"I never forget a face, but in your case, I'll make an exception."

Let's try something. Let's try forgetting everything we ever knew about basketball. Let's... look, you saw The Matrix, right? But "the Matrix" is replaced with "your present conception of basketball". Free your mind. Ain't no such things as halfway crooks. Go all the way. Forget everything. Okay, take a deep breath. If you've done it right, it's all gone. Everything's forgotten about the game. "Basketball" now looks like a curious misspelling of "baseball".

That's how fully I've bought into this hypothetical.

The first thing we find in our quest to discover the meaning of "Basketball" is a bunch of random box scores sprawling across the Internet, and an unaccountable sense that these things form a self-consistent system to try to understand. We all individually forgot, but the Internet remembered! ... But not enough to tell us the rules of basketball. (This is already getting really convoluted. Bear with me, okay?) We're all alone in the universe, and nothing can change that. Except for this hypothetical we've decided to undertake, together. Come a little closer and we can discuss the implications of this hypothetical further. It's cold outside, after all. Put on the samovar, Natascha.

• • •

Anyway. We run some mad regressions on the box scores we find. Some happy ones too, but mostly the seething ones. We notice a lot of stuff going on, a lot of equations that are always satisfied. Ignorant of the structure of the game, we form a hypothesis from these box scores: basketball is a self-consistent system perfectly derivable from the box scores, and this self-consistent system explains why every team wins or loses and to what extent. Categorically. Whatever the case, Implication #1 of the "Perfectly Derivable From The Box Score Theory" is the idea that if you take away any one number from a box score, you ought to be able to derive it precisely from every other number on the sheet. If one player's point totals are missing from every game, filling those numbers in simply a matter of adding up the first three numbers in the three dashed columns (FG, 3P, FT). If a player's field goals are missing? We take their point total, and from their point total, we subtract their 3P and FT. These are equations that are exactly accounted for in nearly every box score. Exceptions in these equations (we correctly reason) are mistakes in recording, not of mistakes in the system itself. And we're cool with that. Every point is accounted for.

But points are pretty easy to account for given only the box score. What about the rest? Well, we form more sophisticated theories to explain the relation between the other 11 pieces of information associated with every player, and eventually, after a few years, we put it all together in something akin to Newton's Laws of Motion or the inverse square law of gravity. We design the Possession Model, humanity's best attempt to make sense of the alien laws of "basketball." Every shot is a resource expended, made or missed. Every turnover is a resource expended. Every rebound is a resource gained. Every steal is a resource gained. Every set of free throws not as a part of an and-one is a resource expended. In all cases, the resource is the same. It's called a possession, and -- other than blocks, assists, and fouls -- our box scores are almost completely devoted to encoding this type of resource: how many of these a team gets, how efficiently it uses them to score points, how it loses them.

Our only disagreements here aren't all that fundamental. Just as we basically agree that something thrown upwards must come downward in a parabolic arc, we agree on the Possession Model of Basketball. Our disagreements boil down to a few lingering questions. First, how much is each of the resources is "worth"? Second, how do we credit the resources to the individual players that accrue the statistics? After all, certain things like rebounds and missed shots seem pretty commonplace, while steals and turnovers are comparatively rare. Maybe we can figure something out with that, you know? Those probably don't work out to the same value in an actual game, right? Or maybe they do. I don't know. Neither do you. None of us has ever seen a game of basketball, because we're forgetting! That's the whole point of this exercise, darn it!

Different researchers come to different conclusions with each of these questions, but overall, the consensus we share is more powerful than the minor points of disagreement. We go to the moon with this model by the end of the first decade of forgetting basketball, to keep up with the Newton analogy. We explain so much of what goes on with this model that we feel that we understand the box scores on a deep level, even if only as a self-consistent system. So we're all pretty satisfied we would be all major league at basketball if we knew what the heck it was. But for all our hilariously misplaced hubris, we still have doubts. We're only human, after all. We still ask ourselves about the little questions, the unknowns about this system we've found. Why are the two final scores never exactly equal? Haven't these people heard of ties?

Also, there's the giant elephant in the room. What on Earth is an assist?

• • •

Assists appear to be the only facet of the box score that "doesn't fit the plan" of a perfectly self-consistent game. Blocks and fouls are important but somewhat rare, they mostly seem like a less meaningful version of a steal and a negative statistic associated with opponent free throws, respectively. Yet, all we have are correlations: sometimes assists seem more like the concentrated pulp of a dying tree's fruits than the sweet pulp of a flourishing system, not entirely negative but not a panacea either. So we're left with a question and it's not clear where to begin answering it. How do we explain assists?

Spoiler alert! We can't.

With mystical explanations we can scrap together a narrative, but when you're dealing with science you can't take that much on faith alone. So we gather what we know about the fabled statistic. They're pretty consistent between players, teams, and what assists do for a win. Even if we don't know quite what they denote. Assuming basketball is a perfectly self-consistent system described by the box score, we try all sorts of mathematical models on the box score, but we come up short. In want of more data, we come to a lot of intriguing alternative hypotheses to explain assists.

• Hypothesis #1: Assists are essentially random events in the economy of a basketball game that can favorably occur to each team that Make Everyone Better in a mystical sense. Rather like the weather and climate, we can project and explain how assists happen in a large-scale sense even if chance prohibits us from going much further. Some teams are great at having fortune smile upon them or, equivalently, at having fortune frown upon their opponents. We assume that point guards are rather akin to clerics or scientists or strategists, tipping the balance of fortune in their team's favor, because it's the only reason they seem to be in the game on their own merits. The best leaders and priests and scientists are inordinately valuable to their teams. Is this the role of the point guard? And this explanation certainly jibes with our intuition, even if it doesn't have any empirical strength. It's a cool idea and it catches on. Everyone is happy someone thought of Hypothesis #1, even if it does feel like sort of a holdover/straw man while someone figures out something better.

• Hypothesis #2: We go the pure mathematical route: There are approximately 20-24 players in each game and each of them can have a number of assists. This gives us a point in 24-dimensional phase space, called "assisted space". It is thought that basketball is very simple on the lonely whole and very complicated on the margins of assisted space. We believe that this point in assisted space explains the remaining difference between the computed score (from all other stats) and actual score. Unfortunately, inferring a function with 24-dimensional domain is essentially impossible and this line of inquiry leads nowhere except to some neat graphics. Of course, neat graphics form 80% of the economy of the Internet and Hypothesis #2 is named Time's Person of the Year in a gimmick. In a tidbit sidebar the "net worth" of this Hypothesis is estimated at $600 billion.

• Hypothesis #3: We presume basketball is a system of inordinate complexity. As the focus moves from the possession to the assist, we note in our box scores that assists aren't simply correlative magnets for efficiency, but almost certainly have something to do with field goals and turnovers. If the possession is a resource, then the assist appears to be a secondary resource. It's further noted that just as defensive rebounds have to do with the other team's shots, assists have to do with one's teammates' shots. As a self-consistent system, assists are seen as the cooperative counterpart to turnovers, which sacrifice resources to the other team. Assists sacrifice one's own shots attempts for those of the other players, likely because the synergy of those players is the most efficient use of possessions.

Hypothesis #3 eventually takes over the academic community. This is not because it fits the evidence best, no. Too easy. This is because, after a long protracted debate over the meaning of the assist, hockey goes into a lockout and some random dude that watches hockey is sitting at home and is asked by a scholar of the mythical game of "basketball" what an "assist" means, as though it's some cryptic, unfathomable divination. After twenty-five minutes of a discussion held with that particular ironic relish of the French-Canadian accent, our hockey friend tells us everything about the nature of an assist. We understand, now.

Yet, even though humanity long abandoned Hypotheses #1 and #2, we can't let go of the mystical assist-givers as the grandmasters or prophets of basketball, accounting for all the complexity. Everything eventually falls into place for our conception of basketball. But in the back of our minds, point guards are elevated to the paragons of the sport, and the possession model is seen not as fundamental construct but as a holdover to the glorious exaltation of the prodigious assist-givers. And the other stats, in their self-consistency, now don't seem important so much as relatively preordained and fixed, as a perfunctory stage in which the assist-givers can thrive in their personal versions of chaotic fluidity and complexity. We run fascinated regressions on each assist-giver attempting to valuate the good and the bad. We understand, now.

• • •

Come to think of it, the word means "assist." That seems pretty obvious in retrospect. But then again, we're the people that spent an entire afternoon pretending to forget a sport we love because some idiot on a blog told us to. But let's be real: it was all a fever-dream and you forgot nothing about anything. No one did. Not even me. We all decided to pretend to forget basketball just to be polite to my absurd fascinations, and I thank you for it, but the experiment was an utter failure and during everything I described you still envisioned it all in terms of the basketball you've known and will continue to know. I asked the impossible of you and I'm frankly disappointed that you couldn't deliver. My faith in all of us is shook.

Look, I'm sorry.

But it kind of made you think, didn't it? Those assists, oh man, we went crazy with those assists. And you could probably buy all of that, right? If we didn't know what assists were, we'd have to account for them somehow, and they're the only things that aren't almost perfectly accounted for in the box score, at least in stats that actually "seem" to matter. And they do matter: we know assists matter a lot, and anyone that watches basketball or does any kind of regression knows that assists matter a great deal. Still, we shouldn't fetishize them like the people in that example. There's nothing mystical about a drive-and-kick. There's nothing mystical about good basketball, on the whole (even if there is something awesome about a great point guard that evokes a mystic). No, nothing fancy: work-a-day assists are just one part of the Big Picture Fundamentals, and that's all there is to it. We understand, now.

On the other hand, for all our sophistication in box score stats, most of them boil down to: "possession model" + "assists are generally positive" = "good players care about possessions, using them correctly, and racking up assists". And that's something worth noting. Because I'd argue that not many people actually approach the game that way, and while it's a neat "self-consistency + context" construct, it's also not intuitive and arguably not rational, either. I calculate the number of possessions and the players' individual points per possession when I look at the box score, to be honest, just because I'm a math guy and it's very easy for me to add field goal attempts and turnovers and half of free throws attempted and subtract offensive rebounds. Then I take the secondary/tertiary stats as "context". But I never really buy that as a good description. It just doesn't work for me. I know on some level that this approach is flawed, that it's priming me the wrong way, and that it gives a false linear narrative to something holistic and multifaceted. "Oh, he was inefficient at shooting, but he got a lot of steals and blocks and assists" is often a valid thing to say, but when the second part of your sentence can completely deconstruct the first part of your sentence? That's fundamentally flawed.

"Oh, Chris Paul got 20 points on 20 shots, that's kinda trash. Also he got 18 assists and 7 rebounds and 6 steals. I guess he's not such a trashy offensive player after all." I shouldn't prime myself that way, and I shouldn't have to engage in complicated mental arithmetic or random, non-intuitive single-number stats just to have a basic idea of what statistically a player is contributing. There's no baseline, there are a few stats columns jutting out arbitrarily, and overall, there's not a solid picture of what's going on. Just because assists don't fit the Possession Model doesn't mean they have anything mystical or tacked-on to them, or anything particular that separates them out from any other statistic. They just fit a self-consistent model less easily. There's nothing wrong with that. It just makes it hard for human beings to contextualize them correctly. There's nothing special about at-rim shots or threes, other than that teams generating these shots more often than their opponents will tend to win more games. Basketball is not unfathomably complex as a game, but sometimes it seems that way between the hodgepodge of different sites with analytics on the one hand and the fluidity and gospel truth of what one sees on the other. So let's get back to basics somehow.

So maybe that's the first alternative reality that is actually worth noting here. It's worth trying to blend analytics and what we see in a much more fluid way. The visual candor of the game can fool, but it's a powerful tool when you apply the proper rigor. We're people that are convinced by the eyes and the numbers, but the truth lies not in disjoint fragments but in a simultaneous picture containing both.

And instead of going all-out in the other direction from the Possession Model (which is very powerful, intuitive, and explanatory on a team level), perhaps we could build a set of assist-and-shot-location-heavy stats into the default box score that would accommodate the Quarterback Model for understanding basketball as an alternative. The Quarterback Model, akin to Hypothesis #3, could sit as a sort of brother theory to the Possession Model, with equal standing but with slightly different perspective. To explain what I mean: If the key axiom underlying the Possession Model is to maximize the value of possessions while minimizing the value of opponent possessions, the key axiom of the Quarterback Model is that the key skill for players is to generate efficient shot attempts for themselves and their teammates (and stop the generation of those efficient shot attempts for their opponents).

There are some fundamental problems with recording assists: For example, there aren't any non-examples, it's not a stat you can just not rack up, or rack up negative examples by feeding teammates in the wrong spots and making them miss with bad passes. To have weak assist stats right now doesn't mean to fail an efficiency test, it means quite literally to have fewer assists, pace/teammate/schedule-adjustments notwithstanding. But getting location-specific data for the assists (and for players' own shots) could help us go beyond the nebulous cliches. It's worth noting that in fact, to a lot of folks, that is the default version of basketball, not because they're ignorant of the Possession Model but because they find it less satisfactory or aesthetic or explanatory.

