Here's a speculative answer, Matt:

I've been reading "Thinking Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman, and here's one of my takeaways so far: Modern psychology - as Popovich likely knows from the advanced psychological methods of the U.S. military - has identified dozens of heuristics that cloud and guide the judgment of experts and novices alike. These heuristics all exploit the tension between the intuitive and rational minds and thereby allow - to use the simplest examples - irrational methods of advertisement and rhetoric to pierce into the rational mind, even to the point of predictability. What's more, the heuristics may be based on absolutely nothing: When you are asked to make an estimate of a quantity and an experimenter puts a totally random number on the sheet of paper before your estimate, your estimate is going to be heavily weighted by this, again, totally random number. This is just one example of how the mind is led astray by diversions to the fickle intuition, both in the random ether-streams of words and numbers of the Internet and deliberate attempts to sow the mind with messages by advertisers and public figures. Complicating matters even further is that (according to Kahneman) this tension between the intuitive and rational is also central to the great power of the mind.

I speculate then that Popovich deliberately tries to navigate this reality of the mind, and so gravitates toward incredibly intelligent, driven, attentive role players like Matt Bonner, TJ Ford, and Kawhi Leonard and gives them simple expectations and tasks that they can focus on with every fiber of their being while on the floor. It's no coincidence that the Spurs' execution seems so crisp: Popovich makes a constant effort to ameliorate the diversions to the intuition and to highlight the strengths of the prepared player's intuition. Popovich has incorporated the power and the frailty of human intuition into his every decision as a leader and demanded in turn that his players do the same.

This is why (for example) Popovich will stress repetition and practice and patience: there are all sorts of perfectly valid short-term reasons why his players may fail to execute or fail to learn or fail to be attentive in a small sample. Popovich doesn't - can't - control these myriad short-term factors, and in fact it's his counterpart's job on the other team to create as many of these short-term problems as possible for the Spurs. So he ignores them to some extent, chooses his battles, makes his rotations when he sees something disturbing, and then goes back to the film room.

Crucially, Popovich recognizes that he himself is subject to the same forces, and that he's not just playing a game of rationality: while his performance as a coach must not be guided unaided by his own brilliant intuition, he is subject to the same flaws as a decision-maker. He recognizes that the lifers in the coaching profession (such as Larry Brown and Hubie Brown) - for all their intelligence and experience - have a fatal flaw: They will often stress most about the things they can't control, whether or not those things are actually the most germane to focus on in scouting and winning games. And this stress will guide their intuition and advice and decision-making, creating an irrational bias: Coaches would rather lose on the randomness of 3-point shots than of a long train of creative mistakes such as turnovers and other "easy stuff" such as missing foul shots and layups, even if the probability of winning is higher for a given team with the latter mistakes. This isn't because the coaches are wrong or misguided: It's just that they're coaches by calling and approach their duty with a solemn conviction that if their players listen and execute the coach's best-laid plans, their teams will either win or only botch games for want of talent or luck.

Popovich (I imagine) has no such faith, and while he regards various coaches as being elite (take his effusive praise for Rick Carlisle, for example), he will also acknowledge at every stage of the game that it's a players' league, and will credit Tim Duncan et al. with the vast majority of his own success, and when Popovich actually brings up his own role, it's usually to apologize to his team for failing to give them a good or clear enough gameplan in some sense. What's more, he effusively acknowledges the power of random chance in determining outcomes: While he'll give credit to a team that wins on good shooting, he won't put much stock in the victory (or loss) if the shooting was pretty demonstrably a fluke.

And so with this fundamental skepticism and self-effacing attitude, we have finally that Popovich has no mystical beliefs about his role or the power of his intuition as a coach, which is minimal: to tinker with lineups, to bring the very best players to the front of the rotation, and to find an offense and a system of roles that allows his players to maximize their strengths and minimize their weaknesses while allowing Popovich himself maximal flexibility to handle various game situations. That's the whole endgame: He uses games as practices for his players so that he can see what situations various players are most comfortable in, what tandems are most germane to winning, and how to approach his potential opponents in the playoffs.

And just as surely, Popovich uses these games as practices for himself, for his own intuition as a coach, because he realizes that his view of the game is as susceptible to the transient short-term stimuli of the moment as his most cherished theories of work and and basketball and effort. As much as any doubt he could ever cast towards his players, Popovich therefore has no problem casting the same amount on himself. After all, he is just a person that - like his players - is trying to maintain focus as a lot of people and things deliberately conspire to obscure this focus on the simple truths of a simple game.

• • •

With this speculation established, we come to Matt Moore's question. As part of Popovich's belief in the long haul and the approach of gradually developing the intuition, we might also suppose that the coach (before every season) gets his staff together and considers a whole lot of possible game and pre-game situations - for example, down by 12 against an inferior team with 15 minutes left or facing a mid-level non-divisional West team on a back-to-back on the road. Then Popovich and his coaching staff - along presumably with an in-house statistician - build a reasonable model for how they should respond to a large proportion of game situations. Then, an hour before tip-off and the media session, Popovich defines the sample space of the game before him and then draws from the I Ching 10-15 times, with more draws for back-to-backs and injuries and near the end of the season. Then - guided by this psychological anchor - the coach uses his intuition and what he knows about the situation to make slight tweaks to the result of the drawing and calls this a game-plan, which he then explains to the media as condescendingly as possible as if it were the product of incredibly simple and obvious planning.

There are 64 separate hexagrams in the I Ching. For Popovich, that great historian - who even encourages his team to discuss the State of the Union in team meetings - the I Ching is an obvious, well-trodden device for introducing randomness, with none of the dull silvery novelty of the Twitterverse. By weighting the hexagrams by the various distributions established before the season (and re-weighting at a mid-season team meeting), Popovich manages to maintain in a powerful tension the placidity and focus of a rational mind and the relentless unpredictability of an unhinged, creative intuition.

• • •

Or maybe it's that Tim Duncan's 35 and Tony's been logging a lot of minutes recently and Pop wanted to give them a lighter load especially on a back-to-back against a Portland team that's historically especially dangerous at home so that when the Spurs come back from All-Star Weekend the Big Three and Tiago are mostly healthy and ready to dominate or slog through the stretch run.

Whatever, something like that. He probably knew what he was doing.

At the Mavs game, they took some time to interview Jeremy Lin's high school coach. They tell him that Lin had described himself as arrogant and selfish before an ankle injury in high school changed his whole outlook. This self-effacement is too much for his astonished coach, who replies that - as you might expect - Lin was never arrogant in high school. Lin's being too hard on himself, his coach says. And you just shrug your shoulders and smile at another wonderful paragraph in an already wonderful story. Tim Duncan is my favorite athlete, and these are the stories that come out about Tim. And about Dirk. And about Nash. These are the good old stories we've already heard, presented in the expansive wonder of the new world that Lin has created.

Now, we know that interesting mini-story with Lin and his coach only because the crew at ESPN has interviewed the coach in the midst of a game and told him what Lin had said in another interview. The media is inextricable party to this story: They've aggressively found something by pitting two accounts against one another. This is the trend: People at ESPN and bloggers and beat writers have done the research and made the calls and done the interviews, and in doing so have created the contours for a phenomenon as surely as Lin's play itself has. The personal and cultural angles that bloggers have found in the past few weeks have been nothing short of tremendous, testifying successfully to the childlike wonder of sports.

What's more, it's an incredibly direct phenomenon, without gatekeepers to stop or redirect it. The quality of the best stories are now relentlessly pushed up to the front pages through endless links and discussions. It's all about the eternal search for good content. It's all about quality, readability, and clarity now, and the power of one's subject matter. It's all about honesty now, and the time spent with drafts. And in Jeremy Lin we've found the perfect story: Lin as subject matter has revitalized this narrative-filled-but-often-tedious midseason stretch in sports media. An incredible, singular feat. And it's why we've all fixated on how many angles there were: Because we knew intuitively that sports media would thrive in proportion to the incredible number of perspectives to write from.

But I think we're collectively at a different stage now.

• • •

I used to feel uncomfortable at parties. I used to feel that the brilliant lights of a dozen pairs of eyes were too bright for this pair, and I didn't want to wear shades. I would overthink and magnify tiny concerns. I would think myself right out of a social experience and I could hear the disappointment on the other end of the line when I said I wouldn't be going out. Even at this stage of my life, I feel the same sort of pressures at first: I literally close my eyes when I enter the room. This difference is that now - after a ten-minute perplexed silence - I open my eyes, I explore the angles and the people, and I find common ground and shared past with people I've known. By the end of a party I am enthusiastic. I am one of the contributory lights. I am a spotlight on the others, bright even to a fault, and they shine on me in turn. These days I drink a little bit more and I talk a little bit louder than I used to, but it's alright because I wake the next morning, revitalized by a full experience, and I don't need to go to a party again for awhile, because I am satiated, and there is no better feeling. It's a feeling I'm expressing now, hours later, but it was wonderful precisely because I didn't need to say anything, could acknowledge my happiness in comfortable silence, could simply feel that love of life with eyes closed and another day ahead of me.

