War does not require bombshells and brigadiers. It does not require bloodshed and hardship. War requires a single thing -- conflict. Overwhelming conflict, traditionally between two large bodies composed of untold masses of souls lining up obediently for the cause. That's all. We don't need two large bodies to have a war. All we really need is a single large body and a small group of rebelling forces with enough pesky guile to incite the larger body to make war. That's it. Perhaps you'd think this new type of war implies a recent phenomenon. One that rose with the advent of terrorism, small cell resistance groups, weapons of mass destruction.

That would be wrong. It's not new at all.

Warfare of the second type -- a large body against a smaller, self-sufficient group -- has always been a factor in society, and always will be. And not in the way you think. Weapons of mass destruction have always been ambling about -- the nuclear bomb is the belated antecedent of weaponized knowledge. Destruction can be wrought from grim dictate of the pen and the rogue idea, in the hands of a brutal tyrant or a careless fool. The biological weapon is a diseased form of an idealist's contagion. The terrorist is the next step in the artist who uses their words to incite fear and loathing among the sycophants who follow. These weapons began with the advent of independent thought. Their rule can be cruel and unusual. The tyranny of a good idea can -- and has -- ruled the world in its history. More than any one man could ever hope to achieve.

• • •

Kobe Bryant elicits fundamentally intense reactions. There's disgust from some -- the echos of scandal and a controversial style loom over his game, and detract from his brilliance among that faction. There's devotion from others -- the style that others so hate endears him to many in an overwhelming fashion. It's a rare few who watches Kobe Bryant and thinks "oh, that's neat, I can take it or leave it though." There's a core challenge to the fan in Bryant's play. A challenge to accept, to understand, to love despite his faults.

And faults? They're there, whether the devotees like to admit it or not. Becoming a devoted fan of Kobe Bryant necessitates becoming a devoted fan of a man who -- despite being one of the most gifted passers of his generation -- simply doesn't pass very often. Becoming a devoted fan of a player whose defensive effort waxes and wanes from an all-defensive peak to a ridiculously low-effort fluff on 90% of the possessions of a season. Becoming a devoted fan of a player who, inevitably, will make life a bit harder for himself every few possessions solely in the name of style.

In a vacuum, these are all things we learn to hate in other players. We learn to dislike the passers who keep avoiding their talent. We learn to dislike the players whose defense yo-yos through incredible highs and impossible lows. We learn to throw up our hands and yell at the player who takes the awful shot when there's an easy shot seconds away. But there's an element of self-respect and self-awareness in Kobe Bryant, in his most quiet moments. This is a man who rates out as one of the most knowledgable basketball scholars of his generation. He's studied the annals of the game, the breaks of history. He understands that he makes the game a bit harder for himself. Internalizes it. He knows that he often does things inexplicable at best and actively harmful at worst. Things that increase the difficulty of his road, or might make the team worse.

And -- surprise, surprise -- he doesn't care. In fact, he scoffs in the face of the people who do. Because much like Manu Ginobili can make his aesthetic keynote a fundamentally inconceivable three point shot, Kobe Bryant makes his aesthetic keynote the imposition of impossibility in any possession he can safely manage it. What should be a simple dish through the double team to Gasol becomes a double teamed bicycle shot. "And-1! And the foul?!" What should be a simple case of rotating on the help for some becomes a dread steal, with Bryant refusing to give an inch edgewise and refusing to let his prey escape the tendrils of his pressure defense. What should be a simple play in most playbooks becomes a one-on-five as his teammates turn to stone and Bryant takes a few pretty dribbles and hoists up a terribly ill-conceived high-arcing shot as time expires.

Swish. The crowd goes crazy.

• • •

Mikhail Bulgakov was a very good writer.

Mikhail Bulgakov wrote plays, novels, and vignettes. No piece better represents the stark way Bulgakov's own nature challenged the world around him as his early-career short novel, Heart of a Dog. In it, a mad scientist takes a dog off the street and transplants into the beast the spleen and reproductive organs of a man, causing the dog to transform inexplicably into a disturbing half-man with a nose for the grotesque and horrifying. When stated like that, it sounds like a silly romp through a now-worn science fiction premise. In execution, it was far more. The book was an examination of the ethical difficulties of enforced transformation, and a reflection of the Soviet's attempts to fundamentally change the Russian people to a nation of communist principle and moral.

Mikhail Bulgakov was fond of the story-within-a-story critical piece, even when it ruined all chance of his work seeing the light of day. Bulgakov wrote dozens of plays that were banned for production in Russia for his entire life. The aforementioned Heart of a Dog wasn't published in Russia until well after his death. His masterpiece -- The Master and Margarita -- was a vicious critique of the Soviet literary establishment baked within a masterwork of a two-frame story and high philosophical questions about life, art, and the general state of man. Writing his masterpiece took an incredible toll on Bulgakov, and realizing the dismal chances he would ever see his life's work published sent Bulgakov tumbling into depression and agony. His inability to get his grandest work published destroyed his health and placed the artist on death's door. Not less than a year after the completion of his manuscript, Bulgakov died.

Mikhail Bulgakov was a casualty of two wars. One was the first world war, where he served as a front-line surgeon and suffered several terrifying injuries that caused him to become hopelessly addicted to morphine for much of his life. The second was a war of ideas, a war balancing Bulgakov's harsh critique of the Soviet establishment against the establishment's disgust towards any and all criticism. There was a distinct irony in the way Bulgakov's work was treated -- Stalin himself was a noted admirer of Bulgakov's. But powerful men like Stalin never quite realize that ideas are bigger than any one man, even one as important as Stalin. Bulgakov's work continued to elicit censures and suppression throughout his life, despite Stalin's general appreciation for his work, with lower level communist officials continually rejecting his attempts to publish until finally levying a full-scale ban on the publication or dispersal of any and all work produced by Bulgakov in 1929, and maintaining it well beyond his death despite his pleas. Bulgakov continued to write, and to bury pieces he could never publish in a drawer he'd never return to. The man knew no fear. Unfortunately for the world, he also knew nothing of old age.

Mikhail Bulgakov died at age 48, a tragic victim of a silent war.

• • •

"Il Fait à présent la Pluie et le beau temps." *

To some, basketball is a game. To Kobe Bryant, basketball is a war.

But here's where things get tricky. It's not a traditional war, as earlier described -- it's not some large-scale conflict between two teams as masses. That's an average basketball game, a brightly colored facsimile of a two-country war as played on a comically abstract field of battle. Kobe Bryant's approach to the game is different -- far before any pretense of the team or the franchise, his war is personal. Kobe vs the machine. Armies lined up to face down the barrel of Bryant's long gun. One versus many.

Bryant's war is one man taking on an entire defense, dozens of possessions a game. Few stars are as good at Kobe Bryant at simply taking ownership of a rogue possession -- turning, for one stirring moment, the game of basketball into a vicious 1-on-5 cage match. If you're one of the people who wonder aloud why Kobe Bryant elicits such stirring praise from his comrades in arms, or why Kobe Bryant is considered one of the best to play the game? Watch how he commands the audience's attention. Watch how he molds and shapes context around the vagaries of his goals and desires. Some stars shoot, over and over again. They'll hog the ball, play some hero-ball, refuse to work in the team concept. Bryant approaches it in a similar way. He wages war on the opposing team, hoping his own overwhelming force will be enough to guide his team through.

This all is_ described_ in a similar way as the hero-balling star, but that doesn't mean it's the same. It's not. The casual star molds their style to fit the game -- Kobe Bryant molds the game to fit the style. He's a showman with a command of his craft so effective that most who watch him can't help but revise their entire idea of what a star should do to follow Kobe's example. Understanding what makes one a fan of Kobe requires understanding the way his game depends on the viewer buying in to his dictate. It requires the viewer to see him take over a game and begin to fundamentally enjoy the takeover more than you would have enjoyed a series of expert shots from his supporting cast. Abandoning, at least temporarily, the idealization of teamwork and taking as your dictate exaltation of the individual. Better than anyone in the game right now, Bryant turns the game into a manifesto, a personal statement. Like Iverson, Jordan, Arenas at his peak.

He takes a game of many and produces a game of one. That's his gift.

* - "He runs the whole show, now."

• • •

There's exactly one person in the game today who reminds me of Kobe Bryant. Not a player, an official, an owner or a fan. It's the man who redefines coaching and changes the meta-game for those around him. It's the man whose machinations often cause the fans to throw their hands up in confusion and anger, whose adherence to the long game can make his individual actions immaterial or confusing. It's a man who -- above all else -- acts like a tremendous jerk and gets away with it on a daily basis simply by dint of his incredible talent and his tendency to change the game.

Gregg Popovich, that is.

There's a certain allure Popovich holds beyond his already considerable coaching talent. And it's exactly what makes Bulgakov and Bryant enduring as personal figures. They find themselves thwarted, at times -- by reason, by logic, by the fact that they're simply trying to fight a personal war too vast for one man. Kobe Bryant, for all his successes, has a lot of incredible failures where he shouldn't have flown solo or alienated his teammates with inexplicable jesting and harshness. Gregg Popovich, for all his titles and talents, has lost the Spurs numerous games stubbornly fixating on crazy tics like small-ball or Blair/Bonner, and he's gotten the franchise fined on multiple occasions on sole account of unnecessary rank churlishness. Mikhail Bulgakov, despite being by far the best Russian writer of his particular era, was unable to parlay his brilliance into any tangible recognition or praise simply because he refused to play the game in the way the Soviet censors wanted the game to be played.

In the final estimation, Popovich is among of the greatest coaches of all time -- and in my book, the greatest -- not for his coarseness and brackishness, but not despite it either. Will Pop's surly answers be entombed in the hall of fame, for all to remember? Probably not. But they will mark the memories of those who remember him, and they will form the first two or three stories that old hands will tell when the children of tomorrow ask what was so special about Popovich. When Bryant is enshrined in the Hall of Fame, the same applies. Bryant's hall of fame career will demand mention of his titles, his scoring, his will to win. All that fun stuff. But the first story old hands tell won't be that of Kobe's 81 point game, but that of his style. His absurdist 1-on-5 fixation that killed the Lakers as often as it helped them. The complexity of a man's failures is as key to their own greatness as the actions that make one great in the first place. Both Popovich and Bryant exemplify that.

Bulgakov once wrote -- semi-prophetically -- that "manuscripts don't burn." He was right. Although he himself once burnt The Master and Margarita in an effort to rid himself of it, he rewrote the book from memory. The ideas and theories underlying Bulgakov's brilliance were too overwhelming to prevent its eventual release, even by his own hand. His work was too good to sit in a musty drawer for the rest of his natural life. Bryant and Popovich -- luckily, for their devotees -- are not faced with the same restrictions. They do not have to file away their brilliance in a drawer and hope that someday an ex-wife will push it to publication. Popovich gets fined, not jailed. Bryant gets criticized, not silenced. Both will leave the league, someday -- and their remembrance will be vast, a multifaceted tapestry of accomplishment and challenge, of brilliance and mistakes, of obvious greatness and obvious prickishness. There will be complicated memories for complicated men, and stories to tell until the young get bored to hear them.

Manuscripts don't burn. And neither do legacies -- those that really make a man, at least.

• • •

• For more capsules on members of the Los Angeles Lakers, visit the Lakers Capsule Directory •

Continue reading

As our summer mainstay, Aaron was writing a 370-part series discussing almost every notable player who was -- as of last season -- getting minutes in the NBA. As the summer dies down and the leaves turn, this quixotic quest of a series has happily reached the last third. But it's certainly not done yet! Today we continue with Mike Dunleavy, Rip Hamilton, and Kobe Bryant.

• • •

Follow Mike Dunleavy by going to Duke. ... Actually, don't__.__

Mike Dunleavy is one of the quietly effective NBA players you might miss if you aren't paying attention. You might be shocked to know that with the sole exception of his 3-9 foot floater (in roughly the 60th percentile), Dunleavy shoots in the top 25% of wing players from every single range on the floor. He converted 67% at the rim, 46% from midrange, 44% from the long two, and an absolutely blistering 40% from three last season. All extremely good. He compounded that by making over 80% of his free throws and getting to the line 2.6 times a game, slightly above the average for wing players. He produced 1.08 points per possession for last year's Bucks, and despite the Bucks' relatively shaky offense for much of the year, ended up with efficiency numbers that would indicate he's one of the top offensive players in the game. Unfortunately, that isn't quite accurate -- late-career Dunleavy's always been a bit too passive of a player on offense, and that was true again last season as he posted a usage percentage of just 19%, well below average. He also was a well-below-average rebounder, hurting his team on the glass without providing the extra box-out advantages you'd get from a player like Epke Udoh.

Still, the man's effective. He gets most of his offense as a catch-and-shoot option, floating around the court on offense in an effort to space the floor as a threat. The vast majority of Dunleavy's shots are assisted -- last year, for instance, he was assisted on a startlingly high 83% of his shots taken. But that's by design. Few plays are ran specifically for Dunleavy, he's just employed as a useful and efficient option that can get his shot off despite a strong close-out and makes any open shot the opposing defense gives him from virtually anywhere. I'm rather undecided as to whether Skiles has been using him entirely correctly or not -- while he's been better with Skiles than he was in his last few seasons with Indiana, when a player is as efficient and effective as Dunleavy was last season for an offense that (prior to the Ellis trade) was about as dismal and low-down as you can get, I think it's generally a coach's responsibility to run more plays for the one efficient mainstay. You may harm the player's overall efficiency, but a slightly less efficient Dunleavy shot was a lot better than yet another awful Drew Gooden 20 foot brick, right? I also understand that Dunleavy isn't a good defender (he's pretty awful), but it's not like you're subbing him out with Mbah a Moute -- Dunleavy and Delfino tended to play the large wing spot in Milwaukee last year, and Delfino was just about as awful defensively as Dunleavy is, if not a slight bit worse. But when your offense is your main problem, getting minutes for guys like Dunleavy becomes key.

As for aesthetics, I can't really speak to ever waking up in the morning and really feeling like I needed to watch Mike Dunleavy. I can't exactly speak to assertions of creative brilliance on Dunleavy's part -- he's not some modernized basketball Picasso. He's the efficient, tedious, and not particularly groundbreaking. An efficient shooter with a nice catch-and-shoot game who defends sparingly and has a famous dad. Maybe I've just written too much of these by now, but it's hard to get too excited about that, although I certainly see his value in the league. The last notable thing that comes to mind, to me, is his face -- I can't be the only person who's spent much of Dunleavy's career having nightmares about his strangely proportioned, oddly structured face... right? Once, when I was a wee lad (read: 21 years old, less than a year ago) I had a dream where I woke up with Mike Dunleavy's face. No, I'm serious, stop laughing at me. It was like Face-Off, except terrifying and all-too-real. I got fired from my job and had to get a job in a traveling circus. I became a supervillain, intent on exacting revenge on Mike Dunleavy (senior) for bringing into this world such a cursed face. I woke up before I could do that, but trust me, it was going to happen. It's not even like Dunleavy's really ugly -- I'm sure there are people out there who find him quite attractive. There's just some aspect about his face that seriously upsets my sensibilities. Any thoughts on what it might be? (Not a rhetorical question. Legitimately curious.)

• • •

_Follow Rip Hamilton on Twitter at __@ripcityhamilton.___

I understand why a lot of people saw Richard Hamilton as a disappointment last season. Really. The old hand was relatively productive when he played, but it was rare he saw the court -- injuries limited him to just 25 minutes per game (in only 28 uninjured games), and unfortunately for Hamilton, the time he spent on the court didn't often overlap with the time Derrick Rose and Joakim Noah saw the court. Per our friends at Basketball Prospectus, in games where the Bulls played their full starting lineup (Rose-Hamilton-Deng-Boozer-Noah), the Bulls went 14-2. Hamilton helped open the floor and take some of the pressure off Rose (as expected) and was slightly more efficient as a shooter than he'd recently been in Detroit (as expected). Unexpectedly, his free throw rate tanked into absolute nothingness and his defense (which was good enough in Detroit alongside middling-to-poor defenders at every surrounding position) became a slight problem-spot on a team that was backing him up with crack defenders like Butler, Brewer, and Watson. Guard-heavy teams tried to abuse Hamilton, as he was regularly the worst defender on the court. For the most part, they succeeded. Which helped keep his minutes down as well.

