I wasn't really planning on watching Jeremy Lin's whole game tonight, if I'm honest. I've missed much of his play this week with a tough slate at work and a lot of extracurricular preparation for Valentine's Day next week. My intention was to watch the first quarter, wait for the inevitable letdown, and switch to Cavs-Bucks or Clips-Sixers or another game I expected would be competitive and interesting. But the game began and Lin's insane start essentially broke my ability to cognitively process what was before me. Jared knows. Watching Lin play wasn't simply like watching a player in the midst of a strong and inspired hot streak. It wasn't like watching Earl Boykins light up the defending champions for a new career high. It was different. Strange. Foreign. And I realized I was watching something that -- even if it was the only great game of Lin's NBA career -- was going to be deserving of analysis and introspection. So let's dig into the curious game and talents of one Jeremy Lin.

• • •

Lin's game isn't particularly inexplicable. This is what troubles many about him. He's got decent size for an NBA point, suitable passing skills, and a talent for driving lanes. He's a good slasher who sticks the finish more often than he shanks it, and seems to have a decent control over the glass with his shot. Which is good, because if you're a slashing point who can't bank, you're bound to get shut down as soon as teams start playing you tightly -- his banking skill will become more and more relevant as defensive bigs sag to him and try to lessen his space. His percentages will drop off as he regresses to his mean talent level, but I could see him remaining a 10-15 point scorer with the skillset he's displayed to date. But one thing that's bugged me in the prevailing Lin hype is the assessment that he's got a cerebral and incredible passing talent just because he came from Harvard and is a "student" of the game. That's too simplistic, too easy, and far too lazy. There's more to it than that. Just because he went to Harvard doesn't mean he always makes the smartest play, or has the best passing talent. He certainly doesn't.

Lin tries for the highlight pass more often than not when the lunch-bucket pass would do just fine, and while he's decent at seeing opportunities, he distinctly lacks the passing talent of a young Kyrie Irving or Ricky Rubio type point guard. Don't get me wrong, his passes are almost always the correct pass, in terms of correctly assessing the options on the floor and running an offense. And in the D'Antoni system that's going to lead to a lot of decent offense. But Lin's not a master of the on-target pass. As a teaching example, take some time to watch Kyrie and Rubio pass around the offense. Keep track of where the ball lands off their passes. More often than it doesn't, it lands precisely where they want it to land -- Kyrie's assist totals aren't fantastic yet, but if you watch how he aims his passes and how targeted they are in their release, you see the ball reaching his target's palm in motion, shadowing his target with an exceptional fluidity. You watch how he can get the pass to where the player barely needs to move to gather it. That's what Kyrie does, when his passing is on -- and while it hasn't led to gaudy assist totals, he's far beyond the passing talent his numbers would indicate. Rubio is on another level. I don't really think we need to discuss that. Lin's passing isn't really like that.

It's effective so far, but it's not entirely Lin's doing in the same way Rubio and Kyrie take full responsibility for their incredible passes. In the D'Antoni system players drill heavily on how to trick defenses into getting them open. Players in a D'Antoni offense tend to be more open than players on any other type of offense with the possible exception of the current twilight Spurs for that very reason -- it's by design. His passes aren't on target, necessarily, nor are they as fluidly attuned to the motion of his shooter. But they're the right passes in the macro sense of his spur-of-the-moment choice, and in a good offense, that's all that really matters. Which is the real key, and the reason this is so odd to watch. The reason his passing is effective in the Knicks offense is rooted in something utterly unrelated to his schooling, and a talent that can't really be taught -- it's the split-second decisionmaking. Utterly disparate from intelligence, his degree, his background, et cetera. It's rooted in his ability to make snap decisions. You don't really develop that from intellectual rigor, you develop that from hard work and twitch-trigger practice until you naturally attune yourself to making the right play.

• • •

In short, his intelligence has little to do with it. It's instinct. Perseverance. That sort of thing. The players that tweet about it and talk about it seem to understand -- Kobe isn't a man who tends to stray far from the narrative, but he too understands the basic fact that Lin's talent has little to do with his schooling and everything to do with the work he put in to get his game up to par. The "Harvard" narrative is a lazy one from a lazy media conglomerate that adores lazy thinking. But Lin's play is certainly interesting, respectable, and as a rotation player in the NBA it looks quite sustainable. The thing that really confuses me, and gets me scratching my head is the heights to which he's soared in a single week.

After the game, I checked my Facebook -- twenty of my 469 friends had already posted something about Lin, and at least three of those twenty were people who I'd never seen watch a game of basketball in their life (and no, none of those three were asian). There's something about Lin that's galvanizing to those who watch him, some special aspect that pervades his play and allows him to rise from his status as a human being into a concept. A physical manifestation of hope. The Obama of hoopin'. After all. It wasn't just the Facebook bomb I saw when I checked my feed. It was the litany of athletes (Tiago Splitter, Steve Nash, Manu Ginobili, Danny Green, Kobe Bryant, David Robinson, and many others) who are talking about him. With David Robinson -- a man who still goes to tons of Spurs games and stays involved in the organization -- openly stating that Lin has supplanted any Spur as his favorite NBA player. What the hell are we watching? I don't really know. It's Lin's world, we're living in it, and I know for certain I'll be watching this a lot closer going forward.

I'm so glad this season exists.

Hey, everybody! This is the fifth edition of the STEVE NASH Power Rankings. The object of these Power Rankings is rather simple -- STEVE NASH is my statistical model for making team projections the season, and STEVE gave us some results about teams' SRS projections before the season. So -- during the season -- we've been updating these SRS predictions to reflect the week's results. Our new results are a rather simple re-weighting of STEVE's projections and the actual results of the season. These new results are then run through a Gibbs sampler to predict playoff probabilities, projected records, and other various stats. I apply the mean-regressed HCA estimates from Evan of The City to these new projections to calculate predicted home wins and road wins remaining in the season and add them to the team's current record. Keep in mind (once again) these are completely and utterly automated -- there's no human input on these rankings, at all. So don't lynch me, Bobcats fans. Without further ado, here are the rankings as of the close of all games played on January 25th.

• • •

Courtesy of (again) Evan, I now know how to embed spreadsheets. This week's spreadsheet:

Today, we're going to go over how the Eastern Conference picture has changed (in the view of NASH) since the start of the season, using sets of three. Next week? We'll cover the West. Today is the East's time to shine, though. If... if "shine" is really a word that can describe this Eastern Conference. (Spoiler alert. It isn't.)

THE REELING ATLANTIC
Dec 24: #1 BOS (40), #2 NYK (38), #3 PHI (36), #4 TOR (29), #5 NJN (23)

The main story in the Atlantic, to this point, is simply how indefensibly uncontested the Atlantic has been. Preseason, virtually everyone was talking about how this was going to be an interesting divisional title race between the Celtics and the Knicks, with the Sixers as a possible intriguing wildcard. Instead? The Sixers have been the only decent team in the division, and unlike the Northwest Division (the only division in the league that currently projects to have every single team over 0.500), the Atlantic may very well end up with only one over 0.500. While the Sixers have stayed relatively consistently around 44-46 wins since their rise peaked around January 10th, the Celtics and Knicks have hemorrhaged terribly since the season's start, and at this point, the Celtics project out as a barely 0.500 team and the Knicks project even worse. A sad projection for a division that looked to be full of interesting teams at season's start.

THE SURGING CENTRAL
Dec 24: #1 CHI (40), #2 MIL (33), #3 IND (32), #4 DET (30), #5 CLE (23)

Chicago is great, Indiana is good, the Cavs are recouping, and the Pistons are straight up atrocious. These are all facts. A lot of us were very high on this Pistons team, even thinking they had an outside chance to break .500 behind a Greg Monroe breakout season. We were half right, let's put it that way. On the other end of things, the Bulls' prospects are very good. Bullish, even. A tight loss to Miami showcased how far along Derrick Rose really is, and if you haven't seen him lately, well, it's a treat, and the Bulls' endless train of stat-stuffing bigs is always an defense aficionado's delight. And of course we have the Cavs, in a season that could alternately be termed a slide and a fantastic over-achievement in the same sentence. Kyrie Irving (instant offense, ROY favorite) has been mindblowingly good and Anderson Varejao has shown himself as simultaneously one of the fastest centers in the league, one of the best defensive bigs in the league, and perhaps the single best offensive rebounder in the league (or he's right behind K-Love). The Cavs might sneak into the playoffs. With the Bogut injury, I think the Cavs are the prohibitive 9th seed at least. Right now NASH has them at 10th.

Here's where STEVE NASH breaks down a little from insufficient data: The Bucks are on a two-game winning tear (including a remarkably scrappy dismantling of the Lakers) but losing Andrew Bogut never helped anyone. One expects their 51.7% chance of making the playoffs to drop dramatically. Losing George Hill never helped anyone either, as the Pacers don't need to be told -- Alex and I are both Spurs fans who have been sort of watching the Pacers for George's greatness alone, and his ankle fracture makes this a really sad day. Still, the Pacers have plenty of depth and the Bucks don't look catastrophically bad even without a true C.

THE CONFUSING SOUTHEAST
Dec 24: #1 MIA (44), #2 ORL (40), #3 ATL (31), #4 CHA (27), #5 WAS (27)

As for Orlando? Well, they got bitten by the newly-christened Lowe curse. You see, on January 23rd, Zach Lowe pronounced the Magic the strongest fringe title contender in the league. At the time, NASH projected the Magic for 41 wins. Since then? They lost to Boston by 31 points on the night of his pronouncement, crushed the Pacers, and proceeded to hemorrhage in the NASH standings ever since on a 1-5 slide. They've gone from 41 predicted wins 9 days ago to just 34 wins today -- the equivalent of going from a projected 50 win team to a projected 43 win team. Their playoff percentage is still high, but as of today, they're projected to end up with the 17th best record in the NBA, a negative SRS, and a snowball's chance in hell of anything good happening. I don't really know what happened. I don't think anyone does. But really, if Zach Lowe finds himself forever banned from the Amway center, I'm not gonna be shocked.

• • •

So overall, the East looks kind of pitiful, but there are also some pretty good teams in there. The Atlantic Division is hilariously bad, the Central projects to be about average, and the Southeast is so polarized that Orlando was up 27 in a game, en route to HCA in the first round before taking a six-minute rotation off and suddenly finding themselves in the second circle of Hell, populated only by Bobcats, destined for an 8 seed or the lower tiers of the lottery.