• • •

This is a conclusion, because pieces are supposed to have conclusions. We went on a journey into an alternate reality, came back, talked about what we learned, and box scores should be better and reflect assists less as a stat-padding extra that kinda doesn't fit but we all know is good and more as a part of holistic model of how teams generate shot attempts efficiently. That's it. That's my thesis, in short, and, in the grand tradition of conclusions we're now supposed to go more general and end with a sort of open literary ending. You know, much like the end of a conversation with friends is filled with well-wishing and deliberately constructed loose ends to signal, above all else, that that was a good conversation, that it was meaningful, and that (some time in the future) we should continue some of these loose ends in future conversations and keep one another in our minds in the meantime. Because... people, man. That's what's important in life, not getting the statistics exactly right for a simple game.

A game whose name escapes me right now. A curious misspelling of baseball, right?

One pet peeve I have when discussing basketball is when people don't treat the game like the game that it is. I don't mean people that take it too seriously. I mean people that completely ignore the role of competition and the act of competing in a game of opposing players and teams with both fitting and clashing intentions. After all, it's this continuous collection of games-within-the-game that compels nearly every rational decision made in the games. The fact that basketball is a highly symmetric game with two teams, a finite amount of time, and definite outcomes (win or loss) seems to me about the first or second fact implicit in any discussion. All too often, we lose that thread in the hodgepodge of personalities, mental feats, and the impressive physical execution. It's a game, though! You have to play the game to win the game. And that game isn't "Can I get my buckets?" or "Can I fit the template of your designated Right Way, focusing on grit and hustle?" It's a game, and the game is basketball.

Enter Kobe. Segue, Denver. That intro comes about because of this strange Laker season in which everyone has mentally diagnosed an unsolvable problem with the Lakers, solved another one, and caused several new problems with short-sighted solutions. The "hypotheticals" game-within-the-game is a whole lot of fun, but as designated practitioner of the Right Way, it's probably time for all the fun to end. No more narratives for me, folks. Simple living, easy thoughts. Kobe has such a unique footprint on any game he's a part of, one that has grown ever more stark and dichotomous through all the recent roster turnover (forced and unforced). And yet, we get bogged down in all the ephemera to try to figure out what the heck that footprint actually is, because Kobe has set us up to think in terms of "Are you, or are you not, a winner?" And there are so many questions, in this world of winners.

• Is Kobe actually having an MVP-caliber season?
• Is Steve Nash a pale ghost of his old self this season that can't guard paper with glue or is he just as brilliant as ever?
• Is Kobe actually a huge minus defender now?
• If he is... is it even possible to build a contender around him, no matter how good he might be on one end?
• _Is Dwight Howard ever going to be the top center in the league again?___

All of these are interesting questions, to a point. But I've reached it. Me, I simply can't find them interesting anymore.

• • •

We always hear about the teams that can't win a title because of some arbitrary reason, like those questions on the list. Lo and behold, one of those teams does. Every year! Remember when Dirk couldn't, until he could? Remember when LeBron couldn't, until he could? Remember when Kobe couldn't win without Shaq, until he could? Remember when Jordan couldn't, until he could? Games aren't won by the best team, they're won by the team that put itself in a position to win and got enough of the right breaks.

The better team simply tend to be on the lucky side of the coin, and teams that are comfortable being good have the most tricks available to keep themselves on that side of the ledger. It's not a categorical game. There's chance, and variables you can't know in advance. With the Lakers, all we have are their footprints on the games. Instead of looking at the shapes and figuring out what weight that contender has, what transcendence that offense is capable of, what depths that transition defense can sink to? We focus on Dwight's mentality and Kobe's chemistry. Nash's "age" and Pau's softness. Because we have an idea of what a contender looks like, we fall on well-trodden arithmetic and see if that arithmetic fits our archetype for a contender. "Is their Pythagorean age too old?" ... "Does a championship team have a player like Jodie Meeks or Jordan Hill at 6th on the depth chart?" ... "How will the Lakers shore up their bench?"

If we want to find answers to the Lakers' curious plight, we need to treat the game like the game it is. Not a scoring parlor (for the offensively-fixated) or a morality exhibition (for the defense-and-grit monger) -- it's a game! Basketball, like all games with an undetermined ending, is all about the process of determination. The process by which a team separates itself from its opponent over 48 minutes, and whether that separation was to the end of a victory or a defeat. From a gamer's standpoint, what does Kobe do when he scores, precisely? He shifts the odds. Kobe plays the game, and the net result of his scoring is that he creates some separation between his favored team and his opponent's, or he gives his team new life against a favored foe. What happens when his opponent scores because of his mistake? Just the opposite, obviously. The odds drift away from his team. Every miss, turnover, and assist changes the odds just a little bit in one direction or the other, depending on the game time and the strengths of the respective teams and players. Odds upon odds, adrift -- that's all that results from the individual actions. Tides shift, chances wane.

The game the Lakers need to play over the next two years to win might be one that we've never seen before. One with crushingly brilliant offense and comically poor defense. Maybe that's the strategy that maximizes the Lakers' odds. Maybe they end up playing 4 on 5 with Dwight stuck at the opposing foul line trying to stop transitions. Maybe Ron Artest plays center. Maybe Kobe plays point guard with Nash off the ball. I don't know! I'm throwing this stuff out facetiously, but not totally satirically. Bill Russell did it for stretches in Finals games if he thought his team needed it. We talked a good game about the Positional Revolution with the Heat, after all. Maybe it's time to rethink the way these guys are supposed to play instead of whinging about the myriad ways a team with no reasonable historical comparison differs from a traditional team.

• • •

My point in saying this is that we're in the midst of injury, yes, but we're also in the midst of a somewhat stifling convention. The Lakers are hurting right now, and there's no tangible lesson to be gleaned from these injuries. At least in consideration of what the Lakers could have done differently. They made some mistakes with minutes, yes, but not that many. Maybe we're witnessing the death in infancy of a legendary dynasty-that-wasn't. Or maybe we're witnessing the calibration from a team that could win 60 games in a conventional way in its sleep to a team with a harder edge -- a team always at 75% health but never lacking in fire. Or maybe we're witnessing the latest form of your mother's same-old sandbagging Lakers, continuing onwards indefinitely as an amorphous blob of a team that can never define itself except in their desire to win each game.

... Or maybe Jim Buss will just blow it all up. That too is an option.

Whatever the case, this roster (especially with the injuries that, combined with rest, just confuse the picture even further) is utterly new territory for everyone from Bill Russell to Hubie Brown to the 14-year-old Kobe fan who's seen 20 games and remembers 3. This team is new business, and they were before Dwight stepped in, before Mike Brown stepped out, and so on. This team has not exploded from conflict; it's imploded from medical reality, if anything. And we ought not to judge the identity of the implosion for awhile. Let's stop talking about what the Lakers are supposed to be. Let's take a step back and take them as they are. We've done enough judging, enough figuring.

Now that all our delusions are right cleared up about instant dynasties and obvious busts (even for skeptical observers, this is a worst case beyond all worst cases), we ought to watch and see where the ride takes us. There are sights to see aplenty, sights that stand with pride and never as spectacle. Come, watch the invulnerable Nash on his last legs. Watch Dwight Howard as an Icarus with wings mid-melt. Watch a Black Swan in Gasol as rare as revolution. And, of course? Watch Kobe. We call him Black Mamba, but in the wake of the implosion it's time to see if he can be a chameleon. Slither more fully into the versatility he has shown this season. And Kobe must be the center of this story, as he always has been. For all one may dismiss the mysticism that surrounds his impact on the game, there's something so unpredictable and fascinating about the way he shifts the odds pathologically towards his own victory and yet never quite enough to shift those odds in a way that leaves you satisfied.

"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age."

H.P. Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu"

Greetings, my fellow Small Marketeers! Small Market Mondays is back! Today I'll be subbing in for Other Alex, who is currently lecturing about the evils of big markets at several prominent small-market universities. I'm told they're receiving him well, which is right and proper considering it's the gospel truth. Now, I'm a little bit different from Other Alex. Not in our approach, for we are both supreme craftsman with an eye to the hustle of scrappers and the grift of hustlers. No, we differ only in our ideologies, and even then, only slightly. But let's talk about it. See, whereas Other Alex wants as life mission to call attention to the wonders of basketball, the miracles of chessboxing, and the pleasurable communal experience of being a small market fan, I yearn for more, brothers and sisters.

I yearn for more than is coded in the San Antonio passes and their gradual, graceful struggle with age. I yearn for more than Marc Gasol's passing or Michael Kidd-Gilchrist and his amazing length to block centers at the rim. I crave for more than Kevin Durant's sparkling offensive efficiency and always remembering to thank his teammates. I crave more than Boris Diaw and Ricky Rubio playing the passing equivalent of Starcraft against one another with the other 8 players to the scent of puppy breath and cinnamon crepes with Andorra at stake. I need more.

Unfortunately, unlike many sports fans content to fill in the void with large-market spectacle and crowd-sourced, manufactured large-market hype and debacle for the sake of itself, I must look inward, for more, and it is terrifying what I find. There are more things than are dreamt of in your philosophies, Horatio, but bless you sincerely for trying! Have you ever seen a shog'goth?

Anyway, one day several years ago, I looked inward in this manner. And then outward. And then shivered! Because I had walked into the rain while I wasn't paying attention. A hard rain was falling outside, and I beheld in a raindrop falling into my hand, for the tiniest instant, the smallest market. It was adorable, guys. Anyway, as is my wont, I immediately went to my Victorian-era loom and reproduced from memory all the jerseys and franchise history I had seen in this rain drop. 18-foot-tall centers. Point guards smaller than the transom above my door at Miskatonic. Small forwards with such a vertical that they actually went into geosynchronous orbit, never to return. I had discovered the Miskatonic Hard Rain Droplet Rainy Day Humans, Part #85 and #96. The franchise had won so many championships, you guys, but David Stern evaporated all of that with mean-spirited, chemical precision. I know they had attendance issues, I know a rain drop is barely bigger or more populous than Sleep Train Arena. I get that. But tradition, man! Apparently we can talk about Willis Reed, but before we can even get into Schiller Freed (real; played for Babylon in 8080 B.C.) we have to wade through all sorts of conspiracy theories. And that's just sad. All I'm saying.

I say this all much to my friend Other Alex's chagrin. He doesn't believe me about the franchise in the raindrops, the markets smaller than quarks, the markets larger than continents with untold aeons of tradition (and my hipster garment company's steady, perfunctory commodification of every drop of this tradition) . But no matter, Virginia. There is a Santa Claus, and he's an oversized power forward from one of the Baltic States. Other Alex doesn't believe me. But for this one week, I took over his column. I proverbially drank the oil of his content production, diagonally. I lord over all that I see. And besides, if I were just making all of this up, I wouldn't have been made a professor at Miskatonic University. Anyway, the game of the week is, oh, let's say, San Antonio and OKC tonight. That's pretty cool, especially if you only know about the traditionally-recognized franchises. All this is to emphasize something The Other Alex pointed out last week.

Chris Duhon: Not even once.

• • •

~ Lakers Talk ~

Anyway, my dyed-in-the-wool small-market heart almost (almost) feels a tug of sympathy for the drama unfolding in Laker-land. But then I remember that Los Angeles is such a large market that it can easily support not one, but two NBA teams. And the market's economic draw constantly threatens to drain even a third team from scrappy locales like Sacramento into the sinful clutches of the Anaheim (which I, unfamiliar, picture as marauding stampede of wild horses of metal and diamonds arranged in a horrifying Platinum Triangle of horse-flesh, a gigantic neo-urban redevelopment district that exists to surround Angel Stadium and host the siren Gwen Stefani who will sing the world to sleep one day, a redevelopment planned to be populated with mixed-use streets and high-rises that stretch to the infinite sky.) There are no Angels left on earth, no Mighty Ducks, no Kings or Fisher Kings left in Los Angeles. Go, all pretense of justice! Go, all sense of community deprived from the world! Go and let us make a large market for the sake of a large market!

But I digress slightly. To put it more bluntly, Steve Nash, a Canadian (for Canada is the ultimate small market) is literally the only thing redeeming about Southern California right now. I cannot pity the Lakers and their horrifying 11-14 start, I have trouble sympathizing for the people of Los Angeles. And the Lakers aren't even bad, they're just mediocre! Welcome to a fun season for the vast majority of the league! The Nuggets may not be thrilled with their 50-win course, but I somehow doubt Andre Miller is right now silently weeping blood into an empty cistern as an oblation to Cthulhu like Kobe Bryant surely is at this very second. Because Dre gets that there are worse situations than 50 wins, even for the perpetually unsatisfied professional athlete. Andre Miller is having none of these blood-weeping ceremonies. Andre Miller is just sitting in a comfy chair, chilling out and finding his favorite old cartoons on YouTube, ostensibly clad in loose-fitting clothes, a night-cap, and his perpetual, terminal case of bedhead. Andre Miller is chilling out. He will have none of your temper tantrums to the media.

What's more, even though the Lakers aren't great, the second team from Los Angeles is: thriving, exciting, and clearly in contention, the Clippers almost make you forget that they were forged from pure evil by Donald Sterling from the gigantic husk of the last Buffalo. So forget how sad the lowly Lakers' situation is: Even this season, it's unfair that one market can be doing so well. Even when the Lakers are mediocre, the Clippers seem to pick up the slack, and for that reason I have trouble feeling anything for the Lakers. All this is to emphasize something The Other Alex pointed out last week.

Chris Duhon: Not even once.

Thank you for reading.

