What is the meaning of life? What do I look like when I haven't shaved in a couple days? The answers to all these puzzling questions will be revealed soon.

Anyway, we did a postgame last night. It was pretty depressing, but we held it together. Heh. In case you weren't aware, the Spurs lost to the Heat last night in a Game 2 blowout to even the series, as the Heat are wont to do. Seven times out of ten we drink our bourbon at night, thus spawning the theme of this program. The word "eviscerate" means "to deprive". In this case, the Heat eviscerated our fragile hearts.

But we're getting better, and by the end of us both of us are weakly reassured just enough by the Spurs' playoff run at large that we're both willing to go with the Spurs on Tuesday, albeit with weak confidence.

And hopefully we're getting better at the postgames. 30 minutes or so of bliss or brilliant entertainment... this is not. But we're getting there day by day. We're pounding the rock, and perhaps that's all that matters. Tonight in our postgame we talked about what we thought of this (all considering) bizarre game full of unlikely heroes and unlikely underperformers (HINT: Everyone more or less fit in one of the two categories, even freaking Ray Allen), and where we think the series as a whole is going. Anyway, have a good day, everyone.

--Alex

P.S. I thought turnovers were an obvious concern for San Antonio, though the actual mechanics of that didn't really come up until an hour after we finished broadcasting. So, on that note, I wrote a piece back in January about how the Spurs played the Grizzlies twice in the span of five days during the regular season, losing the first because of turnovers before making a slight but potent adjustment: They played Duncan and Diaw nearer to the top of the key, a few feet back from Duncan's most comfortable zone, in order to limit turnovers and create a second facilitator. This approach, with interesting strengths and weaknesses, is great for limiting turnovers and their ill effect, but playing your big that far away from the basket is far from ideal in terms of generating offense. But Duncan and Diaw are two of the best passing big men in the game, and I thought it was worth mentioning and linking.

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"Empty your mind, be formless, shapeless, like water. If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle and it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot it becomes the teapot. That water can flow, or it can crash. Be water my friend”

Martial artist Bruce Lee

Ten years ago we had no LeBron, Tony, or Timothy in the Finals.

Now, we have Tim Duncan, Tony Parker, and LeBron James in the Finals. Bienvenidos a Miami -- 2013 estilo.

It's more likely that the Heat sweep the Spurs than that the Spurs sweep the Heat. In such a sense, the Heat are favored. But we've all heard by now a hundred factors arguing for one or the other team, and our collective predictions as writers have been woeful. Let's do something different. Without copping out of making a prediction (which I'll make tomorrow), I'd like to talk about why this series is actually interesting to me -- both as an observer and student of the game, and as a passionate fan that has seen 250 Spurs games or so in the last 4 years and written essays about how Tim Duncan is Prince Andrei and RJ is Pierre.

LeBron James is a chameleon, a physical and mental prodigy that combines in the psychophysical to form the perfect athlete, one with the psychology of a true team player that learns better every day how to assert himself and how to defer to teammates... and how to do both simultaneously. Behold the actualized man, behold the man who can do everything on a basketball court at will with the exception of literally ending the game for a win condition, and, even then, he's not far off. Behold LeBron. And finally, at length, he is a champion trawling the present for a validation. LeBron is as liquid as a great player can be without also disappearing into the container of the game, and yet he's as potent a pick-your-poison as any great apothecary's ever dreamt up. Then you have one of the most athletic and savvy players to ever play the game in Wade, and theoretically a giant cast of players that can step up, of which exactly one or two seem to at any given time.

And who will he be facing but the San Antonio Spurs? Themselves a talented outfit, San Antonio's calling card is consistency, organizational stability, execution, and maximizing skillsets of often limited players. San Antonio's individual players step up, take the light they receive, and shine it instantly on their teammates. Tony Parker is their best player right now, but Tim Duncan is yet still a wise, physical presence at the rim. He's one of the half-dozen best defenders in the league without hesitation, and if you get me really drunk, I'll tell you he's the best. And that liquored up Dewey could make a pretty good case for it, I venture. Kawhi still has this odd orbit around Duncan on offense, and he and Danny Green have this confusing chemistry on both ends that's odd to behold. As the playoffs have shown, the Spurs are not quite so deep anymore; there's not a lead on this Earth vast enough that the Spurs could not lose, if Duncan's out of the picture. Manu Ginobili is a gigantic blaring unknown. What we know fits on a USB-thimble -- what we don't could span the milky way.

The common thread is fluidity. Both teams have played radically different styles over their principals' last six years -- even the Spurs and their vaunted consistency have seen six completely different teams the last six years. Their common thread being "A little fallen off defensively, but dynamite offensively" and, if you weren't watching too hard, you'd assume it was a bunch of boring drives and kicks to the corner, more or less based on injuries. But that's only against the Bobcats and Kings; against teams with competent interior D and solid rotations (such as Memphis, since those are the first two things to say about the Grizz), the Spurs have shown they can make the next-level pass in response to the best rotation in the world... and then another... and then another... and then another. Their players are not just unselfish ideals but are individually creatives, only the Big Three aspiring to creative genius but Kawhi showing flashes and Danny Green and Tiago and Diaw showing their next-level vision and awareness despite sometimes inconsistent execution.

The Spurs and Heat cover more ground on both ends than most teams can aspire to on their best end. And when pressed, both teams are explosive, maximize their transitions, and can go to the rim seemingly at will against the best defenses on the slightest mistake. Some of their defense has ground life out of the eternal, wearing out tiny Stephen Curry's brittle ankles or big Zach Randolph's brutalizing post play. Joakim Noah's brilliance and George Hill's waterbug talents. On the whole, these are two teams possessed of fluidity and the mental and physical dispositions to take advantage of that fluidity. These teams are the Man for All Seasons, unafraid of the executioner behind the door. These teams are like water, and that water can flow, or it can crash.

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Blowouts happen. It's a mathematical fact that if you have a normal distribution with a long ta--... Look, I'm too lazy to finish this sentence. Everyone blows teams out and everyone gets blown out. Maybe it's 15 points because of garbage time, or maybe it's just a really convincing 15 point defeat that genuinely has you asking questions. Sometimes it's because of an amusing match-up advantage that never gets addressed; sometimes it's bad coaching; sometimes they're the Spurs and you're the Bobcats. Whatever the case, it's hard to put too much stock into blowouts if they don't repeat several times. It's the left side of the convolution of two normal distributions with similar variances. Improbable, but possible. Don't panic, guys.

In this context I'd like to talk about Game 1 of Spurs-Grizzlies, and what it bodes for the series.

There's an old, tested coaching technique with blowouts: Throw everything out. Forget whatever you wanted to learn; just throw every record of that game out. Why? Well, because the amount you'll gain by having your team see the systematic flaws that may have caused it and the amount your team will gain in motivation is dwarfed what your team will lose by by dwelling on the game. Suddenly Tony Parker isn't just a good match-up for Mike Conley; he's the guy that went past Conley and 4 other Grizzlies consistently, that whirling dervish who sliced up your defense and found open players virtually everywhere on the floor. Suddenly Boris Diaw isn't just a nebulous blob of passing and angles with lacking focus; now he's a force to be reckoned with and the big that arguably outplayed Z-Bo as a defender in the battle of the round and rooted.

There's another reason to throw the film out: It's mostly noise. Systematic errors suddenly look defining, and they're not in actuality. An error on over-helping and letting guys open on 3s might cost you 20 points in a game (more attempts and higher efficiency on those attempts quickly adds up). Now, 20 points is the difference between the Heat and Bobcats if it's every game. But it's not. I mean, obviously not. There's a reason the Grizzlies are in the Western Conference Finals, more than anything on the strength of their defense. It's because they don't do this every game. They might be fatigued, or banged up (they obviously play a very physical style, and are prone to heavy starters' minutes), or unmotivated. But everything about this game suggests to me that this is just the Spurs having a clearer game-plan and more energy, and using every drop of their advantage (as is their wont).

Coaches throw film out, or, better yet, throw it out and reduce the learning process to a simple maxim, a single thing to focus on as a limiting factor. It's pretty clear that Memphis Coach Lionel Hollins is going to stress not over-helping, and letting Marc Gasol and the bigs handle Tony Parker at the rim with a much more reasonable (that is, a not-collapsing) defense that does its work early and has faith in the work it does. Marc Gasol is a heck of a defender, and so are Mike Conley and Tony Allen. Add Tayshaun Prince in for good measure, and you have a heck of a defensive squad. But they basically spent their last 5 games watching Derek Fisher and Reggie Jackson and Kevin Martin have middling-at-best series. The Grizzlies came out of a series in which they needed to be mediocre to win, and needed to be effortful and thrive. I'm guessing that played a role.

What's more, I tend to think defensive adjustments tend to take a couple games to take root, and it's defensive adjustments (especially by Memphis) that will have the most leverage in this series. The Thunder famously put Thabo Sefolosha on Tony Parker last year, to great effect (though ultimately it was the Thunder's blitzing offense exposing the Spurs' middling defense that won the series). The Grizzlies shut Tony down a couple years ago, though it was a bit obscured by Tim Duncan's apparent (and shocking) physical decline in Games 3 and 4. I'm sure the Grizzlies, when they're putting in a real (and clearly-followed) gameplan for Tony Parker, will have a much more coherent and effective series. This is a Grizzlies team that has found an answer for Chris Paul and Kevin Durant. The Spurs are better than the Clippers or Thunder right now, but there are better and worse ways for the Spurs offense to beat you. And the Grizzlies, of all team, know this.

So throw it out. It's one bad game.

If it keeps up, we'll see the Spurs reach the first Finals in six years. And, if it doesn't... we're going to get a heck of a series. Given what we've seen from Memphis the last few years, I'm hoping for the former, and betting on the latter. Grind never stops.

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"They are in their peak in the flow."

-Legendary Hubie Brown on the Warriors, in a recent Spurs-Warriors broadcast

Early in Gothic Ginobili's run, Aaron and I had grand plans for a week of Tennis-related posts -- a Gothic Ginobili Tennis Week. It never materialized. Part of it was my sprawling impossible-to-edit 4000-word rants about Federer vs. Nadal that used sprawling 2000-word segues about the rivalry between Tim Duncan and Steve Nash. [Ed. Note: That was most of it, yes.] But part of Tennis Week's demise was attributed simply to the fact that the connection runs too deeply, is too multifaceted, and it led us to make over-eager connections between every aspect of tennis and every aspect of basketball. It kind of fell flat.