On the other hand, I think it's important to emphasize that first thing, because it gets lost in most of the retrospectives on his 2012 season: he was productive when he played. Maybe not in the most efficient ways he possibly could've been, but he certainly wasn't bad. I've heard a lot of frustrated people talk about how Hamilton has been a monumental failure in Chicago, or the worst of all possible players. Hamilton was never going to give Chicago exactly what they needed -- he's always been more of a long-two than a three point guy, and his passing and rebounding were both a bit disappointing relative to what was expected of him with a roster like Chicago's around him. But his shooting was far, far better than Chicago had any reason to expect, and the free throw woes were partly caused by the fact that he simply didn't have as much reason to handle the ball as an injured cog when Rose was on the court and when Noah and Deng were rolling. Hamilton is great at drawing free throws when he drives it and when he creates off the dribble -- he's considerably less great at it when he's primarily being employed as an off-ball catch-and-shoot guy in a motion offense. When a role changes, sometimes you lose the skills that made you a star. It happens. He shot as well as could be expected, he was OK defensively, and he didn't show an incredible amount of falloff despite being a creaky 33 year old. He needs to get healthy, obviously, but he did about as well as could've been expected.

Which is actually exactly the problem. Hamilton represents, in perhaps the most obvious form, the big problem with the last few years of decisions by the Bulls management. The Bulls have taken what looked like a relatively young, vigorous roster around Derrick Rose back in 2010 and turned it into something of a retirement home beyond their core four. Other than Rose, the only three important members of Chicago's cast under the age of 30 are Deng, Noah, and Gibson. Deng is far older than his calendar age in NBA mileage due to the insane amount of minutes and overwork Thibodeau (and Del Negro as well) placed upon his shoulders. Gibson is young in minutes but old in years. Noah's great, and the four of them make a considerably great core when they're all healthy. But when you're looking at a four-man core like that, you don't really want to surround them with brittle old men. But that's exactly what Chicago's done. Kirk Hinrich, Rip Hamilton, Carlos Boozer, Nazr Mohammad -- the Bulls have dropped quality young players (C.J. Watson, Ronnie Brewer, James Johnson, Omer Asik) in pursuit of these old hands, and the net result are a bunch of moves that have been marginal upgrades at best. At worst, they're overpriced low-level moves that barely move the needle on the Bulls as a title contender, cut off opportunities for the franchise to keep their young talent, and plug in low-upside filler that costs more than they should to replace actual young talent that may someday deserve the money. It's ridiculous. I'm hoping that the Bulls make some serious moves this offseason to vacate the old and overpriced vets in favor of a serious infusion of youth. I'm not positive this is going to happen, and in fact, I'm pretty sure it won't. But we can hope, can't we?

(Also, as an aside: this concludes all of our Chicago Bulls capsules. Adios, Chicago!)

• • •

Follow Kobe Bryant into the tides of fate. You're in God's hands now, friend.

Went in an odd direction for this one. Do I ever go in any other, though?

Kobe Bryant elicits fundamentally intense reactions. There's disgust from some -- the echos of scandal and a controversial style loom over his game, and detract from his brilliance among that faction. There's devotion from others -- the style that others so hate endears him to many in such an overwhelming fashion. It's a rare few who watches Kobe Bryant and thinks "oh, that's neat, I can take it or leave it though." There's a core challenge to the fan in Bryant's play. A challenge to accept, to understand, to love despite his faults.

And faults? They're there, whether the devotees like to admit it or not. Becoming a devoted fan of Kobe Bryant necessitates becoming a devoted fan of a man who -- despite being one of the most gifted passers of his generation -- simply doesn't pass very often. Becoming a devoted fan of a player whose defensive effort waxes and wanes from an all-defensive peak production to ridiculously low effort-level performances on 90% of the possessions of a season. Becoming a devoted fan of a player who, inevitably, will make life a bit harder for himself every few possessions solely in the name of style.

In a vacuum, these are all things we learn to hate in other players. We learn to dislike the passers who keep avoiding their talent. We learn to dislike the players whose defense yo-yos through incredible highs and impossible lows. We learn to throw up our hands and yell at the player who takes the awful shot when there's an easy shot seconds away. But there's an element of self-respect and self-awareness in Kobe Bryant, in his most quiet moments. This is a man who rates out as one of the most knowledgable basketball scholars of his generation. He's studied the annals of the game, the breaks of history. He understands that he makes the game a bit harder for himself. Internalizes it. He knows that he often does things inexplicable at best and actively harmful at worst. Things that increase the difficulty of his road, or might make the team worse.

And -- surprise, surprise -- he doesn't care.

For more on Kobe Bryant, see his Player Capsule (Plus).

• • •

At the end of each post, I'll be scribing riddles for the next group. Whoever gets the most right will get a shout out at the end of the next post. Tweet me your answers at @docrostov, or post them in the comments. Just about everyone got last night's set correctly. Time to capriciously up the difficulty again. Jerico, Utsav, Booze_Cruise (sounds like my weekends), J, and Mike L all got it right, although I'm being nice and assuming the first three meant Dunleavy Jr. If they meant Dunleavy Sr., as Mike L aptly pointed out, none of them deserve shout-outs. Technicalities!

• Player #322 broke my heart, once. But it's okay. Now I just hope he stays in the league.

• Player #323 is better than most people think, but not as good as he thinks. And I have trouble seeing him as a star in this league. He could be good, though, if he gets out of that toxic California morass and makes a team that needs his scoring.

• Player #324, on the other hand, was amnestied for a reason. He's fallen off to absurd levels, as of late. But he's somehow putting up halfway decent numbers for his currently dismal team, and if it continues, he may stay in the league a little while longer. Recently lost his car keys and slept in his car for a night, in a nationally reported story that has yet to make sense to me.

Tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow.

• • •

Continue reading

As our summer mainstay, Aaron was writing a 370-part series discussing almost every notable player who was -- as of last season -- getting minutes in the NBA. As the summer dies down and the leaves turn, this quixotic quest of a series has happily reached the last third. But it's certainly not done yet! Today we continue with Tyreke Evans, Tony Allen, and Nicolas Batum.

• • •

_Follow Tyreke Evans on Twitter at __@TyrekeEvans.___

It's really hard to figure out what happened to -- and what SHOULD happen to -- Tyreke Evans going forward. Do you remember his rookie year? There were so many things he did well. So many things! Most notable, to me, was his rookie defense. Yes, his defense. While he wasn't the most effective by the numbers, he was a pretty fun defender to watch back in the day. He looked to me like a potentially great defender his rookie year -- he had a certain amount of swagger to his isolation defensive game, and it portended (to me) flashes of a possible stopper-quality defensive talent down the line. Didn't turn out that way, at least not yet, and that's primarily because his defense has become extremely easy to scout. That intensity, that tenacity, that strong isolation coverage? All of that's pretty darn useless if you don't fight over screens, and chief among all of Tyreke's defensive flaws is his dogged insistence on going under screens and letting his man loose instead of fighting over it and sticking to the man. If Tyreke is dogging a player, all a team really needs to do at this point is set a series of screens. Tyreke will get hopelessly lost, his man will score, and he'll slump his shoulders and try again next time. Only to fare badly on the screen and let his man score again. It's kind of a vicious cycle, when your skills are so easy to thwart on the defensive end.

Offensively, things are more confusing. Evans has never been a particularly impressive presence on the offensive end, even going back to his red hot rookie year. There was never any real outside shot to speak of -- even as a rookie, the man shot only 31% on jump shots, including a dismal 25% from three. That decreased to 30% as a sophomore and 26% as a junior. For Evans to really shine as an offensive player, that has to improve -- if not by improving his actual jump shot (something I'm 90% sure would happen if he had a legitimate shooting coach -- Chip Engelland, anyone?) then by working hard on a floater or a jump hook and really incorporating that into his game. As it stands, the Tyreke Evans scouting report is about as simplistic as you can get. "Pack the paint, let him shoot from 10-25 feet. He'll miss. Badly." And why not let him shoot it? As a rookie, Evans dove into the teeth of defenses and racked up fouls by the bushel. By dissuading him from doing that, not only have teams effectively neutralized his greatest offensive threat, they've also kept themselves out of foul trouble and kept Tyreke from getting to the line. Which was actually the main place Tyreke's superstar scoring came from, his rookie year -- he had an insanely high FTA/FGA split that year, and that more than anything else was what propped up his shaky shooting into a well-rounded and dangerous offensive whole.

Other than his easy-to-scout defense and easy-to-scout offense? He has a good command of the tertiary stats -- a good assist rate (for a large wing), solid rebounding for his position, and a relatively low turnover rate despite a lot of ballhandling. But he's not great on the intangibles. He's had a lot of problems moving without the ball, though, and as aforementioned his formerly solid-looking defense has been something of a detriment recently, it's hard to really see what he's bringing you on the floor. He scores "efficiently" only insofar as he's an awesome offensive option when he gets to the rim. Anywhere outside the rim and Tyreke Evans is a jumpshooter -- and a bad one, too. Which is what led the Kings to decide against signing Evans to an extension -- he'll be a free agent after his 4th year. I can't think of it off the top of my head, but has a rookie of the year winner ever NOT been picked up to an extension by the team with his rights when the extension period comes? Some ROTY winners have been traded -- Mike Miller and Jason Kidd come to mind immediately -- but it's extremely rare that they're traded without being a key piece of the trade, and they generally get a nice extension. For Evans to not only NOT get the extension but to be going into restricted free agency is smart on the part of the Kings but crazy given his pedigree and the way things looked little more than three years ago.

All that said, I have trouble giving up on him. In fact, I really haven't. I'm of the evermore lonely belief that Evans still has quite a ways to go until he reaches his peak. Two reasons for this. One, I want to see him with an actual chance to work on his shot with a good shooting coach. He called in Keith Veney -- a famous shooting coach with an immaculate college stroke -- to help him rediscover his shooting. He responded to Veney's work by cutting off his three point shot entirely, a move that was probably for the best given his disgustingly low conversion rates from that end. It now falls on Tyreke to figure out some kind of off-ball offensive game and rework a close shot to be more accurate. How will it happen? Not really sure. Maybe Veney needs to mix things up and try different form adjustments to improve Tyreke's flagging jumper. Maybe he needs to work on his floater. Maybe Evans just needs a change of scenery. I'm really not sure. Something needs to happen, in any event. I see Tyreke's final form being something of a poor man's next Iguodala -- lower usage than he has now, a better picking-of-his-spots outside the rim, and a lot of dunks and cuts to maximize the number of times he can get to the rim and finish. More of a focus on rebounding, being a pivot in a working offense, and (of course) defense. Evans needs to take the time to learn how to handle a screen and fully internalize it. He needs to do a lot of things, but in the main, all he really needs to do is "play better." I can scream to the high heavens about the potential I continue to see in his game all I want -- if he doesn't really do much with that, it's hardly the fault of Kings fans or NBA fans to ignore him and refuse to give him notice.

• • •

_Follow Tony Allen on Twitter at __@aa000G9.___

Tony Allen is the greatest free agent signing the Memphis Grizzlies have_ ever made as a franchise_.

Alright, now that you're laughing, I'll dial back from that a tad. No, he's not their best player. He never will be. I specifically gave myself the weasel-worded "free agent signing" bit to exclude the Conley/Gasol/Randolph extensions, all of which have been arguably as important or moreso to their current success than the Allen signing. But don't sleep on the Allen signing. Really. Don't. Do you remember how much they signed Allen for? Don't look it up. Just guess. How much money does it take to lock up one of the 2 or 3 best perimeter defenders in the NBA for 3 years in the absolute prime of his career, coming off three years in a key defensive role in a defensive juggernaut? How much money does it take if you're one of the smallest markets in the NBA, with none of the built-in discounting factors of an LA, Florida, or Texas team? Have a number in your head?

If that number is more than $9.5 million for three years, you were wrong. And yes. It boggles my mind too. I realize that there were numerous reasons Allen wasn't seen as a premier free agent during the summer of 2010. There were more enticing options at the top of the ticket -- LeBron, Wade, Bosh, Dirk, et cetera. So much so that teams like Memphis found it relatively straightforward to snag bargain bin deals on pieces like Allen, whose offensive woes made him a persona non grata for the majority of the league's front offices. But that's the problem with overlooking elite skills because of singular flaws. Tony Allen's problem is the same one that will eventually depress Sefalosha's value and can lead to highly deflated contracts for defensively talented players. He's simply awful on offense. He turns the ball over all the time with his atrocious handle, and would make it a habit of missing some of the easiest bunny shots he could possibly take. You never know what you're going to get with Tony, and that's often a problem. Sometimes, it meant playing Tony Allen amounted to playing 4-on-5 on offense. But Memphis has been good to Allen -- although he'll always be a far cry from a positive contributor on offense, he's had significantly more chemistry with the Memphis big three than the Boston big three and he's worked hard to modulate his more irritating tendencies -- the turnovers have gotten marginally better, and he doesn't foul nearly as much as he used to.

What makes Tony Allen so unique on the defensive end is that he's not only an incredible one-on-one stopper, he's also a beast in the passing lanes and a bulldozer through screens. Elite scorers who are used to shedding defenders with a screen or two have no real recourse to get past Allen -- his lateral movement is too crisp, too quick, and too bruising. He's also got a modicum of shot-blocking talent, as well -- he's good at the Ginobili-type "touch from behind, apply backspin" block that ruins a shot and usually allows a teammate to take the ball out of midair, control it, and start a transition break. Celtics fans who watched Allen for years know how good he is. Laker fans who watched Kobe and Allen duke it out in the finals twice know how good he is. And anyone who's ever paid close attention to Allen's ridiculous defensive game knows how good he is. He's simply an amazing defender. For the sake of sharing, here's a video you may not have chanced to see -- this is a compilation by The Two Man Game of a sampling of Allen's defensive play on Kevin Durant during the 2011 playoffs. It's absolutely something to behold. Watch how he frustrates Durant -- Durant finds himself unable to make enough space to comfortably shoot, despite being far taller than Allen, but Allen maintains enough distance that Durant can't safely draw the foul. He rotates on a swivel foot while off-ball, able to change directions quick enough to remove the need to exactly anticipate what Durant and Westbrook were going to do next. When they finally get him out of a possession, he comes from behind and erases the shot with a brilliant backspin block. The depth of Allen's defensive skillset is absolutely obscene. Nobody in the league has a deeper well of tricks to draw from.

There's a question that often gets asked by fans of elite closers -- Kobe, Dirk, Manu, Melo, et cetera. Who do you want taking the last shot? Me, of course, I'd take Manu, while accepting the fact that Dirk is probably the best answer in the NBA (and that the best answer of all isn't any one player, just "whoever the hell is open"). But I genuinely prefer to ask a different question. Who do you want defending the last shot? And that answer is a lot more straightforward. You want Tony Allen. Think back to the final shot of the third game of Memphis/Spurs in 2011. Can't remember it? Watch it again. People pounced on Manu and the Spurs for not getting a shot off, claiming that it was a massive mistake by a franchise that never made them. The thing is, it really wasn't a massive failure of the offense so much as an incredible triumph of the defense to quash a fast-break transition three opportunity -- there was no way that Tony Allen could've defended that shot attempt better. He bothered Manu all the way down the court, and by the time Manu had made it far enough to shoot it, Allen used every possible trick to keep Manu's shot from going off and Manu himself from calling a timeout. The Spurs offense was broken on the possession, it's true, but nowhere near enough credit goes to the man who broke it -- Tony Allen, in the flesh. He's a pitbull. He's a beast. And now that his offense is passable enough to keep on the court at all (it's still bad, mind you, but good enough to keep him on-point for 20-30 minutes a night), he's essentially a star player. He's an incredible defender whose contract is -- I maintain -- the greatest free agent signing the Grizzlies ever made. He's Trick or Treat Tony, the baddest $3 million dollar a year veteran in the NBA. And he's gonna getcha.

Also, I say it on top, but I'll emphasize once more.

Follow him on Twitter. Really. He's the best NBA follow and nobody else is close.