• • •

[Ed. Note: ALEX ARNON COME HOME SOON WHAT IS THIS HELL]

Everyone of them knew that as time went by they'd
Get a little bit older and a little bit slower but...

"Revolution #9" The Beatles

Ultimately this season has been a cautionary tale for the Lakers so far on what it actually means to get older. We don't know just what the season has in store for the Lakers, and later in this piece we're going to take a long look at their schedule. But given that there have been so many unbelievable twists and turns, I decided it might be nice to get this moment, possibly the Lakers' nadir as a franchise, in amber (you know, like from that episode of House), for posterity. Okay, so it's December 14th, and I've gone through about four stages of feelings with the Lakers this season, as a Spurs fan and as a basketball fan in general.

1. Abject Sports Horror - "They did it again! How did they do it! ..." I have used the ellipsis to omit several unpublishable 8000-word rants. The Los Angeles Lakers had acquired Dwight Howard and Steve Nash. Their starting five looked legendary. Not much to say.

2. Schadenfreude - 1-4, they fired Mike Brown, and didn't hire Phil Jackson. Kobe made public comments. Hack-A-Howard worked. Twice. Glorious swoon.

3. Abject Sports Horror 2: Electric Boogaloo - Fun fact: I hadn't at all considered the idea that a bad season might be more horrifying than a good season. For all the fear I had of what the Lakers could do, I hadn't realized how awful a flop would actually be. Not in some big picture "It's fun to hate the Lakers and the league suffers when they aren't a dynasty" sense. I mean in the small-picture. "Wait, I like Steve Nash! I might root against him, but he make the game a lot more fun for everyone, myself included! I also like Kobe, Gasol, and Dwight, as players! It's fascinating to watch each of the four and they are all amazing players." The schadenfreude wears off. You start to laugh at Kobe's vintage season being wasted... but then you think about it for five seconds and realize that Kobe is having a vintage season that's being completely wasted. Dwight Howard can't make a weakside play to save his life. Pau Gasol looks about 48 years old. Steve Nash looks about 38, which is 10 years old than he's ever looked. Four generational talents. Four wasted seasons. Steve Nash might never play another full season. Quite distressing.

4. Overriding Curiosity - We have to lower our expectations for this team, if not in terms of potential than in terms of record. Every loss will not be made up in March. A recalibration is inevitable. Even those of us (Aaron and myself included) who had huge questions about age and the bench need to recalibrate: Aaron did his thesis on aging and I was in close contact with him, he was absolutely concerned about the Lakers entering the season. And even before that, I've long held to Bill James' principle that aging happens much more quickly than any of us are generally willing to admit. But neither of us saw this. Hence our recalibration, in which an impulse akin to leadership emerges, and I start to wonder just what the heck this team would look like at full strength again. The Spurs and Celtics from the last couple of years and the 2011 Mavericks were pretty long in the tooth, after all, and those teams were a lot of fun to watch (okay, not the Celtics, but they've had their moments). Heck, the previous iteration of the Lakers (Bynum-Odom-Gasol-Kobe) was pretty darn old and that team's offense was awesome at times. The Lakers could still be scary.

Okay, thanks for indulging me. Now, let's move from what the Lakers_ have done_ to what the Lakers can do, in terms of what that would mean for their remaining schedule.

• • •

Here's Dave McMenamin, laying out the template:

In the NBA's past three full seasons, the No. 8 seed in the Western Conference has averaged 48 wins. After Thursday, the Lakers need to go 39-20 to reach that mark, basically win two out of every three remaining games. Up to this point this season, they've been winning only two out of every five.

39-20. 39 wins, 20 losses. Keep that in mind, it's the bench-mark I'll be using for this article. Anyway, now that the Lakers have to be a good team just to make the playoffs and a great team just to get first-round home-court, they are truly in a playoff mode, by no choice of their own. Having to avoid 21 losses in 59 games? That's not a grinding NBA season, that's a win-or-go-home mentality more at home in an NFL season than an NBA grind. They might not need 48 wins total, but the Western Conference is pretty darn good, and every loss chips further away at the Lakers' margin of error, subtly shifting the odds away from a thriving season.

I can't help but be reminded of the 2010 Spurs. Beset by injuries to Tony Parker and Manu Ginobili and a suddenly aging Tim Duncan, the 2010 Spurs went only 50-32 and were pigeonholed into a three-way tie for the bottom of the playoff heap. It was easily their worst regular season of the Tim Duncan era, and Tim Duncan had the first losing month in the regular season of his career in January 2010. And yet, because of the immense amount of struggle, finding their identity nightly, and actually having to get good (not just shore things up) on the Rodeo Road Trip? In the end, one could make a good case that the season's slog helped them, and they dominated the Mavericks in the first-round 2-7 matchup with a six-game win. In fact, Popovich inarguably tanked Game 5. Unless you want to argue that Gregg Popovich, one of the greatest coaches of all time, really thought literally playing Roger Mason 27:36 was actually his best option for winning that game. Heh.

All this to say that while home-court obviously helps (and to use an example straight from the depths of Tinseltown, it's hard to argue HCA didn't swing the 2010 Finals), even more important than home court is putting out the best basketball product you can. The Lakers are going to find that basketball product or they're not going to make the playoffs. That's the tall and short of it. Thrive or die. No other options. True dichotomy. Yes, yes, the Lakers of recent memory may be the masters of the 54-win season that tells you nothing about their playoff readiness, and it'll take a prorated 54-win season (39/59) to clinch the playoffs.

But well, let's look at the Lakers' season so far.

First, note that they've had a fine point differential (prior to the games of December 14). They're +2.17 in 23 games, which is good for 10th overall. They've dramatically underperformed in their record (Basketball-Reference has them at 13-10 Pythagorean wins; they sit 4 games behind expectation at 9-14). Yes, middling, and yes, they've destroyed lesser teams and gotten close to good ones only after the outcome had been decided. But their differential is still 5th in the West behind the Thunder (9.27!), Clippers (7.59), Spurs (7.46), and Grizz (6.53). So the Lakers aren't bad, per se. Just misunderstood?

Let's delve into the Lakers' remaining schedule briefly (Ed. Note: by briefly he means exhaustively) to see how they could get those 39 wins.

(Very technical note: I use point differentials to separate contenders from pretenders because point differentials are less subject to random chance than records, and predict future records better. On the other hand, this isn't inherently true: Thanks to Dirk's unique skillset in late-game situations, the Mavs seem to systematically overperform their differential and dominate in the clutch. Something like Dwight Howard's free throws and Kobe's complex clutch skillset may similarly mean that the Lakers are systematically underperforming their differential. And also, let's note that because the Lakers may have underperformed does NOT mean they will overperform their differential in the future. That's not how conditional probability works.)

• • •

Because the Lakers indeed have a decent differential, most of the teams in the league are worse (even far worse) than the Lakers. And of the Lakers' 59 remaining games, the Lakers play fully 41 of those remaining games against teams with point differentials that are currently worse (even marginally). The home-away breakdown for these 41 games is 19 home, 22 away. Now, despite their differential, the Lakers are actually 8-9 against these teams so far. They're 6-4 at home, and 2-5 away, in a 10 to 7 home-away breakdown that should favor the Lakers heavily.

It's pretty amazing they have a losing record, actually.

If the Lakers go 20-21 in these games, as you might project from their dismal performance thus far? They will have 35 losses right there, and even if they beat the Thunder, Clippers, Spurs, Knicks, Grizzlies, Hawks, Heat, Bulls, and Nets in every remaining matchup, they'll have a 47-win season. The takeaway here is that Lakers must dominate worse teams, must win nearly every game they're supposed to win. They must dominate much worse teams on road. Morris must dominate Fisher. Yes, the Lakers won't likely lose to the Bobcats or Wizards (whom they're playing tonight!). But keep in mind the home-road split of 19 to 22, and keep in mind that "worse teams" includes a core of bubble teams in the West. A road game against the Nuggets or Jazz is historically no picnic.

Looking at the field, the caramel-filled core of teams that should most concern the Lakers are the bundle of mediocre Western teams including the Warriors, Jazz, T'Wolves, Mavs, Nuggets, and Rockets. All of these teams have worse differential than the Lakers; the Jazz are the only ones especially close. These games I'd like to highlight because the teams involved are a) possible head-to-head tiebreakers for the Lakers b) crucial challenge games that should provide litmus tests between pretenders and contenders. Now that the Lakers know these are important games, we can look at these games more accurately as the crucial leverage points they represent. Win or lose, Lakers must show they are generally better than these teams and can beat them in a playoff-type atmosphere. No, they don't have to win every game in this core. You fully expect them to lose a few of these games on road trips. But you have to see if they will compete, if they'll get better relative to these teams, and so on. That's what we're looking for, and it's why Lakers fans should have these games circled.

This group of bubble games accounts for 14 of their remaining games (6 home, 8 away). So far the Lakers have actually had a good sample of these games. They've had eight so far, and gone 4-4 (not impressive, but not insanely bad, either. Yes, this is a theme, the Lakers look like the quintessential 45-win Rockets/Grizz squad right now, statistically). Of these 8 games, 5 have been at home (3-2) and 3 away (1-2). Not much to say; it's a small sample from an injured team. But it's interesting that they haven't managed any separation.

In any case, 14 games against the bubble teams means that the rest of the 41 against worse teams are basically 27 games against a) significantly worse teams in the West like Portland and Sacramento, b) significantly worse teams in the East like Charlotte and Washington, c) decent teams like Boston and Indiana and Milwaukee that have looked middling on average (for Indiana, "middling" is the average of "horrifying" and "very good"). These 27 games, the Lakers should (and must!) dominate. Being quite serious, if the Lakers drop 9 of these 27, they have to go 21-11 against their direct opponents and (right now) their superiors in the East and West just to hit 48 wins. The Lakers must take these games against (for the most part) obviously inferior opponents. Not kidding, if the Lakers don't beat the Bobcats and Wizards twice, they will legitimately have trouble getting to the playoffs. This is the world we're living in, in 2012. Blah blah blah: Mayans were right.

• • •

Finally, we've broken down their games against inferior teams, let's look at the statement games facing the Lakers, in which they can really show they belong among the pack. Talent-wise they've clearly proved this over the years, but health is a serious question. And the heights they reached last year they may not reach again. These are the games in which they can make that case. These are the Thunder, Clippers, Spurs, Knicks, Grizzlies, Hawks, Heat, Bulls, and Nets. So far they've gone 1-5 against these teams, and their only win was a 5-point takedown of Brooklyn. At home. Yes, Virginia -- the Lakers don't currently have any staple wins on the road. They're 0-3 on the road against teams with a better point differential than them. And even at home they're only 1-2.

Luckily, they have plenty of chances to prove themselves. They have 18 remaining games with better differential, 9 home, 9 away. If they go 3-15? That's the season, basically. I don't think they will do quite this poorly. But they have to get some statement wins, and they have to at least get a winning record at home, in my opinion. If they go 3-6 on the road? No big deal if they manage to pull even at home. The road games? Not necessarily the games you're not supposed to dominate. Schedule losses, games you're happy if you can come out alive from. Tom Thibodeau, Gregg Popovich, Chris Paul, Horford-Smith, Z-Bo-Gasol-Gay. LeBron. Et cetera. Teams that can run the Lakers out of the gym but the Lakers with a healthy Nash and Gasol should easily win from time to time. And if the Lakers can find a way to make the road games tough, and make their home court once again something where teams fear to tread? Yeah, they could make the playoffs and make a strong case for themselves as worthy contenders.

It's their season to make it happen. They play the Wizards tonight. Every loss matters, saps them of just a little more strength. But every win exults them and sets them on that fertile path to the championship, though right now that must seem miles away to a middling team in a city by the ocean.

Gregg Popovich acted in bad faith in resting his starters the way he did. Pop should have been more discreet and subtle about sitting his four best players. The message here isn't that teams can't rest players. They can, and they will. But be discreet about it. Be smart about it. Communicate it. And show some concern for the sometimes futile, often unfair exercise known as the NBA regular season, without which no championships can be won and no dynasties formed.

This is an attempt at summarizing the general point against Coach Popovich's decision. It's a set of arguments that deserves examination, both on their numerous merits and faults. Ken Berger's piece is an excellent summation -- "keep up appearances" even if it is slightly dishonest. You can tank, but dear god, don't say you're tanking. Don't say you're taking nights off and that the plane has already left for San Antonio. Keep them around, report an injury, keep it hush-hush. When I read the tone of this general argument, I disagreed fundamentally and didn't quite know why. Sure, Berger's tone in certain passages serves to undermine his argument to the casual reader (For instance... "But let's play along for a moment, shall we? Let's play along better than the Spurs did." What? How is that anything other than inflammatory?) But it's an overall solid take on the situation, and one that you can't ignore.

• • •

Little White Lies

I landed in a long Twitter argument with Matt Moore centering on Berger's article, one that I don't wish to call back to in a broader sense. But one example stood out. Moore mentioned that you can claim you're feeling sick to get out of a boring co-worker's party, and that doing so is far preferable to calling them boring to their face. That's a powerful example: "Little white lies" are great for seamlessly getting us out of obligations that may not be good for us or we may not enjoy. Keeping up appearances is important, because you have to see that co-worker again and again, and everyone suffers, just because you decided to be honest to your co-worker. Dave Chappelle had a wonderful set of sketches on his show back in the day about "When Keeping it Real Goes Wrong".

