Let's go unfiltered at the Gothic Ginobili. I'd like to talk about a dream I had.

I had some expectations going in, as I vaguely became aware of my location in the dream. Like, I knew it would be a nightmare from the start because the room I was in was really well-lit, and yet from the window I could tell it was night. Great foreshadowing, dream. Also, in real life, I had been in a minor bike accident a few hours before going to sleep (I'm fine, just some scrapes), so I'd expected some flashes of violent imagery. So not just a nightmare, but a screamer as well. There was a compounding and foreboding sense of fear -- as if chemically induced -- that I felt all around me in the emptiness of the room.

• • •

Let's set the scene: As with many dreams, the room itself pretty strongly resembled my one-room apartment, but had expanded out to a somewhat gigantic one-room condo. All the hallways were bigger, there was a small hot-tub sized pool in the center (brewing like a cauldron), and all the windows and doors were much larger and more open. I felt empty and vulnerable, for some reason.

And then the horror started. The room darkened somewhat. Some of the lights in the room flickered a few times and then went to black for no apparent reason. Sometimes I would catch lights going off and right before they did, in that pregnant darkness not yet attained, I would see a figure shrouded in black. I would see this figure just briefly enough to have doubt to its existence, just starkly enough to have no doubt that - whether it existed or not - something was happening and I didn't want to be around when this process reached its culmination. I decided - as I saw street lights from outside flickering out with just the same horror - to control what I could. I closed all my windows and doors and then their blinds if possible. Right before I was able to close the last screen door, Steve Nash appeared outside the sliding door, apparently to help me.

That's right, Steve Nash.

So, yeah. I was having a horrible nightmare with apparitions haunting and then darkening my apartment, bringing my apartment slowly into total, hopeless, horrifying darkness. In the middle of this horrifying dreamscape that had consumed my apartment, diminutive point guard Steve Nash had appeared outside my door waiting to get inside. Now, Steve's chipmunk-esque face definitely had an eerie blue glow, but it was definitely Nash. I let him in without thought or care. Immediately the single light outside flickered and went out, leaving the incorporeal, nebulous, shrouded-in-black figure just 20 feet from my apartment. I slammed the door and closed the blinds. As I recall, Steve Nash didn't say anything. The few remaining lights were flickering out.

So I pushed a button on the hot tub (remember, the cauldron) which turned the unlit water into a well-lit, glowing pillar of pale blue light. This light, pale and insufficient, was the culmination of my desperate attempt to impose order on this nightmare. But in fact, this light was the start of the final unraveling of the dream. For -- as the few lights other than the cauldron's flickered into darkness, leaving its shrouded spiritual moths -- the center of the cauldron began to brew and spin, and from the center emerged this same figure rising first as random interruptions of the blue with black and then as a full, coherent figure with a totally pale face and a monstrous body that appeared to be shrouded in black clothes. I totally panicked and tried to get away from the figure, but the doors wouldn't open. Steve Nash - having an aura of blue identical to the hot-tub's - went for some reason into the cauldron and the figure consumed him into the tub. I, presumably, was next to be consumed. Paralyzed by fear, I tried in vain to get to the console and turn the cauldron's blue light off. But I couldn't.

I lay in darkness for what seemed like hours, mortified. Then the lights turned back on, Grant Hill came in through the big glass door, and he was laughing. It had all been an elaborate prank! It is important to note that he was wearing a Phoenix Suns jersey at this point. As, of course, was Steve Nash, as he left the hot tub, soaked, enjoying the spoils of the prank. Grant Hill spoke. "Haha, I can't believe you thought ghosts were real, Alex! Such a cad!" I laughed and laughed, and then I woke up, the nightmare conquered.

But then I awoke to the reality that Steve Nash (and possibly Grant Hill, as well) were going to the Lakers.

• • •

A nightmare at its essence usually takes elements of the familiar and distorts it with the unfamiliar to create the sensation of the former changing into the latter. Good horror does the same. Death honestly doesn't scare me. But the change from life to death sure does. Injuries don't scare me, as you'd learn to deal with the result. But the process of going from healthy to unhealthy in an instant of total awareness without control does scare me. Darkness doesn't scare me. But the change of light, the change from safe to unsafe, the change from familiar to unfamiliar... that scares me. Quite a lot. The nightmare I had was the distortion of empty light into inhabited darkness, of Steve Nash into vacancy and worldly vapors and death.

But the nightmare of Steve Nash - as I awoke - is now the change from Sun to Laker. A team we could root for to a team that most of us -- or at least myself -- ancestrally despise and viscerally root against. The change from Channing Frye and Marcin Gortat to Pau Gasol and Andrew Bynum. It turns out that -- as with LeBron -- Steve Nash without a ring is actually fundamentally different than Steve Nash with a ring. Something horrifying and grotesque and potent and assertive has to change in him (or at least the way we see him) in order for Steve Nash the Ringless to evolve into Steve Nash the Conquerer. Nothing we can do will stop it. We're not going to feel the horror of Steve Nash when he's in the West semifinals. Then it will merely be an exciting, engaging Laker team that we've lived through and become comfortable with (to whatever extent we can). No, we're feeling the pain in the transition right now, as we try to make that change from the familiar to the unfamiliar.

This is the change. This is the horror.

These are the days before dying, the blood before the clotting, the rapture before the end of time, the spinning of the handle bars before the fall, the fall before the first-aid, the three-quarter-mile of pedaling with open blood on knees and gear-shift oil in hands before the blessed oblivion of sleep. We're walking wounded in the night with zombies and friends in the distance, and from here we can't tell one from the other. Do we approach and hope for the best? Do we run and expect the worst? Or, having seen this one before, perhaps we acknowledge the nightmare, the change before us. Perhaps -- knowing there's no end to it -- we walk boldly into the night, seeking not consummation but mere merciful continuation in the pale blue street lights beside empty bars and parking lots, looking always for temporary escape and shelter.

Let's say you're a GM for an NBA team. Your team just came off a dismal 25-57 season, which is probably about right given all the D-Leaguers you called up near the end and the decent-but-flawed players at the top of the roster. Particularly the injured ones. All that sound and fury, signifying... the fifth pick in the draft! Your owner is excited, you are wary. As expected, on draft night, the top three players on your draft board are gone after the 3rd pick. You know where the 4th pick is going, so you cross that guy out too. No matter, you weren't really expecting anything different. But you look on that sparkling fifth pick with indecision even at this absolute moment of truth. Maybe this is the year you hit lucky five, where (by sheer coincidence) several present and future HOFers have landed.

Because, really. Look at the history! Maybe you'll get Kevin Love. Or Kevin Garnett. Or Ray Allen. Or Dwyane Wade! Devin Harris wouldn't be so bad. All of them (including Scottie Pippen and Charles Barkley) were 5th picks at one point. Statistically the fifth pick is the only one that has yielded close to the All-Stars as the big #1 pick in the last 25 years. You didn't know that until a few days after the lottery, but now it feels like the only thing you've said in years. Your mind dances with one part anticipation, ten parts dread. Your reputation as a GM is on the line, and you might lose your job when all's said and done if this pick never pans out. Nothing like playing roulette with your job, right? You find you have two realistic options. Open the doors, Vanna.

• • •

Option #1: The Nicest Bro You've Ever Known

Here's your first stop. A lengthy defensive wing that spent 4 years at a college known for scrappy work ethic and virtue. You know that Option #1 can defend the 3 and the 4 really well. He has a tremendous work ethic, and he'll be a solid NBA player for many years (so long as he's healthy -- luckily, your scouts give no indication of an injury risk). The only problem? Well, he's not that quick, and he's not that long. His defensive instincts are tremendous -- Shane Battier with some gruesome length -- but that's all he brings to the table. His offense is barely passable, showing rotation-player stuff at best. He doesn't have a jump shot, much less a corner three. And, obviously, you aren't the Spurs. His offensive upside as a vet is something like rookie Kawhi Leonard (intelligent, some driving ability, a 3-ball-corner-pocket to keep defenses honest, decent vision).

But his rebounding instincts are undeniably subpar and his 5 rebounds per game in 35 minutes as a college four suggests he'll always be a liability. Perhaps the peril and the promise of Option #1 is his mind-numbing and undeniably valuable consistency. His college numbers paint a freakishly uniform picture - defensive tenacity and intelligence, bad rebounding, vaguely-passable offense. Every game, every second he's out on the floor you get this. You figure if you take him you'll certainly make your team 5 wins better and make your differential a point or two higher, for about 5-7 years (maybe more) until his expensive free agent days come and his legs start to slow down. Your fans will complain about his rebounding and wish he could give you more, but overall they'll respect the work he puts in. Not bad. You probably won't regret picking Option #1.