• • •

_Follow Nicolas Batum on Twitter at __@nicolas88batum.___

While I'm not Nic Batum's biggest fan, I will say this -- the man is smart. We often pile on players who tend towards inefficient shot locations and chuck up poor percentage shots. We tell them to take fewer long twos, tend towards the efficient ranges, and run far away from the areas they aren't excellent at. Batum does that. He does that very well, in fact. Last season, Batum shot above average percentages at the rim and from three point territory. Fitting with that, almost 3/4 of Batum's shots came from those two regions, and it was enough to offset the fact that Batum shot an utterly abysmal 29% from 10-23 feet last year. He did this despite setting a career high in usage percentage and a career low in the percentage of his shots he had assisted by someone else -- primarily, to these eyes, due to the dismal state of the Portland point guard hierarchy last year. The main knock with Batum -- to me, at least -- is his defense. I have a lot of friends who are Portland fans that swear by Batum as a stopper of the future. I just don't see it, yet.

Don't get me wrong -- the man's useful, and his defensive fundamentals are extremely solid. He draws charges by the bundle, has some shot blocking talent, long arms, solid quickness, et cetera. All the things you want. But he has yet to put them together in a statistically evident way, and watching footage, you start to see small syndromes of laziness. Those possessions where he goes for a steal then gives up on the play as soon as the player gets daylight. Those possessions where he's floating, looking in the lanes, and paying little heed to his man. Those are the possessions that stick in my craw, and make me wonder about Batum as a true stopper. Tony Allen, for all his faults, never takes possessions off. Iguodala doesn't take possessions off. Batum acts like a superstar on defense, pulling the little LeBron/Kobe punch where he takes some time off as though to modulate for the long haul. That's the thing, though. They can do that because their offense is so vital to the team, they kind of need to. Batum isn't that offensively important to warrant off possessions defensively. And frankly? He's not good enough -- yet -- to be defending so well that his defense can withstand possessions where he's a total nonfactor. LeBron is there. Kobe -- for a few years -- was there. Batum isn't, yet.

Regardless. Batum is a good player already, and if he makes a few leaps, he'll probably deserve his fat contract. One thing I found amusing about the aftermath of Batum's contract signing was Batum's insistence that he could average 15-5-5 in an interview with Joe Freeman of the Oregonian. That's a pretty reasonable goal, in some respects. He's actually averaged 14 points per game before (last season), and from 2009-2012 he averaged exactly 15 points per 36 minutes. So if he can get to 36 minutes, he stands a good shot at 15 points per game. In that period, he also averaged 5.3 rebounds per 36 minutes, which means he just needs more time on that one too. But the assists? Batum has had -- in his entire career -- a total of 9 games at five or more assists. Three of those came this season. So, at the time Batum stated that as a goal, he'd managed to reach the number he wanted to average in exactly 6 of his then 202 career games played. That's... that's phenomenal. That's essentially equivalent to what would happen if I looked at my life, examined my data, then came to my friends saying that because I once drank fifteen beers in one sitting, I plan on raising my per-week beer average to fifteen beers each Friday. It doesn't make sense. It's the hilarious assuredness of it that gets me. I think what gets me is how he essentially just took his per-36 averages and then randomly decided "oh, yeah, I should pass too" and more than doubled his career high in assists just to make it even. It is pretty even, come to think of it. 15-5-5? Maybe Batum watches too much Adrian Monk? Or maybe not. I'm not sure there's such a thing as too much Adrian Monk. ... on a related note, is it obvious that I've written too many of these this week? No? THEN PREPARE FOR MORE TOMORROW, FOLLOWERS!

• • •

At the end of each post, I'll be scribing riddles for the next group. Whoever gets the most right will get a shout out at the end of the next post. Tweet me your answers at @docrostov, or post them in the comments. Shout-out to Matt L and Zewo for properly isolating the correct players based on tangential evidence! (Words!)

• Player #316 was stealthily one of the most cost-effective acquisitions of the offseason. Probably won't be there when the rebuilding project finishes, but he can't hurt until that happens. Not on that salary.

• Player #317 was a remarkably good shooter as a rookie. Not sure if it'll hold up forever, and he needs to get a bit better defensively, but he's a solid young guy with strong upside next to a rising star PG. Sounds good to me.

• Player #318 looked GREAT as a rookie. And as great as he looked as a rookie, he looked atrocious last year. And now he has that huge contract. Mistakes, everywhere!

Because I'm getting on a plane at 1:00 tomorrow, the string of two-set days ends tomorrow. With my vacation from work drawing to a close, I'm back on track to finish the series on Christmas or Christmas Eve. Fun times. See you tomorrow morning for the Friday capsules.

• • •

Continue reading

As our summer mainstay, Aaron was writing a 370-part series discussing almost every notable player who was -- as of last season -- getting minutes in the NBA. As the summer dies down and the leaves turn, this quixotic quest of a series has happily reached the last third. But it's certainly not done yet! Today we continue with Jrue Holiday, Darren Collison, and Reggie Evans.

• • •

_Follow Jrue Holiday on Twitter at __@Jrue_Holiday11.___

I'm going to be honest. I fell into a trap with Holiday. While I tend to be a proponent of giving players ample time to continue their development -- especially when, as with Jrue, you're talking about a player who entered the league at an uncommonly young age -- at some point you start to wonder if you've seen enough. Three years into his career, Holiday had yet to enact any large or present changes to the configuration of his game. He seemed about the same as he had when he started -- a very poor at-rim scorer with a surprisingly decent floater-to-long-two range on his shot that made him retain some manner of offensive value. A decent defender from the point guard position who nevertheless didn't have a surfeit of defensive creativity and was relatively easy to figure out if you were a crafty guard like 2011 Wade, Rose, or Paul. Good at fighting over screens, good at contesting, not so good at rotating when forced and a bit overly focused on staying with his original man off a switch. That often led to wide-open shots that he'd have to recover on out of nowhere, or perhaps more commonly, disoriented the relatively substandard Philadelphia defensive bigs into leaving their man to add additional help, which allowed smart coaches and teams to pick and roll the Sixers into (relative) oblivion.

I was also worried about Jrue Holiday's overall suitability as an NBA point guard. His passing always seemed decent-but-not-quite-there, posting assist rates that were hardly in the same stratosphere as any legitimate NBA point guard. Philly fans -- and Jrue fans -- tend to laugh at this. There's a lot of creativity in Holiday's passing, and I don't deny that at all. But it's not an idle complaint. There were 52 point guards that played greater than 20 minutes a contest in 2012 -- Holiday's assist rate ranked 11th worst among them. He clocked in slightly above Brandon Jennings and Kyrie Irving and slightly below Kemba Walker and Jordan Farmar. And while Jennings and Irving were lords of the hockey pass, much of Philadelphia's offense revolved around shooting the long two straightaway off the pass, far moreso than the offenses of Milwaukee or Cleveland. (Not to mention that Kyrie's teammates couldn't make a shot to begin with). Regardless, here's a visual representation of where Jrue stood among the point guards. It's not a nice graph to look at.

Y-Axis represents assist rate, X-Axis represent the player's spot in the 52 player line. Darkened portion represents the guards under Jrue. As you can kind of tell, rather poor spot for our man. He falls well short of the position-average, and clearly comes far behind the "elite assist-man" cutoff around player #46, where Andre Miller delineates the basic split between guards that destroyed worlds with their passing and guards who were merely decent at it. This would be fine, if Holiday wasn't the Sixers' primary passing option and the primary steward of their awful offense. Much like Rajon Rondo shoulders some of the blame for the Celtics' poor offensive results, so too does Holiday bear some for that of the Sixers. Not all -- Collins probably deserves more, for not really putting his guys in a position to succeed offensively. But some. So, rather understandably, I did not expect huge things for Holiday this season, and wasn't 100% sure about the size of his contract -- I felt it was certainly possible for Holiday to live up to it, but it wasn't exceedingly likely.

Count me as wrong on that, so far. There have been a lot of disappointing aspects of the Philadelphia start, not least of which being that their current record and differential are mirages forged against terrible no-good teams in a home-heavy start. And, of course, "anything having to do with Andrew Bynum." But Holiday has been one of the true bright spots of the year, much like Brandon Jennings was last year. He's looked smart and in control, and he's been playing like one of the best guards in the eastern conference. Some of it may be unsustainable -- Holiday has been shooting markedly better on the road, especially from three point range (52% from three on the road this year) and things are likely to normalize. But he was already above average from everywhere but the rim -- and his at-rim scoring has been excellent this year, with Holiday seeking out the finishing play far more readily and sinking the lay-up like a pro's pro. He's been Philadelphia's best player absent Bynum by a country mile, and he's led the Sixers to several wins they shouldn't have even been close in.

He's had poise, and with his talent finally being tapped into, he's been a lovely guy to watch. I'm hoping he keeps it up and makes the all-star team, although the Eastern game is a bit packed. Rondo, Kyrie, Deron, Lowry, the formerly all-star point guard Raymond Felton consumed to augment his powers, et cetera. Even Rose, if he's back on time, has a good shot of making it. And Jennings has been good too. So I fear he may end up as Brandon Jennings did last year, a player who starts the season on a huge tear, misses out on the all-star game, and just tapers off afterwards as though offended at the unbecoming absence. Let's hope that doesn't happen and that Holiday can keep it up long enough to garner some notice, reenergize to finish the season, and continue showing people like me just how far from his ceiling he actually was. Keep at it, Jrue.

(Also, on a related note, Tim: that waiter DEFINITELY was giving you the eyes.)

• • •

_Follow Darren Collison on Twitter at __@Darren_Collison.___

Another UCLA product, Darren Collison is remarkably similar to Jrue Holiday in the basic numbers. In fact, they're almost entirely the same by the numbers -- Collison is slightly worse at getting to the rim, Holiday is slightly worse at passing. Both are good at controlling the ball. Both are exceedingly young starters on fringe playoff teams. Both are having decent starts to this season, although Collison is starting to fall off a bit. Both are great free throw shooters. Lots and lots of similarities. Obviously, differences too. Collison's defense is nowhere near Holiday's, despite both being a bit undersized for their position (Collison far moreso than Holiday). Neither are wonderful at developing an offense -- Collison has balked at running an effective pick-and-roll offense since a short flirtation with fame as a brilliant rookie behind Chris Paul, and Holiday (as any point guard probably would) has had some difficulty running Collins' pet longball program with any real efficiency. Still, Collison has a few interesting offensive wrinkles. Mainly that he's one of the quickest guards in the NBA. Being the son of two Olympic sprinters has its advantages, you know. While this makes him (theoretically) a beast in transition, he's shown some problems actually converting on that.

Which, actually, deserves some special mention. One of the reasons Collison's two point percentage is so low is that he simply has a lot of trouble actually finishing transition layups. He can get to the rim relatively easily, and he can get an open shot there without going through too much trouble. Having speed is useful that way. The problem -- and the thing that differentiates him from other NBA speedsters like Tony Parker or Ty Lawson -- is that he's simply so bad at finishing (regardless of the duress he's under) that his speed advantage impacts his game marginally at best and uselessly at worst. And, as stated, he balks at running a traditional set-play offense -- he regularly dribbles himself into oblivion, ending the play far away from the screen that's been set for him. Going forward, could potentially make him a poor fit in Dallas, as Carlisle likes calling plays. As do, well, most coaches. But still. Collison's best offense is probably going to be a Ramon Sessions-type spread surrounded by shooters as he pushes the tempo a bit. He's not going to get that very easily in Dallas, although I'm interested in the offensive prospects of a Collison-Mayo-Marion-Nowitzki-Brand lineup if Carlisle consents to running Collison's pet spread. He's a good player, it's just an open question as to how useful he'll be in a set-play lineup.

This all would be a lot easier to handicap if Collison would just develop a reliable at-rim finish. Just... something. Anything. A better twist to his layup. A better sense of space under the basket. I don't know. Collison often misjudges how open he is and tries to finish layups from 2-3 feet away from the basket -- if he'd curb that, his at-rim numbers would look a lot better. My fear with Collison is that after an excellent start in Dallas he's been oscillating between abject horror and decent play every few nights. This wouldn't be all that big of a deal if Dirk was around and the team still looked decent without him, but Mayo and Collison have been so important to the Mavericks so far that Collison's poor performances have been that much more noticeable. When Collison registers a game score over 10, the Mavericks are 6-3 -- when Collison registers a game score below 10, they're 1-5. With Collison seeming more important without Dirk around to take some weight off his shoulders, any perceived struggle can lead to drastic measures. Like the Mavericks inexplicably pulling Collison from the starting lineup. Kind of worried that the Mavericks might take a flyer on some washed up old point guard in an effort to spell Collison, not realizing that the new guard has virtually no chance of actually improving their team and he's simply not ver--...

THEY SIGNED DEREK FISHER?!?

The Mayans are coming. Prepare yourselves for the soothing embrace of the grim reaper.

• • •

_Follow Reggie Evans on Twitter at __@ReggieEvans30.___

I'm not a big Reggie Evans guy. There are a few players I legitimately can't stand watching, and Evans is one of them. I don't know if it's the style of play, the lack of offensive talents, or the atrociously off-base calls that Evans seems to get on a daily basis in the NBA. Wait. Yes I do. It's the calls. It feels like Evans draws at least 3 ridiculous off-ball calls a game, which is pretty absurd given the fact that he plays less than 15 minutes a game. The man is a freaking SAVANT at getting under a player, drawing incidental contact, and sprawling on the floor like he's at the mercy of John Henry's hammer. Not to mention his most absurd talent, that being his absolutely remarkable ability to shove players in the back willy-nilly and never get called on it. I honest to God don't know how Evans gets away with half this stuff. You know how there's that whole "David Stern knows where the bodies are buried" thing? Yeah, I think that's crap. David Stern doesn't know where the bodies are buried. Reggie Evans does, and the entire lockout was a ruse to make us think he doesn't.

I'm joking, but explain this to me. How do you internalize the way Evans gets to the line? The man's taken 30 free throws to 21 field goal attempts this season. This isn't a new thing -- last year, he took 71 free throw attempts to 72 field goal attempts. He's been on the edge a few times (IE, within a few free throws of it), but Reggie Evans may very well be the single greatest free throw drawing machine in the history of the NBA. Want to know how many seasons he's had in his career with free throws greater than field goal attempts (or the two virtually even)? Four seasons, out of 10 years played. Want to know how many other players had four? Dwayne Jones. That's it. There are only 16 other players that have had multiple such seasons in the three point era. ONLY 16 PLAYERS. This is not some common thing. It's extremely rare for a player who uses the ball as sparingly as Evans (who sports a career 12% usage rate, although he hasn't passed that in 3 years) to actually register enough free throws to overtake even the sparsest of field goal attempts. Refs flock to Evans like lawyers flock to malpractice suits, waving their arms and screaming bloody murder. "Leave our Reggie all alone," they say! (They don't, but they should. Or they should stop calling so many phantom calls.)

Beyond the absurd calls, he's a hustle player whose defense is shaky at best and harmful at worst. He was fantastic last year against the Grizzlies in the playoffs (in what may very well have been the greatest playoff series he'll have in his entire career), but don't let that fool you into thinking he's a plus defender in the regular season. The man's single-minded focus on drawing fouls and getting rebounds leads him to constantly lose prime defensive position in hopes that he'll get better position for the board, and it doesn't help that he's undersized to begin with. And although he's a great rebounder for his size, he'd be a hell of a lot worse if they actually called him when he grinds his elbows into an opposing player's back to move them out of the way and grab the carom for himself. But that probably isn't going to happen any time soon. Referees have had 10 years to figure out Reggie Evans. They've either all gone blind as bats or discovered that Reggie Evans is the man Kool Keith wrote about when he wrote out the lyrics to Dr. Dooom's "Apartment 223." (Also, for the love of God, don't look them up if you aren't familiar. They're brutal and terrifying. Just be content knowing that the 10 people who actually listened to Dr. Dooom know exactly what I'm talking about and are cringing, locking their doors, and swearing off Brooklyn games until they forget the comparison.)

Really, though. Nothing's going to change. Evans will be Evans -- the most frustrating player to watch in the entire league, if he's not on your team. If he is? Try to enjoy it. It's hard, but you're essentially watching "history" happen when you watch this man draw free throws and crush the boards. Kind of. It's like watching a man set a world record for the most sardines eaten in a single sitting. You know it's a seminal moment in his life, and something you'll personally remember forever. It's "history." You're "rooting" for him insofar as you can root for someone like that. But you also will be nauseated, unentertained, and confused at the reason you're actually watching it. That's what it's like to be a fan of a Reggie Evans team, insofar as I can understand it. But perhaps you have a stronger stomach than I do. You wouldn't be the first.