Well, that's what the Spurs did on Thursday.

Yes, rest is important, and for the Spurs not to acknowledge this fact in 2012 would be foolish. Yes, inter-conference games have a low incentive to win relative to conference and divisional games, except (generally speaking) as statement games for Eastern teams and gimmes for Western teams. Sure, the regular season is probably way too long for the idealized season of basketball health, and plenty of coaches less noble and/or less empowered than Popovich (*cough*, Thibodeau, *cough*) wear out their starters to often-horrifying effects, and this is clearly a bad thing. All of this is true.

Sidenote: This is especially true for older players, and the more we learn about medical science, the more we learn how crucial rest is (look at the concussion debate in the NFL; rest is one of the most important points in any sport's concussion policy). And the risk of fluke injuries and overwork is ever-present. Look at Tim Duncan in 2009 and 2010 playoffs, as Spurs beat writer Jeff McDonald reminds us. Or, just as notably, look at Manu's elbow injury in 2011 that quite conceivably cost the Spurs a playoff series against Memphis. The freak injury was suffered during a meaningless game in Phoenix at the end of the season.

But they still goofed. Badly. The Spurs refused to give the league any advance notice of the impending rest-game, despite (in Coach Pop's own words) knowing since they first saw the schedule that the Heat game would be "one of those" rest games. For all the arguments in favor of why they did it, few actually address how they did it. Because, frankly, it's indefensible. Popovich being Popovich, in his usual caustic way. And Berger correctly notes that the manner in which Popovich approached the rest -- if perhaps not pointedly inflammatory -- was so completely tone-deaf it does merit some sort of acknowledgment, punishment, or course adjustment. Decorum and standards aren't everything, but they aren't nothing either. Let's play the co-worker argument out again, as it should've happened and as Popovich should've handled it: you tell your co-worker that you need some rest, they accept it and everyone moves on with their lives, the party a little poorer for your absence, the boring co-worker happy in his boring party with his boring acquaintances, and you're living it up at home, watching the Spurs torch the Miami Heat and lose in the end, but not without giving everyone an entertaining little romp. Everyone wins for this little deception. Right? I think so. Little white lies save the day. The End, everyone's happy.

• • •

Except, wait. Maybe not. Your co-worker announces after the success of his party last night that he's going to have a party every two weeks, and you're always invited over! Even if you're sick sometimes, even if you have a doctor's appointment, he will accommodate you and request your presence another Thursday night! You have no excuse not to go, now! Haha, screw your life! This is the part where you tell him he's boring to his face. I mean, unless you're in the bridge burning business, you probably don't put it quite like that. You probably say "I'm not a big party guy, I'm not very social. We kinda have other interests. Not so big on strobe black lights set to isolated bass tracks from Metallica put on a mind-numbingly loud speaker for six hours straight, as you are." Your co-worker nods grimly, hearing the subtext. You're never going to be his good buddy.

But ultimately, he moves on with his life, and you are feel free to put in the odd occasion at his place or find something mutually agreeable, supposing he's a decent person that you can get along with, at least. That's if you eschew the lies. The little white lies can't address systematic problems, and I don't hope you'll try. Try to address that situation with your co-worker again with little white lies. Say you're busy with a doctor's appointment. Say you are in a bowling league. Say something different every fortnight, whatever you want to get out of your biweekly travesty... and one of two things will happen: 1. He gets the hint, and finds your treatment of the situation extremely disrespectful (as it is). 2. He doesn't get the hint and assumes you're living a life that is totally tightly-scheduled and rarely available -- in short, an interesting or eventful life that you haven't thought him worthy of forming even a small part. I'd find that latter possibility a lot more insulting than just being called boring.

When you apply little white lies to systematic situations, the result is a culture of deception and a pernicious policy of bad faith. And systemic bad faith has a way of sliding into the kind of bad faith that makes Popovich's bad faith in sending four players home look like The Giving Tree. Don't buy it? Well, just look at this laughably sneaky move undertaken by the Warriors. Little white lies to preserve the bottom line that spiral into grand deception. Tanking is fine by me, but not disclosing that you're tanking by hiding valuable information from your loyal-to-a-fault fans for months? THAT'S inexcusable, and unlike the Spurs' "probably should have given more than a couple hours' notice" sneakiness, it probably cost a number of season ticket holders thousands of dollars apiece on the margins. The bottom line is that this scandal that actually cost middle-class fans thousands of dollars got pushed to the back page by a much more innocuous story, and why?

Because lying about major injuries has become so commonplace that it hardly bears mention.

Pressuring injured players to return with deliberately liberal timelines (the old saw "day-to-day" was addressed in The Breaks of the Game) is as old as the injured list itself. So the Spurs should've told a fib, sure, or at least been a bit more discreet. They should've kept up appearances. And for that, it was reasonable and right that they be punished, even if you think they were in the right. And so Berger's point is well-taken. But it's important to delineate a broader point where it falls apart: keeping up appearances can never be a substitute for systematically good incentives and good products. Keeping up appearances can never be a substitute for marketing creativity or recognizing what the product you're bringing to the table is. And keeping up appearances is a short-term solution, a band-aid, in the parlance, to problems that often go much more deeper than appearances can ever address.

• • •

"I know you hate the Heat, bro. But Tiago Splitter, bro. The Spurs are [fornification throwback word] amazing. Boris Diaw is like staring at a lava lamp set on full chill mode. Way better than Richard Jefferson. I shouldn't have tried to sell you on RJ last season, bro needed a pat on the back just to stay in the game against the Heat. No confidence at all. I'm sorry about that, bro, that was embarrassing, and I was wrong. Come on, change the channel to TNT. Bro. Bro."

-- 99% of my conversations with other people, in short.

Which brings me to Nando De Colo. Tiago Splitter. Matt Bonner. Gary Neal. Boris Diaw. Patty Mills. Household names. ... Well, obviously not. That's what this whole thing is about, right? That those players are unmarketable non-entities that probably can't sell the casual fan to tune into on the margin. The Spurs threw the league under the bus on Thursday, even if the outcome was fine. I get this sentiment, but look more broadly: it's a self-deconstructing argument! The league itself threw the league under the bus in its marketing strategy by making that lineup impossible to market.

Consider: thanks partially to these players, since late 2010, the Spurs are in the midst of one of the more dominant regular season stretches in NBA history. They are also all international stars, both in terms of where they've played (all of them played overseas), and in terms of what nations they represent (Brazil, France, Australia, Canada on a technicality, France). Bonner is a self-deprecating, seven-foot tall, utterly unique player with a sandwich blog who parties with Arcade Fire. Patty Mills is one of the fastest, most energetic players in a league of fast-moving athletes and an inspiration to an entire peoples. Diaw is one of the best passing bigs in recent memory, and a hilarious-looking player with a funny shot. This isn't to advocate on these players' behalf, necessarily. Just to show that it can be done. And, considering the number of international players, that this sort of thing should already have been done! There's a finite quantity of beloved players, but the NBA is far from saturated when Australia's star speedster (and someone that absolutely lit up our Team USA Olympian best this summer) is a non-entity.

Stern's league of stars abides no framework for these interesting, entertaining, teamwork-heavy players that don't quite fit onto a cereal box. Instead of encouraging the unfamiliar, the international, and the elite, Stern actively punishes teams that showcase these players because they aren't already established stars, like (ironically) Parker and Ginobili. I say "ironically" because Parker and Ginobili (and Duncan, to a lesser extent) only won begrudging respect from fans by cutting their teeth in three championship runs that made it impossible to marginalize them with "soft" labels. And even after establishing themselves in every way it is possible for a player to do, the NBA has traditionally done Parker and Ginobili no favors in terms of marketing except for existing as a showcase for their now-legendary skills. Consider that both Parker and Ginobili have had to operate at barely-sub-MVP levels at times simply to get All-Star levels of respect (much less MVP talk), even while doing certain things historically well. And yet, these are the players that Stern has designated as being so crucial to the appeal of the Spurs that sitting them was apparently a travesty worthy of censure and sanction.

That's the irony. Stern is saying that he'll do these players no favors in terms of marketing, and yet, when they become established, they are socially obligated to do him the favor of showing "good faith". All the while players that could be getting plenty of marketing their way (the new generation of Spurs' foreign players), the league is found wanting there. If the Spurs are throwing the league under the bus by not giving fans Manu Ginobili and Tony Parker, then what precisely has the league done in failing to promote these legends before their primes are soon finished? If the Spurs are throwing the league under the bus by giving them apparently random foreign players (that just happened to, without exception, play splendid ball for their countries' Olympic teams), then what precisely has the league done in allowing the entire bench of a great team to escape the notice of casual fans?

The Seven Seconds or Less era was wonderful and entertaining, but perhaps it was more than anything else the prototype of a new way to market the sport. Bill Simmons once called them a "critically acclaimed" team (a back-handed compliment for their inability to get a ring, to be sure). That's the thing about the Suns: you could market them as an international force. You could market them as an exciting combination of athleticism and vision and cohesion. You could market them (and all their next-generation acolytes like the Triangle Lakers, the Motion Spurs, the Ubuntu Celtics, the Grindhouse Grizzlies, and the Program Thunder), not just as a collection of well-documented and compelling individuals, but a true team. The lights have changed, and you don't have to be a diehard to appreciate it. And I wonder if Stern's noticed. Based on his rigid implied treatment of the Spurs as three marquee stars plus an incidental supporting cast, it's safe to assume until proven otherwise that Stern simply hasn't noticed. While the Spurs will likely make some minor institutional tweaks, I'm guessing they'll be the first to admit that staying ahead of the curve in terms of how a modern, international team ought to be run is worth more than $250,000.

And if the NBA's designated international wizard -- David Stern -- had considered it in that context? He might agree.

• • •

Running down an unfamiliar mountain at dawn near his New Hampshire home, Matt Bonner stops suddenly and plots the remainder of his journey down the mountain. Breathing a bit heavily, he spies an uncharacteristically icy grotto. His sense of adventure piqued, Bonner steps into the grotto's entrance. To his astonishment, he notes that the entrance is lined with stringed beads! There might be mountain people living there! Being something of a mountain person himself (he chuckles to himself as he prepares his mountain-man dialect), Bonner steels himself for any sort of encounter. The "room" he enters is rather dark, and a river runs through it, and it is hot and humid like a sauna. Its walls are the mossy rocks of the mountain, its floor a tangle of giant, velour carpets. Feeling his way around the room, Bonner notes statues along the wall that are just mouths and cheeks and throats, invariably bearded. The beard is black and the skin is brown, surprising the lily-white Bonner in the heart of New Hampshire. He makes his way through with just a flashlight and finds another beard statue, now hundreds of feet from the entrance. To Bonner's astonishment, this beard statue seems to be made of different material.

"Hello, Matthew," this beard statue proclaims in a totally indifferent voice. Matt Bonner is not shocked by this at all. Par for the course, Matt Bonner reflects, having seen much stranger things in hermits' mountain grottos.

"Hello, gentle mountain-man," Matt Bonner says diplomatically, "Who is hosting this occasion, and how do you know my name?"

"I am whom they called Gilbert Arenas, Matthew. Now you may address me as Agent Zero, or, Hibachi."

"Hello, Agent Zero. How are you?" Matt Bonner says to his one-time opponent, trying to encourage an atmosphere of trust.

"My mission is to help you, Matthew," and Bonner notes that Arenas' diction was at once precise and unworldly, like the late-period free jazz Coltrane albums Bonner's hip jazz friends had him listening to back at the University of Florida.

"I am always willing to be helped... especially by one with taste in beards as refined as yours, Hibachi," Matt Bonner says, trying to get some point of common ground between them.

A gap in the wall a foot beneath the beard opens. Preparing for anything between a handshake and an assassination, Bonner readies his set-shot T-Rex arms. Out pops a microwave. "This is magic, Matthew. It's a Magic Microwave. This will help you heat up in a hurry. Heat a sandwich up, only once, at dawn every day. Trust it, Matthew. But always once, never twice. I know what bringing too much heat does to a man." The bearded mouth sighs, and Bonner knows that Arenas' eyes, despite being glued (no doubt) to the Internet or a worldly periscope or something, now must gaze into some sort of abyss as Arenas says this.

"Thank you. But what will this do for me?" Matt says.

Gilbert answers in a hurry: "Ten percentage points. Every shot. Hibachi. You'll heat up in a hurry. Now, there's the way out. Through that door made of beards."

"Thank you, Agent Zero," Matt says with sincere gratitude (with a dose of supreme skepticism, it's worth noting), as he hoists the Magic Microwave into his gigantic backpack and begins to leave.

"And Matthew," Arenas says as Bonner turns to go, "I like your taste in beards, as well."

"You didn't even have to tell me," Bonner says happily, his beard bristling, "I could tell by the bristling in your own beard."

The mountain encounter ends and Bonner runs down the hill, a bit more slowly because of the gigantic Magic Microwave. Bonner goes to sleep in comfort. Matt Bonner wakes up the next day and the day is just magic.

• • •

Matt Bonner laces up and goes to practice, and heating it up in the Magic Microwave, Bonner has just the best breakfast sandwich and everything tastes a little better. Being a preternaturally gifted shooter and a legendary gym-rat all in one, Matt Bonner is unsurprised to hit 95% of his open corner threes, but it's an open gym and that's just something that happens sometimes when you're Matt Bonner. Matt Bonner was not convinced that the Magic Microwave had done him any good. Sheer random chance could explain everything, after all.