Thanks for reading.

For the Eastern Conference edition of our 1st quarter all-stars, click here.

A common refrain among those in my twitter feed, for anyone watching, has been that this season makes no sense whatsoever. I have to agree. The season has been unfathomably odd so far. I was going to do a freeform piece on the subject, but quickly realized there was a simpler way to go. Given that All-Star voting has begun, why not give you my first-quarter All-Stars? After all, we're already voting. And the game is in about a month. It's closer than you think, in other words. I'm not really doing statistical rankings here -- these are based on a combination of their stats (mostly documented here so we can look back later), what I've seen from watching them, and where the conference stands. It's a long look, so let's get to it. Keep in mind we'll be going with the infuriating All-Star positional designations; that is, guards, forwards, and centers. Four guards, four forwards, two centers, and two wildcard slots. Go.

• • •

WESTERN GUARDS

• STARTERS: Kyle Lowry, Kobe Bryant

The west is much more talent-rich than the east. Enough so that two or three of the definitive eastern all-stars to this point of the season -- namely Anderson, Jennings, and Lou Williams -- wouldn't even sniff the game if you traveled westbound. Trying to figure out who deserves to start and who's playing the best at the point out of all the western guards is immensely tricky, and I wouldn't really blame you if you threw up your hands and said "Alright! Fine! Give it to Chris!" I mean, really. Chris Paul is the league's best, by default -- he's one of the five best players in the league, surely he deserves to start, right? Well, yeah. Maybe. By the actual game, it's certainly possible that averages will descend to the mean and the superior talent between Paul and Lowry will even out. I'd argue it's even likely. But in the early going, although it's been close, I'd have to tip my hat to Lowry as the starting point for the West, even if this makes me a bit uncomfortable given the allegations swirling around him right now.

As for their play? Lowry has an edge on Paul in three key respects. First, I have to give Lowry a nod for his health -- Lowry has played in 16 of 18 games for the Rockets, while Paul has played in 10 of 15 for the Clippers. Assuming they're giving their teams roughly equally as much, a few extra games is a big deal. Second, his rebounding -- Lowry is averaging more rebounds per-36 minutes than any other point guard in the league right now, at roughly seven per game. On a team that starts Luis Scola, the extra rebounding is completely and utterly necessary, and Kyle's work on the boards helps make up for the team's current lack of big men. Third? His defense. Synergy lets me down, here, so I'm not really working off solid numbers -- I'm working off a feeling. I get the sense, when I watch Lowry, that his man works quite a bit harder for his points than Paul's man does. It doesn't hurt that I feel as though Paul gets dirty on defense a bit more often than Lowry, who (in my view) tends to run a pretty tight ship in terms of avoiding dirty defensive plays. Still, the Synergy stats do disagree -- CP3 allows 0.75 PPP to Lowry's 0.79 PPP. Both good, neither transcendent, and Lowry's ranked a tad lower. But I still can't shake the feeling he does a better job, and perhaps these are just confirmation biases at play. Now, these are only three things -- Paul is still a superior scorer, a superior passer, and an overall superior player to Lowry. But Lowry has played above his head and Paul has played a bit below his. Sometimes that's enough. For what it's worth, if Lowry doesn't break out of his current slump soon (he's shooting 32.3% in the past 5 games, and his numbers have tanked considerably from early season highs), there's a slim likelihood of him MAKING the all-star game, let alone deserving to start. There are simply too many qualified guards in the west. Really.

As for Kobe, I think we all know what we're getting from him. Relatively inefficient scoring, dependent on drawing a lot of free throws and taking a ton of shots. The thing is? He's been legitimately quite good this year. He ranks 35th in the league at isolation scoring with 0.8 PPP, 26th in P&R Ball Handler scoring (0.88 PPP), 18th in post-up efficiency (0.95 PPP), and 2nd in the entire league off screens with 1.15 PPP. The problem with Kobe is that he takes so many isolations that his overall scoring output -- 0.93 PPP -- ends up being 105th in the league when you account for the terrible distribution of his shots. Realistically, though, he's been about as good as a man can expect him to be at this stage of his career. Better, in fact. He's played the 5th most minutes per game of any player in the league, and at he time of posting, the most minutes to this date of any NBA player. His per-36 numbers of 28-5-5 are roughly at his career averages, and while you don't really want Kobe taking 23 shots a game, you can't deny that 28 points on 23 shots really isn't all that bad in the context of a Mike Brown offense. No, it isn't exactly MVP-caliber scoring -- but it's decent, and in a conference devoid of healthy star shooting guards, getting 38 minutes a night (every night) of production like that is a huge boon for a team.

• RESERVES: Chris Paul, James Harden

So, why not James Harden? Here are the facts, for James. He's averaging 17-4-3 in just 30 minutes per game, and on less than 10 shots per game. He's playing reasonably solid defense, to these eyes, and Synergy stats would tend to agree -- he's ranked 87th in the league, allowing his man 0.76 PPP. He doesn't guard the opponent's best player, no -- but he doesn't do a strictly poor job against the players he's given to stop, and he recovers very well on the pick and roll. And offensively? He's essentially lights out from every position on the floor -- he can shoot the three (extremely well), finish in traffic (expertly), pull up, spot-up, and manage the ball in transition. I'd stop short of calling him Manu-lite, because that's not really true -- his passing is about 200x worse than Manu's, and his defense is nowhere at Manu's pesky level. But this season, he's been the spark for the best team in the West, and he deserves at least some sort of nod for his excellent play. And with Westbrook playing poorly enough to not-really-deserve a spot? He's their second all-star, easily.

• • •

WESTERN FORWARDS

• STARTERS: Kevin Durant, LaMarcus Aldridge

Durant is definitely going to start in the game, and quite frankly, he completely deserves it. Durant is putting up an effortless 25 points on 18 shots a night, seven rebounds, three assists, a steal, a block, and leading his team well. His advanced stats are fantastic, leading his team with a TS% of 60.2% despite a usage rate of 31.7%. His defense this year has been much improved, partly because he's getting a whole season with Perkins, Collison, and Ibaka manning the middle and allowing him more leeway to play his man close. With his size, he's always had the ability to be a positive defensive contributor -- this season he's beginning to make that a reality, and that's a scary thought for the league. He excels in defending in isolation and in recovering on his spot-up shooters -- mostly because of his size and long arms, he simply covers distances quicker than most shooters expect and what they thought was to be a wide-open jumper turns into a brutally covered quick shot. The evolution of Durant into a star who can be counted on to keep his man from going crazy is one of the underrated developments that have pushed the Thunder from the plucky and intrinsically good team they've been for the last few years into the odds-on favorite to win the western conference. I mean, really -- if Durant was playing the same defense he has the last few years, I'm guessing the Thunder lose at least 2 or 3 of the close games they've won to date. It's that important.

And then we get to LaMarcus. You can argue that Love or Millsap deserves this spot. You won't be wrong, strictly -- Kevin Love and Paul Millsap have both played some amazing basketball this season and certainly deserve the all-star spots I assign them in a paragraph or two. But Aldridge has been the rock for a surprisingly good Blazers team. They've lost games they shouldn't have lost, but this Blazer team really does look like it has a fringe shot of coming out of the West, and that's something you couldn't really say about the last few years without Roy. The ascendency of LaMarcus is one of the nicer stories of recent years -- always a disappointing not-quite-good-enough player, last year LaMarcus' offense finally decided to match his defense (which had been elite for a year or two before that) -- this year, he's continuing the hot streak and as we enter play for tonight's games LaMarcus has hit a lot of key career highs. He's maintained a TS% above his career average despite the highest usage rate of his career, and is demolishing his career highs in assist percentage and steal percentage. He's rated as the 14th best isolation defender in the league by Synergy, and although his spot-up numbers are relatively awful (and drag down his overall Synergy stats), he spends a lot of the game helping on defense to try and keep to Nate's system and he's one of the key cogs that makes it work. He's got an unguardable bank shot and has one of the best pick and roll games in the entire league. He's fantastic, a superstar, and deserves an entire boatload of superlatives for what he's doing in Portland right now. So he takes my starting spot. Tenuously.

• RESERVES: Kevin Love, Paul Millsap

The only reason LaMarcus is in here tenuously is because the West's depth at the forward position is absolutely insane. Any of LMA, Love, or Millsap would be starting for the East's team -- instead, two of them have to be reserves. Sad. But Kevin Love is quietly having an even better season than last year, at least as a complete player. Adelman isn't crazy enough to really match Love on players on the defensive end, but he has Love playing a floating post defense that he's actually not all that bad at. Not to say he's really a defensive asset, mind you -- his help has been as awful as we've come to expect from Love, but his voracious rebounding and his bulk really do wonders to help him effectively defend players who try to post him up. Which isn't to say he's really a shutdown post defender, because he isn't -- fundamentally, his defensive game is as lacking in polish as Dwight's offensive game was 3 years ago (which, by the way, it isn't anymore -- the "Dwight has no post game" meme needs to die a painful death, and should've died a painful death back during the Magic's 2009 playoff run) and while it's effective, it seems like it's primarily the system that did it. Is that bad? Not really. Now that he's no longer quite the sieve he used to be, Love's numbers mean a bit more to me. And they're absolutely insane numbers -- 40% from three on five threes a game, a rebound rate of 19% (fifth in the league, behind Dwight, Varejao, Bynum, and Humphries) translating to 13 boards a game, atop 23 points a night? That's some crazy stuff. Love is a great player, and now that Adelman has found an effective way to hide him on defense, there's nothing really tangible separating the words "all-star" and Kevin Love's name.