Option #2: The Startling Heights, The Subterranean Floor

Option #2 is a bad dude_._ To prove to you how much of a bad dude he really is, he spent a single year in college and played terribly. Didn't produce all that much, is what we're saying. You don't know his deal. He's showed up at all your combines with a mixture of intelligence, vigor, and earnestness. That was cool. He also fully utilized every single combine to show you the fundamental inferiority of his current skillset. That was not-so-cool. But the upside? Considerable! Option #2 gets physical comparisons to everyone. Dwight Howard to Chris Paul to Elgin Baylor -- confusing, yes, but they make total sense when you see him play. Yet, in the next sentence, a litany of warnings pour forth that this guy might just be a huge Kwame-style draft bust.

It's speculated by these scouts that while Option #2 is an intelligent player and his physical attributes are undeniably unique, Option #2 will probably never reach that plateau of talent his upside demands. His one year of college wasn't just disappointing in the averages: it was extraordinarily high variance, filled with insane displays of athletic brilliance that left their spectators in awe of this Olympian that were followed two possessions later by tripping over his own feet and airballing free throws. At the combine, while you saw the good side of his personality, you never really saw the Olympian rumblings. What you did see wasn't encouraging in the slightest. As far as you're concerned, Option #2 failed the final exam. The most important thing in the NBA is consistency (hello, Option #1!) as all your wily veterans will amply attest when asked.

• • •

Your stats guys -- all of whom backed up your intuition -- give a 10% probability on the premise that Option #2 is a once-in-a-decade type talent, with the potential to be the evolutionary Scottie Pippen or the evolutionary Dwyane Wade. Both of whom were, well, the #5 pick in their respective drafts. There's even a small percent chance that Option #2 is simply beyond compare; the chance that Option #2 is the first in an evolutionary line of a world crushed under his making. The things Option #2 can do on a court rival what any franchise player in the league can do, after all. Which is all well and good, but rather dwarfed by the 50% chance your stats guys give you that he's simply NBA jetsam, a rotting waste of athletic genius and your coveted draft pick. In the final 40% he's just another infuriating marginal All-Star or 7th man that just kind of hangs around for five years and brings crowds just to see him in that brief garbage time spectacle. Anthony Randolph, Tristan Thompson, the like. You run the numbers again, and again you find what you'd calculated 1000 times. Option #1 is the clear-cut winner on average. He makes your team a lot better at the 3 or 4 and you could tell your owner (truthfully) that that position is above average.

Option #1 is buying insurance; Option #2 is putting your existing insurance in the mega-millions. Easy.

But before you click the trigger, you stop and mull it over. You think to yourself... What if I had to make this same choice 10 drafts in a row? That is, for ten drafts, you had the #5 pick and you picked the same archetype you picked this year. You stop. Ten players like Option #1 would be great, right? Well, except that you wouldn't have an offense. Your entire team would turn into a contender-feeder for a few years, just trading and developing successive combinations of "Shane Battiers with gruesome length" for more players and picks. That wouldn't be bad, all considering. You'd probably keep your job. On the other hand, 10 players like Option #2?... Well, you suppose you'd get to play the odds and on average one of those ten would be that once-in-a-decade player.

You gulp. That one guy would make the other nine Option #2 clones -- as well as your 25-win team -- into contenders in two or three years. What's more, you're a thinking man. You tend to see the contributions of players in a game, series, or season, as being of the Pareto distribution mold, where 20% of players are responsible for 80% of the wins, and Option #1 will never be that guy... Option #2 has the possibility to be_. There's a one-in-ten-chance_. Sure, if you were making that same choice for ten years, you'd probably be fired. But your team, and your owner, would be building for a title, and for greatness. Not just building for being the next in a long line of oh-so-close Houston teams, unable to evolve into even a relevant team. And that's what troubles you.

• • •

In the end, you pick Option #1. This isn't a fun little mental exercise, or a quirky stat project. No, this is real life -- this is about keeping your job. Plausible deniability will always be there, and the on-record quotes from your hoopshead luminaries about Option #2 as a Kwame-level bust will always be there. You file them away in your secret locked cabinet of job-defense documents. Don't laugh. It'll be there if you need it. But after this solemn consideration you've thought through a thousand times and expressed to your ownership with the nobility of a man obsessed, you know in your heart of hearts that -- if you were only about the team -- you'd have picked Option #2 in a heartbeat.

Really. Bust or not. Because you've got 9 to 1 odds on 12th place magically turning into 2nd place. That's worth everything, in this league. But you didn't. You went safe. After your pick, you go home to watch tapes of Option #2 stinking up the second combine. You laugh. You drink. You laugh some more. And then you get a draft alert for Option #2, and on force of habit, you check it. Your eyes water. In a draft-day trade, the Spurs acquired the 13th pick for DeJuan Blair and Gary Neal. They chose Option #2.

Seconds later, your Blackberry meets the pavement. You live on the third floor.

Most of this week, we'll be ceding the floor to our resident Dewey and allowing him to examine NBA storylines through the vise of the first piece in the series, Chekhov's Compassionate Comedy of the NBA. In today's Part III, Alex will examine the complex and Chekhovian narratives surrounding the exit of his favorite team, the San Antonio Spurs.

It's time to deal with the Spurs. It's Chekhov Week here, and I think now is the time to plumb the Western Conference Finals for Chekhov's compassionate, biting comedy -- comedy that brews like an oil well right beneath the surface of the blog. It's a take as hot as the sun and we've been waiting for our emotions to cool down a bit.

Anyway, let's recap: The San Antonio Spurs have had the smartest, most effective players in the league for a decade. They have had the best coach, the best franchise player, the best management, the best scouting, and the best system for a decade and a half -- all of this despite limited financial resources. The Spurs dynasty in the Tim Duncan era has been nothing short of amazing. And, like all great things in life, everything hinged on a couple strokes of luck and a group of people that took full advantage of their luck, with the players and staff bringing to the table clockwork consistency and organizational excellence. This is the Spurs as a franchise, minus a few crucial instances when their key players and their role players took their play yet another step up to take basketball excellence into basketball transcendence seemingly through sheer force of will.

• • •

And recently, in the past few years, the Spurs have managed something more: They've completely reinvented everything about their basketball, and nearly as much about their personnel, without sacrificing a drop of their tremendous success. The Spurs have changed up their fundamental approach to basketball, moving from largely defensive squads with some great offensive players to offensively-dominant teams with some great defensive players. For those who understand basketball, the change is about as stark as any in the sport. One day they woke up successful but needing total change just to stave off stagnation, and, about a thousand days later, they woke up having made that change with as much success. A total tour de force: They solved a fundamental problem while simultaneously insulating themselves from most of the secondary problems that seem to inevitably arise with such fundamental solutions. The Spurs had (in ecologist Wendell Berry's terms) solved for pattern successfully. And, as this post-season dawned, the reputation had finally caught up to the reality and the Spurs had established their offensive brilliance undeniably, culminating in a dominant 20-game winning streak.

It felt like learning, just to watch. And maybe we really did learn something, after all of that. All signs -- save for some inauspicious 12-minute sandbagging borne of supreme confidence now and again -- seemed to speak with one voice: that they were probably going to get yet another title. This postseason, to continue the auspicious trend, many of the Spurs' other contenders fell to injury or the mires of lesser vision.

So, as the Spurs' greatness reached its zenith in a massive Game 3 comeback against the Clippers, thoughts moved to their biggest remaining concern: The Oklahoma City Thunder. In the Thunder you have a team that literally and figuratively came out of nowhere over the last few years. But, of course, the Thunder was not a team to tread lightly on: in about half a decade the team had gone from a troubled, owner-neglected (albeit fan-beloved) franchise in Seattle whose better days had passed to a team that was instantaneously on the Spurs' level as a similar model of organization, team culture, personnel, and intelligence. Not by coincidence, many of the Thunder's key personnel actually had come through the Spurs in the early stages of their dynasty, most notably Thunder GM Sam Presti.

And so it went that with these two teams and the values they organizationally represented, only one glaring difference (besides athleticism) presented itself. Yes, that's right: the Thunder organization was built in the fresh ashes of a great and legendary crime of sports fresh in everyone's minds for which their current owner was primarily responsible. Great twist, right? I won't rehash the whole Sonicsgate ordeal (and I'm deliberately excising the word "steal" from this piece), but for posterity, the relocation to Oklahoma City by the ownership group was one of those things that almost no one is defending, but that plenty of people are explaining, if you get what I'm saying.