Two weeks of good fortune later, Bonner wakes up in a sweat and realizes that the luck is here to stay. Whatever he's been doing particularly, he vows to continue. Superstition, religion, dying his hair slightly browner? Perhaps it's that Magic Microwave, Matthew?, Bonner chuckles softly as he hears Arenas' voice echo in his head. In any case, whatever it took, Matt Bonner knows that there are no halfway crooks, and that he has stolen something from the obscurity of luck. So Bonner vows to continue his Magic Microwave routine, no matter how shook things might eventually become. Meanwhile, Bonner naturally starts playing more and more at the midrange and rim in practices, finding to his astonishment that the shots are falling there, too, even against his friend Tim Duncan's masterful coverage.

And the shake-up begins almost immediately after he tells his coach Gregg Popovich about his newfound fortune. Bonner hedges against any sort of concrete judgment in his explanation to the coach (and, of course, completely omits mention of the Microwave), saying correctly that the streak mystifies him as much as anyone. Popovich, ever the man of science, proceeds to rigorously test as best he can the effect of the newfound fortune. After awhile, Popovich is convinced: The Spurs have found solid statistical proof that the difference in Bonner's shooting is in fact something like 10 percentage points better, under every condition they can imagine to measure. The season is about to begin, and Popovich reluctantly goes back to the drawing board on his entire offense in case Bonner's streak somehow turns into a trend that survives the rigors of the season.

And at first the Spurs, ever the guarded guards and bastions of the Old Ways, simply pretend to the outside world that nothing has happened and continue using Matt Bonner to throw haymakers from the corner. As they had half-expected, though, after two weeks, Bonner's percentage from 3 (and elsewhere, on those rare alternate occasions) is about 10 percentage points higher, including a few auspicious game-winners (Popovich may be conservative, but even he can't pass up a high-leverage, low-risk shot like that). All the oddsmakers in Vegas and all the sportswriters know that Bonner's luck can't last, that the other proverbial shoe will drop... that is, everyone except for the befuddled group of 25 people in the Spurs organization and Bonner's family that understand that something strange is going on.

And then they start designing sets to get him (at first) marginally more involved, spacing him to get a few extra shots from the midrange and the top of the key. Two more weeks pass, and his advanced stats drop a bit in efficiency and rise a bit in usage. Wait a little longer and he starts to get more minutes and his stats drop a little bit more, as Popovich begins to come to terms with a funky version of the Harden-Sefolosha dilemma as he balances the minutes of new-look Bonner and aging Tim Duncan. The Spurs are more efficient, though, and Popovich finds he has yet another tool to manage minutes.

• • •

The only one of the five stages of grief that coaches can really get any traction from is bargaining. Anger yesterday, depression later, bargaining now and forever. Competition at its core is all about bargaining for as much a share of and as little a brunt of your opponent's bounty, and good coaches are nothing if not competitors. The bargaining begins as opposing coaches look at his numbers and get past their initial anger. Next comes the endless refrain of: "We need to seriously gameplan this weird seven-foot redheaded dude, guys. I mean it, guys, he's not the Matt Bonner you remember. He's even better." Suddenly the prospect of staying home on Matt Bonner becomes a necessity to emphasize rather than a good idea to mention in passing. "Magic Bonner will destroy you if you aren't careful." all the opposing team's sportswriters intone seriously.

And while this is going on, Popovich bargains with his fortune as well. Counter-gameplanning is one of his best qualities, and he quickly realizes that he needs to take full advantage of the Bonner windfall beyond the secondary benefits of spacing. One of his assets is overproducing and he's not maximizing the increased utility that should come from this bounty. So Popovich tinkers and he tinkers, getting Stephen Jackson to accept reduced minutes so they can experiment with Bonner at the 3.

The gameplanning continues, and in midseason, the results are fairly outrageous (literally outrageous; the anger is seething from almost every living person in the world that sees this ridiculous sort of miracle). The midseason period is typified by a game against Denver in which Matt Bonner scores 49 points on 25 shots (including twelve [1.25 PPP!] pick and rolls and 2-3 shooting from the line) and 3 rebounds while guarding Andre Iguodala, who answers this with a 20-15-15 line. The Spurs win with jaw-dropping regularity, their once-great offense humming along like a freight train at new levels of efficiency. The Lakers "panic-trade" (just kidding, the Lakers end up winning this one, too) Pau Gasol and Steve Nash for Luol Deng and Taj Gibson. Suddenly LeBron James' perimeter defense and "second jumps" (for Bonner's height) become the only things that Erik Spolestra ever seems to talk about defensively.

Western playoff teams try everything to stop Bonner and they start to hit on some strategies (though none without plenty of drawbacks, obviously). They attempt to ball-deny Bonner on the entry passes and they attempt to prevent him from getting up shots in the first place. They attempt to get Bonner in foul trouble by driving at him in otherwise-inefficient ways. They attempt to use his relatively lacking defense in space (his man defense is fine) to get an advantage proportional to how much Bonner is able to help the Spurs' offense.

At the end of the day, the opposing coaches weep at what the stats tell them: Matt Bonner's usage is at something like 28% and his shooting efficiency is actually lower than before the magic day happened when all this rad stuff started (because of course he is taking more difficult shots, but with that kind of usage, and still-above-average efficiency? Deadly.). And he turns the ball over more. Bonner is now directly comparable to Kevin Durant, but Durant is still a league above Bonner. It really, really bugs Kevin Durant that this is a real comparison that someone reasonable could make, though.

The only problem is that Matt Bonner has never had Dirk or Durant's scoring cleverness and tenacity. One thing that is so aggravating to watch about Bonner (and this continues after his super-cool day of magic and luck) is that, aside from a neat dribble-drive and hook game, his sole offensive skills are positioning and shooting. The Spurs can use him on the pick-and-roll because he is an excellent pop-out midrange shooter now and an alright finisher, but the risk of turnovers or of Bonner getting caught outside his comfort zone with no escape is ubiquitous. Dirk has a move where he goes on his back foot and fades away, and from which Dirk can accurately finish from just about any distance. And that's just the start of the innovator's deadly offensive arsenal. But Bonner has no innovation, at least in this sense. He's just a lot better at shooting any shot.

The Spurs are happy, though, and feel pretty confident about their title chances (understandably, considering they finish with about 70 wins). They do however note with befuddlement that the efficiency differential gained from Bonner (they estimate their margin is about 3 points per game better, solely because of Bonner's improvement) is almost entirely due to those extra 10 percentage points of magic, even after massive, intelligent game-planning and changing the structure of their offense to take advantage of Bonner's skillset.

They roll through the playoffs on the back of the player their fan base once had called "Winter Shoes", but those snow shoes find extra traction that summer. The next day, after his Finals MVP has been hung from the rafters of the highest buildings, the magic disappears as soon as Matt Bonner wakes up (Bonner comments with horror that the breakfast sandwich is only "alright") and the Spurs are ultimately pretty happy with Matt Bonner even though his Algernon-esque fall back down to Earth will eventually take him out of the league in a few more years.

"That was all pretty rad, I think. That was a pretty cool thing that happened and then stopped happening," the world eventually agrees as it collectively returns to its morning coffee and breakfast and paper.

THE END

• • •

What is the point of this story, besides providing something ridiculous for your consideration?

Well, I suppose the point is that the essence of a great scorer is something like that of a great shooter, but with extra percentage points of "magic" on every shot that must be gameplanned against and creatively defended and whose existence must be resigned to by opposing coaches. Carmelo Anthony has a "magical" ability to make inefficient shots not-so-inefficient (which doesn't excuse shot selection questions, of course). LeBron James has a magical ability to get to the line and the rim. Steve Nash and Chris Paul have a magical ability to make the percentages of their teammates increase.

I say "magic" not to mystify the essence of a scorer but to (efficiently and artfully) mean "the end result can be quantified but whose process and full expression would be exceedingly difficult to fully describe". For after all, in one sense, it's a matter of time (and patience for analysis to catch up to the data) before we can figure out how a player makes his own and his team's shot selection more or less efficient and his team's shooting efficiency from locations more or less efficient, and vice versa for the defense he plays. But in another sense, this effect really is sort of magic (whether you call it that, or whether you call it psychophysical deception, or game-planning, or practice, or talent, or a hundred other hidden variables, each of hidden significance and hidden interaction with the end product. [This is incidentally why I tend to ignore preseason reports about what kind of "shape" a player is in unless that is exceedingly relevant to his skillset]).

And all this to say that Matt Bonner does not have that magic (at least not in a world where Bonnersanity is still hypothetical). Richard Jefferson does not have that magic. Boris Diaw and Stephen Jackson, for all the valid critiques you can make and for all their limitations, do have that magic, and have enough awareness to maximize its utility in an unpredictable array of situations. The Spurs got an offense that can magically carve up any defense, and ironically one of the best floor-spacers in the history of the 3-point arc (in Bonner) has played a fundamentally small part in that magical brew. And it seems to me that the key difference is that you can't gameplan against the Spurs' offense, but you can gameplan against the offense of Matt Bonner (same goes for Richard Jefferson). Stephen Jackson doesn't just make love to pressure, his skillset is notably (not coincidentally, one supposes) conducive to handling pressure.

And maybe this is a stretch of a silly thought experiment, but it seems to me that that's what the Rockets gained and what the Thunder gave up in their recent trade, the "magic" of creating shots. Kevin Martin is more than a fine offensive player, he's an excellent offensive player. And yet his smart shot selection and free-throw-drawing ability always strikes me as partially as based on the "not important enough to gameplan against specifically" of the regular season, whereas I would say the opposite for James Harden, who (Manu-like or not; I say not) is fundamentally a very creative offensive player in this sense. And when the defense buckles down, I honestly fully expect Kevin Martin to wilt and James Harden to thrive, even if their per-minute regular season statistics end up similar enough to comment. Not because Harden is more efficient or more of a creator (he is at this point in their careers, but as we're seeing, he has been held to a fraction of his true utility and ability level in OKC), but because as far as coaches are concerned, to gameplan against Harden is to contain him and distribute the efficiency to his teammates. The gameplan against Martin is simply to contain him and to watch his team struggle, all the while sort of hoping he doesn't hit a bunch of threes when you're not looking (none of this in offense to Mr. Martin, whose stats are just as real as Harden's; this is a qualitative observation).

This concept of magic (and sorry for the unfortunate linguistic coincidence, Orlando fans) is, in the end, what makes the Lakers team (and Kobe, as perhaps its final form's spiritual core) scary even with the frailty of age. The Princeton read-and-react offense (or whatever comes out of the strange Lakers' experiment) is for May and June, not for November (though in its final form, it's just as formidable in November). It's frustrating to watch, and I think they should probably coast on talent and pick and rolls from time to time while the offense gels... But really, all the great offensive systems in basketball: the read-and-react system, the Thunder's disgustingly efficient pindown play, the Heat's Total Basketball, the Spurs' motion offense, the Triangle, (sorry again) the Magic's 2009 offense? All of these things were built over the course of years of trying to harness and maximize the magic margins that overhang all the statistics of all the great creative scorers, shooters, spacers, and facilitators. All of these offenses require an absolute minimum of the so-called scrubs like Bonner whose same such magic margins barely jut from a dependable baseline of "just okay", like nearly-fallow fields of alchemy, fallow fields spanning miles of draft busts and one-dimensional role-players that play a banal sport that is called basketball with the scornful irony reserved for Bonnersanity in full focaccia-melt spin cycle.

You're reading your favorite basketball blog. Today (finally!) they've got some power rankings up. You scroll down the page with glee, and immediately searching for your favorite team. With horror, though -- 50 wins, ranked 10th? "No, this can't be!" you shout to the heavens. "Why?" The writer (that cad!) has a reasonable response: your best player is, in fact, injured for the opener. That will probably cost your team some games and slow down the development of your team's chemistry. Rough going. "Fair enough," you shrug and acknowledge. After all, this guy knows what he's doing. You move on with your day.

... but not before checking the rest of the list. Huge mistake. Because now you begin to notice that your favorite team's divisional rival is listed at 58 wins, even though their best player is also injured. What's the explanation? Well, this injury may be just as harmful, but at least it will force their uncreative coach into small ball lineups, which are eminently more effective with such a roster. You huff. You puff. And then you get mad. You state strongly to your computer screen a lot of uncomfortably valid objections:

• "But my coach is actually creative with lineups! Why should we expect a bad coach being forced into small ball be more effective than my coach who has been using small ball correctly since the days of Don Nelson in Dallas!"

• "Even if that's true, what happens when their short small ball lineup has to sub out for the 8th-12th spots in the rotation, because those are the only players left? Why is this kind of a forced situation, replete with borderline D-leaguers, remotely preferable to having 7-9 rotation-level players to choose from on any given night? Why is this kind of a forced situation better than my forced situation, considering mine doesn't substantially affect the minutes allocation for anyone beyond the 10th man?"

Most importantly:

• "Why does their team get the benefit of the broken-window fallacy while my team is presumed to take the full chemistry-and-efficiency loss right on the chin? What is up with this writer's pernicious, unstated double-standard?"