Every direction we tried to take a piece about tennis led to yet another direction about basketball, and vice versa, until the only way to get a proper reckoning for what we were writing is basically to write a book about tennis and another about basketball, and then to be reincarnated in 1989 (when I was born) or 1997 (when Aaron was probably born, because he is a freakishly young person, although he owns a house. He is 12. He is BJ Lawson.) So... we had some issues with the audience we wanted to reach, put it that way. Fun stuff, but hard to really get a hold of the whole picture and distill it down into something. But obviously there is tennis and there is basketball, and we enjoy both, and given that we are relentlessly, neurotically teasing out reasons for things, we found a lot of overlapping reasons for liking each sport. And so, every once in awhile, I'll get a hold of a connection between the sports that is accessible, simple, well-reasoned, and easy to tell someone over a glass of beers, or a bowl of milkshake. [Ed. Note: Did Alex Dewey just revolutionize milkshake science?]

And I do, and I write a blog about it. So here it is.

• • •

Ed. Note: The following section was written prior to game six.

As the Spurs and Warriors dually enter a closeout and an elimination game tonight, it wouldn't make me smart to note that Stephen Curry probably has to step up at this point, or that otherwise another Warriors player(s) have to disguise themselves as Stephen Curry. Right now the teams are pretty evenly matched, but the Spurs have a clear advantage - they're a deeper team and have more of a vocabulary with which to gameplan, and after one round of articulate gameplanning by Pop, the tide has turned towards the Spurs. This isn't to say Pop's outcoaching Mark Jackson. But with his resources, Pop has been able to construct a killer gameplan.

In its simplest form, that gameplan is thus: Make Stephen Curry and Klay Thompson run for their Earthly lives on both ends whenever they're on the court. Yes, yes, they're the Spurs, so they're doing it with "the system": loop plays to free up Tony Parker's jumper, Danny Green flaring out to the wing with elaborate, effective screeners to help him out, kick outs & backdoor cuts. Chip Engellend getting them to hit those wing and corner 3s, Tim Duncan working in the offseason to sprint with Danny Green in triple-digit weather (truth), Pop bein' a good dude and coach overall. Manu and Tony and Boris Diaw finding him consistently. Every writerly cliche about the Spurs except "boring". Yes, yes, it's all true.

But they're making him run. And it's working. The Spurs have done more or less what is at all possible for a team to do defensively against Curry (at least in games 3-5 [Ed. Note: And Game 6 too.]) while still respecting most of their other options. Steph Curry has a bum ankle and the Spurs want to run him out of the gym. Klay Thompson, too, to a lesser extent: The gameplan of forcing Curry into constant motion also works to keep Klay moving, and while he's quite a smart, decent defender for his age, he's not laterally quick enough to be the guy you want slowing down Tony or Kawhi Leonard in the open court. And Klay and Curry have both had periodic foul troubles in their careers, and the Warriors can't afford to work around that impediment.

Pop's found a solid game-plan, and it works for two reasons: a) Damned if they do, and b) damned if they don't. [Ed. Note: Yes indeed, that does encapsulate all present options. Good work Dewey.] If the Warriors decide to completely buy out of this strategy, switch on screens to save energy... the Spurs will exploit them with the matchups (just as effectively as Harrison Barnes has exploited Tony Parker in the strategy of playing Green and Leonard on Curry). If the Warriors simply don't run as fast to conserve energy? Well, that's all the Spurs need to get a completely dominant run in, even if the Warriors are hitting good shots. What's more, the Warriors may conserve energy by not running as hard, but the Spurs really work on offense, and the Spurs conserve energy themselves through the Warriors' decision to conserve. And... if the Warriors do decide to have Stephen Curry chase Tony Parker or Danny Green through every screen? He just gets tuckered out, poor guy. His ankle, already a problem, returns in force, a terror for Warriors fans to behold on every possession. Heck, I just like the game of basketball. Heck: I'm rooting for the other team, and I still worry about the ankle going out because he steps on Danny Green's foot after the whistle or something.

But, through all my terror about Curry's ankle, through all the paranoia and outbursts of fandom (did you know that seven times out of ten we listen to our music at night guys [Ed. Note: STOP. CEASE. DESIST.]), through all the admiration at Pop's gameplan and at Curry's shooting and at Duncan and Bogut's defense, and Kawhi and Duncan's two-man game... through it all, I still end up coming back to tennis.

• • •

This is because tennis is one of the most strangely unnatural sports for a human being to play, at least in terms of the motion required. Hands up if you cringed at the weird, long-striding motions of Rose and Westbrook off the dribble even before they got injured. Tennis is like that first-step-then-finish sequence repeated hundreds of times per match (potentially upwards of a thousand, depending on the match-up) and dozens of times per game. And here's the thing: Everyone in tennis understands all of this. Everyone in tennis understands that sometimes your ankle swells up or your toe looks like it's dead tissue or you get a pimple right on the center of your back that never stops itching. Okay, scratch that last one. Anyway, everyone in tennis understands what a grind it is. You'll get concussions in football, you'll get tendinitis in basketball. And you'll get giant-ankle syndrome in tennis. It's not "if", it's "when". And also it's "disgusting".

In this series, going into Game 4, Steph Curry had run about 9.74 miles. It's not at all implausible to suggest he's picked up that rate in the ensuing two games. Call it 18 miles (after Game 5) that the Spurs have forced him to run thus far. You see comparable stats with tennis (which, like basketball, is also played on a ridiculous, grind-it-out schedule that can see a player play two key, high-career-leverage-point matches in about 40 hours, each match lasting about 4-5 hours apiece). Players running several miles per game, and in a period of hours. Players running not in the sense of "Gee, thank you for running that fun little 5k for our charity on soft quarter-mile tracks" types of runs but "every step is the apocalypse and I'm lucky if I get to run back on defense and get five seconds to stop and think". Michael Chang in the 1989 French Open famously shot a bunch of moonshot lobs to give himself rest while he was playing, because he was cramping up. Tennis doesn't stop for you, put it that way. And neither does basketball. Especially if the other team knows you need to rest.

Given that everyone knows about the foundational question of needing rest (and everyone knows that everyone knows that, etc.), energy forms a crucial part of strategy -- both in basketball and in tennis. In tennis you run players ragged in almost the same way the Spurs are running the Warriors' guards. The Warriors "are in their peak in the flow" as Hubie put it (God, what a sentence, right?) and sometimes I think that's because the other team isn't forcing Curry into a nightmare situation of having to run four awkward, bumpy, knee-knocked miles just to keep his team in the game. Defense is easier when you're jogging back in a straight line, and offense is easier (and for Curry, more efficient) when you don't have to run off a defender to get an open look. Rafa Nadal, Andy Murray, and Novak Djokovic are three of the world's top four players, and each of them, for all their grace and proprioception? They are not in their peak in the flow. They are more like the Spurs or Grizzlies: Yes, they make wonderful returns, but their essence is to make reasonably brilliant plays and to wear the other player out with matchless energy. They send their player left and right and left and right, a bit faster now, come on now, like a gym class from hell. [Ed. Note: It's part of why my ill-fated love for John Isner is doomed from the start -- the man is simply never going to be able to grind it out against those elite players enough times in a single season to win a slam. Still love you, John Isner.]

Roger Federer is the only glaring exception, because he doesn't strictly have the grindhouse in his wheelhouse. He doesn't grind out 5-hour victories against the other three; he's too old for that. No; he conserves his energy with his literally-the-greatest-of-all-time vision and athletic grace, and when he picks his spots, he runs like a deer and takes what he needs. And as his energy wanes, Federer will probably be able to carry it out still longer. But if his opponents can force him to run, he's vulnerable. He still routinely utterly dominates sets against the best in the world, and even pulled out an unthinkable 4-set domination against Andy Murray. But if you're one of the other top players and you test his energy enough, and he's had to play two five-setters in 48 hours, he'll even start to make mistakes. Well, okay, it will still be the second-best tennis ever played, but still, it's a huge and glaring dropoff. There's just about nothing stranger than Fed making an unforced error that isn't a next-level athletic vision unfulfilled or a set he's resting on; no, an unforced error that's just a sheer, dumb mistake that any of us could have made. And suddenly Nadal or Murray or Djokovic looks like the smart one, because now he's right at Federer's level skill-wise - or even above Federer - and Roger's foe also has all the energy on his side. Even Federer plays with energy, in the sense that if he can get his opponent running without doing much running himself, that's a good sign that he's winning. And some of the most shocking plays are when a player like Andy Murray (noted for his conditioning and endurance) takes the bait, goes left and right for two straight minutes on a volley while his opponent just stands there... and then he wins the rally, and his opponent looks almost more exhausted, realizing that he's going to have to run all day just to have a hope of penetrating that first line.

I can't bring this to a literary close. All I can say is that's what it evokes in me when I see what the Spurs are doing to Stephen Curry, trying to frustrate him and run him out of the gym. And as Game 6 (and the possibility of elimination) approaches, this young, next-level athlete has more than a little bit of a spark in him, a coach that recognizes and cultivates him, and a team around him that can support this... And if he ever wants to take the bait, run out of the gym, and still succeed, well, that's somewhere that next-level athletes can get to, and as far as next-level athletes go, it's hard to bet against Stephen Curry. It might not happen this year, though.

• • •

Yeah, the Warriors lost, but in this series and the previous one they've established themselves in the "if healthy, then contenders" tail of the NBA. And Steph Curry has established himself as a Nash-like player with his both his shooting and his passing. Aaron and I were talking about it, and you know, Steph and Klay's limiting factor right now as players is their mediocre rates of conversion at the rim. If they can do that; that is to say, if they can learn to score and draw a bit more contact in the lane with their existing skillsets? They will be excellent and the Warriors' team will follow. Harrison Barnes, gruesome fall aside, has looked great in this series. Ezeli's a nice piece. The health issues of Bogut and Lee should make for an interesting story to watch for. Overall, with such a brilliant coaching job by Mark Jackson (some quibbles aside), it has to be disappointing for such a talented, coherent team to go down like this. But it's worth noting that a few factors went the Spurs way in the way of injury and foul trouble that allowed the Spurs to make these gameplans work. The Warriors can't be disheartened by such an impressive season, and as time goes on they will only inch closer to their terrifying primes. It's never happy to lose a series, but the Warriors have done well for themselves and hopefully gained the respect of a large contingent of fans over the course of their special season. They'll be back.