Lin is going to run the point in the second half against Dallas, which will be starting in a moment. I'm getting chills, and I'm excited to see where this goes. I do believe we're reached that point with him, where we've drunk of the story and found words and a shared past, and we've probably talked a little too much. But it's alright, because of this perfect, comfortable feeling that has followed. That feeling is fullness, is satisfaction. But now I feel that we risk becoming oversaturated to the point of sickness. So let's keep a relative silence and see where the crafty point guard with so many angles takes us next. Oh, new stories will arise, new angles about Lin will come up, not all of them with such a fairytale quality. And we need to talk about them. That's what we do. But as the phenomenon becomes an established part of our culture and what is brilliant now becomes standard high-quality fare later, let's simply take these new angles as they come. Let's allow the story to develop with measured, contented patience, rather than in an active search for another plane of bliss. Let's stay where we are, because this is as good as it gets. Let's try to hold on to this feeling, to what we have.

Because we're no longer living in a world of novelty, of struggling to open our eyes to face the truth in its perplexing surprise. No, we've opened our eyes, and we're waking to the good old days of the future, and the next time a phenomenon happens, these are the days, this is the feeling we'll compare it to.

Obsolete! Obsolete! Obsolete!

With Basketball-Reference stepping it up, our old post ideas are obsolete. Have you seen that Twilight Zone episode with that librarian? So - in light of this development - I thought it would be fun to give away all our old post ideas so that someone else could find something to write from them.

• • •

January 2011 - The Small and the Powerful

It's 2015 and there is unrest in the forwards (and trouble in the threes). You see, Richard Jefferson and Tim Duncan may have been besties on the Spurs, but with their recent retirements, who knows what will happen to their friendship? Making things worse is that they unwittingly booked the same outdoor shelter to host separate barbecues! You see, Tim has invited every significant big, and RJ has invited all his small forward friends. Wacky antics ensue as the two - clad in gigantic toques and barbeque aprons bearing slogans* - compete for the tweeners and point guards that have tagged along! Culminates in a living chess game which ends badly for the wings when RJ can't see the entire floor because he is four inches too small. Checkmate!

*"Kiss me, I'm from the U.S. Virgin Islands" and "RJBBQ"

• • •

January 2005 - Jeremy Lin Will Dominate the NBA

Who saw it coming? I did, way back in January 2005. But I punted and didn't write it. This was a fictional tale, set in February 2012, and written as a factual article discussing and analyzing the impact of "Lindemondium". In my version, Lin cycles through every single team, even the Knicks, and is rejected by every one of them. Finally, just before moving out to Europe, he meets Mike D'Antoni (of course, as coach of the Suns) in a parking lot and challenges D'Antoni to a pick-up game. D'Antoni protests, "Why, there isn't a basket!" Jeremy Lin points to a small hole in a chain link fence, 28 feet up, and D'Antoni nods knowingly. Lin wins 30-5, and D'Antoni pegs him as a replacement for Steve Nash, and Steve Kerr signs Lin on the spot. But Robert Sarver - without even consulting his management - trades Lin to the Melo-Amar'e-Tyson Chandler Knicks for nothing but cap space. D'Antoni gets upset and follows Lin to New York. The rest is history: Lin dominates the league, Steve Nash gets pretty upset about the whole matter, but thinks Lin's story is pretty inspiring, and then the Spurs win the championship for their eighth consecutive season.

• • •

January 2003 - Kwame Brown Will Dominate the NBA

Who saw it coming? I did, way back in January 2003. But I punted and didn't write it. This was a fictional tale, set in February 2012, and written as a factual article discussing and analyzing the impact of "Browndemondium". In my version, Kwame cycles through every single team, even the Knicks, and is rejected by every one of them. Finally, just before moving out to Europe, he meets Mike D'Antoni (of course, as coach of the Suns) in a parking lot and challenges D'Antoni to a pick-up game. D'Antoni protests, "Why, there isn't a basket!" Kwame Brown points to a small hole in a chain link fence, 28 feet up, and D'Antoni nods knowingly. Brown wins 30-5, and D'Antoni pegs him as a replacement for Steve Nash, and Steve Kerr signs Brown on the spot. But Robert Sarver - without even consulting his management - trades Kwame to the Melo-Amar'e-Tyson Chandler Knicks for nothing but cap space. D'Antoni gets upset and follows Kwame to New York. The rest is history: Kwame dominates the league, Steve Nash gets pretty upset about the whole matter, but thinks Kwame's story is pretty inspiring, and then the Spurs win the championship for their eighth consecutive season.

• • •

January 2001 - Richard Jefferson's Internet is Down

Richard Jefferson - fresh off an appearance in the NCAA title game -is far and away by general acclamation the best player in the upcoming 2001 draft. But he also has a bad Internet connection, and a big research paper due tomorrow! Bear down, RJ! As RJ strolls around town with his laptop, dribbling a basketball looking for an Internet connection, he meets a bunch of GMs auspiciously along the road, and he tells them of his troubles. But all they can seem to focus on is his terrible handle! RJ gets his research paper done on time, but in doing so has lowered his stock to a mid-first round pick! His little Internet problem has cost him millions on his rookie contract! He ends by wishing he had just bribed the school with the huge donation he was going to give them anyway. Or, better yet, had simply asked his reasonable professor for a weekend extension on his paper! Dag namit!

Note: Yes, I predicted that Duke would beat Arizona in the championship two months beforehand. But - again - I punted and didn't write about it! Dag namit!

Dear Burke Nixon,

Recently you pointed us to your blog (Dear Dikembe: Open Letters to the NBA). The blog's premise could strike someone - like me, for instance - as quite strange. Oh, it's interesting: on Dear Dikembe, you incorporate all the myriad reports and information out there about NBA players into your own experiences as fan and teacher. And then, when you have something interesting to say about a player, you address him directly in a long, open letter (like this one), generally made from long, open sentences (like this one).

What's odd about this premise is a bit hard to express. I write fictional pieces all the time about these same players and it doesn't feel strange and I can't really account for the difference between our approaches. Maybe it starts with the asymmetry of the fan experience: While this is so obvious it's barely worth saying, it's rare when fans are themselves objects of fandom (and especially rare when it's by the same celebrities they're fans of). So - for the most part - public fandom of players simply doesn't go both ways, or if it does, the "mutual" part is usually overly generalized for the players ("my wonderful fans") and overly individualized for the fans ("Marry me, Dirk"). It's a glaringly asymmetrical relation. King-Subject, King-Jester, Patron-Artist, etc.

And you, Burke Nixon - presumably the same Burke Nixon most well-known for authoring an interesting short story that won first prize in a short-story contest according to my cursory research - are not LeBron James' idol or even someone he acknowledges personally. I'm not in this group either (and I've never won a short story contest, either!). It's simply unlikely that LeBron James would decide to write you a personalized letter. And of course, this is assuming that LeBron had found your letter in the first place, which is mathematically unlikely. After all, why would he find you of all people - I could ask - instead of the hundreds of other incredibly articulate writers writing the same types of things, many presumably with the same or better acumen in marketing? And even if he did write something - to you - it would most likely not be in an open, long-form letter that would satisfy and add context to your original piece. Finally, even if he did write something in exactly the right format with some interesting substance, the letter would be bogged down by the self-censorship and self-promotion that comes with status as studied public figure: All his words would be shaped in various ways by his media empire and pressured by the possibility of litigation and ridicule. So yeah, responses are not happening, probably. Not systematically, at least.

But I also don't think you're shooting at a dartboard with a blindfold. I think you do want a response from these athletes, but you're also acutely aware of these asymmetries that make response unlikely. And I don't think one response by an NBA player would vindicate your enterprise by itself *. Finally, I don't think you're wasting your time. You write with lucid prose and apparently sound mind and a lifetime of earthy experiences. I suppose I could assume that despite all of this, you're consumed by delusion or you lack a theory of mind or you're otherwise possessed by something else that would allow you to miss the simple unlikelihood of a response. I mean, I've read enough blogs that it's tempting for me to explain away Dear Dikembe's entertainment and literary value by saying that you'd just missed the point entirely and fallen into an interesting obsession -- as I'm wont to do myself. And that would be a fine, neat, simple explanation, and there are enough intelligent people that fall into this trap that it's plenty plausible. But I can't in good conscience tell you that you missed the mark a little bit, or that you have all your ducks in a row but are swimming on the wrong lake, so to speak. No, I can't say anything to denigrate or marginalize what you've done. I can't make it strange, as strange as the premise is. Which is in itself incredibly strange.

Instead of missing the asymmetry of fandom or refusing to acknowledge it, you've met it head-on, and from there you've subverted this asymmetry to your own ends. By recognizing that a response from an NBA player is really incredibly unlikely, you are able to make statements that are so direct and uninhibited that you completely avoid the inherent strangeness of fandom in your writing. Yes, you may be a fan writing to athletes, but thanks to your format and your recipient-may-care approach, you don't write like a fan. I'm not saying you're writing as an anti-fan - that is, something like a surly, gossiping beat writer, a cynical analyst, a player-hater, a detached stats guru, or all of the above. No, that's not it; it's just that you're writing from an subjective angle that is - by design - absolutely independent from your fandom or lack thereof. Even when you're talking about, say, Ricky Rubio and how much you enjoy watching him (is there any sentiment more typical from the perspective of a fan?), your form is essentially an unblinking monologue of a fictional conversation with Rubio, which turns out to be subversive of a bunch of unstated conventions about fandom. "I like watching you, Ricky Rubio, and I'm assuming a specific soccer metaphor will help you understand some aspect of where I'm coming from here." That's the beginning and end of the social conventions pertinent to fandom in your work. It's as simple as anything, and it clarifies everything.