The movement of the Seattle SuperSonics franchise to the fine city of OKC certainly wasn't uniformly negative (after all, relocation from one fine fan base to another is kind of a zero-sum interaction). But the whole sordid affiar of relocation raised so many ugly economic, social, and ethical questions about the provincial nature of sports (especially of the NBA) in a sometimes-capitalist society where, oh, by the way, you can ask for your host city's taxpayers to build you an arena and successfully carry out a threat to leave if not. The rent-seeking alone... Anyway, my lasting impression of the move is of a cosmic dollop of unfairness that is indefensible if you have even the slightest inclination towards class, sentiment, and the fan experience. The subject is still sore with swaths of fans, and rightfully so. But just to summarize: The Thunder were built on a legendary crime of sports.

On with the series: the Spurs held their home court for two games with characteristic dominance, and the Thunder appeared to be a team of the future, for now. After two games (one close but with a comeback, the second one anything but close), the Spurs looked to have a strong case for one final extension of their great dynasty, an extension that in one stroke would have validated not only all of their organizational virtues but their ability to turn these organizational virtues into an era-defining, historically-untouchable team, something that had yet eluded them. People have the remarkable ability to misunderstand the greatness right in front of them when they have any sort of way to avoid it, and only Jordan-level pathology is enough to finally and permanently break the public's will. The Spurs had never quite been as unsubtle as Jordan or his Bulls. But this season, the Spurs had finally reached the cusp of that kind of greatness.

But instead they lost in six to the Thunder.

Here's the comedy: The narratives of sports tend to be constructed precisely on differences in process being responsible for differences in outcome. So we focus on the differences between the teams and ignore the similiarties as memory fades. As noted, the similarities between the teams are so immense and numerous they're practically defining in scope. Both teams possess uncanny levels of intelligence and effort and luck and success. That's basically the whole franchise right there, no? The fact that these two franchises are meeting is an incredible story by itself, considering the ultimate rarity of such teams in the history of the league. By all rights, this should be the only story, with the victors celebrated for taking advantage of their opportunity in their own unique way and the losers celebrated for setting themselves on the right path to glory and giving a good go of it. But because the two teams have this key difference of a massive sports crime and little else, their areas of greatness precisely cancel each other out in the logic of sports and the main takeaway, the main difference that fans may get from all of this is simply that athleticism and relocating teams in the sketchiest possible way can end up winning out, and that good management and luck for a few years can completely cancel out the horrible karma and cosmic unfairness of something to the extent of the sordid Sonicsgate affair.

So there it is: From the most virtuous premise imaginable (with one wrinkle) comes the most sordid, butchered takeaway imaginable, that one ugly wrinkle subsuming the whole face. It's madness, but we also recognize that it's our madness: this is how competitive logic has to function. The logic of sports demands that when two identical twins fight to the death, the one that survives must have had something extra, and not just the benefit of luck. Sample size an issue? Okay, give them seven fights to the death - first to four wins. You don't look at your opponent as fundamentally similar to yourself when they beat you by a tenth of a second in the 100-meter dash. No, you look at the things that differentiate the two of you, because something had to account for that perfect quaver on the margin, even if you end up blaming the wind.

That Sonicsgate is at the heart of the narrative in the Thunder's victory over the Spurs won't be how GMs see it going into next season (one would hope!), but that may be the ultimate takeaway for many fans, just as the ultimate takeaway of the 2007 Suns-Spurs series was another act of apparent cosmic wrongness as the outcome-determining event (the Horry hip check; iconic albeit a billion times less wrong than Sonicsgate), that time on the Spurs' end. So there it is: we sit down to tell the story and the first thing we have to explain is how the victorious heroes started out in Seattle. And altogether that's high comedy, even though I'm not exactly laughing about it -- Chekhov might be.

• • •

This legitimizing of a terrible sports crime might be the narrative takeaway of sports logic, and it has some appeal, anyway. Plenty of Spurs fans and Sonics fans still licking their wounds could surely be forgiven for tapping into that well for a long while. But then maybe when that long while is over, we can look again and realize that for us, this is all an elaborate, merciful rationalization to explain how a team of destiny was fairly taken from us - without such mercy - by another team of destiny. After all, we have to live with this loss without letting it define our experience as a fan. We have to grieve without becoming the object of grief. Chekhov's settings are littered with remarkable characters forever held back by their grieving fixation on some unfortunate part of reality. But we're different, friends. We can and will find a way to move on. We have that power. So let's start over with the narrative. Let's flip the script.

First and foremost, we fans (not just of the Spurs, but of basketball in general) have imprinted on us memories of a wonderful season by the Spurs, filled almost without exception with brilliant basketball. I once described the Spurs' renaissance to a friend at one point as "better than fiction." And I meant it. The Spurs rolled through every opponent, testifying to the heights of which team basketball is capable. The quotes about the Russell Celtics and the '78 Blazers and the '86 Celtics and the Showtime Lakers seemed totally applicable to a team right before our eyes. It was truly amazing stuff.

Then fifty days were up, the 20-game streak ended, and four consecutive losses later, the season abruptly ended, disastrously. In the Thunder series, the Spurs played their hardest and they might've even been the better team over the course of the series. But even as the Spurs under-performed from transcendent to excellent, the Thunder certainly took advantage and over-performed from excellent to transcendent (and if Game 1 of the Finals is any indication, they're still on that plateau). To their credit, Oklahoma City figured out some facsimile of the Spurs' system on offense, including, yes, that pin-down play of legend and nightmare. The Thunder - thanks in great measure to Thabo Sefolosha's tenacity and to Kevin Durant's development as a defensive wing - found a way to stifle the Spurs offense just enough to outscore them with their own great offense. I turned the broadcast off when they interviewed Clay Bennett after Game 6, not because I'm biased, but because it's simply not his victory and I simply couldn't acknowledge otherwise. And I couldn't stomach seeing that guy's face.

And that's the end of it, the whole story of the Spurs' rise and collapse, without fixations or narratives. It's not exactly how I feel about it, but it's as close to the truth as I'm going to get as a fan. Feel better? Me neither. I really wish they'd won. But it's a start.

And so we turn from misery to coping. The takeaway. Remembering without having to experience, learning without having to dwell. Here's mine: Besides the great basketball, the Spurs showed us in long-form how you make an about-face in your direction as an organization over several years without losing face or admitting defeat, by mixing the proven and the unproven in a slurry of potency and intelligence, relentlessly culling and thoughtfully tending, every day, every detail. That's worth remembering, and, along with the unique players that made up that slurry and the coach, it's a lot of what I'll remember.

And that's about it. While I'd love to say that what you get from something like this loss is what you've decided to take from your experience with the team, I just don't know if that's true: After all, I was there. I know what I saw. I appreciated every moment, really. And as for the Spurs: They held no illusions or hubris about who they were and so had none to lose. No one got any lessons out of the Spurs' defeat and no one gained or lost any validation to anyone that was paying attention. It was just an jolting, arbitrary absurdity that unpleasantly ended an otherwise pleasant couple of months.

Most of this week, we'll be ceding the floor to our resident Dewey and allowing him to examine NBA storylines through the vise of the first piece in the series, Chekhov's Compassionate Comedy of the NBA. In today's Part II, Alex will examine the complex and Chekhovian narratives surrounding one LeBron James.

To get you up to speed as quickly as possible: In Part I, I gave an overview of Chekhov's life and works, specifically his dual-author persona as both compassionate storyteller and surgical comedian. I used this duality to get at a description of Chekhovian comedy, which blends compassion and absurdity in equal measure to give us an impressionistic case history of its characters, a prognosis, and by-and-large an open ending plot-wise from which we can draw our own conclusions. Then I stated that - on just about every imaginable level - the NBA with its absurd narratives is more like a Chekhovian comedy than a Shakespearean comedy or tragedy. I'd like to expand on this statement by taking on some prominent narratives. Today: LeBron James.

• • •

LeBron James comes to mind immediately as an instructive case. In my opinion and in the general opinion of basketball fans, James is the most interesting, polarizing player in the sport -- and almost certainly the best and most athletic player in the world right now. He is interesting for so many reasons: it starts with his athletic gifts that allow him to express himself with seemingly second-order reasoning; that is, LeBron is so transcendent with his athleticism that he may as well be a human in a game of arbitrarily complex robots. His actions on the court - unlike the "efficient," "smart," and "creative" labels we generally reserve for lesser mortals - casually get sophisticated labels like "ironic," "enigmatic," "uncategorizable," "witty," "disappointing," "astonishing," and "brilliant."

