You can work with this!"

"He wears underwear outside his pants."

"Pop, Stephen Jackson did that."

"Stephen Jackson got cut."

• • •

POR/OKC: Durant's New Wrinkle
Jacob Harmon

NOTE: This was written before last night's game between OKC and SAS.

Going into the fourth quarter, I honestly can't say I expected the Thunder to win this game in Oklahoma City. I didn't agree with the odds-makers that put the Thunder as a 6.5+ favorite going into it either. I've seen the Blazers (and particularly LaMarcus Aldridge) knock down big shots in flurries on the sporadically porous Thunder defense twice this year, and even midway through the fourth quarter, nothing in particular made me expect the outcome I received.

Maybe I should start trusting Kevin Durant a little bit more. Most people have noticed KD's relentless improvement of his all-around game; they've noticed the tightening of his handle, his increasingly elite court vision. People are even starting to acknowledge his prodigious skill as a defensive player (a dimension that isn't new this year, and went frustratingly overlooked the past two seasons). But the improvement I saw Durant display in the fourth quarter of this game was the most viscerally exciting of them all: the collected poise of "Angry Durant."

It's not the first time I've seen Angry Durant in some incarnation. He racked up a career-high in technicals last season, barking at the referees and opponents alike. And there's the whole "#NotNice" campaign. But this incarnation of Angry Durant was fundamentally different. When he felt the referees missed a call in the fourth quarter, he slammed the scorer's table with all his might. His protest of "That was bull****! ****!" was more than audible on the commentator's microphones. He looked pissed off, rattled, and generally aggravated. After an animated discussion with the concerned referee (during which I anxiously awaited the seemingly imminent second technical), Durant re-entered the game with a visibly steely resolve.

As you may know, he didn't miss again. Opening up the throttle with a furious lay-up and following it up with a barrage of contested 3-point bombs, Durant scored 11 points in a little over 3 minutes. That was the game. This was Angry Durant like I've only seen flashes of, the Durant that responds to frustration with defiant focus, extending the upper limits of his already immense talent. This is a Kevin Durant who, facing adversity in a close game with an elite division rival, responds by grabbing another gear. His crunch-time play in the early days of 2014 has been almost sneering in its dominance.

Every night won't be like this. KD has never been quite this hot, and it's hard to deny he's a better player than he ever has been... but there will be adversity for the Thunder in the coming months, with Westbrook still out for a while. LeBron James is not likely to relinquish the MVP to him lightly, and the narrative which now elevates Durant to such heights will just as quickly tear him down if he goes cold next Thursday in Miami. Which, let's be real -- it isn't out of the question. It never is.

Still, in the uncertainty of Westbrook's absence and the inconsistency of this Thunder team's very young supporting cast, KD has validated everything I've ever thought that he was. His ever-improving game and night-to-night effort has been a ray of sunshine in what initially figured to be a particularly dark winter for Thunder fans in Westbrook's absence. So whatever the outcome is when the summertime comes, I'll enjoy every one of these moments spent in the sun.

Final Score: 97-105, OKC.

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There are a lot of strange stories in the NBA this season. The Phoenix Suns are their own little pocket bible of fun times and weird sub-stories. Two weeks into the new year, the Nets and the Knicks are in the process of perfecting a Jeckyll and Hyde routine so evocative that they're sending demo tapes to Broadway. (They're 11-2 in the new year. They were a combined 19-42 in 2013. They've got a puncher's chance at winning more games in a 20-30 game January than they won in 61 games in 2013. This is NOT a drill.) The difficulty of picking the West's deserving all-stars out of a surfeit of fantastic seasons is made even more absurd by the difficulty of picking anyone in the East's candidate pool even having a decent one. Stories are everywhere, if you take the time to look.