• • •

At the end of each post, I'll be scribing riddles for the next group. Whoever gets the most right will get a shout out at the end of the next post. Tweet me your answers at @docrostov, or post them in the comments. Shout-out to commenter Okman on an admirable 2/3 guess. Even got the team right, just the wrong guard. Heh.

• Had you told me in 2010 that Player #313 would not be receiving an extension, I would've balked and laughed at you for hours. And I would've been wrong. He will not be getting an extension. It's been a shocking turn for the guy's career.

• Player #314 is one of the best defenders in the NBA, and among the best twitter follows to boot.

• Player #315 is considered to be a great defensive player. But he's not. ALMOST NOBODY BELIEVES ME. But he really, really isn't! I'm serious! Stop laughing! Argh!

In Los Angeles, my friends. All the drugs, money, and Coco Puffs my streetcar could possibly desire. Unfortunately, other people are the actual owners all three of those things, so I can't seriously partake in any. RIP Aaron McGuire. Knew ye well.

• • •

Continue reading

As our summer mainstay, Aaron was writing a 370-part series discussing almost every notable player who was -- as of last season -- getting minutes in the NBA. As the summer dies down and the leaves turn, this quixotic quest of a series has happily reached the last third. But it's certainly not done yet! Today we continue with Elton Brand, Courtney Lee, and Trevor Booker.

• • •

Appreciate Elton Brand by making a snifter of Brandy an important part of your morning routine.

A few years back, I'd firmly sided myself with those who believed Elton Brand to be (essentially) done and washed up. He'd looked subpar for several seasons in a row, playing most of his minutes injured and producing minimal gains for terrible teams when he'd actually make it onto the court. I think I distinctly remember telling a friend that I'd eat my hat if he got through a season without significant injury ever again. Someone should figure out what hat I had on when I said that, because I should get to eating. In Brand's two years since that proclamation, Brand played (I kid you not) 141 out of 148 possible games. He missed just seven! In two years -- one of which was on a compressed lockout schedule! He's currently batting a perfecto on the current season, as well, which is astonishing. We're looking at a guy who played in 113 of 246 possible games in the three seasons immediately prior to that. We're looking at the guy who'd looked a bit over the hill for years. We're looking at the guy who had one of the biggest albatross contracts in the league, once upon a time. He recouped wonderfully, became a key cog in a very solid 2012 Philadelphia team, and was amnestied because the Sixers felt they really, truly needed to resign Spencer Hawes, pick up Kwame Brown, and sign Nick Young. Go figure.

Regardless. While Brand is undersized in height for the center position, he's been extremely effective as a defensive anchor over the last two years by relying on his wingspan, his bulk, and his instincts. He's far better in the post than outside of the paint contesting jumpers, but he's not really that bad at either -- his enormously long arms help him in that regard and allow him to put up a strong contest without jumping or fouling. He's one of the best shot blockers in the league, and unless I'm forgetting someone major, I'm almost certain he's the best one under 6'9". His bulk allows him to body up most post players and keep them uncomfortable in the post, and although he's lost a step, he's still one of the better pick-and-roll covers in the league. There were many reasons that last season's Sixers were good, but the Brand/Iguodala one-two punch on defense was by far the most important. Collins put together a scheme that best maximized their skills and absolutely wrecked even the most prolific offensive teams with effective re-routing, forcing the broken play, and keeping just about every team unsettled against the Philadelphia defense. Andrew Bynum will be a massive offensive upgrade over Brand, but it really does remain to be seen if Bynum can have the same defensive impact that Brand did -- Brand was really phenomenally good on defense in 2012.

Offensively, Brand had some good moments as well under Doug Collins. One thing I did neglect to mention in my Iguodala capsule earlier this week (as good friend Matt Moore later pointed out) was that Iguodala's awful shot selection hasn't entirely been a factor of his own decisionmaking. Doug Collins has an odd insistence on making his teams shoot long two pointers, and this tends to make players on his teams have oddly inflated attempts from the midrange and the long two even when they've got effective three point shooters and solid at-rim players besides them. A stylistic thing. "They're inefficient, but because of that, they're less guarded! Therefore, they are the right option." Not quite accurate logic, but it's what he rolls with. And is, indeed, a pretty big part of Iguodala's higher-than-they-should-be proportion of long twos. And the same goes for just about everyone in the Collins system. It REALLY isn't a good thing for most players, but it's actually ended up being fantastic for Elton Brand. He can't shoot threes (or, realistically, anything outside 20 feet), but inside that range he's great. He's got a phenomenal 10-to-20 foot jumper, and last season posted an excellent 45% from 10-15 feet and 43% from 16-23 feet. He did that on far more attempts than average, as well, just to dissuade you from imagining it's a fluke.

Brand didn't fit very well with Eddie Jordan or DiLeo, but he was essentially a perfect match for Collins' system from both a talent perspective and a fit perspective. And he made that fit count -- he's been a great player for the last two years. Truthfully, he's been far less than excellent in Dallas, and chances are pretty high he'll never produce at quite the level he did last season ever again. Age takes all men at some point, and subjectively, watching Brand inspires a sense that he's falling off in a few ways the stats don't quite pick up. His heavy footsteps, his inability to cover transition plays anymore, his generally flat shot, et cetera. But if he can recoup a bit and Carlisle can put him in a similar defensive situation as he had in Philadelphia, there's really no good reason Brand can't be an excellent value contributor for the Dallas Mavericks this season. And I'll continue eating my hat, thank you very much.

 

• • •

_Follow Courtney Lee on Twitter at __@CourtneyLee2211.___

I'm a big fan of analyzing important leverage points, both historically and in my personal life. You know the analysis, most likely, even if you've never really heard it phrased like that. As an example -- when I was in college, I took a class on Markov Chain Monte Carlo modeling. We were given a distinct problem one week, as part of a broader teaching example. The data was a large dataset of monthly measured smog levels in a small English town. At some point in the last 200 years, the town had completely transitioned its identity -- it used to be a massive industrial town, with several smog-spewing factories and a gritty working class. Now, though? It was a clean, green, sparkling cottage town. The factories were gone. There were some farms, now, and a viable telecommuting working class. The teacher refused to tell us what the town was, and posed as our modeling problem to determine when, exactly, the city "switched." In short, we had to produce a model that would give us a series of the most likely dates when, via the data, we could state that the city had alternated from an industrial smog-spewing smokestack to the everclean present.

We needed to find the leverage point, the moment when the underlying distribution to the smog concentration numbers changed. It was a highly interesting problem, and as it turned out, the data was about as clear as possible -- almost all of us got the same answer, primarily because the town in question had closed down all three of the factories within a month of each other. It didn't exactly take a complicated model to tease it out of the data -- in fact, most of us checked our work by simply looking at the data around the point. It was pretty clear. But although the final MCMC sampler came up with a relatively simple model, the whole idea of analyzing time-varied data in an effort to determine tangible distribution shifts has always stuck with me. We tend to look at a career or a time series as different snapshots of a similar underlying distribution. Analyzing for leverage points and finding distinct distribution shifts inspires a better understanding of the fundamental volatility in the underlying distributions behind the statistics and numbers we take as gospel, and helps us realize when our assumptions may be flimsy or ill-prepared.

Reeling myself back in, Courtney Lee is a good player to introduce with this concept, because I can't really talk about his career without talking about the single leverage point that may have changed his entire story. You may have forgotten it, but I can say without a question that he hasn't. I refer to his blundered miracle lay-up that quite nearly gave the 2009 Magic a tied series with a historically great Laker team. I often wonder -- what, exactly, would've happened if he'd made that layup? Thinking in the very localized sense, the Magic would've knotted the NBA Finals heading into three games at home. They still probably wouldn't have won it, but people don't tend to remember that the 2009 Finals did include three extremely close games -- had the Magic won this one, the series would've at least gone back to Staples for a game 6 and, if they could've flipped one more game, possibly forced a game 7. It's worth noting that while Jameer Nelson was relatively awful in that series, he also was coming back from injury -- which stands to reason that he may have gotten better as the series went on, potentially giving the Magic one or two new wrinkles to use in the later reaches of a long series. The botched layup didn't necessarily decide the Finals, but it has completely changed the way they're looked upon historically. It turned a hard fought series into a "gentleman's sweep." It changed the game, both on a micro and macro level.

It changed Lee's career, as well -- it's plausible to consider the idea that if he'd made that layup and the Finals weren't later looked upon as such a dominating performance by Los Angeles, the Magic may have refrained from flipping him to New Jersey. Had that happened, Lee wouldn't have had to spend a year of his young career mired on one of the worst teams of all time with a coach that supremely disliked his game. He was then ported over to Houston, where Adelman didn't like him at all either -- leading to, again, another lost season. He finally recouped a bit in 2012, shooting more threes than he'd ever shot before under a more approving McHale and redesigning his perimeter defensive game a tad in hopes of becoming a bit more reliable as a stopper. And despite his reputation, he needed it. He's a decent defender, by the eye test, but you look at his on/off numbers and you do start to wonder if he's a bit overrated on that front. Subjectively, his help defense is a bit problematic and he has some trouble getting over screens, which makes his generally tenacious on-ball defense less valuable overall. But Lee's a good guy, and I'm hoping he finds a good niche in Boston. He hasn't looked bad in Boston, but his three point shot has left him and his problems getting over screens have been major problem-points for a Celtics team that desperately needs Avery Bradley to come back and supercharge their flagging defense. His career may never quite be as promising as it was when it looked like he'd have 4+ years of tutelage behind Stan Van Gundy, but it's certainly not a lost cause. So here's to Courtney Lee, leverage points, and the tiny twists of fate that change everything.

• • •

_Follow Trevor Booker on Twitter at __@35_Fitz.___

I like watching Trevor Booker's game. Which is surprising in some ways. Lovingly dubbed "Cook Book" by journeyman Cartier Martin in a midseason joust last year, he's got a lot of the problems that make a player tough to watch at an NBA level. It starts with his position -- he doesn't really have one, and although we live in a post-position world, it's nice to actually have a cogent idea of where you fit on the floor. Booker is in that awkward place between a wing and a big, where he's not quite nimble enough to cover wings but not at all large enough to cover bigs. It ends up making him a rather negative-production player on the defensive end, although given how many players on Washington are awful defenders and how little defensive structure or system the Wizards have around him, it's hard to really argue he's in a great position to maximize anything. And it's not to say he lacks in effort -- the man played hardest of any member of the 2012 Wizards on that end, he's just at such a size & athleticism disadvantage it never worked very well. He also has no outside shooting ability, a rather uncreative game, and is quite prone to turning the ball over. Which usually would make for a player I don't like much.

But that's not all he is. Booker lacks many things, but he'll never lack effort. The man ranked as one of the best at-rim players in the league, converting on a scintillating 73% of his shots in the basket area last season. And he didn't do that on a scant few attempts, either -- he attempted almost 50% of all shots he took from the at-rim range, and he made significantly more shots at the rim than he did from every other range of the floor combined (112 to 69). This does tend to point to one flaw in his game -- as I said, he doesn't have much of an outside shot, and in general isn't much of a jump shooter. He shot just 32% from the floor on all jump shots last year. Subjectively, it looked even worse than that. As a result of his jump shot struggles, he's never going to be a high usage player -- last year, he ranked in the bottom 25% of all big men in usage percentage. But it's the little things, with Mr. Cookbook. The fact that he's the only Wizard with the ability to set a remotely useful screen. The fact that he jumps for loose balls, throwing them at untold speeds into the body of an opposing team's player in an effort to ensure possessions. The fact that he'll hustle for the rebounds while other Wizards stare idly at the ball, immobile, waiting for the ball to approach them slowly and tenderly caress the small of their back as it reassures them that "yes, Jordan, it's OK that you can't stop shooting me. I can take it. I love you."

Overall, I like Booker. I like watching him. I'm not always on the train with high-energy hustle players, but something about Booker really entertains me. I hope he can fully recoup from this season's knee strain and take his place as a 25-30 MPG hustle guy for the Wizards. He's one of the few on that team I unconditionally enjoy. Perhaps it's partly the players around him -- the Wizards are one of the most dismally drab teams in the league, and against that backdrop, I have a feeling that many marginal players would seem more enjoyable than they would in the context of a better team. But there is something beyond that. Can't knock the hustle, can't knock the grit. Seems like a good guy, too. Some call him Booker T instead of Cook Book, which I actually think is probably the better nickname. Also, a fact that deserves constant notation: Trevor Booker's favorite Christmas gift ever, according to the good folks at Truth About It? A big wheel! I mentioned this in the last-year's capsules and I'll probably mention this whenever I talk about Booker for the rest of my life. Because it's awesome. If you vow to remember one arbitrary fact about Trevor Booker for the rest of your life, make it this one.

• • •

At the end of each post, I'll be scribing riddles for the next group. Whoever gets the most right will get a shout out at the end of the next post. Tweet me your answers at @docrostov, or post them in the comments. Commenter Matt L got this last set spot-on. Good work, fella.

• Player #310 has been playing like an all-star point guard this season. His team's still awful, as of yet, but he's surprised me.

• Player #311 hasn't been all-star level this year, but he started decently. He's been worse lately, though, and his team has fallen off badly around him.

• Player #312 flops. A lot. He's also a decent defender who's been somewhat useful to his team, as of late.

Gonna be in Los Angeles tomorrow. Fun times for everyone.

• • •

Continue reading

As our summer mainstay, Aaron was writing a 370-part series discussing almost every notable player who was -- as of last season -- getting minutes in the NBA. As the summer dies down and the leaves turn, this quixotic quest of a series has happily reached the last third. But it's certainly not done yet! Today we continue with Mike Conley, Chauncey Billups, and Shannon Brown.

• • •

Follow _Mike Conley on Twitter at @mconley11.
_

When you list off elite point guards, Mike Conley doesn't always come to mind. There's the usual suspects. You think of Chris Paul, because as Gregg Popovich might say, "he's Chris Paul." You think of Derrick Rose and the Chicago offense's single-minded dependence on him. You think of Steve Nash and his historic offensive achievements. You think of Rajon Rondo and his enigmatic command of the floor. You think of Russell Westbrook and his obscene takeovers. Tony Parker and his cubist post play. Deron Williams and his scoring acumen. Kyrie Irving and his blitzing attack. Stephen Curry's quiet brilliance. Et cetera, et cetera. You don't tend to think of Mike Conley's contributions and think him worthy of inclusion on that list. He's good, but not quite elite. Or so the story goes.

Well, honestly? At this point? He's right about there.

I've never been his biggest fan, but watching him more last year finally converted me. Conley is elite, or at the very least tantalizingly close to it. He's an extremely good three point shooter who has always put in some incredible work on that end. Consider how poor the Grizzlies were at making three point shots last year -- Conley was their best and most consistent three point shooter by a country mile, and would almost always draw the other team's best perimeter defenders on switches. Still made 37.7% of his threes. Conley's at-rim game gets less notice, but deserves more -- on a team with Randolph and Gasol, Conley orchestrates the offense in such a modulated and pinpoint fashion that he too can make his living at the rim, and over 1/3 of his points-from-shots came from at-rim conversions in 2012.

Conley and Hollins have built an offense where Conley's three point range and the threat of a Gasol/Randolph post-up gives Conley just enough room to run plays and flash to the rim, whenever the Grizzlies decide to run a play for him (which isn't often, admittedly -- he's a low usage guard at heart, and doesn't look for his shot quite as much as he perhaps should). In general, though, it works really well. Conley has been so completely essential to the Memphis attack these last three years that it's a minor miracle that Hollins is able to keep him under 36 minutes a night -- in 2010, 2011, and 2012 merely having Conley on the floor improved the Memphis offense by 7.3, 9.4, and 10.2 points per 100 possessions (per Basketball Prospectus). This fits another one of Conley's "silent" skills -- he's gone from a point guard who can't dribble a few years back (seriously, his handle was horrible) to one of the most controlled handles in the game among point guards, and his turnover rate has gotten lower almost every year of his career. Last year, he was 3rd among starting point guards in assist-to-turnover ratio, bested only by Chris Paul and Jose Calderon. Could he shoot a bit more? Definitely. But when you make as few mistakes as Conley does, it's not that hard to look past that.