And that's not the half of it: his narrative arc itself - starting some time around his discovery as a teenager and ending with his death or the death of civilization, whichever comes first - feels big and higher-order, like we're telling the story of an entire, second species through its archetype and only member LeBron. His narratives are simultaneously so alien, so familiar, and so overwhelming that we've reached a surreal stage where LeBron can do something fantastic for an entire game with his season on the line (like Game 6 against the Celtics), and the inertia of so much prior spectacle around him (like that other Game 6 against the Celtics) will immediately and ridiculously wash over the accomplishment, deconstructing and subsuming -- or even forgetting -- the latest gem. Our culture's reaction is something like an amoeba eating random chunks of nutrients, always growing, always moving through space, always changing to reflect back on all of us. It's like watching history in both its infinite malleability and its endless path-dependence. That amoeba was going to eat a Game 6 in some form, come hell or high water.

And then there's "The Decision."

• • •

Chekhov shows us a large cherry orchard into which a woman (now on hard times, but from aristocratic roots) pours all of her sentiment and pain and nostalgia, and precisely because of this sentiment and nostalgia never addresses the simple business affairs of the orchard's estate, and so allows her childhood orchard (and her childhood estate) to be bought and sold pitilessly to a former peasant with none of this sentiment or nostalgia. And yes, her story taken together is heartwrenching, Chekhov calls it a comedy, and he's right. LeBron showed us a twisted inversion of "The Cherry Orchard" two Julys ago. Even though "The Decision" was easily one of the more dramatic moments in American sports history (with a whole lot tangible and intangible hanging in the balance), it was filled with dark comedy: Even beyond LeBron and Wade's infamously facetious "make your pitch, guys" tour of various teams in the week prior, the program itself had LeBron wearing a pink, ridiculous shirt, talking about doing what was best for him (Really, LeBron? I thought I was watching "The Sacrifice"!), and treating it like those old "Fact or Fiction" shows on Fox or those "trailers that will appear sometime during this program" where you needed to wait to the end to get the answer.

The unfathomable amount of dramatic irony, extended to comic proportions, came from the fact that he and his handlers were apparently the only people on Earth that did not understand that he just needed to treat it like a solemn, respectful parting of ways. If he had simply gone up there with a straightforward case to the American public about his decision, then all would've been quickly forgiven (if there were, indeed, anything to forgive), and no one (other than a few Cleveland fans that [fairly] bought into his "hometown hero" approach) would have held it against him. To top it all off, someone decided to donate all the proceeds to charity, as if someone knew what would happen and exercised damage control but was powerless to stop the spectacle.

But for his ignorance of the fan's mindset LeBron was punished, again, with comic and unreasonable severity by those same fans: his wording in that program and in the ensuing celebration have launched a million seedy and bitterly ironic comic take-offs, and I don't know that any of the responses came close to the sheer comedy of the original telecast itself. Jokes and narratives that hit home regarding "The Decision" seemed largely to recreate it in its surreal splendor and to help us wrap our minds around the spectacle's enormity. This is all high comedy, and even if we can't fully muster a laugh ourselves, the gods with their infinite time and trademark British appreciation for irony are finding this all quite amusing. Do I even have to add Dwight Howard's situation? "The guy who tried to make everyone happy in small ways but missed the big picture and thereby cast himself as a villain." It's straight out of a Christopher Nolan "Batman" film. Only it's hilarious. That one off-cuff interview could practically stand in as the definition of "dramatic irony" in a freshmen English course, and it came out of nowhere.

"But, Alex," you might say, "this is just the spectacle inherent in the business end of things. It's one guy, making himself look foolish. Of course there's comedy in the embarrassing spectacle. Talk about the basketball. Life is earnest, life is real, and the grave is not its goal!" I'd agree... except that the spectacle simply doesn't end there: even LeBron's purest basketball narrative, taken completely on its own terms, is never actually going to have a culmination and instead will fester in comedic (but compassionate, you understand) ambiguity until the end of his career. Let's be real: What really happens when he finally gets that first ring? Does all the noise against him stop? Do you think LeBron's going to stop going for rings, or that LeBron will stop having those completely absurd and inexplicable gear shifts that have maddeningly defined him and simply win rings without conscience for a decade barring injury? And do you really think his first ring will retroactively validate everything that came before, or that his failure to get a ring thus far has retroactively poisoned that game against Detroit? Perhaps. Or maybe Kobe is still going to be Kobe, flaws and all, and LeBron then is going to be LeBron now, flaws and all.

Flaws and all, these players are who they are and, like us, they change incrementally through conflict and feedback. I think NBA history tells this story mostly without exception. There is no light switch, just a constant grind for improvement and (generally speaking) a much faster change in scenery that comes with aging and roster churn. There's no end, no culmination in that process, no enlightenment, and, if there is, it wears off just as quickly with the struggles of age and injury, and soon the perfectly-validated champion is a goat and a second banana six years later for honestly marginal differences in approach. I see you, Dwyane. No, LeBron's long, unfathomable journey is not going to end with that first ring, and most of the change will be in ourselves, pretending like he totally changed his approach instead of finally finding four reasonably favorable matchups and a suitable supporting cast.

• • •

Like the multiple loops in that sick hip-hop instrumental you like so much, Chekhov's characters in "Uncle Vanya" are sitting in the exact same spot at the end of the play as they were in the beginning, with the characters that had appeared during the play having disappeared summarily, with only a tearful, whispered testimony to tell us that something has changed over the course of the play. Then it's back to endless, relentless, thankless inventorying for a dying estate. That's far closer to the narrative of an aging player looking for a ring than any sort of Hero's Journey.

Michael Jordan didn't go home after the legendary win in 1998 and just decide to stop being pathologically competitive. If you challenged him to billiards the next day, he'd probably take you up on that, and maybe you'd want to put your money where your mouth is. Tim Duncan didn't learn to defer these last few years so much as he'd always known how to defer to his coach and his management and his role players while he built his teams up socially and on the court. Now he's just deferring a little more on the court. Dirk took over last season not because he figured something out about toughness or pressure, but because Dirk has been taking over games since 2002, and the Mavericks finally got a great defensive center and an unstoppable play to help him put it all together for a title run. For Kevin Garnett, the drive never stopped when he won, he just wanted to win again and again, to increasing and increasingly brilliant futility. (And bark like a dog, too.)

All these players enter the stage from unknown lands and exit to unknown experiences, their experiences mostly centered on building working relationships and managing and understanding stage fright in its full psychophysical generality, and zone defenses from time to time. They fight for our entertainment and dollars for 15 years, change with the flow of eras and surrounding circumstances, develop with us, and then you wake up one day and they've retired, gone to China, or died. There is no third act to these players. There is no first act. Or, more precisely, the first act is always on the sleeve, the third act on the back of the neck. If you could draw it you'd see Chekhov's gun, semiautomatic with fifty bullets a day in the clip, one hundred reloads a year. The trigger is always there in the adrenal gland, always glad to be pulled by the drama to take us from Act One to Act Three in an always-already instant of impressionistic glory and humanity.

Russian author and playwright Anton Chekhov is one of the greatest dramatists to ever live. Born in 1860, Chekhov worked as a clerk in his father's store, absorbing stories and conversations from every segment of Russian culture. By the age of 20, the young medical student had established that he possessed all he necessary writer's talents: the gift of gab, an eye for detail, an ear for narrative, and a heart for compassion. A prolific author of tiny, clever humor pieces at first, Chekhov (on the advice of a noted writer of the time) began soon to focus more on quality over quantity. His stories grew organically into longer and more elaborate works until the day he died -- even his increasingly-less-frequent short stories became better, more potent, and ever more masterful in their craft. And by the end, the depth of his character studies required plays and novellas primarily. By the time he was struck down by a long bout of tuberculosis at the age of 44, Chekhov had given us an unfathomably long trail of personal letters, stories, and plays containing the framework for much of 20th century theater and short fiction.

In his most famous play "Uncle Vanya," Chekhov shows us Dr. Astrov, a compassionate and humanitarian doctor that knows no rest and whose only spare moments are consumed by an earnest attempt to preserve the forests of Russia for the people 100 years hence. Astrov harshly criticizes the other characters in the play as layabouts with a demon of destruction inside themselves that threaten one another's souls as surely as civilization threatens the forests. Dr. Astrov is basically Chekhov in all these senses. Get this: Chekhov was a fully-trained medical doctor that (as his prime as a writer was beginning) actually took an extended trip to the distant Sakhalin penal colony in the far east of Russia -- regions you'd only know from Risk -- to take a freaking __census_.___ This is Jordan-on-the-White-Sox stuff, except if Jordan were instead going to Pakistan to play cricket because he wanted to find a way to humanely apply an economics degree from UNC. Soon after this (by all accounts arduous and sorrowful) adventure into possibly the most miserable region of Russia, Chekhov went on to become a great and compassionate landlord in the waning years of his life.