Me, though, I've been focusing in on one particular team-contained storybook over the past few weeks. The Memphis Grizzlies have had a rough season by any metric you care to look at. They enter tonight's contest against the Bucks with an 18-19 record, which puts them three games out in the Western Conference playoff picture with a little under half the season in the books. They aren't struck with any particular bad luck in close games, a la the Timberwolves -- their point differential (outscored by about one point per contest) befits that of an 17-20 team. Most people would glance at their tepid injury-tarred season and change the channel, assuming it's a garden-variety treadmill of mediocrity and small-market woe. Not me, though. And that's mainly due to the brilliance of one incredible season.

Come, my friends. Meet Mike Conley: all-NBA point guard.

• • •

If you say "Mike Conley" to an average NBA fan on twitter, you'll generally elicit little more than a shrug. Perhaps a joke about Matt Moore. Perhaps -- if they're really tuned in -- a note about how Conley's footwork is nothing short of immaculate in its trickery. That's about it, though. Conley has been a very good player for quite some time, and I've been nestled snug in his bandwagon for quite some time as well. After all, I wrote in my capsules about his strong case as an elite point guard in the NBA, which actually inspired some laughs at my expense. Perhaps not now, though. Conley has never played quite as well as he's played this season, and he's enjoying one of the easiest-to-underrate seasons in recent memory.

Much has been written about how Kevin Love's bonkers numbers tend to be overlooked because his team has been -- over his last few years -- rather mediocre-to-bad. And this is clearly the case. Love puts up numbers that defy our internal logic of what an NBA player is capable of on a nightly basis, and he does carry the otherwise-somewhat-disappointing Timberwolves to wins they have no business competing in. This is all true. Love isn't Kevin Garnett, but he's his generation's equivalent thereof. A game changing super-duper-star mired in a franchise with a knack for constructing underperforming, defenseless rosters. You know the type -- those collections of castaways that can blow the roof off on a good offensive night but have trouble stopping even the NBA's simplest offensive attacks. That's Love's biggest problem, and most people who watch the Wolves can't come away without feeling a little bit sorry for the man.

Conley hasn't had to deal with those issues over much of his career. He's had a much more enviable position, historically, orchestrating the offense for a team with virtually no offensive expectations as defensive talent carries the team to wins regardless of Conley's personal ups and downs. But that's the past. This season, he's actually had to deal with exactly those issues I described for Love, as injuries have ravaged the complexion of the Grizzlies in such a way that's made it next to impossible to compare this year's Memphis team to the grit-and-grind hustlers of yore. At no point in Conley's career have the Grizzlies had a higher-ranked offense than they sport this season -- they're 13th overall offensively, about a point per 100 possessions better than league average. This ranking actually underrates them slightly -- their tough schedule (toughest in the league by a fair margin per Basketball Reference's "strength of schedule" calculation) has been skewed towards the league's best defenses, so it's likely that Memphis' "true talent" offensive numbers exogenous to their rough schedule are even better.

It's the defense that's been their biggest problem, as the Gasol injury (and Gasol's somewhat out-of-shape first frame pre-injury) left Memphis wanting in the middle for their anchor. With Gasol in the game the Memphis perimeter talent (mainly Conley and Allen) are able and willing to adhere to their men like glue, keeping players off the three point line and largely eliminating the types of easy threes that many great offenses live off. With Gasol out, that firm adherence wanes -- Kosta Koufos is a solid defensive center, but he's no Marc Gasol. The Memphis perimeter attack is unable to stay quite as locked in as they are with Gasol in the middle, and they have to fade back to help guard against drives to the rim. This in turn adds a few more inches of space to shooters behind the three point line, which lets opposing teams get off a few more threes and shoot a bit better on them.

Of course, that description assumes Tony Allen is healthy. He hasn't been. He's missed 9 of their 36 games, nine games in which Mike Conley became their de facto perimeter stopper. It makes sense, given that he's the best perimeter defender on the team when Allen is out, but it's evocative of the struggle Conley's had with the roster around him. Point guards have a tough enough job on a normal night, being tasked with orchestrating -- effectively -- a massively complicated multidimensional sonata and keeping everyone happy without overcomplicating the offense. But acting as your team's top perimeter stopper besides? That's like plopping a friend who's never played a single video game in front of Doom on Inferno difficulty and expecting them to make it through in one sitting. Sure, it can theoretically be done, but you have to have a gift to even be in the conversation. Also: why would you do that?!