His defense is also quite underheralded -- Conley isn't exactly Andre Iguodala, but he's a decidedly elite defender at the point guard position. It's very hard for point guards (even really good ones) to break free from Conley with just a simple screen or two, as he's nimble and slippery and has a talent at slipping past screens more quickly than almost anyone in the league. Just as he's modulated and controlled on offense, he's the same on defense -- he rarely takes idiotic steal attempts, but he still rates out as one of the best per-possession steal-generating guards in the league because he picks his spots so well and scouts his prey with the best of them. Memphis is a team that talks a lot -- on defense and offense -- and Conley takes an active leadership role in both discussions. He directs the offense and keeps people in shape on defense. He's Hollins' "voice on the floor", so to speak, and he's absolutely essential to that team. Just compare the Grizzlies' awful night at home against the Kyrie-lacking Cavaliers last week to any of the other games they played this season. They barely beat an injured, terrible Cavaliers team because -- quite simply -- Conley matters that much. Gasol/Randolph are important, and Gay/Allen are great players. But Conley is the mixer that puts it all together, and he's evolved into arguably their most important non-Gasol player. He's the straw that stirs the drink. He may not be elite in the tangibles, and his lack of offensive usage will always hurt him a bit. But in what he brings the Grizzlies beyond it (and his astounding lack of cogent flaws in any specific areas of his game), Conley becomes elite. Or, as I said before, dang near close to it. Which, let's be fair, probably all happened just to make Matt Moore look really astonishingly silly.

Thanks, Matt. Apparently, your criticism is the best pal a guard can hope for.

• • •

_Follow Chauncey Billups on Twitter at __@MrBigShotCB1.___

Chauncey Billups -- by all accounts -- is a really respectable guy. A nice dude, even if his calculated statements after his amnesty would tend to imply otherwise. He's been the locker room glue behind six conference finals teams in his career (so far), and good luck finding a former teammate that seriously dislikes him -- excuse the use of the relatively worn down tropes, but Billups is a leader in every sense of the word. Leads his teammates on the floor, leads his teammates in the locker room, leads his teammates in their off-hours. He's one of those all-encompassing figures, and he's a good bet to become a future coach. Or a GM. Or something. He has a sense of humor, although I have not confirmed this by paying him $75,000 to bake me a cake. And by all accounts, each of his last three teams have done him wrong -- he was in no way expecting to be traded from Detroit, Denver actively promised him he'd stay a Nugget, and New York gave him little say in his future by waiving him straight out of nowhere. A guy with Billups' pedigree and generally good-natured devotion to the team deserved more.

None of that means I can handle watching him play offense.

This isn't even new -- this has been true for years. Billups is not a fun player for me to watch, offensively. In his long and successful career, one of Billups' biggest "successes" has been popularizing something that should have absolutely never been popularized. I refer of course to his undying love of the transition three. The pull-up jumper in transition several feet past the three point line, with a trailer on him, nobody on his team back to rebound the ball, and generally little-to-no chance of making the shot. Back on the early-aughts Detroit teams, this strategy made a limited amount of sense -- those teams weren't very good on the offensive glass anyway, and they wouldn't be setting up high-percentage offense in the first place. There's a time and a place for everything -- transition threes can be useful in an offense. But when they make up every single transition play a particular player runs, their main use (as a change-of-pace offsetting factor) is completely abandoned. No surprise remains. We get on Rondo's back for ignoring opportunities for his own offense and making the pass. Why not get on Billups' back for ruining untold numbers of 3-on-1 fastbreaks with his frustrating three-point heaves with no regard for his teammates, the fundamentals of play-calling, or logic?

The first set of games I watched thoroughly with the intent to recap were played in the summer of 2010, when I watched the FIBA world championship games with Alex Dewey and wrote recaps and analysis of Team USA's ultimately successful romp through the FIBA weeds. In my game-watching, I took notes in a little notepad. The format of my notes became more and more informal as time went on, eventually becoming a loosely-bulletpointed mess of disconnected thoughts and ideas. But about two games in, there was one thing that remained throughout the rest of the exercise. For every team USA game I'd watch and take notes on, I'd add a little box in the corner of my notes titled "Chauncey Chucks". For every time Billups would blithely ignore several open teammates in pursuit of a chucked-up shot, I'd notch a tick mark. It says something that two games into my FIBA experience, I felt I really needed a box to keep track of that. It also says something that I can't remember a single FIBA game where the box had five or fewer tick marks. He makes the shots -- sometimes -- but to call them anything but errant chuckery is to misstate your case. The "Mr. Big Shot" nickname relies less on his ability to make the shots and more on his ability to take the shots -- Billups has no remorse, which is useful at times, but can just as often be harmful as he passes up better options and isolates to no end in pursuit of a clutch isolation. It's kind of annoying.

All that said, he's not terrible or anything -- simply not quite the offensive mastermind many take him as. Despite the chucking, he's still an effective three point shooter and he draws free throws by the boatload. He can't make a two-point shot to save his life (last season Billups shot 38% at the rim, and 34% from two point range overall), but he takes 55% of his shots from three point territory, so he minimizes that damage a bit. I'm of the lonely view that his formerly excellent defense suffered a bit of a letdown period from 2009 to 2011 as his athleticism waned, but I'm with the pack that Billups' move to the two-guard last year was a bit helpful to him on that front. He clearly can't cover point guards anymore, but he's large enough and smart enough to cover the average NBA shooting guards with some manner of efficacy. He gets lit up by the stars, but so does everyone. The big concern with Billups now is simply that of his comeback potential -- the only NBA player to ever successfully return to form after a ruptured Achilles is Dominique Wilkins, who returned around the age of 33. Billups will be returning around the age of 36, after several years of declining performance to begin with. Whatever he can bring the Clippers off an injury like that is going to be gravy -- there should be no serious expectation for Billups to produce offense, defense, or anything of present value. Except $75,000 cake. He should be expected to bring that. I mean, if I was on the Clippers, I'd expect him to bring that...

• • •

_Follow Shannon Brown on Twitter at __@ShannonBrown.___

A short history of Shannon Brown's career seems fitting here. Drafted by the Cleveland Cavaliers as a jitterbug point guard to change the pace and complement LeBron, Brown never quite lived up to that role -- it didn't much help matters that Mike Brown downright refused to play him (just 420 minutes in around 1.6 seasons under coach Brown, and less than a minute of playoff burn in an NBA Finals playoff run). He was ported to Chicago in the Ben Wallace trade, where he (again) couldn't get minutes and left immediately for greener pastures. The Bobcats signed him in the pre-2009 offseason, and after some of the most productive minutes of his career, he came to the Lakers in the same deal that got them Adam Morrison. Then he sort of broke out, became a replacement level player, and has been there ever since. This isn't to say he had a massive, enormous, or incredible role with the Lakers -- merely that Phil Jackson figured out where his skills were, put him in a position to maximize those skills, and let that be. Those skills? An acumen for cutting, a high vertical, and absolutely no conscience when he misses a shot. That last one also hurts him, particularly when he has one of his frustrating games where he takes 7-8 long twos and makes one. But who's counting? (I'm counting.)

Brown represents one of the things most people don't recognize about Phil Jackson (myself included, at times). Jackson wasn't the greatest player development coach in the world, but he wasn't bad at all -- there are a rare few players who couldn't get minutes in Jackson's rotations that went on to become brilliant players in a different situation. Jackson gets a lot of flack for being a less-than-stellar player development coach, but that seems to be more based on judging his player development skills in relation to his best-in-class skills in other areas of his coaching rather than in relation to the rest of the league. He wasn't excellent, but he was average at worst in a league filled with coaches who are abhorrent at it. Just look at Shannon Brown's time with Mike Brown (utter failure), Jim Boylan (hah), and Larry Brown (no thanks). None of them were able to really figure out how to use and develop Brown's gifts. Jackson was the first to really crack it, and although Brown has improved a bit under Gentry's tutelage in Phoenix, it's hard to argue Jackson didn't do a good job developing and bringing out Brown's latent talents. He did a fine job.

As a last note on Brown, I'm still strangely enthralled by 2010's "Let Shannon Dunk" movement. In a very distilled form, the whole ordeal provides a simple explanation for why exactly the dunk contest has descended to such nasty depths over the last few years. The storyline, if you forgot, was rather simple. Brown had a few vicious breakaway slams early in the 2010 season. There were rumblings of him potentially participating in the dunk contest. Rumblings grew to mumblings. Mumblings grew to shouting. Things got a bit crazy. Twitter feeds, websites, a franchise with 16 rings openly prostrating itself and rallying in hopes of getting Brown a spot in the contest, et cetera. Finally, he got his invitation. He shows up, the world prepared for something special. And, well... he sucked. His dunks were terrible. The whole contest, really, was a tired reprisal of the same old thing we'd seen millions of times before. The fun of a modern NBA dunk isn't in the dunk itself, it's in the raw aggression of the action -- not aggression towards the rim or a prop, but aggression towards an objectified opponent. That's why dunk contests with amateurs have become so superior to dunk contests in the pros. Pro dunk contests involve professionals trying to recapture that aggression without an object to act against. Amateurs have molded their dunks to fit the loneliness of the contest dunk, the vacancy of the empty court. Their aggression is focused differently, towards physics and convention and the limits of the human body. NBA dunk contests are players trying to ignore the loneliness and emulate an in-game matchup with props or bounces. Amateur dunk contests are players coming to terms with the loneliness of the form and making it work to their advantage. I don't really understand why the NBA shows the pro dunk contest while ignoring the amateurs, at this point.

Star-power can only go so far, you know.

• • •

At the end of each post, I'll be scribing riddles for the next group. Whoever gets the most right will get a shout out at the end of the next post. Tweet me your answers at @docrostov, or post them in the comments. Comment-folk Sir Thursday and Alex were batting 1.00 last night.

• Player #307 is an excellent defensive player who I thought would be a great fit on his new team. He hasn't been, but he might be turning it around.

• Player #308 could be given the exact same riddle as Player #307. Instead, I'll just say this: I'll always wonder what would've happened to him if he'd converted that tip-in.

• Player #309 has a detailed, extensive, and serious "cookbook" of moves. They are not very good moves, mind you, but it's still a downright clever nickname.

Today, I'm getting on a plane to Los Angeles. Vacation Part II: The Rejazzebration. Let's see if I can get another set done before I take off.

• • •

Continue reading

As our summer mainstay, Aaron was writing a 370-part series discussing almost every notable player who was -- as of last season -- getting minutes in the NBA. As the summer dies down and the leaves turn, this quixotic quest of a series has happily reached the last third. But it's certainly not done yet! Today we continue with Corey Maggette, Jonas Jerebko, and Devin Ebanks.

• • •

Follow _Corey Maggette on Twitter at @ghostC5M.
_

I'm going to try to make this one short, for two reasons. Firstly, I absolutely don't like Corey Maggette. I really, truly don't. Avid readers will know by now that I'm essentially the least-school-spirited Duke student in all of recorded history. I do not like my alma mater and I don't tend to like the players that Coach K's system produces. Corey Maggette completely embodies the Duke style, on defense and offense. Secondly, he's not really a very relevant player. I tend to pride myself in finding at least one or two interesting things to say about each and every NBA player, but when it comes to Maggette, I honestly have trouble figuring out what to say. He's not very engaging, and there aren't a ton of original or interesting observations to be made about his game.

The only observation of particular note with Maggette is that of his somewhat empty style -- Maggette embodies the concept of improving one's stats by playing on awful teams. If his team is atrocious, he'll generally have excellent-to-solid statistics and look like a strong possible option as a first or second string guy on a contending team. If his team is good, those solid statistics dissipate into the wind, and his minutes vanish with them. He's been arguably one of the worst players a franchise could sign. He's overpaid, harms your team's bottom line a bit with his dismal defense, constantly gets taken out for large swatches of the season through injury due to his foul-drawing style, doesn't seem to grasp basketball aesthetics, and completely lacks the personal charm to make up for any of the sins. Not to belabor the aesthetics, but it bears repeating -- his game is centered around a bumbling sort of foul-drawing mastery. In Maggette's career, he's made over 500 more free throws than he has field goals. Which is... not exactly something most people want to watch, efficient though it may be. It's simply not very fun. Maggette is not a very fun experience.

The one other thing I find interesting about Maggette is that of his frame. Many people -- looking at Maggette with no real knowledge about the NBA -- would assume him to be a good defender. He's one of the most muscular NBA players in the league, he's built like an ox, and he just has the feel of a solid defensive player. Well... he's not. He lacks lateral quickness, he backs down out of post position, and he generally just doesn't use his muscles on defense. It's simultaneously hilarious and sad. It's like watching a killer robot whose personality was typed with a Tickle Me Elmo doll. You have this beastly-looking figure on defense who simply cannot guard a fly. He doesn't have the instincts, the know-how, the anything -- oftentimes, it looks like he still feels he's at Duke, overrotating and doing little dirty nudges in hopes the refs won't notice, which they rarely do. Maggette is not the worst player, but by god, he's not very good. He has a laundry list of limitations, the aesthetic allure of a stepped-on anthill, and a decidedly unbecoming disinterest on the defensive end. I just can't really stand watching him, and while I know he was a lot better than this at his prime, I simply can't get over how poor he looks now. Maybe it's injuries, maybe it's karma, maybe it's just the slow march of age. But the man isn't what he used to be, and what he is now isn't very appetizing at all.

• • •

_Follow Jonas Jerebko on Twitter at __@JonasJerebko.___

Jonas Jerebko is one of those players that genuinely confounds me. His rookie season was promising -- he displayed a solid three point stroke, a knack for rebounding, and a general versatility that made it seem like the sky was the limit for Jerebko's potential as an NBA roleplayer. He even looked to have some defensive potential -- his rookie year, the Pistons were quite a bit of a better team defensively with him on the court, and although he had issues sticking with wings or defending post-ups, most teams didn't rely on that against Jerebko that often and he was able to stick to his shot defense on big men (which is solid) and a general ballhawking, wandering defense to set offensive players off kilter. In short, the stage looked set for a phenomenal career as a super-talented roleplayer. Or better! His sophomore year ended up delayed, as Jerebko strained a tendon in a preseason joust with the Miami Heat and ended his 2011 season before it began.

In the run-up to last season, the Pistons signed Jerebko to a 4-year, $18 million deal -- this seemed a bit high to most, but given his promising rookie year, it wasn't that bad. And then the season started. Jerebko did the same things he did as a rookie, for the most part. He rebounded extremely well. He scored efficiently. He hustled. But there was something distinctly different about Jerebko's play, and with more talent than before in a crowded frontcourt, his minutes suffered. Trying to put a finger on what exactly changed between Jerebko's first and second years is actually pretty difficult. The one thing I definitely noticed was a worse showing on the defensive end -- teams had figured out by the end of his rookie year that they could either post him up with a bigger guy or test his lateral quickness with a smaller guy if they wanted to disrupt his defense, and coming off his injury-lost season, he had serious problems doing either. Even his defensive talents from his rookie year seemed lessened -- his ballhawking was worse, his ability to stick past screens fell to pot, and he generally looked lost on the defensive end.

This isn't to say he wasn't useful, but it is to say that his decrease in minutes didn't come capriciously. There was rhyme and reason to it, even despite his solid offense. Most assume that Jerebko is a good finisher given how often he finishes strong. Turns out that isn't quite the case -- surprisingly, he's marginally below average as a forward at the rim. The key with Jerebko is one of constant usage -- Jerebko takes almost 40% of his shots at the rim, and 54% of his shots within 9 feet of the basket. He's roughly average at both, but he does it so often it seems like he's better than he is. And when it's close-in offense, being average is fine -- the problem most tweeners face is a decided allergy to getting to the rim and finishing strong. To Jerebko's credit, he doesn't share this difficulty. He works hard to get to the rim and draws a lot of free throws to get there. Which, net and net, makes him a positive offensive player even if he hasn't quite extended his range to that of a legitimate three point sniper. Yet. The problem is that without the legitimate three point shot, a player of his defensive caliber is going to have trouble getting big minutes on a team with no frontcourt talent, let alone on a team stacked with some in Monroe and Drummond.