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"In the economic sphere an act, a habit, an institution, a law produces not only one effect, but a series of effects. Of these effects, the first alone is immediate; it appears simultaneously with its cause; it is seen. The other effects emerge only subsequently; they are not seen; we are fortunate if we foresee them ... There is only one difference between a bad economist and a good one: the bad economist confines himself to the visible effect; the good economist takes into account both the effect that can be seen and those effects that must be _foreseen. ... Y_et this difference is tremendous; for it almost always happens that when the immediate consequence is favorable, the later consequences are disastrous, and vice versa. Whence it follows that the bad economist pursues a small present good that will be followed by a great evil to come, while the good economist pursues a great good to come, at the risk of a small present evil." -Bastiat

Seen: the audacious disappointment of the Lakers. Seen: the apparent 70-win season snapped ingraciously from Kobe's hands by the Fates and the limits of the human body. Seen: A cascade of endless injury. Seen: a story of merely-average-and-decent looking suddenly ruinous when sneaking a peek at its price and pathetic prospects. Seen: An almost-literal dismantling by the Spurs. Seen: A desperate reliance on Earl Clark and Metta World Peace and Steve Blake. Seen: Dwight at 50% just long enough for the season to be anything but uphill from the outset. Seen: Some of the worst defense ever, by some of the best players in league history. Seen: Spectacle, frustration, outrage, schadenfreude, spin cycle, eerie commiseration from the unlikeliest fanbase. And, seen: A titan's fall.

Unseen: Hints of a revolutionary offense for two or three possessions at a time, in the right phases of the moon. 1-4-5, 2-4-5, 1-5, 2-5, whispered like cheat codes. Unseen: An owner dying and his team, at its nadir, recovering and making a season respectable through it all. Unseen: a leader of offenses elevating himself to a leader of men, getting himself to the place he needed to be in a seeming blink of an eye, both humbly passive and fiercely aggressive, in the same possession, in the same sentence, Kobe expanding his essential game as surely and as potently as LeBron and Durant, until what is left is something new. Unseen: The epidurals, the labrum torn and the indefinite absences that lasted minutes, the back surgery. Plantar fasciitis. A fanbase learning and accepting the hard truths of anatomy in chagrined mornings after devastating losses. Unseen: the regret after the schadenfreude, where suddenly it stopped being funny that Andrew Goudelock had to start, that Kobe just had to play that 45th minute against Golden State, all of us knowing he'd be alright.

Seen: An organization that doesn't know how to hire a coach. Seen: A coach that doesn't know how to communicate to players. Seen: Kobe leading through conflict (with a strange degree of success), Pau and Nash relegated to the margins, Dwight a young man pushed to the front, whose voice has relevance only because his body and mind have talent. Seen: Players that couldn't adapt, players that could, players that didn't have any choices. Seen: Earl Clark. Remembered: An almost physical anger when Clark started playing, having assumed he was injured, given that Antawn Jamison was getting 20 guaranteed minutes despite having with the transition and half-court defense of a toddler. Seen: A seemingly endless rotation of diminishing returns on number of roster spots. Seen: Role players that never embarrassed the Lakers to play, despite not really being able to play. Seen: Chris Duhon.

Unseen: The dismal bench of the post-Jackson years, having nearly the same problems. Unseen: Mike Brown being universally respected as a man, but in the end not quite commanding the full attention of players or the organization. Unseen: Phil Jackson barely able to walk, touted as a franchise savior for players that could barely lift their arms. Unseen: The subtle decay of age, before or after any trades. Unseen: Andrew Bynum, Unseen (and still an interesting idea): The Princeton offense. Mike Brown with a healthy team.

Unseen: The Lakers problems did not begin this year. Unseen: The Lakers have never made risk-free moves, but have always simply aggregated wise strategic decisions from a position of power as a wealthy, potent larger market. Unseen: Andrew Bynum, for months and longer at a time would sit in the several years before his trade to Philly. Unseen: Andrew Bynum being dominated by Dwight Howard as a prospect from floor to ceiling to upside to downside, even when the NBA collectively exempted him from the 3-second rule on both ends and called half the fouls against Dwight Howard. Unseen: The road not taken, for, as inevitable as it seems, the Lakers could have said "no" to Dwight Howard and Steve Nash last summer. They said yes, because the risks of their status quo were far worse than the risks of their new acquisitions. The Lakers made the right choice time after time, and only bad luck and calculated risk worked against them.

Unseen: Kobe's health problems aggregating every season, far beyond pain and fatigue. Unseen: That the perpetual battle of Kobe against injury was not merely a battle against pain but a battle against decay, against time, against his own apparent limitations as a leader. A losing battle, except on that last count.

Seen: That old cliche "heart of a champion" inasmuch as a seemingly sandbagging defense and an otherworldly collection of talent that dies in the first round can be said to have "heart". The Lakers fought. I saw them. They didn't play possessions; they played games. They were tired and they were banged-up and they were seriously injured. More bone against bone than a butcher shop. And they fought. This could have been a 30 win season that everyone decided to recuperate. But for pride, personal pride and the pride of a franchise, and an asymptotically fading hope that they always seem to stave off for another day, every day, the Lakers knew it was too important, and played. They showed professionalism and class and never acted like they were entitled to a win. They had a gameplan, and they executed it, but horror of horrors, irony of ironies, they did not have the personnel.

They were never out of any game nor could they ever seem to get out of the woods, in a game or in the season. They could have done some damage if more guys were healthier, earlier. Every game seemingly came down to a random like Gerald Henderson missing a tip-in or a tricky Philadelphia team finding a mysteriously truck-sized hole on the interior. I rooted for them to lose, up to the last night of the season, but I also wanted to see their opponents win, if that makes sense, and in the end I finally gave up on rooting for the mediocre and disappointing Jazz over the mediocre and fascinating Lakers. I graduated from hater to... well, still, screw the Lakers, but still... there are things that are seen and unseen about the Lakers that are important to the basketball culture, and this season was a unique look at some of the unseen things - the media cycle really causing the problems as much as it was expressing real problems. Unseen: How important the team is for the game when they're relevant and the chaos that ensued when they weren't. Unseen (and sickening): Every Laker's injuries being used to cast doubt on all his previous accomplishments. I didn't really understand the cable deals and the historical relationship that NBA fans have with the Lakers - the weird 30-faced die all of whose faces read "Beat LA" except one that keeps getting break after break and finally lost more than anyone could have known. I got to see who in the media was actually watching the games. Hint: You have an excuse not to watch the Spurs; you don't have an excuse for the Lakers. I got to see the strengths and weaknesses of every player.

The Lakers had the most interesting season of all the teams this season, and it was not because of hype. No, the Lakers, traditionally they of the limelight and the hype and the spin cycle, played a season that was almost scarily substantive, in which the seen could not hide from the unseen, and in which the unseen haunted every positive moment and tempered every negative moment. Championship runs are sometimes preordained as the world collapses around the team, leaving them only to hold serve and survive. Fun seasons for would-be contenders are derailed by a single injury or a single rotten break, and we laugh sadly about the injury or break and get back to talking about the team's wondrous passing or defense. And we remember these championship and also-ran seasons and talk about them with animation and pride as fans. The Lakers this year weren't a team to talk about with animation. Sure, you could talk about them with the grim certainty of time and the fascinating uncertainty of circumstance, but it's hard to get excited about that. But you could talk about them with pride, and, what's more, give them this: At all times ever-present for the Lakers were distant hope for a title and distant fear of a terrible injury. When the seen and unseen are standing as brothers in the same room, can any dream or catastrophic nightmare that we utter in confidence ever be so justified?

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EDITOR'S NOTE: The following is a fictional tale. It marks the return of "John", Alex Dewey's alternate reality San Antonio ballboy. This story is set after the recent Golden State win over San Antonio's backups.

I was wandering the halls aimlessly when Richard Jefferson stopped me in the halls to explain something. "John, here's a doozy."

"What is it, RJ? I'm busy," I said. I wasn't even being sincere, I was just being a jerk so he'd hurry up. RJ had a tendency to could go on interminably. Without my terse influence checking him at every turn, that is. "Hurry up, RJ!"

"Frig, okay, so one time they got together this panel of Hall of Famers and league observers to choose the 50 best players of all time."

I had heard of this. "Yep. 50 greatest players of the last 50 years? Yeah, I know all about that. James Worthy was there, but I think someone got snubbed, right? Something like that."

"No, not that one," Richard said, and I immediately grew skeptical. "No, that one was in... like, 1996. I'm talking about 2009, when I was with the Bucks."

"Oh. I don't remember that. So what?"

"I was ranked, like, #40, John."

"Of all time? What? You? Richard Jefferson? The man who would forget the ball if it weren't attached by years of tireless practice not to screw up on a basic level? The man with a tattoo of his initials in cartoonish block letters inside a circle? That absurdity of a man, that living anathema to greatness and grace? You? Richard Jefferson? The fortieth best of all time?" I thought of every insult I could that was technically literally accurate.

"Yeah, the very same Richard Jefferson as you see standing before you. I was ranked #40."

"But... how could that have happened? Was there an announcement?"

"Get this, there was a single press statement from the NBA on the Internet. I remember seeing it and getting a few supportive e-mails, like, within minutes."

"WHAT?" I was in utter disbelief. Richard Jefferson had never won a championship; instead his team tended towards likable underdogs that overachieved and never got remotely close to an upset when push came to shove in the trial against the true best team in the league. Tim Duncan, Shane Battier, Manu Ginobili, Chauncey Billups, and Dwyane Wade: These are among the so-called alpha dogs that have knocked off RJ from the playoffs, stymieing his championship ambitions. If you can even call RJ's drifting, always-waning existence any way ambitious. It's a possibility that Richard Jefferson was never even the 40th best player in a singleseason. He'd never earned -- and had scarcely deserved -- even a single All-Star berth.