• • •

So. How exactly has Conley acquitted himself in this tough situation?

Spoiler alert: very well.

The load on Conley's back this season has been -- quite simply -- absurd. In a recent contest, Conley scored or assisted on 23 points of the Grizzlies' 31 in the fourth quarter of a close Memphis win. This isn't particularly rare. Conley is averaging his highest usage rate of his career by a large margin, and -- unusually -- is coupling that with his highest effective field goal percentage as well (50.6%, above his former sophomore-year high of 50.3% and well above his shooting in recent vintages). But usage rate doesn't fully account for things like free throws made off of Conley passes -- one of the neat little things one can find in sifting through the new SportVU data is a better sense of "true" usage for high-touch point guards. In Conley's case, he's producing 14.6 points per game off his assists directly. He also sets up one trip to the line per game, and is the secondary-assist producer on two made shots a night.

This is a bit difficult to compare directly with other players, mostly owing to the fact that the Grizzlies have played -- very nearly -- the slowest basketball in the league. (It's oscillated back-and-forth between the New York Knicks and the Grizzlies over the past few weeks -- at time of writing, the Knicks had the title.) The average Grizzlies game has roughly four fewer possessions than league average, and many of the league's best point guards operate on the faster-paced end of the spectrum. For instance, Stephen Curry's Warriors play roughly seven more possessions in an average game. The Thunder, Suns, Clippers, and Nuggets all play roughly six more possessions in an average game. The Spurs and Blazers generally play five more possessions. Hence, comparing the raw points-off-of-assists in a game is a bit misleading, as it blithely ignores the pace-of-play difficulties that work against Conley's all-star campaign.

This argument extends to the normal box score averages, like points and assists. Conley's averages don't exactly jump off the page. He's putting up 18.1 points a night, with 2.5 rebounds and 6.5 assists to boot. He's got 1.6 steals a game, and turns the ball over two times a night. None of that is bad, necessarily, but at first glance, you wouldn't exactly think those are the numbers of a strong all-star candidate. They are, though. In the following table, I'm going to roughly calculate the percentage of their team's offense the eight leading western all-star candidates are responsible for on any given night using APTS (the points-produced-through-assists metric from SportVU), foul assists (adding team FT% multiplied by two for the two free throws multiplied by the number of free throw assists SportVU says the player produces), and their own points. I'll also relay their counting stats and turnover rates, as those are moderately relevant to my next paragraph.

Adjusting for differences in pace using the "percentage of team production" metric virtually erases the large gap in Conley's stats when compared to most of his prime competition. Yes, he still gets pasted by Curry and Paul, but so does everyone. Conley produces more offense for the Grizzlies than Dragic, Lillard, or Parker produce for theirs, and he's closer to Westbrook than Westbrook is to Curry/Paul. Translation makes the heart grow fonder, at least in Conley's case. The same is true for his stats -- if the Grizzlies played at the pace the Warriors play at, a direct translation of Conley's line would average out to 20-7-3 with 2 steals a night and 2 turnovers besides. His shooting efficiency (via eFG%) is less than Dragic/Lillard/Parker but markedly higher than that of Lawson's, and his main bugaboo offensively is his general inability to sell a call -- he shoots just 3.4 free throws a game despite shooting an excellent 85% from the line, far fewer trips than anyone else on this list. That's just about the biggest nit to pick with Conley's production.