As for Millsap, this is another crazy small-season selection, but it's a strong one. Although he plays fewer minutes than Love, Aldridge, or Durant, he's putting up similarly impressive per-36 numbers -- 20-10-2-2 for Millsap to LMA's 22-9-3 and Love's 23-13-1. He's shooting 55% from the floor and finds himself far less involved in the Utah offense than LMA or Love -- he's sitting at a usage rate of 24%, quite a bit less than Love and LMA's 28% apiece. And the way he's scoring has been somewhat impressive. He's been absolute garbage spotting up and isolating, as you'd reasonably expect -- he is not a good shooter. He's been a bullish beast in the post, though, ranking 24th in the league at 0.92 PPP generated from the painted area. And he's been the league's top cutter at this point in the season, generating a completely absurd 1.65 PPP on cutting plays despite the Utah lack of a good passer. And he's been similarly excellent off the boards, having scored 1.42 PPP on offensive rebound attempts with 20 FGM and 3 And-1s on the year. Millsap has been completely beasting it this year, and while 20-10 may not look strictly wondrous, take a look at the Utah roster. Look at the pace they play at (markedly slower than the Blazers or Wolves, I might note). Look at their personnel. And tell me why that's not incredibly impressive. If you're coming up blank, that's sort of the point -- Millsap has been wonderful this season, and if we were choosing the team today, he'd be a must-pick.

• • •

WESTERN CENTERS

• STARTER: Marc Gasol

Marc Gasol got off to a relatively poor start this year, which is what makes my choosing him as a starter so insane to me. I'd essentially pencilled Bynum into this spot from the first day of the season, and didn't really expect it to change. The reality? Bynum has been good -- very good, even -- but in terms of overall value, Gasol has been the player I'd take nine times out of ten, this year. Gasol has been virtually unguardable in the post this year, not really by talent but sheer bulk -- watching footage of him in the post is like watching a tank run over a hobbit village populated by baby Koalas. It's brutal. And defensively? Good luck getting any space whatsoever when you're trying to post him up, and good luck swarming the rim when you know you have Marc there to erase your shot. He's been Memphis' rock this year, and has been better than anyone had any right to expect coming into this season. He's doing to everyone in the league what he did to Tim Duncan last year. And it isn't pretty, if you aren't a fan of his.

• RESERVE: Marcin Gortat

I really oscillated on this one a lot. The way I look at it is this -- in a fair world, the Suns would be an Eastern team and it'd be an easy call to put both Gortat and Nash on the team. They're equally as important to the success of their team. Nash makes the offense run, and Gortat makes the defense -- insofar as it exists at all -- function like an actual NBA defense. Gortat is also an excellent roll man, a great teammate, and one of the best cutting bigs in the league. He's a classical big man's center, and he's probably the best offensive weapon besides Amare that Nash has ever had backing him up. Nash is certainly helping Gortat out quite a bit, when they're on the court together. They have an exquisite two-man game that has the same qualities of the Nash-Amare game that enhanced both their talents.

In this case, though, I have to give the nod to Gortat above Nash. Not because he's a better player, per se, but because he simply means a little bit more to the Suns right now than Nash does. Not much, just a tiny bit -- when Gortat is on his game, though, the Suns defense looks positively average. His offensive game helps keep Nash's passing alive, as Nash symbiotically improves his offensive game with his passing. But the Suns offense looks to me to be about the same as their defense (and ratings hear me out -- they're 19th in the league on offense, and 19th in the league on defense) and Gortat gets criminally too few minutes. He's been great for them, absolutely all-star level, and (after a short period of disappointing games) Nash has been too. But on a team that's 6-11, in the west? You can't get two all-stars on that team. You just can't. So I'd pick Gortat, knowing full well that Nash deserves it just as much. It's a tough life out here for a blog, guys.

• • •

WILDCARDS

• ANDREW BYNUM: Given the incoherent ESPN debate about whether Bynum or Howard are better players, it probably isn't much of a surprise that Bynum's on this list. It probably is a bit of a surprise that I'd wildcard him, though, instead of letting him hash it out as a starter or a reserve. I may be alone in this (and I probably am!), but I really think Gortat and Gasol (Marc, of course) have played significantly better ball than Bynum, on both ends of the floor this year. Bynum is dominant and effective, but he often takes an extremely conciliatary role in the Laker offense -- gets the ball in the post, glances, then passes up an almost-open post shot in favor of another Kobe two. I'd like to see Bynum get a bit more aggressive in calling his own plays, and a bit more defensively active -- lost in the Laker's great defense this year is that Bynum hasn't exactly been playing the soul-crushing defense he played last year and the year before. He's been really, really good -- shutdown for the most part -- but he hasn't been the same kind of "system in a box" (as I like to call them) defender in Brown's system, yet. My guess? He figures out the system around halfway through this season, beasts it for the rest of the season, and leads the Lakers to a nice long playoff run that validates the incoherency of the ESPN commentariat that seems to think he's as good as Dwight. As of yet, though, I feel he's been less valuable to his team than Gortat and Gasol are to theirs. And the Lakers have been a bit disappointing so far, both because of it and because of the elder Gasol's heretofore poor season.

• TY LAWSON: This last spot was probably the absolute hardest pick out of all of these. I ended up going with Ty Lawson for two reasons. First, I feel like he's Denver's most important player. Best? No, that'd probably be Nene or Gallo, but in terms of the player that defines the team, I think Lawson's never-say-die spirit and flawless command of his teammates' offensive execution has to win out in the end. The creative ways he creates for himself, his ball-handling might, his prowess at killing all comers in transition -- at some point, that has to be worth something, and on a Denver team that is absolutely crushing most people's expectations (and is currently in pole position for a #2 overall seed in, again, a tough Western Conference) that's worth a hell of a lot. Second, and probably most importantly? It gives me a prime opportunity to re-link an incredibly old GG piece that virtually nobody has ever read, detailing how much of a hilarious badass Ty Lawson is through a story from my years at Duke. READ IT.

SNUBS

Where the hell do I start? How about at center, where Samuel Dalembert and Nene are both out of my chosen all-star game despite playing at a level that's usually all it'd take to get an all-star selection at their position? Or at forward, where Blake Griffin, Gerald Wallace, Danilo Gallinari, James Doakes, and Dirkus Circus all would merit serious consideration (or an automatic pick) in the east and make few bones about making the game in the west, to date? A list of all-star snubs in the west is less a list of snubs and more a list of "yeah, you could probably swap a few of these with my picks and I'd have no way to argue against it" type of list. Really.

I mean, point guard is a great example. At the point you have Russell Westbrook (having a disappointing season, but could turn it on at any time), Mo Williams (a serious 6MotY candidate who -- if not deserving of an all-star spot -- would at least merit consideration), Ricky Rubio (a rookie phenom who is certainly on the fringe and would occupy the same space as Kyrie in the East), Andre Miller (technically eliminated by Ty making the team, I suppose, but he's never had an all-star selection and he damn well still deserves one) and (finally) Tony Parker, who's putting up better numbers than virtually any of the non-starting Eastern picks I offered in my Eastern post a few days ago, and who has recouped from an awful start to posting a career high in assists per game despite below-average minutes per game, and back to a solid 18 points a game besides. Look. Name a random Western star. He was probably snubbed.

Except Derek Fisher, who was not snubbed. Sorry, Derek, you're just not that good anymore.

• • •

Well, that was an excruciating process. Getting posts like this right is virtually impossible. There's always going to be room to criticize. I hope, regardless, you found fewer things to criticize than you could've. I more thoroughly understand how hard it is for KD to be consistently getting things right, and keeping it proper. I endeavor to do the same, but damn, it's hard out here for a man straight keeping it real. I'm white. Sorry. Thanks for reading anyway.

Hey, everybody! This is the fourth edition of the STEVE NASH Power Rankings. The object of these Power Rankings is rather simple -- STEVE NASH is my statistical model for making team projections the season, and STEVE gave us some results about teams' SRS projections before the season. So -- during the season -- we've been updating these SRS predictions to reflect the week's results. Our new results are a rather simple re-weighting of STEVE's projections and the actual results of the season. These new results are then run through a Gibbs sampler to predict playoff probabilities, projected records, and other various stats. I apply the mean-regressed HCA estimates from Evan of The City to these new projections to calculate predicted home wins and road wins remaining in the season and add them to the team's current record. Keep in mind (once again) these are completely and utterly automated -- there's no human input on these rankings, at all. So don't lynch me, Wizards fans. Without further ado, here are the rankings as of the close of all games played on January 25th.

• • •

Courtesy of (again) Evan, I now know how to embed spreadsheets. This week's spreadsheet:

Instead of our customary thoughts, here's a chart, and some other related words.

Click the chart for a larger view.

If you look at this and wonder what it means, well, good on you, because that's a good question. Essentially, from here on out, I'll be collecting data daily and running NASH updates on my computer. With this will come updated playoff percentages, estimated win totals, et cetera. The end goal (one that we aren't quite near, yet, but will be at eventually) is to automate the process and give you -- our readers -- an interactive graphic that allows you to see the NASH projected wins at any date of the season (as you can see, I haven't back-filled in the data for the first three weeks of the season -- I may not be able to do so easily, so I might punt on that). This is about as readable as I can make the chart going from excel directly. A few notes on format -- Western conference teams get a diamond as their bullet, Eastern teams get a square. Western teams get a dashed line, Eastern teams get a solid.

So, yeah. End state architecture here (can you tell I've been putting in long hours at work?) would be a chart that lets you track either playoff percentages, projected wins, or projected end-season SRS in a convenient, easy-to-navigate interface -- allows user gaming, sorting, team-by-team views, et cetera. I'm still searching for an online interfaced stats package that gives me the flexibility I need to put this up. Current idea is to use SciViews-R and try my luck at that, but lord knows if I can really get that to do what I want. My hope is that something perfect will reveal itself to me soon, and I'll be able to use that. Worst case scenario, I probably drop a fully updated framework for presenting the NASH model output during the all-star break. Best case, probably in the next two weeks. Get excited! Maybe! If you like this sort of thing! But regardless. There aren't many takeaways from this past week, but I can point to a few interesting tidbits.

The Southwest Division -- excepting the Spurs and Hornets -- is collectively on a ridiculous streak right now. The Mavs went from a 58.8% chance at making the playoffs one week ago to a 73.5% chance now. The Grizzlies went from 56.5% to 77.7%. The Rockets went from 51% to 66% -- and collectively, they've gone from a predicted 106 wins over the season to 112. A pretty huge swing. The West is looking about as wide open as it did last week, and it's become a real possibility that the winner of the Pacific Division won't actually get homecourt in a 4-5 matchup -- currently, the Lakers project out as the 4th seed in the West despite having the 6th best record. (And, yes, the Clippers project to miss the playoffs -- partly an artifact of their soft schedule, partly an artifact of the massive amount of games they have left to play -- as we enter play tonight, the Clippers and Jazz have played markedly fewer games than the average NBA team. This will obviously round itself out as the season comes to a close, but something to think about when considering the decreased rest time and the fact that the Clippers have already had some trouble with injuries.