What I'm saying is that you've achieved with your form what all writers aspire to: You have a form where you can simply think out loud, with no middleman. I'm not trying to deny a potentially extensive editing process, I'm focusing on your end product, which is incredibly direct.

And while I didn't think of this originally, re-reading this review a few days later I can't help but notice the similarity to another sort of open letter. You see, it looks like Tim Duncan has you beat by about fifteen years stylistically. Check this out. That's a comparison that has to be made, right now. Almost straight out of college, Tim Duncan decided to take on a rather collegiate assignment, just before he got his first NBA title: He psychoanalyzed himself for a magazine (nothing is more collegiate than that without adding "for his ethnic studies requirement"). On some level I feel that "The Psychoanalysis of Tim Duncan" largely explains Dear Dikembe: Tim Duncan in the comfortable position of explaining himself in a fun essay, being bound only by basic social conventions, has a style and an earnest exploration that directly mirrors your own style. The only obligation Tim had was to describe himself using anecdotes and ideas he'd had, and to do it in an interesting way that would keep his readers reading (it is literally impossible to tell if he had a substantive editor for his piece). The only obligation you have is to be real: to obey the most cursory journalistic expectations of honesty, sincerity, and organization, and to do it in a way that keeps your readers reading.

You just write naturally to these athletes, set everything on the table, and let the sentiment flow. You ignore or acknowledge only abstractly the fame and fortune of your recipient, but also acknowledge directly their existence as a well-documented personality, as a creator of beauty, as a moral actor with the possibility for redemption from sin and for going against their stated values, etc. You focus on certain details of flesh and spirit, and thereby establish slightly-constructed-and-fictionalized versions of individuals that exist on the same metaphysical plane as you do, so as to compare. And then you do compare yourself and your experiences with the athlete in question, and the end result is a set of sentiments common and interesting enough that anyone can enjoy them.

Don't get me wrong: The differences between author and recipient - in fame, objective achievements, and towering athleticism - are still there, palpable as the words themselves, but at some point - as the words pile up - the letter leaves only the artifacts of fandom and the artifacts are tightly-honed observations that do nothing other than to help the rest of the piece to testify to the larger sentiment of the letter. I'm much more familiar with open letters in the realm of politics, and it's an instructive comparison: An open letter to a politician is usually a fertile excuse to censure or commend that politician and the issues and values the politician is made to embody. In Dear Dikembe, the same trick is given literary and journalistic function in basketball culture. Open letters give us a way to directly access and then testify to our own stated values and the well-documented values of that athlete in order to propose a synthesis or a fertile juxtaposition in the minds of our readers. That's what jumps off the page. That's the power of the open letter.

Literature embodies more than can be embodied by your format of open letters, but Dear Dikembe makes me wonder just how much of the fan experience consists of these unwritten - heck, unvocalized? - sentiments towards athletes and the implicit expectation that our athletes respond, at least on the field of play, as if they'd heard us.

As someone who has obsessed about the art and science of reasoning and process (stated in another way: math and computer science, which just happen to have been my majors), it's fascinating to me that it all starts with your having a more direct approach than mine to the same problems I've had with - for instance - writing reviews of blogs written by people I actually know. So I've learned something from your sparse, ten-entry blog, and I can't say that to everyone. I think you're doing well, and I hope you can continue to do so with the same intelligence and personality. Best of luck to you.

-- Alex Dewey

* Though surely if this occurred you would be forgiven for looking in the mirror and pretending to pick yourself up at a bar by way of self-congratulation: "Damn, [insert own name], you fine: I say, 'Damn, you fine.'" is fine pick-up parlance; you can borrow that one, but only to yourself and only for this one specific circumstance. Don't use it, say, to try to pick up a police officer who is at the moment writing a citation within earshot. It would be literally true, of course, assuming that police officer had your exact name.

At a Bobcats home game, a father and his young son are sitting in decent seats:

"Watch that one," the father points at a player, "He's Gerald Henderson. Gerald plays good defense, and that doesn't always make it to SportsCenter, but he wins games for us. He's our unsung hero. Watch how he stops that frivolous chucker, Jamal, from moving past him."

"Wow! That's great!" the child says, as the jump-shooter Henderson is guarding (whom the father correctly believes to be Jamal Crawford) jacks up a terrible fadeaway three that by a miracle of chance goes in. "Was that supposed to happen, dad?"

The father grinds his teeth a little bit. "No, but sometimes it happens anyway. The point is that he's not going to do it too many more times like that. He's inefficient. He can't keep that up. Gerald's defense is great. Watch, pay close attention." But Crawford has the hot hand and - after a Bobcats pass goes literally nowhere - seconds later hits another contested three to the muted disgust of the crowd. The father rubs his temples. "I guess you could say that basketball doesn't always mean the good guys win," the father says grimly, looking on at an increasingly lopsided Blazers blowout.

"Are the Bobcats the good guys, dad?"

"I would say so, yes, more often than not." As the father says this, Gana Diop is at the line. "Except for him, son."

• • •

The game was growing tiresome. "They may be the good guys, but the Bobcats don't seem very good at the game of basketball. This is kind of boring."

"You're right, son. They don't hit too many shots. But a lot of them try really hard, and put their best foot forward. That's important. Listen, I can't make you like the Bobcats, son, but I can tell you why I like them and hope you follow in my footsteps." The son's ears perk up. "Now, there aren't many things that are great about our Bobcats. Not much right now. But a few years ago they had a wonderful basketball team, my boy. Did you know that once there were other Geralds that were even better at winning games than Gerald Henderson?"

"Like who?"

The father - being by trade a fantasy writer in the mold of a cheaper and less reasonable Tolkien - now chooses to structure the tale of the Bobcats in the only way he knows how. "Once there was Cr'azhwals, called 'Crash' by the masses. But his full name was Gerald Cr'azhwals and he was known as a fighter around which could be built a great army. Truly, he was a great Gerald."

"Wow. Were the Bobcats a great army once?"

"Yes. They were amazing. See, at one time, basketball was far more important to the people of Charlotte, son. Our whole lives and families depended on being able to put the ball into the hoop."

"Whoa!"

"Yes, and back then they didn't use basketballs. They shot arrows with poison tips and every warrior had a quiver of flaming arrows. The best archers got more arrows. They didn't use hoops; they used their opponents. Their opponents were their targets."

"Cool! Why don't they do that anymore, dad?"

"Well, because the world is changing, in some ways that are good and others that are bad."

"Oh," The child said with disappointment. "So then was this Crash the best archer?"

"No, not at all. In fact, others usually had to stand in the line of fire so that he could pull his bow taut. But that's not what he did. See, the other armies would live and die with their best archers. These were the aces of an army. And through the dark magic of grit and hustle, Cr'azhwals made these aces into braying goats."

"Wow!"

"The people in Charlotte would rejoice as Crash - on gilded wings - would take the rations of intruders and make them their own. We called those steals. Crash would take the weak arrows of intruders from the sky and split them in two. We called those blocks. If the arrows had foul poison, he would avoid contact with the poison. If the arrows were aflame, well, all the better to cook his newfound rations."

"So wait, Cr'azhwals had wings to fly with? Is that right?"

"Yep. Of course, he could jump so high he didn't need to fly. They were for show."

"Whoa."

"Yeah, some of the aces like Piers the Devil or the Snake Lord Kobe would come to intrude upon the fort. Cr'azhwals would fly down to them, and when they would outstretch their arms, he would outstretch his arms in kind. When they would move to their left, which direction do you think he went?" The father moved his hands in parallel to convey the question.

"To his left?"

"Haha, no. Crash went to his right, like a mirror on his man. Crash was a mirror for the best archers, sending their best shots back, and if one of those great archers from the other armies had a weakness, Crash would pummel them into dust."

"Wow! Crash was great, wasn't he?"

"Yes. The masses of Tcharh Lott were safe with Crash on our side."

"... what? Do you mean Charlotte?"

"Yeah, Charlotte.... but that's just basketball. What made Crash truly great was that he gave us in Charlotte some hope and made the other Bobcats feel like they were part of something. Sure, Cr'azhwals' army was feeble in spirit but with Crash at the front they had no fears."

• • •

In the stadium, the PA announcer tries vainly to get the crowd back into it with the obligatory chants of "DE-FENSE!" and "Go, Bobcats, Go!"

"Son, do you hear that? Do you hear those chants?"

"Yeah. But no one's chanting."

"Well, when Crash was here they did chant. They came to the games and they chanted, because they knew that they could always have a chance to win with Crash. 'Bobcats! Go Bobcats!' they would cry, as Crash led them from their sleepless coma of fear into the restful power of triumph. Say it with me."

"Bobcats! Go Bobcats!" they cry out at once, to the amusement of nearby spectators, who join in with one part irony and two parts masked yearning for Cr'azhwals. Just then, Gerald Henderson seems to get badly injured. The trainers help him leave the court. The crowd is silent for several minutes as the ballboys clean up. "Not another Gerald..." someone behind them mumbles. The father sighs.

The child is undaunted. "Were the Bobcats the best army around? The best army in the world?"

"Haha, nope. There is no one in the history of the human race who would ever say that, son." The child finds some unmistakable disappointment in this, so the father tries to mitigate his statement: "Oh, but the Bobcats were the best at something back then. They held the fort of Charlotte like no other. They defended our city from arrows, and Crash was at the center of it all."

"So... how do you know so much about the Bobcats, dad?"