He was just on a lot of good teams and had apparently made some serious league observers think he was the Nets' proverbial ace in the hole for several years. Sure, he'd had some impressive playoff performances, but I just laughed. I'd seen RJ bumble passes that a child could convert into an easy 2. An inspiring high-flying athlete in his peak (he'd once jumped a file cabinet in the Warriors' front office, just to show he could), Jefferson lacked the feel for the game at the highest levels that tends to weed out such gimmicky high-flyers. But being both athletic enough and fastidious enough to not only keep his job but thrive, Jefferson had still commanded a lot of respect from the people outside the league. An ultimate ambassador, as he was.

"They'd actually singled me out because I was an active player. I still remember it... 'Richard Jefferson of the Milwaukee Bucks, #24, from Arizona.' No. 40 all-time! The press release said they'd be honored with a plaque commemorating their accomplishments. I for one was shocked." Such did Richard reveal his best quality -- his earnest honesty and relentless reasonableness about the whole thing, seasoned with a nice dose of almost pathological humility. He seemed to re-enact his shock with his eyebrows as he told me all of this. "I absolutely did not know what to make of this information."

"I'm seriously doubting this ever happened. Did you dream it? Did you take too much cough medicine the night before, RJ?" I said mockingly. There was a slight hitch in my voice, not unlike Jefferson's characteristic hitch in his shot that had completely destroyed his game in his old age.

"No, I swear this really happened," Richard said sincerely.

"I believe you BELIEVE this really happened, Richard. I just don't know what to make of the possibility that it actually happened. It seems rather absurd on its face."

"Aww, here it goes. OK. Look, the press release calling me #40 was taken down after just twenty minutes up, probably for someone to realize they'd miscalculated a tally or something, I figured," and then he said with confusion, "But they never brought it up again, like it never even happened, that's what was so weird."

"Yeah, that must be a weird thing for you to think happened, but that probably didn't." I said, fully hamming up my doubtful perspective.

"Shut up, John," and I was taken aback by this, "Seriously, shut up, I'm telling a story."

I thought about throwing in a u mad bro, so characteristic of my youthful scorn for any sort of sincere passion, but thought better of it. Richard seemed almost distraught about this omission. "I just wanted to know who was actually there, even if it wasn't me. I'm fine not winning them all, but I feel like I had something taken from me, you know, and I wanted so badly to get it back. I don't have the nice e-mails they sent and I don't have a record of the list, and the NBA never officially acknowledged it. John," he said, "They washed their hands of the one truly supportive gesture of the historical legacy of Richard Jefferson, however absurd you may think him. They washed their hands utterly."

"Damn. Yeah, okay, I can see that," I said with not a little diplomacy in my tone, trying to imagine how Tim Duncan would comfort a teammate that had just missed a game-winner. "So, did you ever find out what happened?"

"Yes, just last week I was visiting the Walton home in San Diego. You must know Luke Walton, we went to Arizona together, and Bill Walton, the legendary center."

"Yeah, I mean, we just played the Cavs a few weeks ago, he was there. And I've seen Bill courtside every once in awhile. He can barely walk."

"That's right, he can barely walk," and Richard was suppressing a smile to get to talk about Bill Walton. "But he loves the game of basketball, John. And he loves his children, and I've always been able to go and talk to him when I've needed to. Yeah, he can barely walk. But he's a very interesting person, to say the least. If you asked him the greatest player of all time on any given day he'd tell you someone different. Some days it would be like Cedric Ceballos, other days it would be Manu Ginobili. Not even kidding. And... for one blessed day, Bill Walton woke up... apparently after I'd made a visit to his family, and he wrote down "Richard Jefferson" and "Luke Walton" as his favorite players of all time. Bill was also one of the people involved in the tallying of the ballots (for reasons passing understanding), and what he told me is that no one had chosen Luke Walton on their lists, but that a couple college observers had remembered my run with Arizona and given me a 50 spot or something. And the way the points were tallied, that was just enough for me to slip into 40th place. _ He told me this all while sipping a gigantic iced tea and lemonade, John._"

"Do you believe him?__" I asked.

"Truthfully," Richard said, "I feel like he could have been telling the complete truth, an utter fabrication, or something far in between. It's not a stretch to give me #50."

"Yes it is," I interjected quickly.

"Damn. Frig. Okay, I mean, yes, it is. But it's not a stretch that someone that watched me in college and sees me in the playoffs my first 5 years and the Olympic team and overrates me in the pros and puts me #50, no?"

"Okay, fine, no, that's not a stretch."

"But yeah, I figure a few guys legitimately give me #50, even #45, and, well, Bill Walton and a couple of his buddies in the Hall get together and say 'Hey, let's put RJ in this thing, he's a nice young man! George Mikan won't mind. Bernard King won't mind.' And they put me at 20 or something, and suddenly they're dealing with a few players like me and a few others that are getting these nostalgic votes that aren't really fair, and so they count up the ballots and decide that they really don't want to honor all the players that got voted in, but they don't want to fudge the vote by getting a legit candidate out of there. So they figure, hey, most of the players that deserve it have already been honored, and the rest probably don't deserve it that much."

"Ah. So they considered scrapping it entirely."

"Yeah, they did. They went ahead with the press release, otherwise I wouldn't have any clue that this had happened, but they went forward with that doubt hanging over it, is what it sounds like from Bill. Again, I'm not sure how far to trust his tale, he once told me eggs were filled with rainbows if you open them at the perfect full moon and put them in front of a telescope and you could eat the rainbow and it would taste like Skittles."

"What in God's name?"

"But I mean, his story about this vote seems pretty legit, no? Sounds like a lot of marketing campaigns that never took."

"Yeah, I guess, RJ."

"My understanding is that they scrapped it as soon as they got the first returns from Stern saying that it was a travesty that I was placed at #40 and that 'he didn't care how much publicity it would cause, it's an embarrassment to lists. Take it down, never mention it again.'"

"And they did."

"I still hold out hope that when Stern is gone they'll put it out there."

"But probably not."

"They probably never will, John, but at least it's a mystery resolved. I can rest easy."

Richard Jefferson, in addition to having an absurd bald head and a bad record in the clutch, apparently had the gift of resting easy. Because I found that I couldn't sleep for the nights following RJ's revalation, furtively tossing and turning in a cold sweat. I thought of all the shams of history that had ever been raised even a shade above mediocrity by a whimsical eccentric peddling nepotism in all his advocacy that the figure in question had happened to visit the day before, or something similarly arbitrary.

I shuddered at these shams that in a hundred years children would be taught to idolize or even emulate in habit, thought, and pattern... for I myself was once a child, brought up in this way! And worst, I thought of the pain - if the soul be immortal - to be one of those shams watching from the afterlife, to know that in a hundred years your poverty of ambition would be falsely rewarded. I shiver.

In the week since that day, I have fretted and bungled my deadlines and obligations in a sort of tragic irony that the Greeks would have relished, thinking of myself remembered falsely as the 40th greatest mop virtuoso of all time. I mop now with a hitch, perhaps for evermore.

Richard smiles as he passes.

Continue reading

The following story is entirely fictional. Any resemblance to persons or situations real or fake is entirely coincidental, and entirely awesome.

Fumbling an ice tray to the ground in the Warriors' break room, the thought struck me: Richard Jefferson must have been frustrated. As Richard is most interesting when frustrated, and as I have an uncanny gift for frustrating him, I smelled opportunity. I unexpectedly tapped Richard on the shoulder with my ice-cold hands and asked (in a deliberately annoying, lilting inflection) "How are you today, R-Jay?"

Though startled, Richard's response immediately convinced me that the end of days was at hand. The first thing I noticed was that Richard's eyes had a cartoonish glint to them, and even his teeth and nails seemed whiter. His skin was childish and immaculate as always, punctuated only by the occasional bump on the noggin received in the course of things. But today there were not even bumps, there were not even doubts: Richard exuded an uncharacteristic confidence as he turned to face me, wiped the proverbial dirt off his shoulder, and drowned out all the haters of the world. To my shock, there was even enthusiasm in his voice as he began one of his stream-of-entirely-reasonable-consciousness rants. "I'm actually doing just fine, John. How are you doing? How are your studies. You are an adolescent, and you know, that means that you must study in school much of the day. I hope you are learning things of import. I was a youngster, too, back in the Reagan Administration..." Jefferson trailed off amicably and smiled with the glee of precisely-aimed self-deprecation that nevertheless left him potent and confident.

I felt like the Grinch when Whoville didn't get all pissed off after someone stole their bikes.

"Why are you okay, RJ? You messed up with the ice tray and then I startled you with my hand. That's not right, RJ."

Richard kept at it. "Haha, whoa, John. You sound mad! Just a little bit, but I can taste it. 'U mad, bro?' I think that, you know, that's what the kids are saying these days, heh."

"Frig." I said clumsily, before receding my eyes at the seemingly reversed roles. I was mad, I thought. I am a basketball journalist that oozes confidence (my holy mantra being "smooth, suave, and sophisticated"), and I have watched Richard with fastidious amusement for four years of his absurdly reasonable demeanor while he unfortunately attempts to play a sport. And now, for once, he is unequivocally happy, and all I can do is stumble over my words in bafflement. So I tried to get an explanation. "I mean, what happened, Richard, did you get an extension? Did Mark Jackson say you were starting? Or maybe not playing at all? I'm never sure what you actually want, heh. Did, like, you find out you're a prodigy at a sport that you're *not* declining at? Did you get three 50-50 balls in a row for the first time in your life? Are you in love?" I asked everything I could think of, each one strangely insulting in its own way.

Richard laughed at all of these suggestions. "No, no, no, and no. None of that happened. You know, I'm still a pretty bad basketball player, all considering," Richard shrugged, still with confidence, "and I'm too reasonable to try other sports that might find me injured, and hence nullify my contract. I mean, definitely I'm still on the downswing. I didn't win any 50-50 balls ("Not even one, Richard?" I thought better than to interject), and I'm not in love. I'm not starting but I will be playing, but not much. Just like before. But," and Richard smiled once again, "I did have quite the recent experience."

"What in God's name happened, Richard? What in God's green Earth happened to provoke this? You know as well as I do that you should not be so happy." and Richard averred this with a shrug.

"Do you really want to know?" Richard asked with an amused look of genuine curiosity. "I mean, I'm not even a front-page player anymore. I won't really get any hits for your blog."

"RJ, I know nothing about what this story is but I will publish it, live, in real time. Just tell me. Please," I begged pathetically, somewhat to my own surprise. Like a dog, I recalled from Kafka.