Far from the philosophical long-form of his contemporaries Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, Chekhov wrote impressionistic stories about all classes and situations in Russian life. This was no accident: His universal treatment of human nature was deliberate, for it allowed Chekhov's characters, almost from the outset of his career, to speak in his tender humanitarian voice without pretense or prejudice. An imperfect healer of his character's conflicts, Chekhov could put the most soothing, noble words in the mouths of his idealists, even as these characters were bound to struggle to live up to their ideals. From peasants yearning for sustenance to aristocrats in a dying estate to the parties to a love affair clinging to a desperate hope, Chekhov's characters successfully testified to their hopes and failings.

Thus was Chekhov's compassion manifested in his life and works.

• • •

On the other side of things we have Chekhov the brilliant satirist, rational doctor, thinker, and comedian. With the clinical touch of a doctor, Chekhov would - at the end of a dramatic arc - take all of the facts of a character together and pronounce not a final judgment but an autopsy or (most frequently) a prognosis. Allergic to hypocrisy, for example, Chekhov took it upon himself to relentlessly mock the false intellectuals of the poshlust, an infamous class of Russian philistines. Dr. Chekhov had a surgeon's toolkit of sharp, biting irony: Remember the Chekhov-like Dr. Astrov from "Uncle Vanya"? For all his love of humanity 100 years hence, he couldn't recognize present love, lust, or respect towards himself that his deeds and vision had accorded him, as many awkward scenes surely demonstrate. And at the end of the day, Astrov ironically loves instead a woman that could never reciprocate that love within the confines of society and that temporarily mires Astrov in the same demons of destruction he criticizes so harshly.

Usually the characters survive their ordeal to receive his prognosis, for Chekhov loves an open ending in plot terms (in an extreme example, the final paragraph of his most famous short story ends with a look to the"long, long road before" his characters). Unlike Shakespeare, who reveled in the bloodbath of a star-crossed tragedy or a grand wedding in the third act of a comedy, Chekhov simply has his infamous first-act gun (though usually it was subtler than a gun) go off in the third as the exposition's conflict come to a climax and then to some resolution. Simple as writer's pie. And there is no grand epic of a tragic arc, even in the longest pieces. Like Hugh Laurie's Dr. House, the histories and the likely futures of his patients of the soul come up through exploration of the present, and mostly not the other way around. Chekhov doesn't (and doesn't want to) explore their every thought or relation so much as he wants to show us a case study and what we can learn from it. For all of Chekhov's compassion, he is still a surgeon, and there are times when all good surgeons must put away sentiment utterly in favor of the cold, logical, medical realities of their patients.

And yet, even though the stories that Chekhov tells have relatively few (but oh, how poignant) instances of bloodshed and the much more understated and impressionistic plots, I'd say that most of Chekhov's characters have dramatic arcs that encompass great suffering and inevitability and unrealized hopes, all of it rather befitting tragedy. After the early, more jocular stories, you can't go through five Chekhov stories without finding at least five tales of pain, disappointment, loss, and renewals that fail to materialize (even if those are not the only five tales you'll find).

Now, all that said, Chekhov often refers in the manuscripts of the saddest plays to the "comedy" he is writing. He's not just cruelly toying with us: Almost every character in a Chekhov play like "Uncle Vanya" or "The Cherry Orchard" bears some great burden of sadness, and the sadness is explored in depth. But, on the same token, so much of that very sadness is self-inflicted, so many of the reactions are farcical or absurd, and so many ways in which the saddest stories play out are filled with comic irony that you could easily find laughs; that is, if the stories didn't linger so darn long. "Annie Hall," the famed film from Woody Allen, is instructive: Despite its great sense of humor (so many great scenes and lines), "Annie Hall" is ultimately a sad, gloomy tale of a neurotic-but-loving relationship and then the long divorce that follows. In its dramatic moments, the film is almost impossible to bear if you have any empathy at all. Geez; it's like that episode from "Futurama" where that dog dies (spoiler), except extended into a movie with two people and no one actually dies. That said, I don't hesitate for a moment to call "Annie Hall" a comedy, given all of its elaborately realized anecdotes, situational humor and Allen's signature approach to wit and his humorous observations. It's just very honest, raw comedy that doesn't always allow you to laugh along with it.

"Annie Hall" is a romantic comedy and delves into the honest truths about relationships. Chekhov writes compassionate comedies that are willing to delve into the honest truth about human nature and suffering.

• • •

(via Charles Trainor Jr, MiamiHerald.com)

I generally see the NBA in its narratives - even with its grand, alpha-dog swaths of epic drama, even with its thrills of victory and agonies of defeat, even with its archetypal runs of dominance by the best players and teams - more as an understated, compassionate Chekhovian comedy than a grandiose and clearly demarcated Shakespearean comedy or tragedy. The NBA as a sport may have the overtures of a grand Shakespearean universe with eternal culminations and grand proclamations, but in practice, in the everyday fan experience, the NBA has far more to do with the spectacles, the self-deconstructing narratives, the random quirks of players and the stylistic explorations of twenty-four players over a hundred possessions.

An NBA game, for all its billing, often comes out to be more like a sketchy, stubbled battle of the bands than a cosmic symphony of athletic excellence. For every Heat-Thunder masterwork, there's a terrible regular season imperfection like this year's 3OT Heat-Hawks game. And sometimes, the game is both! Filled with wacky characters often from unique backgrounds and with so many poignant backstories, with players that could fill ten volumes of quotebooks if you know the right questions to ask, the NBA certainly passes the "laugh test" for farcical comedy (groan). And as for the rest? Well - as we'll see in Part II - Chekhov's more awkward, verge-of-tragedy comedy is central to my impression that the grand drama of the league is tempered by absurdity even at its supposedly most serious moments.

Because this post is a 4000 word epic and virtually impossible to read in one sitting... see Part II tomorrow!

Here's the run, in my eyes. On game nights, I felt that I was vicariously solving some great problem through my Spurs. Every night, they solved some advanced geometry problem with methods the world has never seen. In the mornings, I'd get the glorious feeling of stillness and placidity that accompanies triumph. My favorite team has been fun, likable, and virtuous, at least in my view. I've been quite pleased with what this team has offered up in the previous 20 games. I don't know if any fan of the sport wouldn't be pleased with a run like this.

It probably helps that at the same time this was going on I - a mostly sedentary individual that has always seemed just a bit depressed and cynical and vaguely way-too-reserved - lost something like 25 pounds during the winning streak and developed hitherto unexplored levels of maturity and self-confidence, as well as the vague overtones of a workout routine. The Spurs have reinvented basketball less than I've reinvented my life, and that might not be obvious just talking to me. This blog is as successful as it has ever been, which probably has at least something to do with my editorial mind being as sharp and direct as ever. And I know as much as I ever have about basketball, because for me every other night has been a clinic in the sport, not just as it is today but as it shall be 5 years hence in some optimal future. Most of all, I finally have some mental picture of the end, the culmination, of all my recent work and struggles.

The timing is coincidental, of course. But it's also uncanny: I can't deny that the streak probably helped.

• • •

Or maybe it hasn't helped at all. Perhaps it was a prelude to darkness.

Perhaps the Spurs are just building up my confidence only to unkindly tear it away in the span of one defining week, succumbing to a collapse previously unseen in basketball history. The Thunder are a great team, and last night they found another gear. The tenacity we saw last night retroactively justifies every "promising young team" label previously affixed to them. Maybe the Spurs shall lose, and I with them, these present delusions of efficiency differential and emotional honesty to be unkindly discarded into a bin of reminiscence labeled "Worst Possible Match-Up, or that's what you can tell yourself" on the fringe of the quicksand pit.

But you know what? Although it may not last, I'll always remember Tim Duncan quietly rising up the blocks list. Loudly punctuating the blocks with vision and spryness in his forays to the rim, forays that we'd thought had left this land. There's some magic still, in that old knee brace.

Although it may not last, I'll always remember Manu finding the exact moment of leverage when his team needed a throwback. On the margin, a crucial defeat averted. His hammering -- constant, pounding -- of that margin with the precision of a sculptor.

Although it may not last, I'll always remember Danny Green and Kawhi Leonard -- players inexplicably discarded by the decision-makers of the league until the interest of the Spurs -- burying the Jazz almost singlehandedly in a 20-0 run as their battle-tested brothers in arms watched with glee.

This team is not forever, yet. After all, last night hinted at a dark possibility. They can be, but they aren't yet there. This team is mortal -- they bleed, too. To make presumptions, as a fan, is to be taken by surprised and bleed right with them. But even as they lie, bleeding in the corner like a boxer who wasn't expecting the perfect counter, I can't focus on that right now. I can only focus on what I know, and the things about this team I know I'll never forget. Tiago taking over the fourth, the senseless carving-up of the weaker teams (28 in total), the faint praise for Richard Jefferson, the backhanded compliments everyone gave Stephen Jackson, the passing and drives of Boris Diaw, the ridiculous enthusiasm of Patty Mills, Matt Bonner receiving a transdimensional warning from 45 light-years away and calling up to the president without hesitation, Gary Neal's limited handle and limitless self-confidence. S-Jax - swiftly upon return - guarding Dirk as it was written and as it shall be done.