"Well, the truth is very simple: I was once a Bobcat, but they sent me down and told me I would never see combat for want of ligaments in my knee and tenacity in my heart."

"Really?"

"That's what they told me. But it was really just my knee," the father shakes his fist slightly in anger, "I loved the Bobcats and fought as much as I could. I was once a Bobcat and I watched Cr'azhwals in the sky and drew strength from his energy that flew like his hair in all directions."

"Like Goku or something."

"Close. That's close," the father considers, poring through his mental catalog of small children's programs to find the Saiya-jin hero, "but remember that Goku never had to fight other people. At least not as an adult," the father says, surprising himself with this bit of context, "No, Goku always fought aliens or something. Cr'azhwals not only had to fight, but he had to make things right on Earth afterwards. His teammates sometimes despaired, but he brought them back. Always did."

"Whoa."

"Yes, I hate to say it, but our home in Mint Hill - just outside the sacred fort - doesn't feel quite as connected to Charlotte so long as the Bobcats suffer without Crash."

"Huh, now that you mention it Mint Hill is pretty boring."

"Boring but peaceful. There is peace in our little town, son. Never forget that. Don't take it for granted."

"Yeah, but it sounds like Crash was pretty awesome. I love the Bobcats."

"That's more like it!"

• • •

"So, like... did Crash ever get beaten?"

"Yes. When the Bobcats were on the prowl, the fort of Tcharh Lott would weep from news of afar: For when he was away from home, Cr'azhwals had only his Bobcats to feed and to feed from, and his power waned, son. The legions of archers he could neutralize shrunk to but a single able-bodied soldier, and the legions descended on their intruders the Bobcats."

"That's... too bad, dad."

"Yes, it was. But we knew Crash would get 'em back when he was defending our home. The people of Tcharh Lott learned not to despair of news of Crash from afar, and to wait for their hero to return. For he always did."

"What happened to Crash?"

"Nothing, for awhile. It was good, for a time. Flanked by General Felton and the yeoman Emeka Okafor, they held their fort against armies of strength and numbers. When Crash cut his wings on a certain devil's sword (we called the devil Byeh'Nom), the Bobcats gained power from Crash's encouragement."

"So Crash got hurt really bad?"

"Yeah, but he got better after that. He wasn't quite as fast, but Cra'zhwals recovered." The son nods in understanding and subtly alters his mental image of Cr'azhwals from that of Saiya-jin to that of an Android. After all, Saiya-jins like Goku only got stronger after recovering from injury. "Crash was such a tremendous warrior, though, and one year he even got us to the Tournament of Armies, reserved only for the upper echelon of great armies."

"Did you win?"

"No. But we showed them that we belonged. Ten Bobcats strong," the father says, a tear in his eye, "But then the darker days came. Then came the Lean Years... I cannot finish... No, it is too painful."

"What happened in the Lean Years?" the son asked, recognizing his storytelling father's feigned reluctance to finish.

"Well, since you insist...," the father continued without further pause, "Oh, how I remember the election with despair! The people of Tcharh Lott yearned for power in the wake of The Tournament of Armies. Seeing numbers and strength that they felt had been denied them, they elected a new admiral."

"A new admiral?"

"Yes. The new admiral was a great, aged warrior that had seen the days of wine and roses, had seen more armies before the great Bobcats, had decades ago ended a drought in Tcharh Lott's province (North Kyral) by filling vats with opponents' blood and asking of his fellows "Now, will you have drink?" and they had laughed."

"Who was the admiral?"

"His name... was Jordon."

"Was he a good leader?"

"He was a great leader. Great and powerful, like the Sith. Great and terrible," the father said with trembling voice. The child quivered with fear. "Jordon said that this would be a lean time and rationed his men and horses and food. For the greater good."

"Oh no!" cried the child.

"Jordon saw that - in his vision of constant intrusion and constant defense from intrusion - Cr'azhwals would not fit."

"Nooo! He killed Cr'azhwals! Why, Jordon?"

"Well, no, he just sent him away. See, Jordon saw a port on the Placid Sea and said you may have 'Crash' for no fewer than a thousand horses and Nic Batum."

"Who's that?"

"Oh, Batum's alright. Not as good as Cr'azhwals, that's for sure."

"Damn!... Darn! So they did it. Jordon traded Cr'azhwals away for nothing but the greater good and Nic Batum?"

"Yes, precisely. Well, they couldn't get Batum, actually. So they just settled for the horses, but the port refused to send them. So for naught but flotsam, Jordon sent him away. And in one day - or how it seemed! - Cr'azhwals departed from our fort forever. I can still see the Placid Airship, flying him away as we waved until Admiral Jordon would not have us wave again, and suddenly our warriors - our precious Bobcats! - seemed as depleted as our souls would feel in the terrible Lean Years. Suddenly, in his mad rush for frugality, Jordon had made our army into Lean Bobcat$, spelled (in secret vulgarity, under cover of friends) with our common currency."

"What?"

"Dollar signs. We spell the Bobcats with a dollar sign for the 's' sometimes."

"Oh...."

"Because Jordon only cares about money. Get it? Eh?"

"Oh. That makes some sense. So... what happened to Cr'azhwals in the Port on the Placid Sea, dad?"

"Portland? Oh... I mean, he fought very well for them. They say -- when the Bobcats' arena gets quiet - that you can almost hear Cr'azh, blocking another arrow."

"Whoa. I think I can hear him."

"Yeah. You might even say he's right there," And the father pointed to the Blazers' Gerald Wallace, laughing with his teammates in garbage time of a massive and completely uncontested Portland win.

The son instinctively saluted Crash.

• • •

Eric Freeman of Ball Don't Lie talks about Tim Duncan's awesome, comic-book-vintage knee brace. Freeman reflects on Duncan's personality, and then on his marketability:

"The easy answer is that he doesn't want it to be out there. And yet Duncan did in fact star in several national ads in his first few years in the league, so clearly he's not totally averse to getting media attention. What's more likely is that Duncan's personality, as nerdy as it is, was decided to be too out there for a basketball star. His media anonymity might not have been self-imposed, but rather decided by the companies who need to project a particular image when they hire athletes as endorsers.

That's fine, obviously: Duncan's doing fine for himself. But it's a reminder that what we know of players' personalities often isn't decided entirely by them. Sometimes it's up to the corporate gatekeepers who decide which players fit their needs."

There are niche actors all over Hollywood that exist specifically to play a single role in commercials. Basically Freeman is telling us that professional advertisers can't find such a role for a nerdy, iconic (apparently willing) basketball player with MVP-type credentials for the better part of a decade with a more-or-less impeccable public record. According to this narrative, Duncan didn't tempt large advertising firms enough to offer him a big ad campaign because his nerdy personality is too out there. And that just doesn't add up to me.

I'm definitely not trying to idealize Duncan or insulate him from the forces of economic motivation just because he is a class act on my favorite team but Freeman's unqualified cynicism seems to follow incredibly specious logic here. If Sprite, Edge, and adidas were willing to sponsor him and give him national exposure when he was a rookie (and when he was writing weird stuff like this), why wouldn't they be willing to continue that exposure as Duncan built the Spurs into a dynastic force as the foundational force? Duncan - for all the talk about the Spurs being boring, dirty floppers - has always been fairly well-regarded, especially in terms of character and consistency. The question I have for Freeman is: Did "corporate gatekeepers" overlook that? Are you seriously telling me that with all the weird, abstract ads from the last decade that an ad firm couldn't find a national spot for Duncan selling something "boring but dependable" like insurance or something "fun and nerdy" like sports video games or something "with a quiet tenacity" like batteries using Duncan's reputation?

Yeah, I'm a big Duncan fan, so maybe I'm just overestimating the imagination of ad men and Duncan's Q rating. But I find Freeman's explanation incredibly tenuous, especially when there's a much more likely explanation: Rookie contracts and the economic uncertainty of injury, and those rationally explain Duncan's increased willingness to seek an ad campaign early in his career far better than a Mad Men-esque box-out of a willing Duncan. See, Tim Duncan was on a rookie contract for his first few years in the league, when he had a much less comfortable and uncertain amount of wealth (according to Basketball-Reference, Duncan earned a relatively paltry $3.4M for leading the Spurs to the title in 1999, and less than $4M the *next year*). If he had gotten a career-ending injury early in his career (before the big paychecks), it's possible the next few years of public commercials could have offered him a tenable, remarkably wealthy start to the next part of life. Being an intelligent guy around wizened veterans like Sean Elliott, Avery Johnson, Steve Kerr and David Robinson, it seems absurd that Duncan wouldn't be aware of the ways in which a basketball player's fortunes can change with a single injury, and so he might have chosen those spots on the sheer level of ameliorating that financial uncertainty a little bit. What's more, even though he stayed healthy, Duncan's short-term contract was absurdly below his market value (thanks to the NBA's cartel and the most recent CBA that had altered rookie contracts into their less lucrative form), and these spots also served to compensate Duncan with an income much closer to his true market clearing price and a decent amount of unqualified positive public exposure. Personally, that seems to me an economic explanation that doesn't rely on unfalsifiable hypotheses about faceless corporate gatekeepers.