"Are you sure?" and now Richard Jefferson was mocking me and I wasn't sure how to respond, except to note from the tenor of his voice the only possible explanation.

"Richard Jefferson, did you win at something, finally?"

At this Richard smiled silently.

"You might say that, John," and he began to tell the story.

~ Six Weeks Earlier ~

"People in L.A. take the weather for granted, John. I grew up in Arizona, you know. And being from San Antonio is a little better but you might get periods where you need to have several gallons of water every day just to not die when you're in Arizona. Then I played in New Jersey all those years, and it's just as bad in its own way. When there aren't any hurricanes kicking down your door, that's only because it's winter, where every day is its little own adventure in bleak, premature darkness. And the smell, dear God. Milwaukee, San Antonio, Oakland... we don't take anything for granted in this life, except that life is awful half the time. At least per the weather, heh. But, you know, I bought a place in San Diego a few years ago, and they just don't get it. Those places are paradises when it comes to the weather, pretty much year-round. They get rain a few days in June and they call it "June Gloom" like God is, you know, frowning on them by giving them an ounce of precipitation. They're totally entitled. But I guess I would be the same way too if I'd lived there my whole life."

"I get it, Richard. Weather is pretty nice there." I said, trying to shoehorn Richard's interminable rambling into something with a little more pop.

"Okay, John," Richard paused his fugue to note my insistence. "But let me just say this: So it's February and I'm in L.A. on business. And it's one of those days where every place in the world, tropical islands and all, is just a sea of snow and darkness but for a satellite splotch over Southern California. It's one of those, you know, bright, perfect-weather days where "Today was a good day" is lilting out of every convertible, slowed somehow. And people seemed to really appreciate it. The cars, you know, seemed to move slower even, and there weren't any traffic jams. So I was walking along, just soaking up the sun on the red-orange Earth and pavement with the most wonderfully baked sidewalks, and I get to my meeting in the most handsome suit, briefcase and shades. No one took this day for granted who felt the sun. I'm six foot six and once I was seven. Sun gods were invented in antiquity to explain how perfect the day is."

"... Okay, Richard. Is that all you got to say about the weather?"

"Yeah, that's about all I got about the weather, man. I'm setting the stage. See, I got into the building I was going to and entered the boardroom. And, lengthwise across a cheap, tiny, you know, old, varnish-smelling boardroom table? There sat Clippers owner Donald Sterling, slightly sheathed by the shadow of a lampshade. The room was hot and small and he looked surly, talking to someone else on a phone from 1993."

"Wait, you were meeting with Sterling? Why?"

"Well, you'll probably figure it out when I tell you the other guy in the room. But whatever the case, Sterling's first words were 'Turn up the heat a few degrees, Richard, or I'll turn it up myself.'

"It was sweltering, John. That room was hot as a sauna and smelled like a greenhouse made of wood and just painted over and never ventilated. It was a boardroom and it was stifling. So I say that to Sterling, and he says, 'I don't like people to be happy during negotiation.' I was honestly really confused by this, and just took my seat. And so Sterling smiles, and says, 'Forget about it, Richard.' And then he picks up this remote, and turns the heat up himself."

"Oh, wow." I said, not really sure how to respond to that.

"Yeah, I know, right? But whatever the case, I sit down, and as soon as I do, Sterling hangs up the phone (not a word to the other person) and starts asking me all these questions. Personal, impersonal, insulting, it doesn't matter, just hundreds of questions. It's like you when you need a piece that afternoon, John, but without that basic respect and privacy you naturally give your fellow human beings."

I coughed nervously.

"Most importantly, though, Sterling was asking these questions for absolutely no reason. You interview people because you need a story. Sterling... the reason he was asking so many questions, I'm convinced, was to wear me down mentally and establish his power. It was an interrogation where the interrogator had no discernible utility for any of my information ."

"That's a bit of a stretch, Richard. It's Donald Sterling, not Darth Vader."

"Well, get this... after twenty minutes of nothing but him asking me questions, I asked him a question. I was nervous, so all I could think to ask him the capital of New York. Wanted to see if he knew it was Albany, you know? It doesn't matter what I asked because he flipped out and said, 'Richard, who do you think you are? How dare you ask questions of me.' After that he asked me no more questions, and we got on with the matter at hand, and he never referred back to any of the questions. Like it never even happened."

"Whoa."

"Yeah. I cussed a little in my head and opened my undersized briefcase, sweating in my suit."

"Richard Jefferson, always cussin'. When will he ever learn?" I taunted gently.

Richard suddenly grew animated. "John, you need to stop that. You need to stop disrespecting me. I mean it. I'm so sick of this." Richard actually dropped the ice tray again, not with clumsiness but with malice_._

"I was just joking..." What had come over him?

Nothing, it turned out. Richard's smile returned "Haha, sorry. You know, just thinking about that encounter makes me a bit upset. I still remember some of the viler questions he asked. He would press for answers like the Terminator. His evil spirit had exceptional tenacity."

"Man, maybe he is Darth Vader! Damn!"

"Anyway. I'm in this room, and we're ready to get down to business, you know, completely demoralized, when in front of me, at my place at the table drops a large packet of paper with a red stamp across it marked "VOID". Drops and slides in every direction, it hadn't been stapled. Every page is marked "VOID". A voice from behind says in a crisp, deep, indulgent voice, 'Your move, Donald.'"

"... What?"

"The other party to the meeting had arrived, John. He was decked out in pin stripes, seven feet tall. Completely ignored me, moving with power and elegance, like he didn't need to breathe. Indescribable. He kept walking around the room and dropping papers all across the room, each page, I could see, individually marked "VOID"."

"Who... who could that possibly be?"

"The other person in the room? Kevin Garnett."

"WHAT? How could this--? But--? There's, uh... No way, RJ!" I took a tumble in utter bafflement. I might have hurt myself but for grabbing and gaining purchase on the mop that I never keep more than arm's length away.

Richard chuckled, but acknowledged that it was pretty shocking. "I know, right? So you can imagine my confusion, even after everything I've seen in the league. KG was the other participant in the meeting. They didn't tell me about him. I was at least ready, somehow, for Sterling."

"Yeah."

"I mean, the placement of people in the room is straightforward and logical. I mean, there's Donald Sterling, who owns a decent contender looking for a step up, and Kevin Garnett, a superstar on a non-contender looking for another title. KG wants that ring, John, no matter how much he talks about loyalty, and Donald wants that ring, to vindicate his pesky, miserly existence."

"Right," I said, for what Richard spoke was the straightforward, reasonable truth.

"So let me just set the scene again for your consideration, Donald Sterling has turned the heat up unbearably and has just finished interrogating me. He has utter contempt for me, and probably everything that lives and thrives on this entire planet, except what is his. And then there's Kevin Garnett, with equal measure the scorn, and double the loyalty, and he's delivering "VOID"ed contracts like he is a newsboy from the Great Depression."

"I almost can't picture that."

"It was like a sensory overload, no kidding. They barely spoke, and because of that it was almost like being trapped in a circus, eyes glued open by curiosity and fear. At some point I reasoned to myself that I wasn't totally safe in this meeting, and that I had to count myself lucky if I escaped unscathed."

"Man."

"It was like watching a dinosaur-who-is-a-person fight a bird-who-is-a-person, but with icy glares and gestures alone." Even though KG was the only one up, they appeared to be circling one another. And, on the table, after awhile of this, KG swept all the papers off the table, smiled, and dropped a no-trade clause between them."

"The trump card. All the voided contracts were trades that KG had rejected and personally stamped 'VOID'. Right, Richard?"

"Absolutely right. Look, the Celtics and Clippers had been having talks since December and had pretty much run the gamut of possible trades. They both wanted to make a trade, but KG wasn't an idiot. He wasn't going to screw himself over just to make the trade balance work. Sacrifice, yes. But not debasement, not taking a trade on the chin like a punch. Not debasement which is more than sacrifice, and having been traded three times before, I totally get that. And Sterling was in, though, obviously, on the other side of, that same boat." Richard laughed at his own strange sentence, "It was a perfectly reasonable situation, is what I'm saying."

"I get that." I said, but then suddenly came to the forefront of my mind something I could not in a million years understand, "But why in God's name were you there, too, Richard?"

"That's an entirely reasonable question. In fact, the answer is riddled with bureaucracy at every level, so I'll spare you. Long story short, there's a player arbitration system for situations like this, and I was the only guy in the program's history that had ever opted in to volunteer," Richard said with annoyance, "So I basically have this extra no-pay job, where I go around arbitrating all these sorts of disputes, but I also don't have any power whatsoever and I only get three hours' notice."

"Wow, really?"

"Yeah, and, I mean, it's usually pretty easy to figure out. A guy is holding out for money, I tell him to restructure. A team is trying to avoid signing its second-round pick, you know, I make a quick Excel worksheet Stern and Silver gave me, and show the team the cost-benefit chart. That usually solves it. But sometimes you just have one of those ridiculously intractable situations. Not often, but it happens. You have to orchestrate some kind of compromise. And that's where the story really picks up, John."

TO BE CONTINUED...

Continue reading

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

• LAL vs GSW: Exceptional Follies, Exceptional Fields (by Alex Dewey)
• GENERAL: Our March Madness (by Adam Koscielak)

Read on after the jump.

• • •

LAL vs GSW: Exceptional Follies, Exceptional Fields
Alex Dewey

If you had to inject truth serum into every editor and reader I've ever had and asked them to honestly describe what it's like to edit or read my work, I bet I'd know what they'd say. (Well, okay, what they'd say after the long, probably unbridgeable part where you explain to them why you're injecting them with truth serum for such an incomprehensibly minor question.) They wouldn't hold back. Incomprehensible, mercurial, technically gifted, slipshod and inconsistent with time and structure, combative at times, original, petty, absurd, fixated, unfocused, enigmatic, self-deprecating, and "attentive-but-somehow-mercurial". [ED. NOTE: Yeah, pretty much.] I know this because in their most unvarnished moments, they compare me to Stephen Jackson or Boris Diaw, usually. That's about the long and short of it. I am so focused on getting something expressed and well-articulated out of my head that I miss whether that thing has any sort of relevance to others.

Fun stuff. Keeping that in mind, let me talk about what the Lakers and Warriors did for me earlier this week.