• • •

That was the month (or two, or three) that was. Learning the early offensive sets, seeing that "sometimes it's a miracle" (as Popovich said of the offense after Game 2), the aura of success, trying desperately to write about it but knowing I'm simply too close and vulnerable to it to express myself, recalculating legacies, becoming superstitious, judging the Spurs fans that predicted the Spurs in 4 and incurred the wrath of the Basketball Gods, watching every game. It was surreal and awesome at every turn, in something like equal measure. In parallel came my personal journey: cooking low-calorie masterpieces in eternal taste and economy at the half, watching in shock as the numbers on the scale dropped past even my expectations, finally running that entire path without stopping, having my concerns change from anxious fixations and strange abstractions to plans and to what has precedent, reading every blog post I could possibly find, and finally... discovering that I could have the ideals I'd imagined myself having when I wrote things nine months ago in anticipation of a better life.

Things seemed to come full circle. And after the bags were unpacked, I simply relaxed and enjoyed as I watched Tony Parker finally become a Spur in his unimpeachable, inarguable way. His way and theirs did not so much as align as fuse in a hundred imperceptible gradations. The Front Office -- hallowed be thy name -- and its inscrutable brilliance to solve simple problems in simple ways, and Tony's simplistic "I will take shots close to the basket and eat baguettes all day" style. They finally meshed. Good. Took them long enough.

And as I fully realize the temporary, transient permanence of this team (especially if we lose that crucial Game 4)? Yeah, I'll always remember the punctuating games, the losses that started and ended the streak and perhaps the run: The Lakers doing their dynasty act for what may very well be the last time, on the broad back of Andrew Bynum's 30 boards, and being unkindly swept twice thereafter by the same team, renewed. And then the Thunder, alchemizing their youthful enthusiasm and love-of-game and desperation into something else: by dipping uncertainly into adolescent spasms of swagger and differentiation before inevitably emerged a mature, vicious tenacity that the Spurs have not yet countered. I don't know if they'll find a way. I know they've found ways so many times before. But maybe they won't this time. And that would hurt. If that's so, then I guess I'll remember and sigh at these punctuating games (and perhaps the ultimate result of the season). I'll learn to know this present uneasiness as a deeper shade of melancholy in retrospect.

But I won't despair in some ultimate sense if all the apparent alignments pointing to a title turn out to be a mirage. For in several years, barring unkind fortune to poison the memories, I'll remember this time with a nostalgia I'll know is not simply a mild form of depression, as the aphorism goes. After all, I know that it's quite possible that (as Eliot puts it) these are but the fragments that I've shored against my ruins. But I also know that even if it's true, even with the pain of separation from this time that awaits me, those ruins far hence will not be those of Ozymandias. And without arrogance or bragging, I will know that at least once, as you stand at the ruins, all the fragments you see before you once filled out a mosaic that fit perfectly together in my head, one complete picture of placid confidence as I stood on some balcony, the ocean stretching out before me, yawning with a recent awakening.

Rajon Rondo sighed as the game reached its inevitable resting point. Down 4 points with 2.2 seconds left, the game was as good as done. As a rule, man's reach exceeds his grasp, Rajon thought, but tonight Rajon knew he had grasped something new. He simply couldn't wait to see how he'd tilted the balance. He walked in the other direction -- towards his locker -- after a half-hearted inbounds pass. Rajon paid no mind to the ball's trajectory, or the remote possibility of a win. The buzzer sounded. It was over.

• • •

It hadn't been like this before the game. Then, in anticipation of the ill-fated Game 2, Rajon had written and consulted endless binders of tables containing adjacency matrices of all possible Miami-Boston match-ups, using known data from years of statistics and Rajon's encyclopedic recall of play-by-plays stretching back into the Cousy era. Rajon, carrying a sharp metal compass for reasons passing understanding, was going to optimize the efficiency differential and psychological tenor of the game. He gave Kevin Garnett very precise instructions. He gave Ray Allen very precise and completely opposite instructions. They obliged, each believing the other to have according instructions. No one could be on the same page, Rajon reasoned, on either team. Except him, of course. Rajon would know all. If the Celtics were to win, the team must be disarrayed, winning in a baroque and seemingly random fashion. They could not hope to win Game 2 in Miami systematically in the traditional sense, the numbers revealed. They would have to slip into the margins of the moment, slithering in on the dirty knees and gnashing teeth of Paul Pierce. Yes, the margins of the moment would be their system and salvation.

There were no percentages in the young man's perfect mind, there were armies. Rajon believed that every shot was predestined for make or miss a hundred years before it was launched. Systems were not a means of enacting high percentage looks, they were a means for enforcing one team's Platonic logic on the game. The Celtics slithered in. That was their system. It was perfect. They could (no, should) win any game. But the match-up binders fell off the shelf as Ray came tumbling in on half a foot.

Missing data, Rajon had almost said aloud. He sighed as he swiftly recalculated every number in every binder.

He found dismay in the strength of his armies.

• • •

Ray Allen airballed the meaningless three at the buzzer. It was a four-point loss. Rajon and Paul Pierce had already checked out from the game, the latter having fouled out and left the forsaken city of vice for greener pastures. Such did Rajon, left alone by a clubhouse that respected and adored him but could not approach him in his current state of fugue, return to his tables and binders.

"I am the margins of the moment," Rajon declared in his notebooks. "I am the leftover rebound and the unheralded assist. I am the points that come as you look away."

Having achieved some fifty points, a rare feat for anyone, much less for a player derided for his scoring lapses, Rajon began to see previously imperceptible errors in his match-up matrices that had nevertheless predicted with certainty the inevitable loss of the series and his inevitable scoring explosion in the heartbreaking, crushing loss. The bleak and pale in his face left for the silent films, the full color and action returning from some movie from the year 2800. Rajon smiled, just a bit, with a twitch below his eye. A grain of sand of marginal confidence shifted the whole balance of the series, in his perfect estimations.

From certain defeat, certain victory.

He prepared his instructions to each player - instructions that would be even more contradictory, impossible, and confusing than this last game - and peppered each with still more contradictory pep talks. Some in Russian. His teammates would not only be running into one another as per his designs, they would also pull the emotional fabric of the game apart from the Heat and one another, leaving in its wake a rip, a void, a shadow, into which he would step and repair his own way. A new dawn.

Oh, the series was done. There are no hypotheticals in this life or the next. Rajon did not have to ask if but when his mind-shattering apocalypse of a Game 3 would burn hotter than heat. He would conquer this game of inevitability, if only the armies aligned.

Nate Jones (@JonesOnTheNBA) recently made an argument against Tim Duncan's private, quiet approach to life in the NBA. It's one he's been making for a long time. The argument goes like this: basketball - regardless of the product's essence - is an entertainment business. Tim Duncan is an interesting person and an important basketball player. In the hands of the right writers and interviewers, Tim Duncan could be marketed as a fascinating public figure. Therefore, opening up to the media should increase Tim's brand recognition and that of his team. In Duncan's case, it would also be good for basketball in general (and the NBA in particular) if Tim did so, because he embodies rarefied, virtuous qualities on and off the court. There are templates for Duncan to follow such as Steve Nash, but regardless of how he does it, Tim Duncan should become a more public person, at the very least showing his interesting personality to the national media. In fact, one could argue (as Jones does), Tim Duncan's salary is paid precisely because more athletes don't follow his quiet path. Duncan may not like it, but morality appears to demand that he seek an active public profile for the benefit of the league.

• • •

First off, let me stop and note something: There's a piece I wrote recently that I absolutely will not publish in its current form. (EDITOR'S NOTE: And it's not just because I won't let him. -- Aaron.) The piece starts with a petty complaint about writers complaining about the Spurs and then goes on to posit alternatives. Yeah, not a great pitch to begin with. But there was a moment of realization that illustrated a greater concern, and made the piece fall apart in the end: Spurs fans have insanely little to complain about, right now. Voicing these complaints amid a sea of light, fat-free criticism (that never failed to acknowledge the Spurs' greatness on some level) would therefore be not only tonedeaf but ungrateful. The Spurs are blessed to be the rock of the NBA and I'm blessed to be one of their fans through this stretch of basketball. So I'm not really going to complain about anything today. As Browning said, "God's in his heaven/All's right with the world." And Duncan's at the four. (Or five, if we're being honest.)