Finally, well, by all accounts any of Duncan's apparent "nerdiness" (which Freeman aptly gets at in the article) comes in at least equal measure with a taciturn, understated, stoic personality that sees both rising and falling fortunes as transient and imperfect, which is a picture you'll get (often in those literal terms) from any interview Duncan has done in the last 15 years. With Duncan's personality as it is (or at least as it appears by all accounts), it's pretty plausible to say he's somewhat reluctant to endorse companies for massive national exposure as a sort of "victory lap" for his successes, when he knows an athlete's fortunes are always trending downward with the ultimate (and swift) passage of time. Maybe he's just a quiet guy that wants to hold up the trophy this year and go at it again next year until he can't anymore, as he's specifically said in multiple interviews.

Freeman is giving us an interpretation that Duncan's image is low-profile because his "nerdy" personality was not picked up by unnamed "corporate gatekeepers". But this interpretation is specious, given any interview, profile, or secondary account of Duncan's life and personality, which has him as genuinely avoiding the spotlight and the transient joys and pain of victory of defeat. And Freeman's only evidence to overturn this large body of evidence seems to be two commercials that Tim filmed during Duncan's insanely below-market rookie contract. But once you can account for this below-market contract, then everything else is consistent with someone that genuinely wants a low profile. Duncan was well-compensated after his rookie contract and the ads stopped for the most part, except for the occasional well-written and funny ads (Sprite, edge), in-depth profiles (adidas), and local shilling for his owner that's redeemed by humor (HEB). Father Time is undefeated, and Duncan knows it, so maybe a completely financially taken-care-of individual decides instead to make his few moments in the advertising sun about mentoring, reflecting, and laughing. I don't know but that seems far more likely_._

Lately I've been reading George Karl's 101 Basketball Out-of-Bounds Drills. This is a virtually unavailable book from 1999: I only found it through the Borgesian library of the Internet's darker channels. It's not impossible to find, but if (work with me here) 100 of you went out and bought it, I feel like that would actually prevent the next 100 of you from trying to get it. But despite this, I think Karl's book is worth talking about, if only as a lead-in to talking about halfcourt offense as a whole. After all, the book delivers exactly what its title promises, nothing more, nothing less -- the whole thing is about 115 pages long, and about 14 of those pages are non-drill pages, if you catch my drift. And while each of these pages contains a "drill," the drills are mostly full, workable descriptions of set plays with a couple extremely helpful diagrams per description.

• • •

As an exercise, I turned off all of the lights last night (last night when I wrote this, i.e. December 3) and got into an improvisational reverie and just tried to visualize and memorize a few of the inbounds plays. After doing so - despite the sparse nature of the book's coverage (I run through a couple of the plays below) - I was able to formulate some general principles from what I'd read. Some of the mostly implicit principles behind the plays were:

• Have a "safe" option on the wing in case the play (or even the initial inbounds pass) fails. Kind of obvious in retrospect; if you're coming out of a timeout you don't want a 24-second violation or even a turnover.
• Use a screen or an unscreened flare-out to the corner in order to create space for the inbounds pass.
• Use screens constantly to force mismatches and confusion, and realize how powerful rolling towards the basket off a pick is, even when neither player has the ball (as in a P&R). It's the old wisdom: "If you want to get open, set a screen," presented in its full generality.
• Use v-cuts and backdoors with quicker, smaller players in order to keep the defense honest and positioned to the offense's advantage.
• Use motion across and down the lane in order to force the defense to make bad or inconsistent switches that the offense can exploit for an easy path to the rim.
• As in folk basketball wisdom, the inbounder is extremely dangerous and useful to an inbounds play, but this is only true if the other four players can create the spacing or the screens to allow him to work after he comes inbounds, and only if he's actually suited and prepared for the action called for by the play (usually Karl seems to use PGs when he needs a lot of motion by an inbounding player).
• Passing the ball around the perimeter is powerful and works to the advantage of 3-point shooting teams and dominant driving players. Having great passing big men (like Tim Duncan) and oversized points (like Andre Miller) is a huge competitive advantage on inbounds plays, enabling lobs and post-ups that use their extra skills, which the defense must compensate for or (to the bane of every defense) simply must allow to happen.

And so on. There are so many little tidbits of understanding, so much domain expertise encoded in these diagrams and descriptions. I'm sure this is obvious to many of you that played basketball for your high school or college. But for those of us that played gritty street ball at recess, this book (and no doubt, the hundreds of others like it) is a revelation.

One of my biggest concrete takeaways is that, in sheer basketball terms, Dirk is an offensive coach's dream, and the book demystified to an extent Dirk's apparently miraculous comebacks these playoffs. With all of the marginal advantages Dirk has, both in iso and two-man plays, it's little bit less of a wonder that a loaded staff, an experienced supporting cast, and Dirk's basketball knowledge were able to beat the all-world Heat defense so consistently at the ends of games.

But Dirk's just a concrete example of why Karl's book fascinates me: Making and defending an inbounds play near a team's own basket sort of captures the whole problem of team basketball in a short microcosm of process, with fewer passes, seconds, opportunities, and with a much smaller margin for error on everyone's part. The competitive processes of inbounds plays don't of course match exactly those of team basketball as a whole. No, it's not a perfect microcosm. And there are plenty of elements of basketball that the inbounds play doesn't really cover: Transition, iso plays, rebounding, and perimeter passing come to mind. All of these form tangential considerations in an inbounds play. But just as in team basketball as a whole, the basic process of moving the ball and getting a good shot is the central question.

As with basketball as a whole, an inbounds play gives the advantage - the serve, so to speak - to the offense. However, just like basketball as a whole, this advantage is marginal and contextual. What's more, any number of factors such as poor execution, a lagging fifth player, great defensive rotations, and a bad matchup can instantly and rather decisively tip the scales towards the defense. To ensure that the players have a chance to win the serve, Karl's plays deploy all possible resources: Aside from last-second plays, spot-up shots and quick lobs, Karl uses at least 3 players actively. Most of the plays use 4, and quite a few use 5. It's fair to say that all the drills covered use all five players at least as decoys and for spacing purposes. I mean, most of the plays use 3 players just on the inbounds pass, much less the play as a whole. So these drills really do encapsulate the problem of committing totally to an offensive possession.

Above, I sketched the general principles of all of the plays in the book, but reading that bulleted list again, I note there's a principle I'm still missing. It's of the more abstract variety and it goes like this: Through a decent amount of practice, dedication, focus, and intelligence, a normal, decent offensive team can take on a normal, decent defense, and - through a topology of holes in time and space created at the moments when defensive players must decide to switch - can utterly destroy that defense.

• • •

Drill #53

Now let's go through a couple of drills. We're gonna start out nice and easy with this first drill, and by the end we're going to be nice... and rough (yes, I'm referencing Tina Turner's spoken-word intro to "Proud Mary"). For each of these drills I'm going to show you an image copy of the page, my thoughts, and a gif sequence showing the options of the play that I made from the diagram. Warning: gifs may be canon.

Drill #53 is quite simple. Straight up, your team will use a double screen to sweep out the free throw circle and make a switch at least difficult, creating space for a jumper from the top of the key. And if the defense eventually switches on the double screen, the two big men (conveniently located at the baseline) can start a solid post-up or lob situation as a fine second option.

It's very simple, yes, but note the subtleties of resource management: a double screen is about creating a wall of space more than it's about size*, so the size (PF and C) goes to making and receiving the inbounds pass. The center flares out to give him space to receive the inbounds pass but also to give him an angle to the top of the key. The power forward runs a suggestive route with an establishing cut, so the defender can't avoid the lob question. At best, PF's defender is looking at a battle in the post and not much else.

*Spurs fans might note that Popovich will often use double back-screens (with basically random players like RJ/Bonner/Hill) at the basket to allow Duncan to curl around for an easy two. One rather stark example is easily seen in Sebastian Pruiti's solid breakdown.

And that's just on the inbounds pass. The second pass from C-SF "starts" at the beginning of the play as a dangerous interior cross-court pass, right across the blocks, and when the SF v-cuts into the lane, the pass becomes just plausible enough to have to defend. An option Karl could have added would be an actual cut to the basket for a lob, and you have to think that the SF has to be a lob threat or a threat under the basket for this to work. But despite all of this, the "end game" of the pass is a relatively simple, uncontested pass between two players that have flared to safe spaces.

One of the reasons this review took so long to post was just the simple challenge that I had in making .gifs that didn't look like a child had drawn them -- specifically, a child like myself, with conspicuously poor motor skills and even more questionable design skills. If you must know the whole story of the .gifs, check out their alt-texts. Anyway, here are the .gif files, one for each option.

Anyway, both of these plays are fairly simple to execute and differ only in that in the second version, the SF hasn't gotten open, so the C goes to the PF as the second option.

Drill #19

Well, I chose one simple drill above: Now it's time for one hilariously convoluted (but possible) one.

Now, this drill is exactly as complicated as it looks. Just look at it: It's that complicated. It's probably the most complex and complicated drill in the book, for those of you into maddeningly pedantic distinctions. And there's no "use a screen as a means of confusion". This drill seems to assume that the defense will make perfect rotations. For my part I've only seen a few perimeter possessions where the defense honestly would stand a chance against this play if executed correctly. The only weaknesses I see are: its complexity, its dependence on dozens of quick passes, its length (it might be possible to execute the fourth option in 7 seconds, but realistically, this is an entire 14 or 15 second play).

To understand this drill it's important to see it in real time, as visualizing the above play takes quite a while from the book's description and diagrams. This is a cool thing if you're a reader trying to understand the geometry of basketball. It's not so cool if you're trying to convey the motion of this play to a blog reader. My final version of the fourth option .gif had 44 separate frames, almost all of which consisted of a screen or a perimeter pass, despite the staggered motions inherent to stop-motion animation. It's a very busy play involving all five players.