As for personal thoughts, I can't really fault any of NASH's current predictions, though I think the Spurs may continue their slow descent from their peak back in preseason at #1 in the West. They're currently at #3, but it's not exactly #3 with a bullet (i.e., a solid third) -- only two wins separate them from the 8 seed, and only three wins separate them from being out of the playoffs entirely. The Spurs have played well, so far, and the model is adjusting for their currently putrid road record. Which has taken them down a tad from the last few weeks. Regardless, though, with Manu gone and one of the most hellish stretches of games the Spurs have seen in years coming up, I see them underperforming these projections by a win or two -- enough to be the difference, this season, from a 2-3 seed and a 7-8 seed. It's going to be a crazy playoffs, guys. For real.

• • •

I'd write more, but I need to get to sleep because I had dental surgery today and I have a splitting headache. Join us tomorrow for my western all-stars, and Friday for a freeform post starring... well, not really sure yet, but it's going to be pretty awesome (whatever it is). Sorry for the short post. Hope you're having a great week, y'all.

A common refrain among those in my twitter feed, for anyone watching, has been that this season makes no sense whatsoever. I have to agree. The season has been unfathomably odd so far. I was going to do a freeform piece on the subject, but quickly realized there was a simpler way to go. Given that All-Star voting has begun, why not give you my first-quarter All-Stars? After all, we're already voting. And the game is in about a month. It's closer than you think, in other words. I'm not really doing statistical rankings here -- these are based on a combination of their stats (mostly documented here so we can look back later), what I've seen from watching them, and where the conference stands. It's a long look, so let's get to it. Keep in mind we'll be going with the infuriating All-Star positional designations; that is, guards, forwards, and centers. Four guards, four forwards, two centers, and two wildcard slots. Go.

• • •

EASTERN GUARDS

• STARTERS: Derrick Rose, Rajon Rondo

The starters are relatively obvious. Rose hasn't been having his best season -- inefficient, 31% from three, injured, etc. -- but he's still played like one of the best players in the East. Not MVP ball, but certainly ASG starter quality ball. The stats back me up on this -- Rose has the 3rd best PER among guards right now, the second most win shares (despite missing five games), and is 8th in the NBA at wins above replacement. He belongs here, and he belongs starting. Rondo, as well, has been a bit disappointing this season but still ranks as an ASG starter compared to his closest competition -- despite turning the ball over way the hell too much, he's been the Celtics' MVP so far this year. He's 17th overall in wins above replacement to Derrick Rose's 8th, has the highest PER on his team by a mile, and he's their most invaluable player right now -- the one thing that gives me any pause about him is how atrocious the Celtics are. They've played like the 7th worst team in the East, and while he's their best player, poor teams don't tend to get starting All-Stars. Then again, the East has been incredibly thin on guards this year, and Rondo qualifies.

• RESERVES: Brandon Jennings, Dwyane Wade

I have Wade backing up Rose and Rondo for two reasons. First, he's simply played worse than either -- he's sporting a poor look this season. He's putting up an incredibly underwhelming <0.500 TS% (for the first time in his entire career, mind you), and it's not an empty number -- he's ranked 206th in the league in points per possession according to Synergy numbers (scoring at an abysmal 0.85 PPP rate). That offensive horror show is backed up by solid defense (currently 90th in the league via Synergy, though that's below his usual rank), but when you're playing offense as poorly as Wade has been this season while using up as many possessions as he has been, you have some issues. (To their credit: Rose's defense has been above average but not to last season's high, ranked 126th in the league -- Rondo's however has been sterling, 35th overall and as far as I can tell the best among all Eastern guards.) Due to the fact that he's the only shooting guard playing anywhere near ASG-level ball in the East (other than perhaps Lou Williams, who's going to get his own look in the wildcard section), he deserves the nod.

And then... Brandon Jennings. Wait, what? This is one of those "are you kidding me" moments where you'll need to see the stats before you're convinced, especially if you haven't seen 4 or 5 Bucks games. Or maybe even if you've seen them. I get that. So here are the facts. Jennings currently has the 12th highest PER recorded by a guard this season, and has played the 11th most MPG of any guard in the league to get there. For all the mentions of him as a chucker (which I normally would find valid), via Synergy, Jennings is sporting the 77th highest PPP in the league (0.96) and currently ranks out as the 9th best isolation scorer in the NBA (1.00 PPP). He has a higher true shooting percentage than Rondo, Rose, or Wade -- and every guard in the East playing 25+ MPG outside of the fearsome fivesome of Kyrie Irving, J.J. Redick, Jodie Meeks, George Hill, and Mario Chalmers. We'll get to Kyrie later. He has the lowest turnover percentage of every point guard in the Eastern conference, and he's the only player on the Bucks who's doing much of anything on offense right now. The Bucks have been dismal this year, and they look like a long shot for a playoff bid, but Jennings has been one of the 3 best guards in the East this year (better than Wade, in my estimation, quite frankly). Based on his play up to now, he's a deserving All-Star. And now that I've written this paragraph, he'll proceed to have a catastrophic late-season swing to completely erase my perception that he's getting everything together. I can just taste it.

• • •

EASTERN FORWARDS

• STARTERS: LeBron James, Ryan Anderson

Remember how I said it's been a weird season? Well, it has been. LeBron James has been the presumptive MVP of this first quarter of the season -- he's been good for 30-8-7 a night on a human video game-esque true shooting percentage of 63% (and, again, 33% usage). He's been Miami's rock and he's been absolutely phenomenal this year. He's scoring 1.07 PPP at this point in the season, and that's actually understating how offensively valuable he is. If he wasn't a 75% free throw shooter, teams might very well be better off fouling him every time up the court. That's how potent he's been on offense. On defense, though? I may be the first and only person to say it, but I think he's been pretty disappointing this season. Perhaps I've simply been watching the wrong games, but as I've seen it, LeBron's been cherry picking more this season than he has in the last few seasons. He was a shutdown perimeter defender last year -- this year, he's playing off his man and slow to close out, and overly aggressive in pursuit of the steals and blocks in lieu of pure defensive stoppage.

Synergy backs up this assertion WAY more than I expected when I first typed it, as he's gone from 21st overall in PPP allowed in 2011 to his current spot of 267th overall in PPP allowed in 2012 -- primarily off of, as I was expecting, a dramatically worse performance on sticking to spot up shooters. He's been shiftless on defense, and that's hurting his game. Still, even despite the poor defensive game, LeBron has been on a godly streak on offense enough so that he's still the most deserving All-Star in the East, and the best player besides. As for the other starter? Ryan Anderson has been playing absolutely insane ball this year. Seriously. Among forwards, he's 2nd in the league in Win Shares, 4th in PER, and putting up some crazy pills level averages of 18-7-1 in 31 minutes per game. Does he defend? Not particularly well, no -- though he's doing marginally better than LeBron is in my eyes. And Synergy again backs me up, rating him as the 206th best defender -- pretty poor, but at least he's not in the bottom 25%, right? Like LeBron, his offense is fantastic enough to make up for his awful defense -- he's scoring 1.19 PPP, highlighted with a very high 41.1% from three.

• RESERVES: Carmelo Anthony, Andre Iguodala

Melo is going to be a starter. Let's get that straight now -- we've pretty much got our ASG starters picked out, as there isn't really a competitive race left with the voting. And Melo has roughly a 500,000 vote lead on the 3rd place forward (Amare Stoudemire). He'll be starting. And he does, honestly, deserve to make the game. If barely. He's shooting atrociously so far this year, at 40% from the field and 32% from three (on a criminal 21 shots per game). His defense is as bad as ever. But on the plus side? He's drawing a ton of free throws (hence his 26 points per game), fifth overall in wins above replacement (at 3.22), and the 8th overall ezPM100 score in the league (at 7.58). He's playing well, even if it's for a terrible, horrible Knicks team so far. He's deserving of the spot, even if his team is pretty heavily letting him and Tyson down right now. And Andre? Well... he deserves it, probably more than Melo.

Andre is rated the 7th most valuable player in the league in wins above replacement, currently sitting at 3.01 wins above replacement for a team that has won 11. His defense is only rated 94th overall by Synergy, but please, don't let that fool you. For the last several years, Andre has gotten the toughest perimeter assignment of any Sixers. Night in, night out. And he shuts them down. Last year was his coming out party -- he was the best shutdown defender in the league. And frankly, in 2011, there wasn't another player I'd rather have out there guarding the other team's best. Look at the numbers. They'll make you weep. This year, he's kept his momentum going -- not once this year has Iggy let his man put up gaudy numbers, and the "worst" defensive performance he's had (to these eyes) was when he allowed Carmelo to drop 27 points on 26 shots in a close loss to the Knicks. That's a stopper. And while he rarely has gotten All-Star dap for his All-World D? He deserves it this year. His offense is just fine, right now -- he's in the top 100 in PPP, a place he hasn't been in a while. He's playing fewer minutes but still putting up the customary Iguodala line -- 15 points, 6 rebounds, 5 assists, 3 steals, and the best defense that money can buy. Iguodala is an All-Star, right now. Take it how you will.

• • •

EASTERN CENTERS

• STARTER: Dwight Howard

He's the best big man in the league.

... Christ, sometimes things are just that simple.

• RESERVE: Tyson Chandler

It's kind of funny -- so far, 4 of the 10 players we've highlighted are from losing teams. Really. That's a strange number, because generally, very few players make the team from losing squads. This year, though, the East finds itself sort of screwed. There are only 6 winning teams in the entire conference, and two of them (Atlanta and Indiana) are winning in a rather team-centric effort that doesn't really lend itself to any easy ASG picks. On the other hand, you have your Knicks and Celtics and Bucks, where most of the team is playing like trash but one or two guys are absolutely killing it. In that kind of a landscape, who's an All-Star? Do you take the perfunctory Pacer or Hawk over the players who are beasting it on bad, low-tier playoff teams? Good question. It's a definition that becomes ever-more nebulous as time goes on. And you can have many opinions on it -- most people do.