The Lakers strike me as sort of a medieval morality play, an archetypal comic villain that they've somehow inhabited to teach us the value of youth, of hard work, and of never resting on one's accomplishments. The Lakers are there to teach us that everything will eventually be lost, but all the faster and all the more quickly without the essential and fastidious approach to life that abides others and our endless obligations. When they miss another transition not because of slowness but because they've practiced being slow? When they look every night like the visitors to Denver or Utah on a back-to-back? When Dwight can't figure out how to calibrate his less-than-100% mode to the grind of the regular season? When Metta World Peace decides (humorously, he seems to actively decide, every time) to create his own offense because he suddenly finds himself with the rock, and because, as if oblivious to the massive amount of specialization and scouting that has been done to get him to this place that says "cannot create especially well", despite all the marginal advantages he lacks, and knows he lacks, and knows his opponents know he lacks, he still goes forth and tries to conquer the basket like he's a conquistador...

... Anyway. The moment any of that happens, and the game in the inevitable course of which all of that happens? That moment and that game is validating, it is joyful, and it seems somehow like a ridiculous-but-apt historical marker for a team we'll remember with some pity and laughter ten years down the line. "Were you there when the Lakers weren't even all that bad, just inexplicably and superlatively mediocre, unsustainable considering the quality of their talent but also their historical, partially-institutional ability to attract talent?" our children and young watchers will ask. I will nod, throwing back shots to try and get over the fact that I actually taught my children to speak like that. And, later still, we'll be able to say, "Yes. It was great. It was just the best. Watching Jrue Holiday put the exclamation point on them on Staples Sunday is, in retrospect, the high point of my life."

The Warriors were equally fun in an equally exceptional way. When those with the high-quality interactive visual data -- with the missile technology and all that -- when they get around to creating an immaculate schema for the sport, delineating when you must drive, when you must go for the 2-for-1, when and where and and how often per game you must high-five in order to maximize your teammates' interactivity... When they get this far, in less than 5 years? When Morey lays down these rules as the Second Naismith of prophecy and lore? Whenever that happens, Morey and his quasi-holy rule-makers will have to include some sort of exception for Klay Thompson and Stephen Curry at Oracle. Simply have to. The shot selection and the heat checks that inexplicably go in defy description. In the best games of their lives, when the shots are going in without reason, defensive/facilitator role players will shoot possessed of an uncanny and unbefitting confidence. They seem to shrug at the comic absurdity of their own rarefied spectacle. My favorite example of this is when legendary point guard and non-shooter Andre Miller said "screw it" and went for 3 in his only (or even close to) 50-point game at the age of 35. Of course the three went in, and shrugging, Miller must have known it.

But Klay Thompson and Stephen Curry have created a force field around themselves in which everyone on their team (and sometimes on their opponents!) can feel exactly that confident, all the time. Jarrett Jack, a talented guard, can truly feel like Chris Paul or Jamal Crawford every night. The green light is on always for all parties at the intersection, and the traffic accidents have increased, but it hasn't been anarchy, but a new sort of efficiency and order that is built on the supernatural shot release of Stephen Curry and the interesting talents of Klay Thompson. Call it the Klay-Curry Buckets Exemption: Congratulations, your team barely has to worry about shot selection. As long as you're getting back on defense, may you find buckets from every location.

Of course, even despite all of this, Richard Jefferson still is not allowed to shoot. Not ever.

• • •

GENERAL: Our March MadnessAdam Koscielak

Stop me if you've heard this one before.

"March Madness is the most exciting playoff system in the world."

Chances are, you just stopped me. [ED. NOTE: Yep. Column over. Goodbye, folks.] There's a lot of truth to it. Every team gets a shot, every team can pull off a lucky game. That's why Gonzaga lost while Florida Gulf Coast is soaring. We love underdog stories, and March Madness gives every underdog a real shot -- and even if the real underdogs generally fall short of the championship, their wins always stay in the lore. Me? I dislike college basketball immensely due to 35 second shot clocks, the terrible officiating that makes me appreciate Joey Crawford, and the overall lack of quality talent aside from the few NBA worthy prospects. Despite this, I find myself entranced with brackets and the stories from the alley-ooping FGCU to Marshall Henderson giving us a showing of what I would call "Kobe Unchained." It's fascinating.

Yet, when I think of March, I don't think about college basketball. I don't think about the hope of warmer weather either. After all, this is when the NBA goes into the most intense part of the playoff race. The match-ups are solidified, and sometimes this is where champions are decided. Imagine that in 2011, the Memphis Grizzlies and New Orleans Hornets switch seeding. They were in a tie at the end of the season after all. Perhaps the Spurs never get upset, playing against a balky Chris Paul and a West-less Hornets. If they advance from the first round, would they have continued to the finals and upset Miami using the same playbook Dallas did? Or perhaps last season -- what if we swap the Nuggets and Clippers? After all, they were separated by a mere 2 games. How would the Grizzlies' season look if they weren't upset by the Clippers? You get the point. As much as the regular season seems stale at times -- particularly when we're down to the fourth round of games with a certain team -- I can't help but notice how often the importance of it is downplayed. Eventually, when the novelty of watching rebuilt teams, shocking collapses and stunning breakouts wears off, the people that don't watch the teams engaged in big battles for the lower seeds are left yearning for the excitement of the playoffs. Or so it has been in seasons past. Let me give you an example.

Last season, two teams were fighting for the final playoff spot with three games left in the regular season. On one side, the Utah Jazz, on the other, the Phoenix Suns, in what turned out to be Steve Nash's final season in Phoenix. The Suns needed to win two out of three games to advance. Or win the game against the Jazz, lose the other two and hope that the Jazz lose in Portland. Whatever the case, the Suns first faced the Denver Nuggets. They lost, also losing an important cog in Channing Frye to a dislocated shoulder. And then came the Jazz game, do or die. Marcin Gortat lost his scoring touch that night, from the perspective of time, it would seem that this game would define his Nash-less season as well. Steve Nash tried, but couldn't carry the team. The Utah Jazz clinched their playoff spot. Al Jefferson cried. And nobody really cared outside of the two teams involved and Spurs fans who at least didn't have to deal with the possibility of an insanely motivated Steve Nash.

A year later, the Jazz are once again in a battle for the eight seed with Steve Nash. This time, however, Steve Nash is in purple and gold, alongside Kobe Bryant, Dwight Howard and Pau Gasol. Nearly everyone said that this team would be a championship contender. (Except for Aaron who knew what's up.) [ED. NOTE: My sense of spatial logic is shot, so I don't usually know what's up at all. What IS up, really?] Nearly everyone loves or hates them, as well. Whatever happens in that battle, it's going to get very loud. The conventional drama between mid-market teams and their fans is now a full out war between Lakers fans and the rest of the world. It's drama amplified, and it's a great boost to a generally stale part of the NBA season for the casual crowd.

So, let me say this now; Brackets are fun. So are underdogs, and single-elimination tournaments. But the NCAA Tournament is like a good action flick. Compact, filled with fun and a few good quotes... but it's easily forgettable, unless you really like one of the actors in it. The NBA season, on the other hand? That's like a good book, with multiple characters and sub-plots. It has a few boring parts you have to sift through, sure, and it seems like it's longer than Lord of the Rings. But in the end, the gratification for the big-time fans is infinitely larger, as you come to appreciate how every character, every sub-plot in the story can potentially change it's ending. And never is that amazing complexity highlighted more than in the midst of the stretch run, the March Madness of every NBA fan.

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Aaron and I had the following conversation on November 2nd. The Lakers were 0-2 (going on 0-3) as we had the conversation. Mike Brown hadn't been fired. While Nash's leg was already broken, we didn't know that when we were talking (recall that didn't come out until a few days after the Portland game Nash was injured in). Whatever the case, so much was going on with the Lakers, and I didn't know what to make of the stories that kept pouring in. I especially didn't know what to make of this particular conversation. So I didn't seize the moment, as Aaron suggested.

To my astonishment, it's January 25th (nearly three months after this conversation!) and I've had to make only minor edits, all for grammar/spelling, semantic clarification, cussin', and brevity. I can't make you believe we really had this conversation. All I can do is present it for your amusement (and horror, considering how disturbingly prophetic some sections of the conversation are in retrospect). Also, I am revealing to the world that I thought the Clippers would win about 43 games and the Warriors would get 35 wins, so... yeah. Nostradamus I am not. But the rest? That's gravy! Get that oil, son! GET THAT OIL!

• • •

Alex: A thought for your consideration: The Lakers are not conceivably an unstoppable team, because even in their best iteration, they are eminently and fundamentally flawed. That said, they could be scary good. Still, I'd like to see that actually happen, instead of just taking for granted that they'll get there. I mean, plenty of teams could be scary good (remember the Knicks!)... but health can do a lot to that "could" in a hurry, as can redundancy and uncreative coaching.

Aaron: Fair. This is my thought: I think the Lakers could be pretty great, and I see why the consensus is there. But making the leap from "could" to "will" requires a lot of factors to turn up in their favor, and not all are guaranteed to do so. In my assessment:

• Dwight Howard has to get healthy. His defense looks atrocious and the back problem looms hard, because he can't seem to move laterally anymore or cover as wide an area of the court.

• Pau Gasol needs to be able to defend perimeter guys in at least a remotely passable manner, as they're going to face good perimeter big men in every round of the playoffs. Frankly, if Pau continues to allow 8-8 on midrange to any half-decent big man he guards, they're going to be awful.

• Steve Nash needs to be able to play ~30+ minutes per game in the playoffs. This is essential, and an underrated necessity for them. The backup options are so unbelievably bad that anything less leaves them with this gaping flesh wound for 10-15 minutes of the game, and leaves them too vulnerable offensively to respond. It's this huge internal hole the starters will always have to dig out of

• They need to be in good health and not at all exhausted come playoff time — these are old guys and this is not a given, and exhaustion will sap an old man game more than anything, heh.

• And finally, in a 7-game series? They need Steve Nash's performance variance either at a very low level around an average mean or at a very high level that errs on the high side.