Above is the first option. The SF basically greases the wheels with three screens in the lane (and the center makes two screens on his way to the wing, too). This isn't a play built on deception, really. The SF stays around the elbow after the double screen for the PF to set a back-screen for that same PF. You can account for that, but you're asking the defense to make switch after switch, switching even as a switch is in progress. Note also that the center's pass in is essentially an open lob or an oop if the PF is open. Not all frontcourts are capable of this, but for me this immediately brings to mind set plays involving David Robinson and Tim Duncan.

In the second option the point guard comes from the wing and curls around and flares out off of a SF screen to the open jumper at the FT line. Notice that this second option is set up by the PG and SF following the PF into the lane from the first option. It's not hard to see a simple variation to salvage the first option in which the PG screens for the PF in a second attempt to allow the C-to-PF play, perhaps instead for a five-footer at the block. In either case, the PG can quickly finish the screen and end up with space for a jumper. But the PG-to-PF screen serves a second purpose:

For the third option, the pass to the PG wouldn't yield an open shot, so the C feeds the PF in the post and comes down to help for a two-man game. So long as the PF isn't dribbling and there's time on the shot clock, the PF can basically just hold while the C comes down to screen.

Astonishingly, as you can see, Karl includes yet a fourth option for this play: Supposing the two-man PF-C game doesn't work, the PF can reverse the ball around the perimeter again and immediately cut for the other side of the basket "around" the defense to complete the reverse. Notice that even here (on the fourth option of the play) there are other variations that could easily have worked and been incorporated: A SF jumper, (reward for all those screens in the first part, maybe!) a two-man game on the baseline with the SF-PF or on the wing with SG-PF, or a jumper at any point in the second reverse.

Yes, this play is mighty complicated, with a lot of moving parts and a lot of assignments. But it is also robust and expressive enough to encapsulate much of an offense's skill, is plenty able to be modified to reflect the different advantages and disadvantages that an offense might possess (as it is, this play with its lobs and center decision making seems more at home with a great frontcourt like Tim Duncan/D-Rob surrounded by decent shooters with limited driving ability).

• • •

Conclusion

It's hard to call George Karl an innovator - a... bridgelayer, so to speak - without having a robust knowledge of what came before. I've not heard him been mentioned in those terms before, so it may be safe to assume not. But whatever the case, it's just as hard to deny that George Karl is an incredibly solid coach in sheer basketball terms that has brought every type of lineup to high levels of achievement in his career. You get the sense that it doesn't matter all that much what players he has at his disposal: he will find a way to get the most out of them (though, of course, every player and lineup's ceiling is different) most of the time. There are no doubt clearer playbooks out there, and there are in all likelihood quite a few coaches that are right at Karl's level, or even better. But this book gave me a little insight into how he thinks, and that's a story worth telling. Hope you enjoyed listening.

"First off I hope I make the Olympic team," Durant said recently, humorously humble as ever. "But if I do make it, I won't worry about that, man. I think I do a good job of taking care of my body. So if I'm there, hopefully I can push through it and make it a good season and a good summer."

--ESPN's Weekend Dime, Marc Stein, 1/20/12

Gee, reading that quote really brought back some memories! See, I know Kevin Durant from back in D.C. During the lockout he and a couple of his NBA friends would play on a neat pavement court. Being an intrepid, ruthless basketball journalist disguised as a baby-faced 16-year-old, I seized the moment and asked to join the game, right when they were shooting hoops early in the morning.

"Hey, Kevin," I said, casually as possible.

"Hey, kid. What's your name?" Kevin Durant had a really jumpy, curious voice.

"I'm John."

"Hi, John. Are you by any chance a point guard on the Minnesota Timberwolves?" Kevin and his friends kind of chuckled at that. As did I. Kevin Durant had jokes.

"Nah, they waived me right before the lockout ended. The Spurs signed me, at a reduced salary, as a mop-boy," This last part was true. Only mopping afforded me the insider journalistic access I sought.

"Wait, really?"

"Yeah, seriously. I'm from San Antone. We be chillin'," I said, briefly putting on my aviator's shades before removing them, slowly, while glaring at Kevin.

"What brings you to D.C., then, John?" Kevin asked, a bit on edge now.

"To mop up the streets. With my intense basketball skills. Game on," Alea iacta est. The die is cast.

"What position do you play?"

"Well, I'll play point guard here, KD. But back in school, I'm the starting center. I take the tip and every play after that I anchor my team on both ends," I said, gaining confidence with every word.

"You can't be more than 5'9'', John!" Kevin laughed.

"I'm by far the second-tallest person in my entire school," I countered.

"What about the tallest?"

"Oh, she blew a calf out in the sand in beach volleyball."

Kevin Durant made a shocked expression.

"I'm sorry to hear that!" he said with such enthusiastic sympathy that I nearly cracked up right there. His eyebrows arched intensely, like he was a character in a cheaply-drawn anime.

"Ah, it's not a big deal. She'll get better in a couple of months. And besides, it doesn't matter all that much because I crash the boards like Rodman."

This line sealed the deal, and with some laughter Kevin told me to wait for a few more players (from nearby colleges, I gathered) to join in his pick-up games.

• • •

When everyone had arrived, we all drew lots to see who would be the first captains. There were only 12 of us, so the players that didn't get picked for one game would be captains in the next game. Simple as anything. Kevin Durant actually drew one of the captains' lots and picked me with the tenth choice, obviously out of sympathy. One of the two that didn't get picked was NBA player T.J. Ford.

Now, T.J. Ford was a gangly, awkward experiment with wireframes that had seemingly tumbled out of a graphical computer at the University of Texas and stumbled to the gym where the coaches realized he was a fully-formed college point guard and a future lottery pick. I knew a bit about him from his college days, and he would actually sign with the Spurs after the lockout, but now he just looked... eerily foreign in person. I felt like a scout discovering Nyarlathotep at a Nike camp or something. He also seemed kind of pissed Kevin hadn't picked him. He brooded on the sidelines and leaned against a chain fence, sitting on the ground.

But now I had bigger concerns: Because of the logic of the matchups, I was guarding a 6'10'' PF from a Division I school. Now, honestly, I'm not sure if this was truly the logic of the matchups or just an excuse for physical comedy, but I'm a big fan of physical comedy anyway, so I went with it. It was pretty entertaining, and - as a journalist - I was discovering empirically why Tim Duncan wasn't quite as fast as he was in 2003, and it wasn't just age. Have you ever been in a (playful but physical) fight where you hadn't been eating but where you had been drinking, and had also been running? Do you get what I'm saying? Well, if you haven't, here's the summary: you feel a little bit sick, but more than that, you feel like you're 70% of the way to unconsciousness, and 110% of the way to fainting. And that's exactly what playing the post on both ends was like. Despite the intensity and height difference, after our 12-minute game I had torched my counterpart for 5 points and 7 rebounds. I mean, my counterpart got 15 points and 20 boards, sure, but... it was progress. I had scored, legitimately, and I held my head up. By the end, I really felt like I could play him to a draw. Then they untied his shooting arm, money was exchanged, and the captains started the second draft.

For the second draft, the captains were still sitting against the chain fence, and so those of us that had just played were just talking among ourselves:

"I hope I get picked. If I do, I think I can do better this time. I think my team will win, if we just put the work in." Kevin Durant said. Everyone just looked at him, some concealing smiles, some rolling their eyes. I was astonished.

"Kevin, you're a marginal MVP candidate in the NBA. T.J. Ford is the second-best player here, and he's nowhere near as good as you. I'm an undersized, underage point guard here that plays small forward in a high school for tiny white people. I am in the 80th percentile, height-wise, in my school. We found out in math class. That's why I'm on the basketball team. Because I am relatively tall at my school. I have played literally one-thousandth the basketball that you have and I'm a foot shorter. You're going to get drafted, Kevin."

"Hmm, I don't know. Wait, did you say small forward? I thought you said you were a center!"

"Nah, that was a joke."

"Was the volleyball girl a joke? With her calf?"

"No, that really happened. She's hurtin' in the calf, definitely."

"Oh."

"Dude, my point is, you're being too humble. You're easily the best player out of the twelve of us! No one here would dispute this! Who among you would dispute this? Why wouldn't he get picked, for real?" I addressed the others. No one answered. I was astonished. Kevin Durant was honestly this humble. He honestly thought he had to earn a starting spot where you just had to be the 8th best out of 10 to get one.

"Listen, I just have to do my best and prove that I can make the team. That's all there is to it. Just go out there and compete, and if I get picked, all the better."

"Alright, just, uh, just don't sell yourself short," I could hear the faint echoes of commentators complimenting Kevin's humility, oblivious to how deep it apparently went. I could only smile and make my eyes wide as the others had done. "Is this guy for real?" I asked rhetorically.

T.J. Ford spoke, "Alright, the red team is ready to select. With our first pick, Red Team picks..."

I heard Kevin Durant whispering, "Please, please, please, please."

T.J. Ford finished, "...John!"

Kevin was incredibly disappointed by this turn of events. I had no words, and the other captain immediately chose Kevin Durant.