Which leaves the Pistons where they are now -- with a player who is obviously quite talented and quite offensively useful, but who can't play the 3 (until he gets faster) or the 4 (until he gets more muscle) on defense. It's difficult to figure out where Jerebko fits in the Pistons' future -- he's much like DeJuan Blair with the Spurs, in that they're players who played lights-out rookie seasons who are just about as good as they were during those seasons... but no better. To the extent that one starts to wonder at some point if the rookie season was more of a best case scenario than a sign of things to come. Jerebko's still young, and there's still plenty of time for him to get in better NBA shape and turn the league upside down. But whereas I used to think it was an inevitability, I'm now relatively convinced it's merely a possibility. Wish him well regardless, though -- the guy is very fun to watch.

• • •

_Follow Devin Ebanks on Twitter at __@DevinEbanks3.___

Although Devin Ebanks found himself shackled to Mike Brown's doghouse last season, I never thought it was all that big of a deal. I know there are a lot of Laker fans who like Ebanks -- he's the spitting image of Trevor Ariza, right down to the curves of his jawline. There's a desire, internally, to project Ariza's best traits onto Ebanks and assume them the same player. If not the same, at least similar. But there's a problem with that. Ebanks has played really, really poorly as a Laker, despite playing the vast majority of his minutes against remarkably awful competition in garbage time blowout lineups. Ebanks features an utterly broken shot (he didn't make a single three, converted just 58% at the rim, and barely shot 26% from 3-15 feet last season), a propensity for turning the ball over (an absurd 15% of all his possessions, in fact), and provided no other offensive talents on the floor. Ebanks is not a willing passer in a play-call offense, he isn't a good rebounder, and his steal/block totals are pathetic for a guy as athletic as he is. His defense was solid but unspectacular, with his relatively solid man-up perimeter defense usually easily thwarted by simply running him off a weak screen -- Ebanks did a terrible job negotiating screens in his tenure last year.

This year, despite the Lakers' depth problems, Ebanks still hasn't seen much time. There are many possible reasons for this, but my theory now is that the Lakers simply want to wait and see the results of Ebanks' early season drunk driving arrest before they try him out as a valuable member of their rotation. The court case is in a little over a week, now -- may as well wait and see. They don't want to risk potentially giving Ebanks an important role on the team before a drunk driving suspension is brought down by the league. The Lakers are having enough trouble with chemistry already -- no reason to put a huge investment on a guy who could be out 5-10 games with additional media headaches to boot. So far as I see it. This doesn't totally explain why Ebanks saw very little time under Brown, but I think that's pretty easily chalked up to the fact that he simply never made it into Brown's good graces and Brown was never really confident enough in Ebanks to give him a fair shot anyway. Although, again -- I'm not sure he got all that unfair of a shot. The man shot 26% from 3-15 feet. For such an athletic guy, Ebanks converted less of the time at the rim than 75% of all NBA small forwards. He turns the ball over like it's his job. He didn't draw charges. He didn't have legitimate range to his jump shot. Perhaps he'll be decent someday, but he has yet to prove he's a rotation player in the NBA. Which, once again, goes back to the Lakers' depth problems. The fact that so many fans are convinced that Devin Ebanks -- a player who by former performance would be out of the rotation entirely on 27 of 30 NBA teams -- will vastly improve the quality of their bench is a speaks loudly to the type of depth Los Angeles is carrying right now.

Namely, none. I consider it a complete shock that the Lakers chose to stay put with Duhon/Blake/Morris instead of picking up Shaun Livingston for the minimum -- while Livingston is hardly a lights-out player anymore, Nash's injury has made all-the-more-obvious the Lakers' unenviable position at the point. The same applies to the Lakers' wing rotation, where Jodie Meeks has dramatically disappointed and even D'Antoni has seen fit to use two-point lineups in an effort to minimize the damage caused by playing Darius Johnson-Odom and Meeks large minutes. Artest has played like a shattered record for virtually the entire season, but his starting role is in absolutely no danger -- no matter how poorly he plays, he's not in any danger whatsoever of getting leapfrogged by any of the Lakers' pathetic options behind him. The big man rotation is a mess of ill-fitting parts right now, but at least there are four legitimate players there -- that's more than they can say on the wings and point, and speaks to the general challenge that continue to make the Lakers one of the more interesting teams to handicap and examine in the entire league. D'Antoni has a beast of a task ahead of him to synthesize these pieces into a dangerous playoff monster -- I have a lot of confidence in his ability to do so, but to act like he's not working with a tough roster to mold would be a mistake.

Perhaps Ebanks can break out and surprise. Perhaps he won't. We'll see, I suppose.

• • •

At the end of each post, I'll be scribing riddles for the next group. Whoever gets the most right will get a shout out at the end of the next post. Tweet me your answers at @docrostov, or post them in the comments. Mike L got a 3/3. Good work with some intractable riddles, there.

• Player #304 is one of the most valuable point guards in the league. He's also not a top-5 point guard, and he rarely makes top-10 lists because everyone simply forgets he exists.

• Player #305 popularized the trend of wasting a 3-on-2 transition break with a random pull-up three that none of his teammates were in position to rebound. Everyone does it now. I'm mad.

• Player #306 throws it down, [his name]. Also plays above his head for a contract, seemingly every time!

And that does it for today's second set. Join us tomorrow when -- again -- I will try to do two sets of these blasted things. This certainly isn't going to last forever, given that writing 6000 words per day feels about as insane and unreasonable as it sounds... but so long as I'm on vacation, I figure giving myself a bit of wiggle room to get the project done by year's end is always a good idea. Until then, gents and lasses.

• • •

Continue reading

As our summer mainstay, Aaron was writing a 370-part series discussing almost every notable player who was -- as of last season -- getting minutes in the NBA. As the summer dies down and the leaves turn, this quixotic quest of a series has happily reached the last third. But it's certainly not done yet! Today we continue with Quentin Richardson, Rodney Stuckey, and Larry Sanders.

• • •

Follow _Quentin Richardson on Twitter at @QRich.
_

Quentin Richardson has carved out two unique places in history during his career. The first was through absolutely no fault of his own -- in a downright bizarre period during the summer of 2009, Richardson was moved in the following sequence:

• Traded from the Knicks to the Grizzlies in exchange for Darko Milicic.

• Three weeks later, Richardson was traded to the Clippers in exchange for Zach Randolph.

• Three days later, Richardson was traded to the Timberwolves for Sebastien Telfair, Mark Madsen, and Craig Smith.

• Finally, about three weeks after that, Richardson was traded to the Heat for Mark Blount.

If you're keeping count, that's four different teams in the span of two months. This is -- if not the absolute quickest -- at least among the quickest durations a single player has churned through four teams in the history of the league. To his credit, Richardson stayed grounded -- as he said, at the end of the day, he had a guaranteed contract and he knew he'd be playing basketball. As he put it -- "with the way the economy is, I don't have a ton of problems. If me not knowing what team I'm going to is my biggest problem, that's nothing. A lot of people around the world are much worse off." Always a nice thought, and it's always good to see a guy with legitimate career perspective. The other unique place in history is less based on his game than his off-court pursuits -- for about a year, Richardson made the headlines by being engaged to Brandy. No, not the drink -- the famous singer. That's right, folks -- it was the Humphries/Kardashian engagement before Humphries or Kardashian were more than a glimmer in their parents' eye! (Yes, I'm implying that Humphries and Kardashian are 5 year olds. Watching them interact with other human beings, this may not be a suggestion that's all that out of sorts.)

Otherwise, with this representing the likely end to Richardson's career, what is there to really say about his game? Not a ton. At his best, Richardson was a 3-and-D type player whose defense was never quite at the level it needed to be. His three point marksmanship was solid, early in his career, and a phenomenally effective three point season playing with a prime Steve Nash helped him parlay his shooting talent into a set of reasonably large contracts. Realistically, his defense should've been a tiny bit better -- he's a strong widebody defender with decent fundamentals. But he's also the tiniest bit short for his position, which hurts him, and his large frame (especially during his mid-career fitness swoon in New York off a litany of injuries) has always made it a bit harder for him to cover guys on the move. This hasn't stopped Richardson from having all manner of hilarious NBA moments, like his remarkably silly rivalry with Paul Pierce (clearing the way for DeShawn Stevensons everywhere to attack randomly better players). He also tended to celebrate with funny gestures and reactions when he made threes -- he's clearly a guy that enjoys being on the court, and he (to his credit) doesn't try to do vastly too much on the floor. That's respectable.

No mark Richardson made in history really holds a candle to his sad personal story, though -- it's not rare for NBA players to have been through rough times, but it's rare that they get quite as dire as Richardson suffered. He grew up learning and loving basketball from his mother's prodding, wrought of her inability to work in the aftermath of a stroke and aneurism. His mother -- a former high school player -- taught him the game and shot with him as a kid. But tragedy struck -- his mother never got to see him in the NBA or even in college. She passed away in 1992 after a struggle with breast cancer, only to be immediately followed by Richardson's beloved grandmother and shortly thereafter by his 23-year-old older brother, Bernard. His father reacted sternly, trying to instill an even harsher work ethic into Richardson. It didn't always work -- Richardson had his problems in the NBA, what with his fitness issues in New York, his discipline issues, his inability to stick with any one team, et cetera. But when you look at the things that precipitated that, like losing his younger brother in a senseless shooting in the middle of his New York tenure? You start to gain a lot of perspective and sympathy for the man.

Again, Quentin Richardson is not an amazing player. In his own words: "I'm not a 20-point scorer -- I'm whatever Stan Van Gundy needs me to be. If he wants me to focus on defense, I will." But he has his pride he puts in his work, even if his natural talents betrayed him a bit. On some level, I hope he makes the NBA again -- on another, I think he'd probably be better off in a foreign league or at DePaul finishing his degree. There are young blooded kids who deserve his minutes more right now, and while he was shakily effective last season, he's getting up there in the years and he's a player whose body can abide no real degradation of skill. Still, I have a lot of respect for Richardson, and if this really is the end -- as it appears to be -- I hope he knows that there's at least one fan out there who won't forget the world he came from and the effort he put forth to stay in the league.

• • •

_Follow Rodney Stuckey to the gates of probabilistic hell and back.__

---

As a statistician, watching a shooter mired in a bad shooting slump is (strangely) more compelling to me than watching a ridiculous hot streak. The same goes for other sports -- a hitter's slump in baseball, a quarterback's slump in football, a goalie whose defense suddenly leaves them -- these are the sports phenomenons that interest me most. There's a reason for that, and it has to do with a statistical assumption many sports statisticians and professional analysts make without much regard to introspection and adjustment. That is, the assumption of absolute event independence. I'm not a strong proponent of the hot-hand theory, no. I think it's certainly plausible, although most of the research makes me think it's a bit of a prancing unicorn. And in ALMOST all sports cases, I think semi-absolute independence is a reasonable assumption, with a large enough sample size. But I actually am a proponent of a watered down version of the cold-hand theory. That's the idea that shooting slumps, unlike hot streaks, have a non-negligible chance of breaking the traditional assumptions of independence that underlie most sports statistics, thereby engendering a short buffer of an adjustment period as the player sheds their personal attempts to "fix" their shot and return to the fundamentally decent shot that got them to their pre-slump high in the first place.

There are three reasons for this. First, a shooting slump is far more dire than a hot streak -- in terms of psychological importance, a slump is something that vastly endangers the average NBA player's ability to receive minutes commensurate with their self-perceived talent level, and as thus, it's more of a threat to be taken seriously. Second, there are far more ways to change a shot that isn't going well than there are to improve a shot that's on a hot streak -- there are all manner of things to tinker with when things are going poorly, ranging from off-hand position to jump height to release angle. It's like playing with a control panel with 20 various sliders and having all of them available to you -- you can tinker and toy with it until you find something better, and as you do so, that changes the overall complexion of your shot and potential. And finally, there's the last key -- nerves. When I get nervous about things, I get a bit shaky, a bit less sure of myself, a bit less confident in my ability to perform the task. Shooting slumps harm a shooter's confidence, which in turn could lengthen the slump and mire the player in a muck they can't escape.

In the long run, the use of independence assumptions and slump-gathered statistics used in overall valuation metrics isn't a bad thing. Never will be. Law of large numbers does dictate that things like this tend to even out over time, and the sheer number of players and events occurring at any one time make occasional slumps like the one Rodney Stuckey has started the year on (through 5 games, Stuckey was shooting 8-of-46 from the field and trying all manner of different contortions in an effort to shoot himself out of it). If you're wondering how something like that could happen at all, I'd entreat you to look at this useful applet. It's a coin flip engine, so essentially, it's the equivalent to a 50% shooter shooting shots into the infinite. Watch the "longest streak" metric. You might be surprised to find that the "longest streak" ends up being far longer than you'd expect -- in Stuckey's worst part of the slump, he missed 18 shots in a row. How likely is it that a career 42% shooter misses 18 shots in a row, given that he's shot 3956 shots in his career? You can calculate that exact probability with the Bernoulli distribution -- if you assume independence, the probability isn't nearly as low as most people would expect. You'd see a streak of 18 or more misses 8% of the time.

Which sort of goes back to my point -- while I think that probability is probably marginally higher, accounting for the impact that 5 to 10 misses may make it marginally more likely for a shooter to miss a slightly higher percentage than usual for the next 10 to 20 shots before they revert to their usual form, that probability is actually reasonably high. The amusing reaction to a player's slump tends to be far more dire and bloviating than reason would assess. A slump does not a poor player make -- we live in a world where rare events aren't impossible events, they're just rare. And when people watch slumps and revel in what it really reflects about the player, I get a bit amused. Far more interesting is to watch how the player reacts, and see if you can isolate the things they alter or the tendencies they adjust in an effort to get back on track -- that's where I find slumps to be the most interesting, and why I had an odd fascination with watching almost every moment of Stuckey's hilariously dire season-opening slump.

Having said all that, I don't really know what to say about Stuckey's game. Is he as bad as the slump would tend to indicate? No, not really. Is he good? Again -- no, not really. Years ago, Stuckey was seen as a relative savior to some of my Detroit-hailing friends, the man who would take the reins from Billups and cash in on an excess of talent. That never really happened. Although Stuckey has a promising frame for a defensive player, he's never put in an exceedingly high amount of effort on that end, and his positive adjusted plus/minus last season struck me as an outlier. His effort level has seemed consistently low to me on a fundamentally flawed level over the course of his career, although I'll be the first to admit that Synergy is down right now and I don't really have the ability to back up my memories with my usual scouting at the present moment. He just doesn't seem to have a smart grasp on when to rotate and when to stay at home, choosing to straddle the line and get burned all too often.

On offense, Stuckey's big talent is that he understands the importance of at-rim scoring to a balanced offensive attack -- Stuckey converted only 53% at the rim (in the bottom 25% of all SGs), but he took 41% of his shots there, which helped him maintain an overall moderately decent field goal percentage. Which does tend to brush some of his problems under the rug -- namely, the fact that he absolutely can't shoot beyond the midrange. He can make a few midrange shots a game, if you need it, but he's absolutely dismal at long twos and three pointers, shooting 31% last year on all shots beyond 15 feet. That's not very good. The one thing he was good at is the one thing I hate watching most -- he was great-to-excellent at drawing free throws and good at converting when he got to the line (83% is a good rate, for anyone). Which tends to be a way to get me to hate watching you. Until you slump and my fascination overrides all aesthetics concerns. Note to all shooters: if you want me to become interested in you, apparently all you need to do is go on a prolonged shooting slump. Sounds like a plan, right?

• • •

_Follow Larry Sanders on Twitter at __@LarryLuv_8.___

While Larry Sanders had an up-and-down experience in his first few years in the league, as with many Bucks, he's been one of Milwaukee's pleasant surprises in their early-season renaissance. Some expected Chicago would run away with the central division. Others expected Indiana would make a strong run at it. Others were on bath salts and ate people's faces off. (They did not have any stated horse in this race.) They were all wrong, at least so far -- Milwaukee has played better than anyone else in the central division, going 7-5 against a schedule ever-so-slightly harder than Chicago's season-opening cupcake parade. Their most impressive performance by far has come in a loss, as well -- they were ousted by the Heat in overtime (in Miami!) despite getting abysmal 13-41 shooting from their Ellis/Jennings pairing and next to nothing from Ersan Ilyasova. The Bucks have surprised many. Myself included.