So your day went from a happy one to a sad one in about two minutes, and all the unfairness of life has come back to mystify you again. "Who's this human trashcan, and why does he like the __<EXPLETIVE DELETED> Los Angeles _Clippers so much?"_ you ask. You suppose sadly that there will be other articles that you'll read, someday, but never again will these articles be read by one so innocent as you before the reading. Weeks later, you remain an avid visitor to the site. Unfortunately, your visits are now tinged with pure spite and furious disdain instead of unbridled joy and the desire for knowledge and informed opinions. You leave vicious comments. You have officiallybecome a troll. This "Choose Your Own Adventure" story is complete.

How could this situation have been prevented?

• • •

Baroque Standards & the Rank Problems

One thing that surprised me a few years ago is that is that it's totally possible for me to improvise half-decent fugues and canons on my personal piano. Certainly nothing to write home about, in my case, but it was still surprising. I've been playing piano for quite a long time, but I'm no savant -- just a mediocre player. But I'd read and heard about all these elaborate fugues and thought "Wow, how could anyone be that brilliant, just to get started?". Well, it's not as hard as I thought. I sat down and tried it. Used some basic harmonic and rhythmic tricks to keep the piece driving, you know? Focus on the bass, focus on the themes, and put it together. Simple. The composers of the Baroque era had a few themes that they were able to get a handle on, a few short phrases, and then they'd set the metronome working and see what fit. They did it long enough and the structures grew at once more complex and more direct, over a few hundred years. It was a process.

• • •

The Door's Locked -- a New Way In

Power rankings are constructed to be easy to improvise and go down the list in a few sittings. You could design a half-credible flow chart as to how most people compose them. "Here's the top team in the league.", "Now who's worse?", "How much are they worse by?", "Did I miss a team?", etc. The point of power rankings and their structure is to quickly get something written about every team. It's a sports-writing gimmick, not that there's anything wrong with that. That problem with divisional rivals getting the baroque treatment? It's a totally valid concern. But it comes from the fact that no one can keep in their heads 30 teams and the subtle balances of power that something like an injury will affect. And it's a zero-sum season: You think the Spurs will win 55 games this season? Alright, but that also means there are 55 fewer wins up for grabs for the rest of the teams, 5 fewer available than for someone else predicting the Spurs win 50. No one has the entire schedule in their heads. No one knows the minor detail that the Warriors play the Suns first game of the season so an injury probably won't affect their win/loss record... or, if they do, no one can balance that detail with the schedules of the Spurs and Mavs and Lakers and Clippers, etc., and engineer the perfect mental model to explicate the subtle calculus of injuries and limited options and just plain unknowns that are so endemic to sports.

Power rankings offer a quick, elegant, reductive way out. Go team by team, and if you don't like it, change up some numbers. In a roundabout way, it's also the famous problem of stats vs. intuition. Not usually a strict "stats vs. eyes" debate as some would like to believe; instead, it's usually a debate between one person's pet set of statistics and interpretations versus another's pet set. You might be able to project that Eric Gordon is a better player than last season, yes. Valid qualitative observation. But how do you balance that with a lot of other shooting guards also getting better? How do you weigh the statistical effect of rule changes, like the rip-through-foul getting altered before last season? How do you take into account Gordon's changed role on a (vastly) changed team? How do you compare how his improvement affects his team to how other similar shooting guards will effect theirs? What about the risk of uncertainty - did you scout him last season? Did you document him last season? Even if you did -- how do you know it's not your eyes that changed? How do you know the stats he has put up so far mean the same thing they did last season?

This isn't necessarily to advocate for more statistics -- common interpretations of stats suffer similar problems. As soon as you pretend otherwise, as soon as you try to run without shoes in the winter, you start to stub your toes and feel the frostbite. SRS for Miami does not have the same meaning as SRS for Boston, even though the calculation is made the same way, even if you adjust for pace. They play a different way qualitatively, and SRS can't necessarily capture that, especially when you get down to the level of matchups. All SRS does is give you a good and immediate sense of a team's quality. So you make an internal decision. Is Miami better than their SRS? Is Boston better than theirs? Let's look at more stats! But then, infuriatingly, you're back where you started. And you're back to intuition, and looking at secondary and tertiary stats and trying to glean significance. "How bad will the Clippers (or Spurs) be at protecting the rim? Is this an epochal concern, or is it going to amount to 1 point per 100 possessions? Will teams plan to get to the rim more often, making it a much worse flaw than last year's stats suggest? Or are those stats already taking that into account?"

The point here is to recognize that when people (be they writers or fans or soulless statisticians [Ed. Note: Hey, I heard that.]) make these sorts of advanced projections about hundreds of unknown variables, these are the pitfalls. Baroque reasoning must become endemic to how we approach dealing with a lot of data. We need to realize that self-consistent stats tables on the one hand and (totally baroque) presentations like power rankings don't offer a way out. They offer a way in, for writers to check the thermostat while setting it until the room feels comfortable. We all know that setting the thermostat doesn't mean everyone else in the room will be comfortable. It's a complicated problem and instead of admitting that we are cosmically adrift trying to make sense of an unknowable problem, we still want to boldly insist that we know the standings of the West in five months, or that the only unknowns relevant to our prediction are simple, bite-sized factoids like whether Manu will be healthy in March.

You may be totally right about the Clippers being worse than those power rankings suggest. Or you simply may be right that self-consistency is missing from the rankings -- but try doing the power rankings yourself. You'll find them exceedingly easy to begin, and then, if you're already this kind of a daring soul, you'll end up where all of us end up in the land of power rankings: going absolutely nuts trying to get them right and perfectly balanced. Eventually you'll settle on some sort of mind-shattering movie set to Bach as you indifferently hit "Publish," sending the rankings for all the world to see, as though your mouse is the trigger of a gun. You know not how much fury you'll cause to your readers, and then you'll laugh yourself to a restless sleep. You wake up in a cold sweat, wishing to God you'd ranked the Clippers lower. I mean, after all. Your ranking is based on Lamar Odom being healthy and willing to play 20+ mpg, and Ryan Hollins being an asset, and 40 year old players providing serious contributions, and just this huge myriad of --

... I mean, seriously, it's just not happening. Sorry.

Gothic Ginobili turns one today. As part of our celebration of this somewhat unexpected milestone, our writers are producing a variety of content reflecting and appreciating the journey that got us here. Also, evidently, we're publishing a semi-preview roundtable where our writers participate in a new style of roundtable where the questions are made up and our points don't matter. We're revolutionaries. Maybe.

#1: What is a new perspective you'd like to bring to your NBA viewing experience in this new season?

Adam Koscielak (@AdamKoscielak): I have no idea. I know that I have to expand my analytical sense. Perhaps root out the irrational ideas I have at time, and focus on the rational ones. Or perhaps the other way around. We’ll see when the season gets here, I guess.

Jacob Harmon (@jharm71): Recently I find myself trying to focus a lot more on the background elements of the game. Obviously there’s a tendency to ball-watch or star-watch, and you try to take in all the aspects of the play, but I’ve developed a weird habit of watching stuff that isn’t even in the play. Sometimes stuff that’s not even on the floor. What kind of faces is Daequan Cook making in the corner? What sort of weird kids are on the sidelines? How close IS Rick Carlisle to having a stroke? This is the valuable sort of analysis I want to bring to the table. Hire me, Daryl.

Alex Arnon (@Alex_Arnon): I don’t know, man. I’m as much of a surface fan as they get really. I guess I could make some really primo puns on some player’s names or somehow relate [insert obscure NBA player here] to Waka Flocka Flame -- I feel like I have a deeper understanding of irrelevant trap music artists than most typical long-form NBA blog readers (read: white people). I’ll leave the actual intelligent analysis up to you actually intelligent people.

• • •

#2: Name one player you'll pay an absolutely unreasonable amount of attention to in the coming season. Then pretend that teams are people and name a team.

Adam: Aside from Marcin Gortat and the Suns? Jonas Valanciunas and the Raptors. This team has playoff potential many people fail to see, and Jonas is a big guy with a ton of promise. Whatever happens with them, it should be fun.

Jacob: Obviously I’ll be lavishly taking in as many OKC games as possible and talking about our Big Four (Three? Man, I hope this post doesn’t come back to haunt me in a few days) to anyone who will listen. Of the Four, I’m really going to be obsessing over Ibaka’s evolving offensive game. He seemed to improve dramatically and looks to come in with a ton of confidence on the offensive end. Other than OKC, I’m bandwagoning the Bobcats this season. Despite the misteps, stumbles, faceplants, and uninspiring baby steps, I really want to see them succeed. I’ll be watching MKG pretty closely, especially after I ranted about T-Rob being the better pick and have thus far looked like an idiot for doing so. I’m a cult of Jordan guy, I want to see him vindicated, and Charlotte really needs any enthusiasm they can get, so I’ll be watching and scanning for any signs of optimism. Those guys don’t need another cynical outsider telling them they’re doomed. Go Bobcats!

Arnon: I’ll be honest - I don’t get over emotional trauma like a rational human being. Whether zzzit [sic] be something insightful/hilarious/not-completely-embarrassing I could’ve said in a conversation or an all-too-brief encounter that I could’ve elongated with an all-too-beautiful member of the female persuasion, I like to reminisce on what could’ve been and what hopefully might be. So it’s in this vein that I’m going to watch Daryl Morey’s Frankenstein-ish monster of innumerable power forwards try to make it work with my one true love Jeremy Lin. I’ll be superimposing the face of Amar’e Stoudemire on Royce White’s sweet cuts late at night after a few too many glasses of wine. I’ll be hoping that Jeremy Lamb takes an ill-advised double-teamed jumper after a few too many jab steps in an attempt to see how Melo would’ve wasted Lin’s drive-and-dishes. I’ll be crying after the Rockets improbably make the 8th seed in the west while James Dolan laughs at me from his throne of plutocracy as the Knicks undergo their customary crash and burn.

• • •

#3: What do you want to say now that you will be peer-pressured away from saying on Twitter and the like, but this is a CONSTRUCTIVE ENVIRONMENT, AND FOR ONCE, I WILL NOT BE SHOUTED DOWN, I'm just going to say it once, okay, and then we can all figure out what it means? Get it off your chest. Relaaax.

Adam: Michael Beasley is not as bad as we think. I’ve watched him in the preseason, he’s made some mistakes, but mostly he’s shown some real smarts I didn’t expect to see. Way too often Twitter finds itself hung up in old memes, and heads out to biblical proportions of self-proof to make sure that they prove you wrong. “Mike Beasley is playing solid basketball? Well, it’s only the preseason.” can quickly turn to “Hahahah, I told you so.” Unless he stays as a solid-to-good wing for the entire season, they will harp on him for every bad shot. Because he’s Michael Beasley. The dude’s only been in the league four years now, he’s changed teams three times. And he has his fourth head coach and system to learn now. Schadenfreude is fun, but it’s much more fun when it’s an established veteran with the boneheaded plays (looking at you, Jamal Crawford)

Jacob: I’m with Adam on the Beas, for what it’s worth. The guy has got a lot of talent and great physical tools, and I think the “headcase” thing gets blown out of proportion to the extent that it overshadows him as a player. I still think he can be a decent wing given the right situation; I believe in the Beas. Other than him, I’m going to say I’m on the DeMarcus Cousins bandwagon. I think his characterization as such a young player of his caliber has been entirely unfair, and that much of the locker room problems in Sacramento stemmed from Paul Westphal, who demonstrably was willing to throw the guy under the bus to save his own skin. He’s never going to be the charming golden boy, but I don’t think there’s enough Rondos and Cousins in the league who have both the unashamed chip on their shoulder and the game to back it up. A lot of guys with one or the other, but not enough with both. It’s fun. The guy can play. He’s been in the league two seasons and he’s putting up 18 and 11, which isn’t exactly easy even if your efficiency isn’t stellar. People need to get off his back a little bit before the dude snaps and kills Jerry Colangelo.

Arnon: Teams like the Justice League Lakers and Super Friends Heat are making the NBA less enjoyable. Sure, you have your hidden gems like the Nuggets that are “fun” to watch but at it its core this is an extremely Gollum-esque league -- all these guys want and all the majority of fans care about is getting that ring (after their paychecks, of course). Perhaps it’s just an extension of us as Americans who only care about being the most powerful and very best like no one ever was (oh my god did I really just make a LoTR and Pokemon joke in the same paragraph please take me out back and put me down for my own good [Ed. Note -- No. Get back to the salt mines.]). When it’s a virtual certainty that the Heat will face either the Lakers or Thunder in the finals if they all remain healthy, my view on my Knicks goes from the usual pessimism to complete apathy. Why does it matter if we get the 4th or 8th seed when the only difference is that we lose to the Heat in the 2nd round instead of the 1st? I’ll try to find little nuggets of pure enjoyability from the NBA like a Tony Allen lockdown, Damian Lillard flash of promise, or Andre Miller flashback performance. But in a world where I’m slowly turning into an adult and becoming more burdened by the realities of real life I’m afraid that I’ll have less time for these small pleasures and that I’ll only care about the seemingly predetermined big picture.

• • •

#4: What team is the ice cream of the NBA? What team is the smoked salmon of the NBA? Green tea? Go crazy with this one.