One other notable point from the previous table? The turnover rate. Mike Conley's turnover rate of 10.8% may look roughly equivalent with the rest of the guards in the table -- it's true, most of them are reasonably good at taking care of the ball. But 10.8% isn't just a garden variety "good ball control" number. It's actually a historically strong campaign. Consider it as a mental venn diagram. In one circle, you have high usage players, who score the ball a lot and are responsible for putting up a decent number of points every night. In another circle, you have prolific passing players, who pass the ball a lot and are responsible for setting up a large number of teammates on any given night. And in the last circle, you have low turnover players, who are extremely hard to steal the ball from and who rarely make sloppy passes. It's not particularly hard to locate players who have one of those three traits -- 10-20 a season, usually, even if you put in a decent minutes restriction. It's not even particularly hard to find a player that combines two of the traits -- low turnover high usage setup scorers were big a few years back (think Michael Redd, Ray Allen, the best case scenario for Klay Thompson) and there are many low-usage point guards who are borderline savants at ball control (think Chauncey Billups, Kirk Hinrich, the best case scenario for Kendall Marshall).

But a player who combines all three in a single year? High usage, high passing, low turnovers? That's rare. Exceedingly so, in fact, and Mike Conley's season is a quintessential example of such a year. Only 31 seasons around his level can be found when querying the historical data, and it's quite a neat list to be on. Chris Paul, Michael Jordan, Gary Payton, Kobe Bryant, and prime Brandon Roy are all in the party. Turnovers tend to be one of those stats that people ignore a bit when assessing players -- unless a player is REALLY bad at them, it doesn't tend to enter the evaluation discussion unless nits are being picked, and a player with extremely low rates doesn't tend to get much credit for it. If you compound his fantastic turnover rate with counting stats that are easy to overlook given his team's pace/schedule and his best-in-class point guard defense, you have a surprisingly strong all-star candidacy.

(NOTE: It's also really quite impressive that these singular players are producing 30-45% of the offense for the league's best offenses, especially considering most of these players are only on the court for 2/3 of the game. For those who are bad at mental math, indicates these guys are producing 50% or more of their team's offensive production whenever they take the floor. Every offense helmed by these eight players is in the top half of the league. Point guards are often blasted for poor defense and their occasional off nights. Step back for a moment -- if you had to directly produce half of your team's best-in-class offense when you were on the floor, wouldn't you be a bit gassed?)

• • •

He has a case, obviously, but I can't lie to you: Conley isn't going to make the all-star team. There's almost no way he makes it in at this point. The selections are later this month, and at 18-19 the Grizzlies are far enough out of the playoff picture to scrub him from the conversation. Not when Lillard's Blazers are the story of the season, Paul/Curry have locked up two slots, and Dragic is his team's only remaining all-star candidate. I'd venture that Monta Ellis has a higher chance at making the game than Conley, simply because I don't think it's likely that the Western coaches send 5-6 point guards and a single shooting guard to the game. Especially not with the surplus of excellent big men in the conference who deserve a spot there too. He might make the all-defense team (and he should!), and he has a shaky case for 3rd team all-NBA (an honor he will almost certainly not achieve).

There's a more interesting (and more pressing) question for Conley and the Grizzlies, far removed from the all-star game and any all-NBA questions. Very simply: can the Grizzlies make the playoffs? I'd venture they can. Conley has gotten good enough this year that they just might, although the margin for error is virtually nil. They've made one particular big problem for themselves in this first half of the season -- they're down 0-2 with two games to go in the season series against Dallas, who's one of their stronger opponents for the bottom two seeds. That's their main damage, tiebreaker-wise, and it probably is going to make the seven seed unattainable if the Mavericks can hold on to that (something I suspect they'll do). They're down 0-1 in the tiebreaker against Minnesota, although they have three games remaining to make that up. They have two games remaining against Oklahoma City, a team that despises them after last year's unceremonious ouster.