But Jones' argument needs to be addressed I think, not as a Spurs fan and not as a Duncan fan. No, Jones' argument needs to be addressed for the sake of keeping perspective in our demands of public figures. Consider this. In Chris Ballard's piece (four words we will repeat in aeternum) about Duncan, Tim is in a hotel elevator with Ballard when suddenly a family of three enters:

_ Here's what the husband does not do. He does not do a double take, betray any recognition of Duncan or make a comment about the previous night's game or this year's postseason or that one time Tim Duncan did that amazing thing. The wife does not bat her eyes or squirm. The daughter does not think OMG! OMG! OMG! and start texting furiously. This is not LeBron or Kobe. Or even Melo._

The door opens, the family leaves without looking back. Duncan looks relieved.

It's a very simple and poignant take - in a moment, Ballard has perfectly illustrated the price of fame to someone like Duncan. The price of fame is not just the simple cost to an athlete in time and pretentious, insipid discussions of brand (doubly so for an introvert). It's also the constant cost a famous person endures whenever he walks out the door. It's not just the people that rave over him that he meets in elevators. It's also the people he doesn't meet but that always threaten to address him and his family in public with a bit too much familiarity. It's not just the "shaking hands and kissing babies" part, to put it in presidential terms. It's the Secret Service part.

The consequences of increased fame aren't just present in an interview or two with the incredible Chris Ballard: they're in the hordes of tabloid writers. They're not just in the long-term recognition of his image, but also in the long-term commodification of his image and the lessening of his control over that image. Not just the extraordinary people he'd meet, but also the ordinary people the earthbound Duncan would have trouble dealing with on an equal and uncomplicated footing. Not just about his own privacy, but also about his wife and daughters' privacy. Not just about the privileges he's not taking advantage of on behalf of the league, but also about the corrupting influence of such privileges on him and those around him. And so on and so forth. Try to say you're humble when you've got a billboard in the center of town promoting your book. Try to say it's not about you but about the team, then, when you're being paid to wax rhetorical about what taking the last shot feels like. Try to say that journalists are worth your time when feckless hacks like Dan Shaughnessy are twisting everything you say -- even your small, humble quips -- to make you appear a confidence-lacking lesser star. Please. Go try it.

• • •

Yes, Duncan is a smart guy and could probably figure out how to make fame as controlled, pleasant, and altogether about his message as anyone else. But when you demand that the more private public figures be more vocal and start holding their salaries over them, well, realize something. You're not only asking for them to share their lives with the world more: you're also asking them to bring the world into their lives more. The athletes that welcome some measure of this intrusion should be respected as a necessary part of the ecosystem of this entertainment business. But let's not ask someone like Duncan to make such sacrifices unless we're damn sure we're clear on the costs. At some point Jones posted a tweet that really bugged me.

Nate Jones @JonesOnTheNBA: Duncan should care, @Rags8, because the league has enabled him to become a very rich man. There are obligations that come with that. 2:06 PM - 16 May 12

Can you see why I think this all needed to be said? Take it all together: Duncan gets paid a whole lot, but for that compensation already has plenty of obligations endemic to being a public figure, even if you ignore his 82+ appearances in front of thousands of fans to perform at a world-class, historical level. (Let's not even touch the looming fact that salary caps and max deals are effective price ceilings below market clearing price for a franchise-cornerstone star like Duncan.) Oh, and Duncan also has to go on the road away from his family for 41+ games a season. Oh, and he constantly makes physical sacrifices to maintain his declining, ever more precarious athleticism. Oh, and even if he isn't necessarily seeking out appearances, he addresses the media (and often appears at press conferences) after virtually every game of the season. Jones may be respectful of players like Duncan as players and human beings, but when it comes to the public realm Jones is dipping dangerously into the well-worn "ungrateful to be paid millions to play a children's game" trope.

Isn't it far more plausible that the intelligent and conscientious Duncan does care, and does recognize (as he says over and over again in interviews) that the league is an entertainment business... but still wants to strike a compromise for his public image that's further on the spectrum towards privacy than a Steve Nash? (And by the way, don't these more public athletes like Nash get further compensated for such public appearances? Just saying.) Why is any of this wrong in the slightest? Duncan has done everything with his basketball skills with remarkable class. Perhaps I'm biased, but I'd say that Tim has given us more than enough. In his long career, he has produced his personality for the league more than enough. He has produced financially for his team and league far in excess of his salary. He has produced spiritually for fans far in excess of what he has been given. Asking Duncan to do more -- to sacrifice more -- may be effective as a conversation-starter and indeed, Jones articulated plenty of great points.

But with the disengagement of an observer, Jones has given us precious little in the way of empathy or insight for Duncan's real options and priorities. Duncan made a choice. And while I would defend til death Jones' right to critique Duncan's choice, a fair assessment of the personal implications of what Duncan's choice entailed is critical to the argument here. You can call foul on Duncan's introversion and decry his quiet nature. You can say he should've brought the media into his life. That's your right. But understand the hidden costs, and at least acknowledge them -- it's a choice he made, with tangible benefits and drawbacks. It was not a moral obligation. The argument should be framed accordingly.

I've been itching to respond to Steve Kerr's recent Grantland piece arguing for raising the age limit because I find so much to disagree with. However, trawling the Internet for counterarguments, I found this podcast by Henry Abbott and Michael McCann, laying out almost every imaginable critique of Kerr's piece two months in advance of it being written. I find it more succinct, organized, and authoritative than anything I could put to text. Still, at the end of the podcast I felt like something crucial went unsaid. Kerr's piece ultimately had less to do with the age limit itself than with the larger problems Kerr uses the age limit to simultaneously attack: player maturity, development, and marketing. These are clearly critical problems to be solved, and in this two-part response, we're going to work on them.

But in the framework of these larger problems, Kerr's proposal to change the age limit by one year seems at best absurdly limited and unsuitable for these problems. Kerr's argument, to me, reads somewhat like that of a high school student who writes an essay arguing something trivial like that a first-time drug possession fine should change by $50, in order to ameliorate crime, increase revenue for the state, or advance political liberty by a few ticks at the end of the fiscal year, using a bunch of ad hoc, heterodox arguments. "It will ameliorate crime because... it will increase revenue because... it will advance political liberty because..." Perhaps, Steve, perhaps. Crime, fiscal policy, and liberty are enormous problems, though, requiring a broader vision than a rhetorical, cherry-picked take whose prime directive appears to be "stay on message."

• • •

There's a qualitative difference between ages 18 and 19 and 20 in our culture. But changing any such age restrictions by one year in either direction isn't going to solve a whole lot for the few high school seniors and college freshmen good enough to enter the NBA. Changing the age limit to 18 didn't work, changing it to 19 didn't work, and changing it to 20 won't work, because these aren't problems of age but problems of pattern. And solving a systematic problem of pattern with a marginal tweak of quantity is foolish.

There is a problematic undertone to Kerr's approach to decision making. Kerr refers to his proposal of simultaneously offloading player maturity, development, and marketing to the NCAA and Europe as "smart business" almost completely for reasons of cost. This is the absurdity I want to address today: Kerr may be right that raising the age limit is smart business. I don't agree, but I could at least buy that premise. But if I'm an executive with any business sense as I'm listening to Kerr make this pitch, I'm not going to sign off on this proposal in a million years, unless Kerr takes the additional step of recognizing (and at least estimating for me) the gigantic hidden costs the NBA is also taking on in outsourcing huge portions of its business to organizations the league has no direct control over.

What do these hidden costs look like? Well, consider. The NBA has absolutely no control over...

• ... What kind of maturity the NCAA or Europe is going to teach these players. In the case of the NCAA, "Maturity" sometimes requires first making stupid mistakes like getting injured without adequate school-sponsored insurance. "Maturity" sometimes means first becoming cynical over being lost in an unjustified bureaucracy. "Maturity" sometimes means being part of a program that doesn't care about you and undermines your confidence. These lessons of so-called maturity may in fact arise from conditions endemic to the NCAA that make the lessons completely unnecessary for a life in the NBA, or a life in professional basketball in general.

• ... What kinds of skills the NCAA program develops in the NBA's best prospects. "That big man is the next great NBA prospect! Just imagine what a coaching legend like Mike Krzyzewski can do for him in two years! I just can't wait until he comes to the NBA with ever-present knowledge of how to stealthily foul for 30 seconds of a 35 second possession, this will truly augment his ongoing development nicely."

• ... What kind of a training staff is handling the NBA's top prospects. Not every school is like Duke, with a massive on-campus hospital -- some schools are dreadfully behind in sports medicine, just like some NBA teams. It's true, we get one more year of data if we force players to stay in the NCAA for another year. But the NBA as a whole also takes a massive, unnecessary organizational risk when we allow them to stay that extra season. (Such as, say, De'Sean Butler.) Just saying.