Now, the thing with these? They all could happen, and even if only 2 or 3 happen, they'll still be a decent team. (Aaron Note: Yeah, nobody really could've seen NONE of them happening coming.) But the other thing is that it's an extraordinarily large assumption to just assume they'll all happen without a hitch. It's basically as big an inherent assumption as a Spurs fan saying: "Yeah, by the playoffs Tiago Splitter will be producing double-doubles nightly, we'll trade Blair/Neal for Anderson Varejao, Tim Duncan will only play 24 MPG of 25-15 ball in the regular season but 40 MPG in the playoffs, Tony Parker will average 30 points per game without breaking a sweat, and Kawhi Leonard will be the 2nd-best SF in the league by May." But one of the sets of team assumptions is today's "conventional wisdom", while the other is (rightfully) completely insane.

Alex: Yeah, I hear that. That kind of analysis actually favors the Spurs, Thunder, and Heat above anyone, playing the odds.

Sure, Dwyane Wade has to be healthy for the Heat to be favored. Sure, Manu has to be healthy for the Spurs to be favored in the West. Sure, Kevin Martin has to turn back the clock about two years and shoot the lights out. Additionally, the Spurs have to shore up their defense come playoff time, the Heat need to get LeBron more rest, and the Thunder need Ibaka to make a big leap. In some sense, though... that's it. If they all those two things and have reasonable health, they're dangerous title contenders. These two things are by no means given for any team, of course, and the Grizzlies actually come out really good according to this perspective of uncertainty, too.

But what I don't like about the Lakers' chances is that Pau has looked really old so far. Unlike Duncan, there's no big precedent for him having a comeback year. And there's no masterful interior defense to bank on. If Dwight was healthy, he'd provide that, but man... he has to be 100%. They're only going to go as far as Dwight can take them, I think. Sure, they could carry him being less-than-ideal for one series, but I doubt they're going to be able to compensate for an 80% Dwight all the way to Kobe's 6th. Not with their other burning questions. Either they cut back his minutes or his performance, and with their roster? That's a choice they can't afford to make.

Aaron: Yeah. They need Dwight at 100%. That's an absolute. Need Nash at a very high level, too.

__Alex: __Also, you have to wonder. Of course, we all know that Dwight has been an iron man before this back injury. That's a really good sign. On the other hand? He's never had to get healthy before. Take Paul Pierce. That guy's had injuries since he came into the league, it seems, and because of that he's learned to ride them out to an extent. Pierce has learned what it takes to get healthy off a big injury, or as healthy as you need to be to play. Because of his excellent health, Dwight (ironically) has never had to learn that compensation mechanism. Not to this extent. Instead, Dwight is going to try and learn on the fly. Also, I mean... let's be clear, Dwight's injury is sort of unprecedented as a situation. We don't know where it's going. Just as a sanity check, I realize this might be a rationalization on my part... I mean, okay, his pre-injury health has been surreal.

Aaron: Eldritch.

__Alex: Demonic, even. Still, how often do players just _get___ healthy with a bad back while playing 40+ minutes over the course of an NBA season? If you didn't answer 100%, well, that's exactly the problem. That's exactly my point.

Aaron: Yep.

Alex: Anyway. Who cares about the Lakers, man? RJ's line is 0-1-0-0-0 on one shot, no TOVs and a -11, in seven minutes. That's just blessed. Heh, I like the Warriors, but I can't shake the feeling that they're also not that... good... [Alex's note: Hey, I'm doing really well in predictions thus far in this conversation. I'm still human, though. All too human.]

Aaron: ... Alright. Let me respond fully to that last Laker point. The Pierce/Dwight comparison is very interesting, because it's true — this is the first major game-changing injury he's had to deal with, and he looks significantly compromised.

Alex: The comparison that comes to mind for me is David Robinson. Remember how Simmons described his first game? Even more of an athletic freak than Dwight, even more impressive physique. Of course... he was never totally the same after that injury.

Aaron: That is not a good comparison. Come on.

Alex: Admiral was around 30.

Aaron: Heh, but Dwight is 27. Like, hmm... That's not... okay, I admit, that's not THAT different, and I'm wondering how many minutes David Robinson had played at that point. Since you often get a better sense of true cardinal age from minutes played in the NBA rather than years spent on this earth. Actually, I'm looking it up now. I'm curious. Which year did he suffer it, again? I was five years old or something.

Alex: Well, it was late 1996, I believe. Like, very early in the season, so D-Rob would've been 31.

Aaron: __Okay, at the time Dwight suffered the injury, he had played __22,550 regular season minutes and 2,246 playoff minutes. At the time David Robinson suffered his injury... Okay... now... wow. Uh. You might flip out, so sit down if you are inexplicably standing up while reading this window

Alex: Okay. :swallows coffee:

Aaron: At the time David Robinson suffered his injury, he had played 21,353 minutes in the regular season and 2,084 playoff minutes.

Alex: :spits out coffee:

__Aaron: __So, even though it seems ridiculous on its face, that's a phenomenal comparison if you take the baseline that David Robinson wasn't ever quite the same dominant D-Rob after that. Also, funny story: After that injury, Robinson never played over 34 MPG in a full season again. He played:

• 34 mpg in 98
• 32 in 99
• 32 in 00
• 30 in 01
• 30 in 02
• 26 in 03

Alex: I think it's very clear that David Robinson was cloned and crossed with something unpleasant to make Dwight Howard. Huh... let me check his MPG before injury, hmm.

Aaron: Way ahead of you. It was 36+ every season.

Alex: Oh man, this is... this is eldritch.

Aaron: 37, 38, 38, 39, 41, 38, 37 for D-Rob.
And... 33, 37, 37, 38, 36, 35, 35, 37, 38 for D-Wight (upon our houses).

Alex: Wow, do you see what I'm seeing (I don't know if it right-adjusts your Trillian window, but it does for mine)? See, if you take that first two years off (Dwight's rookie/soph seasons, I guess) they line up just about exactly. Same number of seasons, almost the same number of minutes per season. Naturally.

00, 00, 37, 38, 38, 39, 41, 38, 37 for D-Rob.
33, 37, 37, 38, 36, 35, 35, 37, 38 for Dwight.

Aaron: Anyway, the most jarring thing about this is that prior to the back injury, David Robinson missed 12 games one year, 2 games another, and 1 another. Dwight missed 4 one year, 3 another. So, Dwight a bit less, but that's phenomenally comparable. They were both preternaturally healthy big guys who suffered big back injuries.

Alex: This is honestly... a huge story. Wow.

Aaron: D-Rob was older, but in terms of minutes played, Dwight actually was more experienced. So yeah, it's pretty insane. And yeah, given tht the conventional wisdom indicates that Dwight will be back to superhuman form in 3 or 4 weeks, this is a pretty big piece. Or, rather, a short piece with a big idea. If you promise to tamp down the crazy metaphors to try and make it more public-consumption level... You know what, Alex? "u can hav this 1, heh. This is 4 U, DewLord McSame. this is UR momnt. Ur time. Ur lyfe."

Alex: What?

Aaron: ... just... uh... make a piece out of the stat. Thanks.

• • •

Thus concludes the cautionary tale.

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According to A Season on the Brink by John Feinstein, legendary Indiana coach Bob Knight once had a sign in his locker room reading "Victory favors the team making the fewest mistakes." Knight loved it. I do too. If you think about it, in a situation of uncertainty, that's all we can do. Try to get better, and try to make fewer mistakes than your opponent, if there are opponents involved. More broadly, coaches seem to understand at all times something that fans, commentators, and bloggers all at times seem to forget: you're in a game to compete with the other team, not to look competent, even if that's only a few letters off. Whether or not that's always possible with political and organizational realities is another matter altogether, but that's the job description, right after acting as leader and manager and putting the best sporting product on the floor. You have to compete. And competing means looking carefully at the levers by which wins are raised, and attempting to aggregate as much leverage for your team in a given match-up as possible, and denying the same to your opponents. That's -- in a nutshell -- what it means to compete.

Let's talk about mistakes.

• • •

While there are players that are simply mistake-prone by nature or inexperience, there's generally some sort of consistent schema or a mechanism in the sport by which players and teams make their various types of mistakes. For instance, "you don't know how to pass out of a post-up when they bring a certain type of pressure" or "you don't have the ability to score or shoot so they can play off you and pack the paint every single time." These schemas and mechanisms form much of the strategic calculus underlying competition. Simply stating "that's a mistake" may be accurate but it says very little. How something is a mistake, is far more important. It's not that the mistake occurred, it's how a team tilts the odds in its favor, how teams force mistakes, and how teams get themselves out of the situations that demand mistakes. There are little mistakes that can be corrected on their own terms, but to go further, to fix the mistakes that plague your team day by day, you have to solve the mechanisms by which the mistakes come about: the misconceptions about spacing, the troubles your team has against a press, the trouble you as a player have against back-door cutters. And so on and so forth. And the trouble your team has with turnovers.

As the title of this piece probably suggested, this is really about turnovers. Turnovers aren't just mistakes, and even to the extent they are, they need to be examined as part of the strategic fabric; after all, the absence of turnovers happens only in a simplified strategic situation. A turnover is not some nebulous failure of execution that happens when a certain neuron doesn't fire in the non-idiot section of the brain. Oh, sure, a turnover can be like that, or a young player that just whiffs on a pass. But most of the time we have to delve deeper, just the same way we wouldn't automatically dismiss bad shooting on a given night as either bad luck or horrible players or horrible shooters. Good players miss good shots, and a turnover, like a missed shot, can simply be the negative residue of a good decision made by players in a position of uncertainty.

We're no fools, generally speaking, in basketball. We get that there are "good and bad shots" that happen to miss because of random chance, even if the NBA is a "make-or-miss league". What's more... and this is key, there are shots that both the offensive and defensive team will live with in the competitive fabric, essentially saying "Good if it goes. Bad if it doesn't." or, more precisely, "Serge Ibaka taking that shot? Well, gee, we could both do better, but we could both do worse. At this point there's no point for the defense to contest it, and no point for the offense to go for a better shot. Serge Ibaka, this is your lucky day. Take that shot, Serge, so we can all stop standing around like idiots while essentially nothing unfolds but the slow march of seconds." (Much of the variance in a game comes from the outcomes of such shots that both teams decide to live with; in some sense this is the largest source of variance in the strategic calculus of a game, though I'm not sure yet how to phrase that constructively.)