That said? It's not all bad. They've clinched the tiebreaker against Phoenix, which is EXTREMELY important since the Suns represent the most likely team to drop out of the playoff picture. They've still got a good shot at the tiebreaker against Denver, as they're 1-1 against them. Gasol has returned at essentially the perfect time -- he has over a week of easy games to get his legs back before their next big test, a home-and-home against Houston later this month. The three games they have against Minnesota are virtually going to be playoff games -- the Wolves and the Grizzlies have identical records right now, and they're each other's biggest competition in the race to unseat the Suns from the eight spot. And what's more, the tough schedule the Grizzlies endured is going to lead to a relatively easy slate for the rest of January, much of February, and a much of March. Their last few weeks are going to be difficult, but if they're sporting a full squad at the time they have a good shot at replicating their run to the 8 seed in 2011 where they started rolling around the all-star break and ended the year on a tear.

They'll also have their chances to mess up other teams' playoff aspirations, even if they're out of the playoff picture late in the season. From March 24th to the end of the year, they play Minnesota twice, Denver twice, Phoenix once, Dallas once, and play four of the league's six main title contenders in the final few weeks (Miami, San Antonio, Golden State, Portland). If they do manage to pull off the eight seed, they could end up as one of the most dangerous eight seed matchups in recent memory. Given how well that treated them the last time, I don't know if they'd really complain too much if that's the way the cookie crumbles. Luckily for Gregg Popovich, the Spurs aren't on pace for the #1 seed right now, so he doesn't have to worry about that particular potentiality.

... Hey, wait a second!

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If I had to venture a guess, I'd assume that most of our readers aren't married with children. It's okay, friends. I'm not either. But if there's one piece of advice I would -- and have! -- given to virtually all of my friends who eventually want to be mothers and fathers, it's to eschew sweating the small stuff and make absolutely positive they cut into the context of any childbirth statistics ever given in an effort to push them into a certain course of action. This is important in all walks of life, obviously, but it's never more important than it is when you're dealing with something as important as a child. Whether the data is inspiring them to get a child or entreating refrain, it's a decision that's way too important to let apocryphal data and societal mores dictate the way you and your partner proceed. There's an exceedingly excellent case study to this effect centered around a truism presented as statistical fact by a vast majority of the doctors advising on childbirth in the 21st century.

"One out of three women over the age of 35 will not have conceived after a year of trying."

Simple, short, sweet. If you want kids, everyone had better start before 35, or you're in for years and years of sitcom-quality disappointment! Built in laugh tracks and sad trombones will follow you around as the process goes awry again and again. If you're looking for a fulfilling child-filled life, better jump in the sack early and conceive as soon as possible. Get on it! There's just one small nit to pick with this conclusion, and it has to do with the data the statistic is based on. It's not that it's without data. In fact, it's got some very strong data behind it, at least compared to a lot of the bunk medical statistics that inundate junk science and crazy recommendations. It's from a dataset of 3,508 families from church records spanning over 150 years. It included rural areas and areas of significantly higher socioeconomic status. It was performed in France, a decent reflection of the world at the time.

The problem: this 150 year study spanned 1630 to 1780. That's right -- the statistic doctors and armchair experts love to cite when convincing women to bear children early is based on a study that's well over 200 years old. Things were a little bit different back then. For one thing, lower life expectancy meant that at birth, the average person would be dead by 39. (Modern medicine has pushed the expected-age-at-death upon birth all the way up to 70 this past year.) Women who were between 20 and 24 years old at marriage bore 7 children on average, with only 3.7% of them remaining childless. (That's 2.6 children per women today, at least in the United States.) The most important part? There was absolutely no fertility treatment in that day and age, no contraceptives, and no widely available healthcare at all. There were midwives to help the birth along but little guidance on moving the process along, something we have in spades today.

Although women do clearly lose fertility at a certain age, there's scant little present-day evidence supporting the idea that modern infertility dawns before 40. In fact, there are a number of important studies to the contrary. A 2004 study found that 82% of 35-39 year old women conceived within a year (as compared to 86% of 27-34-year-olds, hardly a vast gap). A 2013 study found that 78% of 35-40-year-olds conceived within a year. Some smart takes have suggested the gap is rooted less in an inherent tendency of older women with children being slightly less fertile to begin with, noting that the most fertile ladies have a higher probability of "accidentally" filling out their family earlier and that women who are fastidious about birth control usage have roughly the same chance of a mid-20s woman of bearing children easily.