The Bucks have been good, which is in and of itself rather shocking, but more shocking to me has been exactly how they're doing it. Not Ellis, not Jennings, and not even Dalembert -- the players that are leading the Bucks to respectability are simply the players left over after years and years of what seemed like poor drafting and poor trading decisions. Include Sanders in that mix. If not putting everything together, Sanders has definitely put something together -- starting on the boards. He's been a FAR better rebounder than he used to be, finally having spent a summer studying positioning and figuring out where exactly he needs to be to corral more rebounds and help his team. Whereas before Sanders would consistently find himself boxed out and totally out of the picture when the rebound careened off the board, this year's new-age Sanders has finally realized that in order to ensure any kind of a career in the league, he needs to put his athletically gifted 6'11" frame to work. That realization and an excess of confidence -- never quite there before -- has turbocharged the man's game. He's played great, and he's been one of the Bucks' biggest season-starting shockers. His offense looks good (on, as always, low usage), his passing is fine, and his defense is decent. He's startlingly engaged. He's legitimately becoming an NBA player. A beautiful transformation.

All that said? I'm not sure Skiles is really the right coach for Sanders post-crisis, or if I'm honest, Milwaukee in general. You have to wonder what exactly went through Skiles' head when he refused to give Larry Sanders much time his first two years, even in garbage time -- Sanders played under 900 minutes in each of the previous two seasons, and while he wasn't a phenomenal player, it's extremely hard to really assess how good a young player is when he barely gets minutes even in the face of massive injuries to the frontcourt, as the Bucks have been quite familiar with. His minutes and role were constantly yanked around, and I really have no idea how he got any sort of comfort developed with Skiles leaving him completely in the dark night-in and night-out on what his role was to be the next day. I read a joke on Twitter quipping that Skiles was trying to fulfill the never-before-seen idea of literally giving every single one of his big men 20 minutes per game of burn. If he was just doing that, maybe it'd be fine -- but hes oscillating them between 30-36 minute games and 0-6 minute games. It's too much variance. There's preserving guys to save them from injury and then there's simply being odd and capricious with your lineups. Skiles shuffles around young players without any real rhyme or reason -- sometimes he'll be riding the hot hand, but oftentimes it just seems that he forgets certain players are still on his bench. Look at last week -- Sanders played 21 minutes in a loss to Charlotte, putting up reasonably strong per-minute numbers. He then proceeded to play -- not a typo -- SIX minutes against the Heat. Two days later? 29 minutes against the Bulls, because that makes sense. Then he played 12. Skiles is a good coach, but at some point you need to wonder if his devil-may-care lineup assignments aren't hurting the development of the young players Milwaukee needs to develop.

There are many reasons Skiles rarely lasts long in a new city. The Bucks, even as they surprise and shock in the early going, are providing a perfect example of why Skiles that is. If you can't develop young talent or put young guys on the floor, you aren't going to build a contender in a small market. You simply aren't. And if your "developmental strategy" involves yanking young players around and acting like they don't matter, you're going to encounter a bit of resistance -- both on the player end and the organizational end. Here's hoping Skiles finally learns from his past foibles. And here's assuming he absolutely won't.

• • •

At the end of each post, I'll be scribing riddles for the next group. Whoever gets the most right will get a shout out at the end of the next post. Tweet me your answers at @docrostov, or post them in the comments. Shout-out to Matt L, Rad E Cool, and wul.f for putting together the pieces on 2/3 of these, and I admit this -- the Sanders riddle was legitimately terrible.

• Player #301 draws free throws. He really doesn't do anything else of any perceivable note. Why did he have to attend my alma mater, again?

• Player #302 might be good -- as a rookie, he really surprised me. But as a sophomore (after a year out of the country), he surprised me again... in the opposite direction, a bit. At least the Swede's starting the year decently, and playing well for a team that's rather dismal.

• Player #303 is a massive downgrade from Quentin Richardson. He's young, but he's underutilized and his top-heavy team has to be looking to waive him and sign a better vet... right?

And we've hit the 300s! The end is nigh. Will again try for two today -- can I make it two days in a row? If so, check back around 5-6 ET for today's second installment.

• • •

Continue reading

As our summer mainstay, Aaron was writing a 370-part series discussing almost every notable player who was -- as of last season -- getting minutes in the NBA. As the summer dies down and the leaves turn, this quixotic quest of a series has happily reached the last third. But it's certainly not done yet! This afternoon we continue with Mickael Pietrus, Andre Iguodala, and Earl Boykins.

• • •

Follow Mickael Pietrus on Twitter at @MickaelPietrus.

It's something of a pity that Mickael Pietrus has struggled over the last few years with freak injuries and game-sapping accidents. While he's never been a star-type player, or even a reliable roleplayer, he had promising seasons early in his career that made one think he had a shot to be something pretty good in the NBA. His sophomore season, Pietrus averaged 10-3-1 on just 20 minutes a game, which would translate to decent roleplayer status if he improved even the tiniest bit since then. His fourth year, he did a bit better and produced 11-5-1-1-1 averages on just 8 shots a game and 27 minutes a contest. Nothing world beating, of course -- he combined solid (although non-exceptional) perimeter defense with decent marksmanship from three and a nice knack for taking care of the ball in the few and far between times he handled it. But he's been extremely injured the last few years, which has detracted from his value quite a lot -- in the long view, he's a 36% three point shooter who's been money from the corners in his career. In the short view of last season, he was a slightly-above-average three point shooter on extremely low usage who takes 70% of his shots from three point range and provides little else of serious value. His defense has been touch-and-go since 2010, and his lingering knee problem last season dramatically harmed his defensive efficacy. The effort was still there, and he was still as intense as always -- he just wasn't getting nearly as much as he or the Celtics wanted out of his efforts.

As of yet, Pietrus remains unsigned. It's a little bit of an open question as to why, but not that much. There are two main teams that could clearly use him, right now -- the Lakers (who could use another body at the three to compensate for Artest's drop) or the Spurs (who currently have zero legitimate NBA small forwards on their roster while Leonard and Jackson recover from injuries). The big problem Pietrus faces is that of his previously-stated demands; his agent has stated outright that Pietrus is highly unlikely to accept any veteran's minimum contract for his efforts, and neither of the teams that need him really are in a position to offer him much more. Which leaves him in a bit of a jam. If he's healthy (as he's stated multiple times he is), he probably could be a helpful piece in the NBA. But he's only helpful on a team that could legitimately use a 3-and-D swingman with few tertiary skills and little room to improve -- IE, a veteran team that doesn't have the cap space to offer much beyond a minimum deal! So he sits in wait for a team to pick up his option, and hopes that by the time it happens he isn't too out of shape and out of practice to really contribute. It's rough, but he's been waived before and he's gone through the wringer. Can't imagine he'll get too bent out of shape about it. Good guy, from all accounts, and I think this video of him saying he loves the viewer in a terrifying voice will confuse and befuddle me always. Also, it's kind of a wonder more guys don't do this. Duncan and Pietrus seem to be the only two to do it with any regularity. Step up your broadcast mischief game, NBA.

• • •

_Follow Andre Iguodala on Twitter at __@mindofAI9.___

Many people don't really seem to gather exactly how good Andre Iguodala has been the last few years. Specifically, weirdly enough, the vast majority of Sixers fans I'm friends with. Evident example -- I remember talking with a friend of mine. Huge Sixers fan. It was back in the run-up to the 2011 season, during the summer doldrums. While I insisted that Iguodala was a high-quality player, he was having none of it. "He cannot score" said he. "His defense is not up to snuff" said he. "He's a ruthless, overpaid stat-padder who could be replaced by Evan Turner for less money" said he. And I shook my head, but reluctantly left the table to finish the conversation and get back to my job. As time went on, I felt that I both better understood and less agreed with his position, and a position I find relatively common among Philadelphia fans. There are three big table-legs that make Iguodala a fantastic NBA player. They are as follows:

• Andre Iguodala is the best perimeter defender in the NBA. Really. Few others are consistently anywhere close, in fact -- over the last two years, LeBron has been the only perimeter defender whose advanced metrics have touched Iggy's (although both Tony Allen and Avery Bradley at their best give them a run for their money), and LeBron has struggled with some element of disinterest in the regular season. Few seem to believe me on this, but it's a serious thing -- LeBron James is a phenomenal playoff defender and a best-in-class defensive talent due partly to his versatility and partly to his inherently smart approach he takes to defense. But he doesn't play out every possession at a breakneck pace, for good reason. He used to, when he was a younger man -- but last season LeBron seemed to come to the realization that it's exhausting and unnecessary to go as hard for a random November regular season game as one would for a playoff game in the eastern conference finals. Iguodala? At least in Philadelphia, he hardly had a possession all season he "took off". And he was the leading cog in one of the best defenses in the NBA, an all-engulfing talent that destroyed and obliterated star wing players every single night. It was uncanny. He defended the opposing team's best wing, helped on bigs, shaded rotations, and destroyed driving angles. I have no idea how he did it all and stayed healthy and engaged for the entirety of the 2012 season. It was a miracle of defensive accomplishment for Iguodala, and he should've gotten a lot more credit for it.

• Andre Iguodala is one of the best passing wings in basketball. This one is something most of his harshest critics will still begrudgingly admit, but I have an inkling that few people are aware of just how creative Iguodala is with his passing. He doesn't always break out the incredibly creative moves, and he's no savant a la Manu Ginobili. But he's EXTREMELY good. Not top-of-the-class, a la his perimeter defense. He's not the best passing wing -- I would say off the top of my head that Kirilenko, LeBron, and Kobe Bryant are inherently "better" passing talents than Iguodala (although Bryant doesn't use his talents nearly as much as the other three). But Iguodala has a creative spark that comes out every now and again, leading to beautiful plays like this phenomenal between the legs pass, this soft no-look behind the shoulder pass, or this quintessential use of a blown Thunder rotation to pass to himself for a pretty dunk. He isn't Steve Nash, but he's no Ramon Sessions either -- there's a hell of a lot of creativity behind his passing, something for which Iguodala rarely gets quite as much credit as he should.

• Andre Iguodala is one of the best finishers in the NBA. A lot of people understand that Iguodala is good at dunking. And he is -- consider last year, where Iguodala slammed in 89 dunks on 91 attempts, missing just two dunks in an entire season of action (ironically, both misses came against Boston in the playoffs, and both came in the last four games of Philadelphia's season -- he came remarkably close to going 100% on all dunk attempts in the 2012 season). He shot 48% on tip-ins, layups, and hook shots in the 2012 season, and did so despite grabbing his own offensive rebound with startling regularity. Last season, Iguodala's overall mark at the rim -- 75.2% -- was 7th overall in the entire league. If he actually would use his ability to get to the rim more often, Iguodala has the potential to be a startlingly effective scorer at this stage of his career.

As you might have realized while reading that last bulletpoint, though, there's something of a hollow problem in his offensive game. Simply put? For all the grief we give players like Carmelo Anthony and LeBron James for not going in the post and playing to their strength, we seem to fully exonerate Iguodala for -- quite literally -- having one of the worst efficiency-to-locale shot distributions in the entire league. You know how we get on J.R. Smith for shooting a lot of jumpers? Iguodala, last season, was far worse. Despite shooting 75% at the rim, only 25% of Iguodala's offense came there -- the average wing shot around 34% of their shots at the rim, for good reason. It's really efficient to do that. Iguodala preferred to coast outside the arc, shooting an absurd 64% of his shots from beyond 15 feet, something that would be quite nice if he was Ray Allen, but turned out to be somewhat of a waste given that he's not. He shot just 31% from the long two, and while he had a flukishly-good showing from the three point arc, it really remains to be seen if Iguodala can stay around 40% from three on a regular basis. Watching him do this -- game in and game out -- can be infuriating. And it can cause a lot of grief to fans that are forced to watch his semi-regular dismal offensive nights where he acts allergic to cutting, driving, or the concept of at-rim play.

The problem that most Philadelphia fans have with Iguodala -- it seems to me -- is that of poor timing and poor decisions. Sure, he's the greatest large forward passing talent the Sixers have had in the last decade. But why does he defer at every possible opportunity? Sure, he's a great perimeter defender. But why was he so fruitless at it while Iverson was at his best, and why did he only develop into a perfect complementary piece after Iverson had departed? Most of the Philadelphia fans I've met love Iverson, and for relatively good reason. But acting as Iverson's follow-up act has not suited Iguodala well, given his propensity for poor offensive decisions erring on the side of minimal usage and his generally low-key game. For every aspect of his game that Iverson imposes on his viewer, Iguodala ruminates and produces rumblings of tempered brilliance. He's a thinking fan's player who suited up to follow a player of visceral passions, and that (above all else) explains to me why Philadelphia never really caught on to Iguodala. It's like going to a wine tasting after pigging out at Taco Bell. Your crunchwrap supreme might have been delicious, but good luck appreciating a good Bordeaux while you try to get that volcano sauce aftertaste out of your craw. The tastes simply don't fit.

So, no. Really, I'm not that surprised that Iguodala got booed, and I'm not really mad at Philadelphia for booing him -- even if I think (as I do) that Iguodala is a fantastic player and one of the most underrated swingmen in the league. He's a sophisticated player with sophisticated flaws, and attempting to stomach Iguodala's complex game after Iverson's simple passions -- especially without the winning that Philadelphia fans have become accustomed to through osmosis from the Phillies and the Eagles -- was probably a bridge too far for Philadelphia. Here's hoping he finds a better role in Denver, exacts the same dominant defensive stylings elsewhere, and (of course) the obvious__: finally stops shooting so many long twos.__ Dear God, man.

• • •

Follow Earl Boykins, but don't be surprised if he escapes Tom's clutches into Jerry's lair.

When your claim to fame is that you're the Muggsy Bogues type "ridiculously small player" of your generation, you're going to have a legacy. Whether you like it or not. Look, I'm 6'4". I'm almost one foot taller than Earl Boykins -- an actual NBA player, I may remind you. This never ceases to amaze me. Consider it. He's probably shorter than most of our readers! He's shorter than me, than you, than all manner of individuals... and he not only made the NBA, he prospered in it. He wasn't great last season, and all things considered, he's probably out of the league at this point -- he's 36 years old, now, he cannot get his shot off, and he's having a lot of trouble staying with NBA quickness. I mean, he used to have trouble staying with NBA guards because he was a foot shorter than some of them. I'm pretty sure he still benches as much as he used to -- I distinctly remember seeing a story about how he could bench 300 pounds, which is insane for a guy his size. But strength isn't everything at a certain age. Now that he's gotten to the point where his natural quickness is waning and he can't stick with everyone like he used to, it's becoming more and more difficult to get him minutes. So I'm unsure whether he'll get a callback -- it's possible last season's short jaunt with the Rockets will end the ride, with this guy. But what a ride it's been.

Boykins has been -- if not phenomenal -- an insanely amusing player to watch in his 13 years in the league. Just look at what he did in the 2011 season, with the Milwaukee Bucks. Was there anyone who wasn't watching enraptured as Boykins filleted the Lakers defense in a game where the Bucks -- sans Bogut or Jennings -- demolished the Lakers by 19 points? Is there anyone who can honestly say they weren't completely floored when Boykins led the Bucks to a strong shellacking of the would-be champion Mavericks to open the 2011 calendar year? Boykins has spent his NBA career doing crazy things, and his diminutive size makes him a consistently entertaining presence to watch in a professional basketball game. His defense isn't great, given that almost every player in the league can simply shoot over him, but he's hardly useless -- his low center of gravity makes him quite adept at producing steals, and while he gambles very often, at his size the only real defensive weapon he's got is his ability to nick the ball. So I don't really blame him for gambling nearly as much as I'd blame a larger player. Look at it this way -- gambling makes sense for Boykins, because he has a lot to gain, but only a tiny bit to lose. ... Get it? Because he's tiny? I'm a riot, folks.

Anyway. Fun fact -- Earl Boykins came from the Cleveland area. This may come as something of a shocker, but given that fact, he might actually be one of the 5 or 6 best players to ever hail from that neck of the woods. You've got LeBron James, Charles Oakley, Nate Thurmond, Gus Johnson, and Stephen Curry. Boykins fits in right around those guys. He's right there! It's kind of like a race! LeBron James is driving ahead of Oakley and Thurmond in a Ferrari to their 1980 Oldsmobiles. Behind them, you have Stephen Curry trying to drive a broken-down Jetta with no tires and Gus Johnson screaming at his engine to move faster without realizing his keys aren't in the ignition. But then -- look! Earl Boykins, the boy-kin wonder, rollerskating his way into our hearts and dreams! Just like he did mine.