I think it's a mix. And with the Knicks, as bad as they've been, I think they have two players who are putting up AS-caliber numbers. Carmelo is one, and Tyson is the other. He's doing his best on defense, and he's changed the culture on defense in New York to the extent he can. He's been efficient when he touches the ball (1.21 PPP, 4th in the league -- mainly off his 76.2% true shooting percentage) and his defense has been superb. The Knicks have been playing him strangely on the defensive end, with D'Antoni commonly forcing him to close out on spot-up shooters and defend sweet-shooting stretch fours instead of locking down the paint. He's doing relatively well, though his spot-up defense has been predictably bad -- that's not his game, and D'Antoni should probably figure that out at some point. Maybe. Regardless, for a team that's pretty damn bad this year, Chandler has done everything expected of him and then some. And he wasn't really a deserving All-Star last year, despite the Dallas protestations that he was. But this year, he should have his spot.

• • •

WILDCARDS

1. LOU WILLIAMS: This may seem kind of odd, but Lou Williams is probably my pick for the one-quarter 6MoY. It's him, James Harden, Mo Williams, or Al Harrington -- nobody in the league has been as impactful off the bench on a great team as those four have been to this point of the season. Lou is currently sporting a PER of 22.6, which puts him at 14th on Hollinger's PER leaderboard. He's got one of the lowest turnover percentages in the league this season, and if he keeps it up, he's going to end up with one of the 50 best seasons -- historically -- in preventing turnovers. He's currently turning it over on 7.4% of his possessions -- that's 38th all-time among guards that played 20+ MPG in a season. Amazingly, there are only two players above him on that leaderboard with a higher usage percentage than Lou has this season. Jeff Malone and Michael Jordan. Just insane numbers. He's scoring rather efficiently -- 16 points a game on 12 shots, which doesn't sound wonderful, but he's scored more points than any other Sixer this year. He's done it on 41% from three, along with a small-sounding two rebounds, three assists... but that's in 24 minutes a game! His per-36 numbers are a much more impressive 23-3-5 with a steal, on 17 shots. That's over 50% better than his per-24 numbers, and it suddenly makes his All-Star campaign a lot more reasonable. In a compressed season and a thoroughly disappointing East, there aren't a lot of truly deserving candidates. Out of the fringe guys, Lou stands out. He deserves it. (... You know. 16 games in. He may not -- and probably won't, as this turnover thing is kind of the definition of a fluke -- deserve it by the actual game, but right now, damn right he deserves it!)

2. ROY HIBBERT: I can't believe I'm honestly tabbing Hibbert as an All-Star caliber player right now. Really. I realize I just watched him completely take apart Andrew Bynum and Pau Gasol, but dear God, an All-Star? If this was the West, I mean, damn: He wouldn't be considered. But that's the world we're living in: In the East, a center averaging 14-10 with a PER of 20 on a winning team is probably enough to get you in. Don't get me wrong, Hibbert's numbers aren't strictly poor. He's Synergy's 44th ranked defender, and while I think that may overrate him a bit, he's been far better on that end this year than I've tabbed him for in his career so far. Not a shutdown guy, but a good guy. He's been a bit hard to tab on offense as well -- not particularly good, nor efficient, nor someone you really want to give the ball to. But that's sort of how every Pacer has seemed this year -- nobody's really been automatic, everyone's been equal parts disappointing and promising, and they're managing to eke out the wins anyway. That's basketball for you. Sure, it may not last very long, but I'm liking this Pacer team and it deserves an All-Star.

SNUBS

Alright. Snub is an incredibly loose definition, because frankly, if you couldn't crack an ASG roster that includes Brandon Jennings, Lou Williams, and Roy Hibbert you really aren't an ASG-caliber player. In the West, there are at least 3 snubs that would've made this Eastern Conference list if they'd been in the East. So I have some real problems shedding crocodile tears for players who -- while among the best at their position in their conference -- couldn't crack this list. Regardless, there are a few who deserve mention as being right below Lou and Roy for those last two wildcard slots.

First up, a few solid players who are putting up good numbers and are the best player on their respectively horrible teams -- Kyrie Irving, Gerald Henderson, and Greg Monroe. Kyrie has been a super elite scorer (yes, he's a rookie, but he's also already flirting with the 50-40-90 club. Nor does it hurt that he's currently sporting the 4th best PER for a rookie guard of all time), Gerald is an elite defender (to these eyes there isn't a single non-Iguodala perimeter defender in the league that does a better job than Gerald -- impossibly feisty, and his offensive game has evolved from a horror show into a pretty blend of old-school basketball that's light on the free throws and heavy on the fundamentals), and Monroe is an elite do-it-all guy (he's currently leading the Pistons in PPG, RPG, and SPG... and he's 2nd in assists and blocks -- he may very well lead the team in all five categories if he ends the year hot, and I honestly can't think of the last time a player had a ghost of a chance of accomplishing that). If their teams were better, any of those three would probably pole-vault one of their counterparts on this list. They aren't, though, and those three aren't really putting up numbers good enough to throw any of the aforementioned folks out. So, sorry, guys.

And then the decent players who are playing above-average ball on above-average teams, but really, aren't having an individual year good enough to truly warrant a selection. Yet. All of these guys are basically on-call for the game assuming that someone on the list drops out. In this category, we have Josh Smith, Chris Bosh, Luol Deng, Carlos Boozer, and Joe Johnson. I'm not going to go over these guys point-by-point, because there's really no point. We all know what kind of players these guys are. Solid folks. Decent players. And not really a chance in hell that they'd sniff an ASG if they weren't having the seasons they're having right now on teams that aren't contending, or overachieving. In particular, Josh Smith is probably the most deserving of these five -- he's putting up excellent numbers and is without question the Hawks' best player with Horford benched. And they keep winning, which is mostly a credit on Smith and Larry Drew. Regardless -- as I said before, I don't really feel there's a serious "snub" on my list. Because the East is bone-bare of talent right now.

(And no, Deron fans. He is simply not an All-Star right now. I'm sorry.)

• • •

Our first quarter Western All-Stars will be posted on Tuesday. Thanks for reading.

Hey, everybody! This is the third edition of the STEVE NASH Power Rankings. The object of these Power Rankings is rather simple -- STEVE NASH is my statistical model for making team projections the season, and STEVE gave us some results about teams' SRS projections before the season. So -- during the season -- we've been updating these SRS predictions to reflect the week's results. Our new results are a rather simple re-weighting of STEVE's projections and the actual results of the season. These new results are then run through a Gibbs sampler to predict playoff probabilities, projected records, and other various stats. I apply the mean-regressed HCA estimates from Evan of The City to these new projections to calculate predicted home wins and road wins remaining in the season and add them to the team's current record. Keep in mind (once again) these are completely and utterly automated -- there's no human input on these rankings, at all. So don't lynch me, Wizards fans. Without further ado, here are the rankings as of the close of all games played on January 10th.

• • •

Courtesy of (again) Evan, I now know how to embed spreadsheets. This week's spreadsheet:

A few observations, as I continue to create a proper format for these ranking posts.

THREE UP, THREE DOWN

• UP: IND, DAL, UTA. Two weeks in a row for Utah, who ranks as one of the more interesting teams in the league right now for me. They have a relative dearth of quality wins, but they DO have one of the more impressive blowouts of the week with their scorched earth obliteration last night of the Los Angeles Clippers. Paul Millsap is playing all-star ball, and they're on the edge of a top-10 ranking on the defensive end. I didn't really believe STEVE NASH when it predicted Utah would be a fringe playoff team, but that's exactly what they look like right now, their 9-4 schedule notwithstanding. As for these other two? Indiana finally is starting to play up to their record, and though the model has been hesitant to declare what we've seen as gospel, it's finally starting to see them as a mid-tier playoff team that'll challenge for a top-4 seed. Mostly on the back of Hibbert. And finally? STEVE NASH apologizes to Mavs fans -- two thirty-ish point blowouts will make any model think better of your team, and the Mavs have finally eclipsed the 0.500 mark (handily, in fact) and are looking like a decent bet to make the playoffs, now. And they even have a shot at a division title!!!

• DOWN: PHX, SAC, POR. The Suns have been bad this season, and this week -- a dispiriting blowout loss to the Bulls, a 10 point sans-Nash loss to the Nets, and a respectable (but disappointing) 11 point road loss to the Spurs -- represents all facets of it. Not at all enough minutes for Gortat and Markieff, and some puzzling decisions by Alvin Gentry. He doesn't seem to have a good sense of what he wants to do with this team, and while he looked like a solid and decent coach in the Suns' exciting 2010 conference finals trip, his minutes distributions lately have been utterly counterproductive and if he bears any front office responsibility for not trading Nash while he had value he's not worth keeping as the team goes forward. Not like Sarver will do anything about it. Sacramento has been abhorrent, despite DeMarcus Cousins' improvement. And the Blazers? They had a pretty poor week, for a team that looked REALLY good to start the year. They had a more-embarrassing-than-it-looked 3-point home loss to the Magic, were victims to a murder at San Antonio in the middle of the week, lost a tight overtime game to a reeling Rockets team, and barely eked out a win against a remarkably bad Hornets team. They're still top tier in the West, but they look less like a world-beater and more like a solid playoff team with a punchers chance at making an NBA finals. Like the Grizzlies, I suppose.

• • •

GENERAL DISCUSSION.

In the spirit of fixing errors, I realized this week that the weighting mechanism I was using was maintaining week 1 reweights on our week 2 ratings. As a result, a few teams got the short stick in last week's writeup -- for instance Portland was in 5th when the model actually had them in 2nd in the West (hence their fall this week). In a related story, when calculating playoff percentages, the model was assuming there were only 7 spots per conference, not 8. I've updated the probabilities in each week, which doesn't really change the broad narratives I talked about, but does change some of the numbers. I'll try to go back and edit it at some point. Apologies for that error.

I would comment on interesting trends, but there aren't too many of them. The Spurs have been awful enough on the road that the model now predicts they'll end with a final road record of 16-17 -- which, given that they're oh for five so far, may seem like an almost charitable assessment. We see a pretty clear separation between the contenders and the pretenders in the East, with the Heat/Bulls/Sixers troika all ending up around 45 wins (which translates to around 56-57 wins in a full season). The Thunder are lapping the competition, record-wise, in the West -- their two biggest competitors (Spurs and Nuggets) both have had underwhelming low points to their starts, and it's tough to see either seriously challenging the Thunder when all's said and done. I thought, before the season, that the Thunder had about a 50% chance of winning the West. NASH has finally come to an agreement with me, it appears.