My point, in short: even strong data with a huge sample size and a large tail is eventually made obsolete. The study that doctors are referring to with the scare statistic on women in their 30s is very real, and it's one of the best pieces of data we have from back in the 1700s. It's immensely valuable to historians and it's immensely interesting to analyze. But that's about as far as we can take it. The surrounding facts are simply too different to easily generalize the findings of generations past in a modern context, and citing it when discussing modern decisions is about as irresponsible as advice wrought from citing no data at all.

• • •

On Monday night, the Cleveland Cavaliers swapped Andrew Bynum's non-guaranteed $12 million dollar salary for half a year of Luol Deng. As sweeteners, the Cavaliers threw in two second round draft picks, a protected-to-the-moon Sacramento draft pick, and the lottery-protected right to swap picks in the 2015 draft. For the Bulls, this was considered a decent haul for a player they weren't intending on paying going forward. Expiring contracts don't mean much in the modern NBA, and as Bill Simmons might say: any time you can pick up three draft picks and save money, "you have to do it."

A lot of the analysis of the trade was focused on Cleveland's future. Most of this analysis ended up rather negative. After all, the future plan here isn't exactly golden. What's Cleveland really doing? At 11-23, the Cavaliers entered the trade at 3 games out of the Eastern Conference playoffs with three teams separating them and the eight seed. Deng should improve them, but they can reasonably expect New York and Brooklyn to be improved in the season's second half as well. Not to mention the obvious fact that they looked like a solid lottery team in the much-ballyhooed "best draft in the history of the human race." (OK, nobody's said that. They've just heavily implied it and been hilariously overenthusiastic about it.) Why give that up -- and draft picks! -- on a lark?

All that said? I think both these conclusions are a bit hasty. The way I look at the trade is thus: Cleveland just acquired an immensely solid player that fits perfectly with their long-contract coach's style and playbook. The player in question is currently having the best season of his career on a cap-friendly expiring deal that neither imperils their summer cap space nor takes minutes from any in-position rookie. Acquiring a player like that is rare. Very rare, actually. Anthony Bennett might lose a few of his struggling out-of-position minutes, but that's probably for the best when it comes to his future development. It's very easy to mention the assets Cleveland liquidated in scare quotes and laugh lines. "The Cavs just gave up three draft picks on a rental! What's wrong with them? WHAT'S UP WITH THAT?" It's true -- their future is confounding, and their goals are a bit unclear. But what assets did they really give up? To wit:

• 2015 Portland Trail Blazers second round pick: Unless the Blazers implode in a flaming rush of flighty glory, chances are pretty high that Portland's 2015 season looks a lot like Portland's 2014 season. At least in broad strokes. I'd say 50 wins or so is the most likely scenario, barring a crazy injury, and that should be enough to push this pick into the second round's bottom ten. Let's say 50.

• 2016 Portland Trail Blazers second round pick: Handicapping a team two years in the future is difficult. But Aldridge and Lillard should still be in their primes, and the team as a whole is quite young. So I don't see any particular reason why we shouldn't expect another win total in the 50s in 2016, either.

• The Most Protected First Round Pick Ever: Okay, that's really quite unfair. But it was essentially the point when Sacramento traded the pick in the first place, and it remains the point today. If the Kings finish with a top-12 pick in 2014, they will not convey the pick this year. As they currently stand at 11-22 (on pace for the fourth overall pick), that seems exceedingly unlikely. In 2015 and 2016, the pick is protected such that if they finish with a top-10 pick, it doesn't convey. I did some simple math to calculate the average win-range of the 11th worst record in the league. The range spanned 35-40 wins. It's not unattainable for Sacramento, but it's going to be rather difficult -- DeMarcus Cousins is having an all-star caliber offensive season this year and Isaiah Thomas is at the peak of his potential. They're still one of the worst defensive teams in the league, and in a conference like the modern West, it's hard to see them winning 35-40 games unless they manage to adapt defensively in such a way that lets them stop a team or two. Will the rookies of the next few years improve the Kings defensively enough so that 40 wins is realistic? Color me unsure. Best case scenario would be the 11th pick in either draft. Worst case? If the pick doesn't convey in 2015 or 2016, it becomes Sacramento's 2017 second round pick, which is problematic given that 2017 is far enough away that it's easier to imagine a better-constructed roster having taken hold at that point.