Adam: The ice cream has to be the Denver Nuggets. Their speed is yummy, the flow of the offense is amazing and whenever you feel down about the status of the league, you can watch a whole big bucket of their buckets. When it comes to the salmon, here’s a fun story for you; I used to HATE salmon. Like, absolutely completely, totally hate it. Actually, I hated all fish but herring on some kind of irrational level. Then, one day, during a visit to my aunt and uncle, I was basically force-fed some of my uncle’s home-smoked salmon. I’ve loved salmon (as long as it was good, fresh, well smoked salmon, of course) ever since. So, for me, that’s the Miami Heat. I had an irrational dislike for them, categorizing them as an annoying superteam, but the truth is, that the Flying Death Machine is A TON of fun to watch. And if you tell me otherwise, you just hate smoked salmon. And that’s ok, you’ll like it one day too. And finally, green tea, calming, healthy, and polarizing. Some people love it, some people hate it. Personally, I love all tea, and some good green tea sometimes outranks black tea in my ratings. But, I understand people who don’t like it’s bitterness (I do not, however, understand people who sweeten green tea. You are all criminals to me), which doesn’t change the fact, I will never share their crazy viewpoint. Now, this team, for me, has to be the Suns. I love them, even though many people don’t. I love them because of their very particular taste, not in spite of it. You get my point here, right?

Jacob: Man, I’ve never had salmon or green tea, so I don’t really know what that means. I think you’ve gotta break down the ice cream of the NBA. What flavor are we talking here? If you’re talking ice cream flavors, it pretty much breaks down to vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry. Everything else is just some mixture of those three, like a color wheel. The vanilla ice cream of the NBA has got to be the Minnesota Timberwolves. Plain, refreshing but not too exciting, they’re going to satisfy your sweet tooth but you’re not exactly going to write home about them. And there’s an awful lot of white dudes in that locker room. Even Brandon Roy is more milk chocolate than anything. I know the blogs and Twitter have squeezed every bit of commentary possible out of how white this Timberwolves team is, but does anyone remember last season, when the Lakers fielded a starting lineup with like three white guys on it? I think there was a feature on ESPN. Whoever wrote that piece should be hopping the first flight to Minneapolis. Anyway, the vanilla Timberwolves, for the trifecta of game, skin color, and icy precipitation. (If there’s a lower road to take here, somebody let me know.)

I just Googled “what does salmon taste like,” and realized I have had salmon. Almost every Sunday for at least a couple of years. Smoky, a little aged and crispy, but still good, still satisfying and filling, and a serviceable centerpiece for a midday lunch. I may be way off base here, and maybe it’s the context in which I’m remembering them (both the food and the team) but to me that’s the Boston Celtics. I don’t exactly seek out Celtics games, and I’m not especially crazy about any one facet of the team, but I can’t deny I’m usually entertained when I watch them play, and I’m always pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed the experience. I’m not crazy about Paul Pierce, but I have a ton of respect for both KG and Rondo, and with Jeff Green back I expect to find myself enjoying quite a few unplanned Celtics games this season. I’ve definitely never had green tea though. For sure.

Alex Arnon: I suppose this question all depends on your view of these foods. Ice cream to me is something that I legitimately can’t stop eating once I start. It’s either all or nothing for me - one bite turns into one pint and one pint turns into one huge night of bloating and regret. So on one hand there’s this thing which is so captivating that I constantly need more but getting more just leads to regret -- doesn’t that sound like the Golden State Warriors to you? A team that has so much delicious offense that you can’t help but watch every Klay Thompson three or David Lee pick-n-pop(sicle). But upon too much gorging you can’t help but notice that the Warriors are behind due to a complete lack of ability (or even disregard) on the defensive end and while you’ve fallen in love with them during the good offensive times, you can’t help but feel disgust at yourself for being entrapped by their offense so much that you completely disregarded their defensive woes until they were almost magically down 120 - 102 with a minute to go in the first half.

Smoked salmon is one of those foods that is fairly - uh - caucasianly biased when it comes to fandom. I could go for the easy joke here and say that this means that the Timberwolves are the smoked salmon of the league (COUGH HEY JACOB HOW YOU DOIN' COUGH) but I think that while they’re not the whitest team by roster like the T-Wolves, the Indiana Pacers certainly more than make up for it with the TYPE of players who they employ. Being that you’re here on Gothic Ginobili, you’re most likely an extremely intelligent, incredibly handsome and/or downright beautiful person who knows of all the white player tropes already. But I’ll rehash them here for you anyway -- whenever there’s a talented white dude in the NBA or NFL, all of the analysts praise his “mental fortitude” during tough times when “he keeps the locker room together” through his “blue-collar” “hustle plays” where he’ll “sacrifice life and limb” diving for a loose ball which he’ll always get because he’s “always in the right place at the right time”, with his “deceptive speed” and anachronistic “love of mayonnaise”. Alright, maybe that last one isn’t true, but doesn’t that sound like your 2012 - 2013 Indiana Pacers? They’re a team full of players who play way above their talent level through teamwork, hustle, and defense and I can almost guarantee that someone on SportsCenter is going to talk about them being “scrappy” during every Pacers highlight. And they employ Tyler Hansbrough. Case closed.

As for green tea, I don’t get the hype. Everyone’s always talking about how it’s good for weight loss and good for blood pressure and good for energy and good for preventing diabetes and good for -- well, you get the point. Here’s the thing though, I don’t care how good green tea is for you, because I absolutely despise it. Whether it’s because I had a terrible experience with green tea ice cream once (no, seriously, I once had to deal with a hysterically crying girlfriend in a Vietnamese restaurant over our green tea ice cream dessert as she ranted about how unfair life is because she got a flat tire and the guy made her pay full price for it even after she shamelessly flirted with him) or because I just hate all teas in general (except Arizona teas because god damn who doesn’t love that delicious corn syrupy goodness), I just don’t like it no matter how good it is for reasons unbeknownst to myself. For me, the team that meshes with this rambling, semi-coherent analogy has to be the Hawks. I have no idea why I hate them -- I don’t know if it’s their terrible name, Joe Johnson seemingly sabotaging them for years to get his max contract, being forced to watch their mediocre basketball in the playoffs each year, or their practically non-existent fanbase. While the NBA blogosphere at-large seems to love them this year because of whatever black magic Danny Ferry worked to get rid of Joe Johnson and clear up some cap space, there’s just absolutely no love going their way from me. And, thankfully, there’s currently no love going in that aforementioned crazy girlfriend’s way from me any more as well.

• • •

• IMPORTANT NOTICE FROM THE EDITOR •

"... What."

• THIS CONCLUDES YOUR IMPORTANT NOTICE FROM THE EDITOR •

To bring our Olympic coverage up, we’re bringing our formerly retired series of daily vignettes — titled “The Outlet” — back for the Olympics. “Don’t call it a comeback.” Though, you can call it series 3, as we are in the title. Every day there's Olympic Basketball to cover, we’ll try to share two or three short vignettes from our collective of writers ruminating on the previous day’s events. Should be a fun time. Today’s Outlet covers the action from Olympic basketball, day one.

• AUS vs BRA -- The Return of Flopsy (Alex Dewey)
• USA vs FRA -- FRA-enheit 451 (Alex Dewey)
• RUS vs GBR -- They Had To Use Their AK (Alex Dewey)
• ARG vs LTH -- "We've Been Here For Years" (Alex Dewey)

Click the jump for today's thoughts.

• • •

AUS vs BRA -- The Return of Flopsy
Alex Dewey

Okay, only watched a quarter and a half of this one, but one thing stuck in my craw: Brazil's offense was relatively insane by NBA standards in this one, and to be instructive, I'd like to focus on the Brazilian great Anderson Varejao. If you've ever watched Anderson Varejao of the Cavaliers operate out of the pick-and-roll, you know how intelligently he plays, rolling even if the point guard decides to kick it out, rolling with his massive frame in directions that allow him to flare-screen or post-up for later action on the play. If he gets the ball, he can use it, even though he isn't an exemplary scorer. It's awesome. In the 2011-12 preseason, I noted with relish a wonderful end-of-quarter play by Andy with the Cavs:

My favorite Andy play of this game came at the end of either the second or the third quarter when he was rolling off a pick for Kyrie, who couldn’t get him the ball and ended up passing to a second option (Casspi I think). Varejao kept rolling, kept looking for the pass, and in the meantime was establishing good post position. But Casspi was open and took a good three. As soon as Casspi set up to shoot the three, Varejao, still in mid-roll, used the fact that his man was still moving with him to establish rebounding position, which he got on a near-side rebound for an awkward fading tip-in to beat the buzzer. I know chasedown blocks and dunks make the highlight films, and if it didn’t beat the buzzer it wouldn’t even be a highlight. But it was the kind of tenacity, intelligence, and creativity that wins games and championships.

Seeing Varejao in the Brazil offense was something of a revelation. In an offense that seemingly has no weak or strong side of the court (that is to say, cross-court passes were extremely common, and in a few possessions you'd see multiple cross-court passes -- real passes, not just reverses around the perimeter), so fast and inclusive is its offensive action, Varejao looked totally complete as a player. Even though Varejao isn't a good creator or scorer (even in the less tightly-wound international game that sees Pau regress back to a top creator/scorer), Anderson looks like the total package -- a node in a fast-moving network that must move quickly and unpredictably from side to side. Varejao's decision-making is actually used properly, making him -- in retrospect, unsurprisingly -- an astonishingly complete, elite big man at both ends in the Olympics and perhaps more useful than a more traditional scorer from the five.

To put it one way, if the Spurs (or whatever Steve Nash can make of the Lakers next season) somehow acquired Anderson Varejao, I sincerely believe that their top-ranked offense would not suffer much or at all. Instead, I rather believe that the top-ranked offense would change its character, much like it did with the acquisitions of Stephen Jackson, Kawhi Leonard, and Boris Diaw last season (or with the Lakers, with the emergence of Lamar Odom and Pau Gasol at the start of their most recent dynasty). Just as Parker's French Team experiences informed his masterful 2012 campaign, perhaps a closer look at Andy could inform an NBA coach about how to use him in the future. A top coach and a top guard might be able to find a way to use Anderson Varejao to his full potential, despite his reasonable reputation as a role player. Even with Andy's fine contract, it's pretty surreal to think how much more valuable he could be. If not, well, that's just one of the breaks of the game and a reminder that Olympic basketball has a way of turning your expectations upside-down.

This is quite aside from Andy's defensive skills, and quite apart from the exciting fourth quarter of the Brazil-Australia match, which saw the Aussies make an awesome comeback behind the speed and energy of (admittedly quite inefficient overall) Patty Mills and an impossible do-everything stretch by a finishing, charge-drawing, perfect-passing Joe Ingles that nearly brought the Aussies into the extra session. Ingles made two crazy finishes on two consecutive possessions_, one a high-arcing banked layup over the outstretched arms of Anderson Varejao_. I guess Joe Ingles subscribes to the Kobe System. Unfortunately the game was more-or-less decided when Brazil forced an Australian kick-ball with 9 seconds left, resetting Brazil's expiring shot clock and forcing Australia to gamble or foul. Ugh.

There should... probably be a slight rule change on that account, all things considered?

• • •

USA vs FRA -- FRA-enheit 451
Alex Dewey

This was a barnburner. Unfortunately for Gerard Depardieu, France itself was the proverbial barn. Boris Diaw looked awful, Kevin Seraphin looked solid. Tony Parker was sparkling, and he wore these goggles, and he still had both eyes, and it was really neat. Parker ran the offense quite well, and was able to get open space for some of his signature drives, borrowing his "Loop" action from the Spurs (or vice versa, it's impossible to know). In "Loop," as Joon Kim aptly demonstrates here, Parker passes the ball off to another player at the top, then uses a series of screens around the paint (in the eponymous loop shape) and his own speed to get a few feet off the defender, from which he can operate with an extra couple steps or else force the defense into an auspicious switch. Parker is well-equipped in these situations, and for the first quarter, the French team was holding pretty close to the U.S.

Then the U.S. remembered that it had more depth and talent at every other position -- even considering its sparse bigs, even to a somewhat stacked and medal-worthy French team decked out with major and minor NBA players. The depth came from Coach Krzyzewski's somewhat obvious decision to play small ball for much of the game, for the simple reason that it allowed him to play as much of Durant and LeBron together as possible and two top point guards (often Westbrook and Chris Paul) at once. Amusingly, France still found itself with mismatches on defense (I saw two LeBron post-ups on Tony Parker, for example... one of which -- hilariously -- failed. The other resulted in a kick-out three. I was pretty confused as they were happening). LeBron, Melo, and KD are remarkably good players with length and versatility, and it turns out that guarding inferior NBA fours and (in LeBron's case) even fives was not a major concern compared to the offensive output it provided. I never got the sense that Ronny Turiaf or Boris Diaw could score at will.

The U.S. offense was pretty neat, at least in the highlights. Whole lot of lobs and cuts. LeBron made an insane 50-foot bounce pass between two streaking defenders. Heavenly. My personal favorite (great euphemism for "not an insane 50-foot bounce pass," right?) was Deron Williams on a fast break, receiving an outlet pass and delivering a behind-the-back, over-the-shoulder touch to a player at the basket for an easy finish. And then there's this -- Harden's athleticism on the left-handed finish kind of evokes Scottie Pippen for me. I'm never going to complain about over-passing on a team with Kobe and Melo, but I guess that would be the nit to pick. France did not have the quickness to stop the overpassing, in any case, although Batum had some nice defensive sequences, including an impressive chase-down block right before LeBron's needle-threading 50-foot topper.