Despite his disappointment, Kevin delivered a monologue thanking his captain for the confidence he'd shown in selecting Kevin. "...and team blue shirts are going to win the championship this game if we can just execute and act like a team, from the top to the bottom of the lineup," Kevin pointed at Royal Ivey as his captain chose Ivey with the last pick. "Don't get me wrong: Team red shirts are great. We know they're great. They're tough on both ends. We all know this. But we think that we're better."

• • •

T.J. Ford took me aside after the draft. "I hate that guy."

"Who?"

"You know, that tall guy. Long arms. Anime eyes."

"... Kevin Durant?"

"Yeah, exactly. I hate that guy, kid."

"How can you hate Kevin Durant, TJ?" I said, genuinely curious.

"Ah, I mean, it's not hate. You know, I just don't think he's as humble as he acts. I think it's, like, an act, you know? I'm pretty suspicious."

"An act?"

"Like, a put-on for the media and his team. I know it don't make much difference if it is, but I'm curious. And we're, you know, going to test that, right now. In this very game."

"... What in God's name?"

"Why do you think I came here, kid?"

"To play basketball when your league of professionals is locked-out?"

"Well, yeah. I guess. But also to test Kevin Durant's humility. That's a close second, in terms of goals."

"Come on you guys, we're playing in a couple minutes!" Kevin called to us from afar.

"Listen, kid."

"Yeah?"

"I want you to play against Kevin Durant... Then..."

"Uh... okay, T.J. But that's a nightmare match-up..."

"Kid."

"Yeah?"

"Shut the hell up and let me finish."

"Oka-..."

"First I want to deliver an impromptu press conference, as coach and captain of red shirt team."

"What?"

"Do you have a microphone handy, kid?"

"Yes. But I don't s--..."

T.J. at this point started talking loudly enough so that Kevin could hear him as he fed me questions from index cards hidden under his giant white headband.

"Mr. Ford, how do you feel about Kevin Durant? How do you plan to match him up with your defense?"

"Well, John," calling me by my first name for the first time in 10 minutes, "I don't think he's a very good player at all, so I will be matching him up with my worst player... John. I have contempt for Kevin's playing ability. Utter contempt. A child could beat him, if that child had ever been in a fight, because that fight alone would make that child tougher than Kevin Durant."

"Is that why you didn't draft KD in the first place for your team, Mr. Ford?"

"No, I didn't draft him because I didn't think he DESERVED to be on a team, John."

• • •

"Well, KD, I guess you learned that you aren't as humble as you thought! You know you're the best player here, and you were just putting on a show of humility."

"T.J., I'm surprised at you," Kevin said, "The difference came down to front office acumen. Blue shirt team knew what it would take to build a contender, and realized that I could be a valuable contributor to that contender."

Ford just shook his head at the insult. I was laughing.

"Well, T.J., if it makes you feel better, that was the best game of my life! I got 8 whole assists."

"Aw, shaddup. You're not even a real point guard, kid."

"Well, to be fair, neither are you, T.J. But you have some good games."

"That's... that's kind of true, actually. Thanks, kid."

Kevin Durant shrugged and untied his right arm. It was time for the third draft.

For an explanation of what this is about and a full listing of the Pantheon thus far, go here.

We're updating The Pantheon today with eleven links. Fun times for all. An important note that we'd like to emphasize is that we are really, really open to suggestions (discovery-wise, the list is about 40% Aaron-40% Alex-20% later suggestions at the moment), even to your own pieces. Really, we don't mean to be biased or terribly exclusive: I mean, it *is* meant to be a textual highlight reel, yes, but as we're trying to exhaust the list of the very bets, we're realizing that it's essentially inexhaustible. When we want to include something on the basis of supreme quality, we can usually find room for it. Because of this, The Pantheon is becoming more and more of a library for great pieces than anything else. We're keeping the name, and the attitude of timelessness (because all the pieces are truly timeless, and the additions are no exceptions), but we recognize the subtle Borgesian shift from pantheon to great library. And we're cool with that.

I say this because we are quite aware that the additions are mostly Spurs pieces. We're called "The Gothic Ginobili" and this is what we're familiar with. Now, we're pretty confident that other fan bases are producing content every day as hilarious and brilliant as Popovich giving Vampire Beno Udrih a withering stare that causes Udrih to impale his own heart in shame while "Luke Walton's smile supernovas into escalating sobs". We just haven't seen it. Sorry. Tell us if you do see something great (especially one that speaks to you personally as a fan of one of the teams/players), preferably in the comments of The Pantheon. This is best because it saves us the trouble of adding it directly/filtering them/until an update while still allowing readers to check it out. If you'd prefer more privacy or a longer explanation than a post or a link dump? Then try droping us a line through our staff email. We'll read it, and probably even respond!

I realize there's something inherently normative about making a freaking Pantheon (and naming it that), and every time we update it I feel a certain (kind of obsessive) pressure against the normative, the biases, and the urge to promote based only on preference in subject matter. Why? Well, because sometimes that normative part is the ugly stuff of exclusion in selection of material and a cheap delineation of what is high art and what is not, and it's kind of endemic to the human mind to compartmentalize these sorts of things. But it's not our purpose, and we're aware of the problem. Note it. Thanks. New links after the jump.

• • •

TABLE OF CONTENTS (for pieces in 1/20 update only)

• • •

The Riverwalk Conspiracy by Rand - Maybe I'm revealing my bias for fiction here, but I just love a hilarious, well-characterized thought experiment. This piece (written in the midst of the 2010 playoffs) captures a strange, mystical caricature of Spurs' Coach Gregg Popovich and his methods, mid-flight. Owner Peter Holt acts as the perfect comic foil. [Note: Owes a lot to another PTR piece of fiction, the longer Ginobili vs. Dracula. I didn't include it here because it's mostly too contextual for a general NBA fan to enjoy, but I love this chapter which I think holds up pretty well without context.]

• • •

The Pathology of Manu Ginobili by sungo - This is one of those pieces where the sentences get better and better and the focus becomes clearer and clearer as the piece goes on. By the end it's something to behold, and to hold on to. You could change the tenses and adapt some stuff and it could be a HOF introduction or an epitaph, but it could never be changed to suit anyone else. Why? Well, because there will never be another Manu Ginobili. And I don't know if there's a better description of Manu out there.

• • •

David Robinson was a Fine Role Player by Timothy Varner - This is one of the most accurate explorations of the strange, unselfish culture of the San Antonio Spurs over the last two decades. Tim Varner (of 48 Minutes of Hell) traces the Spurs' culture directly to the contributions of one David Maurice Robinson. With every playoff exit by teams he had carried at an MVP level, Robinson saw all that was missing and tried again and again to be those things the next year. But Robinson found out that he just couldn't be all the that his team needed, not with Jordan there, not with Hakeem lurking in Jordan's shadow with a great supporting cast and an otherworldly 15-month stretch. So, when Tim Duncan came along, Robinson (with some early disdain and wounded pride) easily, unselfishly sacrificed his touches and his accolades in order to help the Spurs to win two championships and to create a great legacy and a long-lasting culture of character. And in doing so, the Admiral created the template for a different kind of legend: a different kind of star. Varner's title is ironic in the best sense and helms a piece that builds to an overarching narrative that anyone who has followed the Spurs to any degree will understand.

• • •

John Wooden and the Culture of Ought and On Johnny “Red” Kerr by Timothy Varner - You know, looking over the Pantheon so far, I notice that the criteria that seem to dominate our selections are depth of insight, passion, journalism, and imagination. But at the end of the day, it's probably Tim Duncan - along with his subtle virtues of integrity, intelligence, and competition for its own sake - that I'm tuned in to watch every night. It's our deep respect and admiration for Tim Duncan that motivated the existence of the Gothic Ginobili more than anything else (if you want to know second place, just look up at the banner/name). The same is true of sportswriting. We look first for writing that dazzles our imaginations, then for writing that expands our minds, then - without exception - we look for writing that stirs our souls and affirms our values. If you understand all of that, then the inclusion of Varner's pieces is obvious.

• • •

The City’s Advanced Stats Primer and EZPM: Yet Another Model for Player Evaluation by EvanZ - Math recognize math. I don't know enough about basketball statistics to really give you an unbiased, objective opinion on which stats and approaches are best. If ezPM is the best single-number statistical APBRmetric on the Internet I have no idea, and if it's hopelessly dated, well, I don't know that, either. I'm not a big stats guy. What I do know (from decades learning math and from reading about some of these statistics over the past few years) is that ezPM is a fine metric, and takes Dave Berri's already decent but flawed (no, really, it is) "Wins Produced" metric to yet another level of insight.

But more than anything pertaining to the ezPM stat itself, I'm mostly linking to this pair of pieces for the mental process behind them, the story told by EvanZ in the "Primer" of finding an abundance of these already-decent metrics like WP, building something a bit better in ezPM, and - in the scientist's dismal, grinding, purposeful way - in the end still not being totally satisfied with the outcome. After all, every scientist worth their salt understands intuitively and concretely that there are always more avenues for improvement, and there are always thoughts that can be re-thought, as history (and math especially!) suggests. It's a story that for the most part Berri frustratingly and oddly omits from his own work, and that we'd love to hear. Because (speaking not as a scientist but as a happy consumer of its products) the honest stories of science not only bring cultural exchange (as in the "Primer") but also tangible improvements in the science itself (as in ezPM).