To conclude, I will now provide a list of every single player who has been blocked by Earl Boykins in their careers.

• Sam Cassell (x3)
• Tyronne Lue (x3)
• Mo Williams (x2)
• Eduardo Najera (x2)
• Damon Stoudemire (x2)
• Brevin Knight (x2)
• Bobby Jackson (x2)
• Dwyane Wade
• Steve Nash
• Jason Terry
• John Stockton
• David Wesley
• Sebastien Telfair
• Dan Dickau
• Earl Watson
• Wally Szczerbiak
• Rafer Alston
• Lionel Chalmers
• Ken McLeod
• Aaron Brooks
• Chauncey Billups
• Ramon Sessions
• Greivis Vasquez

This list is beautiful. It is a treasure. Thank you for sharing it with me.

• • •

At the end of each post, I'll be scribing riddles for the next group. Whoever gets the most right will get a shout out at the end of the next post. Tweet me your answers at @docrostov, or post them in the comments. Geezer, J, and @MillerNBA got 2/3 right. Good work to all three.

• Player #298 played himself in the movie Van Wilder. And that makes about as much sense as getting waived after starting a few games last season for a playoff team.

• Player #299 is on the slump-to-end-all-slumps to start the 2013 season. It took until the eighth game of his season for him to shoot over 50% in a single game. Really. Serious fact.

• Player #300 needs more minutes. And may get a coach fired, through no fault of his own -- his coach has been OK with his current team, but if he keeps burying Player #300, he may end up on the hot seat.

Two sets today? Will wonders ever cease? Join us tomorrow for two sets that will probably be significantly less interesting than today's two sets. Fly with the wind.

• • •

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As our summer mainstay, Aaron was writing a 370-part series discussing almost every notable player who was -- as of last season -- getting minutes in the NBA. As the summer dies down and the leaves turn, this quixotic quest of a series has happily reached the last third. But it's certainly not done yet! Today we continue with Daequan Cook, Brandon Roy, and Jeff Foster.

• • •

Follow _Daequan Cook on Twitter at __@DC4Three.___

It's a well-worn trope -- "don't let the stars beat you." Don't let Russell Westbrook and Kevin Durant kill you, so goes the wisdom. You can't just let Tony Parker and Tim Duncan tear you up. It's simply uncouth to let Melo score all of the points he needs. You need to accomplish the inconceivable. You need to shut down the stars, or make their shots impossible, and in the wake of so doing you need to allow everyone else on the team to beat you. If a good team is going to beat you, your chance will be "higher" if you simply shut down a team's stars and force the roleplayers to produce instead! Never fails, any time! Tried and true. Basketball gospel, not basketball lore -- it's reached the same apocryphal wisdom status as such hits as "shoot for the win on the road and shoot for OT at home" (regardless of, you know, age of your pieces and how harmful OT could potentially be), "bench a guy after 3 fouls even if they haven't fouled out in years (hello, LeBron), or "experience wins championships" (good players win championships -- experience alone wins you bingo night at the retirement home).

Here's the thing. Wisdom or not, I've never totally bought the idea. I understand the goal, here -- you want the defense to cordon off the star players to such a degree that a reasonably well-guarded shot by a great player's teammate becomes preferable to the great player's shot. In practice, there are two ways this turns out. In a world where a team is defensively dominant enough to "make [the roleplayers] beat you" without resorting to tricky double teams that leave incredibly high percentage options on the wings or the weakside, the whole trope is just stating the obvious -- "try to guard star players well." But in the other situation, the trope becomes actively harmful for defensive teams when they're even slightly outside the realm of "best-in-class". Because when you aren't a great defensive team, there's only one real way to effectively "shut down" a great player. Double teams. Simple, clean, ridiculous double teams to try and strip the ball or force the pass-out. Strategically, this tends to be a pretty poor play except in extremely important, high-leverage situations -- and I'd look at it thusly, even then. Let's say that a star player is such a good scorer that a single defender -- even a really good one! -- barely changes the bottom line for that player's scoring efficiency. So one-on-one coverage is useless, so to speak -- they'll be around peak efficiency even with a single very-good defender on him. You have to do double coverage or you derive no benefit. That's what most elite scorers do to defense, and where the "you need to shut him down" idea comes from.

Then you have Scrubs #1-4, surrounding the great player. Single coverage -- at least when players actually stick to their man -- generally bottles them up pretty well. None are great shakes at making contested shots, usually making around 10-20% of them... at best. But as with any NBA player, all of them can make a wide-open shot. Every single one. With relatively good percentages, too. And indeed, that's the problem! Superstars are great, but unless you're giving Durant wide-open threes on every single possession, a constant diet of double teams is going to lead you to give up dozens and dozens of wide-open shots for everyone else. And yes, maybe Durant's efficiency goes down enough to really give you a shot at pulling it out, if you double him viciously and everyone has a terrible shooting night. But when you're giving threes and layups that are open enough, there's no reason for that to be the assumption -- in fact, for the opposing team, leaving a bunch of open role-players may actually play the percentages a tiny bit better! What's the problem with actually letting Durant beat you? What's to say, in fact, that the chances of the star scoring 50 in a must-win game are probably slightly lower than NBA shooting scrubs converting 50-60% from three if you're leaving them completely wide open in efforts to double up and stifle the star?

I've yet to hear a particularly compelling argument otherwise. Perhaps the best argument in my favor would be the 2009 Eastern Conference Finals, where Stan Van Gundy made the at-the-time inexplicable decision to go single coverage on LeBron, trusting that the Cavaliers would have more trouble scoring if he took away every non-LeBron option than if he doubled LeBron into oblivion. Mike Brown did the inverse, doubling Howard and trying to make anyone-but-Howard beat the Cavs. As it turned out, Rafer Alston, Rashard Lewis, and Hedo Turkoglu were more than happy to oblige if left open enough, and prove the somewhat obvious fact that NBA players can make wide open shooting practice threes if you shade too strongly on Howard. And Mo Williams, Delonte West, and Zydrunas Ilgauskas proved the also somewhat obvious NBA fact that if you simply stay at home on roleplayers and refuse to give them any open space, they have trouble producing you any offense whatsoever and your team will fold even with a godlike performance from your single-coverage guarded superstar. Needless to say, I don't think "letting the scrubs beat you" is a good strategy, at least not as it tends to be applied for below-elite defensive teams. But there's another problem as well. This one is more ephemeral, and more fandom-based.

You know that feeling you get when an elite player runs roughshod over your team? Imagine Jordan running over the 90s Cavaliers, Kobe over the 2010 Suns, LeBron over the 2012 Celtics. et cetera. It's not wonderful, but it's ever-present. A sort of "we can't really beat you" feeling you can't shake, but you can't really feel all that bad about either. But on the other hand? How hard is it to watch scrubs pick apart your team? Really! Do you have any idea how insanely awful it felt during the 2009 finals to watch Rashard Lewis, Rafer Freaking Alston (who was out of the league in two years!), and Hedo Turkoglu pick the Cavs apart? Do you comprehend just how awful it was to watch then-backup Goran Dragic completely obliterate the Spurs in a fourth quarter that very well seemed to end the Duncan years, at the time? And thus, we finally get to the actual subject of this capsule -- do you have even the slightest inkling of how freaking excruciating it was to watch when Daequan Cook buried two completely wide-open threes in a row in game 5 of the 2012 WCF, and ended up making up the entirety of the Thunder's final margin in just four minutes of burn?

Look. Much respect for Cook. He's carved out a patently decent career as a shooting specialist out of a relatively bare cupboard of talent. That's quite respectable. He's put in the hours and worked on his game and made himself into about as good an NBA player as anyone could've really hoped. He was a somewhat marginal player in Thad Matta's "Thad Five" at Ohio State. He won a three-point shootout. There are very few things he can do at an NBA level beyond the obvious "shoot three pointers" racket. But how am I supposed to really feel better about a loss if we get this loss because we triple-teamed Durant only to leave someone like Cook completely and utterly wide open in the same corner on two consecutive possessions? "Oh, wow, good thing we didn't let Durant beat us!" Why am I supposed to simply accept the conventional wisdom that letting Durant shoot a one-on-one jumper would've had a higher probability of success than two consecutive "it is virtually impossible you miss this" threes from one of the better three point shooters in the entire league? Because, well. I don't. I can't. And the conventional wisdom -- at least in this case -- is wrong. A team that isn't defensively dominant doesn't need to double just to explicitly "shut down" a specific player. It needs to figure out the best way to play the percentages and the best way to shade without throwing a full double team or leaving shots that are virtually impossible to miss. It needs to react like Stan Van Gundy reacted to the problem of the 2009 Cavaliers offense, not how Mike Brown reacted to the 2009 Magic offense. And it needs to stop giving Daequan Cook wide open threes.

They were wide open. THEY WERE COMPLETELY AND UTTERLY OPEN.

(... look, I really loved the 2012 Spurs, okay?)

• • •

_Don't follow Brandon Roy's current game. Remember how he was, instead__.___

There's a certain ephemeral quality to a person's image that's always a bit tough to internalize, at least for me. I look back at the people who have left my life -- through death, drift, or decision -- and consider the way I look at them. It's never really fully representative to the depth of our prior relationship. Perhaps I'm thinking only of the good times and inexplicably gliding past the bad, as with my recent ex or my beloved departed grandparents. Perhaps I'm thinking of the bad alone, letting the sins override all comers in a mental leap for the sake of keeping things simple and eviscerating nuance. Perhaps I'm just forgetting, without any real internal subconscious motive or purpose. It all happens, and as far as I can tell, it all has the same internal reason. I'm -- in a strange way -- trying to come to terms with my own mortality, and a realization of my own flickering image through the realization of how inaccurate our snap impressions at any one moment are to begin with.

There are many things in this world we simply can't control, but chief among them is our inability to truly manage our own image. Sure, the rich and famous can try the good try, but in the end people will think of you as they'll think of you and you don't really have much control one way or the other. And as your skills fall off, your sins grow many, your life piles up and you can't do everything quite as well as you used to... things change. People lose their patience, people drift. And someday, you die -- and your image is no longer under your own power at all. People will think as they will and the only thing dissuading them from recency bias and knowledge of only your final, waning years will be unreliable second-party accounts of what you did or what you didn't do. Someday, your footprint fades. People may remember a few things you discovered, if you're really smart or really great. But they will completely forget who you really were.

But even while you're living large, nobody really knows who you are on the inside but you. By isolating my inability to provide correct and fully-nuanced snap judgments myself, I'm slowly realizing that death's treatment of your image is hardly that much worse than life's. To some extent, we're all actors in a limited-release play with no script and no real guidance to tell the audience what we're trying to do. Might as well try to enthrall while we're on stage and hope for the best, because there's never going to be an encore. And that brings us to today's second player -- Brandon Roy, the now oft-injured kneeless wonder. Image is extremely important to discuss a player like Roy. And it's important to use it to provide both a cautionary tale and adequate appreciation for who he really is. Brandon Roy is one of my favorite players ever. I also never -- EVER -- wanted to see him come back like this. I never wanted to watch as he struggles up the court, getting torched on defense and unable to get his legs under his shot. I never wanted to see what it would be like to watch a man with a truly arthritic knee fall victim to health and provide a dark reminder of how quickly a promising career can crumble to dust.

I don't like being this dark about an NBA player -- after all, it's simply basketball. But I find it viscerally awful and horrifying to watch Roy on the court right now. I honestly have had to turn some Wolves games off this year. Any higher power up there who has any say or vision into this must be a misanthrope. Only someone who hates us all would take from a man like Roy his beautiful gifts, adored by so many. He was one of the most captivating players I ever watched, and taking an eye to his current game is like being forced to grapple with the image of a person you don't want to change. A friend who's descending into depravity and horrors for no apparent reason. A loved one who no longer loves you back. A family member falling prey to madness and dementia. Nobody wants to change their image. But sometimes it's forced upon you. And all you can really hope for is that you never quite forget the electric feelings and love you held before -- the important moments, the exalted truths, the highlights of your lives together. Because you need that. I need that. We all need that.

Brandon Roy will never again be as I described just one year ago. He decided to come back. Love of the game, love of the sport, love of the roundball. A happy story, that. But the tragedy here -- insofar as basketball can provide -- is unmistakeable. A reminder of the things we'll all face, one day. Roy will have his moments. Nights of fleeting glory, possessions a shadow of the ones he used to have all day. But all things change, and nothing's static. He will never be the man he once was. He will never provide the same way he used to. He will never be Trouble B-Roy again -- he's fated to wander, a ghastly shell, a reminder of the fates no man can truly dodge.

And for that, we all suffer.

• • •

Follow Jeff Foster by practicing your mean-mugging banker face.

Around March of last season, Jeff Foster retired. This was met around the league with an air of general indifference, a sense that most had accepted him gone long ago. And perhaps that was apt. After all, although Foster was able to carve out a long and prosperous $50 million dollar career as an NBA player, he wasn't exactly a high-magnitude, high-impact player. He was a lucky man who ended up in the right situation with the right attitude over his entire career, and never really seemed to be on the verge of leaving even though he never had more than one or two NBA talents. Foster did two things -- he played physical post defense (although physical did not always mean good) and he rebounded the ball. That was it. Five of the top ten seasons for offensive rebounding over the duration of Foster's career belong to Foster. He was a phenomenal offensive rebounder, a shaky-but-sometimes-beastly sharp-elbowed defender, and about as utterly dismal from every other area of the court as a player could be without getting hoist by their own petard and thrown out the door immediately.

Were it not for Foster's fundamentally rare situation, we probably wouldn't be talking about him right now. I probably would've simply let the exclusion criteria for these 370 players leave him out, as it almost did. But in Foster's case, his situation with the Pacers demands he merit inclusion, a final note before he takes his leave and packs up into the wilderness. Jeff Foster, in the final tally, played 13 years with the Indiana Pacers. One team, his entire career. In those 13 years, Foster has managed to make a mark -- however small -- on every single important Pacers team of his era, good and bad. He was on the 2000 team, the motley crew that forced six games against a very good Laker team. He was on the 2004 team, the one that pushed the eventual champions more than a not very good Laker team did and the team that looked anointed before the 2005 season. He was also there for the fall, the nadir, and the long road back -- he suffered as any fan did with the aftermath of the brawl, and as the Pacers tore down and rebuilt, Foster eventually became the only core member of the Pacers with any experience playing winning basketball.

Longevity has its place. Foster became the Pacers' moral center, insofar as a basketball team could have one -- he became their soul. And as the Pacers crawled out of the muck and shambled towards relevance, Foster was their guidepost. He was the core of the team's identity, and the main reason they became what they were at their peak to finish last season -- a tough, gritty team with a bit of an edge but an always-respectable undercurrent guiding it. Jeff Foster isn't just a player. He's an insect set in amber, a carefully preserved reminder of the road the Pacers traveled and the direction they wanted to go. He's a player who -- despite, again, only having a single elite skill in a 13 year career -- inspired beautiful heartfelt appreciations and begrudging acceptance of his importance from Bulls fans who despised him. Jeff Foster is worth writing about, and he's worth remembering. He may not have been important on his own merits, but his impact on the overall attitude that this Pacers team brings to the table when it's rolling and his impact on the league as a whole is worth noting, remembering, and appreciating. If only just. Godspeed, Jeff Foster. May you become the greatest wingman in the world, using your single talent to lead many a-dumped men to the best rebounds of their lives.

• • •

At the end of each post, I'll be scribing riddles for the next group. Whoever gets the most right will get a shout out at the end of the next post. Tweet me your answers at @docrostov, or post them in the comments. Good work to Mike L, our lone 3/3 guess.

• Player #295 would look awfully nice in the forum blue and gold, at least in D'Antoni's eyes. He might be washed up, honestly, but he'd likely be a far sight better than some of the refuse on their bench.

• Player #296 is the single best perimeter defender in the NBA. And in my opinion, nobody comes close.

• Player #297 is probably out of the league at this point. Goodbye, Spawn of Muggsy.

Happy weekdays. Surprise -- gonna be trying to get two sets of these things out per day, at least this week while I'm on vacation from work. Don't know how successful I'll be, but let's see if I can't get this next set up by around 3:00 ET today.

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