• ... What kinds of situations the NCAA puts the best prospects into to get that valuable second sample year of scouting data. If so much decision-making truly hinges on those four extra months, then isn't at a minimum inconvenient that half the games for, say, Duke, may be against cream-puff non-conference opponents like Elon and UNC-Albuquerque? What about the fact that the central event of the NCAA is a single-elimination tourney, which is basically the opposite of an effective statistical sample? Isn't it at least a substantive cost that the NBA has no control over this process so crucial to its own scouting?

• ... What kinds of marketing efforts the NCAA will make to single out their greatest players. Marketing a player is the process of crafting a story and a message for that player, and the NCAA is hardly helping them out in this respect. For the most part the NCAA errs on the side of marginal players from high-powered programs, pasty-white volume scorers like Jimmer Fredette, or "prospects" like Austin Rivers of Duke or Harrison Barnes of UNC. Rivers is never going to be a stud in the NBA, he's just not that great. And yet the fact that he goes to Duke (and is related to Doc) is always going to trump his true talent. Barnes has disappointed his backers again and again, and yet he was and is still referred to as a top prospect from that class. He'll probably go top-7. The hype machine doesn't care much whether the player ever gets close to the hype, and as far as the NBA is concerned, college hype for players that don't pan out in its league is indistinguishable from static on the airwaves, crowding out its prospects, competing with the NBA's young players for the nation's attention. College marketing is built on the best stories, not necessarily the best players, and yet the NBA is built on selecting for the best players from college and overseas. College does write better stories for college players plenty of times, it's true, but by and large the NBA gets the residual, leftover hype (that it has to establish again anyway when the player gets to the league) while the NCAA reaps the spoils of that process.

I hope I've demystified some of the hidden costs of the proposal that are three-card-monte'd by Kerr's presentation. Solving these problems not only takes us far from "common sense," but also takes us into the sticky realm of addressing our priorities and our vision for the league, and making choices and compromises accordingly. It's suddenly not just a smart business, common sense, open-and-shut case whose only rejoinder comes from straw men like "Who are we to deny a 19-year-old kid a chance to make a living when he can vote, drive, and fight in a war?"

Kerr's proposal to raise the age limit is also a proposal for the NBA to let the NCAA and European basketball dictate the maturity, marketing, development, and maintenance of its talent pool for an extra year. What his proposal reduces in cost to the league it reduces in equal measure the control that can be exerted by the league. "What age rules will maximize revenue and limit cost the most?" is a perfectly valid business question. But Kerr isn't presenting the costs fairly, and the proposed benefits of outsourcing these functions to the NCAA and Europe are fraught with compensatory costs of their own, all of which deserve strong mention.

• • •

To bring our playoff coverage up, we’re bringing our formerly retired series of daily vignettes — titled “The Outlet” — back for the playoffs. “Don’t call it a comeback.” Though, you can call it series 2, as we are in the title. Every day (or, rather, every day we aren’t doing a larger and grander piece), 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 has one of the longest pieces we've used for this series in a while, with Alex ruminating on the Nuggets' elimination to the tune of Sorkin's ultimate masterpiece, "Two Cathedrals."

• "Brothers in Arms." by Alex Dewey.

Click the jump for today’s take.

• • •

Brothers in Arms
Alex Dewey

You ever see that masterful West Wing episode "Two Cathedrals"? Well, I got to thinking of it as I watched Game 7 of the Nuggets-Lakers last night. The episode - for those unfortunate souls who haven't seen it - carefully sketches out young Jed Bartlet's friendship with Dolores Landingham at a Dead Poets Society-type prep school. Jed, of course, would become the president one day, but it takes a wake-up call from new secretary Landingham to send his intelligent, compassionate character into a life of public engagement. Meanwhile, in the present, Mrs. Landingham (now Jed's longtime secretary) has recently died, having been senselessly hit by a drunk driver. And Now-President Bartlet -- attacked on every side, personal, emotional, professional, physical -- is doubting whether he should continue his career and seek a difficult second term. After Mrs. Landingham's funeral, Bartlet tells the Secret Service to seal the cathedral, so that he can give God a piece of his mind.

"She bought her first new car and you hit her with a drunk driver. What, was that supposed to be funny? "You can't conceive, nor can I, the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God," says Graham Greene. I don't know who's ass he was kissing there 'cause I think you're just vindictive. What was Josh Lyman? A warning shot? That was my son. What did I ever do to yours but praise his glory and praise his name? There's a tropical storm that's gaining speed and power. They say we haven't had a storm this bad since you took out that tender ship of mine in the north Atlantic last year..."

Bartlet's anger builds and builds until finally, feeling totally betrayed by a God he'd lived to serve, Bartlet shouts some blasphemies in Latin and tops it with an emphatic: "You get Hoynes!" This is the ultimate blasphemy, giving way for his dismal, cynical rival (Vice President Hoynes) to receive the nomination, effectively ending Bartlet's future political intentions.

• • •

The Gasol-Kobe-Bynum Lakers are there to break your hearts, to make you blaspheme against the Basketball Gods. Again and again, these Lakers will kill your favorite and your second-favorite team and send your most intense and enigmatic players to the locker room feeling like they had a chance. You will learn to root against these Lakers by virtue of the character and intensity of the other teams they inevitably face. But to the victors go the spoils, as they say, and for all the talk of their dogging it in this series, they clearly did have a few spare bullets in their chamber. Once again the strength of their game has justified their own perennial boast to relevance. No one has beat them four times in a series this season and it really doesn't matter that the Nuggets thrice refused them. That's how a seven-game series works, and more power to them if they can do it their way.

Their way or not, though, I get a naive and vulnerable feeling sometimes. Too often it's when I watch the Lakers or the Heat enact their prescriptive doomsday against some wonderful, joyful team doomed to fail. Like these Nuggets. These Lakers in particular make you question again and again just what it is we're all doing watching a game where the catty, drama-laden forum blue and gold can simply use teams like this as their personal scratching post solely and shamelessly coast through a series on account of their natural advantage. "You get Hoynes!" I actually tweeted this during the game, when the Nuggets' deficit was at its most dire. The dismal march of the Laker machine churns onward, and with it the remarkable joy that watching the Nuggets brought me.

But remembering "Two Cathedrals" also made me stop and reconsider. At his low point, after he's decided to concede the nomination to Hoynes, Bartlet utters ruefully to his wife that "the world can rest easy." The moment is shocking in the context of the series, even beyond the cursing of God (which is at least active and assertive). It's something as bad as death when you've given up hope. And when you look at the emotional arc of "Two Cathedrals," hope is the real problem of the episode, not the cliffhanger of whether Bartlet will run again or whether we'll give our goals another try.

• • •

And so the climax of the episode isn't Bartlet deciding to run again: It's Barlet (thanks to an apparition of Mrs. Landingham) recognizing where he came from and recognizing who he is: a flawed, occasionally impulsive, decisive, compassionate public servant that will stand up again and again for what he believes in. What matters is that Bartlet has regained hope. For all his weaknesses, he can always rely on his virtues and experience to keep hammering away against the problems of the world as long as he can draw breath. And he can always have the solemn faith that maybe, one day, some of these problems will break forever. Once that's established, the outcome of the political story is an obvious, meaningless afterthought. After a long motorcade ride set to Dire Straits' "Brothers in Arms," the president enters the press room and takes the hardest question first: Will you be seeking re-election, Mr. President? Bartlett's actor Martin Sheen - in one of my favorite moments in all of television - wordlessly answers with a posture of hope and affirmation. Roll credits.

Because of the appearance of Metta World Peace for Game 7, George Karl felt averse to using the Nuggets signature smallball backcourt of Ty Lawson and Andre Miller. But down 16 in the third, Karl realized he had nothing to lose and sent in Miller at the middle of the third quarter. Before the inevitable run that ensued, the run that put the Nuggets up 4 but still kept a Denver victory well out of reach, I muted Steve Kerr and Marv Albert, turned off my other monitor, and cut the lights in my apartment. Well, all the lights save for the light from two cathedrals in the backcourt, perhaps never to play again together. I played an apt song for the occasion: "Brothers in Arms." It was impulsive and superstitious on my part, but I don't know that I'll ever forget 'Dre Miller and Ty Lawson getting the Nuggets back into their unique brand of steal-and-rebound-and-transition, if only for a few glorious minutes of game time.

That stretch was a wordless affirmation of the Nuggets season and of the Nuggets themselves and while the Lakers tonight will wake up as the Lakers tomorrow - with a still-extant chance to deliver Kobe's 6th - the Nuggets on that team will wake up as Nuggets forevermore, and that moment of hope will always give Denver's mountainous sunsets a blip on the horizon, a hand silently reaching for last traces of light.