• Lottery-protected swap rights in 2015: This is an asset for Chicago, as it represents a potential maximum pick gain of (if they have the best record and the Cavaliers are the worst playoff team) around 15 spots, and gives their own pick more upside in trade talks if they decide to flip some of their now-owned picks for veterans that can bolster Rose after his return next season. This is also quite possibly one of the easiest things Cleveland has ever given up. Look at it this way: if the Cavs fail to improve enough to make the playoffs this season or next, they'll keep their lottery pick and give up nothing. If they improve enough to make the playoffs this season, the general youth of their team would have them internally thinking they'll have the potential to make the leap to a 4/5 seed team next season and lose -- at worst -- 4-5 spots in the draft to Chicago. And this whole strategy is a very high-upside/low-downside one for Chicago -- if Chicago flames out and ends up a marginal playoff team next year, the swap could be as little as one or two picks or -- if they miss the playoffs (a situation more possible than most care to admit) -- completely impossible.

When you take the picks out of the amorphous and scary "three draft picks" verbiage, it becomes a lot less enticing. And Chicago's haul in the trade becomes a lot less fun for Bulls fans. At their very best, barring future moves, they'll have a pick at #11 overall (ideally in 2015, since they'll want their high pick to be contributing at a high level at some point before Noah's body gives out), two picks in the fifties, and... maybe they get to pick a few spots higher in the 2015 draft? The real benefit for them is the one that Cleveland didn't care much about at all -- Bynum's contract was only half-guaranteed, and to my knowledge, Cleveland's already paid almost all of that guaranteed money. Reinsdorf saved something in the neighborhood of $20 million dollars on the deal, which was the real reason the Bulls traded away the guy who was playing the best ball in Chicago for four shaky assets. Cleveland was going to waive Bynum regardless -- this trade allowed them to flip some of their shakiest, lowest-probability assets and a contract they didn't care about for a player that could -- quite possibly -- end up as a big part of their long term plan, a la David West in Indiana. As the Gilberts might say: "what's not to like?"

• • •

One last thing, and a tie-in to the earlier tangent regarding fertility rates. (No, that wasn't the start of an attempt to gradually turning Gothic Ginobili into a blog about historical fertility, tempting though that may be.) One of the oft-repeated truisms that's been shared ad nauseum in response to any ambivalence about these so-called "assets" is the idea that every draft pick is an asset. After all, you can find talent everywhere in the draft. Manu Ginobili was selected at 57. Isaiah Thomas was selected at 60. Tons of great undrafted players make the league every year. There's still talent down there, and we need to always state that and heavily price it in when assessing the value of late second round picks. Right?

You know what? No. Not right. It's a factor, and it's context that needs to be noted. But it's also incredibly misleading without the contrary context. When doctors and armchair fertility experts cite scare quotes about the women-over-35 statistic, they're being intellectually dishonest despite being factual and accurate. Lies by omission can be as insidious as simply making things up. When someone makes things up it's generally easy to track back their statement and discover they were lying to begin with. It's significantly harder to take a factually correct statement and discover what contextually made it inappropriate for your situation. And simply stating "Manu got picked there" as though it invalidates aspersions to the draft pick's value ignores a lot of the context around Manu getting picked there at all, not to mention the basic context about relative pick value in the first place.