And in our weekly note on the matter -- NASH sees the season turning out, despite all the hype the East had entering this season, exactly like recent years in terms of how the lower-tier playoff teams look. The West has no less than three teams who project to miss the playoffs in the West despite better records than the Eastern 8 seed. The East has two playoff teams under 0.500 and the three worst teams in the league. For all the talk about the East coming back? Certainly doesn't look it.

• • •

I'd like to say more, but man, am I tired. I'm going to watch a few games and go to sleep. Night, world.

I consider myself a relatively well-read man, at least when it comes to Russian literature. I haven't kept up with my reading as much as I used to before college (which seems to be the case with any literate math and science major), but I've become really fond of picking up my old favorites and reading a few chapters every now and again as a reminder of why I loved them. That and short stories, which is the reason I've had a quite unfinished post on Popovich through the eyes of Solzhenitsyn bouncing around in the 48 Minutes of Hell drafts page for at least a month now. I'll finish it, someday. I promise. This is all relatively beside the point. I love Russian literature. I love the cultural sensibilities at play in many of the Russian greats, and the general cossack voice that seems to lend itself to the limits of character complexity and motivations that lie at the heart of work operating at the apex of literature.

Alex and I would both attest to having spent many long hours discussing amongst ourselves the best NBA analogues to some of the characters from our favorite novels. Who's the NBA's best representation -- both rhetorically and in their aesthetic realization of the character's themes -- of War and Peace's Pierre Bezukhov? Solzhenistyn's Ivan Denisovich, or even Cancer Ward's Oleg? Gogol's incarnation of the poshlost, in the knavish Chichikov? Lermontov's Pechorin, Goncharov's Oblomov, Dostoevsky's Prince Myshkin. All incredible characters -- are there any NBA analogues, of their ilk? There are, for some. Some are reaches. And others are Eddy Curry. But that's beside the point -- one could frame relatively entertaining and insightful posts around the eternal search for an analogue of each classic character I described, if they'd like. Someday, we may do that.

Today, though? Let's talk about Nikolai Vsevolodovich Stavrogin and Kobe Bean Bryant.

• • •

Last night, in a mostly ignored tweet, Doug Hastings stated -- in his usual semi-rhetorical way -- that it was almost irresponsible to analyze Kobe Bryant without discussing Stavrogin. I read the tweet, laughed, and immediately felt that I'd read the defining description of Kobe Bryant's approach to the game. I'll explain that in a bit, but assuming most of our readers haven't read Dostoevsky's Demons in the last year, I'll attempt to explain who Stavrogin is. Necessarily, there will be some spoilers (though I won't spoil "At Tikhon's", as that's one of the greatest reveals in all of literature) and if you're planning on reading it and can't handle being spoiled I'd proceed with caution.

Stavrogin may be the most intrinsically talented and intelligent individual in any Dostoevsky novel. Russian literature doesn't tend to have "perfect" characters, but on paper, Stavrogin fits the bill. Strikingly handsome and brilliant, Stavrogin is desired by every character in the book, for a time. He's the town's most eligible bachelor, the smartest man in the book, and (to the young nihilists upon whom the book is based) a lightning rod who they eternally desire as their leader. He doesn't necessarily want to lead, but the nihilist masses see him and his talent and believe him to be their savior. He has a face that -- to quote the book -- "reminded some people of a mask" in its perfection. It couldn't be that handsome, he couldn't be that talented, he couldn't look and feel like such a sterling specimen of a man. But he was all those things. On paper, in appearance, and in all ways of summarizing a person before you really get to their soul. Unfortunately, the soul is a tricky thing.

"Today as before, I'm still capable of wishing to do something decent and I derive some pleasure from this, but the next moment I want to do evil things and that also gives me pleasure."

-- Stavrogin to Dasha, p. 690

Stavrogin was a severely flawed man. As flawed as a man that fits all the descriptions above could possibly be. His talent insulated him from the concept of empathy, leading him to spend much of the novel exhibiting a complete and utter lack of a conscience. Or, really, a soul. There are conflicting periods in the novel -- some where, as he describes, he wishes to be decent and some where he wishes to be evil -- and in the end paint him to be a deeply contradictory individual. He shows both kindness and wickedness. He tells the nihilists he won't allow them to murder his friend to make a political statement, then stands idly by as they do so. He feels pain at his wife's suffering, then has her murdered. He is a classic Byronic hero, in a warped sense -- talented and perfect on paper, but bored of life. Completely indifferent to the friendships of others and driven to ennui and disrepair by the world that exists on a level lower than his potential.

Stavrogin shows no ability to make relationships, and no ability to cash in on his talent and potential in any way beyond his reputation. In a sense, one could effectively summarize that aspect of Stavrogin as a lack of motivation to assimilate with the less talented. Stavrogin never met a single person in Demons who he felt was his equal. Everyone was lower-class, a subhuman compared to Stavrogin's on-paper excellence. This lack of empathy and lack of ability to do anything but assert his own superiority when faced with interacting with lower-tier citizens reflects on his actions, but also on how he lived his life. Stavrogin takes on ridiculous, unnecessary feats just to see if they would affect his countenance and force him to feel. Stavrogin's extraordinary abilities desensitized him to normal stimulation. Stavrogin felt he needed to go one step further, for his own sake -- he couldn't simply duel someone he wronged, he had to fire intentionally in the air to mock his dueling parter's poor shot, then shrug and leave without shooting his dueling partner as he wallowed in his failure. He couldn't simply have an affair, he had to kiss the wife of a nobleman in front of the nobleman's face, at a party. He couldn't simply mock his heritage by marrying low, he had to marry a mentally challenged slave.

The acts of Stavrogin aren't acts of bravery or courage -- often, as in the duel (where he was nearly hit three times and intentionally missed his own shots as an inexplicable and mocking joke), they're the acts of foolishness and completely detached from reality. But foolishness isn't the right word for his primary motivator -- for Stavrogin, they're acts of curiosity. A man who feels he is above God -- as Stavrogin says in his culminating confession -- attempting to find his philosophical limits and his stance on good versus evil. And disturbingly discovering he had no limits to his depravity, no personal line between good and evil. He could not bring himself to feel as a rule, only for the most absurd of his sins could he come close to approximating what it was like to feel. Stavrogin did great things, and he did terrible things. And the scariest part, perhaps, was that he had no real motive behind them. He simply did them to see if he could ever do anything to affect himself.

• • •

As a person, Kobe is not Stavrogin. Nor anything close. Stavrogin is a depraved and challenging character, and in making this comparison, I'm in no way trying to make a personal judgment on Kobe's head or heart. He is not Stavrogin. But in his game, there are aesthetic similarities. And in the philosophy that guides his decisionmaking, the similarities would be (as Hastings said) somewhat irresponsible to ignore. As a basketball player, Kobe is similarly talented to Stavrogin. Molded from a young age to be a basketball star, Kobe's spent his entire life in pursuit of excellence for his talent. And psychologically, that slightly differentiates him from Stavrogin. Because Stavrogin is good enough that he needs not pursue anything tangible, or any validation of his skills. But this isn't to say Stavrogin is absent a pursuit of his own -- in his previously described attempts to find his limits, Stavrogin discovered he could not feel.

In his fruitless pursuit of empathy, and in pursuit of humility, Stavrogin squanders his talents and commits remarkable sins. They are sins that make his final confessions the out-of-place final chapter of Demons (banned in the original Russian but was eventually unearthed and re-added by Dostoevsky researchers) -- titled "At Tikhon's" -- one of the most disturbing chapters in all of literature. Stavrogin's sins cannot be properly assessed within his moral code, until one realizes he never really had one. As an aesthetic complement to Kobe Bryant, you can't do much better than the unconscionable self-obsession of Stavrogin and his lack of human empathy. Kobe is not a player opposed -- on its face -- to winning "the wrong way." He doesn't mind taking half his team's shots, because he has no patience or time to spare for those of lesser talent. You watch Kobe play, and for every time a teammate shanks one of his perfect passes (as Kobe is a gifted and talented passer, despite his distaste for showing it), you can see in his mind the wheels turning. The mental note. The sense that -- for the rest of the game -- Kobe feels he can't rely on that player, even if the player worked hard and the miss was in no way their fault. Because they missed. In his mind, Kobe doesn't miss an important shot. A shot off one of his passes is important, to Kobe, and a player who misses it is a persona non grata.

Curious of what I mean? Look at some tape. Watch Andrew Bynum, and how quickly Kobe decides to stop passing to him every time he misses the ball. Watch as Kobe takes on ridiculous feats -- not in pursuit of feeling, as with Stavrogin, but simply because he desires the challenge. Kobe is notorious for playing through injury, and at this point, the parallel between his injury habits and Stavrogin's detachment from reality is too ripe to pass up. Kobe is essentially blowing up his future body in pursuit of revisiting his younger days. He's taking up too many possessions, playing too many minutes, and has no motivation to assimilate with the less talented Lakers around him in a coherent offense. He and his fans are desensitized to the reality of his injuries -- to the terrible arthritis he will live with for the rest of his life, the balky knee that will require incredible feats of medicine to stay healthy as he gets older, the tear in his wrist that would normally require serious surgery -- all in yet another attempt to challenge himself. To continue winning and scoring and being all-caps KOBE despite his age and the gradual decline of his game. The desire to beat father time, to leave the game on his own terms, to take as many shots as he possibly can even when it hurts the team.

Kobe's motivations, while generally malleable towards winning, have never been solely about the rings or the scoring titles. It's been a story written about Kobe, about winning on his own terms. A man whose career was solely about winning would never have let his game 7 meltdown versus the Suns happen. He wouldn't continue to take completely inefficient possessions and ignore the incredible second options the Lakers have always provided him that he more than any Laker fan seems to properly value. In a close game, you aren't playing the Lakers. You're playing Kobe, by himself, because winning isn't nearly as important as winning on his own terms. He has no conscience about the shots he takes and the damage he does to his body, because to him, this is a challenge. It's Kobe versus an army of imaginary haters, Kobe versus his body, Kobe versus Jordan. These are the standards Kobe Bryant often seems to hold himself to, in the game of basketball. This is his legacy, though he doesn't care much for it. Kobe doesn't care where you place him on a top ten list, really -- he cares only insofar as he wants to prove those that dislike him wrong. That's as far as he'll go.