Like good shots, we observers tend to be attuned to good plays and good decisions that simply don't work out, too: LeBron passing to an open Udonis Haslem instead of trying to drive on a lane-packing zone, for example. And turnovers can be part of those good decisions and good plays. This isn't universally the case, but I often see turnovers as just an unfortunate residue of a creative team and creative players that pass and create before they have perfect control of a situation (against defenses whose goal is to deny them this control). And if you accept all of this, then we as a group of observers need to have the discipline to live with those turnovers as fans if they're part of a decent plan, just like we live with missed open 3s by shooters from the wing and corner. I'm saying this because I'm a Spurs fan that watched San Antonio come up a bit short in Memphis last Friday night and dominate the Grizz in San Antonio Wednesday night.

In both games, turnovers were right at the center of things, present in one and absent in the other.

• • •

Fortunately for me, I actually wrote this piece about the Memphis game and turnovers last Friday, and had the opportunity to sort of soak up what I'd written and reconcile it with the rematch in San Antonio, and the ensuing adjustments. So let's start with Friday. The first item of note is that the overtime Memphis win had a nice ebb and flow to it. Great execution from beginning to end. Ultimately, Friday saw a very close game that the Grizzlies won on some close calls, and a phenomenal performance by Darrell Arthur late. The important thing to remember is that the Spurs (and Duncan specifically) had a lot of harmful turnovers, and with Memphis' personnel, those turnovers led (rather predictably) to:

1. A lot of friggin' points. As well as...
2. An understandable "all these turnovers make me sick!" reaction by Spurs fans.

I wanted to address that. Speaking personally as a Spurs fan, it's viscerally infuriating to see Tim Duncan lose the ball again and again against the Grizzlies, looking old and tired and mistake-prone. But the fact remains that on Friday, Duncan wasn't just making idiotic plays: Memphis was swarming him with their lengthy, athletic wings and guards. Since 2011, this has been one of the themes: Memphis has ably recognized Duncan's individual offensive skill, including his ability to make and receive passes, and to score good baskets from the mid-range despite advancing age. And Memphis, recognizing all of this, decided to cut that lever for their destruction off. If anyone gets the Spurs and Duncan and Popovich, it's the two teams that have co-opted them the most: the Grizzlies and Thunder (not coincidentally their two most recent playoff defeats).

The Grizzlies simply have a better understanding of Duncan's "old man game" than any other team in the league, and they aren't going to give Tim Duncan simple single-coverage where one of the smartest players in the league is given unlimited time to think and the best off-ball offense in the league has unlimited time to operate. So they denied Duncan the entry passes and the dribble on Friday. They didn't let Duncan dribble ("not even once") and they helped on him. They threw looks at him and forced him to react, and sometimes made even reaction impossible, because as soon as he dribbled they were on him. Despite that the whole of a good defense had been calculated to stop him, Duncan simply was not making glaring mistakes and the Spurs team as a whole weren't poorly executing (with perhaps the single exception of Gary Neal). The Spurs had decided to give Duncan the ball at the high post and the Grizzlies had decided to counter by helping off shooters.

This strategic equilibrium, perhaps not ideal for the Spurs (but plausible as an ideal) happened to lead to Spurs turnovers by the bunches. These teams have been stuck in this game since 2011 (and teams in general have been doing this to Duncan since he went to Wake). And ultimately, it wasn't a horrible strategy for either team. The Spurs still managed to score, and Duncan's interior passing (as well as Splitter/Diaw's) anchored the Spurs to a offensive game against a solid defensive team. Also, yes, there were turnovers. Occasional lapses in execution behind the turnovers explain a few of them, but overall the game was an example of excellent execution. Smart coaching, tenacious players on both teams that knew their roles, and the kind of control you get with good teams that don't leave their feet without purpose. That's where I'm coming from. But a lot of the reactions understandably fixated on turnovers as a great plague facing the Spurs. My response is: Okay, but do these turnover woes really justify radical changes? Are turnovers really hugely avoidable against Memphis? If so, does the solution have anything to do with the buzzword "execution"? I doubt it.

• • •

This is a line of questioning we now have a solid answer to. See, everything up to now I wrote on Friday, more or less, including that line of questioning. What was interesting to me about Wednesday's San Antonio blowout is that with Manu out and Parker not having an exceptional game, the key adjustment that the Spurs made offensively was (indeed) simply to limit the turnovers. And let's be clear here. Above I wasn't saying turnovers weren't bad or that they weren't the thing that cost the Spurs in that game. They were bad, and they did cost the Spurs, perhaps the entire game. I was saying that, even if that's true, Tim Duncan is a generational talent and, in a crucial way, still an efficient offensive player, even if his skill is now less of the "get buckets" variety, and more of the "navigate the complex strategic sub-games of an offense to reach win conditions effectively" type.

So, on Friday, it wasn't a horrible strategy by the Spurs to give Tim Duncan the ball on the low block or the elbow to initiate offense against the Grizzlies, a team that can defend all guards effectively and run out in transition off turnovers. The low block, after all, is close to the rim and ideal for hitting cutters and the corner three. And the elbow matches Duncan's midrange game perfectly, and he can also hit cutters and three point shooters from a central location. Guards like Chris Paul and Steve Nash relish the center of the paint at the free throw line on dribble-drives, but for a stationary big like Duncan, the edge of the paint is where he loves to operate. But, as Wednesday proved, the Spurs could certainly do better against a team like Memphis with their respective personnel. Their answer was to deliberately bring Duncan slightly back out of the offense. When he got the ball, Duncan seemed to operate from the space between the top of the key and the wing. Call it the elbow, but maybe take a few steps back. Which is to say that Tim Duncan was operating 20-22 feet from the basket. So not ideal by any stretch of the imagination. But by doing so, the Spurs' calculated adjustment thereby altered the geometry of the situation, in order to deny Memphis the chance to double and trap Duncan.

The adjustment worked; the Spurs ended up with just 13 turnovers, and Memphis apparently got zero fast break points the entire game, one of the many things that left their offense in shambles in the 2nd half. No easy buckets whatsoever. Why did it work? First of all, Memphis couldn't sensibly commit a trapping Tony Allen or Mike Conley to take Duncan off his dribble. In fact, on a semi-related note, when Tony Allen tried to over-help off a shooter at one point, Duncan punished Allen severely with a sharp pass to the open man. Duncan isn't a serious dribble-drive threat from 22 feet, but that simply meant Duncan had an unmolested look at the basket. Second, placing Duncan at 22 feet gave Memphis a much trickier decision even for the single defender (Marc Gasol): while Duncan is only an above-average mid-range shooter this season (Tim shoots about 4 per game from 16-23 hitting 43.5% according to Basketball-Reference), he flirts with the elite in that category regularly enough to make a consistently open shot a dangerous concession. What's more, the Spurs offense is predicated to an extent on avoiding mistakes. So many of their easy looks come from good teams turning their heads for a second while Danny Green or Kawhi Leonard cuts to the rim. Marc Gasol is an excellent rim protector, but he certainly isn't if he's 20 feet from the basket guarding Tim Duncan at the elbow. And so Marc stayed back.

On a related note: the Spurs offense is great partially because even if you deny cutters by staying home in the paint, their open shooters kill you. Memphis being unable to trap Tim Duncan without overhelping off open shooters, then, turns out to be quite a huge deal in the structure of the game. And on Wednesday they couldn't trap or steal from Duncan, and for the Grizzlies' sake, their offense was stuck in half-court mode the whole game, which is where their poor spacing bit them in the 2nd half. The Spurs didn't significantly cut down on turnovers from Friday to Wednesday (18 to 13), but they did cut down on the types of turnovers that the Grizzlies got low-risk, high-reward situations from. And I suppose that's part of what I'm getting at: If your team is coughing up the ball, it's worth it to see if they're genuinely coughing up spots of blood or if they're just getting a good, high-percentage idea out of their system that didn't turn out so well.

That metaphor went somewhere, didn't it?

• • •

I'm a Spurs fan, obviously. Less obviously, the 2011 series between these two teams marked a change in the way I viewed basketball. The two teams played in a way that you could really suss out with study and experience, in a series that genuinely came down to minor adjustments and how certain players were playing from game to game. Defensively, Duncan looked about 40 years old for stretches in that series, and likely had suffered an ankle injury earlier that season in silence. Manu Ginobili was at 85% (which is still really, really good, it should be noted) and had broken his arm just a week before. And Memphis was able to obliterate Tony Parker. Still, it was a 6-game, well-contested series, and the Spurs and Grizzlies traded often brilliantly-executed, gritty, tough basketball. Although Zach Randolph had the series of his life, anyone that watched that series had to gain a lot of respect for that whole Grizzlies team as competitors, and if nothing else, for the Spurs as competitors.

The Gary Neal shot (and the preceding run of buckets the Spurs got in the final minute) remains one of my favorite basketball memories of all time, and in a fit of curiosity, I vowed to document every possession of the series on my old blog. I didn't complete that particular project. But I did get an entire six minute stretch done and the insights gleaned to this day help me think through this match-up. Moreover, I gained a strong appreciation for two of the most iconic teams in the league today. Sometimes I look at other teams in the league and just notice something missing. Thibodeau's teams that can't get buckets for stretches, Indiana's own inability to score a bucket, the depressingly baroque Mavericks, the Morey Rockets in the pre-Harden era, the hyper-spaced Woodson Knicks, the post-Ubuntu Celtics, the pre-smallball Heat, and so on. And it just seems kind of shady, like they're trying to manufacture wins with almost cynical efficiency. There's a maddening incoherency to teams that can't score for stretches and a maddening blase randomness to teams that don't defend and don't move off the ball on offense.

As for these two teams? Memphis and San Antonio -- while both having diagnosable issues -- aren't holding anything in reserve, and they aren't being anything but on the level with who they are and what they bring to the table. The Grizzlies are missing good shooters, and the Spurs are missing perimeter defense and a fourth big. They're tired, gritty, methodical teams that get up for the games when they need to. They're smart teams with an ethos and usually bring their best to the playoffs, and sometimes, a six-minute stretch can give you a pretty darn good idea of where the two teams are respectively, a stretch that can make you forget all about sample size and withholding judgments. Look, the Grizzlies are still a bad match for the Spurs. In some sense nothing has changed. But something about the essence of the sport, something more eternal than other games, can be found in the simple matchup of 10 players that know where they are and what they're doing. It's in that spirit that I wrote a piece about the night the Spurs -- somewhat unexpectedly -- made the fewest mistakes. Thanks for reading.

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