There were a lot of fouls, though, especially in the first half. To be honest, the fouls made the game alternately pretty and unwatchable. The officiating seemed to be alright but altogether rather suspect. Then again, our baseline is constant bailout calls for superstars, so seeing Boris Diaw get bailed-out is pretty jarring and makes objectivity difficult.

• • •

RUS vs GBR -- They Had To Use Their AK
Alex Dewey

Man, international play really makes these defensive-minded wings look like the best scorers in the world for stretches, eh? Former Jazz great Andrei Kirilenko and Luol Deng played their respective brands of tenacious, punishing, versatile defense. But it was their offensive games that really seemed to shine. On a set play at one point Kirilenko made this insane redirection pass across the lane from the top of his reach for an easy finish. AK-47 at various instances performed as every causal link in the positive production of easy baskets, especially in the currency of steals, passes, and finishes. Kirilenko was by far the best offensive player on the floor and for stretches Deng (and Pops Mensah-Bonsu) could make the same claim. Deng made this wonderful dribble-penetration-to-dunk through Russia's defense that the announcers described as a "pro move" but I don't think I've seen any of the pros in the NBA do it quite like that, not with quite the cleverness of strafing. All that said, while Russia looked tough, I'm not holding my breath for them to pull out a game from the U.S. Kirilenko might outplay one of our insanely long, versatile combo wings/bigs. He might even outplay two. But I really doubt he's going to outplay all nineteen such players on the U.S. roster.

And if they intend to medal, they'll need him to.

• • •

ARG vs LTH -- "We've Been Here For Years"
Alex Dewey

21-10-6-4 on 17 shots with 2 turnovers. Not a world-beating line.

Manu Ginobili makes a drive and his man doesn't get called for contact. It might have been a flop on Manu's part. There's no way to know. But Manu evidently does not think so, and during the ensuing Lithuanian possession, you can see Manu complaining about the no-call. Lithuania gets a basket on the possession and Manu takes it upcourt, still upset, still complaining to the ref walking beside him about that single no-call. As he's dribbling it up in the back-court, while he's in mid-complaint, Manu draws a rip-through on the full-court-pressing Lithuanian defender. So Argentina's offense resets and in seconds, Manu makes an angry drive and then gets a tough, impossibly-high-arcing finish, off glass as I recall.

The announcers compare him to David Banner. You wouldn't like him when he's angry. I don't know, I kind of liked the whole sequence. And -- flops and complaints being incidental to this anecdote -- the sequence exemplified just how much control Manu really exerted over this game. Sure, Carlos Delfino was shooting lights-out from deep and Luis Scola was shooting quite well himself (not to mention his finishing that seems ever crisper in the international game). But this was Manu's game, and he looked like a world-beater.

Manu passed the ball to Luis Scola by using a soft bounce off the top of the backboard on one play. On another, Manu drove to draw in the man from the corner, started a two-pass reverse around the perimeter to a wide-open Carlos Delfino in the corner to end the first half. On a finish in the second half, the announcers noted how he extended his arms to make a finish under the basket, and I understood exactly what they meant - his sinewy strength allows him those crafty, stretch-arm plays that defenders cannot help but underestimate. On another play, Manu found Nocioni on the roll for a wide-open look. Dagger. Ho-hum.

And -- with the game in hand, two minutes left -- Manu got into a vicious scrum for a meaningless rebound that Manu nevertheless felt was his. He fell on the other player, back first. A teammate kissed him as he subbed out. He emerged unharmed.

21-10-6-4 on 17 shots with 2 turnovers. Call it 30 things that he did right against, say, 10 he did wrong, in 30 minutes. No, it's not a world-beating line, but just like Manu himself, it sneaks up on you, it aggregates, it pools its advantages into something powerful. It complains and games for every inch and every millimeter, and it's vanquished the stars and stripes before.

The internal monologue of Lakers head coach Mike Brown was always full of cuss words. Much like our own spatial universe, the space that Brown's cusses inhabited was both infinite and always expanding. Also extremely confusing. Tonight - after midnight in his busy den - the cuss stream burst audibly from his blowfish-esque brown cheeks. I can't honestly say that I'd fare any better in his dilemma, though. Consider that just weeks earlier, the Lakers had signed Steve Nash, perhaps the greatest floor general that basketball had ever seen. This in addition to the Lakers' franchise player Kobe Bryant, perhaps the most skilled isolation player that basketball had ever seen. In addition, several of the Lakers' cornerstones intimately knew the Triangle Offense, the most successful team offensive concept that basketball had ever seen. The team's four cornerstones (Nash, Bryant, Bynum, Gasol) came from four different countries, four different cultures, and four different skillsets, each a genius of athletic achievement in their own respective ways. Most coaches would be ecstatic at this development.

"That is, until they ran the numbers and figured out what all of that actually means," Brown said joylessly. The task before Mike Brown was monumental, and whatever he decided would require innovation on his part and adaptations for his players. A lot of dismal days of patient frustration lay ahead for the Lakers. Still, with his trademark persistence, all the problems of an NBA offense started to make sense to him over the course of the night, and all the mental jetsam discarded in his den's gigantic novelty royal-blue recycling bin started to look better and better until they became literally reusable in Brown's new sets and schemes. From the white boards, a well-used protractor, and forgotten tomes of Phil Jackson strewn about the study, Mike Brown cussed out an entire offense that night. He wasn't confident at all in what he'd invented, but it would have to do, he supposed. At dawn, drinking some coffee and doing a compulsive ritual before the front door, the inventor of the Circle Offense hurried to a 9am presentation of his offense. Soon, he supposed, the Los Angeles Lakers would have to learn to form the Circle at a moment's notice.

• • •

"And that's every option, every cut, every set: Everything you need to know about the Circle." As Mike Brown finished his presentation and turned the lights back on, the Lakers noticed to their amusement that Mike Brown had a measure of chalk on his hands and his face, though he had been working on projectors and whiteboards. A close observer would note the nearby bowl replete with donut holes. Brown himself pointed out the donuts before anyone else could.

"These donut holes are spherical. If we were playing four-dimensional basketball, the Circle Offense, in point of fact," Brown noted proudly, "could easily be made into a Spherical Offense. Eh heh heh heh." Brown's chuckle - now so familiar to the Lakers' ears - was obscure and self-aware but undeniably contained a large measure of mirth. The Lakers could rarely tell in advance when Brown was telling a joke or - after the fact - what the joke had actually been. They often wondered if he was even laughing at what he had said or something completely different. Brown continued chuckling for a few minutes, perhaps to ensure everyone forgot the joke entirely, staring past his players into a blank corner on the far side of the conference room. Finally, he turned his head to the assembled players for one last detail.

"By the way, notice that the Circle technically starts right when the ballhandler is three feet from his defender. That's the 'moment of truth' I had mentioned, Steve and Kobe. You see that?"

"Yeah. Seems familiar to some offenses I've learned before," Kobe said with a diplomatic grin, "I think I can probably figure that part out."

"Oh, really? That's nice. Anyway, that's the presentation. So, any questions about the Circle? I want to start drilling tomorrow, so now's the time!" Brown said with open relish.

"Nice offense...," Steve Nash started hesitantly,

"Why, thank you, Steve! I worked on it the last few months! I'm glad you apprecia--" Brown lied defensively.

Steve wasn't having it, though, and continued: "...But for the sake of Kobe, Pau, and Andrew, I feel I should ask: Coach, did you basically just steal the entire Triangle Offense and move two of the players in the Triangle slightly to look more like a giant circle?" The five-hour-long presentation had finally sanded down Steve's great reserve of patience and he forcefully stated the obvious. Kobe was surprised that Steve of all people was so outraged. He thought, "Hadn't Steve played with Shawn Marion and Boris Diaw and Joe Johnson and Amar'e... like, when his teams were good?" Kobe would always bring up Kwame Brown in interviews as a mental shortcut for total incompetence and deferral, but Kobe visibly shuddered just to think of all the D-Leaguers that Steve had carried without complaint. And Mike Brown had finally worn that patience away.

Every Laker save for Steve was blinking wildly now, both in astonished anticipation of conflict and in enacting the opposite of the actor's trick of holding the viewer's attention by rarely blinking. Kobe's facial expression was frozen as his head slowly swiveled from east to west, about an inch every ten seconds. "No." has never taken so long to express. Mike Brown was visibly nonplussed at Nash's point, and showed just how nonplussed he was by holding his arms out as wide as they would go and putting his head down on the conference table. A living minus sign. Raising himself up and wiping some (but not all) of the newly-added sugar from his undersized suit, Mike Brown addressed his critic defensively.

"Steve. Let me ask you a question."

"Yeah, Coach?" Steve's childish chipmunk features - combined with his worried eyes - evoked an "A" student attending an incompetent teacher's lecture. Steve fully expected a scolding for correctly identifying the capital of New York.

"Steve. Did you take geometry in primary school?"

Steve saw where this was going and tried to pre-empt Brown's ridiculously on-the-nose gambit of literalness. "Yes, of course, Coach. I even took geometry at Santa Cla-"

But Steve's effort was in vain, and Mike Brown began to assert his husky presence. "Good for you. So you know what a triangle is, then, right?" Brown relished his borrowed role as a superficial Socratic questioner much as he also relished one of the remaining donut holes with delicious jam.

• Twenty Minutes Later •

"A circle doesn't-"

"A circle doesn't have sides, Steve. That's right. Now if you think I stole this offense from the Triangle, feel free to think that, Steve. But just remember that the sides make that impossible."

"But-"

"I think we've discussed the origin of this offense enough. I think we all understand each other. Now, let me ask you something. Steve."

Steve Nash visibly gave up at this point and just prepared to answer his coach's question. "Yeah, Coach?"

"Can you make these curvy passes you see on this diagram?" Mike Brown noted a semicircular arc on the diagram from point to corner that would take a slightly wider path than the three-point line.

Had Brown taken geometry class in primary school himself? Steve wondered now. "Physically speaking, I can't... I suppose I could use the physics of the situation to-"

"Suppose is all we need. I'm not an offensive coach, Steve. It's your job to figure it out. Any real questions, without asking how I thought of this offense?"

"Yes, actually. The Tria- I mean the Circle Offense seems like it favors a team without a dominant ball-handler. How can we maximize my skillset in such an offense?"

"Great question, Steve. Alright, so you see all these options for the Tria- er... Circle Offense on the slides I prepared?"

Steve Nash grinned heartily at his coach's slip-up. "Uh... yes."

"Well, look a little bit closer. Notice all the dribbling options. Notice all the pick and rolls that develop organically. Notice all the spacing that a good shooter brings to the offense. There are plenty of ways for you to contribute, and, I suspect, some default plays like the pick and roll that you'll excel in and eventually select by season's end. You can start to favor and improvise on the sets and options to suit your skillset. I'll leave this part up to you. You're the offensive coach on the floor, not me." Nash found this concession amusing after the five-hour presentation, but held his tongue.

"Okay, coach. So.. are there any resources I can use to improve my understanding of the Circle Offense?"

"No. Because it is completely original and nothing out there properly conveys the developments of the Circle Offense. Heh heh heh. You'll be starting from scratch," Mike Brown said, and it was unclear why he was chuckling.

"Oh," Steve said, mentally preparing to study the Triangle online.

Now, gazing away from one another, Steve Nash and Mike Brown looked at different horizons in far distant corners of the conference rooms, their horizons (one suspects) being utterly mutually exclusive but their goals being identical. Steve Nash fidgeted with some advanced kinematic diagrams featuring esoteric aerodynamic calculations. Mike Brown rejellied the mass of remaining donut holes, the jam making the donuts cohere into a sphere. Dire Straits' "Brothers in Arms" sounded from someone's cell phone occluded from view. There's so many different worlds... so many different suns... And we have just one world... But we live in different ones... And then the room filled with silence as no one offered to claim the cell phone ringing.

Kobe shook his head a few more times in the silence of the conference room. Andrew Bynum, shaking his head at a normal speed, shook his head hundreds of times in the same thirty-minute window. "I guess I make five," Brown said as he finished eating his delicious sphere. "Five different countries, five different skillsets. Let's make it work." Everyone gave a little audible start: No one had said a word individually but the room collectively had audibly opined the one word, "Yes." Now the Lakers filed out at different times. Debussy's Clair de Lune played from Mike Brown's cell phone as he turned to wipe off all the powdered sugar on his face and hands, a reserve of sugar so replete that to the remaining Lakers it resembled a fountain rising from Brown's back-turned head.

• • •

A week later, at Steve Nash's home, Steve received a 500-page tome written by Mike Brown. Nash knew that Brown had written the massive book describing all the options of the Circle Offense because his name was on the front. It was evidently an unpublished second edition, Nash supposed, because long sections had been crossed out and long anecdotes about Brown's experience at Kansas State had been replaced with accounts of Brown's Cavs assistant and former coach Hank Egan. Accounts featuring Brown as an assistant to Phil Jackson with Pippen and Jordan were replaced with witty anecdotes featuring Brown's former head coach, Gregg Popovich and the Twin Towers. Moral lessons straight out of the 1960s were replaced with modern lessons.

The section about plagiarism had been excised entirely, with calligraphic precision.