• • •

Stavrogin ends the novel proper in a manner that, to the reader, continues to make him as inscrutable as a character could possibly be. In short? He kills himself. For a man so devoid of emotion, so lacking in human empathy, so impossibly detached from the world around him -- doing that really makes little sense. There are two primary ways to understand it. Either Stavrogin kills himself in one final self-destructive pursuit of something that makes him feel, or he kills himself because he's been lying on his face the whole time. Stavrogin does in fact feel. And his sins -- too weighty to disclose here, the reveal too important to the novel for me to spoil it for you -- finally weighed upon his soul enough that he could no longer live with himself.

When Demons was first brought to America, it was brought by Constance Garnett (an object of my loathing, but that's a subject for another day) under the title The Possessed. The Russian title is actually "bez-ii", a word that is loosely translated as a plural form of "evil spirit." The problem with the original translation is that it ends up completely changing the meaning of the novel -- the characters in the book are simply not possessed by forces external, and it's silly to think so. To think that is to utterly misunderstand Dostoevsky's point. Rather, the characters themselves are the possessors. They are the ones whose ideas and depravity possess the minds of the men that follow them. They are the ones to come up with their own philosophy, and they are the ones responsible for their own actions.

Kobe Bryant is not an equivalent to Nikolai Vsevolodovich Stavrogin, and they are not comparable on most levels. There is no need whatsoever to list off Kobe's sins, or even attempt that comparison. Because as a person, Kobe could never reach the complex and inscrutable level that Stavrogin arrives at as a character. But in his game, and in his utter lack of respect for his own future -- as a human being, not as a basketball player -- the parallel both to Stavrogin and the novel itself becomes noteworthy. Kevin Harlan can yell about Chris Paul having no respect for human life all he wants. He'll be right -- Paul's empathy is similarly lacking, for better or for worse. But Chris Paul's lack of empathy will never come anywhere close to the philosophical purity of a player like Kobe, and in his late-career return to his prime 2006-2007 game, Kobe seems intent on reminding everyone who the reigning king of detachment is. It is he, and no matter what kind of new talent enters the league, not a soul will ever match him.

Kobe's self-obsession and his desire and need for an eternal challenge will be his real legacy. And the way he has taken the Jordan dichotomy and altered it to fit his designs points to the original flaw in the title -- it is not Kobe who is possessed by his own designs, but Kobe who is the possessor of others. He has full ownership of all that he's done, and the mindset he's brought to this league. He is the one who has, to some extent, remade the league in his image. And he is the one who, when all is said and done, succeeded. At what cost? Good question, especially if you're one of his fans. Because worrying about his health is something that even I (a man who doesn't much like Kobe) have been partial to do. But please, don't kid yourself.

If he cared about that, do you really think he'd be playing on that wrist right now?

I am afraid of showing greatness of soul. I know that it will be another sham again—the last deception in an endless series of deceptions. What good is there in deceiving oneself? Simply to play at greatness of soul? Indignation and shame I can never feel, therefore not despair.

-- Nikolai Stavrogin's suicide note.

I don't like free throws. Let's start there. They're efficient, lovely, and essentially free points given how well most teams shoot them. But as a general rule I don't like them. They remind me a lot of football, a sport that (for all my love of sports) I have never been able to get very excited about. It's a stoppage in play that extends the game, often results from a sketchy call, and leads to boring no-effort full-court defense as teams return to their offense from the scene of the crime. And unlike play-stoppers like timeouts, there are rarely fun and interesting plays to be run after a free throw. There are rarely intrinsically interesting schemes. Just leisurely bring the ball up court, maybe rotate it a few times, and shoot an iso. That tends to be the play-of-choice on the other end after a free throw. And it's incredibly aggravating, from a strategic standpoint.

And really, a free throw is fine, considered alone. It's an occasional pause of the action to catch one's breath. They aren't always bad. And time-outs are fantastic, sometimes, for the same reason (and because the strategic laziness that tends to be prevalent on post-free throw plays isn't there at all). But too many free throws takes a great deal of strategy and the fluidity out of the game of basketball, and I find that aesthetically problematic. For a game whose lifeblood relies so much on the essential movement and flow of the offense versus the defense, and the strategic mores of the 10 men on the court, free throws are about as interesting and fun as a comatose dancer. It makes the referees more important than any player. And it warps the game around it, if it occurs too often.

Let's discuss last night.

• • •

In trying to adequately measure my dislike of free throw-driven games, I once took it upon myself to try and determine what the optimal number of free throws are for a game of basketball with good offensive execution to be enjoyable. I came up with an admittedly patchwork solution after watching a random sampling of games that fit certain criterion. If a game's free throw attempts are more than 75% of the game's field goals made, there are problems -- that is, if both teams combined for 75 field goals but combined for 55 free throws, it was probably a pretty uninteresting game to watch from an aesthetic standpoint (unless it's a defensive team that get into pseudo-offensive flows that are intrinsically fun to watch, like the prime Celtics, prime Spurs, or a Mike Brown team -- and even then, the offense was probably awful to watch). On the other hand, if both team's combined free throw attempts amount to less than 40% of the total made field goals in the game, it was probably a pretty fun game to watch -- the action probably came in a relatively uninterrupted flow, there were probably at least 3 or 4 key runs where teams went 5-6 minutes without a single free throw, and you're far less likely to get performances where stars shoot terribly but were "efficient" due to the volume of their free throws. Last night provided the starkest test case in a while for two games on polar opposite ends of this spectrum.

In last night's overtime thriller between the Rockets and the Spurs, the teams combined for 29 free throw attempts to 83 field goals -- that's 34.9% as many free throws as field goals, well under my Mendoza line for a fun offensive game. And it was -- both teams were making some great shots, with the Rockets even making a lot of great ones against solid defensive pressure from Tiago Splitter and Kawhi Leonard. The offensive flow was something to behold, and overall, there were scarce few dead balls that didn't result in a brilliant offensive play by Popovich. Even the last play of the game, one that I originally thought was a bust, actually was a reasonably clever slip screen attempt to get Tim an open elbow jumper. The Rockets played it well, and there were probably better plays in that situation, but despite the ugly result (a poor Danny Green runner as time expired) it was a relatively creative play. Sometimes the shots didn't fall, sometimes they did, but it was an incredibly fun game with a distinctive flow and an absolutely electric performance by both teams. It was a lot of fun, on the purely offensive spectrum. It's exactly the kind of basketball that most people love to watch.

Then we have last night's overtime... something, between the Clippers and the Heat. Now, I wrote about the Clippers and the Heat the other day, and why I dislike both teams. This game was a great reminder of basically every one of my points. It was absolutely excruciating to watch. And when, post-game, I checked my numbers to see if they passed the FTA/FGM "bad" game Mendoza line of 75%? Sure enough, the teams combined for 57 free throw attempts to 68 made field goals. For those counting at home, that's 83.8% -- on average, for every 5 made field goals, there were 4 free throw attempts. That's ugly. Incredibly so, in fact. LeBron James himself had 17 free throws, more than the Rockets attempted as a team and just as many as the Spurs attempted despite the Rockets ending the game with two desparation fouls to get a chance to win. The percentages from the line in that game were disgusting (the Heat shot 58.8% from the foul line, akin to the Heat being a team composed of nothing but Shaquille O'Neal at every position on the court), but it wasn't the percentage that made that game such a slog. It was the utter lack of offensive creativity for the Clippers (and, really, Blake Griffin's insistence on pretending he can make a 20 foot jump shot), the constant bailout calls by the refs, and the fact that with so many non-transition post-free throw dead ball possessions, the Heat rarely got a chance for Coach Spolestra (an excellent play-calling coach) to actually do his job and call good plays.

Why does it matter, really? Simple. The amount of press being spilled from the Rockets-Spurs game is minimal. Virtually nil. It's just one of many games in the regular season, even though it happened to be quite possibly the best played offensive game of any so far. It was beautiful basketball. The ESPN game, on the other hand? Postmortem is that it's a glorious struggle, a smashmouth display of basketball grit, a game with more Olympiads on the court than any other we'll see this season, et cetera. Realistically? It was a slog, and one of the most uninteresting games of the season -- on both ends -- from an aesthetic standpoint. Sports media has its successes and it has its flaws, but the conflation of a game's theoretical "importance" with aesthetic ideal has to be one of the most aggravating.

Repeat after me. Just because a game has a bunch of great players on the court doesn't mean it's a good game. Just because three of the five best players in the world were faced up in crunch time doesn't mean the game was fun. A great game takes a lot of factors coming together and a whole lot of luck. The Heat-Clips game was just about as bad a game as you could possibly have when you pit those two rosters together. Instead of properly placing it where it belongs -- a forgettable regular season tilt between two teams that were playing absolutely horrible basketball in no way reflective of their talents -- the media feels the need to spoon feed a narrative warping the definition of a good game just enough so that this game fits. Well, it wasn't. It was awful.

Call it important, call it a close one, and certainly call them stars. But don't you dare call it a good game.

• • •

Instead of a programming update, I have a depressing website note. In updating WordPress, the powers that be evidently saw fit to completely and totally delete our old theme. As it was a theme I made by hand and hadn't backed up anywhere, this is an incredibly awful turn of events for us. I've been incredibly busy and frankly don't have time to mess around with this today (or this weekend). So, for now, we have a pretty awful-looking temporary theme. Our apologies. Hopefully in the next two weeks I'll have time to rebuild our old one. Really incredibly mad about the whole thing, if anyone has a smart idea for getting it back, I'd appreciate it. Anyway. My lunch break is over. Back to the daily grind. Have a good day.

EDIT: Great news! One of our readers was able to recover our old CSS from their internal firefox cache. They sent it to me. After I re-implemented it there was only some minor code shuffles I needed to do to fix the theme. So we're good as new, and the theme is actually backed up and saved this time. So, hooray! I love our readers. For real. You guys are fantastic, and in this case, saved me from hours of excruciating re-work to try and rebuild the old theme. Thanks a ton.