In the 1990s, foreign scouting wasn't just a small-scale enterprise. It was virtually nonexistent. At the time Manu was drafted, he'd been leading professional basketball teams since the age of 17 and putting up high-quality numbers for four years. He was an athletic NBA-size player with a beautiful game and a ridiculous work ethic. In the modern world, a player like Manu Ginobili would be isolated much like Ricky Rubio -- he'd be on the radar of NBA teams from 14-15 years old, and competing internationally at a very young age. This is not to say that every single market inefficiency that keeps a player from being picked early is gone. There will always be new places to find value, and there will be ways to get decent value at that range of the draft. But it IS to say that as scouting has improved and international players have made their mark on the league, the exact market inefficiency that caused a Hall of Fame player like Manu Ginobili to go in the late 50s has closed. And it's difficult to imagine what future market inefficiency would cause something as unfathomably unlikely as that to ever happen again.

And none of this even gets into the biggest issue in treating all draft picks as amorphous "assets" -- draft picks are all assets, but the NBA's extremely late draft picks are akin to playing scratch cards for $50 winnings. To try and support the case of "value in the late draft", a good friend and quality analyst in Kevin Draper sent the following 17 player list of good players that were picked in the late 50s or undrafted: Manu Ginobili, Kyle Korver, Marcin Gortat, Amir Johnson, Ramon Sessions, Patty Mills, Isaiah Thomas, E'Twaun Moore, Chris Andersen, Udonis Haslem, Jeremy Lin, Jose Calderon, Wesley Matthews, Anthony Morrow, Reggie Evans, J.J. Barea, Chuck Hayes. It's a great list, and it does much to support the idea that smart teams can find some value in the late reaches of the draft.

But, again, consider context -- that list of 16 players arrived over fourteen_ years___ of draft picks.

Assuming that every season there are 11 picks from 50-60 and about 10 guys who went undrafted that'll make the league (a fairway assumption, I admit, but a lowball one), that's still something in the neighborhood of sixteen NBA-quality rotation players out of a group of THREE HUNDRED OR MORE POSSIBLE PLAYERS. Sixteen in three hundred! That's around a 5% chance of the pick panning out, if you're counting. That means a draft pick in the 50s is an asset where 95% of the time you're looking at a wasted roster spot or a waived player with no recognizable value to the team. Five percent of the time, if you're lucky, you might get a guy like Patty Mills or Reggie Evans, a 9th or 10th man that you could've gotten for a few million on the open market. And then, if your team is really really lucky, and your scouting department is years ahead of the game on a glaring market inefficiency that nobody else has keyed into yet, you might get the next Manu Ginobili. Oy gevalt.

Draft picks are valuable. Unbelievably so. But a draft pick cannot only be valued by its very highest upside potentiality -- it must be valued rationally as a function of the upside, the downside, and the overall likelihood of both. For low draft picks, they're genuinely low-upside value plays with extraordinarily low probabilities on the upside scenario. The Cavaliers are flush with draft picks in a general sense -- even after trading away three draft picks, they still have four first round draft picks in the next two years and four second round draft picks as well. (Yes, that's right -- pre-trade, the Cavs had eleven draft picks in the next two years. Gilbert had officially become the exact opposite of Ted Stepien.) They flipped the uncertainty inherent in their two least valuable second round picks, a contract they were going to waive anyway, and their amorphous protected first round pick for an expiring deal on a player they've coveted for a while.

What's more, that player fits. Very well. He plays their by-far worst position and doesn't crowd out the minutes of any of their younger players. He fits well with their long-contract coach. If Cleveland didn't hit a slam dunk on this trade (and indeed got as "embarrassed" as some very smart analysts have said), is it even possible for a non-title-contending team to "win" a trade in media discourse if they give up a single draft pick? Does giving up draft picks -- no matter how low-upside those draft picks may be -- foment an instant loss in every trade for a team that isn't playing for June? Perhaps, but I don't think so. Question Cleveland's future plan all you want -- it's about as questionable a future plan as they come. But they weren't being irrational, and they definitely weren't getting bilked.

Special thanks to the December 2013 issue of Significance magazine for alerting me to the fertility story. I enjoyed it.

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