• • •

Regarding Moses by Matt Moore - On the blogosphere, we talk so much about upsides, breakout stars, and devastating disappointments. Most of all, we talk about the nebulous, dynamic legacies of our stars, young and old. Our era has more upsides than it has downsides, and I'm not really complaining. But it was so refreshing when Matt Moore took an afternoon to do some research and reflect on Moses Malone. Moore comes away with a simple portrait of Malone, who knew he was great, had a lot of fun, and then got on with his life. Set against a modern pace of sports media constantly massaging and shaping legacies with each game, the article is well-done and neat. While the prospect of a book about Mo would be nice, this article is a fitting send-off in its own right - simple, enjoyable, important without being heavy. Strawberry soda pop.

• • •

Tracy McGrady, 'freakish' talent and the peril of ease by Dan Devine - When someone makes a good argument that carries with it the sketches for a much broader frontier of understanding, then they've "stretched the game out," quite literally. In Devine's piece, we get a stern deconstruction of the expectations that coaches, fans, and management place on their stars and the laments that follow when those expectations aren't met. And, as a result, we learn to undervalue what we have and overvalue what we could have but never might. On some level much of sports fandom is predicated on the hope that our teams and our players will do unreasonable things: Performance - even to the crustiest statistician or historian - is not the whole story. The missed shots, the skills that inexplicably don't take to a player, the rotations that could have been made: these expectations all matter, of course. But it's worth taking a step back, and that's exactly what Devine's thoughtful piece does.

• • •

Two last additions: to our description of Traveling West Finds Cleveland by David Campbell, we're adding the following two articles which give additional background and broader context about Delonte to Campbell's piece. They're The Real Mr. West by Tzvi Twersky and A Teachable Moment by Angelo Benedetti, and they're both fantastic and worth reading in their own right.

A few months back, when this blog first launched, I wrote a piece that was meant to be less a discussion and more a diatribe starring the work done by the Wages of Wins blog. It was the opening piece of our Juwan a Blog? series, and it currently stands as by far the most negative portrayal of any blog I've reviewed. Aaron and I both have strong opinions about what Wages does, and both its strengths and weaknesses. One strength, which we really could've done a better job of highlighting, is the sheer volume of intelligent people the WoW network has accumulated -- while we can disagree with their orthodoxy and strict adherence to their way of thought (which, obviously, we do), you can't knock the hustle, nor can you knock their intelligence. There are a lot of smart, smart people at Wages, and in my takedown of their methods, I didn't necessarily articulate that. So, please consider this articulated.

Here at the Gothic, what we hope to do more than anything is start conversations. When Aaron wrote his piece this weekend examining Kobe via Stavrogin, he didn't intend it to be the be-all or end-all of his writing on Kobe, or the discussion of his comparison -- he intended it to start the conversation. How valid is the comparison? How well does it fit Kobe, and can one stretch it further? Those are the questions we like to ask. When we created the STEVE NASH model, we didn't do so intending it to be a be-all and end-all of our statistical meandering -- we merely want to add another model to the discussion atop the various standard prediction models, and see if we can't get a few more ideas on the table. Like my pantheon, it's only the stepping stone to -- hopefully -- a some-day valuable index of the absolute best sportswriting the NBA has produced. More than anything, that's what we like doing here.

I say this all because Wages of Wins recently addressed diminishing returns on defensive rebounds in an update to their main metric, Wins Produced. Such a tweak might sound fairly standard, but they've previously exhibited stubbornness and an almost impossibly high standard for making even minor changes. By their standards, it's a huge deal. They also published a link to this very post, summarizing more well-written (and my own) critiques with links to the pieces. Again, that might not seem like a big deal that they posted it, but they didn't used to post comments like that. And the fact that they seem at least marginally earnest about starting a dialogue is fantastic. It would be intellectually dishonest to ignore progress to suit my existing narrative. So good on them. I thought it would be more fair to them as a self-contained blog if I could stop cluttering their comment pages and repost this as an well-linked, oft-updated summary of their primary critiques here on Gothic Ginobili -- ripe for their own responses, when they get a chance, and ourselves isolating things we feel should be addressed. This is that ostensible entry, if you haven't gathered already. Let's get to it.

• • •

Before I get into the critiques, let me note that apparent critiques of "style" are inextricable from those of "substance". This isn't because everyone that disagrees is trying to invent a hole in substance by calling Dr. Berri curmudgeonly. It's because just as Berri values the peer review process in and of itself, much of the Internet (especially among the stats/blogger niche) finds the closed-access, privileged nature of this process to be anathema to the open spirit of inquiry of the Internet. They feel that Berri's measured, stubbornly-academic approach has negative effects on the substance, context, fluidity, and ultimate ceiling of his research that has allowed others to leapfrog WP48. That said, while this is meant to be a compendium of critiques against WP, it's hardly for attention (we're kind of burying this between two pieces more important to us, to be honest) and it's not meant to be a purely negative. It's just meant to be a conversation-starter, and a positive force for the understanding of basketball through statistics and discussion. If we can raise the tenor of debate, we've done our job and that's the bottom line.

• In the spirit of this disclaimer, shall we start with my own criticism? (In their collective defenses, this was written before I knew about the team dreb% adjustment, which does begin to challenge my narrative to a real extent.) I argue that (and this will be a theme in all of these) the Wins Produced metric is perfectly reasonable but is not so reasonable that we have to throw out all our other reasonable concepts and metrics, and given Dr. Berri's stubborn and ideological approach to the metric, it's unlikely that WP48 will ever get to the point that justifies the arrogant, often lazy attitude of this blog towards its metric. It's not absolutely substantive, I admit, but I don't think it's fallacious, either. I read the books and I read this blog far too often, and I feel I've diagnosed the key "problem" that many individuals smarter than I have with their stat and their approach.

• Here are a couple of links that - in the first one - fantastically detail the state of basketball statistics from a well-reasoned, overarching point of view. In__ the second link__, the blogger EvanZ (a friend of the blog and of STEVE NASH; hell, dude even helped us find the last two links) posits and computes a strong, substantive +/- analogue to WP that (as far as I understand it) uses play-by-play data to award what is captured by the box score credit in a similar way to WP. Evan does change how rebounds, assists, shot attempts, and defense are weighted and it is a completely different metric, but his ezPM starts with (and is most apt to be apprecated by) people that get WP and agree with it to large extent but find it has troublesome components.

• I don't know anything about Phil Birnbaum, but this response to the rebounding section of WoW's FAQ is very well-argued. Accounting for diminishing returns on rebounds as Dr. Berri et al. did recently is a step in the right direction, but as far as I can tell, these critiques of WP and rebounding are still absolutely valid as conversation-starters, at least, and best of all they actually start with the words of Dr. Berri, decreasing the amount of abstraction into which fallacies and sentiment can enter the conversation.

• Here are two disgruntled amazon.com reviewers (at least one of which runs a stats blog that I know of) sketch out their frustrations with the WP model.

• Nathan Walker argues (and, to be fair, partially rants) that there is existing, solid empirical evidence against the empirical value of offensive rebounds and the assignment of team statistics to player statistics is extremely shortsighted, looking instead for more sophisticated +/- models. This captures perhaps the most visceral statistical critique of WP: "We've already thought about this along the same lines. Who are you to call us more irrational?"

• D. Blum "eclectic reader" puts together a constellation of objections whose home planet is the loaded terms "Wins Produced" and "productivity" as used in the WoW books and blog. A lot of us can accept (because of its reliability) that WP measures something, and that something is often pretty close to basketball productivity. But using the term (with an associated absolutist approach) forces the metric into an uncomfortable Platonic standard which it doesn't seem to live up to for critics. Probably the strongest critique here is #3, which persuasively argues that WP's fixation on retrodicted correlation with Win% doesn't (by itself) indicate a robust statistic by creating an absurd - but illuminating - parody.

• The Problem with Wins Produced by dhackett1565 of Raptors HQ is a wonderful (and - as far as I can tell - mathematically sound) examination of the rebounding question by showing that WP is a degenerate (in the good, mathematical way) special case of a slightly more complicated formula. It illustrates that WP does make choices in its allocation of individual statistics not necessarily based on strict logic and correlation, and even purports to show a contradiction in how WP is awarded over the course of a single possession. (Personally, I don't see the contradiction yet. I'll update if I do.) I think this is an important step which shows both the elegance and the problematic simplifications of WoW. For me as a math major? Well, this one gave me a lot to think about. The rules and structure of basketball (esp. the demand for transition defense and the 3-second rule) make problematic the idea (seen in WP) of offensive rebounding as a regained possession without further context. Also, this link is a bit more respectful than the Amazon links, and really does try to get at both sides of the argument. Hat tip to EvanZ (@thecity).

• An Incredibly Long And Educated (though probably partially outdated) Look from APBRMetrics is, well, uh... an incredibly long and educated (though probably partially outdated) look from APBRMetrics. Unfortunately it's from 2004-5, but it features a lot of good content if you're willing to pore through it. Hat tip to EvanZ (@thecity). Again.

• Dave Berri's Dismal Science - An alternative conclusion to the WoW network's typical conclusion of the bounded rationality of NBA decision-makers, SilverBird5000 of Freedarko.com deconstructs the economics of the scorer's market in a world run by Berri's metric, reversing the causal chain between pay and quality to an extent, to argue (somewhat convincingly) that scorers are "overpaid" partially for the risk-taking activity of scoring as opposed to crashing the boards. I don't know that I agree totally, but it is at least reasonable and a solid interpretation.

All of us care (way more than we should) about getting it right, WoW and above critics included. That might sound trivial, but I think it's a good first step. Thanks for reading.