Hey, everybody! This is the second edition of the STEVE NASH Power Rankings. The object of these is rather simple -- the ratings intend to take the predictions that STEVE NASH spat out before any games were played and update throughout the season with what teams have shown so far. The long and short of it? They're a simple re-weighting of current season SRS with the STEVE NASH projections then ran through our Gibbs sampler to predict playoff probabilities, projected records, and other various stats. Upon re-weighting, I apply the mean-regressed HCA estimates from Evan of The City and calculate predicted home wins and predicted road wins remaining in the season and add them to the team's current record. Which leads to the STEVE NASH end-state projections of what this season will look like -- an odd way to do Power Rankings, but hey. We're an odd blog. Without further ado: the updated NASH rankings. Keep in mind (once again) these are completely and utterly automated -- there's no human input on these rankings, at all. So don't lynch me, Mavs fans. Without further ado, here are the rankings as of the close of all games played on January 10th

• • •

Courtesy of (again) Evan, I now know how to embed spreadsheets. This week's spreadsheet:

A few observations, as I try to create a proper format for these ranking posts.

THREE UP, THREE DOWN

• UP: OKC, PHI, UTA. An interesting group, these three. The Thunder's rise in the rankings has less been the model becoming convinced of their dominance (note their predicted SRS is just 3rd in the west, barely ahead of the Lakers) and more based on their simply continuing to win games. The model currently predicts the Thunder will go just 31-24 to end out the year, but their torrid 9-2 start has them in pole position to win the West's top seed. In Philly's case, it's simply the model updating the preseason projection (6th seed and a 0.500 record) to match what we've seen already -- a team that has destroyed all comers and looks far superior to most teams in the east. Utah is an interesting case -- nobody really knows WHY they're doing so well, but they're doing pretty incredibly well at this point, and need to be taken seriously as an actual threat to make the playoffs. Not that they really want to make the playoffs, as that'll set their rebuilding back a year, but still.

• DOWN: DET, HOU, MIN. Less interesting. All of these teams had terrible weeks -- Detroit got blasted by a team ranked rather low in the NASH view of things, and Minnesota continued to punt winnable games with low execution. And, you know, get blown out by the Cleveland Cavaliers. That doesn't help. Houston, on the other hand? They're coming off of a remarkably dismal performance against a poor Charlotte defense, and (like the Wolves) continue to barely-show-up for games they should have in hand. Kyle Lowry being out is the main driver, but really, their atrocious defense falls squarely on McHale's broad shoulders for imposing a terrible system and refusing to properly leverage the pieces he has to make a coherent whole. Just a disappointing team overall, and while NASH still has it in the playoffs, you have to assume the picture gets darker fast if they don't shape up.

• • •

GENERAL DISCUSSION.

This week, in an effort to fix a few errors in the last edition (the spreadsheet is updated, tho the image that accompanied the post isn't) I enacted some changes. First, I reweighted the predictions post-generation in order to have a season with the correct number of games won and games lost. In STEVE NASH's case, it was predicting teams would win about 930 games this season and lose 1050. That may seem like a wholly reasonable prediction given how dismal many of the games have been this season, but that isn't actually possible. I also added a home/away component. The rankings are now well aware of how many home/away games a team has played up to this point, and generates its predictions with some help from Evan's aforementioned HCA rankings. So those are some model improvements that are immediately evident. The "previous week" part of the rankings is a re-ran version of week #1's rankings to account for these changes. They aren't all perfect, but they're improving.

Overall, the picture is rather customary of what we tend to see in the regular season. The model predicts that the worst western team (the Sacramento Kings) will still manage to post a better record than five Eastern teams. Which is crazy, silly, but completely expected given the paucity of talent on those particular five eastern teams. The West is wide open, though the Thunder have finally pulled away from the pack in the NASH rankings. Even though it projects the Thunder to end the season with an SRS below San Antonio and Denver, the Thunder now have around a 30% chance to win the West in STEVE's estimation. And beyond the Thunder, the West is stuck in what essentially amounts to a holding pattern with four teams tied for second. The Spurs and the Nuggets are projected at 41 wins, with the Lakers and Blazers both projected at 40. On the plus side for fans of those 5 teams, no team in the West looks remotely as good as any of those five, giving each of those five greater than 90% odds of making the playoffs. Beyond those five, a remarkable 8 teams have > 10% chance of making the playoffs -- from Minnesota to Houston -- which points to how incredibly wide open the Western playoff picture is right now.

As for the East, it's as starkly contrasting as the West is open. The Bulls and Heat are easily the two best teams in the East, and there's an 80% chance that one of those two teams gets the 1 seed. The Sixers are still on a starkly upward trajectory, and rate out as the only other 40 win team in the conference right now. Beyond them? Only 9 teams have a >10% chance of making the playoffs (as opposed to the West's 13) and there's an incredibly stark dropoff after the 3 seed, with a bunch of middling teams vying for just-over-0.500 records (including the disappointing Celtics and Knicks). The only real drama that STEVE predicts comes from Milwaukee's quixotic playoff quest -- despite their awful turn without Bogut earlier this week, they still project out as a 0.500 team the rest of the season. If they can get some luck with injuries and their defense resumes form, STEVE believes them to have a great shot at knocking either Atlanta or Indiana out of the playoffs.

And that's about all we've got for you today. Go back to bed, STEVE NASH.

• • •

That's all for now, friends. We'll be back tomorrow with, most likely, the resumption of our Player Capsules series. Perhaps some other stuff. We've got a lot of content coming down the pipeline for you all, it's just a struggle to find time to get it all done. But we'll live. Hope tonight's games are fantastic, and we'll see you next week as STEVE NASH is proven wrong in hilarious fashion about the Mavs once they go on a 20 game win streak (in one week) and lead the league with a 243.2 SRS in seven days' time. That's how it goes, sometimes.

A 19 year old boy was shot and killed on Sunday. Over shoes and a coat. They were a $200 pair of shoes. Three or four men, at a bus stop. It was a shade after 2:30 in the morning. According to police reports, the men rolled up in an SUV. They got out. Shots were fired -- some by the assailants, and some by another person whose identity is currently unknown. They stole his shoes, his coat, and nothing else. He leaves behind a pregnant girlfriend, his almost-finished high school diploma, and a family that loved him. He is dead.

I repeat: a boy lost everything over a pair of shoes.

• • •

There's a concept related to this that became -- for a very short period this summer -- ubiquitous in the NBA blogosphere. Malcolm Gladwell wrote an excellent article about it for Grantland. I refer to the concept of "psychic value." Essentially, psychic value is the mental value we assign to things beyond their actual worth -- it's what makes a Van Gogh worth far more than the canvas and the paint it's composed of, and what makes the hilarious signed photo of Matt Bonner being guarded by Shane Battier in my living room more valuable than any other photo of Matt Bonner I've ever seen in my life.

It's also the reason that, upon losing the clipboard I'd used as a drawing board and notepad since the age of two in one of my class buildings, I spent almost a year keeping in touch with the building's janitors trying to find it. I basically did their job with them for a week, searching desperately for my beloved clipboard. And I called/visited often after I ended that stage of the search. I told them (and my friends that were wondering why I was mopping floors and cleaning classrooms) that it was because there were important papers on the clipboard. Really? There weren't anything but sketches and loan paperwork. Nothing I couldn't redraw, nothing I couldn't re-print. The papers didn't matter. It was the clipboard. Even though it was, again, a broken wooden clipboard from the early 90s. So many hours of my life, quite literally wasted. I don't really regret it. Because if I'd given up on it, I'm sure I'd feel even worse about losing it than I already do.

The reason I mention all this is to highlight just how far psychic value can make you go in pursuit of your psychic desires. If you value something enough, you can quickly become obsessed. Which (admittedly) isn't always strictly a bad thing. I certainly can't say that. Obsession can be good, in a backhanded sense, if it's in pursuit of excellence. I've certainly spent much of my life obsessed with the pursuit of success. Being good at what I do. Being appreciated, content, et cetera. In sports, we tend to idealize obsession from our heroes and laugh about it in our villains -- for instance, Tim Duncan's offseason workouts with Danny Green and James Anderson were an awesome story to me. The story of Kobe staying after a game and taking umpteen-hundred shots was (on the other hand) an object for laughs. Begrudging respect, but laughs all the same.

But this obsession -- the extremities of psychic value -- is essentially why David Lee Robinson is dead.

Really. Let's get some perspective here. An SUV costs quite a bit of money. Even a used one. A new one can run you anywhere from $25,000-$40,000 -- assuming it's heavily used, that's still going to run you up to $10,000. SUVs are expensive. Handguns? According to the Washington Post, it costs about $833.69 to get a handgun in Washington D.C. I doubt they went through legal channels, but it's still a $500 and up proposition to get yourself your own handgun even through the seedier means. Or perhaps they stole both, though I'd never deign to assume theft, even in these situations. Because I don't know the people who robbed and killed David Lee Robinson. I don't really want to. But the fact remains -- they definitively owned both those things. Far more valuable than the shoes by any metric of economic value, no matter how they got it. And they still felt that a 19-year-old's shoes were reason enough to rob a man, and reason enough to pull a gun on him. Reason enough to end his life. That's the psychic value that they -- and a non-insignificant number of people -- assign to sneakers. Jordans. Nice kicks.

There is a line that separates this kind of a sad, distressing obsession from the normal obsessions that we experience and thrive upon in our everyday lives. It's really a hazier line than we'd like to think, when you get to the fringe cases. Try drawing the line between the obsession that drives a man to value a pair of sneakers over the life of his fellow human being and the obsession that drives a fan to make furious and serious death threats against Otis Smith and his family. The line between this ridiculous crime and the obsession that drives Charlie Villanueva to threaten to kill Ryan Hollins (and later charge the Cavalier locker room searching for him). There are darker spots in the NBA. Things that we'd rather not talk about, much less consider ourselves a part of. And for the most part? These aren't your everyday fans or your everyday players I'm talking about -- most of them are, like you and I, in it for fun alone. We watch and play this game because it's fun. It's a way to make a great, amazing living. A wonderful time sink. It even helps people.

But here we are. Nobody should ever value a thing like a pair of sneakers over a human being. Hate humanity all you'd like, but love your fellow man -- at least above a pair of kicks. We can be fools and louts and all sorts of things. We can do terrible, awful things as collective masses. But value people as people, not objects or concepts or items. We are tangible. We are real. We are human. In the end, to the man that killed David Lee Robinson, his victim was worth less than that. Less, even, than the shoes on his feet. And there's not a damn bit of good that can come out of that.

I really don't really know what more to say. Rest in peace, David Lee Robinson.